New Year retrospective posts exist because traditionally, the news takes a break towards the end of December. How profoundly on-brand for this year that the news never stopped. 2024 did not take days off. 2024 was open for business the whole time.
How many plot twists can one year have? From a debate performance so bad it tanked a political nomination (as I predicted it might) to a bullet that almost killed a candidate and resulted instead in a picture so perfect that the election seemed fated to be his. From the sheer heady joy of Harris breathing new life and new hope into the race to the slow and grinding agony of watching her throw it all away. I did not know who was going to win this election, but I did not expect Trump to win the popular vote. Even Hillary Clinton squeaked out a popular victory. A grim ending. A grim winter.
We have been moving steadily towards fascism for nine long years. We did not have it in those first four years of Trump, but he eroded the norms that protect us from autocracy and established a new Supreme Court majority. Trump’s attempts to steal the election in 2020 were nakedly authoritarian and but for a few brave Republican loyalists we would have fallen into it then. Biden kept us from falling over these last four years, but he did not pull us back from that cliff’s edge either. He promised us only the same status quo that led to Trump’s victory in the first place, and because it is impossible to go backwards through time he failed to deliver even this. Nine agonizing years teetering over the edge of an abyss, never quite falling but never fully regaining balance. Pinwheeling our arms, increasingly desperate, until at last, in November of 2024, we slipped over the edge. We are still falling. We have not yet hit the ground.
America as we know it is over. The rule of law still stands for now, the constraints on government power still officially in place, but we have never been more aware that our rules are nothing more than ink on scraps of ancient paper, or how easily paper burns. Trump’s cabinet picks have made it excruciatingly clear that he intends to light some fires. The Washington Post, LA Times, and ABC have visibly knuckled under to the pressure. Many other outlets are clearly pulling punches.
For the last two years, when the news had the decency to stop for five seconds, I used a work of fiction to reflect upon the year. In 2022 (The Best Worst Year), I talked about The Prestige and betting one’s life and future on a coin toss. In 2023 (The Year We Held Our Breath), I talked about Stephen R Donaldson’s Gap Series and adrenaline withdrawal. This year, I would like to talk about the end of the world.
Cabin In The Woods is an incredibly subversive movie masquerading as a wildly entertaining horror/comedy. Spoilers for a 13-year-old film: a group of young and conventionally attractive friends go to the eponymous cabin and encounter horrors beyond understanding. You have seen this plot a thousand times before and the movie explains why: a top-secret government organization carefully engineers and orchestrates these massacres as a yearly blood sacrifice to appease ancient gods, who will rise up and destroy the world if not sated with blood. They use chemicals and subliminal messaging to get the characters to make the poor decisions that see all of them slaughtered, one by one, for their hubris.
But one of the characters, Marty, finds himself able to resist the manipulation thanks to something in the pot he never stops smoking. He figures out the plot and manages to break into the compound beneath the cabin with the other surviving character, Dana. They release the various monsters used to murder these sacrificial victims each year, who kill (almost) everyone in the agency in a cathartic orgy of blood and violence.
All of this is very fun. What makes this movie truly great, however — truly subversive in a way few people seem to recognize — are the last eight minutes of the film:
Everyone seems to be dead except Marty and Dana, who find their way into the sacrificial chamber deep below the earth. And then, the program director emerges, unarmed. She explains that these yearly sacrifices appease the gods and that, if unsated, they will rise from the deep and kill everyone on the planet. She asks them to do the right thing.
Director: The sun is coming up in eight minutes. If you live to see it, the world will end.
Marty: Maybe that’s the way it should be, if you’ve got to kill all my friends to survive. Maybe it’s time for a change.
Director: We’re not talking about change! We’re talking about the agonizing death of every human soul on the planet, including you. You can die with them, or you can die for then.
Hollywood has sacrificed characters for so much less. They love nothing more than to shoehorn in a scene where the hero dies heroically to save some innocent (or guilty) other. It’s a Christianity thing, I think: that weird martyr cult aspect of the religion that underpins so much of our culture. This is a no-brainer. Obviously the stoner must die.
But Marty makes a different choice. He fights back. The Director plunges to her death. And so, as the world trembles, he and Dana huddle together, blood-soaked and badly injured, waiting for the end of the world.
Dana: You were right. Humanity…it’s time to give someone else a chance.
The stone chamber crumbles. An enormous hand emerges from the deep and smashes through the earth, to the surface, decimating the cabin before slamming down with tremendous force. Hard cut to Last by Nine Inch Nails. The End.
I didn’t want things to end like this, here in the real world. I voted for Harris. I knocked doors for her, despite my enormous issues with her campaign and her policies. But things did end like this, and now everything is in flux. Trump and the tech bros have forgotten something important: by undermining norms and laws they do not like, they have undermined all norms, all laws, very much including the norms and laws that have allowed them to siphon so much wealth and exert so much control. They’re betting they can sculpt something that benefits them even more before things harden. I’m not so sure that’s true.
I am looking at the Republican civil war currently raging on Twitter, where Vivek Ramaswamy decided it would be a good idea to explain to the MAGA masses that we must import tech workers from abroad because our culture is so broken compared to superior cultures overseas. Plenty of open racism in the overwhelming backlash to that hot take, but also a sense of betrayal. The fight is over H-1B visas, which Ranaswamy once declared himself against and which MAGA views (not entirely incorrectly) as stealing American jobs by paying the overseas workers less. Musk, who uses the program heavily at both Tesla and Twitter to coerce insane work hours from people who wish to remain in the United States, vowed to “Go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend” (along with a few other choice profanities), is (definitely) demonetizing and (allegedly) banning people who disagree with him. So much for free speech. And Trump? MIA for 36 hours, at which point he told the New York Post he agrees with Elon Musk and supports the visa program he himself cut in 2020. Musk is still calling the shots, it seems, and I still don’t recall ever seeing his name on a ballot. His fans are starting to realize that he’s not what he claims to be. They’re starting to realize that he lied.
I am also looking at just how much bipartisan consensus there really is in this country, and how much of that consensus falls to the left. 74 percent of voters support raising the minimum wage to $20. 62 percent of Americans support Medicare for All; just 26 percent oppose it. Increasingly, people are open to more than just talking about it; recent polling shows that 69 percent of Americans blame the insurance industry at least in part for the murder of Brian Thompson. This attitude was unthinkable even five years ago. People are at the end of their rope. This is very dangerous, but it’s also an opportunity.
Trump won. But enormous fissures are opening in the foundations of his power and he hasn’t even been sworn in yet. Everything is in flux, which means anything is possible. A window is about to open, I think, for talking to the right about the people who have lied to them. Not just about H-1B visas or fiscal responsibility, but about everything. We often call the 2020 election fraud attempt “The Big Lie,” but the biggest lie of all is the one the people at the top started telling us long before Trump got here, long before any of us were alive. They say our problems come not from the people who have the most, but the people who have the least. It’s immigrants. Trans people. The Woke Left. People of different races. Wrong, wrong, wrong. It’s the people in power. It’s the people who fan those flames so that we’re too busy fighting each other to wonder why our lives grow steadily worse.
There is no way out of this mess that does not involve either bloodshed on an unspeakable, unacceptable scale or millions of people who voted for Trump changing their mind. As his supporters begin to realize what many of us have always known — that they are being manipulated and lied to — there are opportunities for conversations about that Biggest Lie. Opportunities to point out that the culture war only serves the people at the top; opportunities we must take with maximum empathy and minimal recrimination.
The people who propagate The Biggest Lie are counting on more than just their ability to stoke the flames of racism, sexism, and transphobia in their own followers. They are also counting on our inability to forgive these things. They want to poison relations between us until reconciliation is impossible even if their dupes see through the lies. Unfair as it is, we have to fight against that too.
I was so afraid of this moment: when MAGA would win access to power, turn the FBI into an open Gestapo and terrify people into silence, when they would try to strip my friends of human rights — when my country, which I love so much, would die. Sometimes, things have to die. Sometimes, you have to clear the slate before you can build something better. Were we really going to cling to the crumbling edifice of this country forever? Go slowly into that numb, grey night? I was so afraid, but now that it’s happened I feel strangely hopeful. Movies end. Life does not. The giant hand came down and we are still here. What will we build, now that everything that once protected us is gone?
I have so much more to say about this, but it will have to wait until next year. By the time this hits your inbox I will already be off-grid, holed up in a heated tent in the Catskills and awaiting the changing of the guard. I have a history of wandering into the wilderness when I feel myself at a crossroads and it’s worked out well for me so far. Perhaps there are answers out there. It will be beautiful either way.
2025 looks to be a hard year. An ugly year, full of oppression, repression, and state-sanctioned violence. But it is also a year of promise. A year of new beginnings. The first year of our post-America lives, and an opportunity to begin the process of forging something better.
Happy New Year. We can do this. We’ll get through this together.
America is dead. Long live America.
People in Phoenix AZ are like, okay *this* time we rise from the ashes, yeah?