“Trump betrayed, confused, and almost destroyed essential communal trust in the USA. Rebuilding communal trust and a shared factual basis of truth is now the top job in restoring faith in US commitment to democracy worldwide. Peggy Noonan describes the peaceful transition of political power demonstrated in 1973 by Richard Nixon in resigning and publishing transferring the presidency to Gerald Ford, read on.
~Hazel Henderson, Editor”
Main Street (11/09/20): Where might Trump voters have got the idea that a president was illegitimate? Images: Getty Images Composite: Mark Kelly
This extended moment of history reminds me of Washington in the years before and during the Civil War. There was a kind of hysterical intensity among our political class in those days, on all sides. The instability was so dramatic—Rep. Preston Brooks caning Sen. Charles Sumner on the floor of the Senate in 1856, poor Mary Todd Lincoln with her rage and manias, and her husband telling her that if she continues like this she’ll wind up in the asylum. Those are famous examples, but you can’t pick up a book about those days and not see what looks like real and widespread personal destabilization. There was a lot of self-medicating, as they say. The journals and diaries of Mary Chesnut, who resided in the heart of the Washington establishment as the country broke apart and in capitals of the Confederacy as it formed, tell constantly of the officers and politicos coming to her home to drink into the night, and the ladies and their laudanum. Something strange had been let loose as things broke apart. Continue reading