Civics: What Should we know about the 2024 Election?
Susan Yackee, Mike Wittenwyler and Rick Esenberg shared their impressions and experiences of the November 2024 election at the Madison Literary Club’s [madlit.org] most recent meeting.
Machine generated transcript.
mp3 audio
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The Madison Literary Club is a small overlooked jewel in the city’s cultural cluster. Founded in 1877, the 147-year-old social group brings together town and campus to host, as its website promises, “presentations on subjects of current interest and engage in lively conversation about them.”
The club delivered on its promise a few days after the Nov. 5 election with an expert panel exhuming the election results that so shocked Madison. Only 20 or so people showed up, but one of them wasCharles Franklin, director of the celebrated Marquette Law School Poll. Just an observer, he demurred when asked to join the conversation. He was, as he explained later, on a “busman’s holiday.”
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The Presidential election was mentioned, of course. Naimisha Forest dove into this topic recently:
Except for this evidently premeditated and striking if cryptic assessment:
“I think Trump may be one of those figures in history who appears from time to time to mark the end of an era and to force it to give up its pretences. It doesn’t necessarily mean that he knows this, or that he is considering any great alternative. It could just be an accident.”
I make five points. Four are specific to Kissinger on Trump. The last is on the Hegelian model of historical change – the cunning of reason – that Kissinger rather casually deploys here while toying half-heartedly with his branzino (European bass) on a bed of green vegetables.
First, Kissinger thinks Trump may already be a substantial figure in world history, not, alas, some bizarre printer’s error that Trump-opponents hope to erase from its pages.
Second, he’s not just any historical figure but one who marks the end of an era. This much should be apparent even from Trump’s critics, who denounce him for upending the post-war “liberal international order,” among other epochal crimes.
