America is the greatest democracy in the world: a place where an incoherent system of contradictory beliefs has produced an equally incoherent politics. In the irrational ferment of what it may be best to call simply the thing that happened — the confluence of Trump and QAnon, the pandemic, Defund the Police, moral panics about gender and migrant caravans, and so on — Americans became inured, in a way rarely before seen, to the spectre of the counterintuitive miracle. One could choose any number of examples from across the ideological spectrum: the belief that a gaudy real estate mogul was a champion of the working man, or that reduction of law enforcement would bring down crime. My own favourite example, though, is the suite of measures broadly known as harm reduction that were adopted in many forms across the United States, and are now being rolled back, to the relief of some and the outrage of others.
Read Full Article »
