Happy New Year, You Filthy Liberals

I won’t spend time belaboring what you know: 2025 was likely the most embarrassing year in all of American history. Most of the safeguards on the executive have failed, Congress is impotent, and the courts are complicit. Only one public office remains standing to cull this authoritarian rot: the private citizen. Moving into 2026, our mission is simple: we must take responsibility for our nation and rally around the truth. 

American quality of life has been so far above global standards for so long that our comfort has become our constraint. To cede any ground on our present comfort is nearly unimaginable to the American citizen, but we must each begin evaluating what we are willing to lose— time, services, tax dollars —in order to restore order to our nation. Centering our countermovement around responsibility is the fitting response to the MAGA movement, which asks only that its voters outsource further and further power to the executive branch, forfeiting their freedoms every time their dear leader artificially foments yet another wave of asinine outrage. Our response cannot be to outsource our responsibility to our own politicians in kind— they have demonstrated a glaring lack of vision. Our response must be an understanding that good things are rarely free, that we must secure our future by making sacrifices in the present. To be responsible for the future, we will have to coalesce around practical policies. To fight for the future, we must begin the serious process of determining those policies together. This will necessarily involve a rejection of the idea that there is any fruitful conversation to be had with MAGA. 

Jonathan Swift once aptly wrote that “[you] can’t reason someone out of something they didn’t reason themselves into in the first place.” In this political war, we must remember that there is only one good reason to talk politics with MAGA voters: to publicly ridicule them. No good can come of earnest political conversations with the MAGA voters in your life, because they are concerned only with identity, not with policy. Reserve your energy, steer the conversation away from matters of policy when trapped in a room with members of a reality denialist cult. We can take our advice from Sun Tzu, here— “Move not unless you see an advantage; use not your troops unless there is something to be gained; fight not unless the position is critical.” Save your energy, because we have much more difficult work to do.

The time has come for those opposed to this administration to establish and unite around a robust policy platform. The time has come for the American public to realize their duty; we hold “the highest public office in the land” according to Supreme Court Justice Brandeis. If we are to retake Congress, we must rededicate our energy to establishing what exactly we plan to do with the legislative power we aspire to regain.. Sun Tzu’s advice once again seems appropriate, here: "If your plan is not in writing, you do not have a plan at all. Instead, you have only a dream, a vision, or perhaps even a nightmare." 

Most of us already know that we have a hard fight ahead of us to win the votes that will earn us control of Congress. We cannot wait until we have regained that footing to decide what our next steps will be. If there is any hope of saving this country from the global trend toward fascistic oligarchy, those opposed to this administration must begin to set aside differences and choose which policies they will enact. What metrics help us evaluate the best path forward? What policies will heal our ailing healthcare, housing, and education systems? Where can each one of us opposed to MAGA give ground to one another so that we all end up standing on the same front line? 

To quote Supreme Court Justice Brandeis again in his concurring opinion in the crucial 1927 free speech case, Whitney v California—

“Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the State was to make   men free to develop their faculties, and that, in its government, the deliberative forces should prevail over the arbitrary. They valued liberty both as an end, and as a means. They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness, and courage to be the secret of liberty. They believed that freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth; that, without free speech and assembly, discussion would be futile; that, with them, discussion affords ordinarily adequate protection against the dissemination of noxious doctrine; that the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people; that public discussion is a political duty, and that this should be a fundamental principle of the American government.”

 No more wasting time on useless drivel about the most recent scandal. Time to drill down on how we purport to shape the future and how much of our comfort we are willing to sacrifice to achieve that future. We must take responsibility for the outcomes we hope to see. 

Unless we do, we won’t have a future at all.