A Great Reset

I must confess I am very glad that attempts to gather up trucker convoys in the US have fallen flat, not so much out of triumphalism over the folly of the Trumpians but because we have come to a point where we have bigger fish to fry. We need to forget all about masks, vaccines, etc., at least in the hyper-political sense in which we have been indulging in that discourse. For the moment, we need to back off talking about who fucked up worse in the lead up to Ukraine and also about microaggressions and trans kids participating in sports.

Instead, we need to recognize that armed forces play an important part in keeping us safe to have those discussions, and that diplomacy does too. So we need to speed confirmation of diplomats (Cruz and Hawley were the main offenders there as of last November) and be less negative about the role of non-political professionals in government who work across administrations. But we also need to be open to higher levels of defense funding as we confront a structural challenge from China aligned with Russia (and, it turns out, others in Asia).

But global warming looms in the back of all of this. John Kerry was right when he said in Munich the week before last that it remains an existential threat above and beyond the threat posed by Russia. Perhaps if we can dial down our internal rancor we can find ways to get those on the right to accede to what they already know in their hearts of hearts, that global warming is a real problem that we aren't addressing at appropriate scale.