What's Next?
The new political era takes shape
My novel, Glass Century, will be released this May. Please pre-order it, and support what has been the great project of my life. Junot Diaz calls it a “spectacularly moving novel.” It’s “smart, stylish and original,” according to Adelle Waldman. You won’t regret buying it.
The American republic is a sibilating beast; it has fifty mouths and one hundred eyes, and the blood on its fangs drips with love. It is sick and confused and outrunning death. It is alive, deliriously so, and it feasts on contradiction. The twentieth century was the American century, and no one has yet grabbed hold of the twenty-first, now a quarter of the way finished. Time is a free agent. Money and power are only the beginning. America the damned, America the beautiful. Explain this nation to anyone at your own peril.
Eight years ago, I watched Donald Trump get inaugurated as the forty-fifth president of the United States. I wrote about it then, as I do, straining to make sense of history in motion—doing so is a bit like trying to type from the top of a speeding train. Eight years ago, everyone I knew was writing about a protest or in one. The streets were crackling with fear and desire; desire because any march carries with it a degree of lust. What wonder one feels in the chanting and waving, the streets thrumming. Public space is seized. The cars must go away. Real life is suspended, for an afternoon or night, and sometimes you get to do it all over again. The Women’s March subsumed Washington. The march to save immigrants was on the way. Black Lives Matter, soon to have its world-historical second wind, would be the capper in the pandemic summer of ‘20.
Now we enter the cooling period. This is, in some sense, welcome, because proportion gets restored. Art does not have to march to a political drummer, and we can all start to think for ourselves again. Mania will carry a movement for only so long. We can breathe deep and accept the United States is going to outlast Trump, that this project is simply too big for him. Federalism won’t be readily tamed. Hydra-headed, centi-tentacled, it will grind on, the states and the counties and the townships and the municipalities making up our dizzying sprawl, so many rules, so many hypocrisies, guns here, no abortions here, smoke weed here, pay income taxes there. America is too big to fail. Traveling through England over the last week, I began to understand this. There are too many Americas, and if one withers, another surges to takes its place. The size, the land, all that mad dynamism—it staves off decline. Europe has much to teach us, like granting cheap healthcare to all citizens and driving down gun crime. We can learn from them, and I have great affection for England and the rest of Europe. But I am not sure what they can learn from us. How do you learn to create a federal republic of three hundred million people? How did you learn to have land? I am convinced this will not be the Chinese century—it won’t be the American, maybe, but it cannot belong to them. Xi’s China lacks soft power. There is TikTok and RedNote, but no Chinese dream. Their authoritarianism has strangled their culture. China does not export wonder like South Korea and Japan. Few immigrants across the world pine for China. They want to flee for Europe or, in most cases, the United States. One can debate whether the American dream is real. What is indisputably real is what human beings feel. And in 2025, Trump or no Trump, America is a City Upon a Hill: choked by exhaust fumes and sludge and crime, perhaps, but a City nonetheless. What other nation can claim that?
By disposition, I am an optimist. I may be externally cynical, but I am, in my blood, hopeful and sincere. I am eager to see, culturally, what comes next in the United States and how our body politic evolves. It is easy enough to argue the old politics—those of the 2010s—aren’t returning this year. If anti-Trump protests are inevitable, they will lack the size and scale of those that came in the last decade, and other social justice movements will not find the same zeal. Movements reignited in recent years, like the protests for Palestinian rights and against Israel, are not yet broad enough, and have firm establishment opposition, for now, in both political parties.
This new era is uncertain because it is not easily modeled on anything that came before. In spirit, the late 2010s and early 2020s resembled the countercultural shifts of the late 1960s, when the civil rights and anti-war movements were seismic national forces. The 1970s, with its rising inflation and burgeoning backlash to 60s-style fervor, offers some parallels to today, and even features another one-term Democratic president. Still, the 2020s, with its own enthusiasms and derangements—and overriding influence of the internet on quotidian life—does not quite qualify as a 1970s rerun. The 1990s, with its apolitical bent, could offer some clues for the near-term. Presidential turnout tailed off and caring too much about politics, among certain segments of the youth, was considered gauche. “It was a time when you could kind of just kind of drop out, and be yourself, and work on your own life, or whatever,” Chuck Klosterman, the author of “The Nineties,” told GQ.
Are Americans ready to drop out in the same way? It’s dangerous to generalize too much, and the 2024 election, if a dip from 2020, was among the highest turnout elections in modern history. Activist groups will not suddenly melt away either and Trump promises to spur enough outrage, for the left at least, to keep many Americans engaged. If the left is furious, polarization promises a counter-swell on the right. But there’s enough evidence to suggest the inner life is gaining traction over the outer life—and it’s grown far more anti-institutional in its orientation.
In the 2010s, self-optimization of the “Lean In” variety was geared toward ascendance within traditional institutions. You were going to scale the corporate ladder and win that promotion. You were going to be the champion of your orderly, white collar life. If you wanted to migrate outward, you were going to drum up a cause, whether it was a political campaign or obsessing over “Kony 2012.” It was a hustle toward a better life within a work or political matrix. Be a better person, and do it so your friends and co-workers could take you seriously.
Now, much of that is suspect. The murder of Brian Thompson, the CEO of a multibillion-dollar healthcare conglomerate, is cheered on. Very few are earnestly describing Sheryl Sandberg as a role model. Newspaper subscriptions aren’t booming as an act of defiance against the Trump White House. Monocultures are crumbling away, media distrust is high, and even celebrity influencers, heroes to the 2010s youth, no longer hold the same allure. The left is leaderless, but so are, increasingly, other subcultures—or aiming, in one sense, to become that way. On TikTok, which has now returned, there have been multiple movements to block or ignore celebrities like Kim Kardashian and JoJo Siwa. For some, especially on the pro-Palestine left, anger runs hot at the celebrity class because they are insufficiently political when it comes to the war in Gaza. Others, though, are simply moving on and hurrying inward. Interest in the occult and mysticism has continued to grow, with astrology and manifestation captivating a larger share of twenty and thirty-somethings in the 2020s. Absent magic, nootropics—supplements that allegedly boost mental focus—are another road to self-improvement for the online set, along with the gospel of Andrew Huberman, who is less a singular personality than a font for controversial health wisdom aimed at middle-aged men. There’s the fury aimed at Big Pharma, seed oils, and even fluoridation, embodied by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.
None of this fits a neat left-right axis. Kennedy was a lifelong Democrat, after all, and his deep-seated skepticism of vaccination can be viewed as a greater manifestation of an anti-institutional rancor that has made men like Dr. Anthony Fauci, a one-time liberal folk hero, into a repository for fresh resentments in the Covid era. Trust the Science is out, as is lusty worship of any politician who is not Trump—and even that may wane once MAGA is forced to govern anew. Much has been made of the politics of Luigi Mangione, the alleged killer of the UnitedHealth CEO, and what it might mean for the 26-year-old to be a sort of “internet centrist” not easily shunted to Team Red or Team Blue. Mangione is the ultimate anti-influencer—beloved by many, particularly the young, for possibly murdering a man in cold blood. He is a character who would have been an ill fit for the sincerity of the hyperpolitical era, since his ideology, beyond hatred of the American healthcare system, cannot be made plain. His manifesto didn’t include a call for Medicare for All; he never wrote of any other technocratic reforms, either.
America—left and right and center—was transfixed the minute Thompson’s death was made public. It was the rare mass event to cross the partisan divide. A darker sub-stratum was exposed, and experts wondered what it all might mean. It was as if the volume had been rapidly turned up on a conversation that had been sotto voce for so long. Americans absolutely despised their healthcare system and it didn’t matter who they voted for in the last election. The usual scolding didn’t work, if politicians and pundits of all ideological persuasions did their best.
What comes next, no one quite knows. Mangionemania has subsided for now, but the young man himself—as an individual—was always beside the point. It was what his alleged actions provoked in people and what he meant to millions. He has yet to trigger any copycat killings, and we are a country, broadly, that is not as violent as it once was. Bloody uprisings are probably not in the works, nor literal civil wars of the kind that kill thousands. Instead, the revolts may be psychic, with a firmer break away from those who wield power from any perceived institution. A consciousness revolution, perhaps, whatever that might look like. A tug toward the Romantic, certainly. It is no accident Emerson and Thoreau were Americans, and that they found most purchase when the industrial revolution was violently upending how a nation had conceived of itself for a half century.
It will be useful to separate culture from Trump and politics on a larger scale; this will likely begin to happen. The debates over “woke” and “anti-woke,” which are already on exhaust fumes, will lose resonance. Those braying from either faction will quickly seem like anachronisms. Each side, in its own way, used to be totalizing. Either submit yourself to a thin gruel of social justice—DiAngelo and Kendi were sorry excuses for intellectuals—or tumble down the MAGA drain, pretending Christopher Rufo and Curtis Yarvin are formidable thinkers. My own opinion, snooty as it might be, is that none of them write novels, and our intellectual class of the last century did. I judge them harshly for their inability to create art or take any serious interest in it. It was plausible, at one time, for the leader of the conservative movement to discourse on Less Than Zero. Not any longer. There is a growing dissatisfaction with this mass philistinism, I believe, even in the United States. The young sense it isn’t so healthy. Trump represents its apotheosis, and the Democrats are not the most cerebral lot, either. Cable television is, largely, a middlebrow medium and it’s slipping for a reason. Pundits aren’t influencers. The internet, meanwhile, is rife with addictive slop and ephemera. Can it be resisted? Can it be beaten? This is a world question, not merely an American one. Even Trump is a character actor here. The plot is bigger than him and all of us. These are his last four years. Just because he’s too dim to find his memento mori doesn’t mean it isn’t there.
There's a huge amount to admire in this essay, Ross; I love its sweep and lyricism. I want to push back, though, on one point, which is your handling of "woke," which I found to be a touch glib. You write, of DiAngelo and Kendi (and their counterparts on the right):
"My own opinion, snooty as it might be, is that none of them write novels, and our intellectual class of the last century did."
For my money, the problem with DiAngelo and Kendi is that they were peddling a version of identity politics & antiracism stripped of class analysis. Increasingly, I've come to think that there are two competing strains of identity politics, left and liberal: on the left, there's the original recipe, which sees class as inextricably linked to oppression. In this version—the one practiced in U.S. civil rights movements until McCarthyism created a chill over anything that smelled of socialism—solidarity was made possible by the fact that everyone saw a place for himself in this coalition. By contrast, the liberal version, which came to dominate U.S. discourse after the murder of George Floyd, is almost entirely stripped of class analysis, and is thus, in many instances, willfully divisive and alienating. (I'm curious to know if you've read Olufemi Taiwo's essential book 'Elite Capture,' which discusses these trends more eloquently than I can.)
The grand irony of this moment is that Luigi Mangione's murder of Brian Thompson, and the subsequent awakening of a pan-ideological class-consciousness, is that it arrived just after an election in which Kamala Harris and her campaign utterly failed to read the room, believing that standing shoulder to shoulder with Liz Cheney in defense of democracy would woo the tens of millions of Americans who live in a state of constant economic precarity.
In reading your essay, I was genuinely moved by the palpable ache in the prose, at the same time that I longed for you to name the elephant in the room, i.e. the historic, engineered inequality we're facing, and the concomitant consolidation of big tech & authoritarianism. Perhaps you view this as being so obvious as to be understood axiomatically. (And I realize you imply it, somewhat, through your discussion of people's fury at the U.S. health care system.)
But for me, at least, one of the central questions, as we approach the coming years, will be whether or not we can, as a means of creating class solidarity, replace a politics of contempt with a politics of curiosity. To do that, I think, requires us to articulate the fact that most Americans suffer under the same conditions, and seek out different/opposing modes of cultural exclusion as ineffectual bandaids for the underlying material rot.
I don't think this contradicts anything you've written—even your observation about intellectuals of yesteryear writing novels—but rather operates, perhaps, as counterpoint.
Thanks as always for your beautiful writing.
We've had our disagreements but this is the most beautiful thing of yours that I've read. I am ordinarily not much of a fiction reader but this does make me seriously consider giving your novel a shot.