Death Struggles

William S. Hart and Robert McKim in Hart's The Return of Draw Egan (1916).

Shorter David Brooks, "The Ideology of Hate And How to Fight It", New York Times, 6 August 2019:

The typical mass murderer nowadays is not acting only out of psychological damage, loneliness, and pessimism, but also ideology, as we learn from reading their manifestos; an ideology which is not classic xenophobia or white nationalism but a combination of essentialism, separatism, and social Darwinism, or the belief that your ethnic group will probably be replaced, which is a form of antipluralism, which is a reaction against the diversity, fluidity, and interdependent nature of modern life, shared by Trumpian nationalists, authoritarian populists, and Islamic jihadists, engaged in a struggle with pluralism which is one of the great death struggles of our time, being fought on every front. Pluralists are people like me, who believe that each person is a symphony of identities, and that culture mixing has always been and should be the human condition, the adventure of life, a constant dialogue that has no end because there is no single answer to how we should live, about movement, interdependence, and life, whereas the enemies of pluralism dream of a pure, static world, and oh yes I said I was going to tell you how to fight them but look at me I'm all out of space again.