Headline:Voters’ capacity for being appalled by Trump is waning

Sub-headline: The Democrats should think hard about public tolerance for impeachment proceedings

Bravo, Mr. Ganesh!for such a collection of observations beginning and ending with Bertolt Brecht and the East German One Party State. That state that compromised so many, like writer Christa Wolf , by means of Staci coercion. But note that Victor Klemperer elected to stay in the East. The feuilletonist mines World Literature as the in-order-too of his self-aggrandizing project.

The Impeachment of Clinton is one of the featured narratives of Mr. Ganesh’s acidulous historical pastiche. Absent is the more complex , a challenge to his narrative thrust,  the Nixon political melodrama. Another inconvenience, to Ganesh, is the fact  that the very civic actors, like Gingrich and his minions, were guilty of the same kind of sexual exploitation of female underlings. Political hypocrisy so magnified by both factions  rendered the whole of the Clinton impeachment, in the eyes of the electorate, the political  moralizing of The Contract with America rendered moot, into mere political theater.  The whole spectacle became a comedy of political mendacity with the more ‘likable’ Bill  ahead in the polls. Gingrich was on wife number 2 or 3 at this point? Which wife of the Speaker did he desert, on her sick bed?Cancer wasn’t an impediment to the Speaker’s roving eye! 

Trump’s approval ratings do have some significance:

Trump’s approval rating : 53.5 disapprove, 41.3 approve 

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/

Mr. Ganesh closes his essay with this shopworn cliche of the moralizing Conservatism of this, and perhaps other historical moments :

We are all relativists now, or at least enough of us are to matter. That is a larger problem than any one president.

The only problem with ‘relativism’ is that it must be ‘relative’ to a something, a subject, not as some free-floating descriptor. Ganesh employs it as a capacious catch phrase, that attempts, in its poverty, to describes a malady that afflicts a who and or what is its very raison d’être. In sum, it is a term of political abuse. A defense of an imagined ancien régime .

Old Socialist

https://www.ft.com/content/e6f47504-6668-11e9-a79d-04f350474d62