3 reasons I'm hopeful.
And a little bit of lore about me, if that's ok.
Hey, been a while.
It's strange resurrecting the corpse of the newsletter I wrote when COVID-19 was at its worst. Like now, I felt overwhelmed by an endless onslaught of confusing misery radiating from the news cycle. Horrible things seemed to happen daily, no one was held accountable, and I was burning out.
And plus, I was unemployed and shit sucked really, really bad for regular reasons, too. I’d just gotten laid off from my second writing job out of college—a gig at a weird long-form newsletter company, the sort that tells your Pop-pop how to invest in the stock market and uses the guise of vague but also incensing click-bait to do it. Every pitch was the same: Some kinda new snake oil just dropped that you can get in on, and it’s all thanks to this crazy business opportunity that just blew open the doors to newer, bigger gains. I didn’t know anything about the stock market when they hired me, which they said was no problem.
(The first and only pitch I made at the job before getting laid off, along with over half the staff, 3 months into the gig? Invest in Tesla, because Elon Musk wanted precious minerals from Venezuela. Venezuela was going through a lot of shit in 2020, remember: There was a “presidential crisis” and a lot of Americans were weirdly psyched about it. That’s a way longer story, but Tesla’s doing pretty great now. I just didn’t have any money to actually invest. Also, he’s evil.)
Ultimately, the snake oil was always the same mechanism: options. Options trading is an extremely volatile form of trading because, unlike regular stock trading, you can lose more than your principal investment if things go topsy-turvy. That’s not to say there aren’t successful options traders, but I also wouldn’t recommend it to the average Robinhood user as a reliable way to make money.
It was a shitty job, but I lost that job. Yes, COVID, and yes, shit sucked bad. I didn’t know what to do with myself but I knew I needed to stay busy and work on what I’m skilled at and what makes me happy, so I started writing this newsletter.
It helped me have a better relationship to understanding what was going on. I was taking more time to understand what was happening thoroughly instead of letting it hit me in the emotions like a sack of rice, and I was learning a ton.
Plus, I think I did a pretty professional job at running this thing? I was finding legit sources, seeking out reputable voices—my heart was in it. On some level, I think I even tried to moderate myself to appeal to a wider audience. That’s probably why I labeled it “progressive” instead of “socialist.”
That’s why I’m revisiting this thing, though. I don’t know if I’ll commit to doing it because I have a day job and I’m busy. I might write some more stuff or I might not.
Let’s get onto some hopeful thoughts for 2025.
1. Their Beliefs Are Bad!
Say what you will about America’s ailments, from its pimples and warts to its pus-filled wounds that have been left to rot. We have a lot of deeply rooted issues. But from Lazarus’s “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” to Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” America has rich philosophical traditions entrenched in multiculturalism, democracy, and equity. We’re far from perfect, but those ideas are planted deep in our brains from birth.
Which makes it all the harder to divide us. American fascists have built a coalition around disparate groups—the billionaires, the big tech workers with disposable income to gamble, the traditional conservatives who see this as their last gasp at turning the ship of social progress around, the various bigots who are single-minded in their obsessive hatred (whether they fixate on transgender folks or race/crime statistics), the fence-sitting “centrists” who are unhappy at all times for unclear reasons.
These groups, truthfully, have little in common. In some ways it’s a bigger ideological tent than the left could ever claim to be: You have legitimate influence from people who want to bring back the monarchy exemplified in JD Vance, childlike billionaires who care about their wealth only insofar as it is an extension of their narcissistic need to be loved like Elon Musk, straight up white power shitheads like Stephen Miller, confused buffoons like Joe Rogan, crunchy granola anti-health freaks like RFK Jr., and the star atop this Anti-Christmas tree is none other than the void himself, Donald Trump.
These people are connected far more by their lack of beliefs than they are by their convictions; bending the knee is simply the first step in getting what they want. And just as we saw last time, once it becomes clear that each will have their agendas limited by Trump’s ego and rabid drive for power, the ship will fall apart mid-drift.
Scrutiny Through Economics: Where We Are & Where We’re Headed
The base may not initially flinch at the uncertainty surrounding the fascist coalition, just like it didn’t last go around, but Trump isn’t inheriting Obama’s economy. Which was far from perfect: Through years of quantitative easing post-2008, we hid inflation in the background. Consumer goods stayed steady despite the government money printer never shutting down, so people were broadly content even as assets like housing and stocks continued to skyrocket. And as those assets continued to climb, they became bigger and bigger vehicles for speculation, which is the polite way to say it became more like gambling.
We find ourselves once again in a place where so much of our economy feels like a bubble. Does Tesla’s stock have any relationship to its utility to society, or is its growth driven the same way meme stocks are? Unsustainable hype leads to the rise of both, whether that’s Elon’s clownish CEO antics or the meteoric rise of Hawk Tuah girl and her subsequent meme coin crashout. Is crypto a currency, or a place to park money and watch it grow? Can AI improve our lives as promised, or are we all just using it to write and summarize emails to each other?
Add to that a president who wields tariffs like a bludgeon, and two parties who both believe in antiquated economics, rely on tightening the belt when things get tough instead of investing in our infrastructure, and have all but given up on enforcing consumer protections and price-gouging legislation.
This is to say that we’re on a steady collision course toward a giant recession iceberg. It’s all but inevitable, and the only thing we can hope for is that it happens under Trump, which I believe it will and I also believe he believes it will.
What to Do When the Groceries Don’t Go Down
If a right-wing strongman politician loses the will of the people because his economy sucks, how can he get that support back? Well, let’s look at some neighbors.
Start a Fight—and Win It, Fast
People don’t like long, drawn-out wars. Fatigue kicks in quick when your doomscrolling turns into watching your neighbors die daily. But one only needs to look at Putin or Netanyahu to understand that quick wars can do wonders for your numbers. Get in, take some land, get it over with, get your support back. Don’t let the cost of tanks fuck up the price of milk, control the narrative as best you can, and you’re golden.
Hence all this Greenland, Panama, Canada, and Gaza talk.
I don’t think Americans are hungry for that kind of conflict. Between our endless hawkish attitude toward the Middle East and our financial involvement in other conflicts, Americans are tired of war. Part of Trump’s appeal—which was a farce, like much of his appeal—was that he’d keep us out of wars. Remember that disgusting New York Times piece Donald the Dove, Hillary the Hawk? Yuck.
We’re not buying anyone, we’re just bullying them. If we continue escalating tensions and find ourselves in a conflict, on top of prices not going down, I don’t think people will be very happy.
Create Enemies Within
So Trump thrashes around and looks to the other way right-wing strongmen politicians maintain the will of the people, a different kind of war, an internal struggle.
Find a minority group and blame them.
Even better if they’re not originally from here, so you can blame the economic downturns on their arrival and influence. This playbook can be seen with Muslim migrants in the UK, France, and Europe broadly, Russia’s fearmongering about the West encroaching on the rest of the world, the antisemitism that cuts across all shades of fascism, or Trump’s increasing focus on migrants.
Need extra juice for your hate campaign? Blame groups that aren’t intrinsically affecting the economy, but tie them together in a larger narrative that paints them as explicit allies even when they’re unassociated.
Think LGBTQ+ people, who have been bundled into the increasingly vague “woke movement” rhetoric. In the fascist’s mind, their very existence is an assault on traditional values, so of course they too are responsible for the degradation of the cultural character of America through their support of immigrants. To normal folks, Trump’s “transgender operations on illegal aliens” might sound like utter disconnected nonsense. Subtlely, though, it implies that illegal immigration and transgenderism are manifestations of the same side of the coin; a greater scheme to destroy “the West” and all of the values it holds dear, never mind that those values include things like inclusivity.
I know it might not feel like it right now, and I know these hate campaigns feel daunting and unstoppable. But if I can take a knee and be cringe for just one second: Diversity is our strength.
Seriously! It’s not just lib shit to think that!
The more accepting we are of immutable traits like where you’re from or who you want to fuck, the more difficult it becomes to maintain a politics of division. As people are exposed to the devastating realities of how fascism divides us, I believe some, maybe enough, people will snap out of it.
TV changed how Americans thought about the Vietnam War, and while big tech certainly won’t save us, I do think the ways that we’re more connected than ever will make it difficult to continually hurt us and our friends, family, and neighbors.
2. The Vibe Shift is Imminent!
After Luigi Mangione domed UnitedHealthcare’s Brian Thompson, something peculiar began. Ben Shapiro and MSNBC’s comments sections looked hauntingly similar, united in a range of apathy over Thompson’s death to outright celebration.
What felt like a one-off seemed to snowball, with some “conservative populists” angered at Elon Musk’s flagrant grip over our government or questioning whether we should believe Mark Zuckerberg’s flip-flopping.
In retrospect, perhaps the writing was on the wall sooner than I realized in the misguided but scrappy attempts of gamers to take down Wall Street by ballooning the value of GameStop or their equally misguided attempts to break free from our parasitic financial institutions through crypto.
People are angry.
As that anger snowballs, I see more and more people stepping back from the culture wars and realizing that we’ve been pitted against each other for a reason. The rich will bend to whatever culture is dominant at the time, so let’s stop giving them ways to wriggle out of scrutiny and start pointing the finger at them for making our lives hard.
This isn’t to say we should welcome those “conservative populists” with open arms; if there is a future where we’re united by class instead of race, gender, or sexuality, then they need to stop being weird about race, gender, and sexuality. But if we lead with the economic policies and serve people in ways Democrats, Republicans, and MAGA haven’t in recent years, we’ll take the wind out of the sails of those culture wars much more effectively.
Don’t fall for the bait of arguing about social issues with people who don’t even know any gay folks, trans people, or migrants. They don’t care and it’s just a convenient vehicle for their frustrations pushed by the billionaire ruling class. Recenter on whether the Republicans (or the Democrats, for that matter) have their interests at heart, and whether they have more or less in common with the working-class left than the oligarchs.
3. Weakness Leaves Area for Improvement!
One embarrassing reframing you’ll often see in corporate America is that any weaknesses should be perceived as possible opportunities. If your product isn’t reaching young people like you want, that’s not cause for despair, but a reason to figure the problem out and adjust strategy accordingly.
In reality, of course, sometimes a product just isn’t ever going to resonate with a certain demographic. But how we structure our society isn’t bound by the same limitations as a private business’ profit goals, so in this case, it really is true that wherever we’re weak, there’s room for strength.
I’ve lost a good deal of faith in the Democrats, but that leaves space to recreate whatever left movement there is in America from the ground up. Criticizing politicians for how they act is a good thing, it turns out.
Voting didn’t save us, but maybe you running for office will. Maybe you have a voice that would be valued in local government meetings, maybe you have a unique insight into a problem, maybe you have a skill that you’re not taking advantage of.
For me, that means writing more and thinking about ways to write that can better serve society and whatever movement there is that I end up wanting to be a part of. But for you, it might mean getting out into your community, leading a protest, organizing your coworkers or neighbors, or however you can stay engaged without falling into complete despair.
You may feel powerless, and you may feel weak—but all that means is you have the capacity to get strong and take power back.
That’s all for me. I might be back with more because I do have a few topics I’ve been thinking about like:
On Confrontation & Strategic Disagreements: a look into why it’s so hard to criticize our friends who we mostly agree with.
Blaming Leaders, Not Voters: a nuanced take on third-party voting and how it’s used as a scapegoat for accountability.
How to Talk to the Modern Conservative: my tips for dealing with partisanship, fake news, and where your energy is worth putting.
So, until next time, don’t despair. Because that’s what these fuckers want you to do.
David