I find the end to be poignant:

"In the one-party state—a state in we are now in, since the pretense that Republicans and Democrats are equal and symmetrical is just dead—a state in which democracy, the Democratic Party, and the US Government are one and the same, as communism, the Communist Party, and the USSR were one and the same—all politics is existential. In the late Soviet Union, it’s very simple. You are for the government or against it. You are for communism, the Communist Party and the USSR; or you are against them. All political crimes reduce to “anti-Soviet agitation.”

This change, from indirect dissidence to direct dissidence, is a critical transition point in the life of the revolutionary total state. The outcome of this transition is that, very soon, it becomes utterly impossible for any cool person to support the government. In fact, Chuck E Cheese did not condemn the Great Coup—it easily could have, though.

Fashion, which is what we’re talking about here—intellectual fashion, but fashion—always flows from cool down. Cool people do not copy uncool people.

Once power loses its mask, once censoring dissent because it makes a mockery of the government is not just what power is doing, but actually what power says it’s doing, we enter a new stage of history—because serving this power is openly humiliating to the servant. Or at least, to any servant of intelligence, wisdom, conscience and character.

At this stage, therefore, power is actively recruiting its own counter-elite. There is only one way to produce a regime change that sticks: a circulation of the elites. Therefore, we have taken a genuine step toward history. The gigantic gear has moved one click.

Finally, we have seen a vivid illustration of real regime change in the 21st century—not what regime change is, but what it isn’t. Because whatever it is, it isn’t this.

Regime change in America cannot possibly come about as the effort of either side in its comic-opera cold civil war. Rather, it must represent the end of this farce; it must hold a vision, and hold to a vision, of a government which effectively serves every American.

And it cannot seek power through some tantrum against its ruling class—who, while they are certainly getting worse, are really not that bad on a historical scale. Proles: it is very easy for them to be awful, and you to be worse. You will never win that way.

To win, you have to follow leaders that are better than them—by their own standards. And the hardest thing of all to understand—since, as Xenophon put it, you are just about ready to eat them raw—is that your enemies will have to win too."