I watched the 2016 election returns at a friend’s co-op house in Brooklyn with dozens of millennial leftists. You can imagine the pitiful shape of the night: blasé confidence giving way to nervous titters to gallows humor to dread-filled silence. People cried. I got drunk and called my mom. The days that followed were filled with frenetic activity, urgency, and reevaluation. My girlfriend and I broke up; we were unhappy, and the rote hope that had sustained us seemed naïve, delusional in the face of history’s reproach. Things, we realized, did not simply get better. Meanwhile, my days filled up with meetings: tactical confabs–cum–therapy sessions where fellow activists, many of us newly minted, processed and prepared for what might be coming.
This time feels different. At least to me. Perhaps it’s simply a matter of non-novelty. The devil you know is at least less alarming than the devil you don’t, and Donald Trump is a devil we know all too well. Or maybe I’m just old. Part of me hopes the young are feeling the way I did eight years ago: angry and brave, buoyed by collective indignation and defiance. I certainly hope they don’t feel resigned. Many young people refused to vote for Kamala Harris over the ongoing butchery in Gaza. They did so out of moral seriousness, not cynicism. And I suspect they have moral seriousness to spare. The Democrats didn’t deserve to win; the victims of Trump’s policies won’t deserve what’s coming for them either.
“I feel pre-exhausted,” I heard someone say on the street after the election. I know what they mean. Many liberals and leftists experienced the beginning of Trump’s first term as a constant barrage of menace and mayhem — much of it directed at them personally. That there was some narcissism in this didn’t diminish its effects. Paying close attention to Trump’s every move — like tracking a horse loose in a hospital, as comedian John Mulaney memorably put it — was full-time work. It was enervating. It narrowed our field of view. People forgot how to talk about other things or felt they had to apologize for remembering. Alertness and action were self-cures for........