This Is Where We Are

Three hundred essays.

I didn’t expect to reach that many essays this quickly. But I also didn’t expect the country to change this much in the time it took me to write them.

When I began We Have Friends Everywhere, I was already worried about the patterns I was seeing. I’ve written about authoritarianism, propaganda, the concentration of power, the erosion of institutions, the replacement of competence with loyalty, the willingness to turn immigrants and political opponents into enemies, and the danger of treating each new violation as though it existed by itself.

People sometimes said those warnings were exaggerated.

Three hundred essays later, I don’t think they were.

This space is reader-supported.
If this work resonates, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

Some of what I wrote about as warning signs has become part of the way this government operates. Not because I somehow predicted the future, but because much of the agenda was already there in plain sight for anyone willing to read it. Project 2025 laid out an enormous amount of what could happen if those ideas were given power, and many people still dismissed the warnings as exaggerated or unlikely to become reality.

History doesn’t work as prophecy, and I’ve never argued that Donald Trump is exactly like Adolf Hitler or that the United States is now Nazi Germany. But I’ve written about Hitler, Putin, authoritarian governments, oligarchies, monarchies, propaganda systems, and democratic collapse because those histories show us how power changes institutions and how societies become accustomed to things they once would have considered unacceptable.

Authoritarian systems don’t begin with the worst thing they eventually become known for. They develop through accumulation. Institutions are weakened. Independent voices become enemies. Loyalty becomes more valuable than competence. Government power becomes increasingly personal. Groups of people are defined as threats. Extraordinary actions are justified as necessary responses to extraordinary dangers. Each breach makes the next one a little easier because people have already adjusted to the one before it.

That’s why history matters. It doesn’t give us an exact script for what happens next. It gives us patterns worth recognizing before we reach the end of them.

One of the clearest patterns in the Trump Regime has been the elevation of loyalty over independence and competence. That has nothing to do with whether someone went to the right school or has the right degree. History is filled with highly educated people who helped authoritarian governments consolidate power. The question is what the system rewards. When expertise contradicts the leader, does expertise matter? When institutional responsibility conflicts with personal loyalty, which one wins? When facts interfere with the political story, are the facts allowed to stand?

We have seen enough to know the direction.

The Justice Department is now led by Todd Blanche, Donald Trump’s former personal criminal-defense attorney. Federal agencies have been reshaped by removals, ideological tests, and demands for loyalty. Independent oversight has been weakened. Election administration has been pulled further into partisan power struggles. Government power has increasingly been directed toward people and institutions the president considers hostile. Universities, journalists, judges, lawyers, protesters, immigrants, political opponents, and even parts of the federal government itself have been described not simply as institutions or people with whom the administration disagrees, but as obstacles or enemies.

That isn’t merely a question of whether this administration is competent.

Authoritarian government doesn’t require everyone surrounding the leader to be stupid. It just requires enough of them to be obedient.

And that becomes especially dangerous when obedience is paired with an ever-expanding definition of who belongs.

I’ve been thinking about citizenship a great deal because the question underneath citizenship is one of the oldest questions in authoritarian politics: Who counts?

This regime has continued trying to narrow birthright citizenship and has openly pushed to end it as a constitutional guarantee. The Justice Department has also elevated denaturalization as a federal enforcement priority.

The broader danger is what happens when a government begins deciding that citizenship, rights, and belonging are more conditional than people once believed.

We’ve seen that pattern before.

In Nazi Germany, the Nuremberg Laws didn’t begin with mass murder. They began by legally redefining who counted as a citizen and who did not. Jews were stripped of full citizenship and separated from their neighbors by law, creating the legal categories that later persecution would build upon.

That’s why the question of citizenship matters so much now. Once a government establishes the power to narrow who belongs, the next question is who else can be placed outside that protection. Who is sufficiently American. Who is sufficiently loyal. Who deserves the rights of citizenship, and who can be told those rights no longer apply.

History doesn’t tell us that the outcome will be identical. It tells us not to dismiss the process by which rights become conditional and whole groups of people are gradually moved outside the protection of the state.

Those categories of citizenship matter long before anyone knows how far they will eventually be taken.

That’s also one of the reasons I’ve written so much about Russia and Vladimir Putin.

Russian authoritarianism has depended heavily on destroying the distinction between truth and propaganda. Deny what is proven. Introduce what is unproven. Repeat both until certainty itself becomes suspect. Attack independent journalism. Treat political opposition as illegitimate. Turn loyalty to the leader into loyalty to the country. Normalize corruption. Exhaust people with so many contradictory claims that eventually they stop believing truth can be known at all.

The goal of propaganda isn’t always to make everyone believe one specific lie. Sometimes the more effective goal is to make people stop believing anything at all.

When nothing can be trusted, power gets to decide what’s true.

Trump’s relationship with Putin and the Republican Party’s transformation on Russia matter because authoritarian methods that once seemed foreign have become suddenly recognizable in American politics: attacks on independent information, loyalty tests, government retaliation against perceived enemies, conspiracy elevated into governing rhetoric, and democratic constraints treated as obstacles rather than safeguards.

Over the last several months, federal institutions have been weakened, expertise repeatedly displaced by loyalty, government power used against political enemies, citizenship tested at its edges, election administration dragged further into partisan conflict, and American history itself has become something this regime is trying to control. Each development matters on its own. But together they show how much the country has already changed as we approach the midterms.

And that’s the part I think we have to face clearly.

This is not where we were when I began writing about this regime.

A great deal has already been dismantled. Rules we assumed would hold have been exposed as traditions that worked only because people in power voluntarily respected them. Institutions we assumed would push back have too often surrendered. Members of Congress who should have acted as a constitutional check have behaved as though their job is to protect the president rather than the branch of government they were elected to serve. Courts have imposed limits in some cases, but even those limits matter only if a government ultimately accepts that the law applies to it.

This is why saying we were overreacting never made much sense to me.

Waiting until an authoritarian system is complete before acknowledging the pattern defeats the purpose of recognizing the pattern in the first place.

No one studying history looks backward and says people should have waited until every institution had collapsed before becoming concerned. The useful question is always what was visible earlier, when there was still time to act.

That doesn’t mean America’s future is predetermined.

But it does mean that our response matters.

And now we’re approaching the midterms with considerably more knowledge than we had before.

We know what this administration does when institutions stand in its way. We know what happens when Congress refuses to defend its own authority. We know how quickly immigration enforcement can expand when human beings are first reduced to categories such as invaders and threats. We know that rights we assumed were settled can disappear. We know they are already laying the groundwork to call the next election fraudulent if the results don’t go their way. We know that enormous private fortunes can translate into extraordinary political influence. We know that government agencies can be weakened from within without ever formally being abolished.

We also know that people can become accustomed to almost anything if it happens gradually enough.

That may be the part that frightens me most.

Not simply the outrage itself, but the normalization that follows it.

Something happens that would once have dominated the national conversation for weeks. A few days later, something else happens. Then something else. Eventually we begin measuring events against the last extraordinary thing rather than against the standards we once claimed mattered.

That’s how the unacceptable becomes ordinary.

It’s also why speaking matters.

I have said that in speeches, in essays, in comments, and standing in front of people at No Kings. Speaking doesn’t mean shouting at strangers on the internet. It doesn’t mean arguing endlessly with people who have no interest in listening. It means refusing to allow what is happening to disappear into silence.

Sometimes it feels like we are shouting into the wind. But we keep shouting anyway, because silence has never restrained authoritarian power. Sometimes another outrage arrives before we have finished understanding the last one. We keep paying attention anyway, because exhaustion is not an argument for surrender.

Sometimes it can feel almost hopeless when the people we are facing have more money, more institutional power, more media power, and more ability to shape public life than the rest of us could ever hope to match individually. That’s exactly why none of us can afford to think individually.

History is filled with ruling classes that convinced themselves their wealth made them untouchable. Monarchies believed it. Oligarchies believed it. Industrial empires believed it. Authoritarian governments still believe it.

There’s a recurring arrogance among people who accumulate extraordinary wealth and power: the belief that because they can buy access, influence governments, control industries, own platforms, shape information, and surround themselves with people who tell them they are brilliant, they must somehow be entitled to decide the future for everyone else.

History has never guaranteed them that privilege forever.

The French Revolution is one of the most dramatic examples, but the larger lesson is not about guillotines or romanticizing violence. It’s about what happens when systems become so unequal, so insulated, and so dismissive of ordinary people that they lose legitimacy. People can be pushed only so far before they stop believing the system represents them at all.

America was supposed to understand that.

Our political experiment began with a rejection of monarchy. No hereditary ruler. No permanent governing class. No president above the law. No individual whose personal interests were supposed to become synonymous with the interests of the nation.

No kings.

And yet we are living through a period in which enormous private wealth and enormous political power are intertwined, while one political movement has organized itself around the authority and personality of one man.

That’s not what democratic government is supposed to become.

But naming what is happening is only part of our responsibility.

We also have to decide what comes next — if we can get to next.

That is not guaranteed.

If we regain enough political power to repair what has been damaged, I don’t think simply putting everything back exactly as it was is the right choice. We now know where the weaknesses are. We know how much of American democracy depended on assumptions that no one would ever push certain powers this far. We know that norms are not laws. We know that voluntary restraint is not a safeguard when the person holding power has no interest in restraint.

Some of what comes next has to be stronger than what existed before: more accountable, more democratic, less vulnerable to enormous private fortunes buying access and influence, less dependent on officials behaving responsibly because tradition says they should, and more explicit about limits that previous generations assumed were understood.

No more Citizens United.

That work will take longer than one election.

The midterms matter enormously, but no single election repairs a democracy. Voting is one tool, and an essential one, but democratic life also happens in state legislatures, school boards, city councils, courts, newsrooms, classrooms, community organizations, protests, conversations, and every place where people decide whether they will participate or withdraw.

That’s part of what these three hundred essays have taught me.

When I started writing about this moment in our history, I was trying to understand what was happening.

I still am.

But somewhere along the way, the writing also became a record of what we were willing to notice while it was happening.

I’ve written about elections and courts, war and propaganda, women losing rights over their own bodies, immigrants being turned into targets, scientists and experts being pushed aside, journalists under pressure, billionaires accumulating extraordinary influence, books and history, artificial intelligence, water, forests, art, science, democracy, and the strange persistence of human beings trying to build something better while other people are trying very hard to tear it all down.

The subjects have changed constantly.

The question underneath many of them has not.

What kind of future are we willing to accept?

Three hundred essays later, I am still speaking because I don’t believe silence is neutral in a moment like this. I don’t believe one essay changes a government, and I certainly don’t believe writing guarantees an election or bends history automatically toward justice. I write because truth has to remain visible. Because we have to remember what happened before repetition made all the lies ordinary. Because people need to know they are not the only ones seeing the patterns. And because this democratic experiment still belongs to all of us.

That’s what I refuse to surrender.

There’s an enormous amount of work ahead. Some damage will take years to repair. Some institutions may never look exactly as they did before, and perhaps they shouldn’t. If we make it through this period with the ability to rebuild, we should rebuild with the knowledge of what failed and why.

I am angry about a great many things three hundred essays later. I am worried about where we are. Sometimes I am exhausted by how much there is to understand, how quickly it changes, and how easy it would be to stop looking.

But I am not more hopeless.

If anything, I have more evidence than I did when I began that people everywhere still care what happens next. I see it in people organizing locally, helping neighbors, defending libraries, protecting elections, teaching history, making art, showing up at meetings, marching, writing, speaking, voting, helping other people vote, and refusing to accept cruelty simply because they’ve seen it before.

That matters because no authoritarian movement wants people to understand how many others are standing beside them.

So this is where we are after three hundred essays.

Farther down this road than I ever wanted this country to travel, with real damage already done and difficult work ahead of us.

But we are not finished.

I am still here. I am still watching, writing, and speaking.

And I hope you are too.

Because we have friends everywhere.

And it will take every one of us, together, to build the future we deserve.