Ambiguity in the Age of Outrage (w/ Jon Meacham) - #545

-The dork Star Wars cantina of famous biographers

-Jefferson’s hypocrisy and the impossibility of paragon standards

-Lincoln was not an abolitionist

-The Howard Zinnification of American history

-Ambiguity as the ideological propagandist’s mortal enemy

-The true (New Testament) saint of America

-George H.W. Bush’s blunt admission

-This president would cut your throat for a vote, then be the first to call 911

-Exhaustion as a strategy, and the establishment’s failure to meet the moment

-Autocratic narcissism and the turn toward political sadism

-Despair is a sin

-Political loss as seasonal, not existential

-What will the next side do with inherited expanded executive power?

-14th Amendment redemption clauses as high-level nerd porn

-Amusing ourselves to death in a visual-media politics

-Katie Britt’s private doubt, and the ecosystem that manufactured it

-Lincoln couldn’t write a bad sentence; Reagan could land the line

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Buy Jon Meacham’s anthology, American Struggle: Democracy, Dissent, and the Pursuit of a More Perfect Union (Bookshop | Amazon)

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