On November 9, 2016, I woke up in a country I did not recognize. Donald J. Trump, reality TV host, racist and grifter, had just been elected president. Four years later, the election of Joseph Biden has done little to ease my sense of alienation, of distress. I am still a stranger in a strange…
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When the history of America in the early 21st century is written, it will include a viral pandemic that killed hundreds of thousands, a reckoning over centuries of racial violence and oppression and a president who stoked the prejudices of a loud minority who fear demographic change. It will also include a nightmarish policy in…
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Most of the South’s fiery segregationists are dead and largely forgotten, dumped into the ash bin of history by their fierce opposition to equal rights for black Americans. If they are remembered at all, they are thought of as racist throwbacks, small-minded men who stood on the wrong side of the defining issue of their…
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The Trump years have coincided with lots of low points in American civil society — with successive rips in the civic fabric, with countless acts of domestic terror, with numerous assaults on the values and traditions of American democracy. It is hard to construct a hierarchy that would name the worst of them. But as…
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Impeachment proceedings may strengthen President Donald J. Trump by emboldening his lies, enraging and enlivening his sycophantic base and smearing Joe Biden and his son, Hunter. A vote not to convict by the Senate — which would certainly follow any “yes” vote in the House — may persuade uncertain voters that Trump has been the…
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