At The Ink, we’re in the business of asking big questions and diving into the emotional and intellectual undercurrents of our times. In this dramatic and convulsive year, we’ve found some themes that have given us both clarity and hope for the future.
So today we bring you ten big ideas that we’ve wrestled with this year, along with one more to keep in mind as we look forward. We hope these help light the way for you, and that you’ll continue to think and question along with us in 2025 and beyond.
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2024 in ideas
1. American men are in crisis
Again and again in our conversations this year, we confronted the fact that a great many men are in crisis, adrift between old and new ways of being. And the authoritarian right, sensing this, has built a pipeline that leads from that sense of disaffection directly toward fascism.
Trump — and the right in general — is tapping into deep feelings of insecurity and anxiety amongst men. Boys and men are taught to live in constant fear of emasculation. The pressure to live up to some kind of masculine ideal — strongman, hero, provider, or protector — is very real in boys’ and men’s lives. And with recent social changes — the death of manufacturing jobs, the rise of women in the workforce, the rise of feminism and the #MeToo movement — many men are feeling lost and emasculated. Trump feeds this beast by promising them to give them back their threatened masculinity. The right is turning threatened American masculinity into a major talking point, and somehow restoring it as a significant part of their political project, and it’s scary to watch.
2. Loneliness is epidemic — and political
Call it late capitalism, call it the end of neoliberalism, call it what you will — but the fact is that our fragmented, technologically mediated, efficiency-obsessed social order has left millions lonelier than ever, and that alienation is a drag on our physical and mental health, our sense of well-being, and on our democracy.
So what we have to recognize is that, yes, there are material concerns that people have in their lives around the economy, around safety, around other challenges like a housing crisis, but there is also a deeper spiritual crisis that’s taking place in many of our communities, in our country and in the world more broadly, a crisis that’s marked by people feeling a greater sense of disconnection from one another, feeling unmoored or disconnected from sources of meaning and purpose in their lives.
3. The GOP is turning arsonists into firefighters
Against a backdrop of a Republican Party that depends on the rage-creating power of persistent problems like “the border” and “the deficit,” a key argument of Trumpism has been that “it takes a thief” — Trump is so familiar with the machinations of power, he’s suggested, that only he knows how to fix the system, to drain the swamp. But generalized, that has produced a revolving door of problem-creators-turned-problem-solvers — and a system that closes off the possibility of fixing the country’s actual problems.
A defining feature of our age of increasing oligarchy is the widespread, and widely believed, idea that people who cause problems should be tasked with solving them.
Not only is having caused a social problem no longer viewed as a disqualification for joining the solving brigade in many circles. It is viewed as the qualification itself.
Looking for a firefighter? Who knows more about fires, their ins and outs, than an arsonist! Hired! Looking to protect hens? Talk to foxes. How they know about hens!
[Post: RIFFS: The arsonist-to-firefighter administration]
4. Everyday freedom is in the economy, stupid
The year offered powerful reminders that the freedoms people most care about aren’t always the ones we associate with the word “freedom.” High prices, in particular, made millions of Americans feel unfree in ways that were ignored for too long and eventually reverberated through national politics. It makes sense. We vote only ever so often, but every day we experience freedom or coercion, freedom or unfairness, freedom or fraud at work, in commercial transactions, and in our interactions with the giant firms and commercial institutions that put limits on our lives.
How people experience freedom in their day-to-day lives often involves their economic relationships and what their engagement is like in our commercial sphere. Some of the chicken farmers that I talked to, for example, were so scared of the processors that they were dependent on that they didn’t even want to go speak to the government. The fear of retaliation was undermining their free speech rights — core liberties.
Similarly, we see how the expansion of noncompete clauses locks workers into existing jobs, makes it very difficult for them to freely switch employers. Core liberties, again.
One of the original insights of the anti-monopoly tradition in leading up to the passage of the antitrust laws, was that in the same way that we have checks and balances in our political sphere to guard against concentration of political power, that we similarly needed the antitrust laws to safeguard against concentrations of economic power. It was recognized that you really need safeguards on both sides to create real liberty and real democracy.
5. Reparations are venture capital for the next America
Heather McGhee is one of the keenest analysts of American politics, and her take on what it would mean for the country to finally settle the debts of systemic racism is one of the clearest framings we’ve seen. Against the zero-sum thinking promulgated by the right, she posits reparations as an investment in a future that might realize the multiracial democracy that is America’s promise.
Reparations are not zero-sum. I think of reparations as seed capital for the nation that we are becoming. We’ve gone so far in this country on the backs of the descendants of a stolen people who’ve contributed unbelievable amounts to this country’s prosperity and ingenuity and culture and intellectual life, and we’ve done so as Black people have faced every possible constraint and barrier.
6. Progressives should stop lecturing people to get with the program of the future — and start helping them migrate there
Progress is good, and it’s undeniable that our society has made vast improvements in addressing its problems of racial and gender equality. But those changes have been disorienting for millions, and well-intentioned as they are, the people who fought for those changes have not done a good job of helping the people affected by them to cope. If there’s to be any hope of combatting the slide toward authoritarianism, we need to come up with a better strategy for change management on a societal scale.
Consider that we have completely changed the meaning of being a man and what you can do and not do as a man in the last 20, 30, 40 years. Thank god. But let’s be honest: We have done a better job of dismantling some of the old stories and practices and structures of masculinity that needed dismantling than we have of teaching men new ways to be men. The result is a vacuum, and certain podcast charlatans are very deft at getting in there and pied-piping men into new misogynistic visions to fill the void.
This is all too often how it goes: We are better at the dismantling than the re-mantling. (And, understandably, some think this is just fine. Why should we fuss over people whom we’ve been fussing over for so long? At last, the fussing time is over.)
7. Trump’s appeal depends on victimhood, not just on strength
Trump’s appeal to voters depended upon a peculiar sort of rhetorical martyrdom — basing his promise to protect his supporters on their willingness to protect him. He’s set himself up as a sort of human shield, and the degree to which the adherents of the MAGA movement have invested their faith in that performance is something that his opponents have not taken seriously enough to formulate a workable response — and a measure of the difficulty of breaking the spell of his appeal.
At the simplest level, he is attempting to reverse the traditional flow of concern in a democracy: he wants you to worry about him instead of expecting him to worry about you. But he has also cleverly turned this exhortation to worry about him into a kind of proxy shield for his supporters: by worrying about him, you ultimately are worrying about yourself. “They want to take away my freedom because I will never let them take away your freedom — it’s very simple,” Trump has said. “Never going to let it happen. They want to silence me because I will never let them silence you. And in the end, they’re not after me; they’re after you. And I just happen to be standing in the way. It’s my honor to do so.”
8. Democrats neglect emotion at their peril
At the core of Trumpism is a classic authoritarian’s appeal to voters’ deepest emotional substrate. People have very real anxieties about the direction of America — and though MAGA promises only imaginary and unserious solutions to real and serious problems, those promises are satisfying on that deepest level. With the brief exception of the first weeks of joyfulness that marked the beginning of Kamala Harris’s campaign, Democrats have largely failed to appeal to emotions at all. If they cannot find a way to change that, they risk failing to find any way to appeal at all in the future.
Autocrats are very, very good at tapping into people’s innermost fears. On the one hand, they make themselves the carriers of those fears, but they also make themselves the solution. So when Trump said, The American dream is dead, he made himself the vessel of the forgotten, the people who felt downtrodden. Of course, his regard for them is fake. He just wants to use them. But he simulated care and inhabited those emotions, and then provided a solution: “I alone can fix it.” And people felt safe with him.
9. The pro-democracy cause must reclaim rural voters
The Republican Party has dominated electoral politics across rural America, offering in place of tangible benefits a feel-good resentment and a sense of belonging and cultural identification. Democrats have responded with policy solutions — on a significant scale, in the case of the Biden administration — but have failed to offer a competitive cultural appeal. The Harris/Walz campaign tried to close this gap, but if the Democratic Party hopes to compete in states it has abandoned, it must find a way to provide help with love, against the Republicans’ love with no help.
You have a situation in so much of rural America where people don’t feel that they need to hold their elected officials accountable. They are electing Republicans up and down the ballot, everything from dog catcher all the way up to U.S. Senator. And they don’t ask, “What are you going to do for us?” As we say in the book, it’s not just that they should vote for Democrats. Maybe some of them should, but at the very least, they should get themselves better Republicans.
[Post: Caught between “love with no help” and “help with no love”]
10. The post-neoliberalism scramble is ON
Neoliberalism — the market-fundamentalist political order that has governed global affairs since the mid-20th century — depends on continuous growth. But climate change has made evident the physical limits on growth while growing inequality has made clear the political limits — and the dangers of failing to build a more just economic system for the future. The race to determine what that may be has begun.
[T]he economic system helps shape who people are. And neoliberal capitalism has helped shape people who are more selfish, more greedy, more short-sighted. I talk about Donald Trump as being emblematic of what neoliberalism produced, and how that doesn’t even work for a good economy, let alone a good society.
The alternative is trying to build a system that shapes people more in concert with our values, people who are more other-regarding, more honest, more cooperative. And I think we can at least move in that direction.
And one more to keep in mind for 2025: With hard times ahead for democracy, we need to build community and resilience, and be there for one another
The task ahead for those working for progressive change in the coming years has more to do with resilience than resistance, and that means acting locally, building alternatives, and never losing sight of the ultimate goal. This will demand that we maintain our own mental and physical reserves, seek community, and stand up for one another when it matters most.
In times like these we are entering, when it will become harder to have systems that are kind, interpersonal kindness will matter more. It shouldn’t have to, but it will. Having each other’s backs will matter more. Checking in on your friends will matter more. Letting people sleep on your couch will matter more. Cooking for people who are sick will matter more. We should not be in a situation where the burden of care shifts so radically from the center to the edges, from a coordinated system to an ad hoc network, but it is where we are headed. And we will all be called on in the times ahead to be for each other what, in a better time, the system would be.
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This post was originally published on The.Ink.