The Uncomfortable Reality of Now
January 10, 2026
“The lights are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life-time.” ~Sir Edward Grey, August 1914
It is hell living with a historian. I talk about Venezuelans’ opinions. My husband talks about an end to the international order. I wonder aloud whether AI will ever “experience” emotion. He asks why we are handing our future to a bunch of tech bros without laying out some ground rules and demanding a plan. I worry about our few puny investments in the stock market. He lists the dangers of oligarchy in an economy that no longer makes the anchor of a middle class attainable.
My mind works small-scale, intuitive, at home with the personal and the domestic. This is a realm I have always defended hotly, insisting that it matters every bit as much as the public square does. We must stay sane; we must continue to tend our surroundings.
I love the way Andrew’s mind can capture huge social and political shifts: the end of a century-long international order; a consolidation of wealth sharper than that of the Gilded Age; a technological revolution that threatens human viability. Yet I tug him away from dire news at regular intervals, insisting that it is too stressful. Many of us have learned to pull back, these last few years. Therapists scold their clients for doomscrolling. People now announce, with a bit of pride, that they no longer obsess over the news.
I am in that group, skimming what seems thoughtful but mainly counting on Andrew to relay crucial news. The rest of the time, he is analyzing what could happen, monitoring the variables. So when he says, mouth set grim, “We are seeing an end to the international order,” I am not sure how to respond—except to love how much he cares and hate what it does to his body.
Several days later, the small, fond smile is wiped from my face. Matte Frederiksen, prime minister of Denmark, has announced: “If the United States were to choose to attack another NATO country, then everything would come to an end. The international community as we know it, democratic rules of the game, NATO, the world’s strongest defensive alliance — all of that would collapse.”
I swallow hard. Ah, but this is all still hypothetical, I reassure myself. Childish bombast. The U.S. attack a NATO ally? Preposterous.
“Nobody is going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland,” deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller points out, affirming that U.S. policy is to take full control over a self-governing island that is part of Denmark and a fellow NATO member. For the military access we already possess? No, for the minerals our AI needs, so we can keep our stock market puffed up sky high, like a Macy’s parade float.
As I am taking this in, we “arrest” the president of Venezuela, a deft operation you could see as defending human rights except that it turns into a takeover, because all we really care about is the oil. “Between 30 and 50 MILLION Barrels of High Quality, Sanctioned Oil,” Trump exults.
We are back to the days of manifest destiny (translated as, we take what we want) and “might makes right.” We have lost the trust of most of the world. Civility has been tossed aside. Favors buy power, and disagreeing gets you punished. In the words of the New York Times editorial board, we have a president who governs “in defiance of the Constitution, without regard for the truth and with malice toward those who stand up to his abuses.”
This is more than liberal pundits (and my husband) tossing out grim hypotheticals. We are witnessing radical structural changes, both domestically and globally. “Before, when countries violated international rules, they at least generally acknowledged the existence of those rules,” Andrew says. “If countries start saying, ‘Screw the rules; we don’t have to abide, no one else is,’ then where does that leave international trade? International travel? American investments overseas? What Putin began in 2022, Trump is continuing in 2026. We will have a global Wild West.”
On this year’s holiday cards, friends scrawled “2026!” as though the midterm elections would fix everything—but while Donald Trump has exacerbated the effects, these changes began well before his presidencies and will continue after he is gone. We are not seeing a political blip or a temporary aberration. “The destruction of the old order is behind us,” Damon Linker writes in Persuasion. “It has been accomplished. Trump’s unique skills will no longer be needed…. Right-wing dissenters vastly outnumber those who support responsible governance from the center right.”
We live in a country that has been pushed into extremism and manipulated by forces of money, power, and technology well beyond our ken. And somehow, no matter how much it stresses us, we have to wrap our heads around that.
“And then what do we do?” I ask Andrew wearily, having dutifully Sharpied two protest signs and boycotted stores without exactly knowing why.
“This is the big 250th anniversary,” he points out dryly. “Americans revolted against the Crown and Parliament so that the elite could not tell us what to do. We the People. And we need to take action again. Precisely and strategically, with clarity and tight focus, not in a hasty rush of kumbaya. And before we do that, we need to admit to ourselves what is really happening. No more denial or delay.”
He sends me a video by Tad Stoermer, a visiting scholar in the Center for American Studies at the University of Southern Denmark who has just finished a book about the history of resistance in the U.S. Without choosing political sides, Stoermer talks about the architecture of effective resistance, which involves a “disciplined infrastructure that can operate when the legal and communication channels are closed.” A situation that once would have struck me as dystopian make-believe but grows more real by the minute. When courts are captured and petitions are ignored, Stoermer says, resistance movements either escalate or surrender.
Historically, in the U.S., only certain kinds of protest are acceptable, he continues. “Don’t be too loud, too violent, or ask for too much. Don’t become radical.” Democrats have been playing their resistance safe, “acting like if they just message better, the system will snap back.” Instead, he says, what is needed is strategy, along with tactics and alliances and “a brutal clarity about things as they are.”
As Rebecca Solnit put it, “Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency.”
Times change. But not always for the better. After World War I, my husband reminds me, the U.S. helped build a new international system. After the devastation of World War II, we helped strengthen that system. “Now, we are threatening the very system we helped to create. Is this really what we want? Have we thought about where it will lead?”
Feeling helpless, I retreat to our cozy kitchen and calm myself by cooking dinner. After dessert, Andrew mutters a quote from Star Trek the Next Generation: Captain Picard wondering aloud whether, as he saw the Visigoths come over the seventh hill, the emperor “truly realized that the Roman Empire was about to fall.”
