It's been almost a year since I've posted. Things have gotten a lot worse.

I'm very worried that the US is about to embrace a strategy in Iran that's centered around the deliberate comission of war crimes.

I think a lot about what is happening to us, and why, but I don't have any solid answers. It's always seemed odd to me that we don't talk about why more often. As a country, we've had a lot of success with democracy and the rule of law. Why don't more people care about those things now?

Although I don't have a solid answer, I think I can say a little bit about what a good explanation will look like:

• It should explain why MAGA has been happening over the past ten years, rather than ten years earlier, or ten years later.

• It should be able to explain the rise of illiberalism in several countries. In other words, the explanation shouldn't be too specific to the US.

• It should be able to explain the systemic nature of our collapse. The explanation has to cover voters, GOP politicians, the heads of large companies, newspapers, and so on.

• It should be consistent with the magnitude of the change. In other words, "Hillary didn't campaign in Michigan," doesn't seem good enough. If the first loss had been a fluke, if the GOP hadn't fallen in line, and if voters hadn't chosen Trump a second time, an explanation like that might work. But that's not our situation. What's happening seems pretty tectonic. With all due respect to the chaos butterfly, big and lasting changes come from big causes.

• It shouldn't be too reductive. If there was a smoking gun, we'd all know what it is by now. I think it's likely that there have been several stresses on the system, of different kinds, that have come together in an additive way to create the crisis.

• The explanation can't be entirely about ideas. There have to be facts on the ground that are driving things, at least in part. This doesn't mean that ideas don't matter. I believe they shape the way the changes we're seeing are being expressed, the shape they're taking.

• The explanation shouldn't rely on a broadspread decline in character, or on great figures making bad decisions.

I believe it's likely that the fundamental causes of MAGA are the changes created by shifts in media technology, and changes in how we consume information and choose what to believe. But I don't have any actual evidence that this is true.

I also believe it's helpful to think of our polity as an ecosystemm, with the collapse represented by MAGA being analogous to the failure of a rain forest or a coral reef. It's possible to say that a coral reef is dying because the ocean temperatures have risen, while still understanding that the actual collapse will be made up of a complex set of events that contain causal links between them. The warmer water might cause one species to die out near the reef, while the death of that species might create other knock on effects.

I'd like to finish this post by saying something about why I've come to this point. I want to try to show a little bit of my work, since I'm not very confident in my ideas.

Gordon Wood has been my biggest influence as I've tried to think this through. I don't believe the specific causes of the American Revolution have anything in common with the current crisis, but I think Wood's approach has a lot to each us about how to think about and understand the causes of historical events. In particular, what he says about changes in ideas being drivers of historical change have been important to me. The idea that vast changes require substantial causes comes from Wood.

On top of that, Anne Applebaum's The Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism, has been very helpful. The second point, about the need to explain what's happening outside of the US as well as within it, is taken from Applebaum's book. But beyond that, her book describes what she knows about why many specific people, friends and colleagues into whom she has real insight, have embraced authoritarianism.

In the immediate aftermath of Trump's 2016 victory, I read Paxton's The Anatomy of Fasicsm. The first thing I took from Paxton was reassurance -- it seemed clear that 2016 era MAGA wasn't a truly fascist movement. I no longer feel that to be true, though. But mostly I took the idea that fascism is less of an ideology and more ef a process that happens to a polity. This is more or less the foundation of my attempts to think through what's happening.

Finally, I understand that it's silly to take my own ideas so seriously. It's a little vain and certainly undeserved. But it's very hard not to think about what's happening, and to try to make sense of it.

Democrats are terribly unpopular now. Some of the criticism people level at them seem irrational to me, while others seem just. Thanks to triangualtion, I feel like there's no choice but to vote Democratic. No matter what problems I have with them, they're vastly better than the Republicans.

But most people don't agree with me. Lots of people like the Democrats in an unconflicted way, and lots of people feel that their problems are so bad that staying home or voting for Trump was justified. There is deep hatred of centrist Dems on both the right and the left. Dems tend to believe that the people who don't like them are either stupid and misiunformed or bigots. That attitude makes lots of people hate them even more.

It seems to me that two things are true. First, Democrats are the main vehicle we have that has any chance of defeating or even constraining Trump, and there is no time to tear the party down and rebuild it. And second, there are serious problems with the Democrats that would, in normal times, provide good reasons for people not to support them.

It also seems to me, after reading what I've been able to about why people voted for Trump, that legitimate flaws in the Democratic party played a significant role in the second loss to Trump. Voters reacted badly to bad things in the party, while tuning out vastly worse things in Trump.

I don't know what this means. Should we call out the Democrats on the things we don't like about them? Should we shut up and stay in line? Should people like me try to argue, honestly, there are terrible problems with both parties, but right now the Republicans are far worse?

Technocracy seems like a good thing, and in general, I'm a supporter of technocratic policies. I want to let medical experts manage public health. But there's a problem.

When an expert talks to someone like me about their subject, they have to dumb it down. It's hard to take complex subjects like the economy and present them in a format that works on social media. In a democracy, it's easy for experts to think of the electorate as children with power, children you have to speak to simply, in the right way, so they'll use their power in the right way. Dems do this all the time. Sometimes it can veer off into dishonesty.

Last month, there was a fight among Democratic supporters over whether it made sense to shutdown the government. Professional strategists believed it would be disastrous to take on blame for that. Other experts believed that if the government were shutdown it would give Trump the power to pick and choose what to fund, and so a shutdown would help Trump and DOGE gut the goverment. But the base wanted Dems to fight.

I'm not an expert political strategist, and I don't know who was right. I heard Carville explain the insider position in terms of the Cook Partisan Voting Index, and what he said made a lot of sense. At the same time, I really wanted them to fight. I still want them to fight. I don't know the answer.

Under Schumer's leadership, Dems decided to vote for cloture but against the CR, ensuring that it would pass. Schumer talked about fighting. They figured out who should vote for cloture and who should vote against it, probably based on Cook PVI numbers.

It was dishonest, and it was based on the idea that people don't know or care what cloture is.

Technocratic experts were afraid that the general public didn't need masks, not because it was true but because there weren't enough to go around. The basic position was right, medical workers needed them more than anyone else. Dems told us Biden was OK, because they knew Trump would be worse, not because Biden was actually OK.

In Gaza, Biden clearly made the decision and not to impose any real constraints on them. But he didn't level with the public about that. A lot of people agreed with the real policy, whatever I think of it. But he lied to the public about what he was doing.

The Bulwark's Sarah Longwell does a focus group podcast, where she plays recordings of voters explaining what they think. I know the recordings selected will probably inevitably show some sort of bias. But I've heard recording after recording of voters saying, "I don't trust Democrats." Trump has lied about many things, he continues to lie constantly. But his policies have been very much in line with what he said he'd do.

A lot of people think that Dems have to begin to fight. That might be true, or it might not be. I'm not a political strategist. But for me, personally, I think they have to learn how to be more honest, and how to stop talking down to people.