immanence

With its flurry of perplexing and often contradictory initiatives and statements, Donald Trump’s second presidency is leaving traditional media outlets, along with their tired viewers, overwhelmed and incapacitated (qualities exacerbated by the media outlets’ oligarchic owners’ kowtowing to the new administration). There are still many good journalists doing important work. But there’s also a palpable sense, especially on the left, that media are failing at their critical task, leaving the rest of us to fend for ourselves.

This post considers the situation and shares a starting list of some writers and researchers sharing important analyses of what is unfolding. The list is growing without warning (last revised on Feb. 17), and your suggestions are welcome, in the comments or by email.

In a matter of days, Donald Trump has accomplished for Vladimir Putin, and to a lesser degree for Xi Jinping, what neither of them would have imagined possible or at least likely. By withdrawing nearly all U.S. support for humanitarian and civil society initiatives around the world (except for Israel and Egypt), and by launching economic wars against the U.S.’s two closest neighbors, Canada and Mexico, and threatening former allies including Norway, Trump has signaled to the world that a new configuration is dawning: a multipolar, neo-imperial one in which oligarchic empires can dominate their “spheres of influence” in whatever way they like, and that democracy has nothing to do with it and power has everything. Ukraine and Taiwan, like Canada, Greenland, and Panama, are in this sense just starting points for this new global realignment.

Where the Americas were the meeting ground for a previous round of multipolar (as opposed to bipolar) inter-imperial conflict, the warming Arctic is poised to play that role for the coming one — hence, the attractiveness of Canada and Greenland, a tacit way to acknowledge the realities of climate change whilst continuing to deny them.

Meanwhile, thousands of U.S. federal employees are being fired for doing their duties, to be replaced (if at all) by loyalists to Trump’s authoritarian machine. Whole arms of the U.S. government, including any that deal with the science of climate change or the social rights that had long been denied to minorities within the U.S., are being “cancelled,” and control over the workings of the federal government, including its pursestrings, is being handed away to unelected senior oligarch Elon Musk or to the fanatics at Project 2025. Musk’s takeover, in the last few days, of federal payment systems and high-security State Department computer systems constitute, in historian Heather Cox Richardson’s words, the “largest data breach in human history.” (Richardson’s full report from yesterday is well worth reading or hearing.)

There are two potential rays of hope in all of this.

The first is that the Trump agenda is so self-contradictory, with rival factions ready to fight each other when the opportunity arises, and rapid-fire executive announcements liable to fall flat once they are put into motion — so things might not end as badly as they would if they were in fact widely supported, which they are not. The strategy of “moving fast and breaking things” will lead to a lot of wreckage, but some things will be left standing and the breaking will itself be revealing and messy enough to convince people not to ask for more of it.

The second, and I think more reasonable prospect for hope, is that those on the receiving end of Trump’s attacks include so many Americans and others around the world that new forms of resistance can and will become possible. Canada’s and Mexico’s leaders have shown the beginnings of this kind of resistance through their forceful responses to the tariffs. (I especially love my own British Columbia’s targeting of red-state produced liquor; Ontario’s premier is considering a similar move. Blue states might start thinking about developing “blue-state certification” to be able to sell things to Canadians.) Even Canadian hockey fans showed their healthy response to Trump’s announcement by booing the U.S. national anthem at a hockey game on the weekend.

Hockey fans aside, Canada’s politicians are speaking in a pretty single voice for the first time in years, demonstrating that an external threat — like hostile aliens landing on Earth — is the best unifier. Meanwhile, Europe is still a very active battleground between institutionalists who, for all their weaknesses, maintain some semblance of functioning social democracy, and the far-right, Trump- and/or Putin- aligned forces that challenge them. (Let’s leave aside the weaknesses of those social democracies for the moment. We can go back to criticizing them when the larger risk — of the varying forms of neo-fascism — isn’t so prominent.) Media are at least not decimated yet in Europe. And the rest of the world will have to judge for itself what it all means.

The real question is whether any such mobilization is possible in the trainwreck of our affective and attention economies — where everyone is so glued to our dystopian screens that we can hardly move ourselves out of our seats.

Here it’s worth remembering that those behind the trainwreck — radical-right culture warriors, anti-government libertarians, and tech-bro oligarchs — are experiencing the jouissance of their lives, gleefully speeding through every stop sign and intersection with primal abandon, as they imagine the destruction of whatever bogeyman they believe held them back (women, blacks, minorities, urban elites and DEI warriors, the Deep State, the liberal world order, or whatever).

This suggests that now is not a time for meekly tut-tutting our disapproval. Shouting “coup!” and “fascism!” is also not be the best strategy. Consumers of right-wing media have long stopped taking those shouts seriously, and without substantive analyses, they start to ring hollow for everyone else. (But for some of those analyses, which remain crucial, see below.)

What we do need is Aikido- or Jujitsu-style redirections of that energy. The question is how to do that effectively. Whatever else, it will require imagination and creativity.

Some go-to sources for up-to-date analysis of what’s happening

Here are some of the more prominent analytical voices of the “resistance.” Most of them are well-known center-left intellectuals who have taken it upon themselves to inform the public, often by starting their own substacks or other online newsletters.

• Heather Cox Richardson, “Letters from an American” (best daily analysis of US news, through the eyes of a critical historian): https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com. Here’s a good post analyzing the last couple of weeks: https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/february-1-2025?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=l8m0y&triedRedirect=true

• Rebecca Solnit, “Meditations in an Emergency” (her brand new newsletter): https://meditations-in-an-emergency.ghost.io. And for those still on Facebook, Solnit’s page is well worth following: https://www.facebook.com/rebecca.solnit

• Bill McKibben, “The Crucial Years”: https://billmckibben.substack.com

• Anand Giridharadas, “The Ink” (by Anand Giridharadas)”: https://the.ink. And Giridharadas’s substack: https://substack.com/@anandwrites

• Robert B. Hubbell https://roberthubbell.substack.com/. Here he is on the reasons why this qualifies as a coup: https://substack.com/home/post/p-156224507

• Timothy Snyder, “Thinking about…”: https://snyder.substack.com. On the logic of destruction and how to resist it”: https://snyder.substack.com/p/the-logic-of-destruction

• Robert Reich: https://robertreich.substack.com

• Olga Lautman (who “tracks tyranny” in and by the US and Russia): https://substack.com/@olgalautman. Here she is on Musk getting access to Americans’ data: https://olgalautman.substack.com/p/why-has-musk-gained-access-to-our

• Corey Robin, https://coreyrobin.com/ Robin is an insightful political scientist, whose comments on Facebook are worth following: https://www.facebook.com/corey.robin1

• Ed Conway, “Material World”: https://edconway.substack.com Good analyses of the material underpinnings of some of these political developments. Here he is on Canada and oil: https://edconway.substack.com/p/america-still-needs-canadian-oil

• Ruth Ben-Ghiat, “Lucid”: https://lucid.substack.com/ Bein-Ghiat is a historian and scholar of fascism. Here’s her take on the “new kind of coup” being conducted: https://lucid.substack.com/p/a-new-kind-of-coup-trump-and-musk

• Christina Pagel, “Diving into Data and Decision Making”: https://christinapagel.substack.com/ This data-crunching healthcare scientist seems to have just moved into analyzing the Trump administration, but her posts are excellent. See “So this is how liberty dies…” Making sense of Trump’s first three weeks and “How to fight back: charting opposition to the actions of the Trump administration,” both of which include handy Venn diagrams and links to spreadsheet databases.

• “Popular Information” (edited by Judd Legum, former editor of ThinkProgress): https://popular.info/

• “Musk Watch” (edited by Judd Legum, written by Caleb Ecarma): https://www.muskwatch.com/

• “Gutting the Administrative State” is a collection of academic analysts on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/starter-pack/himself.bsky.social/3lh4ptkqkqw2b

• Jared Yates Sexton, “Dispatches from a Collapsing State”: https://jaredyatessexton.substack.com/

• Parker Molloy, “The Present Age”: https://www.readtpa.com/

• Seth Masket, “Tusk”: https://smotus.substack.com/

• Tina Brown, “Fresh Hell”: https://tinabrown.substack.com/

• Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, “What if We Get it Right?”: https://ayanaelizabeth.substack.com Like Bill McKibben, Johnson is always looking for rays of hope or at least possible actions on climate change amidst all the bad news.

While some of the mainstream media are doing their best to do their job (I’m thinking The Guardian, The New York Times, and even the somewhat embattled Washington Post), there are surprising scoops and acute analyses to be found in some lesser-known media (some of them pay-walled, others not or not completely), including these:

• Wired: https://www.wired.com/ has been good at breaking news about the Musk takeover of branches of the federal government (for instance, here and here).

• The New Republic: https://newrepublic.com/

• Rolling Stone: https://www.rollingstone.com/. See this piece: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/trump-musk-usaid-employees-doge-shutdown-1235257736/

Then there are the media about the media, of which three of my favorites remain:

• WNYC’s “On the Media”: https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm , which is still one of the best podcasts covering the media, with good recent episodes on the new Trump era.

• Columbia Journalism Review: https://www.cjr.org/ and especially its daily email, The Media Today.

• The Poynter Institute’s news page: https://www.poynter.org/news/ and its daily Report.