Seth Cotlar: I learned the values of religious pluralism, multi-racial democracy, and equality under the law from my family, my local public school, & the mainstream media I consumed in the 1970s & 80s (especially PBS kids shows like Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers). This is why the right hates those institutions.

Smart stuff as always from John Ganz. "This is the key difference between Trumpism & traditional conservatism, which still paid lip service to minimal, formal universal mediums like the rule of law, citizenship, & the market. To Trump those words are just bullshit." substack.com/home/post/p-...

The Shadow of the Mobsubstack.com Trump's Gangster Gemeinschaft

John ends by evoking the specter of a future America living under Trump's mob rule...but he means the literal Godfather-esque mob, not the "woke mob" or the "democratic mob" that conservatives used to (and still claim to) fear.

I'm currently reading this book whose argument fits well with the point Ganz makes here. The vision of the US as a religiously pluralistic multi-racial democracy governed by the rule of law under which each person is treated equally has fairly shallow roots. www.google.com/books/editio...

Illiberal America: A Historywww.google.com If your reaction to the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol was to think, 'That’s not us,' think again: in Illiberal America, a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian uncovers a powerful illiberali...

I still think those ideals are worth preserving and fighting for, but we need to stop kidding ourselves that there's always been wide, popular buy-in to those ideals and that they are somehow self-supporting and self-enforcing, inextricably woven into the arc of America's moral universe.

Six years ago I wrote this piece analogizing Trump to a low key mobbish figure, a familiar type of corrupt yet untouchable local gentry in the gemeinschaft world I was socialized into as a young person in small town America. sethcotlar.substack.com/p/what-happe...

What happens when that joker from Palookaville becomes President?sethcotlar.substack.com Anyone raised in a small town like I was probably recognizes who Trump is. He’s the ballsy guy who recognized in 2nd grade that the rules…

I learned the values of religious pluralism, multi-racial democracy, and equality under the law from my family, my local public school, & the mainstream media I consumed in the 1970s & 80s (especially PBS kids shows like Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers). This is why the right hates those institutions.

If Mr. Rogers was alive he could be elected president in a landslide. I wish he was still with us just to give our congresscritters a piece of his mind (very calmly and respectfully).

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