When political leaders set a negative example, professional commitments to just practice become more important. It is hard to subvert a rule-of-law s… - Timothy Snyder

Hitler the thinker was wrong that politics and science are the same thing. Hitler the politician was right that conflating them creates a rapturous sense of catastrophic time and thus the potential for radical action. When an apocalypse is on the horizon, waiting for scientific solutions seems senseless, struggle seems natural, an demagogues of blood and soil come to the fore. A sound policy for our world, then, would be one that keeps the fear of planetary catastrophe as far away as possible. This means accepting the autonomy of science from politics, and making the political choice to support the pertinent kinds of science that will allow conventional politics to proceed.

If you once believed that everything always turns out well in the end, you can be persuaded that nothing turns out well in the end. If you once did nothing because you thought progress is inevitable, then you can continue to do nothing because you think time moves in repeating cycles.

[A]ccording to the Constitution the Chief Justice presides, that is to say, he's in charge. The Senators are meant to be jurors. What Chief Justice Roberts allowed to happen, was that the jurors decided that they could do things like, say how they were going to vote in advance; that the jurors could decide to do things like, not listen to evidence; that the jurors could decide, basically, the shape of the trial. ...[I]f you're in any kind of court in the United States, those kind of principles where the judge just gives up, would be unthinkable. So basically what we saw was a trial that wasn't a trial, and so both in the form and in the outcome the Supreme Court ends up being marginalized, and not just the Congress.