Goodbye, 2025.

Hello and a very happy New Year to you all. I couldn’t be more eager to send 2025 off. I’m both exhausted and grateful that The Right of the People has done well enough to exhaust me. And here I’ll offer one more thank you to all of you who’ve bought the book and written in with kind words about it.

Finishing and promoting it took up more of my time than I would have liked, but I did write a few posts here and there over the course of the year. Here’s a roundup of highlights:

“Trump is back. And the resistance has been humbled into near-impotence” — The Guardian (January 21)

The New York Times tells us that the migrant wave under Biden has been the largest period of immigration in American history, one that has coincided with economic growth and falling crime. The inability of Trump’s putative opposition to call attention to those facts ⁠– to offer a case for an orderly, secure but capacious immigration policy and immigration reform is a key reason why the undocumented in cities like Chicago can reportedly expect raids against them to commence within a matter of days.

The ICE activity being discussed now is a far cry from the mass deportations that Trump has called for and promised; here and elsewhere, it’s unclear how much of Trump’s stated agenda will manifest itself as real or within stunts designed to dazzle the most gullible voters in the electorate. We can be reasonably certain, though, about who will benefit the most from whatever equilibrium Trump and his flunkies reach.

The combined net worth of the four wealthiest attendees of Trump’s inauguration was $1.06tn; the VIPs included Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, Sam Altman and Sundar Pichai ⁠– titans of 21st-century industry, paragons of a new Gilded Age that Trump’s politics, beneath all the humbug and bluster, have been forged to sustain. Much remains uncertain about the path the next four years will take us down. But it’s crystal clear who’s going to come out ahead and who it’s all for.

“Musk’s rampage through government shows us how we can finally close the book on what Trumpism is all about” — The Guardian (February 18)

Democrats should be positioning themselves not as the guardians of America’s institutions but as the defenders of the American people’s concrete interests ⁠– showing and telling voters about all the federal government does for them every day and how the conservative agenda Trump, Musk and the Republican party are pursuing threatens and has always threatened them. The perversity of a man getting to rework their government purely because he happens to be the wealthiest person in the world and financially backed Trump’s campaign should, of course, also be underscored.

The especially ambitious might even try arguing to the American people that all the goings-on in Washington illustrate the danger of having so much wealth accumulate in the hands of a few in the first place. Elon Musk is gliding towards becoming the planet’s very first trillionaire. His access to the levers and gears of the federal government now could help him along in myriad ways. Even an improved political system would struggle to constrain the amount of power he possessed as a private citizen and has now leveraged into a public office; democratic republican governance will never be secured in America without turning our attention to the structure of our economic system as well. Dismantling the federal government to prevent that from happening was a key object of the conservative project before Trump. It has remained so with him at the head of the Republican party and will remain so whenever his time is up. Right now, that project is succeeding.

“Donald Trump has transformed the American story” — The Guardian (April 9)

On 19 April will be the 250th anniversary of the beginning of the war that founded this country ⁠– a war that, as we would do well to remember, was animated in large part by an ideal that stands undiminished by time and unmarred by the sins of our past. Human beings are not made to bear arbitrary, capricious and unaccountable rule. Whatever our social standing or economic status, whatever side of national borders we happen to fall upon, we have rights that should prohibit others from abusing us to their narrow ends and entitle us to governance that allows us to pursue our own. In the time since the founding, we’ve come to commit ourselves to this ideal more deeply and sincerely than those who first arrived at it. And those of us who remain committed to defending it have reached a point of decision and decisive action. What we face now, at the juncture in history we’ve been dragged to, is nothing less than the end of the American republic. And the chief danger to it, we should insist, is something much larger than the third term the president is considering to the laughter of elected Republicans, something that will outlast this administration and outlive Trump if we allow it. It is the ideology that brought Trump to power to begin with.

“Pivot to Video” – Flaming Hydra (May 13)

Some people write for its own sake. But, perhaps unfortunately, I do not. Writing, for me, is a means to the possibly delusional end of effecting a measure of change in this country. And moving the needle for the left is going to take outreach to a great many people who aren’t engaging with political writing much, or at all. This isn’t a novel challenge the internet has freighted us with; streaming and podcasting are just the latest in a series of revolutions in mass communication kicked off by the arrival of radio about a hundred years ago. The decisive blow against print was struck not by the internet and the dawn of the social media era but by television, the invention of which, I half-believe in my more crankish moments, has done about as much damage to the human race as nuclear weaponry. But like The Bomb, what’s been done here can’t be undone. The writer who is serious not just about the act of writing but the actual dissemination of their ideas must find ways to communicate those ideas to a public that gets more and more of its information through sound and video on screens.

“The Democrats Are Having a False Reckoning Over Joe Biden” — The New Republic (May 23)

All told, Biden was able to pursue another campaign out of Democratic deference, careerism, and complacency. There was no spell he cast over the party; nothing he himself did to stupefy and paralyze its leaders. Up and down the ladder, the shrewd and the merely timid, all of whom knew full well that he shouldn’t run again, each took measure of the situation and figured it was safest to do nothing until doing nothing became untenable—and for several weeks afterward.

Prominent Democrats speaking out about all this a year ago would have been meaningful. Today, it means nothing. Denouncing Biden’s run now ⁠that he’s a political nonentity⁠—out of office and perhaps very near death⁠—isn’t taking a brave stand against the internal culture of the Democratic Party. It’s a reflection of it: a wholly cost-free and substantively empty way for opportunists to perform independence from the party now that the coast is clear and there are no toes of consequence to step on. Biden ran again, and is being condemned for running again, for the very same reasons.

“Trump’s barbarism is turning his biggest strength into a liability” — The Guardian (May 23)

[T]here is an opportunity here, for those with the good sense and courage to take it, to use the public’s dismay at the Ábrego García case and the realities of Trump’s immigration agenda to sell it on an alternative vision for our immigration policy and an alternative set of culprits for the problems immigrants have proven easy scapegoats for.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents supposedly on the prowl for the thugs and thieves who’ve ruined communities and degraded our public infrastructure would be better off kicking down the doors of Congress than smashing the windows of asylum seekers. And, of course, if preserving law and order means that criminals who are sucking our public resources dry and who pose a danger to women ought to be dealt with harshly, we should insist on bringing the convict, grifter, and accused rapist in the White House to justice. The chief priority of his administration is terrorizing people for committing the crime of coming to this country and working harder for it than he ever has. His agenda here is corrosive to our values. It is degrading to our society. It materially profits no one. In important ways, it hurts us all.

More and more Americans are wising up to this. Fewer and fewer are willing to stand for it.

“You may not know it, but the Democratic primaries for 2028 are already under way” — The Guardian (July 18)

A consensus among Democratic consultants and the party’s most esteemed pundits has emerged that Harris ⁠– who challenged Trump for not being tough enough on immigration and was loth to even mention her own personal identity over the course of the race ⁠– ran a campaign that did too little to distance the party from the positions of progressive activists.

Tack to the political center even more aggressively, the thinking goes, and the Democrats might have a chance not only at winning in 2028, but returning to competitiveness in red regions in the country that the party hasn’t contested seriously since the 1990s and 2000s. Ask this set what happened between the 1990s and 2016 to weaken the party in these regions in the first place, and you’re unlikely to get a coherent answer.

The fact that so much of the recent erosion the party has seen with white working-class voters in particular happened under Barack Obama’s cautious, center-left, and rhetorically mainstream administration ⁠– before the resurgence of left identity politics that has swept the party since about 2015 ⁠– may be of interest to political scientists and historians. But it’s a wrinkle in the prevailing narrative professional Democrats are unwilling to consider ⁠– committed as they are to believing, or pretending to believe, that real moderation has never been tried.

Also per tradition, some of my favorites from the year in music are available for your listening pleasure on TIDAL and Spotify.

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I’m hoping to write more and write better next year. Thanks, as always, for reading.