Dissenting Into Madness

On political commentary in the age of Trump

The foundation of my political commentary over the last few years was the assumption that the Democratic Party purports to want to do good for the world. To take care of the people and the planet; to protect the vulnerable and provide for the needy; to center the good of humanity above short-term profit interest. Democratic politicians do not always, or even usually, embody these principles. Sometimes their words and deeds are so far removed from this ostensible ethic that their professed belief in it feels like a cruel joke. Still, for the last four years I have taken for granted that the party in power at least pantomimes, and occasionally realizes, sharing my values.

Yet the times, they are a-changin’. Today Donald Trump takes the oath of office. He comes to power having won the popular vote, alongside Republican majorities in both houses of Congress and countless conservative enforcers among the layers of our ever-more-nakedly partisan judicial system. These people do not portend to share my priorities or my beliefs about what bettering the world means. The premise that underlay my recent political writing no longer applies.

Frustrated Democrats often bemoan leftists putting (what they perceive as) more energy into critiquing them than more ideologically distant Republicans. To the extent that that’s true, it is a question of pragmatism. The American left is a crucial piece of the Democratic coalition. However much they prefer to pander to the center, it is crucial to the party’s viability that progressives’ interests are represented, so sometimes they have to listen. The Republicans have no such incentives. That the left disagrees with them is the point.

Take the issue of abortion. I do not believe the Democrats have a coherent strategy to protect reproductive rights. I see the pattern of politicians breaking their campaign promises to codify Roe v. Wade, then turning the responsibility back onto the voters as betraying a strange disbelief in their own agency. I have argued that Joe Biden’s disinterest in packing the Supreme Court is, in practice, no different than endorsing Roe being overturned. If Biden were a sleeper agent whose goal were to neuter the pro-choice movement while remaining performatively supportive of it, I do not think anything about his administration’s approach to abortion rights would have been meaningfully different. I have put energy into expressing this because most of my readers hew towards the Democrats, and I had hoped that increased pressure from the party’s base would nudge our leaders to take a stronger stand. Now the problem is not that the ruling party is too feckless to counter the minoritarian movement to ban abortion. Stripping away reproductive freedoms is their stated goal. Nothing I can write will change that.

Over the next few years conservatives will accuse their critics of wanting Trump to fail. In some cases it is true that I flatly oppose his ends — like forcibly deporting millions of people or rolling back protections for the LGBTQ+ community. There are other issues where the problem is more nuanced: the Republicans’ stated goals are anodyne enough, but their solutions would be so harmful and counterproductive that it beggars belief that they are proposed in good faith. For the country’s sake I hope Trump is right (and that the basic logic of economics is wrong) that imposing high, wide-ranging tariffs will lead to lower consumer costs. I hope he is right that slashing federal spending and neutering regulatory functions will ultimately be more helpful struggling Americans than social-welfare programs are. I hope he is right that climate change is not an existential threat to humanity that we urgently need to address. But I cannot fathom that he is. And whether they are true believers or they are merely pretending to be to mask their own self-interest, no Republican leaders seem interested in hearing such a thing.

To say nothing of the dearth of spaces to have such conversations. If social media ever provided constructive forums for political discussion, it doesn’t anymore. Twitter has become increasingly unusable even when the algorithm isn’t pushing white supremacists into your feed. Meta is following suit and relaxing its anti-hate-speech moderation policies as Mark Zuckerberg sucks up to Trump. Bluesky seems to be speedrunning the stereotypical spiral from fun to miserable. Even here, the bigotry that Substack happily platforms looms beyond the borders of my own blog.

It will be important to stay vigilant and informed in the Trump Era. The harm his administration causes and the hatred he espouses are no less contemptible because they are predictable. Of course there will remain plenty to criticize about a Democratic Party that is already caving to Trump on immigration and transgender rights. (One could write volumes about the fittingly humiliating final days of Biden’s term, as the fiction that he had been doing everything he could to enact a ceasefire in Gaza completely unraveled, and his administration feigned surprise when TikTok complied with the ban Biden himself enacted.) I don’t like to be pessimistic and perhaps this feeling will pass. I certainly am not here to advocate self-censorship. Yet for the moment, the notion of writing about more important things than my normal beats of sports and food seems futile. What’s the point?

I’m not a journalist or a politician. I’m just a guy with a computer who’s stupid enough to think he has something interesting to say. But — for better or worse — there is nothing that embodies our national ethos more than this kind of presumption, and thus it is un-American to snuff it out. Having leaders who care about ordinary people is a necessary condition of making this country great. We will have to wait at least a few years for that.