It’s difficult to pinpoint the moment in my life where America started to lose the plot.
It would be easy to wallow in this mess—to doomscroll as the world washes away.
But on this anniversary of the United States of America, I believe we are not without hope. It may feel like America has been careening along the highway of enshittification since the turn of the century, but the thing about driving on highways is that you can always take an off-ramp. The truly remarkable thing about this country is its ingenious ability—through elections, immigration, freedom of speech, and economic mobility—to constantly remake itself.
We need to become makers once again, working against the rage, the despair, the grifting, and the misinformation wherever we find them. And we can. Based simply on what I’ve seen as a journalist over the last quarter century, reasons for hope remain. It can be useful once in while to gather these reasons about us as armor against despair.
Sadly it won’t happen. Sure some won’t vote Republican in the next election because gas is expensive or some other shallow reason like that. Then a Democrat comes in, bring some superficial sense of normalcy to the state of things. Then in the next election they will vote Republican again and you’ll go through the same shit all over. This has been the cycle since Bush’s term? Probably earlier.
American politics won’t change without deep structural reforms and I don’t see those happening any time soon.