Asked whether federal workers are dissenting in ways that go beyond previous party changes in the White House, Tom Malinowski, who was President Barack Obama’s assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor, said, sarcastically: “Is it unusual? . . . There’s nothing unusual about the entire national security bureaucracy of the United States feeling like their commander in chief is a threat to U.S. national security. That happens all the time. It’s totally usual. Nothing to worry about.”
Juliet Eilperin, Lisa Rein, and Marc Fisher, “Resistance from within: Federal workers push back against Trump,” The Washington Post, January 31, 2017.
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Interesting comment today by Cameron Blevins: History and Its Limits under Trump.
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Being a historian right now feels like being kept awake through brain surgery.
Elizabeth Catte on Twitter, January 28, 2017 -
Am still shaking my head over the new administration’s discriminatory ban on Muslims entering the United States. It was no surprise after the hateful rhetoric of the election season, but announcing it on Holocaust Remembrance Day? And not mentioning Jews in a statement about the Holocaust? I wish I could call these actions tone-deaf, but they feel more intentional and sinister than that, even if the more apt historical parallels are the U.S. rejection of Jews fleeing Nazism and the internment of Japanese-Americans as an entire class of people during the Second World War.
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“I would suggest that a major source of our unease — beyond Trump’s personal unfitness for the presidency — is not that Trump is going to attempt to construct some fascist-style dictatorship, but rather that the trends that are manifested in his triumph represent a threat to our democracy that has arrived from an unexpected direction. That is what has left me, in any case, bewildered and unprepared.”
“But Hitler was a fixated ideologue with a strong party organization, while Trump is an opportunistic narcissist driven above all by the need for adulation. Hitler was the ‘little corporal,’ the man of the people, who feigned austerity, while Trump is a billionaire who flaunts his wealth and luxurious life-style. Ultimately, Trump seems far more a hybrid of Berlusconi and Putin, potentially merging kleptocracy and autocracy, than the reincarnation of an ideologically driven, war-mongering, and genocidal dictator.”
Christopher R. Browning, “Dangers I didn’t see coming: ‘tyranny of the minority’ and an irrelevant press,” Vox, January 18, 2017.
I recommend reading Browning’s whole piece. See also the earlier comments by the sociologist and political scientist Theda Skopol, “A guide to rebuilding the Democratic Party, from the ground up,” Vox, January 5, 2017, which is about much more than the Democratic Party. She understands something that conservatives of various stripes have long acted on, but which Democrats have ignored to everyone’s detriment.
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Seen yesterday at the Women’s March in Washington, DC (photo by author).
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I have been learning new terms these past months. Today it was “alternative facts,” which goes together with an older term, apparently repurposed for our current political and cultural moment—“gaslighting.” I saw the latter term on a protest sign at the Women’s March yesterday.
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Cognition is the most socially-conditioned activity of man, and knowledge is the paramount social creation [Gebilde].
Ludwik Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, translated by Fred Bradley and Thaddeus J. Trenn (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1979), Kindle ed., chap. 2, sec. 4.