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Notes on American Fascism

novalis
1 min readMay 1, 2018

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  1. When Hamlet says, “All Denmark’s a prison,” he instantly invents modern political theory.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. A news-watcher is fatalistic: they can only watch the world happen.
  5. 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?
  6. 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.

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