We Are Living Through a Chaotic Era
The Information Age, the realignment, and the rise of minority rule.
Tim and I are going to interview Alexander Vindman live on YouTube this afternoon at 2 p.m. EDT. I hope you’ll watch. There are not a ton of people who know more about Russia and Ukraine than he does.
Before we get started I want to spike the football. Yesterday I wrote about how Trump would defend himself from the tape in which he is heard telling people that he was showing them classified documents which he knew were classified and also knew he was not allowed to possess. I told you that he would redeploy the Access Hollywood defense and say it was just Locker Room Talk.
Ten hours later, Trump spoke to a reporter from Semafor and said that it was just “bravado” on the tape and that he didn’t mean any of it for real.
That’s the value proposition of this newsletter. I help you see around corners.
And in the first item today, I’m going to talk about a guy who helps me see around corners.
1. The Sos
Doug Sosnik is an old Clinton hand and one of the smartest people alive on the subject of politics. This week he sat down for a long interview with Bill Kristol and it is powerfully illuminating.
You can watch it as a YouTube video or download it as a podcast here.
His big thesis is that we are currently living through a chaotic era in American life.1 Sosnik believes that this moment began in 1992, which featured both Pat Buchanan’s insurgent campaign against H.W. Bush and Ross Perot’s populist third party campaign, which got 19 percent of the vote. At the time we didn’t appreciate what these twin events meant.
It wasn’t until 2000 that the true nature of the chaos started coming into focus. Trumpism is best understood as an extension—not the culmination—of that trend.
Sosnik says that this chaotic era most resembles the late 1800s, when America managed/stumbled through the transition to the Industrial Age. The ultimate root of our current problems, he says, is a transition from the Industrial to the Information Age.
As such, he believes that this chaotic era will not end in 2024 or 2028. It is likely to extend