Omar El Akkad: 'One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This'
In this extract from his upcoming non-fiction, the novelist and journalist critiques the normalisation of extreme rhetoric in US political discourse
Hasnain says:
Powerful words here.
“It is a source of great confusion first, then growing rage, among establishment Democrats that there might exist a sizable group of people in this country who quite simply cannot condone a real, ongoing genocide, no matter how much worse an alternative ruling party may be or do. This stance boggles a particular kind of liberal mind because such a conception of political affairs, applied with any regularity, forces the establishment to stand for something. It suddenly becomes insufficient to say: Elect us or else they will abolish abortion rights; elect us or they will put more migrants in concentration camps; elect us or they will make your lives so much worse. What is the use, once elected, of doing anything of substance when what was necessary, the negation of some other hypothetical outcome, has by definition already been achieved?”
Posted on 2025-02-18T02:38:40+0000