What have we learned?
—After two presidential impeachments in the space of a year and two months?
—After another close and divisive election during a global pandemic, and an electoral aftermath like no other. The incumbent president created and propagated an enormous lie — that the election was stolen. The lie was believed by millions. And then the president himself tried to steal the election.
—What have we learned after watching our beloved Capitol, cathedral of liberty, be stormed and desecrated?
—After seven people died and 140 were injured in that siege?
—What have we learned after the second, riveting and painful, impeachment trial?
What have we learned?
Well, first, we learned, again, sadly, that we are two countries — inhabiting two self-contained realities.
There is an invisible wall between them.
Almost no one crosses back and forth.
And both believe the other to be the aggressor in the cold, and sometimes hot, war between them.
In the shadow of the Vietnam War (1972), the great political philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote a book called "Crisis of the Republic." It dealt with three manifestations of the legitimate political system breaking down — civil disobedience, lying in politics and violence as a response to broken politics, or what she considered to be the absence of true politics.
We have been in that crisis for the past four years.
