Mes Dépêches

I haven’t written here in a while. At the speed at which this world is spiraling, my last few letters should now feel quaint, the letters struggling to hold the tenuous connection to the ancient world like VGA cords with those little screws that never once failed to pop loose. But what’s new?

War-hawk Republicans aren’t new. Inflationary populists aren’t new. Isolationist co-opters of the Republican brand who flooded Facebook with photos of ‘insufferable’ gas prices under former President Biden, pivoting without irony to defend unwanted wars around the world which have thrown gas prices even higher… fair, that may be new.

My favorite podcast is a twice-weekly bitch-fest among a circle of smug, exiled Rinos, ideal for someone who fancies himself a smug, exiled Rino. The cacophony of gripes wanders through my ears as I drift down quiet Upper East Side streets, my mind half-lost elsewhere, half dream-shopping for an apartment I’ll never afford.

“Democrats have to realize the old era is over and move on,” one of the panelists claims defiantly.

The old era? The hell?

My memories of the Arab Spring are hazy at best, owing partly to my advancing age today and partly to the fact I was far more concerned with post-Financial Crisis underemployment at the time. But wasn’t that supposed to shepherd some grand new democratic era in the Middle East? An end to the autocracy that remains in place even today?

Similarly I’m reading Michael Crichton’s Rising Sun, a novel written in an era in which it was accepted fact that America’s era was over, Japan’s was at hand. Thirty years later, doomsday experts peddled the same assurances over certain Chinese domination.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. (May we all pray for a repeat when it comes to AI.)

I’d like to think Democrats learned their lesson on immigration. Then-President Trump putting children in cages may well have led to his defeat in 2020, but Mr. Biden telling Americans there was no issue on the border, even as the gates broke down and city streets filled with hordes of Central American homeless; those visuals, that lie, was strong.

And hopefully the era of “woke” ends, both those movements deemed “woke” as well as the hyperbolic hand-wringing in response, wailing in certainty that a handful of loud liberals represented existential societal threat.

But betting on either side to learn a lesson from its own excesses seems silly. Voters rallied behind a stilted Richard Nixon to straighten the “woke” Age of Aquarius in 1968, a half-century after a wave of unrestrained immigration was one of many frustrations that built broad support for Prohibition to restore traditional culture in 1920.

In both cases, conservatives took the wins too far: Mr. Nixon’s abuses require no waste of breath here, while a wholesale rebuke of Progressive Era regulation forged the path to the 1929 crash.

In this current case, it seems entirely plausible the country’s leaders caught culture war fervor and went too far on issues that never earned more than nominal public support: surely I wasn’t the only one trying to be compassionate but grimacing when someone asked my pronouns.

Conversely, polls suggest the country’s longer-held support for gay marriage has largely held under Trump 2.0. Is it possible the latest “woke” era, and her end, was perhaps much ado about nothing? A roller coaster lived principally on ratings-hungry airwaves eager for a little controversy?

Our lives change: My Chemical Romance dropped that iconic key change in Welcome to the Black Parade at just the moment my life stepped from stable college girlfriend to a decade fat, drunk and lost. Styles change: Obama’s halting, sanctimonious lectures were once modern and refreshing. Tastes change: I remember when people used Comic Sans and meant it.

But the push and pull between new and old, urban and rural, Northern and Southern, the tension between haves and have-nots and plain simple envy, every one of those feelings which drive the wild tugs in every political swing – they simply aren’t new.

Like Mr. Trump, Ronald Reagan, a divorced Hollywood actor, won rabid evangelical Christian support over Sunday School teacher Jimmy Carter. Like New York’s democratic-socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani, literally every single New York mayor in memory has raised taxes – some due to ideology, some due to fiscal crisis, but if you’re writing a bigger check do you really care why?

In concert with today’s headlines, Mr. Nixon pushed the courts to silence the New York Times and, along with predecessor LBJ, strong-armed the Federal Reserve into keeping interest rates low. No one has used the word “tariff” since the 1930s, for good reason, but trade protectionism in other forms was perhaps even more prevalent in the Biden years than today.

Mr. Trump is destabilizing, chaotic and damaging to the United States brand in a way we will not fully understand for years. It is possible if not probable that trade and security alliances reroute around our coasts for some time, and momentum picks up for an alternative to the global dollar system. Time will tell.

Living in London a few years back, I remember commentators loudly pounding chest, the UK having soundly beaten back the so-called experts who predicted her post-Brexit demise. It took time, but the infamous “mini budget” reveal by then-Prime Minister Liz Truss was the moment those arguments stopped.

Fox News’ loyal lap dogs may find themselves in a similar position.

Mr. Trump is a lot but he is not new. The forces powering his rise – progressive overreach, distrust of immigration, that militant George Wallace crowd always on the hunt for strongmen and scripture in a never-ending quest to shrink the world to fit their lens – each has a long history. And his supposedly “unprecedented” charisma has merely restored a genre rather than redefined it. Google “Huey Long.”

Could the next two years give us a repeat of Napoleon? My hope is the energy powering Mr. Trump’s reign, and the institutional capitulation enabling it, stops at the line of that which is truly new, curbing his worst instincts and leaving some grass on the White House lawn after the cage match he’s desperate for America’s 250^th birthday to be.