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more than knowledge we need experience. the political system has been so inwardly recursive that the ability to even get ones feet wet, proverbially speaking, has completely eroded for an average citizen. access is a drug and politics has become a cabal to protect the addiction to it.

Indeed. It also encourages empathy and sympathy for Cassandra. 🤔 Though it's more about frustration and aggravation than helplessness, for me anyway. Gotta do what you can when you can with what you got. 🖇✊️

“We have noted that corruption appears to visit the White House in fifty-year cycles. This suggests that exposure and retribution inoculate the Presidency against its latent criminal impulses for about half a century. 1/2

Around the year 2023 the American people would be well advised to go on the alert and start nailing down everything in sight.” ― Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Imperial Presidency -1973 2/2

What about all the mostly military people? They study wars, military engagement, political atmospheres, and everything about how situations developed. You can't tell me they don't know history. Yet here we are. That statement has never made sense to me.

I've heard that around a half of American adults don't read at 8th grade level. Literally half of the voting population can't read books like 1984 or 451 Farenheit, let alone Marx or any books about philosophy/politics/history. And then you, guys, are suprised why Trump won?

Also some of those that do study history are doomed to convince themselves that we need to try it again. I don't think simply being exposed to history is enough for a lot of people when they're free to come to their own ignorant conclusions and conspiracies of it.

Depends on what you read of course. A diet confirming only what you already believe is a lean diet. As Prof John Lennox learnt after his father handed him Marx's writings: if we are going to engage with people of different beliefs, we need to understand what those beliefs are.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel actually wrote: "What experience and history teach is this,—that peoples and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it." This was later shortened and popularized by other writers.