I’m migrating much of my writing on politics and history to a new Substack.
My posts will continue to be free, but the new platform offers – if you chose – a paid subscription or the chance to make a contribution that will support my writing and research, particularly for a new book project. Many have subscribed or made a contribution already and I’m very grateful.
On to this week’s column.
“The arc of the moral universe is long,” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “but it bends towards justice.”
I still believe in that optimistic, long-term view, but we also know that the arc of American history on the path to “a more perfect union” is a place of many detours and culdesacs that do take us backward.
It is our fate — largely our own doing — to live at a time when the arc is going backward. Backward, perhaps, to the Gilded Age of the 1890s. The president likes to invoke William McKinley, for example, as an ideal, but the 25th president is, at best, a shady role model.
Read the full piece on Substack.
Thanks.