2025 was rough, but 2026 is shaping up to be worse if the first week and change are any indication. Buckle up. This is a long rambling post which may go nowhere. I won't fault you for a "tl;dr" today.
Where to start? What even is normal? Hell, I was barely a teenager when the September 11th attacks of 2001 turned the world upside down. I'm on the other side of the continent from New York, but it's the same country, and we suffer the same consequences. I entered adulthood with memories of the (relative) peace and prosperity of the '90s, only to be confronted with war and propaganda.
Early on, I was completely fooled by the jingoism of George W. Bush and his cronies. I grew up in a fairly conservative Republican family, and still agree with most of the criticisms leveled against Clinton and the Democrats. I was easily suckered by the false dilemma of politics. However, as I continued to learn more, especially about the ramification sof the PATRIOT Act and other changes, the illusions crumbled. The lies and half-truths of the war started to flake away like bad paint, revealing the unsavory reality behind it all. Beyond that, by the time Saddam Hussein was captured, I knew something was wrong at a societal level, too. He was an evil dictator with an illegitimate claim to authority based on fake elections, but the gleeful bloodthirsty reactions I saw to his execution were disturbing.
By 2008, I hoped someone would be able to return the good parts of Republican ideology to the forefront of political discourse. Ron Paul seemed like the one. He argued that fiscal conservatism requires peace and trade instead of war and corporate collusion. He recommended ending the war on drugs as well, arguing that government force made drugs more dangerous instead of protecting people. He argued for sound money as a response to looming economic problems. He asserted that federal power needed to be decentralized to the state or local level as much as possible. All of this aligned with what I still believed were core principles of Republicanism.
In case you didn't know, he didn't even win the Republican primary, since either he couldn't persuade the party, or else the rot in party leadership runs too deep to allow such ideas to win. The Democrat Barack Obama won the general election on a campaign promising peace, hope, and change. Boy, was that a lie. He established a kill list, and even murdered at least one American citizen. And that's not to minimize the expansion of Bush warfare policies including drone warfare based on rather dubious intelligence. Weddings, funerals, and families were slaughtered in the name of "fighting terrorism," but what was it all for? The US didn't bring peace, it brought more terror and death in its wake for two decades. Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and more may not have been ideal societies, but now, they are respectively still run by the Taliban, an "electoral autocracy," an ongoing civil war with a human rights disaster, and under an al-Qaeda leader.
Mission Accomplished? Not even slightly. Pointless bloodshed, pointless fear, pointless hate, pointless destruction. A very few gained vast wealth, and the vast majority were plundered or killed to make it happen.
And the worst of it all? Republicans finally seemed to be getting the picture in 2016. Despite all his flaws, Trump was at least perceived as a repudiation of the Republican machine. He promised peace and prosperity, although he never presented anything beyond populist rhetoric. Nothing he said suggested he had a clue about anything deeper than what drew cheers. He built a cult of popularity such that anyone could see what they wanted in him if they just ignored the warning signs.
It didn't help that his first term was a morass of accusations and impeachment attempts based on objectively flimsy attacks. His real faults were ignored, because despite all his bluster, he never really seemed to threaten the "Deep State." And he was at the helm when the COVID scare happened. He kick-started the disastrous authoritarian response to that. And then there was the matter of police killing George Floyd, at the very least failing to render aid after holding him in a restraint for far too long. There was a glimmer of hope for bipartisan demands for police reform until the left chose to turn it into a pure race issue, alienating anyone outside their echo chambers. Their protests and riots drove Republicans straight back to supporting the police to restore "law and order."
The Biden administration was a mess, from a poorly planned yet long overdue withdrawal from Afghanistan to COVID. The left demanded unquestioning obedience to the health bureaucracy and refused to acknowledge their president's clear cognitive decline. We still don't really know who was running his autopen and making strategic decisions in his administration. The folks most upset at Trump's arbitrary decisions were fine with executive overreach when their guys were dictating policy and imposing arbitrary mandates. Weird.
In 2024, we got the spectacle of two truly awful people vying for office. Trump was pulling out all the stops to pander as much as possible while Democrats pulled a last-minute switch from Biden to Kamela Harris, one of the least charismatic and least-qualified candidates I have ever seen, the human embodiment of police and court corruption in America. Of course the Democrats had no choice but to delude themselves into seeing her as the girlboss savior instead of overthrowing the party leadership that just chose her to represent the party without even a pretense of the democracy in their party name. Between their abject failure to offer anything of su stance and the optics of two failed assassination attempts against Trump, I wasn't surprised at the Trump victory.
2025 was filled with broken campaign promises, but that was hardly a surprise. No end to the war in Ukraine. Ongoing atrocities against Palestinians in Gaza. Strategic bombings in Iran. Escalating attacks against Venezuela. Destructive tariffs. Massive immigration enforcement including detention of US citizens and deportation of people under asylum protections. But MAGA cheers it all. After Biden's perceived laxity, this was seen as a return to law and order again. Immigrants and foreign government policies are convenient scapegoats for inflation, crime, drug addiction, and out-of-control spending regardless of the facts.
Finally, to kick off this new year, he proved how little he cared about anything more than his own ego by completely trampling the Constitution (yet again...) to which he swore an oath by invading Venezuela without even the half-baked "authorization" used to justify Afghanistan and Iraq. So far, a week later, there don't seem to have been any severe consequences, but the folks insisting everything was an unmitigated success. Mission Accomplished again, right? Only if the mission was to Make America Jingistic Again. The MAGA base is back on board for war. The escalations late last year were apparently just the prelude to the new belligerence.
And to top it all off, just a couple days ago, three ICE agents surrounded an automobile in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The details are disputed, but a mother was shot by federal agents. The MAGA crowd immediately leapt to defend the police and condemn the victim. It was only a few years ago they were standing against federal overreach during COVID, but now they demand the iron fist of the state be used to crush their enemies. Their focus is on her politics and sexuality, not the circumstances of the incident. They hold her to a higher standard of action under pressure than the highly trained professionals they venerate in law enforcement. Comply or die is the new mantra of the self-identified defenders of conscience and property rights. The boots won't lick themselves.
I'm not surprised by the media and party leadership supporting state power. Democrats and Republicans disagree only on how some aspects of it should be exercised, not on whether state power is legitimate in the first place. But I used to think there was some hope for the public at large. But no, as soon as some Great Leader promises them the moon if they only unquestioningly obey a narrative, they worship their new god with a fanatic's zeal. Right now, it is most obvious among the Republicans, but the Democrats are no better when they feel like they are in power. The ratchet effect continues with every election cycle, strangling free thought and free choice. If even I could see my way out of that labyrinth of lies, why can't more do the same?
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