Mike, thank you for this article. You have produced a potent outline of the political mess we are currently navigating. People will abhor total collapse; so I’m hopeful we will muddle through this crisis of cosplay and bloody political theater. I lived through the Jim Crow era in North Carolina as a white person. If you weren’t white in the 1950s, Jim Crow society did not afford you democratic rights—and only limited economic opportunities. The KKK types provided a synthesis of deadly terror and cosplay for the hateful personalities of that time. Somehow we got through the likes of Jessie Helms. But of course it took about 100 years overall if you start counting from the failure of Reconstruction until men like Helms passed on. We are in a resurgence of that same KKK mentality now; but society is also much more complex, and the economic drivers of today favor innovation and multicultural dynamics. We my stumble in some reanimated KKK fever dream among Trump types and the inheritors of Helms but I’m hopeful the economic dynamism of our current time will left us all up beyond our darkest instincts. An open democracy will prevail as long as our economic structures are constantly remade to provide pathways of opportunity for our national population. Also, at the same time, we will have to navigate adjusting our outdated concepts of growth so that we as a global population become more sustainable and aligned with natural limits. None of that is easily achieved; but if we fail, the human experiment dies because Nature will erase us from the planet.