Notes toward an essay - an optimistic view
There is a sense that a moment of crisis has passed - psychologically, if not politically. The worst possibilities that many of us feared have not yet materialized, and perhaps they never will. The right has shown itself, in the final analysis, to be cowardly and weak - concerned more with projecting the appearance of power than effectively wielding it. This is not to minimize the harms that they have inflicted - one cannot, and should not, overlook those who have been and continue to be killed, brutalized, falsely imprisoned, impoverished, and otherwise immiserated by this regime, and one hopes that all involved in committing these crimes will be held to account. Only that the psychic disturbance, the sense of being "under siege" that seemed omnipresent since last year's election, has lessened by several degrees. Looking back, the "failures" of wokeness (I put this in quotes because we do not yet have enough distance to say for sure that it failed) were one, ...