The notion of “stuck culture” is by now so general its attendant malaise has infected the upper echelons of political discourse. Do we even need to explain it? “We’ve seen that movie before,” Obama said before the Democratic National Convention last summer, referring, of course, to the first Trump term, “and the sequel is usually worse.” A good line from a strange speech, which went on to compare Trump to “the neighbor who keeps running his leaf blower outside your window every minute of every day.” Weird image, right? And then even odder, the waffling punchline, no doubt the product of some harried last-minute rewrite: “From a neighbor, that’s exhausting. From a president, it’s just dangerous.” I really think, personal feelings aside, one should make a rhetorical distinction between the annoying neighbor and the aspiring despot. Yet something of this image, of the leaf blower whirring day in and day out, “ev…
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