"Get out the rake." #NealStephenson

I know what happened in 2003. I value the lessons of history. But I don't need to relitigate that past with Tom or anyone else to recognize that he has been staunchly anti Trump for 10y+ and a pro democracy/pro constitution patriot. Your attempt to sow division is not well received.

Maybe he's been faking his way through them all along, too. I mean, how would you even know? He might be saying the same thing you just said about him, but about you. To me, that has a kind of beautiful symmetry it would actually be really sweet if it were true.

Gah: typo. 2003.

Which of those two arguments matters right now? You know.
Which side do you take. You know.
Which side in that battle is Tom on? You know that two.
I'm not one to tell anybody which feelings to have, but please remember what time it is and where we are.
Be here now, not in the past.

Do you prefer battle of our time, today, at the barricades defending democracy, the battle that requires courage because victory is not guaranteed, or the easy battle in which you already know you were proven right, where you're comfortably sure of the outcome, because it's 22y in the past.

Pft, ad hominem. Do you think it's 2025, that we have a fascist president, a sycophantic congress, that the MAGA GOP is trying end US democracy, & that we must fight that battle or lose democracy, or do you think it's 2023 and we need to debate are SH's WMDs real? Which battle do you want to fight?

Now, in order for all sides to preserve our right to have different opinions and take different policy stances w/out repression from our own govt, and our ability to even have those policy debates, we must unite and speak, in one voice, for democracy.
Thank you, Atlantic, and Tom, and David.

We felt, correctly or incorrectly (the latter, it turned out), that expending all our discourse on policy disputes and ignoring the risks tied to not attending to (deferring maintenance of) our democracy could come at no cost to democracy.

The thing is that, 2 decades ago, our disparate discourse enjoyed a kind of luxury: we were still able to, mostly, take for granted that those fundamentals weren't under deliberately open+overt assault by our own govt's officials.

Indeed. The last decade has (re?)inspired many of us to get back in touch with, and to reunite around, those fundamentals.

I should have included (and meant to include) the modifier (with respect to Frum and Nichols): anything they've written in the last decade, after coming out as Never Trump. But Frum 20 years ago? Plenty to disagree with then.

What's wild is that I'm not only just as solidly progressive and left leaning as ever, I'm in fact more left leaning and progressive as I've ever been *at the same time as* I haven't disagreed with anything that David Frum and Tom Nichols have said or written in the last decade. Thanks, Atlantic.

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