El Duce’s staged event is meeting blow back from many quarters. Instead of looking like he is in charge and in command, Trump looks small, vindictive, reckless, and dictatorial. Anything but presidential.

The protests, denouncing the murder-execution of George Floyd, have gone global. People are marching far beyond our shores. The world for many reasons has become smaller and more interconnected. Information and images travel at instantaneous speed to a global audience. In the first of his magisterial books on 19th century Europe, Eric Hobsbawm, one of the great historians of the 20th century, remarks that the citizens of Seville only learned about the French Revolution 6 weeks months after the event. How different the world is today!

Life is, if anything, humbling, revealing how much we got wrong in the past and how limited our knowledge is of the present, and the predictability of the future. If we have any doubt about that, the events of the past few months should have convinced us otherwise.

I hope Congressional Democrats call for the resignation of Attorney General William Barr. His lead role in organizing the thuggish like clearing of the park of peaceful protesters around the White House, among other things makes him unsuitable to be the highest law officer in the country.

Any analysis that features the role of neoliberalism or white liberalism in bringing the country to its present impasse, while, at the same time, dimming or even removing from view the role of right wing extremism and its long ascendancy to power may sound deep and radical, but it is neither. It’s analytically wrong and strategically misguided.