Everyone Their Own MAGA

but the city casts out 

that man who weds himself to inhumanity

 thanks to reckless daring. Never share my hearth

 never think my thoughts,

 whoever does such things. 

 --Sophocle, Oedipus Rex

I still feel my identity as an American, but I get Patrick's unease. An America that cannot shun Donald Trump - as it would have in a better time - is a changed country, and not the one I grew up in. I am glad to live in New England, which still feels like a sane place. https://t.co/ywClLDCaBv

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) November 7, 2024

In a post-Augustinian, post-Romanticism world, Sophocles no longer describes us, much as we want him to. There is nothing “e pluribus unum”  about his Athens, the culture that gave us “barbarian” to describe non-Greeks because non-Greeks sounded like babbling babies (because they didn’t speak Greek).

I don’t live in New England, though I certainly want to visit there. I did live in the Midwest for five years, and while there were lovely people there, I understood the people in Texas better. And still do, though I’ve always been baffled by their politics.

I’m still pretty sure they haven’t wed themselves to inhumanity. We just don’t agree about what “humanity” is.

Gotta locate your identity in something that doesn’t involve the people around you, unless you want to perpetuate American regionalism and parochialism.

Besides, “majority rule” in America has always meant “we need the majority so we can rule.”