# 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.)

It would be nice to believe that a felony conviction will cause the scales to fall from the eyes of American voters. That over the next 20 weeks the public will realize that Donald Trump is manifestly unfit for office.

But we wake up this morning and the American people are still the same people.

• 55 percent of them think the economy is shrinking, whe

... See more

Conservatives also believe themselves to be factory-default humans (with obvious demographic implications) and everyone else to be aberrations, errors, and defects in need of recall.

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.