# Politics

No matter the era, conservatism is a story about how 50-year-old white guys thought everything was better back when they were 13, before the bad people came along and made it so things couldn’t stay the same forever. (This fetishized past used to be the 1940s or ‘50s. By updated math, civilization’s current peak was 1987.)

In Cry, the Beloved Country Alan Paton wrote:Sorrow is better than fear. Fear is a journey, a terrible journey, but sorrow is at least an arrival. When the storm threatens, a man is afraid for his house. But when the house is destroyed, there is something to do. About a storm he can do nothing, but he can rebuild a house.

Every time we elevate the lowest-ranking people, we improve the future for everyone else as well, and it’s a whole lot easier to invest in elevating those people if we accept that we don’t inherently deserve anything better than what those people have, that we have never been different from anyone in any meaningful way.

As society changes its goldfi

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Nobody seems to have language to say: We abhor, reject, repudiate, and punish all political violence, even as we maintain that Trump remains himself a promoter of such violence, a subverter of American institutions, and the very opposite of everything decent and patriotic in American life.