The first and most obvious problem we face is that it has become hard to figure out exactly how worried to be. There is a distinct problem in an empire ascribing enormous power to a significant individual because, normally, you have to take what that individual says very seriously. Alas, as you well know, we are long past normal.

As with the was-it-or-wasn’t-it-a-nazi-salute discourse, it is, to borrow a phrase, the indeterminacy that’s the point. It puts us in this state of constant alarm and constant self-doubt. This is destabilizing on both a personal and social level, and this is also the point.

It seems so much worse this time around. As my colleague Richard Warnica wrote recently, Trump seemed like an aberration in 2016, some inexplicable cosmic mistake. Now, he is arguably an avatar of the American political mainstream. With the capital of most of the world’s richest people behind him, and a pliant and fully committed administration, an army of loyal supporters, and a 53% approval rating, Trump (and Musk) promise to make lasting, deleterious change.

I don’t think profound changes are historically unique. 1989, 9/11, 2008, 2020: these were all profound, too, and these were all in just my lifetime (I’m not yet that old). It’s also worth noting that, as with the first Trump term, part of the shock was that “this is happening here.” Americans don’t take kindly to facing the kind of things the rest of the world must deal with regularly.

So, the task for us lies not in declaring moments profound, but in properly making sense of them. I am struck by this idea that we are living through an inflection point — a moment in which social, geopolitical, and ideological arrangements are reorganized and restructured. Consider this me thinking out loud at a strange moment.

Whatever is happening, the period of post-Soviet liberalism is very likely dead. It isn’t that Trump will try and annex Canada (I don’t believe he will) or that it’s clear what will happen with his despicable rhetoric that the U.S. will occupy and ethnically cleanse Gaza. It’s that the dam has broken on the basic idea that empires are bad. Certain things seemed clear — that right shouldn’t always make right, or that those with the biggest guns shouldn’t simply just take things because they can. Now, these are very much up for debate.

Post-1990s Fukuyama-esque liberalism is thus well and truly dead — not just because of Trump as augur, but that the reign of Trump and Musk means that what is sayable appears to be changing.

What can be said has always had constraints. At various times, certain ideas — that God may not exist; that racism is wrong; that heterosexuality was the only acceptable norm — were “unsayable,” inasmuch as you could challenge them, but doing so would come with serious consequences.

What can be said changes over time, and the boundaries between what is acceptable and not mark out what is valued. Now, constraints on certain ideas appear to be loosening. There are obvious ones. Racism, misogyny, transphobia now bubble up and spill over into the mainstream. The richest man in the world can talk about about defending Italian or Japanese culture — a “code” or dog whistle that is obvious to everyone with half a brain — and it doesn’t even make the news. The same man and the American vice president can call for the reinstatement an explicitly racist 25 year old “kid” who is upending the American government, and then defend the reinstatement with the plain implication that racism simply isn’t that bad. Oh, don’t forget about Kanye.

That means certain things. Key ideas — the viability and value of multiculturalism and diversity; the notion that race is not a determinant of, say, intelligence, worth, dignity; that the emerging diversity in gender and sexual identity represents a form of liberation — are now up for debate and will have to re-litigated. In this context, “re-litigation” means significant social upheaval, policy change, and the potential for not only real harm enacted through the state, but a return to a more intense social tension based around these categories of identity.

But I also think there are other ideas that once seemed unthinkable that are going to be now be debated. The value of liberalism itself, secular humanism, the post-national state and the resistance of ethnic nationalism, the spuriousness of race- or sex-based hierarchies — these are all going to now carry a whiff of suspicion. As for the possibility of a genuine movement to something beyond capitalism — that seems further away than ever.

I do wonder if, in their alarmism, screeds like this risk laying the groundwork for the very change I am decrying. Once one accepts that change is about to happen, one is more likely to accept that change as inevitable. That isn’t my aim. Rather, I think it’s good to confront what is happening, and that particular things we thought we had settled are about to come under attack. I will not be surprised if criticisms of the “inherent character” of certain cultures or identities starts to spill into the mainstream. We are, in my estimation, not as far from calipers and IQ nonsense as you and I wish we were.

But, for now, I am demoralized. To see figures like Trump, Vance, Musk — people who are not merely my ideological opposites, but who strike me as some of worst and most despicable public figures in living memory — gain so much power and adulation has filled me with despair. The task now is to figure out how to not give in to that feeling of powerlessness — and for Canadians, to plan and strategize for how to resist the fascism to our south that threatens to spill over our border. The only wisp of hope I am holding on to is that, as naive and cliched as it sounds, I genuinely think the truth is on our side. They are, in a very plain and obvious way, wrong. That at least gives us a toehold from which to begin to climb.