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When All You Want to Do is Stop the Clock
It's not easy to celebrate a New Year that promises to be absolutely terrible
Donna Schwartz Mills
January 02, 2025
Is there anything more optimistic than the promise of fresh beginnings and hope offered by the start of a New Year? I so wish I had felt that way this week. Instead, I wished that I could simply stop the clock and remain in 2024.
The specter of Trump 2.0 dampened whatever sense of celebration I might have had this Tuesday night. The New Year’s Day terrorist attack in New Orleans didn’t help. Neither did the explosion in Las Vegas.
And yet, today I find myself feeling… not too bad. The truth is, wallowing in fear isn’t productive. And continuous outrage is an energy sap. Optimism- against all odds - may be our best weapon against the Heritage Foundation’s plot to turn our country into an authoritarian nightmare.
I stopped making New Year’s Resolutions decades ago, but I’ve taken the practice back up with a big one for 2025: I resolve to look for reasons to embrace love and positivity.
While it was kind of fun to watch the MAGA social media civil war unfold over the holiday, I’ve spent way too much energy on disdain and mockery. I can’t help but feel nostalgic for the Harris-Walz campaign’s emphasis on joy. I am going to dig myself out of the doldrums I’ve been in since November 6 and work on feeling joyful instead.
It’s a strategy endorsed by experts on authoritarianism.
Authoritarianism thrives when people lose hope that things can ever change.
New Year Readings
No podcast this week, but we did flag a whole bunch of good reading that came in over the holiday, including the Ruth Ben-Ghiat essay quoted above. Anne Applebaum also makes a strong case for fighting authoritarian lies with optimistic truths. Both offer real-world examples of how that worked in the fight against other regimes.
David Pepper is an activist who focuses on the need for grassroots organizing at the state level. His end-of-year newsletter not only tackled the fear we share but an outline of actions we must take this year. It is an inspiring read, and I hope you’ll take a look.
Our legacy media continue their obsequious slide into uselessness. The Washington Post continues to lose reporting and editing talent and their Murdoch-veteran editor replaces them with folks from the Wall Street Journal (which is another Murdoch rag). The new head of MSNBC wants to make the network “friendlier” to MAGA. And as Jeff Tiedrich points out, ABC News and The New York Times continue to sanewash all the intelligent things the president-elect says.
One Last Thing
When I was in the White House, I thought of human rights primarily in terms of political rights, such as rights to free speech and freedom from torture or unjust imprisonment. As I traveled around the world since I was president, I learned there was no way to separate the crucial rights to live in peace, to have adequate food and health care, and to have a voice in choosing one’s political leaders. These human needs and rights are inextricably linked.”
Since Carter passed away on Sunday, I must have read at least a dozen tributes to him. I’ve been stricken by the parallels between how the press treated him and continue to denigrate Joe Biden. These men are the epitome of the optimism we need to hold on to this year.
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