Labor Day Weekend, end of summer, and I have nothing new to say about the utter mess we're in. So once again I fall back on past posts that, I hope, still have something useful to say. This one is from April 2021, when Biden was a new president and there was a cautious, I've-been-burned-before kind of hope in the air. The piece is notable for how incredibly deluded it turned out to be — I was wrong about almost everything, and the optimism you read here couldn't have been more misplaced. Yet even so, the main points of the piece remain pertinent as pundits galore continue to bloviate about the "extremes on both sides." Lately there has been much written — and more than a little hand-wringing — about the fate of the fabled American “Center,” that vast majority of sensible people who just wish we could all get along. In particular, there was an op-ed in the Times last week by Thomas B. Edsall — a seasoned, generally respected journ...
Life and Politics in the Age of Covid