The Closest Thing I Have to Optimism
On better days, I conceive of the global rise in nationalist authoritarianism as an inevitable counter-movement in the dialectic of world history.
My family always plays the “good news/bad news” game, and we usually mix it up. Sometimes my daughter (now 7 ½) wants the good news first, sometimes the bad news. I do too. I like the brief moment of discernment the game involves: taking a quick emotional temperature before making the decision. And I like the low stakes.
This week, I had planned to focus on the bad news, which is how the Republicans will steal the 2026 election, using a combination of ICE intimidation at the polls, governmental intimidation of opposition candidates, biased “election integrity” committees, and sympathetic judges and state legislatures. Well, I guess I just did the bad news first. But I won’t go into it this week. I took a quick emotional temperature reading, and just didn’t want to do it.
Instead, I want to present my best version of the “good news”: a quasi-optimistic interpretation of the Trumpian authoritarian police state. Spoiler alert: it’s not really that optimistic, at least not in the short term. But if you’re a regular Both/And reader, you probably knew that already.
Rather, I want to share the narrative that sometimes gives me solace, because I know that a lot of us really need that right now. So here goes.
1.
I begin with a point I’ve made before in this newsletter, which is the case for epistemic humility. Life is unpredictable, as I’ve recently had occasion to relearn, and politics is particularly unpredictable.
In the short term, while the 2026 election is but fifteen months away, that’s still an eternity in political time. We have no idea what combination of economic developments, global events, or Acts of God will take place over the next five quarters. Right now, Trump’s signature policies on immigration, the budget, and cuts to governmental services are mind-bogglingly unpopular, thank God, and if the economy goes south, that will hurt Republicans no matter how much the police state scares brown people away from the polls. On the other hand, we’re only one terrorist attack from the strongman being popular again, and Fox News can spin anything. We really don’t know.
Zooming back to the mid-to long term, we know even less. Many times over the past few weeks, I have fantasized about the MAGA period being regarded by history as a horrible moral and tactical mistake. I hope Tom Homan, Stephen Miller, and the rest of these police state nationalists are someday brought to trial, or at least condemned by the votes of history. It also seems the damage to American standing in the world may be irreversible, and Trump and his congressional and judicial enablers will own it for all time. As I’ve written before, I often feel like my essays are written for an audience thirty years from now. We knew, I want to say, and I’m sorry we couldn’t stop it.
It’s also possible to imagine far darker futures, but I’ll get to those next week.
There are existential uncertainties on a planetary level. What AI will do to the economy and to culture is still utterly unknown. And that’s just scratching the surface; maybe Peter Thiel and the transhumanists are right that AGI will arise soon, that we can upload ourselves to It, and that this human form will be largely irrelevant by the end of the century. Seems unlikely to me, but what do I know.
Nor do we have any idea how and when the climate crisis will manifest, or whether enough people will care even when it does. Or the economy, or global nationalisms, or war, or what the world will look like when the century comes to a close. Some days, I think the future looks like a dystopian film — more Elysium than Mad Max, but who knows — but other days, I think it might look a lot like today, only worse. It’s hot, rich people are basically fine, poor people suffer, and a lot of people don’t care.
Point is, we really don’t know about any of this. I have no idea what kind of world my daughter will inhabit. Which, given the world we’re currently inhabiting, seems like good news.
2.
On better days, I conceive of Trumpism, and the global rise in nationalist authoritarianism, as an inevitable counter-movement in the dialectic of world history. For most of the last hundred years, human societies have grown more interconnected and mostly more liberal. Women have more power and rights now than any other time in human history (unless you believe the myths of a primordial matriarchy, that is). I can access more information in the next thirty seconds than anyone who lived on Planet Earth before 1995 could access in their lifetimes. Technology has utterly transformed how we live, and information technology has transformed how we relate to one another, how we consume, and how we understand the world — and most of these changes have led toward more globalization, technologization, and erosion of traditional norms.
So of course there has to be a reaction. MAGA’s dominant myth is that we can somehow turn back the clock to, well, at least the 1980s, before feminism, gay rights and immigration transformed the social order and somewhat displaced white male hegemony; before America lost its manufacturing and rural jobs; and before technology and the internet changed the inner and outer geographies of our country. Obviously, this is mostly impossible, but so are most myths.
Anyway, Donald Trump is more of a nihilistic Fuck You to contemporary society (as his base conceives it) than a real program for change. The theocrats love it, the white nationalists love it, the plutocrats love it, and perversely, even the tech-libertarians love it since it gets Big Government off their backs.
But this effort will fail, right? It’s not going to work. Inflation has increased and is set to increase more. Manufacturing jobs aren’t going to come back via import substitution, and few native-born Americans are willing to do the work that migrants do in construction, agriculture, and other fields have done for decades. Yes, civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights and especially trans rights will be rolled back or erased, just as human rights have been by nationalist conservatives like Xi, Putin, Pinochet, Orban, Mussolini, and You Know Who in Germany. But at some point either this fever dream comes to an end, because it can’t deliver the goods, or it becomes so totalitarian that even the electorate can’t take it down anymore.
Meanwhile, Democrats across the ideological spectrum are learning how to talk to real people, whether they’re moderates like Gavin Newsom or socialists like Zohran Mamdani. Young people are not more socially liberal than other generations, but they are more economically liberal; they know they’ve been shafted by traditional politicians and economics, which many MAGA people know as well. So far, only Bernie Sanders has been able to attract many working class, conservative-ish white voters to an economically progressive platform that would actually address their concerns. But is it hopelessly optimistic to imagine that a future progressive might as well?
I want to zoom back a bit further, though.
It is clear that two things happened to neo-liberalism in the last few decades: the economics failed, and the pace of social and technological change left many people feeling alienated and angry. These are macro-scale historical currents that are more impactful than what Kamala did or didn’t say last October. No incumbent party won in 2024, and the far right is rising everywhere in the West. Economic dislocation, migration, fear/anger about social change — these are all the necessary ingredients for fascism (or ‘national conservatism’ or whatever you want to call it). These movements are not inevitable, but they do seem larger and more fundamental than the vicissitudes of day-to-day politics.
Of course, the details still matter. Some figureheads are better than others: Trump embodies faux-populist rage more effectively than do Nigel Farage or Marine LePen, for example. And small actions are still important, like the outrageous Republican gerrymandering which enabled Republicans to maintain their majority in the House of Representatives.
It is, of course, both/and.
3.
I hesitate to write this concluding section, because it’s a little weird, and I don’t know if I believe it or not. But if we zoom out even farther, there are times in which I feel a synthesis of all of what I’ve been discussing thus far: epistemic humility, a sense of dialectical regression, and, for the lack of a better term, a kind of faith.
Hinei El Yeshuati, Eftach v’Lo Efchad is a verse from the Psalms to which I’ve returned many times this year. Literally, it means “Behold, God is my salvation; I shall trust and not fear.” But I see it less theistically; for me, it means that I obviously don’t know what’s happening on a societal, planetary, or cosmic level, but there are moments at which I feel trust in this unfolding, even as it brings so much suffering and pain. I’m not enough of a theist to say that God has a plan for us, and I don’t think everything happens for a reason. But I am enough of a panentheist to relate to this bizarre, surreal, and often cruel moment as part of the unfolding of the mystery, the great I Don’t Know.
My mind rushes with caveats. Obviously, even if the dialectic is resolving itself somehow and this is all some phrase in a vast symphony of Being, still suffering is real and it is horrible and we should try to have less of it. There’s still cancer, Auschwitz, the Black Plague, the many massacres of the innocents. If God exists and is indeed making an omelet, She certainly breaks a lot of eggs to do so, and who gets broken is random. Equally obvious, we humans are also in the kitchen, and have some limited agency, and so we should fight against police states, ethnic cleansing, environmental suicide, inequality, bigotry, and the rest. Both/And again.
But caveats aside, I glimpse, in quieter moments brought on by meditation or medicine work or reflection on this very strange period in my life, some convergence of epistemic humility and the trust expressed by the Psalmist. Who knows, maybe there is some inscrutable, transcendent-immanent consciousness unfolding itself within this matrix-like manifest world. Maybe there is a dual-aspect monism of consciousness and materiality, emptiness and form. Or maybe there isn’t, and none of it matters anyway apart from cruelty and compassion.
It could be an opiate for which I’m reaching, some false consolation that there is some consciousness at the wheel that doesn’t belong to powerful men. But at least this is a negative theology, one that pretends no knowledge — only faith itself.
Thanks for reading the “good news.” I’m curious for what gives you faith, in this sense of the word — maybe post in the comments.
The ever-psychedelic Madison Margolin interviewed me recently on the subject of Judaism and Psychedelics that just got published here.
I also wrote an article for the Forward about my continued amazement at how a lot of America is tolerating vicious police-state tactics being used against not only immigrants but anyone who dares to Walk Around While Brown in America. Are we the “Good Germans” now? I wonder.
Some things I’ve been reading this week:
On the ‘damage to American standing in the world,’ I loved this piece by Martin Wolf which aptly summarized Trump’s assault on American greatness.
Memo to New York voters: non- ‘law and order’ approaches to policing actually work better. Here’s
on Baltimore’s success story. did a great report on the fringe, anti-vax quasi-scientists now running the NIH. This does not count as good news.Thanks to subscribers for your support — I hope you’ll spread the word.