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From TPM Reader MG …
You asked, “What Sense Are You Making of the Post-Trump Era?”
Well, there is simply a mixture of relief and apprehension.
The relief is for the obvious things: The relatively smooth deployments of the Covid vaccines, a steady hand at the helm of state, government doing what the federal government should do, no more intentional twitter eruptions and all of that. Considering where we were on January 20th, it is immensely comforting to be where we are right now.
From TPM Reader JE, a rather different take on the question, less political outlook than deeply personal, inter-personal experience …
So, by far the biggest outcome for me from the “Post Trump Era” (and to some extent I need to move the date back to November 2016 to describe this fully) is the realization that a lot of middle class white Americans (I’m in that group) are still racist as hell. Prior to that the racism was couched in careful language, was eased out with a nod and a wink that indicated that maybe someone still wasn’t on board with the modern state of the world.
From TPM Reader KG …
I’ve enjoyed reading the replies to your question, but I have a somewhat different take. As a 79-year old white female I’ve seen remarkable changes in the country. Change being the operative word. My first brush with politics came on a train carrying Harry Truman, who I watched speak while sitting on my father’s shoulders. I’ve been a political junky ever since.
Thank you to everyone who’s sent in their reads on making sense of the post-Trump Era. I’ll be publishing more this afternoon. Keep them coming. My interest in soliciting these notes is that we are in a confused and confusing political-historical moment. It’s important to untangle that for anyone who is concerned about the country and civic life. It’s even more pressing for a news organization.
We owe a great deal to the insights and knowledge we gain from the social sciences, with their modeling, systems creation and statistics. But at core humans are a story-telling species. We organize the world around us through storylines, narrative arcs, the actions of individuals, the interplay of actions and reactions through time. This isn’t to embrace a “great man” theory of history. It’s not a comment on how history works. It’s a statement about how our brains apprehend, understand things – how we take the discrete facts we find and put them together into something that tells us something. Nor is it to relativize contending ‘narratives’, something that has long been the province of certain parts of the academic world and through a strange alchemy is now also pervasive on the right. Some narratives are truer than others. Many are deeply false. It is simply that we understand most intuitively through storylines, through the progression of events and the actions of people.
Where Things Stand: Bipartisan Agreement On Badness
The most obviously bad parts of the Georgia voting law are seen, by voters of both parties, as obviously bad, according to a new poll.
The Los Angeles Dodgers have created a special section at Dodger Stadium for fans who are fully vaccinated. A few other teams have introduced similar set asides. This is a good idea and we need more of it. The reward for being vaccinated should be to get back to life as usual as much as possible and as quickly as possible. Now that vaccines are pretty widely available for people 16 and over there’s no reason you should need to be seated near or with others who’ve chosen not to get vaccinated when you’re enjoying a ball game.
From TPM Reader ST …
Asking the question about how we’re all coping with the post-Trump era helped clarify for me the continuing unease I feel.