Nothing Is Ever Going Back To Normal
So let's turn to the work ahead
Hello friends.
I’m writing today to tell you nothing is going back to normal. There is no going back, there is no more normal.
I am marking this down here, for you and me and all of us to remember, in the spirit of a Post-It Note on my bulletin board.
This past week, former President Barack Obama did an adorable photo-op with Mayor Zohran Mamdani and some preschoolers, to promote the expansion of free childcare in New York City.
This is shameless feel-good propaganda, and honestly, shoot it in my veins.
For those of us who can remember it, the Obama presidency was probably the last time things, in America, anyway, truly felt normal. By “normal-feeling” I mean not utopia, but these two specific beliefs:
There are adults in charge of the most powerful country in the world and they are mostly doing their best
The arc of the moral universe bends toward justice*. Bad things are naturally going to get better
This is what I mean by “normal”. This is what we are not going back to.
We got some of this during Biden, to be fair. Like, we went whole weeks without thinking about the president. And he passed quite a lot of pretty good legislation. But it was in the teeth of a global pandemic and then he kind of blanked out and skidded to a halt on live TV, so...yeah. Not fully normal.
We might elect a heroic new President in the next election, an honest, upstanding, high-functioning adult. I really hope we do. But she arguably will no longer be in charge of the most powerful country in the world, nor of a coherent and trusted global order, nor of a functioning bureaucracy. Those are damaged: our power, the world order, the trust placed in the US.
Don’t get me wrong; there are and will continue to be pockets of normal, veneers of normal, moments of normal, whole days of normal if you don’t look at your phone. Calm, beauty and safety. Vast swaths of relative order.
We have some inspirational leaders, like Mamdani, who are trying to help ordinary people and give them hope. There is real progress on some fronts, like renewable energy.
Lots of things still make sense and are more or less working. Zendaya has a new movie coming out. You can still get a speeding ticket if you go too fast on the highway, or a llama pinata delivered for your kid’s birthday party.
All of this is taking place alongside brutality and chaos, major trends of devolution and destruction on the national and international level. This isn’t normal; this is hypernormal.
Here are the facts. The Trump regime has abandoned the world order of which America was the linchpin for 75 years, torched our international alliances and relationships, installed incompetents all over the government, and destroyed an incredible amount of state capacity at the federal level. He started a major war, and he’s losing. It’s been a self-destructive mission for Team USA, both inwardly and outwardly.
Plus we’re in a market bubble. And climate change is intensifying.
Surprisingly, I am not saying any of this to freak you out. On the contrary. I might be saying it, a little bit, to calm myself down. Mostly, I think it could help you and me unclench the part that is waiting/hoping/expecting, and consistently being disappointed, in our failure to return to normal.
Unclenching, to free up that energy for something else, like adjusting to the changes, caring for those most affected, and envisioning something better than the status quo ante.
The gyrations of the polycrisis are getting faster and jerkier in the weeks since our President started a war of choice. Two countries are playing tug of war for control of a shipping passage that admits 20% of the world’s oil, plus many other building blocks of things like computer chips, and fertilizer that grows food.
Have you wondered why the stock market hasn’t crashed harder in the midst of this unprecedented, open-ended oil and materials shock? Why it keeps bouncing back up every time Trump lies and says the war is over?
Could it be because we’re already in the midst of a bubble and no one wants the party to be over?
According to a rule of thumb advanced by Warren Buffett in 2001, the total value of the stock market shouldn’t far exceed GDP, or (roughly) the sum total value of all businesses in the United States.
At the height of the dot-com bubble in March 2000, the Buffett Indicator was 200%. Stocks twice GDP. It crashed to half that.
Right now it is 232%. Absolute la-la land.
A few weeks ago I was at a fancy birthday party in Gramercy. I’m talking champagne, caviar, tuxedos. I got into a conversation with a sanguine Manhattan wealth manager. He didn't think the war in Iran will bring on a recession.
Nor did he credit the notion that climate-fueled chaos would be enough to eventually cause an economic crash on the order of the 2008 financial crisis.
“There were 24 billion+ dollar weather disasters just in the United States, just last year,” I told him (because I am so fun at parties). “The second-biggest city in America burned, destroying $53 billion in value. What will happen when it burns again? When—not if.”
"Everyone will move inland," he told me.
This is, frankly, a childish response. The normalcy bias. We all have it. It’s a well-known cognitive bias, defaulting to “calm”, refusing to respond appropriately to terrifying circumstances. The mind blinks, and skids to a halt. It’s also referred to by first responders as “negative panic.” It can cause “savvy” people to become obtuse.
There’s a better idea. Get ready. Alex Steffen spends much of his time trying to get people to wrap their heads around what’s coming, climate-wise. Ethan Fletcher has been doing a great job analyzing the impact of climate on housing, particularly.
And Gregg Gonsalves wrote in the Nation recently: “We Need to Prepare for the Mammoth Task of De-Trumpification.”
In public health, biomedicine, and other sciences alone, we have a generational task ahead of us. Just to rebuild what we’ve lost will take a “Marshall Plan” for these fields. Whole agencies have been decimated; divisions dissolved, thousands of civil servants who made these places run fired, data erased, key bodies like the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices populated by cranks and quacks, others like the US Preventive Services Task Force put in limbo, and study sections and advisory councils at NIH thrown into disarray. Procedural rat-fucking has slashed the number of grants funded, while capable leaders are replaced by cronies and ideologues, often with little professional expertise or experience.
Gonsalves is thinking on the right scale: decades. A generation. Science, medicine and research are just one area among hundreds for which this is true.
Getting rid of the chump regime is step one. Steps 2-100 are about imagining and crafting something radically better. There is no going back. Only forward.
Like Peter Magyar, the newly democratically elected leader pledging a free Hungary, ending 16 years of Orban rule, and kicking out all the puppets. Then he went on state TV, which had banned him, to inform them that they were a “factory of lies” and he was shutting them down.
The aftermath of the Hungarian election is going to prove even worse for the grifters of the MAGA project.
On election night, Péter Magyar announced that he would be signing Hungary up to the European Public Prosecutor’s Office which investigates transnational and complex financial crimes and money-laundering. Orbán kept Hungary well out of its jurisdiction, for obvious reasons.
As Magyar said, “No mercy. They will need to take responsibility for all their actions.”
That is what MAGA fears most.
This is the energy we need from our next American President.
The structures of government that enabled Trump’s rise to power need to be comprehensively reformed, and he and his cronies need (figurative) defenestrating.
We need to hold the war criminals, the ICE criminals, all the public criminals accountable; we need tribunals, truth and reconciliation panels.
We’ll need a new Supreme Court, with term limits. The New York Times recently revealed, through secret memos, the extent to which this one is controlled by nakedly partisan, pro-fossil fuel interests who are sidestepping the normal deliberation process to hand victories to their allies.
A more representative democracy. Probably some new states to realign the Senate, a new nonpartisan national redistricting commission, end the filibuster, public financing of elections, rebuilding of public media infrastructure, restoration of the Voting Rights Act, comprehensive voting reform.
A rational immigration policy. I would vote for Reagan’s policy from 1986: full amnesty and legalization.
Rebuild/rethink/restructure international alliances.
Raise corporate, capital gains, and wealth taxes, more funding for IRS enforcement to actually collect those taxes. (Biden increased this funding; Trump cut it again).
Join the Fossil Fuel Nonproliferation Treaty. Make Polluters Pay laws to confiscate the wealth of the fossil fuel industry and dedicate it to rebuilding. New permitting processes to scale up renewables. New construction and zoning laws in fire- and flood-prone areas, need to figure out getting people resettled and housed in more resilient and affordable ways.
Preserve nature and biodiversity, urgently reallocate and conserve water and soil.
AI and data center regulation. AI Dividend?
A new care economy. A real plan for declining birthrates and an aging population.
We need to figure out WTF is going on with men, the amount of misogyny, sexual violence and violence against women that is coming to light right now is breathtaking.
Gun reform.
Reparations for the descendants of enslaved people and for Indigenous people. We need a renewed civil rights movement; Trump has upended decades of civil rights protections.
I’m just spitballing here. There’s a lot more. This is the work of many lifetimes and it’s actually exciting to think about. This is what I want to be thinking about. This is good fiery spring energy. Not looking back at the past when I thought some sober, well-spoken constitutional law professor was going to solve it all for me.
In the comments: What would you add to this list of The Second Reconstruction?
Some reading/associated links
The Right Of The People: Democracy And The Case For A New American Founding by Osita Nwanevu (a YouTube discussion; here’s the book)
10 Steps to Repair American Democracy
*To Obama’s credit, he generally qualified this Rev. MLK Jr. quote to emphasize the need for individual action toward justice. Here he is in 2016 at Rutgers University’s Commencement:
I’m fond of quoting Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” It bends towards justice. I believe that.
But I also believe that the arc of our nation, the arc of the world does not bend towards justice, or freedom, or equality, or prosperity on its own.
It depends on us, on the choices we make, particularly at certain inflection points in history; particularly when big changes are happening and everything seems up for grabs.
Love your column, this one especially, thank you! I have another item to add to your/our wish list of what we want to manifest (womanifest?) going forward. As a recovering network news journalist who left corporate media to cover what I could not get on the air (at CBS Radio); environmental news, I would make climate education mandatory because clearly we have an eco-literacy crisis in the U.S. How do I know? Half the country voted for a fossil fool (or deny-o-saur as I call them). Although there are likely environmental studies courses available at many high schools and universities thats not doing anything for the adults in charge for at least the next decade. And because there is very little/if any support for independent environmental content creators like myself we desperately need funding! I shouldn’t have to pay to produce and promote my own interviews with Solutionaries—29 years and counting—in order to provide a critically needed public service! Thanks for listening.
I feel you, Anya. But I’m cautiously hopeful for the longue durée. If you were writing in 1934, with the depression in full swing, the Great War still ever present in memory and 10 years of even greater tragedy ahead, you’d probably have said the same thing. And yet just twenty years later, in 1954, with your kids having their own kids, things probably seemed pretty normal for your grandchildren. Let’s just hope they don’t need to go through a Holocaust to get there.