Thursday, November 5, 2020

The Day After the Day After

I've got a hunch that every day is going to feel like "the day after" for a while yet. 

For some, the whole point of "the day after" is to somehow rescind, smudge out, or de-authorize what happened the day of. Call it "the Great Undermining." 

I think it has become an American institution as predictable as "I voted" stickers on the first Tuesday of November. 

* * *

Then there's this: Alan Jacobs on the dirty little secret that all of us know but don't want to admit: America is simply far less competent than it used to be.
What we need as a nation, more than anything else I can think of, is a recommitment to basic competence, and, especially, a refusal to accept ideological justifications for plain old ineptitude. Too often Americans give a free pass to bunglers and bozos who belong to their tribe.

And this: not everything needs to be political.

If everything is about politics, we cannot cultivate a healthy Good, and if we don’t cultivate a healthy Good, we cannot have healthy politics. 

 

 

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