What are we going to do?
Starting to think about a plan for the future.
One thing that seems obvious, as I follow the news about Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency and its rapid-fire assault on the U.S. government's critical infrastructure, is that there is real value in having a plan.
What Musk and DOGE are doing has roots in Project 2025, the conservative plan to impose right-wing policies on the entire country, and is also informed by Musk's own grievances. (He is targeting agencies that have investigated and imposed regulations on his companies.) I suspect we're going to find out President Vladimir Putin of Russia has a hand in this bullshit too; he's been laying the groundwork for over a decade. (Far too many Americans believe special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation found no evidence of Russian collusion with the Trump 2016 campaign. Mueller's and other investigations have actually decisively established that Russia interfered on Trump's behalf in the 2016, 2020, and 2024 elections.) Putin and Musk, of course, have been secretly in touch on a regular basis for at least a few years now.
I don't know how any of this shakes out, but by all the objective indicators, it's gonna be grim. Between DOGE's federal funding cuts and the employees it's eliminating, hundreds of millions of dollars will vanish from the economy all at once.
So if you believe Trump, Musk, or Putin wants to crash the U.S. economy—and I would say at least one of them does—their plan is working alarmingly well.
What is our plan?
I don't mean the plan for the Democratic Party or even the left wing exclusively, although I mean a plan driven by left-wing ideas, energy, and support. I don't mean a political plan to remove Trump from power, because nobody reading (or writing) this newsletter has the capacity to do that, and there are other people who do. I don't mean a plan to fight his administration's policies, although a key part of it would be resisting them. (On that note, this interview with the executive director of the ACLU made me feel a little better about our odds of weathering this constitutional crisis.)
I mean that all of us who want a future where we can do good work, feel genuinely safe and secure, and not spend our time arguing about ridiculous bullshit need to start thinking about how we, as Americans, can pool our time, talents, and resources to build durable communities. How are we as neighbors going to ensure that we protect the immigrants, trans folks, and other people among us targeted by conservatives? What are we doing in our professional networks to prepare for abrupt reductions in revenue or funding? Are there cooperative ways we can save money on food? How do we rekindle something like the sense of trust and community that many of us grew up with, except bigger and stronger? What tools do we need to guarantee that ordinary people—the vast majority of us—have more influence over the direction our society goes than an ultra-wealthy minority?
These are the kinds of question we'd need to answer even if Donald Trump weren't the president or didn't seem to be ushering in catastrophe. Our civic rules, institutions, and habits were all designed in a world where most information never traveled faster than 60 mph. But now we're living in a world where decisions made by one person can have enormous, near-instant repercussions for millions of others, miles away. In a world like this, our collective responsibility goes beyond simply voting and trying to sway our elected officials. We need to throw ourselves into the project of reimagining, remaking, and redeeming America, and figure out what it looks like to weave that work into our everyday life.
I gotta go help build a Lego set now; more on this next time.
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