It's easy in isolation to notice the authoritarianism of the Trump administration and to think that the best way to fight it is to ensure that authoritarianism doesn't triumph in the United States.

What if the gravest risk is not one-party rule, but a kind of Balkan-style civil war where neighbour is against

neighbour, because the more open hostility there is on the streets of America, the likely

are a dissent into civil war.

Well, well, well, it's interesting times. How are you feeling at the moment

about American democracy? I always find that, you know, it reminds me of being, when I was at

high school and university and you had to do an essay and try to figure out what

you thought about the essay question, I would always look across at fellow students who read

the essay question and then immediately launched into writing. And I would think, there's no way

they're going to get a good mark because I haven't had time to digest what the point of the question is

to structure their argument and to reach a conclusion that makes sense in advance

because they don't know where they're going with their argument yet.

And I would always sit there after reading the essay question

and spend the first precious five minutes of the essay writing time, not writing, but

thinking and jotting notes and bullet points about how to tackle the issue. And I was thinking

about that analogy the other day to the moment that we're living in where we're being thrown

an enormous amount of information and the news cycle seems completely overwhelming and daunting

and our natural reaction is just to grab a pen

and start scribbling mentally about what our emotional response is

and maybe it's a time to not do that

because often our initial instincts and our knee-jerk reactions

are of the least constructive.

...