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Americans Are Turning Hard Against Trumpism
THIRTY YEARS AGO, THE POLITICAL SCIENTIST Christopher Wlezien proposed the “thermostatic” theory of politics. In short: If policy goes too far in one direction, voters will send signals to push it in the opposite direction, over time maintaining a rough equilibrium. This effect shows up in public opinion…
🚨OVERTIME🚨
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Discussion prompts: If you’re lucky enough to be traveling for the holidays, what’s one thing you’re looking forward to doing while there? BONUS: Something you consider a must-read now but didn’t know about a year ago.
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Anything by Heather Cox Richardson on Substack. Her bi-weekly and American Conversations podcasts are informative and inspiring, and her Letters from an American newsletter is a must-read every morning.
My "must read" that I didn't know about a year ago: books by Chilean author Roberto Bolano. To Bulwark readers I would recommend two short books, both of which I found insightful while being darkly hilarious.
"By Night in Chile" is a novella about a priest on his deathbed attempting to (and failing to) reconcile his experiences with Chile's literary intellegentsia and the Pinochet regime.
"Nazi Literature in the Americas" is the other book, and no explanation I can give of it would possibly do it justice. It's a fictional encyclopedia of right-wing poets in North and South America, briefly describing their lives, works, and ideologic influences. I chortled many times while reading it. The details he chooses to include (or omit) and the choice of words are ...casually devastating. The characters are pitiful, revolting, or both. And they feel familiar after watching so many people in public life undergo ideologic shifts in real time over the past decade. It's not as dark as it sounds, until then it is.
My only critique of Nazi Literature of the Americas is that I don't know how to explain having a book with this title on my bookshelf... so it's been on my nightstand since I first read in back in October.