(1) A friend commented that Biden’s victory becomes more impressive after you contemplate the enthusiasm gap: Trump’s base believed that Trump was sent by God, whereas Biden’s base believed that Biden probably wasn’t a terrible human being. I replied that what we call the “Enlightenment” was precisely this, the switch from cowering before leaders who were sent by God to demanding leaders who probably aren’t terrible human beings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
(2) I would love for Twitter to deactivate Trump’s account—not<\/em> for any ideological reason, simply for Trump’s hundreds of past violations of Twitter’s Terms of Service, and for there no longer being a compelling public interest in what Trump has to say that would override all his Terms of Service violations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n (3) When Biden appeared last night, and then again tonight, it wasn’t merely that he came across like a President-Elect of the US, but rather that he came across like a President-Elect of the US who’s filling a vacant position<\/em>. Until Biden starts, there won’t be<\/em> a president of the US; there will only continue to be the president of those who voted for him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n (4) Now that Trump has gone this far in shattering all the norms of succession, part of me wants<\/em> to see him go the rest of the way … to being physically dragged out of the Oval Office by Secret Service agents on January 20, in pathetic and humiliating footage that would define how future generations remembered him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n (5) I had an idea for something that could make a permanent contribution to protecting liberal democracy in the US, and that anti-Trump forces could implement unilaterally for a few tens of millions of dollars—no need to win another election. The idea is to build a Donald J. Trump Historical Museum in Washington, DC. But, you see, this museum would effectively be the opposite of a presidential library. It would be designed by professional historians; they might solicit cooperation from former members of Trump’s inner circle, but would never depend on it. It would, in fact, be a museum that teenage students might tend to be taken to on the same DC field trips that also brought them to the Vietnam Memorial and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). Obviously, the new museum would be different<\/em> from those bleak places; it would (thankfully) have a little less tragedy and more farce … and that’s precisely the role that the new museum would fill. To show the kids on the field trips that it’s not always<\/em> unmitigated horribleness, that here was a case where we Americans took a gigantic stumble backwards, seeming to want to recreate the first few rooms in the USHMM exhibition, the one where the macho-talking clown thrills Germany by being serious rather than literal. But then, here in the US, we successfully stopped it before it got to the later rooms<\/em>. Sure, the victory wasn’t as decisive as we would’ve liked, it came at a great cost, but it was victory nonetheless. A 244-year-old experiment in self-governance is back in operation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" (1) A friend commented that Biden’s victory becomes more impressive after you contemplate the enthusiasm gap: Trump’s base believed that Trump was sent by God, whereas Biden’s base believed that Biden probably wasn’t a terrible human being. I replied that what we call the “Enlightenment” was precisely this, the switch from cowering before leaders who […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_seo_schema_type":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"{title}\n\n{excerpt}\n\n{url}","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5088","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-fate-of-humanity"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5088","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5088"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5088\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5090,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5088\/revisions\/5090"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5088"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5088"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5088"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}