I use John Robb’s term “Trump Insurgency” here to highlight the fact that the election of 2016 was not an example of “ordinary politics”. Anyone who fails to understand this is going to be making significant errors. For example, the 2016 election is not comparable to the 2000 election (e.g., merely a “close” election) nor to the 1980 election (e.g., an “ideological transition” election). While it is tempting to compare it to 1860, I’m not sure that is a good match either.In fact, as I go back and try to do pattern matching, the only real pattern I can find is the 1776 “election” (AKA the American Revolution). In other words, while 2016 still formally looked like politics, what is really going on here is a revolutionary war. For now this is war using memes rather than bullets, but war is much more than a metaphor.
Bill Fulkerson on 14 Aug 18"For a close reader of Moyn's work on human rights the differences between his two works are head-spinning. Where Last Utopia attacked the very idea of historic continuity in explaining the human rights movement that emerged in the 1970s, Not Enough builds an entire narrative on continuities. The result is an aspirational history for a reformed human rights movement, a history of roads not taken - with respect to equality, in particular, which Moyn elevates to the 'original' position - that can still be reclaimed. Not Enough lacks the skepticism that Moyn employed so effectively in The Last Utopia to explain how disconnected contemporary human rights was from its claimed antecedents and undermines arguments in both books. In addition, by not heeding his own lessons from Last Utopia, Moyn understates the emergent human rights movement's inability to contest what became neoliberalism. As someone who confronted those issues at the time, it is harder to dismiss the claims of complicity."
