2025 Will Be Worse. But Also Better.
The interregnum is over. The work starts now.
1. American Cassandra
Just objectively, 2025 is likely to be a worse year than 2024. But part of me is relieved and I want to talk about why that is and what it means for our future.
The last four years were pretty good. We drove a stake through COVID’s heart. The economy was strong. Wages were up, unemployment stayed low. Crime dropped like a stone. Was there bad stuff mixed in there, too? Sure.1 But that’s always the case. We live in a fallen world.
And yet, over the last four years I’ve felt like I was witness to a slow-motion train wreck.
Beginning in the fall of 2020 I started warning people that Donald Trump would run for president again. After January 6 I warned that Trump would not pay a price and that Republicans would come to embrace the insurrection. I went around telling anyone who would listen that Trump was going to run, he would win the Republican nomination in a walk, and that he might well win the presidency.2
It was always clear to me over this period that we were living not in some glorious “post-Trump” future, but in an interregnum. The battle against authoritarianism had not been won. The fight was merely in a ceasefire period—during which only one side had ceased firing. We were moving, inexorably, toward another showdown.