In my quest to become Mayor of Mountain View, there seems to be hope for me yet. An American born Indian guy named Bobby Jindal just won the Governor's seat in Louisinia a week or two back. That's a pretty amazing commentary on how far the U.S. has come in the past decades. Just 15 or 20 years ago, David Duke (a leader of the KKK) was in the running for Governor in Louisiana. It was a landslide victory in favor of Bobby Jindal. So, to go from David Duke to a landslide victory for an Indian guy is simply amazing. Jindal has quite an interesting background, including a stint at McKinsey & Co. after he got his Masters degree from Oxford.
I found this opinion piece ( Democrats aren't innocent bystanders ) interesting on how both Democrats and Republicans share responsibility for polarizing the electorate and undermining some of its faith in democracy. It references two other posts that were pretty good as well: The Disease of Delegitimization The Weimarization of the American Republic The second article is really long and heavy on history. But given all of the comparisons people make between the current times and those of post-WWI Germany, I found it interesting to dive in to understand where the comparisons are coming from and how close we really are. The short answer is that we aren't that close (phew). Seems like post-WWI Germany was incredibly fragile. This was a good excerpt that summarized it: So, unlike the 60s, you have a dynamic in which both sides are behaving like radicals, in which the establishment isn’t yelling “stop,” and in which oikophobia is more evenly distributed, relative to its Boo...
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