New Year, New USA
The decay and destruction wrought by 2025 has fertilized the ground for 2026 to be a year of new growth in American Politics.
Wow, 2025 was a great year!!! I’m sure someone has uttered these words over the past week. Not me, or anyone I’ve been around, but someone, somewhere has said it. Maybe they received an unlikely clean bill of health from their oncologist after years of battling a rare cancer. Maybe they landed a dream job offer after months of what seemed like hopeless searching. Maybe they were present for the birth of their first grandchild. There were many reasons to be happy in 2025, but few of those reasons had anything to do with politics.
In the world of politics, 2025 was a year of disappointment, devastation, destruction, and decay. Those on the political left watched in horror as the Second Trump Administration wreaked havoc on every part of American life they could touch, seemingly only limited by their own idiocy and gross incompetence: dismantling the federal bureaucracy with the help of the richest man on earth, enlisting hordes of masked ICE agents to snatch residents off the streets and ship them to overseas to be tortured, bombing fishing boats on the pretense that they are transporting narcoterrorists - the devastation goes on and on. The fundamental difference between American voters is no longer between those who believe the Trump Administration is fascist and those who do not - it is between those who are enjoying the fascism and those who are resisting it.
That is not to say that the first year of Trump’s Second Administration has been a happy time for everyone on the right who set this debacle in motion on November 5, 2024. While the MAGA faithful will gleefully claim I voted for this, Trump has disappointed nearly every American who voted for him for reasons other than sadism. He’s disappointed the price-conscious, egg-centric voters who thought Trump’s tariff plans would finally bring an end to “Bidenflation.” He’s disappointed those who bought his rhetoric of being the “Peace President” by not only failing to stop the slaughter in Gaza and Ukraine but also stoking the flames of needless war against Venezuela. He’s disappointed the crypto bros who thought Trump wholeheartedly shared their libertarian dream of private currency rather than opportunistically using digital tokens to siphon money away from his followers and into the pockets of his family and cronies. He’s disappointed Latino and Indian voters who thought MAGA meant traditional values and supporting small business, rather than raw, unfiltered racism. The disappointment goes on and on. While Trump entered 2025 enjoying a nearly even net approval rating with independent voters, he will end the year with a net approval rating of -43 with the politically unaligned. For all but the most devoted followers of his cult of personality and his oligarchic buddies in on the scam, Trump’s 2025 carnival of chaos has left the American people exhausted, repulsed, and desperate for something different.
Across the political spectrum, 2025 has been a year of disappointment and distress. Yet as this annus horribilis draws to a close, let’s ponder how all of this institutional destruction and decay creates fertile ground for something new to emerge in 2026.
AI (Re)alignment
The phrase “AI Alignment” refers to the pressing engineering challenge of ensuring actions taken by artificial systems align with the goals of the human beings who programmed them. Whether AI systems will align with the interests of humanity is an ominously open question. But what 2025 taught us is that America’s elites have fully aligned with AI expansion, drawing MAGA Republicans, the corporate wing of the Democratic Party, Big Tech, Big Oil, and Big Banks in an accelerationist stance on data center construction. From Donald Trump using an Executive Order to pre-empt state laws blocking data center construction to Josh Shapiro trying to prevent local Pennsylvania officials from protecting their constituents from data center developers, politicians from both parties are aligning with AI accelerationism despite cost of living impacts from energy rate increases, glaring environmental hazards, and most importantly the potential existential risk of a rogue AI that might emerge with objectives completely out of line with the perpetuation of the human species.
2025 was a year of immense pressure from the top down for the construction of AI data centers, triggering popular resistance from the bottom up. The promotion of billion-dollar development projects for an obviously job-killing technology like AI is waking up Americans in both Red and Blue states to the fact that the “job creation” rhetoric of politicians has always been a flagrant lie used merely boost the profits of their corporate patrons. Americans are waking up to the fact that the ungodly concentration of wealth accumulated by tech, energy, and finance moguls is not a reward for improving the lives of average Americans but plunder from an economy rigged by the politicians they have bought and sold. The alignment of our political and corporate elites with the interests of AI data centers in 2025 may provide an unprecedented opportunity for a nonpartisan populist revolt against parasitic enemies of the people in 2026.
The Rightward Vibe Shift Flop
If you listened to the media class chatter at the beginning of 2025, Trump’s victory was more than just a typical electoral win; it was a tectonic cultural shift that would alter the very landscape of American politics for years, if not decades, to come. As a social class whose professional advancement and financial prospects depend on hyping up every event as earth-shattering and era-defining, the press can be forgiven for hyperbole. It’s not hard for old timers like me to remember headlines in 2009, heralding an Obama victory as ushering in a new age of unstoppable, demographically predetermined liberal hegemony. What could not be forgiven in 2025 was the Democratic Party blindly following the press’s Rightward Vibe Shift hype machine by shamelessly flip-flopping on immigration and gender, railing against “wokeness” while dropping f-bombs, and trying to incubate a “liberal Joe Rogan,” all in an effort to appeal to a supposed new conservative American mainstream ushered in by Trump’s 2024 victory.
The foolishness of Democratic overreaction to media hype would be demonstrated by the fact that the Rightward Vibe Shift would not survive to see the end of 2025. If there was a “Reichstag Fire” moment that could have transformed 2025’s Rightward Vibe Shift from a vague cultural milieu to a palpable political reality, it was the gruesomely public assassination of Charlie Kirk in September. The so-called martyrdom of Charlie Kirk would seemingly give the Trump Administration the public opinion support to not only culturally eclipse the Left but also persecute political enemies through actions like the National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence. And if there was a moment when the Rightward Vibe Shift could lock American mainstream culture in its vice grip, it would be the Town Hall Interview of Kirk’s widow, Erika, by Bari Weiss, “Free Press” defector from the liberal New York Times and editor in chief of CBS News, newly installed by the Trump-aligned oligarchic Ellison family. Rather than capture and accelerate America’s emergent right-wing zeitgeist, Weiss’s interview of Erika Kirk became fodder for memes and mockery. Weiss’s mousy demeanor withering in the presence of Erika Kirk’s demonic blue eyes gave the showcase event optics that felt more like a failed exorcism than a folksy town hall reaffirming America’s commitment to Charlie’s dubious legacy as a promoter of free thought. Weiss’s subsequent shame of trying to bury a 60 Minutes feature on the gruesome torture of Trump Administration deportees to El Salvador’s CECOT prison would further reveal the pathetic grift of right-shifted advocates of “free speech” who now actively cover up the atrocities of this floundering fascist farce of an Administration.
What 2025 taught us was not that there was a coherent rightward shift in mainstream American Culture, but that we live in a political reality devoid of coherence, where the mainstream has forked off into an endless array of neurotically fetid rivulets. Trump’s 2024 win was a testament to the schizophrenic, paranoid, traumatized state of an American political psyche tortured by tech algorithms, agitated by economic precarity, and crippled by social isolation. Trump won because he provided a more sensational narrative, identifiable enemies, and simple solutions to a nation that understood its fate to be far more dire than the rosy picture painted by Biden and Harris. Yet Trump only worsened Americans’ quality of life in 2025. In 2026, Democrats will need clarity of purpose and a principled commitment to material improvements if they are to capitalize on the potential bipolar swing of the American political pendulum. 2025 gave us previews of 2026 political schizophrenia in the surprising phenomenon of the Trump-Mamdani voter and the public endorsement by Groypers of looksmaxxing Gavin Newsom over the less aesthetically pleasing J.D. Vance. Upcoming primaries featuring progressive candidates like Graham Platner in Maine and Kat Abughzaleh in Illinois promise the possibility of a 2026 Leftward Vibe Shift well beyond the suffocating restraints of the establishment Democratic Party.
Release the Files!!! Impeach His Ass!!!
There have been few pipe dreams more distracting and destructive to the Democratic Party over the past decade than the false hope of impeaching and convicting Donald Trump. Back in 2017, Trump had barely even been sworn into office before liberals began reassuring themselves that white knight Robert Mueller would topple the Donald by exposing his shady dealings with Russian oligarchs. When Russiagate fizzled, liberals saw a quid pro quo gotcha moment in Trump’s 2019 phone call with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, leading to Trump’s first impeachment by the House and subsequent acquittal. Trump’s second impeachment (and acquittal) would come just weeks before leaving office in 2021 for his involvement in stoking the January 6th insurrection. Once out of office, Trump would be convicted of 34 felonies, yet Joe Biden and Special Counsel Jack Smith would fail to land the knockout blow to prevent Trump’s return to the Oval Office. Despite Trump’s incessant crying about “lawfare,” liberal dreams of impeachment and conviction have been little more than just that…dreams.
For the past decade, I have been a skeptic of liberals’ fantasies of impeaching and convicting Trump. But 2025 has shown me something different. Unlike previous impeachment scenarios that confirmed liberals’ caricatures of Trump’s super villainy, the Epstein files strike at the heart of conservative narratives of Trump’s super heroism as a defender of traditional values and dismantler of globalist pedophile rings. The bad guys that Trump allied with in previous liberal impeachment fantasies, like shadowy Russian operatives and J6 protestors, were either irrelevant or sympathetic to the moral framework of conservative America. But Epstein and his band of elite pedophiles have been archvillains in the QAnon-tinted moral vision of Trump voters for the past decade. Fallout from the Epstein Files has turned Marjorie Taylor Greene from Trump’s greatest defender to one of his loudest critics. Trump’s transformation into Pedophile Protector in Chief has made best buddies of conservative Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie and progressive California Democrat Ro Khanna, who are now bringing inherent contempt charges against Attorney General Pam Bondi for her failure to release the Epstein Files in good faith. An impeachment of Trump and prosecution of the crooks running the DOJ and FBI will force every political actor in America to choose a side in the fight against child sex abuse. Trump’s efforts in 2025 to protect rather than prosecute all implicated in the Epstein files offer the potential for an epic political realignment in 2026 capable of finally making the Trump impeachment and conviction fantasy a reality.
Fertile ground does not guarantee a bountiful harvest. The ground must be tilled, seeds must be sown, irrigation and fertilization must happen, all followed by the crops being harvested before they rot. The destruction and decay we witnessed in 2025 have no doubt fertilized 2026 America for a new politics. Populist revolt against AI, rapid schizophrenic vibe shifting, and an impeachment-hobbled Trump provide opportunities for novel political dynamism not yet seen in 21st-century America. Yet to harvest this new political reality, we must sow the seeds of compelling ideas, irrigated by networks devoted to clear policies with tangible goals, fertilized by principled and unwavering candidates who can harvest material gains for the American people in electoral cycles to come. The harvest is bountiful, and the laborers are few. But as we wait for the ground to thaw during the dawning of this new year, let’s pause to appreciate the fact that 2026 holds far more promise for us than the wretched year of destruction that has passed.