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A president described a regime change in the style of the 1930s as desirable: "You know what solves it? When the economy crashes, when the country goes to total hell and everything is a disaster." What we need, he thought, were "riots to go back to where we used to be when we were great." He couldn't quite pull off this scenario in January 2021, but it was not for lack of trying.

Scenario 1 ... Collapse Avoidance (This scenario is fictionalized in Kim Stanley Robinson's novels New York 2140 and The Ministry for the Future.)

Scenario 2 ... Collapse/Rebirth (Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven and Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games unfold in this scenario.)

Scenario 3 ... Collapse/Survival scenario. (This is the setting of Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower and Cormac McCarthy's The Road.)

Scenario 4 ... Collapsed Extinction (Adam McKay's film Don't Look Up and Alan Weisman's imaginative nonfiction book The World Without Us are portrayals of this scenario.)

...to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory. (p.81)

Melting polar ice caps leading to weather disruption, sea level rise, and coastal flooding.

Rapid climate disruption leading to extinctions, crop failures, and far-reaching economic impacts.

Flooding, wildfires, extreme weather leading to mass migrations.

White supremacist and nativist attacks on immigrants and minorities, with conspiratorial falsehoods and stupidities spread by demagogues seeking power.

Volatile stock markets, runs on banks, credit and bank defaults, currency failures.

Cascading failures of political leaders, leading to cascading failures of public institutions.

Mass and social media spreading mass deception leading to mass delusion leading to mass hysteria.

Authoritarian regimes preying on fear and resentment, eventually replacing or compromising democracies.

Food shortages. Water shortages. Supply chain disruptions. Decline in both health and health care, and increases in violence. Electric grids and internet crashes due to weather events or terrorist action.

“This book is the story of how democracy has
persisted throughout our history despite the many attempts to undermine it. It is the story of the American people, especially those whom the powerful have tried to marginalize, who first backed the idea of equality and a government that defended it, and then, throughout history, have fought to expand that definition to create a government that can, once and for all finally make it real.�� (p.xvii).

“The word conservative began to take on specific political meaning in the U.S. when antislavery northerners refused to honor the Fugitive Slave Act that was part of the Compromise of 1850. That law required federal officials, including those in free states, to return to the South anyone a white enslaver claimed was his property. Black American could not testify in their own defense, and anyone helping a ‘runaway�� could be imprisoned for six months and fined one thousand dollars, which was about three years�� income.�� (p.7).

“When voters elected Lincoln president, his centering of the Declaration of Independence led the Republican Party to create a new, active government that guaranteed poorer men would have access to resources that the wealthy had previously monopolized. They put men onto homesteads, created public universities, chartered a transcontinental railroad, invented national taxation (including the income tax), and, of course, ended Black enslavement in America except as punishment of crime. As Lincoln wrote, ‘The legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves �� in their separate, and individual capacities.�� (p.9)

“The use of the word socialism by those opposed to the liberal consensus had virtually nothing to do with actual international socialism, which developed in the late nineteenth century and burst into international prominence when the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia overthrew Czar Nicholas II. International socialism is based on the ideas of mid-nineteenth-century political theorists Karl Marx who believed that as the wealthy crushed the working class during late-stage capitalism, people would rise up to take control of the means of production: factories, farms, and so on.�� (p.26)

“Enlightenment thinkers had rejected leadership based on religion or birth, arguing instead that society move forward when people made good choices after hearing arguments based on fact. But this Enlightenment idea must be replaced, William F. Buckley Jr. argued in God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of Academic Freedom, because Americans kept choosing the liberal consensus, which, to his mind, was obviously wrong. He concluded that the nation’s universities must stop using the fact-based arguments that he insisted led to ‘secularism and collectivism,�� and instead teach the values of
Christianity and individualism. His traditional ideology would create citizens who would vote against the orthodoxy of the liberal consensus, he said. Instead, they would create a new orthodoxy of religion and ideology of free markets.�� (p.29)

“On one hand were the ‘Liberals�� who they insisted were basically communists (they capitalized the word to make it like the Chinese Communist Party, which was on everyone’s mind after its 1949 takeover of China’s government). This was not some limited group of conspirators; it was the vast majority of Americans: anyone, Republican or Democrat, who believed that the government should regulate business, protect social welfare, promote infrastructure, and protect civil rights, and who believed in fact-based argument.�� (p.30)

“In Goldwater, Movement Conservatism and the racist mythology of the post-Civil War years came together. Hoping to boost Goldwater for president in 1960, his supporters hired Bozell to write a position platform for him. Published as a book under Goldwater’s name, it was titled The Conscience of a Conservative. Joining the opposition to the federal defense of civil rights with Movement Conservative hatred of business regulation, it was more than a part platform. It was a general manifesto against the liberal consensus.�� (p.32)

“The southern strategy marked the switch of the parties�� positions over the issue of race. Johnson knew what that meant; the nation’s move toward equality would provide a weapon for a certain kind of politician to rise to power...The stage was set, with rhetoric and policy, for the rise of authoritarianism.�� (39) “The idea of ‘alternative facts�� revealed that this seemingly stupid lie about the crowd size was not only a way to get media coverage but also an important demonstration of dominance...Trump straight-up lied, and he demanded that his loyalist parrot his lies.�� (95) “Republican congresspeople, who surely knew that what they were hearing was completely divorced from reality, repeatedly jumped to their feet to applaud it. The president had made it clear he controlled the reliably Republican voters in his base, and no Republican could cross him. It was clearly Trump’s party, to do with as he wished.�� (p.132)

“Today's crisis in democracy has brought us back to the same question that haunted the founders: Are the principles on which this nation was founded viable? Is it really possible to create a country in which everyone is equal before the law and entitled to have a stay in their government or are some people better than others and thus have the right and the duty to rule?�� (p.163)

“The same men who put their lives on the line to establish that all men are created equal literally owned other human beings. They considered indigenous people ‘savages�� and women subordinate to men by definition. Neither black men nor Indians nor women fall into their definition of people who were ‘equal�� or who needed to consent to the government under which they lived�� (p.164)

“The Gettysburg Address marked the birth of a new nation, one that would not include human enslavement except as punishment for crime...for the first time in history, a constitutional amendment increased, rather than decreased, the power of the federal government.�� (205). “The Civil War and its aftermath were America’s second attempt at creating a nation based on the Declaration of Independence, establishing once and for all the supremacy of the federal government, and using it to guarantee equality before the law and equal access to resources.�� (p.209)

... we do have an example of what non-prison-based solutions to crime look like at a systematic level: it is what we do for white kids, and for middle-class and rich white kids in particular. We could reasonably describe whiteness as the oldest alternative to incarceration in America. (p.185)

... I had no interest in my father being incarcerated or my mother being deported or in I being taken away from my family. Even as a child I knew that if I told anyone what was happening in my home, any of these things could have happened ... (p.222)

I. Be Informed
II. Get Involved
III. Stay Open to Compromise
IV. Remain Civil
V. Reject Violence
VI. Value Norms
VII. Promote the Common Good
VIII. Respect Government Service
IX. Support the Teaching of Civics
X. Put Country First

I was shocked to learn this reality through my work in Suriname. I realized that what is happening there today is the exact process that unfolded in North America 150 years ago. While attending the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues and attending meetings held by the World Council of Churches, I also learned that what is happening in the Suriname rainforest is happening around the world. I was befriended by Indigenous Peoples in the Philippines, West Papua, Sweden, Norway, Mexico, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Peru, Australia, New Zealand, Greenland, and many other countries. All faced legal forced removal from their lands. All faced major human rights abuses--in many cases including targeted violence and extrajudicial killings. In nearly every country, extractive industry was legally polluting land, causing disease, forcefully removing communities from their lands, and killing innocent people.

My faith defines me. I am a Christian woman, a devoted follower of Jesus. Learning that the Christian church originated the Doctrine of Discovery sent my life spinning
sideways—my understanding of the world and my place in it. How strange to find that, according to the logic of the Doctrine, I am not one of the "chosen" in the exodus story, but rather a Canaanite. Learning the precepts that underlie the Doctrine of Discovery, the ideological alibis that morally and legally justify land theft on an epic scale, shook me. Yet understanding how the Doctrine of Discovery has shaped the world, and my life in particular, has awakened in me a call to justice and peace proclaimed by Jesus in

Trolls may be destructive and callous; they may represent privilege gone berserk; they may be a significant reason why we can't have nice things online. But the uncomfortable fact is that trolls replicate behaviors and attitudes that in other contexts are actively celebrated ("This is how the West was won!") or simply taken as a given ("Boys will be boys"). Trolls certainly amplify the ugly side of mainstream behavior, but they aren't pulling their materials, chosen targets, or impulses from the ether. They are born of and fueled by the mainstream world—its behavioral mores, its corporate institutions, its political structures and leaders—however much the mainstream might rankle at the suggestion.

If this study has accomplished anything, then, it is to call attention to the overlap between us and them, and to encourage readers to spin endlessly their sense of what has happened—a line of questioning that is as likely to direct focus inward as it is to cast blame outward, and that provides a framework for thinking carefully and critically not just about the what of trolling, and not just the how, but the why. This why might not be a solution unto itself, but it is, at the very least, a start. And that is something.

... Love is not reliant on judgement, but on a decision to set judgment aside. Love is anarchy. Love is chaos. We don't love the deserving; we love flawed and imperfect human beings, in an emotional logic that belongs to an entirely different weather system than the chilly climate of reason.

Intelligence is the ability to recognize, adapt to, create, and manipulate cycles.

First, it is work that causes substantial harm either to other people or to nonhuman animals and the environment, often through the infliction of violence.

Second, it entails doing something that "good people”—the respectable members of society—see as dirty and morally compromised.

Third, it is work that is injurious to the people who do it, leading them either to feel devalued and stigmatized by others or to feel that they have betrayed their own core values and beliefs.

Last and most important, it is contingent on a tacit mandate from the "good people," who see this work as a necessary part of the social order but don't explicitly assent to it and can, if need be, disavow responsibility for it.

Fed Up with Fundamentalism: A Historical, Theological, and Personal Appraisal of Christian Fundamentalismt, by Leroy Seat

The Limits of Liberalism: A Historial Theological and Personal Appraisal of Christian Liberalism, by Leroy Seat

Thirty True Things Everyone Needs to Know Now, by Leroy Seat

A Wonderful Life: The Story of My Life from Birth until my 82nd Birthday (1938~2020), by Leroy Seat

"We dodged a bullet on SARS," told me. ... If the virus had been just a little more transmissible generally, among all patients and situations, he said, "It could have been a huge problem." But that SARS-CoV virus had one feature, or the absence of a feature, standing between it and a global nightmare in 2003. "Which was, for the most part, asymptomatic people didn't transmit until they were sick. So you had time." You could identify cases, trace contacts and quarantine. It could be stopped, for those reasons, and it was. If the virus had been a little different, "highly transmissible, with more variable disease manifestation, harder to figure out who were silent carriers, then we may never have been able to contain SARS." (p. 47)

At the time that NAFTA was signed, there were a number of good strategic reasons for its passage that would prove beneficial to America and Americans over the long run. Realizing those benefits would hurt factory workers in many communities, we did not allow ourselves to be honest about the deal we were making—we glossed over the losses, and, later, turned around and pointed fingers. We could have done better, and we should have.

... the reality is that America has intentionally ceded ground under his [Trump's] watch. Leaving the Trans-Pacific Partnership is the clearest demonstration of how America has walked away from a leadership role in global trade—we have abandoned our historic role of writing the rules of the road. �� Globally, everyone agrees that we want China to be a better actor, engaging in trade in ways that are more consistent with other industrialized nations. Up to now, the U.S. has done this in partnership with allies, and has provided leadership to guide the way. Under Donald Trump, the preference has been for America to go it alone (without pesky allies who might muddy things up) by using tariffs rather than joint action as the chief tool for influencing China.

But a trade deficit is something else entirely: it simply describes the difference between the value of goods and services a country imports and the value of the things that it exports. Importing more from a given country than we export to it is not a measure of strength, weakness, solvency, fiscal irresponsibility, or anything else—nor is our money "lost" when we do so.
In a world where services such as software, movies, television, music, banking, insurance, transportation, and education are becoming much more strategically valuable to economic growth than the number of goods we can produce in a factory, a trade deficit on physical goods simply shouldn't bother us.

Tariffs, by their very definition, are a sales tax that a country imposes on its own consumers and importers for buying foreign goods—when the U.S. creates them, they get paid by U.S. citizens to the U.S. government, full stop. There's no debating this point; it's just a fact.

As economies—and, especially, America's economy—have evolved to center more around services than physical goods, businesses in fields ranging from finance and law to marketing and entertainment have set their eyes on the vast majority of potential customers who happen to live beyond their own national borders. Because the rules of trade were largely written during eras when services were little more than a blip on the economic radar, a major goal of new trade agreements like TPP is opening the same doors to consultants, cloud service providers, IT support, and engineers that we've already opened to steel mills and lumberyards.

I am pleased to report that trade wars are nowhere near as devastating as actual wars. That isn't to say that they don't also have victims, though—on the contrary, the major difference between trade wars and actual wars is that trade wars typically don't have winners.

An America that makes everything at home would be a land of $10 bananas, $100 shirts, and a diet limited by what's available season to season. You wouldn't have an iPhone to distract you or a laptop to stream TV.

... that even the best intentioned deals are always going to leave somebody behind.

By and large, globalization has helped three categories of people: rich people in rich countries, rich people in poor countries, and poor people in poor countries. What we have not done well is make globalization a winning proposition for poor people in rich countries. �� President Trump is right about the impact trade has had on many segments of our population as well as lower-income workers in developed countries around the world

Behind these six items are meaningful stories that help explain not only how trade has shaped our lives so far, but also how we can use trade to build a better future for our own families, for America, and for the world.