People Without Memory Are Putty.

It's Certainly Something We Haven't Seen Before In Terms Of A Fully Commercial Global Brand - Really A Family Of Brands - Not Just Trump But Also Ivanka, Who Has A Sub-brand. We've Never Seen This Before. We've Had Presidents In Financial Conflicts Of Interest Before, But This Phenomenon Where A Sitting President Image Avatar Is Out There Selling Golf Courses And Condominiums, Even As He Is In Office And Having The Value Of His Personal Brand Inflated Dramatically By Fact Of His Being President, Is New Territory.

It Is Always Easier To Deny Reality Than To Allow Our Worldview To Be Shattered, A Fact That Was As True Of Die-hard Stalinists At The Height Of The Purges As It Is Of Libertarian Climate Change Deniers Today.

And That Is What Is Behind The Abrupt Rise In Climate Change Denial Among Hardcore Conservatives: They Have Come To Understand That As Soon As They Admit That Climate Change Is Real, They Will Lose The Central Ideological Battle Of Our Time—whether We Need To Plan And Manage Our Societies To Reflect Our Goals And Values, Or Whether That Task Can Be Left To The Magic Of The Market.

It Is Eminently Possible To Have A Market-based Economy That Requires No Such Brutality And Demands No Such Ideological Purity. A Free Market In Consumer Products Can Coexist With Free Public Health Care, With Public Schools, With A Large Segment Of The Economy -- Like A National Oil Company -- Held In State Hands. It's Equally Possible To Require Corporations To Pay Decent Wages, To Respect The Right Of Workers To Form Unions, And For Governments To Tax And Redistribute Wealth So That The Sharp Inequalities That Mark The Corporatist State Are Reduced. Markets Need Not Be Fundamentalist.

In Pragmatic Terms, Our Challenge Is Less To Save The Earth From Ourselves And More To Save Ourselves From An Earth That, If Pushed Too Far, Has Ample Power To Rock, Burn, And Shake Us Off Completely.