Are we just in another moment of baseless hopium?
Rights and structural betrayals are not games but lessons about humanity and believing false narratives.
There’s a lot of hopium floating around right now, and I don’t want to be the grinch at the parade. What Minnesota did with pushing back against ICE abuses matters. It deserves to be recognized. In a country that’s spent much of the last decade indulging its worst impulses, civic courage is no small thing.
But after listening to this week’s episode of The Next Level at The Bulwark, I felt myself pulled toward something familiar. JVL kicks things off with new polling and says, “I think we’re winning.” The numbers are real, and a twenty-point drop in approval is real. Republicans using words like “panicking” is real. ICE backing off in Minnesota is real.
And still, I can’t shake the sense that we’re confusing motion with safety.
There’s a deeply American belief woven into that tone: that public opinion restrains power. Approval falls, midterms shift, and thus the institutions recalibrate. The system corrects itself as inflation rises, and voters react; accountability follows. The electorate rescues democracy.
It’s a tidy theory, and it also has boundaries.
For people in targeted communities, the past decade wasn’t about shaky consumer confidence or bad vibes. It was brutal. It was normalized cruelty. It was watching an insurrectionist, racially charged demagogue win twice. A few points moving in a YouGov poll don’t undo that.
When Tim Miller plays the skeptic and says, “The damage persists. The world is still going to be terrible,” he’s naming the tension we ought to sit with. If we truly crossed a Rubicon, if anti-democratic norms became mainstream, then a dip in polling isn’t a transformation. It’s just a forecast.
Yet so many poll-obsessed commentators still treat this like a customer satisfaction issue. The storyline goes: voters stuck with Trump for the economy, and they’ll abandon him for the economy. As though the same electorate that empowered authoritarianism twice was simply crunching numbers.
This is where the narrative gets too cozy. The voices blaming “excesses of wokeness” for Trump’s wins often deny Trump voters real agency when it counts. The left was too moral or too loud or too much of something, and thus, authoritarianism becomes a backlash, not a choice.
Earlier this week, I wrote about people who approach politics like a game, tracking indicators, pulling levers, and refreshing approval dashboards. That mindset dominates cable panels and podcast roundtables. It’s not sinister, it’s just institutional memory and cultural blindspots operationalized.
But politics isn’t a board of blinking metrics.
It’s the exercise of power.
If you treat the last week like a scoreboard, it feels encouraging. Republicans stumble, ICE pulls back, approval ratings slip.
“Don’t be panicking.”
But if you see the last decade as structural change institutions bending, norms eroding, and millions showing comfort with illiberalism, then the question isn’t whether we’re up this week. It’s whether we’ve rebuilt countervailing power.
Minnesota mattered not because Nate Silver’s average ticked. It mattered because people used power peacefully, strategically, together.
Hope is essential, and celebration nourishes.
But hope without memory becomes self-deception.
And celebration without strategy drifts into complacency.
That’s the tension I can’t shake.
The rock solid evidence is that the forces of evil have a very firm grasp on the instruments of power, They control the police, the military, the legislature and the judiciary
Any Judicial victories are at the lower court level, and 99% of the time they are Temporary Stays, not injunctions. A temporary stay is 10-14 days and, and gives the government time to go back, refine it's pleading.
There are 12 District Appeals courts, the really important ones are the 5th,9th,11th, 12th and DC court (each district appeals cout has 12 judges) all of them are dominated by Republicans and with a very heavy Trump appointed roster)
The fix is in on the November elections. if honest and fair, Republicans would lose the house,
but they won't be, Trump and the Republicans have enacted laws, policies and measures that will sway the vote.
The only way to beat them is for a 100% massive turnout of Democratic and Democrat leaning independents.
The signs are there, Trump will only leave on a gurney. He has redone the White House in his image, renamed institutions in his image, purged the Library of Congress of DEI (meaning non white, non straight director and employees, same with the Smithsonian, taken down exhibits.
If Trump does not leave, there is no law enforcement, no military force that can force him to leave..
There might not even be an election.
Steven Bannon advertised that they were working on keeping him in office. Trump even said that he was going to cancel elections.
What disturbs me is that nobody, especially liberals, and pundits on MSNOW, even acknowledge that awful fact.
Hopium is a drug, Hope plus opium.
During the Napoleonic wars, the first to enter the breach of a castle walls were called The Forlorn Hope., because they did not survive. Incredibly they were volunteers, the pull of machismo is that strong.
I fear the slide into authoritarianism has become free fall. We’ve been in defensive mode for 10 years, 9 of which too few people took seriously.