Cultural upheavals can be a riddle in real time. Trends that might seem obvious in hindsight are poorly understood in the present or not fathomed at all. We live in turbulent times now, at the tail end of a pandemic that killed millions and, for a period, reordered existence as we knew it.
It was a startling, if overlooked, admission at the start of November, nearly two years into Russia’s horrific invasion of Ukraine: The conflict did not, despite the repeated insistence of internationalists in the West, resemble World War II.
Jonathan Lethem, as he sees it, is the last of his kind—the Brooklyn novelist who wanted to flee Brooklyn. “The idea, when I was growing up—and it was an old one—was you got out of that place. And if you could put it behind you, you might not even mention it.
Bernie Sanders arrived in Ann Arbor in late winter, his future to be decided in two days. Thousands of students thronged the University of Michigan campus, gripping their blue-and-white signs, one so overcome with emotion she battled back tears as Sanders spoke. Above a sea of expectant faces, his name was spelled out in enormous, yellow block letters: B.E.R.N.I.E. The students held them high and wouldn’t let go.
Last December, the 30-odd members of the Democratic Party’s rules and bylaws committee filed in to the Omni Shoreham, the glittering resort hotel that once hosted Franklin D. Roosevelt’s inaugural ball.
Ron DeSantis, the 44-year-old governor of Florida, has entered the presidential race, establishing himself as the most formidable Republican rival to Donald Trump. Mr. Trump, an inveterate liar who tried to overturn the last election, is alienating to a wide swath of voters, and many establishment Republicans have been happy to hunt out alternatives, particularly in Mr. DeSantis.
On the last day of February, Lori Lightfoot became the first mayor of Chicago in 34 years to lose an election. The polarizing Democrat was one of the only big-city executives in America to govern through the pandemic and face voters again, coming in third and failing to advance to the next round.
The stunning failure of the Democratic Party on election night was nowhere more apparent than at Il Bacco, an Italian restaurant on the boulevard where Queens bleeds into Nassau County. That was where a soon-to-be-infamous 34-year-old political neophyte walked out to a cheering throng of Republicans and declared victory in one of America’s most important House contests.
Kevin McCarthy, after 15 excruciating ballots, was finally elected speaker of the House, and if his path to leading a slim, ideologically volatile Republican majority is any indication, chaos will be in the offing for the next two years.
It became quite easy, in the days after the so-called Twitter Files were dumped across the Internet, to dismiss entirely all of their revelations. For many progressives, the whole affair was a right-coded distraction, and therefore worth deriding or ignoring altogether.