Back to Posting, Perhaps

Recently, I had the thought that I might return to the habit of posting here occasionally, and naturally that led me to look at the last thing I wrote on this blog, a post called “Getting Trump Wrong” that I published on January 23, 2021, three days after Biden was inaugurated, two and a half weeks after the January 6 insurrection attempt, and a little over four years ago today.

That post hasn’t aged all that well, at least in its assumption that Trump badly miscalculated by attempting an insurrection on January 6th. At the time, and for a while after, that certainly seemed like a reasonable assumption. Of course, in the end, like so many other things we used to think mattered, it just didn’t matter enough to enough people.

It’s good to make predictions and then keep track of how they do. At the moment, though, I hardly know what to predict for the country. My hope is that the constitutional order holds, that enough people connect the consequences of Trump’s decisions back to Trump, that we can emerge from this eventually, and when we do, can build back some of what was vandalized and discarded. But I’m not sure. In any case, although no one reads this blog, part of the reason I’d like to try posting here again is just to keep up the practice of saying things that are true, to the best of my knowledge, in public. There’s so much else to do now, but that seems like a good habit to cultivate, so I’ll give it a shot.