Anyone old enough to be reading this has lived through some interesting times. It’s been six years since the onset of COVID-19, 10 since Donald Trump burst onto the political scene, 17 since the 2008 market crash, 24 since 9/11 and so on. Still, even in that context, this past year has been dizzying, as the foundations on which our sense of the world rested, however shakily, now feel like they are truly in freefall.
I think few people have been more wrong than the writer Francis Fukuyama when in 1989 he famously predicted the end of history and the ultimate triumph of Western liberal democracy as the endpoint of intellectual and social evolution. In retrospect, the rosiness of the post-Cold War period, in which the United States, despite its dings and foibles, emerged as an undisputed hegemon, was a mirage. The U.S. was still riding high on the achievements of the years after World War II, when we redesigned the global order and achieved both cultural and technological dominance. But it’s clear now that the fall of the Berlin Wall did not mark the end of anything but was just the apex of our ride on history’s roller coaster.
This year, 2025, I think marked the final curdling of so much of what had animated the optimism of an era that I was born in but did not really experience. The reality for nearly half the country that’s 35 or younger is that we didn’t see the construction of this order, but have watched as fractures spread through its foundation and are now seeing, it seems, the beginnings of its collapse.
The internet, once heralded as a global domain for connection and the ultimate victory of knowledge-sharing and expertise, has decayed into online spaces controlled by fascist-friendly billionaires, rife with propaganda, where chatbots are driving people to madness and suicide or are pretending to be dead loved ones. It is increasingly difficult not just to parse information but to determine what — and who — is real. These systems have been built on brazen, wholesale theft of the collected output of human endeavor, which is thereby cheapened and discouraged. The platforms promise a world of your own making, friction-free and just pleasant enough, no human connection necessary. We all, deep down, know how that movie ends.
Then, of course, there’s Donald Trump. Someone close to me recently used a metaphor that I found very apt, which had to do with cows’ digestive process (their stomachs have four parts). Trump is the omega of this process — the violent id of the country, the vile byproduct of its ambitions processed, regurgitated and reprocessed until what’s left is just ugly mush stripped of all nutrients and complexity.
You really can find a reflection of everything that’s rotted through in our culture in the man, whom I don’t even think of so much as a sentient agent as a manifestation of our national filth, acting out of instinct to enrich and pleasure himself and his friends and family. Even in this, he is certainly not original, just another in the long line of repositories around the globe of jingoistic grievance. What’s notable here is that he’s not the leader of El Salvador or Bulgaria but the United States, which had so long fancied itself not just superior but inherently superior, incapable of these base acts of democratic immolation.
To our country’s credit, 250 years of relatively peaceful transfers of power and liberal norms (emphasis on relatively) is a significant achievement, and the U.S. spent much of the last century as both global example and stabilizing pillar (again, very imperfectly). So much so that the dollar was the global reserve currency and the U.S. was effectively the cornerstone of global institutions like NATO and the United Nations. The world order was based on the assumption that whatever else was happening, the gears of U.S. institutions would keep grinding along. Whoops!
So here we are, with the president calling for the execution of members of Congress who have dared to call on the military not to straight up murder people at the president’s orders. Episodes of masked and unidentified government agents trawling cities grabbing people apparently at random and pulling them into unmarked vans have become routine, an everyday happening in parts of the country. The Department of Homeland Security is out here tweeting about “sodomites” and remigration, which is just a word for forced mass ethnic displacement popularized by European gutter racists.
Trump has helped himself to a variety of Congress’s enumerated powers and told the courts to pound sand. We’ve dismantled huge portions of our administrative state — which is vaster and more important than most people can fathom, with responsibilities ranging from managing waterways to inspecting medicines to investigating financial crimes. And he’s done so in ways that often cannot be easily reversed. The damage is far more than even cynics like me had expected, and has happened in less than one full year of this presidency. The great curse of creation is that destruction takes a tiny fraction of the time and effort.
OK, OK, let me step back here for a moment. I’m not writing all this to depress you, but to take stock. Things do not trend naturally toward justice and fairness and liberty, and I think it’s crucial to understand that. The more we treat these as automatic processes, the more we are disarmed and disoriented when the forces arrayed against those things come for us — and let’s make no mistake here, those forces are organized, persistent and winning. Society as we understand it, as we want it to occur, does not happen by default. It is a practice, a weekly one, even a daily one, like brushing your teeth.
It’s clear that there is energy here to be harnessed; Trump’s approval is abysmal, the lowest it’s been. The elections that swept Zohran Mamdani and other Democrats around the country into office last month clearly brought new people into political awareness, and one silver lining of the administration’s immigration crackdown and efforts to tank the economy and public benefits is the way they are engendering a renaissance of community involvement and mutual aid. Communities are coming together to watch for and alert each other to federal immigration operations all around the country; here in New York City, community members, including many who were just walking by, fully blocked a planned large-scale raid near Chinatown. As the shocks of Trump’s economic and social policies take hold, more people are organizing around mutual aid, which is a frequent precursor to greater political involvement.
A certain level of political complacency — or outright fantasy, driven in part by the splintering and pollution of our public discourse — led us here, but I think people are being shaken out of it. There’s a world where this all culminates in a return, not of the retreat to a fantasy past that the nativists seem to want, but of, well, this: the rebirth of community media, local and consistent civic engagement, politics as practice and not just entertainment or something that has to be done once every four years, and so on. It’s an opportunity, and one that we can take. Let that be the lesson for the year.
