The Urgent, Immediate Danger: A Brief Manifesto
There are threats in America today: immediate, urgent dangers that must be countered just as urgently and just as immediately. These dangers do not, for the most part, have anything to do with the kinds of long-range trends I discussed in a recent post: they are not things that could or might happen, or even directions things are heading. They are here, and now, already prevalent, already virulent, already spreading.
No, these threats are not "Donald Trump," or "Wokeness," or "MAGAism" or "fascism," or any such thing. They are emphatically not coherent ideologies, let alone individual people. They are things much more inchoate, and much more dominant, than that. As Chesterton says, it is assumptions more than stated beliefs that define an age: and as Aristotle knew, it is habits more than opinions that make a person what he is.
This is a work of polemics: it is by design short and to the point. Please pay attention.
