A New Season of Hope

During this holiday season, I’m fortunate to be with my family.

I take stock of where we are more than 11 months after Trump’s return to power. There’s been significant resistance to Trump from many. In some places though, the powerful have bent the knee to his authoritarianism and corporatist, crony capitalism. I’m heartened that those taking the most risks are regular people, with little status and money, who have stood up to paramilitary forces simply because they believe in their obligation to their fellows.

Trump is unpopular and in failing health. His movement has lost critical elections by large margins in the past several weeks. His MAGA movement is jockeying for position in the new authoritarian structures or are plotting to keep him in power.

I’m looking at what lies ahead this year—continuing to defend the vulnerable, supporting our neighbors, and working to influence the powerful to follow the law, their conscience, and the constitution. Trump’s minions are scared. They parrot lines from the authoritarian internationale. They say we’re engaged in a color revolution when veteran lawmakers remind our armed forces of their obligations to the law and not to him.

They don’t dog whistle much anymore. They openly proclaim Nazism and fascism. In their directives to ICE, in their recent National Security Strategy, in their daily recitation of cruelty and humiliation against the least of these our brothers and sisters, they openly embrace racism, eugenics, misogyny, transphobia, and cruelty.

It’s scary that the broad liberal project—from the American Revolution and its promise of our equality, the victory of over slavery in the Civil War, over the fascists in WWII, President Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms and New Deal, the Great Society, Civil Rights, education, and so much more—has been rejected by them.

This reality, however, now binds us to the old revolutionary character of liberalism. We are bearers of that faith in justice and equality that so many have fought for—from union picket lines, to the women who held votes for women signs in front of Woodrow Wilson’s White House, to those who braved the Edmund Pettus Bridge, to the women who riveted ships together in WW2 and tended to the wounded at Bataan, to those fought for us on battlefields like Iwo Jima and Normandy.

Our mission—to reform our democracy so that it is better than the one Trump took from us, and so that it works with justice and fairness for all of us—has never been clearer.

As we look towards 2026, think about what you can do. Put your body out on the street as much as you can—as I did with my 12-year-old son at a No Kings march. Read and share sources of news that are positive and in the fight. Don’t engage in doom, gloom, or be tempted into being dupes for the regime.

FDR said in 1941 that Freedom Means the Supremacy of Human Rights Everywhere. Let that sink in and move you.

We’ll see each other in 2026.

Featured image is The battle of Gettysburg - General Crawford's charge on the rebel lines