media - politiglue

The Slow Coup of “So What”

E. H. Mercer — Wed, 05 Feb 2020 04:30:00 +0000

February 2019 is not defined by one scandal, but by a habit: the national shrug. “So what” has become a governing posture, turning oversight into hostility and misconduct into background noise. Democracies don’t fail only through dramatic ruptures. They fail when standards become tribal weapons and consequences become optional.

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The Center Cannot Hold, but It Can Be Rebuilt

E. H. Mercer — Sun, 15 Dec 2019 09:10:00 +0000

December 2019 closes with the House voting to impeach President Trump and the Senate poised for a trial whose ending seems prewritten. But the real stakes are larger than one outcome. The question is what we will tolerate, what precedents we will normalize, and whether a republic can survive an attention economy that rewards contempt over standards.

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The Republic on a Razor’s Edge

E. H. Mercer — Sun, 10 Nov 2019 21:11:05 +0000

America in 2019 feels like a nation trained to react faster than it can reason. Impeachment dominates the headlines, but the deeper crisis is cultural: truth has become tribal, institutions are treated like weapons, and the 2020 race is already poisoning the present. The question isn’t who wins—it’s whether we still believe we share a country.

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