It is not reasonable for a government to expect the country to politely pause the due course of politics to conduct an internal party leadership contest, while the rest of the world spins onward, in some doomed attempt to game the polls ahead of the next election. They have to know that the best result from a rebrand can only be a sugar high soon to be nullified by the long-term damage from such cynical arrogance. That’s not a risk the rest of us agreed to undertake.

Hello, 2025. Here’s a thought from Bill Maher, in his rich and recent book What This Comedian Said Will Shock You (2024), that we all ought to keep in mind for the road ahead:

We have to drop this fantasy that we can crush the other side or shred or pulverize them. Those aren’t real things. They’re the middle three settings on the blender that no one has ever used. America is a big country filled with millions of people who don’t think the way you do and never will, and you can’t own, vanquish or disappear them. Were stuck with them and they're stuck with us. They’re here, they’re annoying, get used to it.

For me, what set Ross Douthat’s excellent book, The Decadent Society (2020), apart from others in a tenacious trend that aim to diagnose what ails us (often without any reference to root causes), is a willingness to talk to his reader like an adult—more than that, to actually concede our faults and deal with reality. For example, here’s a really thoughtful point about a best-case scenario for managing our decline:

This would require accepting that the postwar boom isn’t coming back, accepting that the space race was mostly just Cold War posturing, accepting that we're an aging society that can’t afford vast socialist experiments or growth-chasing supply-side fantasies, accepting that we aren’t going to spread democracy by force of arms—accepting, in other words, that the discontents motivating idealists of the center and populists of the right and left are just differing forms of nostalgia, which can be managed but never satisfied, and which are ultimately just impediments to achieving contentment in our civilization’s old age.

We’re too tribal, that I’ve heard before, but what I haven’t been invited to consider is whether we’re actually just re-enacting the battles of yesterday out of comfort. That feel much closer to the truth.