Does This Matter?

About a decade ago, I got a huge amount of reader traffic for a blog post I wrote one week after the 2016 election. Titled “This Is Not Normal,” it was a catalogue of the corruption, lawlessness, and obsequious journalism coverage the incoming Republican administration was bringing to society, with dozens of examples that now almost seem quaint because of how much worse the second round of Trump has been already.

A key thing I begged readers to do then, and everyone outside of the leadership class has done, is to point out that the brazen corruption, nepotism, abuse, violence, lies, and malice, were just not normal. We did not have to accept them, or concede to them, or pretend like they were legitimate. I still think this. But I also watch, with jaw-dropping dismay, as seemingly every single leader in our society chooses to knuckle under and declare that what’s happened under Trump is normal, even when it means their own institutions being grievously harmed with uncertain prospects for anything we might recognize as civil society surviving.

Trump II has been far worse than Trump I in every dimension I can think of, including the journalism that is meant to inform us of how bad things are. Journalism in the 2020s has decided, en masse, that it’s perfectly fine for fascist billionaires to dictate coverage to them, that independence counts if it’s limited to marginalia and exceptions, that the Supreme Court really can just summarily upend decades of human rights and administrative law that had allowed our country to function. They even have begun to say it’s okay to dehumanize and marginalize queer folks, just because some rich people in charge of a corrupt system want that for us.

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I recount this because I think we need to keep in mind that none of this should be normal, even if it has become normalized by the institutions that surrendered their role in society to fascist thugs. I am watching today as the Supreme Court just flipped another multidecade legal precedent on its head, somehow allowing the President to fire any independent head of an agency except the Federal Reserve, for reasons no honest person can follow or parse. It is only the latest in a long string of lawless outrages by this court, which has become a council of unelectable, unaccountable mages choosing in a fit of pique which rights they think we deserve (carrying assault weapons into a shopping mall) and which rights they think we don’t (Black folks voting).

None of this capricious lawless is normal, and we should never pretend that it is. But what can we do about it? A decade ago, I said we should refuse: don’t accept that this is normal, don’t accept that things can never change, don’t accept defeat. “Refuse to let our country be stolen from us,” I said, only for eight years to go by and for the country to voluntarily choose to do it again, but worse.

I don’t know what to do anymore. My normal response, writing, feels empty. What does writing do, in our current environment? I have struggled with this for years, where I once was prolific and visible as a writer and now mostly frustrated and demoralized by the reputational damage I took being right about some things while watching people who were wrong just coast upward from success to success. The most sociopathic people in our society are its most successful, at least when measured financially and institutionally. We are, at greater and greater speed, being choked to death by a small band of unaccountable people at the top of our society.

It’s not like there’s nothing on my mind. I have research in progress that’s exciting and interesting to me, and I think it will be for some of you. I am working on a book that’s too early to share details about. I am thriving, personally and professionally, and (weirdly enough) I know my neurochemistry is balanced. But it’s hard to make me feel like writing in public matters anymore. The thugs in ICE have leeway to stalk and harass people over social media posts, universities are bowing before partisan politics and running away from free speech and academic freedom as fast as they can, and rapacious, never-profitable AI companies are parasitizing the entire economy even as the President they financed is busy wrecking that same economy as quickly as he can. What does a blog do against that?

I don’t have answers. That’s going to be a theme. But I am trying. I launched this blog to see if a different set up will make me more amenable to at least cataloguing where I stand, ideologically, in the hopes that a) I am not visited by the stormtroopers, and b) it does not lose me my job, which it has in the past.

I wish I had something more upbeat to say, but I don’t. We have so much worth preserving, but every single value I hold dear is under sustained assault by people with far more money and power than I will ever accrue. It feels bad. It is bad. But we can’t accept this, we can’t pretend it’s the new normal, and we cannot allow it to keep on happening silently.

Cover: Pictures of the renovations of the Reflecting Pool taken between May 2 and June 18 reveal just how badly Trump’s project has backfired. / Reuters Photographer / REUTERS