When This Blows Over

…The contestation of politics, the struggle over power and
ideas, over the Constitution and the law and who we are as a
political community, never ends. It's always possible for a
settlement or consensus at one moment of history to be
rethought, overturned, or reversed. Rights granted can later
be rescinded — and there's no way to prevent that from
happening beyond continuing the fight, day after day.
History isn't an arc slowly bending toward justice. It's a
battlefield on which a skirmish line shifts back and forth
in an unending contest between ideological combatants.
The agonistic character of politics becomes
concealed during eras defined by consensus, when
the skirmish line stays in much the same place,
shifting only slightly or fairly slowly from year to
year and decade to decade. But such eras are the
exception in history — or at least never more than a
temporary interlude between periods of more rapid
or intense struggle…
- Damon Linker