Sometimes I will write a post that somewhere midway through the writing starts to feel bloated and overwritten and then, in a pique of writerly nausea, I decide several sentences can and should — no, must, yuck! — do the work of a stable of paragraphs. This post began as one of those posts.
2024 was a deeply disappointing year. It capped two or three years that all had the feeling of playing out bad hands — a presidency defined by the jagged aftermath of COVID (a first-in-half-a-century inflation shock being the jaggedest), an increasingly frail president who couldn’t easily be replaced without doing even more damage than having him run for reelection. This doesn’t address decisions that should have been and could have been made differently. I focus on these because they were based on earlier decisions or events which were either right at the time or very difficult to avoid. Again, that steely but trapped feeling of playing out bad hands.
In 2025 we all face the consequences of those failures. But we are equally liberated from much of that history. Everybody is being dealt a new hand. We can make decisions differently, with more clarity, with less paralyzing concern over sunk costs. If there’s a message of the Biden years, it’s that there’s no simply going back to whatever we thought was the system that more or less worked before Trump arrived on the scene. You have to go forward on the basis of all we’ve seen over the last decade.
My takeaway is what I alluded to in this November piece about being the party of institutions in an era of distrust: Less reflexive protectiveness of institutions and norms and none for ones that can’t concretely justify their necessity in the future rather than the past. Enough valorizing process over results. This isn’t always obvious and doesn’t always come without real risks. But everything involves risk. Caution carries risks. The Trumpists control everything. They are the status quo. They were in many ways already the status quo but they are now in such a way that there is just no murkenizing or hiding it. All the billionaires have arrayed themselves on Trump’s side of the playground and said they’re on his team. We can see who is in charge and who’s powerful and who is the establishment. I find this liberating.
