PSA

This is a thing I need to hear. Maybe you do, too, so I'm gonna say it out loud:

The good guys win.

We're watching an autocracy act with impunity right now. The Executive branch ignores the Constitutional checks imposed by the courts. It's able do to that because Congress refuses to provide any balance at all.

Meanwhile, personal command of billions of dollars and absolute control over a media channel mean you get to fire the parts of government you don't like and send taxpayer dollars to your own companies. Bribery works and corruption is a job requirement. Tens or hundreds of millions of dollars slipped into the pocket of the President get you a prime seat at the table.

Venality is its own reward.

It can seem in the moment as if these developments are irreversible – that once a malignant narcissist has seized power, once a private citizen commands the treasury, we have lost.

We have not.

Heather Cox Richardson is a historian whose current gig is writing research notes for PhD students of history, one hundred years hence. She documents in detail the outrages and illegalities that Trump and the MAGA movement are perpetrating right now. She ties them to instances in this country's past where similar outrages happened. She explains how society suffered, but responded and improved, then. Her point is clear: the way may be long, the path steep, but America makes progress over time.

We have fought back and won, over and over again.

In the span of my sixty-two years I can see it for myself.

I was born in an America of vicious institutional racism. Skin color determined where you could live, what public facilities were available to you, how brutally cops could beat you. Women were circumscribed in society, unable to bank, mostly unable to work, subject to abuse at home and in public. Homosexuality was considered an unnameable sin.

Six decades later, a cis white man still plays life on easy mode in America. But it is a vastly better time to be brown or black, a woman, LGBTQ+. Some of society still loathes and fears otherness (and, yeah, some of that some of society currently runs many things). But a large swath of America recognizes the injustices of the past. We know and love and respect people different from us. We believe in a more perfect union and are committed to creating it.

Over two and a half centuries as a nation, over my six decades as a citizen, we have made progress. That is irreversible. These are truly the values of America. We believe them more deeply and live them more fully than our founding fathers or our great-grandparents. Our great-grandchildren will do better still.

Not everyone, of course, but many, many more than before! Reactionaries, the misled and the fearful bury their heads in the sand, insist on a return to the narrow privilege and widespread pain of the 1950s and before. But here's the thing about heads and sand: Eventually, you suffocate.

There's never been a more fragile coalition that put a President in power.

Donald Trump absolutely won the election thanks to racist and sexist voters who liked what he said about shithole countries and grabbing pussies. Without that slice of bigoted electorate, he would not have gotten enough votes to give him his thin plurality. Others voted for him because they'd lost ground to the wealthy and because government failed to serve society broadly. Fox News and the President convinced them that he alone could fix it. Enough of them were persuaded to edge him back in the Oval Office. Some with obscene wealth spotted an opportunity and bought themselves a government. They've seized levers of power and are aiming yet more wealth at themselves while they can.

Those three pieces of his base will not hold together. I confidently predict that MAGA will shatter when chaos turns to failure. Winning was easy. Governing's harder.

We have come this far because brave and committed people before us spoke up and taught and led. They did that in the face of threats from powerful institutions. Those threats have waxed and waned over the life of the country. They are gaining force now, and it is our turn to confront them.

It's daunting, I know.

But the good guys win.

Rest up when you need to. Carry that knowledge with you when you return to the fight.