1. After 9 weeks of teaching the History of American Conservatism in the Age of Trump I've finally come to realize why it's been so stressful.
2. Any historian can tell you, radical changes happen slowly. And radical change also happens incredibly suddenly. Those two statements are not contradictions.
3. Why did the Civil War end slavery? It happened incredibly rapidly. Few would have predicted in December of 1860 that the entire system of slavery would be destroyed by April 1865? Yet it was.
4. But that rapid destruction of slavery was made possible by decades/centuries of community building and resistance by enslaved people that primed them to respond pro-actively once the army of liberation showed up in their neighborhoods.
5. That rapid destruction of slavery was also made possible by decades of Abolitionist agitation that had created the ideological pillars for the popular case against slavery and seeded public opinion.
6. That rapid destruction of slavery was also made possible by decades of anti-slavery politics that always fell short of the moral clarity Abolitionists called for, but which nonetheless created the political will to act against slavery when the time came.
7. Teaching the History of Conservatism has made me realize that the radical politics we are seeing acted out by the @gop over the past year have been a long time coming.
8. Despite the apparent chaos of the Trump Administration, they are implementing the sort of immigration and regulatory policies that radical right wingers have been espousing for decades.
9. Their isolationist foreign policy (abandoning NATO and our commitment to liberal democracy) has roots that stretch back to America First in the late 1930s.
10. The change we're seeing has been coming slowly for decades, masked by what appeared to be a "reasonable" Republican party.
11. Slow changes build over time, but don't inevitably result in big things (like the end of slavery or the collapse of constitutional democracy).
12. But those slow changes, when combined with the unexpected conditions for a fast change (a Civil War, an economic depression, an international conflict) can accelerate things...make possible all sorts of dramatic changes that very recently had seemed unimaginable.
13. I've been on this earth 50 years, and have never lived through days that felt so perched on the edge of some sort of radical, paradigm shifting change.
14. Teaching the History of Conservatism in 2018 (as opposed to the other years I've taught it) now feels like a story of the slow changes that have slowly, imperceptibly pushed us to the edge of a cliff.
15. Who knows what happens next. History is unpredictable. I've always known that, but I've never lived with the sensation of living on the brink of some significant historical break about to happen.
16. Studying the slow motion run up to what might be that break has, quite frankly, been the most emotionally exhausting teaching I've ever done.
