- Symmetrical cowardice: Far too many Democratic leaders are afraid to tell their race extremists to be responsible, and far too many Republican leaders are afraid to tell Trump to be responsible. So both parties become less attractive to reasonable people.
- It’s hard to take the long, speculative, and serene view on what’s often prescribed for the health of the Republican Party — namely a period without Trump even if it means a period out of power — if you reasonably believe the country is just one Democratic administration away from serious ruin.
- It’s easier to imagine getting through four years of Joe Biden starting in 2021 than it was to imagine getting through four years of Hillary Clinton starting in 2017. But (ironically?) we have mostly the four years of the Trump administration to thank for that.
- In some ways (judges, deregulation, the economy) Trump has been as good as conservatives hoped, but in other ways (personal character, institutional stability, and much foreign policy) he has been as bad as conservatives feared.
- At minimum, the United States should get an award in race relations for “most improved.” There’s breathtakingly less racism than there used to be and the stereotyping that remains is lamentable but mostly a result of actual statistical differences in behavior. And there’s really nothing to justify big marches, let alone riots.
- Some statues will come down, and some will stay, and the impact on black lives will be precisely zero. The Left has gotten people’s attention about (fictive) “systemic racism,” and its agenda turns out to be defunding the police and tearing down statues — what more do we need to know about how silly it is?
- The pandemic shows how resilient but fragile humans and human society are. And we don’t know a lot of what we’d like to know about the coronavirus and how it spreads, or what medical research will come up with, or how people will act if left to their own judgment, or the economic and human costs of continued shutdowns versus non-shutdowns. Cut everyone some slack.