What has helped me is adjusting my expectations. We, meaning liberals, are not in a “growth” era anymore. Big sweeping structural changes to benefit American society as a whole are probably off the table for now. We are in our “survival” period. If we can get to the other side of this without having devolved completely into oligarchy, that’s success. We have to be a little less like Obama and more like Churchill imho.
No offense intended, but this is the attitude that leads to democratic backsliding in the first place. Did you think we were on "the other side of this" after Biden was inaugurated 4 years ago? When will "big sweeping structural changes" *ever* be on the table? It's precisely because the left-of-center is unwilling to even contemplate such changes that they keep losing face publicly to a right that isn't unwilling to say outrageous things—and then act on them, even if in completely ineffectual ways.
No I didn’t think we were in the clear with Biden. When McCarthy went to Maralago after Jan 6 I knew we were not in the clear. Big structural changes are on the table when the left has significant power. That has not happened for a very long time. I don’t think it is a good idea for democratic political candidates to promise big structural changes when they are unable to deliver on it. We are not getting M4A when we have to spend political capital on making sure trans people can still exist in public without persecution. I don’t see us having that kind of power in the near future with polarization the way it is.
In 1932, both the US and Germany faced an economic crisis. In America, the non-incumbent party promised sweeping structural change. In Germany, the right-leaning coalition—not the NSDAP themselves, but the parties that fell between the Nazis and the SPD—promised stability, order, sanity.
America got the New Deal. Germany got the Holocaust.
In 1932 we were deep in the Great Depression and Hoover was very unpopular. If Trump screws things up that badly, and the public actually blames him for it, I imagine Dems will be in good position to expand their power enough to make big structural changes.
In 2020 we were deep in the Covid pandemic and Trump was very unpopular. He had, in your formulation, screwed things up badly. And the Dems did win the presidency, and had (admittedly narrow) majorities in both houses of Congress. Four years of tepid political hedging later, Trump is back.
I really do not mean any offense, but it is deeply frustrating that this obtuse line keeps getting trotted out when it has been tried and failed multiple times in the last ten years. It should be clear to anyone that this is not how you win.
What I mean to say is that trans people having access to gender-affirming care, being able to change gender markers, not be in the closet, is more important right now than M4A. I agree with you that M4A, or at the very least a public option, is more popular. But I don’t think we have the ability to implement those changes unless we have more power. And I don’t think it serves dem candidates well to promise that they will enact M4A and not deliver on that, even if it’s not for lack of trying. That’s my opinion.
What's clear from the Biden administration is that we don't have the ability to do *either* of these things, because conservative control is embedded in state governments and the federal judiciary!
So if you want to protect trans rights in any meaningful sense, you'll need to make sweeping structural changes anyway.
Not an American but whatever, US politics dominates all English speaking social media anyway. Despite my euroness I feel exactly like this. Exhausted by the hypocrisy. Over it. Looking for a new hobby.
What I really do not understand is: What do these nihilists (republican and terminally online anti-electoral leftists alike) get out of all this? What’s the point of deciding nothing matters? Why doesn’t your hypocrisy depress you? I guess if you’re shameless there’s no downside to lying/having no principles. But what positive emotional thing are they gaining?
What they get out of it is freedom to be as evil as they'd like. When nothing matters, there's no reason to try to stop them from being evil. You'll notice how much they cloak their horribleness in irony. Elon's response to his salute hasn't been a sincere apology, or a sincere double down, but a joke. Because a joke is a shield. You can be the worst person in the world but if you're doing it as a joke, it's ok now.
They don't act like it, but liberal criticism of them and their behavior does actually get to them, it does worry them, it does irk them, because they know it has lasting power. They know that, true or not, criticism sticks and leaves a nasty stain. Liberals who cared managed to permanently destroy the Neoconservative movement by hanging Iraq off their neck forever, and the Neoreactionaries are acutely aware of this, even on a subconscious level, they don't want to end up being cringe like Bush is now.
There's some post-election interviews with leaders of the "Uncommitted" movement floating around. They argued that the Biden/Harris campaign did not earn the pro-palestine vote so this usually pro-democrat movement should write in an "uncommitted" vote during the primary.
They seem fairly principled to me. The dems refused to negotiate with these single-issue voters, so lost the vote. You can blame them or their negotiating partner (the Harris campaign) but they don't seem nihilistic. If anything, they seem a little too idealistic and made the perfect the enemy of good. Maybe next time, the dems will be more open to working with them if they want to win.
That's assuming you think the democratic policy is actually good. Some also make arguments that Trump might actually be better for Palestine. Sure, some of the rhetoric is worse, but his actual policy seems better (assuming you credit him with the current ceasefire). They might be wrong (too early to say imo) but that just means they're making a bad prediction and not that they don't have values. Biden's policies allowed ~64,000 deaths (not counting indirect causes like starvation) according to a recent estimate in the NYT, so Trump has a pretty low bar to clear. In baseball terms, Biden/Harris had negative WAR so going with someone unpredictable isn't unreasonable.
So in short, the Pro-Palestine people got the following:
-An improved negotiating position in the future
-Replacing someone known to to not fulfill their goals with someone unpredictable enough that they might
It's reassuring to accuse anyone that disagrees with you of irrationality or incoherence, but it's not very useful. I'm sure that right now a lot of those leftists are reading articles in Jacobin or N+1 about how the cynic nihilist KKKamala supporters preferred having Trump to stopping arms sales. That's hardly a fair analysis and neither is this.
My impression of things is mostly from twitter here, but I think you’re right that a lot of lefties involved in the most well organized parts of the palestine protests were probably more over-idealistic and unrealistic rather than nihilistic. However, when complaining about the nihilism of the anti-electoral left there is also a broader phenomenon were anything good liberals do gets ignored or lied about. ”Both sides are equally bad, but I hate the democrats more”. Voting and normal politics being seen as a distraction from the real source of change (revolution, in some hypothetical future). The world/capitalism being so broken and all encompassing that all you can do is wallow in how terrible everything is. These people were like that before October 7th too. Palestine is a recent issue where some people attach that sentiment. I don’t think it’s most leftists, but they sure manage to make noise online. (So to be clear: Not saying that Palestine protests aren’t mostly sincere, they obviously are usually)
Thank you for the fair response. I think that a lot of the behavior of these leftists can be explained by their position in the broader left coalition. As a small but decisive faction, it's entirely reasonable that they attempt to influence the party as a whole. Ironically the republicans seem to be able to function better as a coalition. The Freedom Caucus is extreme and often obstructs the larger party (even removing the speaker of the house) but the republicans are able to compromise with them and enact policy. The mainstream democrats seem much less capable of doing this sort of thing and instead blame the faction for not falling in line without concessions. Then they lose.
I understand that you are mostly referring to people posting, rather than actual political actors, but those people don't have much political influence by definition. If these people didn't get attached to Palestine protests, it seems like they wouldn't be involved with politics at all. There's not much point in blaming apolitical people for losing elections. Once again, the republicans are much better at this. A lot of Trump's success comes from mobilizing people that are not usually politically engaged.
If you're trying to get in the head of why someone would misrepresent things in order to seem cynically above it all, I think the best first step would be asking yourself why people like this article.
I'm in the same boat, and it feels like I'm being pranked by a nationwide conspiracy that's in on the joke. The ones who are grifting tend to be obvious about it, and there's nothing new about talking heads flattering their own audience, or industry tycoons getting down on their knees for whoever is in power.
But besides that cohort, the levels of cucked devotion, mental acrobatics, and willful blindness regularly on display have built up to such a historically unprecedent degree over the years that it psychologically hurts for me to accept it's genuine. The closest parallels I can think of are religious movements, but this feels qualitatively different. I keep hoping for Ashton Kutcher to pop out from backstage to reveal I've been on an insanely elaborate episode of Punk'd this whole time, and that everyone has just been _pretending_ all along to be brain-addled sycophants for a blatantly corrupt dementia patient.
The only other alternative scenario that would fit and also give me solace is discovering a debilitating digital brain virus that has been spreading via internet memes or something. I don't know man, I have no idea how to react or interact with anyone whose worldview can only be sustained upon a hoverboard detached from reality. It's a wild new world.
Of course this is somewhat downstream of a burst of "you need to make sure we DON'T normalize these things by reacting against them with the fervor they deserve," which (despite the bad memories of the political hobbyism and personal derangement it produced) was successful - the vibes of the initial administration were insanely different and that mobilization did connect with people in power feeling emboldened to hem the admin in. The problem is ofc we just can't replicate that, because it does cause personal derangement and public dysfunction, and even if I did write a really good argument for why we should do it again no one would.
I really think engagement with local politics is the answer. People should do the northern courage or grim determination thing on the federal level but most people just want to feel something not completely garbage and time wasting, and you can do that if you commit to making your town a better place to live.
I felt this way for a little bit. And i think it's reasonable to feel that way for a while.
But what's helped me get over it is to focus on how I can make a difference and push back or make things better. Even just advocating for more housing in my community feels like fighting back. They want us to give up and go away and to that I answer: no ❤️
I am 100% with you, the level of cynism is dismaying. As someone who was always (largely) most concerned about the foreign policy implications of Trumpism, I found the Titktok reversal and the capitulation to China thanks to people like Musk the most upsetting last week. I think there is still a light at the end of the tunnel though. Please keep it up, we need level-headed liberals doing what you do.
What keeps me hopeful is that I believe the MAGA coalition is profoundly fragile. Fissures will inevitably open up in the coming months. Their confidence and swagger will cause them to sprint head first into the giant wall of incoherence that is the MAGA agenda.
Fairy tales weren't punished in 2016, but the economy is hot and there are very real constraints in 2025.
So, the lack of energy from the Democrats might actually be a good thing in the short term. It'll be a tall order for Trump to shift the blame for an economy going off the rails to Democrats who have no pulse.
It's not true that nothing matters--after all, you wrote this because all of this matters to you. Furthermore, a lot of people feel that way.
I think the issue is that we don't know how to effectively act in circumstances like these. We can't make Trump go away--his term just started. Marches and traditional forms of protest don't seem to be effective--we did that for the entirety of Trump I and we're right back here again. Posting on social media certainly doesn't help.
What we need is a sustainable, collective way to continuously communicate about what's wrong with Trump's world, and what would be better about a different world--and to do so off social media, and outside the context of election campaigns. On social media nothing matters by design, but in the real world things do matter. I don't know what that way of working together to communicate looks like, but I do know that the only way to get there is off social media.
I don't think that video shows "a Trump crony saying inflation is fine under Trump." He's saying that inflation is a reasonable trade-off for national security. He could still believe that it's not a reasonable trade-off for whatever Biden allowed inflation for.
It's also arguable that he's even a Trump crony. I'm not sure that he has any position in the Trump admin and he never endorsed him. The NYT had a headline saying that he privately supported Trump's opponent.
I had a chance to look into it more it doesn't seem like Dimon is ever much of an inflation hawk. Here's him in JPMorgan's letter to shareholders in 2022, when inflation was at a peak:
"Believe it or not, inflation and interest rates are not the things that worry me the most. I’m most concerned about large geopolitical events, cyber attacks, nuclear proliferation, large dysfunctional markets (partially due to poorly calibrated regulations; e.g., the U.K. Gilt and U.S. Treasury markets) and failure of other critical infrastructure."
Maybe this isn't representative and at other points he has been loudly pro-Trump or very critical of inflation, but I don't really see it. I think instead of saying a Trump crony suddenly thinking inflation is fine, it'd be more accurate to say something like
"Banker unaffiliated with Trump continues to think concerns about inflation should be secondary to geopolitics"
I guess you could say that a stint on an advisory council during the first administration makes him a lifelong crony, but he quit that. He mildly praised some aspects of Bidenomics and even allegedly considered running against Trump in 2020. Seems like a very loose definition of crony.
(Sorry for being so gauche to reply to myself, but I thought it'd be helpful to separate criticisms in case anyone wanted to explain why they're unfair)
While pro-Palestine protests have decreased since the election (similar to most forms of political demonstration) they're still ongoing. Searching "December 2024 Palestine protests" shows plenty of results. For example, Columbia University Apartheid Divest held an “NYC all out for Palestine” protest on December 9th, more than a month after the election. People were arrested, professors were suspended, buildings were vandalized. It's hardly a sudden stop in protesting.
Or just search for protests on November 29th. Palestinian Solidarity Day happened to fall on Black Friday this year and it resulted in plenty of disruption, mostly covered locally.
There was definitely a spike during the election, but there were similar spikes in interest for other issues like abortion or gun control.
I don't see anything to support the idea that the pro-Palestine movement suddenly disappeared after the election. Maybe a better description of what happened would be something like:
"Pro-Palestine leftists that had protested Biden and Harris at a gradually decreasing rate continued roughly the same pattern after the election, but received much less attention from news outlets and people like myself".
(It also seems like it'd be reasonable to mention that Trump allegedly pushed through the ceasefire deal, fulfilling a goal of the movement.)
There was an article on The Atlantic some time ago that I found very useful to understand the shift in America's moral landscape. Needless to say, it's the result of deep socio-historical processes and it goes well beyond politics as such.
I believe the analysis extends beyond the US to the West more broadly.
And regarding Elon's """Roman""" salute, here's an article by a British historian on how anti-Nazi values became the fundamental moral touchstone of the West in the post-war period, and how the canonical post-WWII narratives are losing their power, with these regrettable consequences.
It really does feel like a generation has grown up going "'Yeah ok dad, i know, hitler sucks, brush my teeth, don't stay up too late' *rolls eyes*" as a form of ironic teenage rebellion against those anti-nazi values. It's something we've never been equipped for and Francis Fukuyama warned could happen, if every generation needs to rebel against traditions they don't understand, then eventually freedom and democracy will become the target of generational rebellion. Fascism is now Punk Rock.
Been thinking about this exact phenomenon since 2016. Once you get two or three generations removed from a paradigm defining event like WW2, people just forget about the lived experiences of the time and the reasons why such an event became paradigm defining. Is this shit cyclical? Is mass social unrest and violence inevitable? Is it necessary to remind people what it’s like to not have freedom and community?
Good articles. The second one really points out an obvious truth about how much our society's moral foundations are centered upon "not Hitler" and how it's not enough to keep it stable.
I'm sorry, I can't take articles that pretend antisemitism is mainly a problem on the right seriously anymore. It's true Twitter saw an explosion in Nazi red triangle accounts over the last year, and they've all been on the far left. Trump actually announced some measures against campus antisemitic hate mobs after democrats spent a year covering for them. There are some antisemitic elements on the far right, but the vast majority is on the left, and democrats have done almost nothing to stop it.
Keep the faith; this too shall pass. It will be difficult the next few years, but Trump will go away eventually and there are better people out there to take his place.
You did this! All of this! You Democrats did this to yourselves! You reelected Bill Clinton, and sold your souls to corporatist globalization. Then you became McCarthyite warmongers, to say nothing of open borders and transgender nonsense, and now you're upset about your own cynicism and apathy. Lol. Lamo.
You're so lost you don't even see drowning as losing anything. You believe your lungs are filled with water already, and you are a vengeful spirit coming to sink those who "drowed you". Maybe if you believe your already dead in some ways it becomes true. Will you even be able to remember what it's like to be alive when your lungs burn with water?
You win, I can't win a fight against a ghost. There isn't any point to talk to someone that thinks they are already dead.
Also notable from that interview, Johnson specifically says that only some rioters should be released. (sorry, I don't know how to format this)
KRISTEN WELKER:
Okay. Let me ask you about the pardons Mr. Trump has promised for January 6th defendants. When I interviewed him last month, he would not rule out pardoning those, even those who pleaded guilty to violent crimes. Mr. Speaker, *do you believe that someone who assaulted a law enforcement officer on January 6th deserves a pardon?*
SPEAKER MIKE JOHNSON:
*No.* I think what the president said and Vice-President-elect JD Vance has said is that peaceful protesters should be pardoned, but violent criminals should not. That's a simple determination. It's up to the president on that. But there's been a lot of talk about it. But we'll see what happens.
[AND]
KRISTEN WELKER:
President-elect Trump, just to be clear, has said he's going to look at everyone. When I interviewed him, he said he's not ruling out anyone. *So, my question for you, would you oppose a pardon for someone who has pleaded guilty to assaulting a police officer?*
SPEAKER MIKE JOHNSON:
*Look, every case needs to be evaluated, as he said.* But what President Trump is getting at is the lack of faith that people have right now in our system of justice. It was abused for the last few years, under the last four years under the Biden administration. The Department of Justice itself was weaponized. When the people lose their faith in our system of justice, that is what leads to all these other concerns. And President Trump's going to restore that. We're going to have new leadership.
He's definitely being non-committal, but hard to read "No" as a celebration of pardoning violent rioters. He leans a lot on not having evaluated each of the 1500 cases individually.
If you prefer to read the entire transcript, rather than isolated clips with commentary, you can do so here:
What has helped me is adjusting my expectations. We, meaning liberals, are not in a “growth” era anymore. Big sweeping structural changes to benefit American society as a whole are probably off the table for now. We are in our “survival” period. If we can get to the other side of this without having devolved completely into oligarchy, that’s success. We have to be a little less like Obama and more like Churchill imho.
No offense intended, but this is the attitude that leads to democratic backsliding in the first place. Did you think we were on "the other side of this" after Biden was inaugurated 4 years ago? When will "big sweeping structural changes" *ever* be on the table? It's precisely because the left-of-center is unwilling to even contemplate such changes that they keep losing face publicly to a right that isn't unwilling to say outrageous things—and then act on them, even if in completely ineffectual ways.
No I didn’t think we were in the clear with Biden. When McCarthy went to Maralago after Jan 6 I knew we were not in the clear. Big structural changes are on the table when the left has significant power. That has not happened for a very long time. I don’t think it is a good idea for democratic political candidates to promise big structural changes when they are unable to deliver on it. We are not getting M4A when we have to spend political capital on making sure trans people can still exist in public without persecution. I don’t see us having that kind of power in the near future with polarization the way it is.
In 1932, both the US and Germany faced an economic crisis. In America, the non-incumbent party promised sweeping structural change. In Germany, the right-leaning coalition—not the NSDAP themselves, but the parties that fell between the Nazis and the SPD—promised stability, order, sanity.
America got the New Deal. Germany got the Holocaust.
In 1932 we were deep in the Great Depression and Hoover was very unpopular. If Trump screws things up that badly, and the public actually blames him for it, I imagine Dems will be in good position to expand their power enough to make big structural changes.
In 2020 we were deep in the Covid pandemic and Trump was very unpopular. He had, in your formulation, screwed things up badly. And the Dems did win the presidency, and had (admittedly narrow) majorities in both houses of Congress. Four years of tepid political hedging later, Trump is back.
I really do not mean any offense, but it is deeply frustrating that this obtuse line keeps getting trotted out when it has been tried and failed multiple times in the last ten years. It should be clear to anyone that this is not how you win.
What I mean to say is that trans people having access to gender-affirming care, being able to change gender markers, not be in the closet, is more important right now than M4A. I agree with you that M4A, or at the very least a public option, is more popular. But I don’t think we have the ability to implement those changes unless we have more power. And I don’t think it serves dem candidates well to promise that they will enact M4A and not deliver on that, even if it’s not for lack of trying. That’s my opinion.
What's clear from the Biden administration is that we don't have the ability to do *either* of these things, because conservative control is embedded in state governments and the federal judiciary!
So if you want to protect trans rights in any meaningful sense, you'll need to make sweeping structural changes anyway.
Not an American but whatever, US politics dominates all English speaking social media anyway. Despite my euroness I feel exactly like this. Exhausted by the hypocrisy. Over it. Looking for a new hobby.
What I really do not understand is: What do these nihilists (republican and terminally online anti-electoral leftists alike) get out of all this? What’s the point of deciding nothing matters? Why doesn’t your hypocrisy depress you? I guess if you’re shameless there’s no downside to lying/having no principles. But what positive emotional thing are they gaining?
What they get out of it is freedom to be as evil as they'd like. When nothing matters, there's no reason to try to stop them from being evil. You'll notice how much they cloak their horribleness in irony. Elon's response to his salute hasn't been a sincere apology, or a sincere double down, but a joke. Because a joke is a shield. You can be the worst person in the world but if you're doing it as a joke, it's ok now.
They don't act like it, but liberal criticism of them and their behavior does actually get to them, it does worry them, it does irk them, because they know it has lasting power. They know that, true or not, criticism sticks and leaves a nasty stain. Liberals who cared managed to permanently destroy the Neoconservative movement by hanging Iraq off their neck forever, and the Neoreactionaries are acutely aware of this, even on a subconscious level, they don't want to end up being cringe like Bush is now.
It's at the point where to be well mentally is an act of defiance.
There's some post-election interviews with leaders of the "Uncommitted" movement floating around. They argued that the Biden/Harris campaign did not earn the pro-palestine vote so this usually pro-democrat movement should write in an "uncommitted" vote during the primary.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/leaders-uncommitted-abandon-harris-movements-reflect-trumps-victory-ea-rcna184849
They seem fairly principled to me. The dems refused to negotiate with these single-issue voters, so lost the vote. You can blame them or their negotiating partner (the Harris campaign) but they don't seem nihilistic. If anything, they seem a little too idealistic and made the perfect the enemy of good. Maybe next time, the dems will be more open to working with them if they want to win.
That's assuming you think the democratic policy is actually good. Some also make arguments that Trump might actually be better for Palestine. Sure, some of the rhetoric is worse, but his actual policy seems better (assuming you credit him with the current ceasefire). They might be wrong (too early to say imo) but that just means they're making a bad prediction and not that they don't have values. Biden's policies allowed ~64,000 deaths (not counting indirect causes like starvation) according to a recent estimate in the NYT, so Trump has a pretty low bar to clear. In baseball terms, Biden/Harris had negative WAR so going with someone unpredictable isn't unreasonable.
So in short, the Pro-Palestine people got the following:
-An improved negotiating position in the future
-Replacing someone known to to not fulfill their goals with someone unpredictable enough that they might
It's reassuring to accuse anyone that disagrees with you of irrationality or incoherence, but it's not very useful. I'm sure that right now a lot of those leftists are reading articles in Jacobin or N+1 about how the cynic nihilist KKKamala supporters preferred having Trump to stopping arms sales. That's hardly a fair analysis and neither is this.
My impression of things is mostly from twitter here, but I think you’re right that a lot of lefties involved in the most well organized parts of the palestine protests were probably more over-idealistic and unrealistic rather than nihilistic. However, when complaining about the nihilism of the anti-electoral left there is also a broader phenomenon were anything good liberals do gets ignored or lied about. ”Both sides are equally bad, but I hate the democrats more”. Voting and normal politics being seen as a distraction from the real source of change (revolution, in some hypothetical future). The world/capitalism being so broken and all encompassing that all you can do is wallow in how terrible everything is. These people were like that before October 7th too. Palestine is a recent issue where some people attach that sentiment. I don’t think it’s most leftists, but they sure manage to make noise online. (So to be clear: Not saying that Palestine protests aren’t mostly sincere, they obviously are usually)
Thank you for the fair response. I think that a lot of the behavior of these leftists can be explained by their position in the broader left coalition. As a small but decisive faction, it's entirely reasonable that they attempt to influence the party as a whole. Ironically the republicans seem to be able to function better as a coalition. The Freedom Caucus is extreme and often obstructs the larger party (even removing the speaker of the house) but the republicans are able to compromise with them and enact policy. The mainstream democrats seem much less capable of doing this sort of thing and instead blame the faction for not falling in line without concessions. Then they lose.
I understand that you are mostly referring to people posting, rather than actual political actors, but those people don't have much political influence by definition. If these people didn't get attached to Palestine protests, it seems like they wouldn't be involved with politics at all. There's not much point in blaming apolitical people for losing elections. Once again, the republicans are much better at this. A lot of Trump's success comes from mobilizing people that are not usually politically engaged.
If you're trying to get in the head of why someone would misrepresent things in order to seem cynically above it all, I think the best first step would be asking yourself why people like this article.
I'm in the same boat, and it feels like I'm being pranked by a nationwide conspiracy that's in on the joke. The ones who are grifting tend to be obvious about it, and there's nothing new about talking heads flattering their own audience, or industry tycoons getting down on their knees for whoever is in power.
But besides that cohort, the levels of cucked devotion, mental acrobatics, and willful blindness regularly on display have built up to such a historically unprecedent degree over the years that it psychologically hurts for me to accept it's genuine. The closest parallels I can think of are religious movements, but this feels qualitatively different. I keep hoping for Ashton Kutcher to pop out from backstage to reveal I've been on an insanely elaborate episode of Punk'd this whole time, and that everyone has just been _pretending_ all along to be brain-addled sycophants for a blatantly corrupt dementia patient.
The only other alternative scenario that would fit and also give me solace is discovering a debilitating digital brain virus that has been spreading via internet memes or something. I don't know man, I have no idea how to react or interact with anyone whose worldview can only be sustained upon a hoverboard detached from reality. It's a wild new world.
Of course this is somewhat downstream of a burst of "you need to make sure we DON'T normalize these things by reacting against them with the fervor they deserve," which (despite the bad memories of the political hobbyism and personal derangement it produced) was successful - the vibes of the initial administration were insanely different and that mobilization did connect with people in power feeling emboldened to hem the admin in. The problem is ofc we just can't replicate that, because it does cause personal derangement and public dysfunction, and even if I did write a really good argument for why we should do it again no one would.
I really think engagement with local politics is the answer. People should do the northern courage or grim determination thing on the federal level but most people just want to feel something not completely garbage and time wasting, and you can do that if you commit to making your town a better place to live.
I felt this way for a little bit. And i think it's reasonable to feel that way for a while.
But what's helped me get over it is to focus on how I can make a difference and push back or make things better. Even just advocating for more housing in my community feels like fighting back. They want us to give up and go away and to that I answer: no ❤️
This exactly. You can clean out the rot in your town. We need that more than ever.
I am 100% with you, the level of cynism is dismaying. As someone who was always (largely) most concerned about the foreign policy implications of Trumpism, I found the Titktok reversal and the capitulation to China thanks to people like Musk the most upsetting last week. I think there is still a light at the end of the tunnel though. Please keep it up, we need level-headed liberals doing what you do.
I feel you, brother. I, too, am an optimist at heart struggling desperately to find something to cling to.
What keeps me hopeful is that I believe the MAGA coalition is profoundly fragile. Fissures will inevitably open up in the coming months. Their confidence and swagger will cause them to sprint head first into the giant wall of incoherence that is the MAGA agenda.
Fairy tales weren't punished in 2016, but the economy is hot and there are very real constraints in 2025.
So, the lack of energy from the Democrats might actually be a good thing in the short term. It'll be a tall order for Trump to shift the blame for an economy going off the rails to Democrats who have no pulse.
It's not true that nothing matters--after all, you wrote this because all of this matters to you. Furthermore, a lot of people feel that way.
I think the issue is that we don't know how to effectively act in circumstances like these. We can't make Trump go away--his term just started. Marches and traditional forms of protest don't seem to be effective--we did that for the entirety of Trump I and we're right back here again. Posting on social media certainly doesn't help.
What we need is a sustainable, collective way to continuously communicate about what's wrong with Trump's world, and what would be better about a different world--and to do so off social media, and outside the context of election campaigns. On social media nothing matters by design, but in the real world things do matter. I don't know what that way of working together to communicate looks like, but I do know that the only way to get there is off social media.
I don't think that video shows "a Trump crony saying inflation is fine under Trump." He's saying that inflation is a reasonable trade-off for national security. He could still believe that it's not a reasonable trade-off for whatever Biden allowed inflation for.
It's also arguable that he's even a Trump crony. I'm not sure that he has any position in the Trump admin and he never endorsed him. The NYT had a headline saying that he privately supported Trump's opponent.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/22/business/jamie-dimon-jpmorgan-harris-trump.html
Edit:
I had a chance to look into it more it doesn't seem like Dimon is ever much of an inflation hawk. Here's him in JPMorgan's letter to shareholders in 2022, when inflation was at a peak:
"Believe it or not, inflation and interest rates are not the things that worry me the most. I’m most concerned about large geopolitical events, cyber attacks, nuclear proliferation, large dysfunctional markets (partially due to poorly calibrated regulations; e.g., the U.K. Gilt and U.S. Treasury markets) and failure of other critical infrastructure."
Maybe this isn't representative and at other points he has been loudly pro-Trump or very critical of inflation, but I don't really see it. I think instead of saying a Trump crony suddenly thinking inflation is fine, it'd be more accurate to say something like
"Banker unaffiliated with Trump continues to think concerns about inflation should be secondary to geopolitics"
I guess you could say that a stint on an advisory council during the first administration makes him a lifelong crony, but he quit that. He mildly praised some aspects of Bidenomics and even allegedly considered running against Trump in 2020. Seems like a very loose definition of crony.
(Sorry for being so gauche to reply to myself, but I thought it'd be helpful to separate criticisms in case anyone wanted to explain why they're unfair)
While pro-Palestine protests have decreased since the election (similar to most forms of political demonstration) they're still ongoing. Searching "December 2024 Palestine protests" shows plenty of results. For example, Columbia University Apartheid Divest held an “NYC all out for Palestine” protest on December 9th, more than a month after the election. People were arrested, professors were suspended, buildings were vandalized. It's hardly a sudden stop in protesting.
Or just search for protests on November 29th. Palestinian Solidarity Day happened to fall on Black Friday this year and it resulted in plenty of disruption, mostly covered locally.
https://komonews.com/news/local/protesters-disrupt-black-friday-shopping-u-university-village-apple-store-palestinian-democratic-republic-congo-causes-complicity-genocide-child-labor-abuse-consumer-closed-trespass-warning-arrest-money
Less anecdotally, google trends shows that interest in Gaza and Palestine didn't drop that much after the election.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=palestine,Gaza&hl=en
There was definitely a spike during the election, but there were similar spikes in interest for other issues like abortion or gun control.
I don't see anything to support the idea that the pro-Palestine movement suddenly disappeared after the election. Maybe a better description of what happened would be something like:
"Pro-Palestine leftists that had protested Biden and Harris at a gradually decreasing rate continued roughly the same pattern after the election, but received much less attention from news outlets and people like myself".
(It also seems like it'd be reasonable to mention that Trump allegedly pushed through the ceasefire deal, fulfilling a goal of the movement.)
There was an article on The Atlantic some time ago that I found very useful to understand the shift in America's moral landscape. Needless to say, it's the result of deep socio-historical processes and it goes well beyond politics as such.
I believe the analysis extends beyond the US to the West more broadly.
"How America Got Mean" by David Brooks
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/09/us-culture-moral-education-formation/674765/
And regarding Elon's """Roman""" salute, here's an article by a British historian on how anti-Nazi values became the fundamental moral touchstone of the West in the post-war period, and how the canonical post-WWII narratives are losing their power, with these regrettable consequences.
"The End of the Age of Hitler" by Alec Ryrie
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2024/11/the-end-of-the-age-of-hitler
It really does feel like a generation has grown up going "'Yeah ok dad, i know, hitler sucks, brush my teeth, don't stay up too late' *rolls eyes*" as a form of ironic teenage rebellion against those anti-nazi values. It's something we've never been equipped for and Francis Fukuyama warned could happen, if every generation needs to rebel against traditions they don't understand, then eventually freedom and democracy will become the target of generational rebellion. Fascism is now Punk Rock.
Been thinking about this exact phenomenon since 2016. Once you get two or three generations removed from a paradigm defining event like WW2, people just forget about the lived experiences of the time and the reasons why such an event became paradigm defining. Is this shit cyclical? Is mass social unrest and violence inevitable? Is it necessary to remind people what it’s like to not have freedom and community?
>Fascism is now Punk Rock.
The original punk rock had quite a bit of fascism too!
Was gonna say this. Folks should look up David Bowie’s views in the 70s.
Good articles. The second one really points out an obvious truth about how much our society's moral foundations are centered upon "not Hitler" and how it's not enough to keep it stable.
I'm sorry, I can't take articles that pretend antisemitism is mainly a problem on the right seriously anymore. It's true Twitter saw an explosion in Nazi red triangle accounts over the last year, and they've all been on the far left. Trump actually announced some measures against campus antisemitic hate mobs after democrats spent a year covering for them. There are some antisemitic elements on the far right, but the vast majority is on the left, and democrats have done almost nothing to stop it.
Keep the faith; this too shall pass. It will be difficult the next few years, but Trump will go away eventually and there are better people out there to take his place.
The lmao scorpion is truly the parable of the information age. Fantastic essay.
Jeremiah, thanks for writing this article. You've captured how I've been feeling. I'm just so... fed up. Fed up with everything.
You did this! All of this! You Democrats did this to yourselves! You reelected Bill Clinton, and sold your souls to corporatist globalization. Then you became McCarthyite warmongers, to say nothing of open borders and transgender nonsense, and now you're upset about your own cynicism and apathy. Lol. Lamo.
You're so lost you don't even see drowning as losing anything. You believe your lungs are filled with water already, and you are a vengeful spirit coming to sink those who "drowed you". Maybe if you believe your already dead in some ways it becomes true. Will you even be able to remember what it's like to be alive when your lungs burn with water?
You win, I can't win a fight against a ghost. There isn't any point to talk to someone that thinks they are already dead.
>I see it when the Republicans who claim to be pro-police celebrate the release of Jan. 6th rioters who assaulted and killed police officers.
Jan 6th rioters did not kill any police officers.
Brian Sicknick is a police officer who was severely assaulted on January 6th and died of a stroke the next day.
He was killed by rioters in every moral and practical sense that matters.
https://6abc.com/post/brian-sicknick-family-capitol-police-officer-died-january-6th-insurrection-speak-pardons/15823602/
The medical examiner ruled that he died of natural causes: https://www.npr.org/2021/04/19/988876722/capitol-police-officer-brian-sicknick-died-of-natural-causes-medical-examiner-ru
Nowhere in the article you linked does it state that Sicknick died as a result of the injuries he sustained on January 6th.
THAT'S YOUR TAKEAWAY?
No. It's just an incorrect factual assertion in an article in which I found much to agree with.
Congrats on missing the point so dramatically. It's an accomplishment.
What was the point I was supposed to have arrived at
No it's his lie
Also notable from that interview, Johnson specifically says that only some rioters should be released. (sorry, I don't know how to format this)
KRISTEN WELKER:
Okay. Let me ask you about the pardons Mr. Trump has promised for January 6th defendants. When I interviewed him last month, he would not rule out pardoning those, even those who pleaded guilty to violent crimes. Mr. Speaker, *do you believe that someone who assaulted a law enforcement officer on January 6th deserves a pardon?*
SPEAKER MIKE JOHNSON:
*No.* I think what the president said and Vice-President-elect JD Vance has said is that peaceful protesters should be pardoned, but violent criminals should not. That's a simple determination. It's up to the president on that. But there's been a lot of talk about it. But we'll see what happens.
[AND]
KRISTEN WELKER:
President-elect Trump, just to be clear, has said he's going to look at everyone. When I interviewed him, he said he's not ruling out anyone. *So, my question for you, would you oppose a pardon for someone who has pleaded guilty to assaulting a police officer?*
SPEAKER MIKE JOHNSON:
*Look, every case needs to be evaluated, as he said.* But what President Trump is getting at is the lack of faith that people have right now in our system of justice. It was abused for the last few years, under the last four years under the Biden administration. The Department of Justice itself was weaponized. When the people lose their faith in our system of justice, that is what leads to all these other concerns. And President Trump's going to restore that. We're going to have new leadership.
He's definitely being non-committal, but hard to read "No" as a celebration of pardoning violent rioters. He leans a lot on not having evaluated each of the 1500 cases individually.
If you prefer to read the entire transcript, rather than isolated clips with commentary, you can do so here:
https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/meet-press-january-19-2025-n1311375
You could also read Politico, which describes Johnson as wary of pardoning those protesters.
https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2025/01/21/congress/johnson-pardons-00199701
This might be a more reasonable way to describe the statements like the ones above.