Today's Must-Read: Pushing the Conversation: A Twofer

Two pieces from Hullabaloo this morning, back to back. First, via Digby, this piece by Adam Gopnik from NYT:

The point is not that what Obama did was necessarily always admirable, but that amnesia about even the very recent past has become essential to the most decent conservative politics; only by making the national emergency general and cross-party can it be fully shared rather than, as it should be, localized to the crisis of one party and its ideology. In plain English, it becomes necessary to spread the smell around so that everyone gets some of the stink on them.

Fottnote: The press has been more than complicit in this, and it hasn't been just Fox.

This piece by Tom Sullivan follows immediately:

Writing for the Irish Times, Fintan O'Toole agrees. He believes the sitting president's caging of toddlers is no mistake, but test marketing:

Fascism doesn’t arise suddenly in an existing democracy. It is not easy to get people to give up their ideas of freedom and civility. You have to do trial runs that, if they are done well, serve two purposes. They get people used to something they may initially recoil from; and they allow you to refine and calibrate. This is what is happening now and we would be fools not to see it.

One conclusion from both articles: this is not something that's newly emerged with Trump: he's the prototype; it's what the right has been working toward since the days of the John Birch Society, the Moral Majority, and Ronald Reagan. Actually, come to think of it, there's always been an element in American society that doesn't love our foundational values. And now they've learned new techniques to control the discourse.