Let's Make a Happy New Year

After a tumultuous 2025, we start on a clarifying journey

First, the bad news. In the latest indictment of my executive management skills, America This Week will not be coming out tomorrow. Too many people are on vacation at once, with too many people in airports at the wrong times. Unless aliens land or earth’s core implodes Sunday, the year-end wrap comes Monday. On behalf of all, I apologize.

Today is New Year’s Day, which means the seemingly interminable horror-coaster ride of 2025 is finally past. Politically, it was a wild year. Much as 2015-2016 saw the rise of populism and a radical electoral reconfiguration that included the merger of neoconservative Republicans and Clinton Democrats, 2025 saw dramatic fissures. Domestically, the MAGA movement is splintering over a podcast argument and the Democratic establishment seems paralyzed by its own boom of socialist candidates. Globally, a security framework in place since 1945 is hanging by a thread, with the West’s once-democracies all snarling for a fight, maybe with each other. The moment recalls a passage from the great 1940 elegy of Yeats by W.H. Auden:

In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate.

How different the world suddenly looks! In 1992 politicians and intellectuals were convinced we’d reached The End of History, with Europeans and Americans sure they’d already discovered government in its ideal form, with no serious incentives left for war and a not-small possibility open that “successful democratic societies could remain that way indefinitely.” Tinker a little here to lower crime, a little there to deal with drugs or homelessness or extremism, and perhaps the Hegelian cycle of endless conflict and synthesis could be halted — maybe there was nothing left to talk about?

That feels like a thousand years ago. Today those same “social democracies” hardly share a clear status quo belief about anything. Do we want nation-states or not? Majority rule? Free enterprise? Borders? Liberal education? Fiat currency? Families? The one seemingly universal conviction is that the existing system is no longer functional, causing question-clouds to form over the most fundamental parts of society, to say nothing of merely enormous structures like the health bureaucracy or the system of international trade. Gathering controversies over all these things may end well, but they almost can’t end soon.

I was raised in the irony generation, which means I’m generally allergic to conviction or answers. My Generation X was sandwiched between Boomer parents we loved but secretly laughed about (like bearded Steven Keaton from Family Ties) and a millenial earnestness we didn’t get. The current uncertain era has already shown that young radicals and elderly nostalgics seem to have more common than our group in between, raised on standup and MTV.

My generation never had to truly suffer or fight a war, a debt we owed to parents and grandparents. To pass the same gift to our kids, it now looks like we’re going to have to step outside our comfort zones and get serious, starting now, or soon anyway. What will that look like? For our own small part at Racket we have a few ideas, and we hope you stick with us and help us work those out. We’re all going to need our friends more than ever. In the meantime, please join us in welcoming 2026, which we still hope and believe will be a much better year. Only a few hours, and no disasters yet — a good sign! And things still left to try.

Happy New Year, everyone, and buckle up.