This year of course the pessimism is empirically justified. But I consider that we've had eleven months of WW1 centenary celebrations and many articles about the hideous and appalling and stupid things that happened a hundred years ago. So there's one cheering thought. Things are not- yet- as bad as 1916.
(There's also the intellectual schadenfreude of Neon Trotsky's tweet: "the CIA protesting a right wing president being installed by a foreign power might be the funniest thing that has ever happened.")
