Yascha Mounk at his own Substack:
A few months ago, on the New York subway, I looked up at the woman sitting opposite me, and found my eyes drawn to her cap: “I don’t give a F**K,” read big white letters stitched into navy blue cotton.
Three million New Yorkers ride the subway every day. On some days, it feels as though a quarter of them have a stupid slogan of one kind or another embroidered on their caps. And yet, there was something about this particular woman, proudly sporting this particular slogan, that felt to me totemic of this particular moment in American life.
I first came to the United States for an academic exchange at Columbia University in 2005, and have spent the bulk of my time here since starting my PhD at Harvard University in 2007. No country changes nature overnight, and America still retains many of the virtues with which I fell in love all those years ago. But there are days when I fear that the place has been transformed so deeply that the qualities that would once have been touted as quintessentially American have forever been lost.
More here.
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