A clear eyed commentary on the question of this authoritarian moment and the movement between Collapse and Resistance. Maybe we’re always in between those two, but this indicates the pendulum is swinging back to the middle.
A few excerpts:
Essentially, Trump seems to be governing like…a President in his second term. Typically, two-term Presidents try to change the country during their first four years, but in their second term they tend to mostly reign over the status quo. Trump’s allies and supporters clearly hoped that Trump’s second term would be very different, because of the Biden interregnum — that Trump would come back riding a wave of popular anger and essentially have two first terms. But Trump is ruling like someone who’s wary of being unpopular, and so he’s chickening out on his most extreme ideas.
And:
Democracy is working — the moderate, reasonable, freedom-loving country that you and I grew up in is rising up to protect itself.
And:
America is facing an authoritarian movement, but it’s one that’s turning out to be far more irresolute and incompetent than we had dared to hope a few months ago.