The New York Times’ Opinion section is ending the year with a series of essays called “Turning Points.”
In one essay, “Daily Show” host Trevor Noah encourages people to work together, to not let ourselves be divided — by politics, mainly, but also by passion. (“America, I’ve found, doesn’t like nuance,” he writes at one point. You bet, Mr. Noah.) Keeping people divided was what worked to keep the powerful in power in his native South Africa; it works here, too, and it may be working better than ever.
And then there’s Francis Fukuyama, he of “The End of History” fame. He admits the failures of the cosmopolitan class, who ignored globalism’s disruption at the expense of its promise. His hope is that the ruling classes in Western democracies “fix damaged institutions and … better buffer those segments of their own societies that have not benefited from globalization to the same extent.”
I wish I could be optimistic about that.
Ephemereality 