This IS different.

We are at a turning point in the history not juts of our country but our species. Democracy is the most recent iteration of the innate hopefulness of human beings. It is about believing we are capable of goodness and reason. It is about believing we can find ways to find common ground even when our disagreements are seemingly insurmountable. Liberals are often quick to point out the great stains on our history but America is an exceptional country because we have been living proof that it is possible to create a stable and thriving civilization built on the rule of law and unleash the power of the human spirit through political liberty.

Perhaps because our nation acquired great power of the past century we have come to take that miracle for granted. Democracy is fragile because it requires each new generation to sustain and nourish it or like a flame without fuel it simply flickers into darkness. This IS different not because of any policy or proposal but because the current President is challenging, corroding and disrespecting the foundations of democracy itself. If you find yourself already jumping to disagree or agree with that statement you must know you are part of the problem. The level of political ignorance in this country has become truly toxic for democracy and you have jumped to whatever opinion you have jumped to out of a competitive, nearly tribal allegiance. It is not about being right or the struggle towards being right anymore, too many people just plainly don't know what they're talking about. it's about winning. It's about beating the other side and then holding their face down in the mud when they're down. The problem is the challenges we are facing in this particular moment in time are genuinely existential. The continued existence of the human race has not been in greater peril since perhaps the Toba Volcanic Eruption 75,000 years ago. That is not hyperbole. We may very well make the planet uninhabitable through climate change or we may just yet see the specter of nuclear holocaust revive itself.

The problem as I see it is not so much that the problems are impossible to solve (although the longer we wait the more likely that becomes) but rather that our mechanism for solving them is broken and at the risk of sounding hypocritical here having just laid the blame on competitive/tribal/my-team-beat-your-team kind of rhetoric, I don't see any other way to say it other than to say the leaders of conservatism and the Republican party have failed the country. Now again I'm sure that provokes an immediate redline emotional reaction one way or another as you read that but let me try to make a point here. The democratic party is by no means infallible. There is plenty of sloppy thinking and wrong headed policy going on there as well. The reason why I am singling out republicans is they have abdicated their responsibility to work with and argue with the other side. Debate improves ideas. This is one of the fundamental ideas our whole political system was designed around. The republican leaders in this country have refused to work with democrats and challenge their ideas with the goal of making them better. Instead they have chosen to win at all costs to the point where they have now rallied around a man who's ideas are not in any way reconcilable with conservatism (to the extent that anything he has said can be examined as an idea).

There is a great tradition of conservative thought in this country. There is a great argument to be made but there is no one I know of on the right side of the aisle making it. The result is the left has no intellectual opposition and by that I mean liberals are arguing ideas while Trump and his party engage in nonsensical populist rhetoric while simultaneously lining up a cabinet of billionaires with no understanding of the agencies they have been tasked with running. .