A final dispatch of American political decline

Reflecting on 6 years of living and writing in interesting times

A writer under a hat.
(Image credit: Illustrated | Getty Images, iStock)

After six years, hundreds of articles and hundreds of thousands of words, this is my last column for The Week. Goodbyes are never easy — especially after having had the privilege of covering politics and society during one of the more tumultuous periods of our modern history alongside a team of ideologically diverse writers for a publication that took pride in being more than a partisan cul de sac catering to the like-minded. Still, I can't help but take a moment to reminisce.

My second-ever piece for The Week was posted just as Donald Trump had wrapped up the Republican nomination in 2016, and it predicted a worsening legitimacy crisis in American politics and political institutions. My last is therefore a kind of a bookend, a dispatch from the country's failure to address any of the problems that have made our politics increasingly fraught, hateful, and unproductive.

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David Faris

David Faris is an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of It's Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. He is a frequent contributor to Informed Comment, and his work has appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times, The Christian Science Monitor, and Indy Week.