A key difference between 2017 and 2025 is that in 2017, liberal and progressive ordinary people were dismayed and vulnerable to Trump derangement syndrome while institutionalists were more measured in their responses because it was more noisy theater than substance, and the Democrats were still marginally effective in opposition.

This time around it is reversed. The institutionalists are suffering TDS because state capacity is actually being dismantled, not just threatened with bluster. Liberal and progressive ordinary people have not just given up on state capacity surviving this assault, but even on the Democratic Party surviving this enough to mount a meaningful electoral challenge based on reconstruction or anything more imaginative in 2026. Real-time resistance is a fantasy. They’ll just remain barely alive enough to prevent more effective opposition from taking over. Salvage efforts will not be worthless but won’t be sufficient to sustain a political tradition. Without new ideas and organized resources entering the arena from the left (<5% probability) we’re headed for a decade or more of de facto one-party rule presiding over an extractive, retreating rump state run like a PE fund for and by oligarchs. The story won’t be as bad as post-Soviet Russia, but in the same genre.

But it doesn’t feel like hopelessness at ordinary citizen level. Merely sensible abandonment of an overrun political-institutional front. When Rome has already been sacked, don’t stick around. Retreat to the swamp and build Venice. Truth be told, middle-class democrats are more insulated from collapse of state capacity than even maga voters, and the most vulnerable segments of voters swung enough towards Trump it’s clear they’re giving up on the democrats anyway. So there’s less need of guilt at abandoning them. Not like much of substance was being done for them anyway. Which means the stage is set for a narrowly middle-class-urban systematic exit towards a less vulnerable private-communal-mutualist post-state new institutionalism resting on a hardened new cosmopolitanism. The looming middle-class abandonment of the vulnerable globally will be even more cruel than the US abandonment of Ukraine. And as unapologetic bleeding hearts we’ll feel it more.

Yes, colleges are under siege, but most of us already have degrees from back when they meant something, and it’s hard to mourn the demise of universities when Trumpists are only doing what AI would have done in a few years anyway. I wouldn’t recommend college to any 18-year-old today. Find another script. You really want to go into debt for a piece of paper saying you spent 4 years amid DEI battles being taught by desperate faculty scrambling simultaneously to teach around AI and hang on to collapsing grant funding controlled by “cathedral” inquisitors? The average 18-year-old should only go to college if it’s a) dirt cheap or free and b) in one of the rare places that’s figuring out a playbook to beat the collapsing game. And it won’t necessarily be the institutions buffered by huge private endowments. Those will most likely be captured to serve the residual credentialing needs of elite failsons.

Yes, cosmopolitanism is under siege, the rules-based order is in shreds, and Davos will soon be replaced by a Trump-Putin-Musk bare-chested rabbit hunting party in Hungary hosted by Orban (it will be known as the World Masculine Energy Forum) but you can still travel internationally relatively cheaply and maintain and invest in your global urban middle-class network while the new elites war over the goat carcass of the old order on horseback.

The landscape of desolation is liberating for the unencumbered liberal-progressive now. You can turn away from the lost causes and take swings at interesting new things. Plant new seeds while the institutionalists fight to be bag holders. Ironically, I think conservatives will be the ones left holding the bag because they actually believe they’re reforming and resurrecting rather than destroying and devastating. Entertaining though it might be to watch Trumpies fuck around and find out that governance is hard, it’s better to turn your attention to building new things.