Thomas Sowell is a Great Phrasemaker

If we look back at the conservative movement of the turn of the 21st century, two of the most worthy names must be Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams. They are, of course, black, and have paid the price for not getting with the program and bending the knee to the liberal orthodoxy.

Sowell and Williams are also men that made their bones before the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s and before African Americans became the little darlings of the ruling class. So they have the toughness and pride of the self-made man, and I like that.

This week Thomas Sowell, at 86, has announced that he will stop writing his weekly syndicated op-ed column. In response many in the conservative firmament, and some of us occupying a sub-lunar position, have written about what Thomas Sowell has meant to us.

I myself have ten of his books on my bookshelf, out of the 30-odd that he has published over a hard-working lifetimes. So that ain't bad.

But I think that the great contribution of Dr. Thomas Sowell has been his talent for the catchphrase, or apothegm.

Here is the Dark Lord Vox Day and his list of Sowellisms.

Here is Michell Malkin and her list; she started reading Sowell in college, "no thanks to my college."

Here is Steven Hayward, biographer of Reagan and Powerline guy with his list of Sowell aphorisms.

Here is Christine Rousselle, at Townhall.com.

Here is WikiQuote's list of Sowell quotes.

And here is Thomas Sowell himself, with his favorite quotations from others.

I don't think that Thomas Sowell broke any new ground in economics or history, although he did yeoman work in diversity, showing that there is no such thing as the right proportion of workers in any field, and he showed that affirmation action and quotas are poison, whenever and wherever they are tried across the world.

My appreciation of Thomas Sowell is that his talent for the catchphrase is no small thing. For instance, I have tried to find pithy quotes in the work of Friedrich Hayek without much success. Hayek was a German writer, and wrote in paragraphs; it is very hard to find a catchphrase in his work. But the first thing that people think of in regard to Thomas Sowell is his talent for the pithy quote.

And for that we shall be eternally grateful to the mind and the pen of Thomas Sowell.

Lost in a Legacy Media Wonderland

It's lovely to read the chaps at the Carlos Slim blog as they try to figure out what hit them. So here is Jim Rutenberg doing an end-of-year piece on the media landscape.

This much is obvious, but it bears repeating before the year turns: If the news media is going to do its part in maintaining a fact-based national debate, it’s going to have to learn important lessons from 2016. 

Oh dear, Jim. Ain't you ever read nothing? For instance, how about reading Benjamin Disraeli's political novels like Sybil and Coningsby? There are three characters that define already in the mid 19th century what the modern media is all about. There is Rigby, who writes "slashing articles." And then there are Taper and Tadpole, the political operatives, always asking "What is our cry?"

So nothing has changed, Jim. Already in the dark ages of the 19th century the media was right in the middle of the political game, putting its weight on one side or the other. In Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now, we have three, count 'em, three ink-stained wretches writing, er, fake news to catch the eyeballs of the reading public. There is Mr. Broune of the Morning Breakfast Table. Broune is middle-of-the-road. Then there is Mr. Alf, of The Evening Pulpit, a title with an air of "wonderful omniscience." Finally there is Mr. Booker, of the Literary Chronicle.

At no point do Disraeli or Trollope give us any impression that this wonderful cast of characters is the least bit interested in "a fact-based national debate." Not a whisper. They are all in the business of catching eyeballs.

And that is the business that Carlos Slim's blog is in. Only Carlos Slim is what you might call the original robber baron. He made his bones as the guy with a monopoly on cell-phone service in Mexico. Golly; I wonder how Slim got and kept the cell-phone monopoly in Mexico.

How much fact-based national debate can you expect from a newspaper owned by a crony capitalist?

So it is utterly ridiculous to whine about "fake news." All news is fake news; it all has an angle.

For instance, here is Joel Kotkin talking about the blue cities, supposedly the thriving heart of the new urbanist movement that is revitalizing America's cities.

In reality, if we go beyond the big-city boosterism that dominates media coverage, poverty, crime, and economic stagnation still characterize many urban core neighborhoods even as many downtown districts have recovered. For all the talk about gentrification, concentrated urban poverty has been a persistent and growing problem, with 75 percent of high-poverty neighborhoods in 1970 still classified that way four decades later.

What in the world could he mean with his "big-city boosterism?"

The urbanists are all about "light rail and trolley projects designed to appeal to upscale riders and developers," according to Kotkin. Yeah, and here in Seattle we have just voted for $50 billion in light rail and trolleys.

So where does the boosting of metro-city urbanism come in the arc of justice between "fake news" and "fact-based national debate?" Ain't you heard, Jim? The Germans decided 200 years ago that there was no such thing as "facts." As Kant said, we cannot know things-in-themselves, we can only know appearances, and those appearances go through our minds before we construct the picture of them that we call reality.

I have found that over the years liberals have sneered at the FoxNews catchphrase "fair and balanced." Don't you guys get it? Fair and balanced is a joke, son. It is an ironical comment on the conceit of the liberal media that they deal in facts and genuine reportage.

And that was before WikiLeaks and the emails that showed your average liberal reporter groveling before the big beasts of the Democratic Party.

The Left's Trifecta of Delusion, Incompetence, and Spite

Last weekend the boys at Instapundit rang down the verdict on the Obama administration. My version is this:

The Obama era was conceived in delusion, executed in incompetence and delivered with spite.

But why limit this notion to the Obama administration? Any fool can see that this trifecta of delusion, incompetence, and spite applies to the whole Leftist project.

First, there is the lefty delusion about the economy. Its ground of faith is that economic power must be subordinate to political power; otherwise people will be oppressed and exploited by the capitalists. But this is a delusion. The fact is that people subjected to the full force of capitalist economic power have experienced the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years from per-capita income of $1-3 per day to over $100 per day. But people imprisoned in lands where the political sector dominated the economic sector have starved and died. See Venezuela, land of the Bolivarian Revolution.

But it gets worse, because those lands ruled by the deluded left have suffered under the incompetence of their rulers. Science tells us that such rule is bound to be incompetent, because administrative systems cannot compute market prices. But lefties are too incompetent to listen.

But it gets worse, because the rulers of the deluded, incompetent left have oppressed their peoples with spite. It is not enough for them to rule over the economic sector. The natural leaders of the economic sector, that conjure up prosperity with innovation and pluck, must be named and shamed as "robber barons" and "malefactors of great wealth."

Anyway, as my sister reminded me, we have a name for the nation in which the political sector dominates the economic sector: we call it fascist.

Second, there is the lefty delusion about politics. Its ground of faith is that political power, in the hands of the right people, can be salvific; political power can bend the arc of history towards justice. But this is a delusion. Political power is a necessary evil. It is beneficial only because it is civil war by other means, with the sham fights of elections instead of the real thing of teenage boys and twenty-something men with guns running in the streets. The trick with politics is how to limit its power without leaving the people defenseless against robbers and invaders.

But it gets worse, because those lands ruled by the deluded left have suffered under the incompetence of their rulers. The whole point of social animals like humans is to replace the war of all against all with a zone of peace where people agree not to resort to force and resolve their conflicts peacefully. And the rulers of the land where politics is king incompetently mobilize the whole nation as if for war, little caring that war is about destruction, not construction.

But it gets worse, because the rulers of the deluded, incompetent left have oppressed their peoples with spite. It is not enough for them to mobilize the whole people into a political army. There must also be enemies of the people, reactionaries and their bribed apologists, and these must be sought out and hunted down, and shoveled into mass graves as monsters and scum.

Third, there is the lefty delusion about religion and culture. Its ground of faith is that church and state must be combined into a single totalitarian power structure. The left demands not just to dominate your work and your political community. It is determined to use political power to enforce its secular religious beliefs and dominate your mind. But this is a delusion. Indeed it is a contradiction. The left believes in a vanguard of the evolved and the enlightened, the people of the creative self, empowered to spread their expressive individualism throughout the land. But what of the creative expression of the next generation of expressive creativity? How will they persuade the previous generation of creative rulers to accept their new creations?

But it gets worse, because those lands ruled by the deluded left have suffered under the incompetence of their rulers. The whole point of humans as in this mortal coil is that the meaning of life, the universe, and everything is a profound mystery. And the lesson of the last two hundred years and its scientific and cultural revolutions is that the meaning of it all has become curiouser and curiouser. It is profoundly incompetent to imagine that the true meaning of life, the universe and everything can be intuited by any political elite, and carefully taught to a subservient multitude.

But it gets worse, because the rulers of the deluded, incompetent left have oppressed their peoples with spite. It is not enough for them to imagine that politicians and their bribed apologists can dictate the meaning of life, the universe, and everything to their subjects. The subjects must also be made to care. There can be no backtalk, no dissent from the papal bulls of the political elite, and anyone that dissents from the political line must be anathematized as racists, sexists, and homophobes, and cast into outer darkness.

Charles Taylor, the Canadian liberal Catholic philosopher, argued that the modern era and its "immanent frame" requires a two-fold culture to resolve the cross pressures that each of us feel, from materialists that respond to the aesthetic in poetry to religious believers and Romantics that still want the rational structure of human rights. Taylor proposed a two-dimensional solution. First, we must honor ordinary human flourishing: forming families, owning property, doing it for the children. Second, we recognize that we all search for something higher and fuller. The problem then is how to live ordinary life while still embracing the transcendent, and how to reach for the stars in terms that do not “crush, mutilate or deny what is essential to our humanity[?]"

It has been the central conceit of the left that it had solved the problem of human flourishing by making it into something higher and fuller.

But now we know that its entire project was built on a delusion, implemented with blind incompetence, and enforced with spite, and that everywhere the left has ruled it has crushed, spindled and mutilated human flourishing, human community, and human spirit.

All that is wanting is a little boy to observe that the emperor has no clothes.

Democrats Blundering in Denial

Get a load of this, from Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg and his daughter Anna in The New York Times.

President Obama will be remembered as a thoughtful and dignified president who led a scrupulously honest administration that achieved major changes.

I guess the advantage of that statement is that is reveals the liberal agenda for Barack Obama's "legacy." You will agree that President Obama was "thoughtful and dignified," etc., or we will know the reason why.

Yep, people will disagree about Obama's "impatience with politicians and Republican intransigence denied him bigger accomplishments" but he saved the economy, passed Obamacare, and committed the nation to climate change. Yay!

But then Greenberg has to deal with the fact that Democrats have experienced astonishing losses during his administration. So what went wrong? Here is Greenberg's list:

• The president declined to explain his initiatives effectively.
• He focused on helping the "ascendant... multicultural America... rather than the continuing economic struggle experienced by a majority of Americans."
• He offered "tepid support" for the labor movement.
• His presidential campaign technology did not help in mid-terms and 2016.
• His campaign messages were all about "progress and growth."

I think the way to get past the partisan bubble-thinking is to start with the first paragraph reproduced above.

• "Thoughtful and dignified?" The guy that told his supporters to bring a gun to a knife fight?
• "Scrupulously honest administration?" The one that sicced the IRS on its political opponents and whose Attorney General met Bill Clinton, husband of a woman of interest to the FBI, for a little chat on the tarmac?
• "Achieved major changes?" As in rolling over the opposition without bothering to achieve consensus?

Do liberals really believe this, or does Stan Greenberg believe that the liberal base isn't ready for the truth yet?

Because I live in another universe.

Here's my report card on the Obama administration.

• Obama was foolish to push a Democrat-only stimulus. I'd say that the science tells us that big-government stimulus doesn't work.
• Obama was foolish to push Obamacare before getting the economy back on track. Big government programs are a weight on the economy, something we didn't need after the worst financial crash since 1929.
• Obama was foolish to push Dodd-Frank financial regulation on a weak economy.
• Obama was foolish to push climate-change subsidies and regulation before getting the economy on track. Subsidies and energy regulation are a weight on the economy. See above.
• Obama was foolish to abandon the Moynihan Rule, that you need a 70-30 vote in the Senate to pass big policy changes. Instead he passed Obamacare with a partisan majority and hid his radical changes in a torrent of executive actions and regulations, most of which can be rolled back.

But those are the tactical issues. The official Christopher Chantrill Strategic Appreciation is more important, and more compelling:

• Liberal faith in political power is the folly of the age. Humans need protection from enemies foreign and domestic. But the age-old problem is who will protect us from the protectors: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? from Jouvenal's Satires. Sorry liberals; you are not going to make the world a better place with political power.
• Liberals still believe in big government administration and regulation. That's a century after Mises statement that socialism couldn't work because it couldn't compute prices, 60 years after Hayek said that a bureaucrat couldn't outperform the market, and 45 years since Stigler's article on regulatory capture. It's the Science, liberals.
• Liberals are using government power to push their secular religion. Sexual liberation, divorce, abortion and LGBT may be the wave of the future, but this secular religion should not be a government-established church, and its precepts should not be imposed by government fiat or by elite Supreme Court ukase. This cannot end well.

But don't think that I don't appreciate President Obama. I do, I really do, and here is why.

In my view, the recovery from the 2008 financial crash would have been slow, whichever president and party was in power. See the Crash of 1873 and its great depression, and the Crash of 1929. And the president and party in power would have suffered just because it all happened on their watch.

So I thank God we had a Democratic president during the disappointing and slow recovery from the crash. And nobody dared criticize the president, because racism. Imagine if Republicans had been in power! Why, in was in 2003, a mere two years after the Tech Crash of 2000 that Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) started complaining about a "jobless recovery." Imagine what Nance would have said during a Republican presidency after 2008!

I reckon that if it weren't for President Obama we wouldn't be seeing the Republican Party in its best political position since 1928. Instead we would be seeing the Democrats in their best position since 1937.

And best of all, it looks like Democrats still don't get what hit them.

One Problem for the New York Times is

Here's a crazy mirror story from the New York Times. According to Carlos Slim's blog the Democrats represent all the economically successful regions of America, for a

huge portion of the nation’s globally competitive economic activity occurs in those blue places. Dominated by highly productive, export-oriented advanced industries, high-tech enterprises, and professional services including the management of companies[.]

And so naturally the voters of those regions are all in favor of free trade. Republican regions do not add much value, because of their old tired industries, and the voters of those regions are in favor of Donald Trump's protectionism.

This is curious, because it inverts the narrative of the last century or so. Used to be that progressives said that the whole point of a compassionate and just politics was to think about the folks left behind and try to help them. And Republicans and free market enthusiasts were excoriated for being deaf to the cries of the unprotected, believing that the market should be left to itself.

Now, the NYT guys seem to be saying to hell with the deplorables; we are the winners.

Allow me to introduce a different explanation of all this.

First of all, Progressives live in an over-under culture, as reflected in the priorities of the Democratic Party. On the one hand they are the educated ruling class and their educated supporters; they are globalists. The folks that manage and work for the high-tech economy are natural globalists, and that's fine. But then there are the Unders in the over-under culture, and they are tribalists. They belong to the single-women tribe married to the state, the racial minorities married to the racial spoils system, and the government employees married to the government pension system. None of these people give a damn about the economy or trade; they just want their checks.

You can see that the policies of the Democratic Party neatly reflect these realities. They are all for the globalist corporations and the government handouts, but they don't give a damn about the folks in between. In fact, as Hillary Clinton so obligingly said, the folks in between are the racists, sexists, homophobes, the deplorables of whom you've heard tell.

Now the Republican Party represents the broad middle of America, people that aren't cut out to be tech wizards, and who follow the rules, get a job, and obey the law. So they are people that don't rely on government handouts much beyond the mandatory Social Security and Medicare. On these people falls most heavily the weight of big government taxes and regulation. See, it's one thing to get into tech, which is not heavily regulated, and make a ton of money on some brilliant exploitation of the information revolution. It's another thing to try to get ahead in the ordinary economy where the taxes and the regulations represent a real headwind.

If you are a tech-head, the complexities of high marginal taxes on income, and high taxes on labor, and impenetrable regulations and complexities of employee fringe benefits, and interferences in the labor market like minimum wage laws and labor unions, all these things are not that important, not if you are shooting for billions with your high-stakes tech startup. So you don't worry about them. You can afford to locate in high-tax high-regulation California or New York City.

But if you are an ordinary mortal, the high taxes and regulations and labor laws are like a punch in the solar plexus. It is very hard to start and run an ordinary-mortal business if you have to lift the heavy weight of government as well as learn how to thrive in the market.

The New York Times writes that, despite the attempts of politicians like Bernie Sanders and Keith Ellison to gin up a populist surge in the Democratic Party, "the Democratic electorate has actually become less receptive to populism over the past two decades."

Well, yes. The upper side of the over-under coalition has become less economically populist. Although they don't seem to have any problem with raising the minimum wage. The point is that the under side of the Democratic coalition doesn't have a voice. Their "voice" is the voice of the ruling class that affects to represent them. And as far as we can see the under side of the Democratic coalition is quite happy being kept on the liberal plantation as long as the checks keep coming. But then nobody asked them.

The way that politics works in the United States is that, from time to time, a group that used to be the little darlings of the Democratic ruling class gets expelled from the party and finds itself in the political wilderness. After 40 years in the wilderness this group eventually finds itself a home in the Republican Party and the Republicans, being kind souls, adapt their party platform to accommodate the newcomers. That's how Southern whites became Republican; that's how the religious right became Republican. And that's how the white working class became Republican.

What I want to know is who will be next to be cast into the wilderness. Will it be East-Asian Americans? Will it be Hispanics? Is it possible that African Americans will at some point decide that they can't take it any more?

I can't wait to find out.

The Left's Murderous Cult of Power

One of the great facts of the living world is the fact of social animals. Although life, the universe and everything is a frantic lifelong effort to kill or be killed, yet success in staying alive depends on groups of animals declaring a zone of peace where violence is banished and cooperation reigns and trust is king.

But the left is a murderous cult that denies the facts of humans as social animals and the reign of trust, and it has declared war on the three ramparts of modern society: its peaceful economic cooperation that has extended economic prosperity to all that labor, its peaceful political process that adjudicates political differences without the resort to civil war, and its freedom of religion that allows people to practice their moral and cultural faiths without the resort to religious war.

The left is opposed to peaceful economic cooperation. Right through the astonishing history of the Great Enrichment in the last 200 years the left has insisted that it is all a mirage, and that only revolution and rapine can prevent the cruel hegemony of the capitalists. In fact, the Great Enrichment, which has seen per-capita income rise from $1-3 per day to $100 per day and more, is the fullest expression of the notion of social animals. The rule is that you seek out some work or make some product that other people are willing to pay for. And then you accept the verdict of the market. The left insists that this cannot work, because alienation, exploitation, oppression, and immiseration, and therefore activists should be empowered to regulate and dominate the commanding heights of the economy. And therefore it has waged war against peaceful economic cooperation between consenting adults for nearly two hundred years.

The left is opposed to peaceful political cooperation. It licenses itself to practice political "activism," to oppose anything using the threat of force and demand that society capitulate to its demands. This revolutionary doctrine had merit when workers first came to the city in the industrial revolution and lacked the vote and any political power. And so the mid 19th century in Europe featured street action by the working class that had newly migrated to the city. But the expansion of the franchise to the workers ended the occasion for street violence, and the workers happily stopped political violence once they were given a seat at the table of political power. The whole point of universal suffrage is that people give up, in exchange for the vote, the right to resort to civil war in the pursuit of their just demands and agree to abide by the verdict of the sham fight of elections in which the various political factions compete for the votes of the electorate, which now includes the entire adult population.

The left is opposed to peaceful moral-religious competition. That is the logic of Marx and his notion of religion as the "opiate of the masses" to be demolished by his ideological cult of socialism. It is also the logic of 20th century fascism, featuring Mussolini's Tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contro lo Stato, or "Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State." It is also the logic of so-called cultural Marxism, that seeks a cultural hegemony over society with all cultural forms subordinated to the cultural ruling class's secular religion. But this means that anyone opposing the ruling class's cultural hegemony is forced to raise a head of cultural rebellion, which quickly becomes a political head of rebellion when the cultural ruling class uses its political power to enforce its cultural will. But the whole point of freedom of religion, of the separation of church and state, is that the political power keeps out of religion and permits all those that practice religion in peace to compete for adherents and to influence the culture by their example rather than by their ability to compel general obedience to their beliefs.

The whole point of the modern human experiment is to test the possibilities of more cooperation and less force; it is, if you like the, radical human extension of Nature's idea of social animals. How much force is really needed to police the realm of economic cooperation? How much force needs to be deputized to government to enforce society's will against bad actors? How much force is ever justified in enforcing cultural and religious norms? The left's answer to these questions is: a lot, and we are willing to apply whatever force is needed to enforce our will.

In viewing the left's rebellion against the astonishing ideas of the modern era, we can at least understand the ground of their revolt. What do you mean, that the way to prosper in this world is to submit your economic life utterly to the market and its prices, to trust that there will always be a place and a life for a man or a woman who merely proceeds on the faith that the market will reward those that seek to serve it? What do you mean, that people should submit their political yearnings to the verdict of their fellow voters, and accept defeat with the mild challenge of "wait until next time!" and the resolve to fight the next election with improved arts of persuasion? What do you mean that ignorant and superstitious cults stuck in the past should be allowed to practice and proselytize on equal terms with my scientific and rational knowledge?

But the fact is that the left's fears have proved to be groundless. The Moloch of capitalism and the robber barons? They have transformed the economy, again and again, but it seems they are not that interested in power. Political power? It has come a cropper again and again in the modern era, and instead of being a force to protect the unprotected has more often protected the powerful. Religious power? The separation of church and state was working pretty well until the left came along with its march through the institutions that deliberately tries to intellectually terrorize those that disagree with it.

So why does the left hang on its gospel of power, after its prophesies have failed again and again, ruining millions and lives and its followers have killed in the hundreds of millions?

That is the great question that cries out from the mass graves of the left's millions of victims. What, on the grave of Marx, is the point of this murderous cult of power?

How Do You Know When the World Has Changed?

I noticed a piece on the Berlin Christmas bombing in the Brit Independent by a leftie writer. He said the bombing had ended "his leftie fantasy about Germany," but if you read the article you can see that nothing has changed for him. Berlin is still the bohemian enclave of Weimar Germany, "a sanctuary for gays, liberals, artists and weirdos of all stripes," but now

The coming days will be a test of openness, understanding and love, and I hope Germany will remain strong. 

Yup. He has learned nothing and forgotten nothing.

The point is, when the world changes, and it is time to go, how do you know? Here is a leftie, experiencing the end of his hopes for a multicultural society starring gays, liberals, artists, and weirdos, and in the bloody mess of terrorist acts he talks of love and openness.

As if the left has ever been in favor of love and openness, except in its conceits. In fact what is needed is a few strategic deportations, just like back in the 1920s: a little Murdstonian "firmness."

Here is Zombie, looking at the political events of the last year and the election of Donald Trump and suggesting that it is a hinge point of history. The whole point of the left's cultural hegemony and its march through the institutions and its complete domination of education and the culture and the bureaucracy was that the electorate would be carefully taught to hate and to fear Trumpism,

And then November 8, 2016 happened, and BOOM: It was all revealed to be a lie. Not only did the indoctrination fail, but the general impression that the relentless indoctrination had always been successful was itself a gigantic meta-deception.

So the questions is -- after the Muslim terror in Europe, after Brexit, after Trump -- have we reached Peak Leftism? Or is this just a correction, as they say of the stock market, with the leftist bull market to resume after a season?

I'm sorry to be pessimistic, but I don't think you can tell. Not now, not yet, and I think this applies also to life, the universe, and everything, in general.

You can see this reflected in every business venture, and every war. How do you know if your business venture is going to succeed or fail? When do you pull the plug on failure, and avoid sending good money after bad?

You really don't, because often persistence pays off, and one more Big Push turns the corner. Or it doesn't and you descend into bankruptcy and ruin.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is writing a book, "Skin in the Game," in which he attempts to apply the lessons of his Black Swan and Antifragile to the notion of avoiding "ruin," so that your mistakes don't wipe you out.

I am not sure that this is possible. I think you can certainly do things to minimize ruin if things go wrong, but I don't think you can guarantee it. Taleb apparently thinks that genetically modified organisms (GMO) are a recipe for disaster and ruin. But are they? He seems to support the Precautionary Principle. But is the Precautionary Principle possible? We can never look around the corner when we start a project, because of the famous unknown unknowns. We can avoid potential ruin by making ourselves "anti-fragile" but we cannot completely avoid the consequences of failure.

Yesterday Donald Trump truly became President-elect when the Electoral College met in the several state capitols and elected him president by a vote of 304-227. Is this a sea-change in US politics, after a business tycoon upended the Republican Party to win its nomination and upended the Democratic Party by appealing to its neglected white working class voters in the Rust Best states? Or is it a mere correction, with politics as usual to resume after an interregnum?

The truth is that We Don't Know. And people will be contesting what happened and the meaning of it for the rest of my lifetime.

Meanwhile, life goes on, and the croupier cries faites vos jeux, place your bets, on the next turn of the wheel.