Everyone wants to focus on the strategy. The messaging failures. The tactical faceplants. None of it matters. Not really. Because the problem isn’t the strategy.
The problem is the audience.
You can mock the White House’s response, call it a clown car, call it a panic spiral, call it what it is: A panicked, unraveling cover-up from a regim…
Everyone wants to focus on the strategy. The messaging failures. The tactical faceplants. None of it matters. Not really. Because the problem isn’t the strategy.
The problem is the audience.
You can mock the White House’s response, call it a clown car, call it a panic spiral, call it what it is: A panicked, unraveling cover-up from a regime so convinced of its own impunity it can’t even lie coherently anymore. But the deeper rot? The thing no one in the Beltway wants to say out loud?
It’s working.
Because half the country isn’t looking for the truth. They’re looking for confirmation. They don’t want facts, they want fiction with footnotes. That’s what Trumpism gives the Red Hats, an endless, looping narrative of grievance, persecution, and imagined greatness where reality is not just denied but hunted. You’re shocked they’re calling verified leaks a hoax? I’m closer to being shocked it even made the news cycle than I am them calling it a hoax. This country hasn’t been tethered to reality in nearly a decade.
The felon in the Oval? His cabinet of looters and flunkies? Not the main threat. The problem, the terminal, metastatic problem is the American people. Not all of them, but enough. Enough to break the spine of democracy. Enough to reelect a man who tried to end it. Enough to laugh when children are caged, cheer when protesters are beaten, shrug when allies are betrayed, and vote to do it all over again.
Sarah Longwell likes to say the people are the problem, but they’re also the solution. She’s right, in theory. But that theory assumes a shared baseline of reality. What do you do with a population that no longer believes in gravity? That watches a man shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and decides the blood was CGI?
You don’t re-message your way out of that. You don’t clarify your position. You don’t win them back with better soundbites.
This isn’t about persuasion anymore.
This is about containment.
Because a country that rejects reality will not be saved by truth.
It will have to be rebuilt in the ruins of its own delusion.
While the capitulation of tens of millions of deluded MAGA Americans has gotten us here, it is the uninformed millions who will bring us back. The goal for all of us who want to stop Trump should be to make ourselves seen and heard, to scream from every rooftop, until there is no corner of America that is ignorant to the crimes being perpetrated upon us by this band of fools.
If screaming is what you want to do, go at it. Scream your lungs out, but don’t expect it to change much.
The truth is, these people want the lie. They’ve chosen it. They wear it like armor. They need it to be true—because if it’s not, if Trump is what he so obviously is, then everything they stood for, everything they voted for, everything they cheered becomes indefensible.
They’d rather torch the country than face that.
You’re right that the uninformed still matter. You’re right that we need to reach them. But yelling at a machine that runs on delusion won’t bring it down. It just feeds the noise.
So if screaming helps you stay sane, do it. But know who you're screaming for.
Yes it is. Vulnerable folk feel disrespected, unseen, dismissed, insecure about ‘complex’ modernity, and believe they have found a rescue savior in Trump, a belonging in maga. It’s going to take time and new talk from democrat politicians to draw them out of the ‘cult’. In the meantime, as a former Bill Kristol type republican, I will join a broad pro democracy coalition. I think we can hold the line.
There’s no guarantee that what comes next will be better. History isn’t a pendulum—it’s a fire. Sometimes the things we think are temporary collapses are actually permanent extinctions.
No. It's not working. This story is not going away. What Andrew said is the best thing I've heard in a long time. The "attack, deny, claim victory" method is not just a strategy, it's how they think. They don't know how to respond to a mistake in any other way. Celebrate! The economy is going to drip, drip, drip lower and lower. Tariffs are stupid. This is the way out. Keep calm and they will self-destruct.
Yes, I don't disagree with what you describe. I've been around awhile, and I've had too many lessons in feeling hopeless. The worst. So, I don't allow myself to be there for long. Specifically, with respect to Trump, I can now recognize when I find myself searching for The News Story That Tells Me That He Is Going Down. That happened for me about 2 weeks ago, and I know that I have to stay away from the news for a time, usually half a day, and tone it down for a few days. Other than that, time with friends, a walk, reading, a gratitude practice, calling my reps, therapy when I need it, etc. I know the stories of the Civil Rights Era and WWll. Both hugely inspiring. Someone gave me a book of Churchill's speeches, and during the war they were all about never giving up. The PBS series on the Civil Rights Era was called "Eyes on the Prize." I'm looking now at some of the Soviet dissidents.
I firmly believe that taking care of ourselves is the first priority, because we do not know how long this will take. I am so grateful for The Bulwark and for the comment sections.
This is how movements become machines. Not because they win over the rational, but because they reroute rationality. They flip the moral compass and then punish anyone who still feels it pulling north. The cruelty becomes virtue. The collapse becomes prophecy. The pain is not only justified—it’s required.
You’re right that the clownery and chaos aren’t bugs. They’re bonding agents. They create a shared trauma, a kind of psychological sunk cost that makes turning back feel like self-annihilation. If you admit it’s all been a lie, you don’t just lose your politics. You lose your place in the tribe, your sense of self. So instead, they double down. Again and again. Because the alternative is looking in the mirror and seeing the rubble.
And yes, the media machine exists to make sure that mirror never shows a clear reflection. It doesn't inform, it confirms. It doesn't expose, it shelters. When a narrative breaks, it doesn’t get corrected, it gets replaced.
You’re describing the shape of the thing we now live inside.
If there’s any hope, and I mean any, it’s in naming this clearly. Without euphemism. Without false comfort. Just calling it what it is, so those who haven’t signed their souls away might still have a chance to choose something different.
That’s not optimism. That’s the last act of realism.
And I’m right there with you, hoping, somehow, that we’re wrong.
Excellent point. The most difficult thing for me to understand is the majority of the people bitching and moaning in my little part of the universe are better off than 90% of the people on this PLANET! They have all done very well for themselves and yet they are so full of fear and anger they cheer on the destruction of their own existence. Absolutely miserable in their own prosperity. I can't make sense of it. All of which leads me to believe the current situation will not be resolved until it all burns down.
"Because half the country isn’t looking for the truth. They’re looking for confirmation. They don’t want facts, they want fiction with footnotes."
Accurate. This same principle applies to the people who refuse to abandon religion once science has disproven its fictitious narrative (the earth coming into existence before the sun right in the opening lines of genesis for example). People just want to hold onto their priors no matter what the evidence because they prefer listening to their gut + simple explanations rather than the facts + complexity. MAGA is just the newest form of American religion that elevates bullshit over evidence (elevating bullshit over evidence in general being our original sin that just extends itself to politics nowadays).
Excuse me, Travis: minor rant here. <Ahem> Many people of faith are actually quite capable of nuanced and informed thinking about the world. I've spent my entire adult life in university settings, hanging around humanists and scientists alike. I have met many highly educated seculars who are as just ignorant or closed-minded about religion as some religious folks I know are about science. My husband is a geologist; we both have Ivy League degrees; we are both Christians. Please get over this notion that religious people have ipso facto given up their intellectual integrity. It's almost as bad as making demeaning generalizations about people on the basis of race or gender or class.
The difference between race and theology is that belief systems are a choice while things like skin color are not, so lets not make that false equivocation. If your husband is a geologist and *knows* how things like isotope dating work and still manages to square that circle with the objectively false claims of the bible, then that's straight up cognitive dissonance in my book.
When you wrote “But that theory assumes a shared baseline of reality.” my eyes saw “shattered baseline of reality”. The population was softened ahead of this assault, by reality TV and social media. Those forces did shatter our collective baseline of reality; probably dose-dependent. Q-anon seems to have left the main stage, but it was an irrefutable sign that a true mental illness was spreading among the population. I was scared then, and with good reason.
You're not wrong about rejecting reality, but reality (as opposed to truth, an abstract concept) has a way of asserting itself. Trump voters may never care about the Signal debacle, but they care about their Social Security checks, the price of eggs, etc. You're also not wrong about rebuilding in the ruins. You push yourself up from the ground you fall on. I don't think we've hit the ground yet. It's rushing up to meet us, though.
Thank you. Truly. For asking the only question that matters. I'm sorry if I came off as someone who tears ideas down without providing alternative thoughts and options. That is not who I am.
Many are content to sit on the sidelines and dissect the collapse like it’s an academic exercise. Post-mortem punditry without the burden of prescription. I’m not interested in that. I never have been. I've been fighting these battles on campaigns, with time, effort, financial resources, sweat and tears for decades now. I can also see how my writing, especially something like this, might read like fatalism. Like I’m screaming about the problems with no intention of fixing them. That is not me.
I do believe in a path forward. I just don’t believe in a comfortable one.
As far as I can see, there are only two paths left. Others may see more. I don’t.
Path One: You resign yourself to the reality that this is a 40+ year fight. Not a campaign cycle. Not a news cycle. A generational project. I explain why that timeline is necessary here:
And then you do the quiet, grueling work of rebuilding from the dirt—showing up locally, school boards, city councils, state legislatures—because national power only reflects what’s rotting or thriving underneath. I wrote more on that here:
Path Two: You become part of starving the machine—financially, culturally, structurally. You figure out how to stop feeding the apparatus that keeps this corpse animated. I laid out that angle here:
Neither of these paths is clean. Neither comes with applause. Neither offers you the fantasy of fixing this in your lifetime. Neither is easy.
People generally do not like my ideas, because they are hard. Both of these ideas require real sacrifice—time, comfort, money, community, and sometimes your own peace. Sacrifice sucks. It’s slow. It’s lonely. But I don’t see a future without it. The only answer I see is a significant sacrifice from those of us who are still attached to reality.
Sacrificing for a future, we won’t benefit from.
But someone will.
And that, to me, is enough.
So again—thank you. Not just for calling me out. But for caring enough to ask the question most people are too afraid to face.
It's taken me a while to see things as I do now, much in the way you describe here. I've finally come to understand that there really *shouldn't* be an easy way out this, much as we might wish otherwise.
What we're losing now took millennia to build with knowledge born of pain and suffering. Like a brute force attack over the ages, plugging away one mistake after another, mankind at long last acquired the ability to improve upon its once brutal existence. Standing upon the shoulders of our forebears, we eventually achieved a rarity in human history: A democratic republic, founded in the morals and values of classical liberalism. This was and has always remained experimental rather than a cosmological certainty. Taken for granted, it's practically guaranteed to end in its destruction.
Like most things in life, what we've had is easier to maintain than to build, easier to destroy than maintain. We've neglected our responsibilities and now are in the destruction-over-maintenance phase. The longer the destruction continues, the more rebuilding is required. Unless we resign ourselves to happenstance and have the improbable fortune of being rescued by some unknown outside force, the only way out of this mess is through it. And we're still only dealing with the defeat of the authoritarian threat right now, not even the rebuilding part, should we succeed.
The easiest path forward in the near term is to give in to the lie, put on the red hat, and let your brain turn to goo as you abandon independent thought. If you're here reading this, you're probably not down with this option. The next easiest is to patiently yet minimally resist, hoping an unlikely hero saves you and you'll awaken from this nightmare to the comforts of the Before Times. Otherwise, you're going to have to do some real resistance somehow, and resistance, by definition, is hard.
This is just the immediate fight for control. Should we be fortunate enough to resist and overcome the authoritarian menace, we have to start rebuilding society and building is always harder than maintaining or destroying.
Should we succeed and find ourselves with a liberal democratic republic once more, it's imperative take to heart that we're all much better off with the relatively light responsibilities of maintenance than we ever are with construction or destruction. This gets at what you said about local politics; we need more civic education and engagement across all walks of life and at all levels of society. As citizens, we need to regularly exercise our values. The only way we can hope to avoid this path again is to remember the hard-won lessons learned. Regular engagement in remembrance of our past and making one's participation in society an integral part of what it means to have citizenship is our "easy" path in the long run.
The opposition would be well-served adopting the Navy SEAL adage: The only easy day was yesterday.
This is one of the strongest articulations I’ve read—not just of where we are, but of why it’s supposed to be this hard.
A republic cobbled together through agony and contradiction, pushed forward inch by inch through blood, error, protest, revision. For a brief window in history, it almost held. Not perfectly. Not equitably. But functionally. Enough to believe in.
Then we stopped believing it needed us.
You nailed it: We’re not even in the rebuilding phase yet. We’re still trying to survive the wrecking ball. Still fighting just to keep the lights on in the idea of shared reality. If we’re lucky we’ll come out the other side not to celebration, but to rubble. That’s when the real work begins. The harder work. The thankless work. The kind no one gets credit for in a news cycle.
We need to remember through action. Civic engagement not as a hashtag, but as identity. As habit. As the bare minimum of citizenship. Because you’re right—maintenance is lighter than destruction, but only if we don’t forget what happens when we stop maintaining.
I agree this is a long haul—it took the GOP more than forty years to get here at the apex/nadir of political power. They were patient. The left? God no. If it isn't fixed now now now they stay home next election to teach Congress a lesson, thereby exacerbating the problem. Laws must be changed surrounding free speech. Lies must be reigned in. We also need to break up media monopolies that allow one RW billionaire to own most of the television and radio stations, and even newspapers (what are left of them) in huge swathes of the country. It's the only way to break the hold of the vast RW propoganda machine. Reagan broke up Ma Bell. It can be done. But we need the political will.
But to do that there have to be large majorities of Dems in both Houses to pass such legislation, and a Dem president has to be willing to pack SCOTUS, otherwise such laws would be ruled unconstitutional and we are right back at scratch. Same with campaign finance. It cannot happen until SCOTUS is changed. Why so many people don't get that is beyond me. And peope have to keep coming out and voting for Dems election after election after election. It's not one and done.
But I completely disagree with your suggestion that people take another option and flee the country. While the monied can "sacrifice" by moving to France, the rest of us who aren't as fortunate will sacrifice our health, well being, economic security, and freedom. Not exactly a fair trade off.
You can keep framing emigration as some kind of luxury cruise for the monied elite, but that’s not reality. The vast majority of immigrants aren’t rich. They’re not fleeing to some fantasy of ease. They’re making sacrifices most Americans wouldn’t stomach for five minutes, leaving behind family, identity, language, safety, on the chance their kids might have a shot at something better.
That’s not comfort. That’s courage.
Pretending otherwise isn’t just inaccurate, it’s the same kind of unreality that corrodes everything we claim to be fighting against. If we’re going to demand truth from the MAGA cult, we better damn well be willing to live in it ourselves.
This isn’t about liking the options. None of them are good. This is about telling the truth about what they cost.
The truth is: Migration, when it’s chosen as a political and moral line in the sand, is not abandonment. It’s not indulgence. It’s sacrifice. It deserves to be named as such.
I fully understand that emigration isn’t a sacrifice you’re willing to make. I understand why. It’s a brutal, complicated, deeply personal decision.
Please don’t frame emigration, or immigrants, as wealthy vacationers chasing ease. That’s a comforting illusion designed to justify staying put, and it erases the real cost millions endure just to survive somewhere new.
Make the choice that’s right for you. Truly. But respect that others are doing the same. The fight for a future isn’t one-size-fits-all—and pretending it is only serves the system that’s already trying to break us.
Lived through the civil rights south , in a small Alabama rural town, of poverty and a few rich people. Here we are again in some ways, not all- there was progress.
I will be reading these substack articles. I keep realizing over and over that, at age 55, I will not be seeing the end of this story in my lifetime. In some ways, it's part of the eternal struggle against the forces of ignorance that people have been fighting since the first Homo sapiens tried to get his children to stop eating the shiny berries. We are so far past politics now, and I don't think politics or economics can solve our irreconcilable differences. In fact, once Trump was re-elected, I signed up to volunteer for a food bank that works to keep people housed, as we all know where this is going: hungry, homeless children. And when people reach that point, who will be there to help? MAGA or us?
As far as I'm concerned, it had better be us. And it might not be.
Cannot remember exact quote, or from who, but someone once defined "statesman" as a person committed to planting trees knowing he'd never see the shade.
Good question, but I'm afraid he answered it in the last line. We need to get to the ruins first. Then we rebuild it. Exactly what we're all afraid of.
Exactly what I’m seeing. Not quite four months into this and his supporters still making excuses for him and still unbelievably blaming Dems (ie He only won because they were so terrible,) I fear things will have to get much worse - primarily economically and health wise- before enough people start waking up. My husband and I have started making financial adjustments. Next on the To Do list are updated wills.
Yes. Same here. The excuses are endless, shameless, and completely impervious to contradiction. The worst part? They’re not even defending him anymore. They’re defending the need for him to be right. Because the alternative would mean confronting everything they ignored, enabled, or endorsed. Most of them just… won’t.
I agree with you—things will likely have to get a lot worse. Not because it’s inevitable, but because that’s how deep the delusion runs. Economic collapse, health crises, institutional breakdown. I also have a fear that none of it will be seen as consequence, just more proof the enemies need to be punished harder.
We aren't going to win back the hardcore MAGA. There were Germans decades later who still missed Hitler. THey're gone and they ain't coming back. But they are not half the country. They are maybe a third, which is a frighteningly large enough percentage. Until it breaks through like the Signal story, people are not aware and that is the media's fault because they don't cover what is happening with the immediacy and truthfulness it deserves. That's where it's up to us to use our own outlets—not just here, but X (if you're still there). bluesky, IG, FB, TikTok etc to spread the word. Email your friend that damning clip. Tell your veteran uncle what they are doing to the VA. Let your friend know that her grandma with alzheimer's in the senior's home may be coming to live with her parents if they cut Medicaid because unless they can pony up the thousands of dollars per month for her care, she'll be kicked out.
Actually, to be a bit of a pessimist, it strikes me that things getting worse is really part of the point. It will drive off those who are awake to the danger and have the means to flee it. And it will make those who can't, and those who want the easy path, far more willing--indeed, glad--to give up liberty to attain it. No, do not discount the notion that economic hardship is an aim, not an unintended or unavoidable consequence.
Everyone wants to focus on the strategy. The messaging failures. The tactical faceplants. None of it matters. Not really. Because the problem isn’t the strategy.
The problem is the audience.
You can mock the White House’s response, call it a clown car, call it a panic spiral, call it what it is: A panicked, unraveling cover-up from a regime so convinced of its own impunity it can’t even lie coherently anymore. But the deeper rot? The thing no one in the Beltway wants to say out loud?
It’s working.
Because half the country isn’t looking for the truth. They’re looking for confirmation. They don’t want facts, they want fiction with footnotes. That’s what Trumpism gives the Red Hats, an endless, looping narrative of grievance, persecution, and imagined greatness where reality is not just denied but hunted. You’re shocked they’re calling verified leaks a hoax? I’m closer to being shocked it even made the news cycle than I am them calling it a hoax. This country hasn’t been tethered to reality in nearly a decade.
The felon in the Oval? His cabinet of looters and flunkies? Not the main threat. The problem, the terminal, metastatic problem is the American people. Not all of them, but enough. Enough to break the spine of democracy. Enough to reelect a man who tried to end it. Enough to laugh when children are caged, cheer when protesters are beaten, shrug when allies are betrayed, and vote to do it all over again.
Sarah Longwell likes to say the people are the problem, but they’re also the solution. She’s right, in theory. But that theory assumes a shared baseline of reality. What do you do with a population that no longer believes in gravity? That watches a man shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and decides the blood was CGI?
You don’t re-message your way out of that. You don’t clarify your position. You don’t win them back with better soundbites.
This isn’t about persuasion anymore.
This is about containment.
Because a country that rejects reality will not be saved by truth.
It will have to be rebuilt in the ruins of its own delusion.
I don't want to agree with that but I know it's true. Alarming anxiety flooding my consciousness. Happy Monday I guess
While the capitulation of tens of millions of deluded MAGA Americans has gotten us here, it is the uninformed millions who will bring us back. The goal for all of us who want to stop Trump should be to make ourselves seen and heard, to scream from every rooftop, until there is no corner of America that is ignorant to the crimes being perpetrated upon us by this band of fools.
If screaming is what you want to do, go at it. Scream your lungs out, but don’t expect it to change much.
The truth is, these people want the lie. They’ve chosen it. They wear it like armor. They need it to be true—because if it’s not, if Trump is what he so obviously is, then everything they stood for, everything they voted for, everything they cheered becomes indefensible.
They’d rather torch the country than face that.
You’re right that the uninformed still matter. You’re right that we need to reach them. But yelling at a machine that runs on delusion won’t bring it down. It just feeds the noise.
So if screaming helps you stay sane, do it. But know who you're screaming for.
And know what it won’t fix.
Yes it is. Vulnerable folk feel disrespected, unseen, dismissed, insecure about ‘complex’ modernity, and believe they have found a rescue savior in Trump, a belonging in maga. It’s going to take time and new talk from democrat politicians to draw them out of the ‘cult’. In the meantime, as a former Bill Kristol type republican, I will join a broad pro democracy coalition. I think we can hold the line.
"Because a country that rejects reality will not be saved by truth. It will have to be rebuilt in the ruins of its own delusion."
If it can be rebuilt at all.
Yes. 100%.
If it can be rebuilt at all.
There’s no guarantee that what comes next will be better. History isn’t a pendulum—it’s a fire. Sometimes the things we think are temporary collapses are actually permanent extinctions.
"Because half the country isn’t looking for the truth. They’re looking for confirmation."
The exact psychological phenomena is based on human cognitive biases.
Notably "confirmation bias" and cognitive dissonance.
No. It's not working. This story is not going away. What Andrew said is the best thing I've heard in a long time. The "attack, deny, claim victory" method is not just a strategy, it's how they think. They don't know how to respond to a mistake in any other way. Celebrate! The economy is going to drip, drip, drip lower and lower. Tariffs are stupid. This is the way out. Keep calm and they will self-destruct.
Yes, I don't disagree with what you describe. I've been around awhile, and I've had too many lessons in feeling hopeless. The worst. So, I don't allow myself to be there for long. Specifically, with respect to Trump, I can now recognize when I find myself searching for The News Story That Tells Me That He Is Going Down. That happened for me about 2 weeks ago, and I know that I have to stay away from the news for a time, usually half a day, and tone it down for a few days. Other than that, time with friends, a walk, reading, a gratitude practice, calling my reps, therapy when I need it, etc. I know the stories of the Civil Rights Era and WWll. Both hugely inspiring. Someone gave me a book of Churchill's speeches, and during the war they were all about never giving up. The PBS series on the Civil Rights Era was called "Eyes on the Prize." I'm looking now at some of the Soviet dissidents.
I firmly believe that taking care of ourselves is the first priority, because we do not know how long this will take. I am so grateful for The Bulwark and for the comment sections.
Thanks, Anonymous.
Yes. Exactly.
This is how movements become machines. Not because they win over the rational, but because they reroute rationality. They flip the moral compass and then punish anyone who still feels it pulling north. The cruelty becomes virtue. The collapse becomes prophecy. The pain is not only justified—it’s required.
You’re right that the clownery and chaos aren’t bugs. They’re bonding agents. They create a shared trauma, a kind of psychological sunk cost that makes turning back feel like self-annihilation. If you admit it’s all been a lie, you don’t just lose your politics. You lose your place in the tribe, your sense of self. So instead, they double down. Again and again. Because the alternative is looking in the mirror and seeing the rubble.
And yes, the media machine exists to make sure that mirror never shows a clear reflection. It doesn't inform, it confirms. It doesn't expose, it shelters. When a narrative breaks, it doesn’t get corrected, it gets replaced.
You’re describing the shape of the thing we now live inside.
If there’s any hope, and I mean any, it’s in naming this clearly. Without euphemism. Without false comfort. Just calling it what it is, so those who haven’t signed their souls away might still have a chance to choose something different.
That’s not optimism. That’s the last act of realism.
And I’m right there with you, hoping, somehow, that we’re wrong.
Excellent point. The most difficult thing for me to understand is the majority of the people bitching and moaning in my little part of the universe are better off than 90% of the people on this PLANET! They have all done very well for themselves and yet they are so full of fear and anger they cheer on the destruction of their own existence. Absolutely miserable in their own prosperity. I can't make sense of it. All of which leads me to believe the current situation will not be resolved until it all burns down.
"Because half the country isn’t looking for the truth. They’re looking for confirmation. They don’t want facts, they want fiction with footnotes."
Accurate. This same principle applies to the people who refuse to abandon religion once science has disproven its fictitious narrative (the earth coming into existence before the sun right in the opening lines of genesis for example). People just want to hold onto their priors no matter what the evidence because they prefer listening to their gut + simple explanations rather than the facts + complexity. MAGA is just the newest form of American religion that elevates bullshit over evidence (elevating bullshit over evidence in general being our original sin that just extends itself to politics nowadays).
Excuse me, Travis: minor rant here. <Ahem> Many people of faith are actually quite capable of nuanced and informed thinking about the world. I've spent my entire adult life in university settings, hanging around humanists and scientists alike. I have met many highly educated seculars who are as just ignorant or closed-minded about religion as some religious folks I know are about science. My husband is a geologist; we both have Ivy League degrees; we are both Christians. Please get over this notion that religious people have ipso facto given up their intellectual integrity. It's almost as bad as making demeaning generalizations about people on the basis of race or gender or class.
Thank you, I'll show myself out now.
The difference between race and theology is that belief systems are a choice while things like skin color are not, so lets not make that false equivocation. If your husband is a geologist and *knows* how things like isotope dating work and still manages to square that circle with the objectively false claims of the bible, then that's straight up cognitive dissonance in my book.
Well said!
🥲you are probably correct but the enormity of what you’re saying is still really hard to contemplate
When you wrote “But that theory assumes a shared baseline of reality.” my eyes saw “shattered baseline of reality”. The population was softened ahead of this assault, by reality TV and social media. Those forces did shatter our collective baseline of reality; probably dose-dependent. Q-anon seems to have left the main stage, but it was an irrefutable sign that a true mental illness was spreading among the population. I was scared then, and with good reason.
You're not wrong about rejecting reality, but reality (as opposed to truth, an abstract concept) has a way of asserting itself. Trump voters may never care about the Signal debacle, but they care about their Social Security checks, the price of eggs, etc. You're also not wrong about rebuilding in the ruins. You push yourself up from the ground you fall on. I don't think we've hit the ground yet. It's rushing up to meet us, though.
Perfectly stated.
Messaging will never fix the problem of a populace that doesn't agree on what represents reality.
Yes. perfectly stated. We’re not in a debate. We’re in a delusion management crisis.
So what’s your answer, Patrick?
Thank you. Truly. For asking the only question that matters. I'm sorry if I came off as someone who tears ideas down without providing alternative thoughts and options. That is not who I am.
Many are content to sit on the sidelines and dissect the collapse like it’s an academic exercise. Post-mortem punditry without the burden of prescription. I’m not interested in that. I never have been. I've been fighting these battles on campaigns, with time, effort, financial resources, sweat and tears for decades now. I can also see how my writing, especially something like this, might read like fatalism. Like I’m screaming about the problems with no intention of fixing them. That is not me.
I do believe in a path forward. I just don’t believe in a comfortable one.
As far as I can see, there are only two paths left. Others may see more. I don’t.
Path One: You resign yourself to the reality that this is a 40+ year fight. Not a campaign cycle. Not a news cycle. A generational project. I explain why that timeline is necessary here:
🔗 https://substack.com/@complexsimplicity/note/c-79872455
And then you do the quiet, grueling work of rebuilding from the dirt—showing up locally, school boards, city councils, state legislatures—because national power only reflects what’s rotting or thriving underneath. I wrote more on that here:
🔗 https://substack.com/home/post/p-156240226
Path Two: You become part of starving the machine—financially, culturally, structurally. You figure out how to stop feeding the apparatus that keeps this corpse animated. I laid out that angle here:
🔗 https://substack.com/home/post/p-152108087
Neither of these paths is clean. Neither comes with applause. Neither offers you the fantasy of fixing this in your lifetime. Neither is easy.
People generally do not like my ideas, because they are hard. Both of these ideas require real sacrifice—time, comfort, money, community, and sometimes your own peace. Sacrifice sucks. It’s slow. It’s lonely. But I don’t see a future without it. The only answer I see is a significant sacrifice from those of us who are still attached to reality.
Sacrificing for a future, we won’t benefit from.
But someone will.
And that, to me, is enough.
So again—thank you. Not just for calling me out. But for caring enough to ask the question most people are too afraid to face.
It's taken me a while to see things as I do now, much in the way you describe here. I've finally come to understand that there really *shouldn't* be an easy way out this, much as we might wish otherwise.
What we're losing now took millennia to build with knowledge born of pain and suffering. Like a brute force attack over the ages, plugging away one mistake after another, mankind at long last acquired the ability to improve upon its once brutal existence. Standing upon the shoulders of our forebears, we eventually achieved a rarity in human history: A democratic republic, founded in the morals and values of classical liberalism. This was and has always remained experimental rather than a cosmological certainty. Taken for granted, it's practically guaranteed to end in its destruction.
Like most things in life, what we've had is easier to maintain than to build, easier to destroy than maintain. We've neglected our responsibilities and now are in the destruction-over-maintenance phase. The longer the destruction continues, the more rebuilding is required. Unless we resign ourselves to happenstance and have the improbable fortune of being rescued by some unknown outside force, the only way out of this mess is through it. And we're still only dealing with the defeat of the authoritarian threat right now, not even the rebuilding part, should we succeed.
The easiest path forward in the near term is to give in to the lie, put on the red hat, and let your brain turn to goo as you abandon independent thought. If you're here reading this, you're probably not down with this option. The next easiest is to patiently yet minimally resist, hoping an unlikely hero saves you and you'll awaken from this nightmare to the comforts of the Before Times. Otherwise, you're going to have to do some real resistance somehow, and resistance, by definition, is hard.
This is just the immediate fight for control. Should we be fortunate enough to resist and overcome the authoritarian menace, we have to start rebuilding society and building is always harder than maintaining or destroying.
Should we succeed and find ourselves with a liberal democratic republic once more, it's imperative take to heart that we're all much better off with the relatively light responsibilities of maintenance than we ever are with construction or destruction. This gets at what you said about local politics; we need more civic education and engagement across all walks of life and at all levels of society. As citizens, we need to regularly exercise our values. The only way we can hope to avoid this path again is to remember the hard-won lessons learned. Regular engagement in remembrance of our past and making one's participation in society an integral part of what it means to have citizenship is our "easy" path in the long run.
The opposition would be well-served adopting the Navy SEAL adage: The only easy day was yesterday.
This is one of the strongest articulations I’ve read—not just of where we are, but of why it’s supposed to be this hard.
A republic cobbled together through agony and contradiction, pushed forward inch by inch through blood, error, protest, revision. For a brief window in history, it almost held. Not perfectly. Not equitably. But functionally. Enough to believe in.
Then we stopped believing it needed us.
You nailed it: We’re not even in the rebuilding phase yet. We’re still trying to survive the wrecking ball. Still fighting just to keep the lights on in the idea of shared reality. If we’re lucky we’ll come out the other side not to celebration, but to rubble. That’s when the real work begins. The harder work. The thankless work. The kind no one gets credit for in a news cycle.
We need to remember through action. Civic engagement not as a hashtag, but as identity. As habit. As the bare minimum of citizenship. Because you’re right—maintenance is lighter than destruction, but only if we don’t forget what happens when we stop maintaining.
The easy days are gone.
In 7 generations.
I agree this is a long haul—it took the GOP more than forty years to get here at the apex/nadir of political power. They were patient. The left? God no. If it isn't fixed now now now they stay home next election to teach Congress a lesson, thereby exacerbating the problem. Laws must be changed surrounding free speech. Lies must be reigned in. We also need to break up media monopolies that allow one RW billionaire to own most of the television and radio stations, and even newspapers (what are left of them) in huge swathes of the country. It's the only way to break the hold of the vast RW propoganda machine. Reagan broke up Ma Bell. It can be done. But we need the political will.
But to do that there have to be large majorities of Dems in both Houses to pass such legislation, and a Dem president has to be willing to pack SCOTUS, otherwise such laws would be ruled unconstitutional and we are right back at scratch. Same with campaign finance. It cannot happen until SCOTUS is changed. Why so many people don't get that is beyond me. And peope have to keep coming out and voting for Dems election after election after election. It's not one and done.
But I completely disagree with your suggestion that people take another option and flee the country. While the monied can "sacrifice" by moving to France, the rest of us who aren't as fortunate will sacrifice our health, well being, economic security, and freedom. Not exactly a fair trade off.
You’re still absolutely free to disagree.
But let’s be honest about what you’re saying.
You can keep framing emigration as some kind of luxury cruise for the monied elite, but that’s not reality. The vast majority of immigrants aren’t rich. They’re not fleeing to some fantasy of ease. They’re making sacrifices most Americans wouldn’t stomach for five minutes, leaving behind family, identity, language, safety, on the chance their kids might have a shot at something better.
That’s not comfort. That’s courage.
Pretending otherwise isn’t just inaccurate, it’s the same kind of unreality that corrodes everything we claim to be fighting against. If we’re going to demand truth from the MAGA cult, we better damn well be willing to live in it ourselves.
This isn’t about liking the options. None of them are good. This is about telling the truth about what they cost.
The truth is: Migration, when it’s chosen as a political and moral line in the sand, is not abandonment. It’s not indulgence. It’s sacrifice. It deserves to be named as such.
I fully understand that emigration isn’t a sacrifice you’re willing to make. I understand why. It’s a brutal, complicated, deeply personal decision.
Please don’t frame emigration, or immigrants, as wealthy vacationers chasing ease. That’s a comforting illusion designed to justify staying put, and it erases the real cost millions endure just to survive somewhere new.
Make the choice that’s right for you. Truly. But respect that others are doing the same. The fight for a future isn’t one-size-fits-all—and pretending it is only serves the system that’s already trying to break us.
Lived through the civil rights south , in a small Alabama rural town, of poverty and a few rich people. Here we are again in some ways, not all- there was progress.
Thank you for articulating this so methodically. I'm with you without condition.
I will be reading these substack articles. I keep realizing over and over that, at age 55, I will not be seeing the end of this story in my lifetime. In some ways, it's part of the eternal struggle against the forces of ignorance that people have been fighting since the first Homo sapiens tried to get his children to stop eating the shiny berries. We are so far past politics now, and I don't think politics or economics can solve our irreconcilable differences. In fact, once Trump was re-elected, I signed up to volunteer for a food bank that works to keep people housed, as we all know where this is going: hungry, homeless children. And when people reach that point, who will be there to help? MAGA or us?
As far as I'm concerned, it had better be us. And it might not be.
Cannot remember exact quote, or from who, but someone once defined "statesman" as a person committed to planting trees knowing he'd never see the shade.
A line from one of my favorite poems: "Invest in the millennium; plant sequoias." (Wendell Berry, "Mad Farmer's Liberation Front Manifesto"
Good question, but I'm afraid he answered it in the last line. We need to get to the ruins first. Then we rebuild it. Exactly what we're all afraid of.
Exactly what I’m seeing. Not quite four months into this and his supporters still making excuses for him and still unbelievably blaming Dems (ie He only won because they were so terrible,) I fear things will have to get much worse - primarily economically and health wise- before enough people start waking up. My husband and I have started making financial adjustments. Next on the To Do list are updated wills.
Yes. Same here. The excuses are endless, shameless, and completely impervious to contradiction. The worst part? They’re not even defending him anymore. They’re defending the need for him to be right. Because the alternative would mean confronting everything they ignored, enabled, or endorsed. Most of them just… won’t.
I agree with you—things will likely have to get a lot worse. Not because it’s inevitable, but because that’s how deep the delusion runs. Economic collapse, health crises, institutional breakdown. I also have a fear that none of it will be seen as consequence, just more proof the enemies need to be punished harder.
We aren't going to win back the hardcore MAGA. There were Germans decades later who still missed Hitler. THey're gone and they ain't coming back. But they are not half the country. They are maybe a third, which is a frighteningly large enough percentage. Until it breaks through like the Signal story, people are not aware and that is the media's fault because they don't cover what is happening with the immediacy and truthfulness it deserves. That's where it's up to us to use our own outlets—not just here, but X (if you're still there). bluesky, IG, FB, TikTok etc to spread the word. Email your friend that damning clip. Tell your veteran uncle what they are doing to the VA. Let your friend know that her grandma with alzheimer's in the senior's home may be coming to live with her parents if they cut Medicaid because unless they can pony up the thousands of dollars per month for her care, she'll be kicked out.
We aren't powerless and we aren't voiceless.
Actually, to be a bit of a pessimist, it strikes me that things getting worse is really part of the point. It will drive off those who are awake to the danger and have the means to flee it. And it will make those who can't, and those who want the easy path, far more willing--indeed, glad--to give up liberty to attain it. No, do not discount the notion that economic hardship is an aim, not an unintended or unavoidable consequence.
Of course it’s an aim. Autocrats want the people to be sick, poor and uneducated so they don’t have the wherewithal to resist.
Well said.
Very well said.