Nowtopian

Happy end of 2025 and beginning of 2026! It’s a New Year!

The title is not merely a self-exhortation, though I suppose it could be read that way. It’s been three months since I last posted something to my blog. I did write an essay about the Rise and Fall of the Junipero Serra monument during this time, but it’s over on Foundsf.org. The essay is part of our ongoing participation in the SF Arts Commission’s Shaping Legacy Project. I’ve been resisting writing for the sake of writing, even if I’ve done that a lot over the past 21 years on this blog. I like to write—that’s no crime (yet). But given the firehose of bullshit pouring out of every channel of mainstream media (mostly deferential towards the overt fascism engulfing our society), not to mention the bizarre hyper-abundance of opinions and analyses free-floating on substack, facebook, medium, tiktok, etc., joined by several million podcasts (literally) full of even more talking and opining, the best answer might be silence. I certainly don’t feel a need to repackage and repeat what everyone else is saying.

The Serra statue, stored in a warehouse after its toppling on June 19, 2020

Regular readers of this blog, who are vanishingly few by now, will know that for the past several years a lot of what I’ve been doing is digesting and interpreting all the books I continue to plow through. I do prefer reading books to anything I can find online or in magazines. I gave a presentation on the 2nd edition of Hidden San Francisco at the Howard Zinn Bookfair in early December and was delighted to have a full house of about 30 people at 10:30 in the morning on a busy day full of multiple compelling programs all pitted against one another. There were sharp questions and comments, but the one that was both flattering and frankly funny, was from my old pal Joe Berry, who commanded the floor to announce that I was (one of the) “greatest living bibliographers” and that was something everyone there should appreciate. So yeah, I read and then use this blog to record what I’m learning, hopefully in the process making useful summaries and offering fresh connections and insights. That’s what I do, much more than original research or reporting or any of the other possibilities that confront a writer.

As this past year unfolded, several readers of my recent novel wrote me to compliment what they felt was my prescience. I take no credit for describing what was pretty obviously coming down the pike. But the point of my fictional rendering of ICE Hummers picking up “suspects” and putting them in detention camps was to show how brittle authoritarian rule is, and furthermore, how utterly incapable such people are of managing (or governing) a complex society for any length of time. The quasi-martial law passes within a year in my novel, and so it seems it may recede in the face of widespread public revulsion, untold millions of “good soldier Schweiks” working to rule, forgetting to finish tasks, being late, not taking initiatives to fix things that might be easily repaired, etc. etc. The very dumb sycophants thrust into power have done everything they can to posture as macho toughs, only to destroy decades of carefully built up institutional, economic, and colonialist soft power. They are already finding the lofty pedestals on which they preen turning into eroding pillars of sand.

Posters restored to Democracy Wall on Valencia Street.

There is more horror and cruelty ahead, to be sure. As their small worlds explode, their smaller minds will use the powers they hold to lash out at real and imaginary enemies. That inevitability requires as much solidarity and effective collective response as we can muster. That’s been true all year, and will only be more true going forward. But ultimately, this will pass. The attempt to strangle wind power and solar and the Chinese car industry may work within the borders of the U.S. for a few years, but the rest of the world is moving on. The bizarre abdication of American Empire by the America Firsters is an unexpectedly welcome and entertaining aspect of their misrule. The neoliberal centrists will not be able to put Humpty Dumpty back together again, whether in 2027 or 2029 or later. So that begs the question of the new political forces beginning to emerge now. If the MAGAsters are turning on themselves and eating their own, the inchoate Left is shaking off its paralysis. From municipal socialists like Mamdani to the less visible millions of baristas, uber and truck drivers, warehouse workers, nurses, teachers, and even disaffected tech workers, activists across dozens of campaigns are confronting the Patriarchal White Supremacist dinosaurs at every turn. The slumbering rebels that filled the streets in 2020 to protest racist police violence are still connected, and know how to move together when they want to. The vast majority of Americans are… wait for it… anti-fascist! The racist cruelty and militarized posturing overstepping across the country could soon find itself on trial for countless crimes, petty and profound.

Meanwhile, the planet continues to cook leading to catastrophic floods, fires, hurricanes and droughts, which in turns is sending millions onto desperate journeys seeking refuge and asylum. Billionaires and kleptocratic wannabes like Trump and his family and political allies are looting public wealth with impunity. Public infrastructure continues to decay. People continue to lose their homes while rents and prices soar. Jobs are increasingly precarious and underpaid. The medical system is on the verge of collapse as millions have lost their shitty private insurance due to the right-wing destruction of Obamacare subsidies. Schools are falling apart, broke, and closing while public education is being gutted. Military spending has passed $1 trillion a year, 2/3 of which is lost in the Defense and corporate bureaucracies, lining the pockets of venal war profiteers. Unreliable software increasingly controls snap decisions over who gets bombed and when, while chatbots shield responsible people from accountability for their avarice and ineptitude. The term ‘polycrisis’ has been on the rise, capturing better than most the confusing chaos of our times.

Raj Patel illuminates the term in his recent short essay “Polycrisis: A Breviary”—

The polycrisis, then, is not merely a temporary convergence of disparate shocks. It is the structural expression of this simultaneous exhaustion—economic, social, and ecological. This leads to an interregnum of unusual consequences. Amid the rise of post-neoliberal authoritarian politics, it is on this terrain that alternatives are being forged.

For some people the daily drumbeat of horror leads to paralysis. For others it leads to frenzied efforts to plug the holes in the dike. But as Sarah Jaffe, one of the best labor writers of our generation, writes in her new book From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire:

We can, looking at the multiple states of emergency all around us, drive ourselves to exhaustion, to a kind of martyrdom that sees working ourselves to death as heroic, as long as it is “for the cause.” But a system that cares nothing for our individual lives will not be put down by our heroic deaths…. We know what happened in Gramsci’s Italy and across Europe and the world, but the results of our own time have yet to be determined. We reach back over and over again for Gramsci’s words: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” Sometimes, this is mistranslated as “now is the time of monsters.” (p. 271-272)

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