progress. I was enraged about Wall Street greed and income inequality, even the ravaging effects of capitalism itself, and yet still I had thought, somewhere deep down, that Turkey under Erdoğan was getting better because it was imitating the West. Even when I saw the evidence of the system’s ravages in America, I still saw countries like Turkey as “behind” us in some way, as if the course of maturity and democracy was to go through the same painful process we had. These ideas about my country and the world, no matter how often I challenged them, were foundational. Like many expatriates, I
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