I recently picked up a copy of On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from The Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder. It’s a short, quick read, that I highly recommend.
However, the epilogue is really where it drives home its points. The framing of current politics as a transition process from a politics of inevitability to a politics of eternity I find to be spot-on, especially considering some recent, compelling literature on history as cyclical.
From the epilogue of book:
Some critics…spoke of disruption, borrowing a term from the analysis of technological innovations. When applied to politics, it agin carries the implication that nothing can really change, that the chaos that excites us will eventually be absorbed by a self-regulating system. The man who runs naked across a football field certainly disrupts, but he does not change the rules of the game. The whole notion of disruption is adolescent: It assumes that after the teenagers make a mess, the adults will come and clean it up.
But there are no adults. We own this mess.
Oof.
