Josh Marshall feared the outcome - "We Take Much For Granted"

[NRaleighLiberal]

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/we-take-much-for-granted

Back in July I wrote this post fearing something like November 8th would happen, but assuming it wouldn't. I've been returning to the argument in my head basically every day for the last three weeks.

His original July article

"This is Not The Natural State of Things"

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/this-is-not-the-natural-state-of-things

"Thirty plus years ago I was lucky enough to be one of two poor kids on scholarships in my class at a school for rich kids in a small town in California. The other was the renowned science fiction writer John Scalzi. I just noticed this tweet from him as I was watching a welter of reports about what appears to be yet another terror attack in France.

Sometimes feels like a strong correlation between WWII passing from living memory, and autocracy seemingly getting more popular.

— John Scalzi (@scalzi) July 14, 2016

I don't think John was talking about the attack but the US election and elections now across the world. But perhaps he was talking about the whole picture in toto.

Autocracy is government based on fear, domination and insecurity. It is of course billed as the opposite. But it is born of these three horsemen and in turn breeds them. One of the shaping thoughts of the generation of actors and thinkers who emerged from the Second World War was the seared perception that stability, trust, peace and virtuous cycles of all sorts are not natural phenomena or human norms. In fact, they are brittle creations and perhaps abnormal in human affairs. Of course, these beliefs and the ambitions and goals which grew out of them led to their own follies. One can jump from 1945 to 1965 and see the wisdom of this recognition leading the same luminaries to walk into a folly of an entirely different kind. The men who built much of the world we live in today also built a world that was perpetually on the brink of cataclysmic nuclear annihilation. Their creation, let us say with some understatement, had real shortcomings.

And yet, for all that complicated history and all that human folly, basic realities they understood remain. Democracy, borders that are peaceful rather than armed and bloody ... none of these things are natural states of being like a rock that rolls to the bottom of a hill and then stays there until some greater force than gravity and friction pushes it along or hauls it back up the hill."

snip

[handmade34]

1. K&R n/t

[kebob]

2. True

K&R

[longship]

3. Recommended click-through (second link)

Josh Marshall is nearly always a great read.

This one, especially so.