An Omen for MAGA
Ralph Waldo Emerson warned about this.
On the eve of a new year, perhaps a little 19th-Century wisdom will provide some light in the darkness of the MAGA Time.
In 1841 Ralph Waldo Emerson published the influential essay “Compensation,” which argues in part that in the long run human nature, and nature itself, abhors extremes. Emerson was a dualist, concerned with the action and reaction of opposites — good vs. evil, strength vs. weakness, excess vs. moderation. No extreme survives very long, he held, before its opposite force reasserts itself. To use the language of financial markets, collective behavior, like all else, is subject to the moderating power of “mean reversion,” the tendency of extremes to negate each other so that averages prevail in the long run.
If a moderating principle governs political movements, 2026 could break the swamp fever that is MAGA and terminate the abomination that is Donald Trump. Because, as Emerson put it:
“Nature hates monopolies and exceptions … This law writes the laws of cities and nations. It is in vain to build or plot or combine against it. Things refuse to be mismanaged long. Though no checks to a new evil appear, the checks exist, and will appear.”
Happy New Year.