Kim Campbell, briefly Prime minister of Canada, on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher:
Paul Krugman… wrote that he read Henry Kissinger’s PhD thesis, which is about what happens in a stable system — this time Europe at the time of the French Revolution — when one of the players is a rogue and doesn’t play by the rules. And he talks about all the rationalizations that people make, why they’re doing this. You know: “Well, they have to play to their supporters, and they’ll come on board soon.” And Krugman says as he’s reading this, he thinks “My God, I’m reading about the Bush Administration.”
I think when we face radicals — people who actually don’t accept the rules, who don’t accept the historical consensus of the separation of church and state, who have no respect for the notion of what science is, all of these kinds of things — it is so mind-boggling that people are kind of paralyzed. They don’t know what to do. And so they keep thinking, “Oh, it’s just a marginal thing, they aren’t really this focused at changing things.” And yet they are.
The discussion of Henry Kissinger’s thesis is in Paul Krugman’s book The Great Unraveling. I recommend it.
Revolutionaries depend on the incredulity of the rest of us. If you believe radical right revolutionaries mean to stop somewhere short of trampling on your rights, then they’ve won, you’ve lost.
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