I'll be doing a Substack Live appearance with Luke Hallam of Persuasion to talk about my previous post, on Trump as the first postmodern president, on Wednesday, June 10 at 1pm. Subscribers should receive an email once we're about to start, allowing you to join us if you wish. I hope to 'see' you there. One reason I've been writing less frequently these past two weeks is that I needed to travel to Washington D.C. for two events: the bi-annual American Political History conference, where I chaired a panel on paleoconservatism; and a course for incoming interns at the Niskanen Center, to which I contributed by teaching a three-hour session on the populist challenge to liberalism. The bulk of the readings I assigned for the latter were adapted from my own Substack posts, so those undergraduates are now honorary members of the 'Notes from the Middleground' family. But this isn't a post about either of those events. It's a post about what it felt like to spend several days in the...
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