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- When Hamlet says, “All Denmark’s a prison,” he instantly invents modern political theory.
- Liberals are obsessed by impeaching Trump because it gives them a sense of power; the old liberal order, long since slipped away, can be magically redeemed by impeachment proceedings.
- Our political thinking is dangerously conditioned to the news-cycle. We wait for the future to arrive rather than examine the past as a means of preparing for an unknowable future.
- A news-watcher is fatalistic: they can only watch the world happen.
- We rightly ask whether Putin gave direct orders to interfere with the U.S. election and whether, indeed, he colluded with members of the Trump campaign to do so — but what we don’t ask enough is: why we were so susceptible to interference in the first place? Why was it so easy to convince fifty million Americans to vote for an idiot and a crook?
- Randomness works sometimes. It might work with North Korea. This is one of the “problems” with liberalism — sometimes sane, rational deliberation loses out to impulsive action simply by chance. There is no monster in political history who didn’t get a few things right by accident.