Everything, broadly construed, continues to be pretty terrible. Every week this administration threatens or commits new war crimes, kills many innocent people, harms the citizens it is supposedly sworn to protect, and generally creates more chaos that seems possible to keep track of. It’s a lot, and as I say to all my friends, it is totally reasonable to be overwhelmed, sad, frustrated, depressed, and more in light of all the horrors. What’s important to me, though, is to not feel hopeless; to believe that all is lost and no better futures are available.

I thought I’d write a quick post on how this discipline of hope is working for me these days, both as a counter to the constant stream of horrors and also as an invitation for comrades to make space for dreaming.

The past few weeks I’ve been reading a bit to try and understand what the fuck we (the US) are doing in Iran. It is not good news, I think it’s best understood as the Trump administration felt emasculated as various domestic political defeats piled up so they did some gender-affirming warfare that was extremely short-sighted and has fucked the entire oil-supply for the world for the foreseeable future. (complete sidebar but I must say it: gender-affirming care that follows medical standards of care has an almost 0% regret rate. affirming one’s gender via geo-political fuckery has much higher rates of regret. trans people are not an enemy! the cis-dudes in charge of the country are) It looks like because of this war, Iran will have a stranglehold on a significant portion of the oil and natural gas supply chains moving forward, which is generally understood to be really bad for most of the world.

This news might be less scary for the US except that this administration also hates renewable energy sources, and has spent the past year undermining all projects that expanded our solar, wind, and other renewable energy infrastructure (most recently paying $1billion to cancel an in-progress wind farm), so our current reliance on oil and gas is locked in for quite awhile. This news on top of so much other awful shit; I could spend an hour more summarizing all the increasingly heated attacks on immigrants, citizens who are brown and black, queer people — specifically trans people, and so much institutional destruction that is ensuring that even if the Trump administration is defeated electorally or otherwise, the United States is no longer capable of functioning as it has for the past few decades.

This overall weakening and destruction is a cause of great harm and I do not want to spin it otherwise; this presidential administration has truly fucked up the US’s future in ways we still don’t fully understand.

But that lack of predictability; the guarantee that things are no longer capable of functioning as normal, that is the space where I think we can cultivate a great deal of hope.

The US has an extremely conservative, slow-to-change political system. The shape of our constitutional republic ensures that the windows of possibility are very small; any given Presidental term is facing steep odds of convincing enough of Congress to make big changes. There’s a reason that the significant moments in our history of progress or regress are connected to geopolitical events (World Wars) or intense domestic events (Civil War, the civil rights movement). The right set of circumstances have to be in place in order to reduce the obstacles for dreaming big.

It’s my perspective that the period after Trump, whenever it begins, will be such a period in the US. A period when big change is not only possible but necessary; because the country will be dealing with all the chaos and destruction that Trump leaves behind.

The futures we can build (just as there are many presents today, depending on which part of the US you live in; how much money you have; how your various identities intersect, there will be many futures) in that period are already being built today, and this is a point where I find cultivation of hope becomes so important, because the terrain for what that future will look like is going to be competitive.

In the US today, not only are we facing the authoritarian right wing (which is the Republican party writ-large, as evidenced by Congress’s complete abandonment of any responsibility or authority in light of Trump’s whims), but also a powerful centrist contingent, represented by much of the democratic party (specifically the leadership of Schumer and Jeffries). The centrist contingent seem to be focused on defeating Trump by returning things to the way they used to be. I believe like you can see this most clearly in the way that a unbelievably large portion of the US population really fucking hates ICE and abolishing the agency is now a very moderate position politically, but it is still mostly unthinkable for the centrist Dems in congress. They are focused on useless reforms like body cameras (which ICE already wears) and forcing the agency to obey laws which are already in place and which the agency is already supposed to be following.

This portion of congress is technically liberal but completely unfit to meet the moment, which means that when the Trump era comes to an end and the country looks to determine what happens next, those of us with big dreams of better futures will not only be fighting the authoritarians trying to continue Trump’s work but also the centrists who think that returning to the pre-Trump status quo is a perfectly desirable goal.

I believe—hope even— that this is a completely unacceptable vision for the future for many Americans. And so the challenge is, if we do not want the authoritarian or centrist visions for the future, what do we want?

This question feels so ripe right now, so generative. This month I am celebrating a year of living in Minnesota, which means that in my first year here I experienced what felt like the strongest expression of US authoritarianism yet when the Trump administration deputized ICE to become a terrorist gang wreaking havoc across an entire state; decimating the constitution and legal rights to due process under the bullshit rhetoric of “law enforcement”. But in that horrific set of circumstances, I also participated in a community-wide act of political imagination that felt revolutionary beyond anything I’ve ever experienced.

In the first few months of 2026 (ongoing as I write), Minnesotans imagined what futures they wanted to live in and then collectively built them in real time. As some neighbors sheltered in place and fought to avoid masked paramilitary gangs seeking to kidnap them, the neighbors who were not targets stepped up. We built mutual aid networks that delivered groceries to thousands of families. We figured out ways to transport neighbors to medical appointments. Veterinarians created networks created clandestine networks to ensure pets were taken care of. We rallied people around the country to help us pay rent for the neighbors who went without work for weeks or months. This was all on top of the hundreds if not thousands of people who patrolled the streets seeking to intervene and stop the kidnappings.

I can’t get this community uprising out of my head because almost literally overnight Minnesotans decided that the normal rules of how the world works were optional, ineffective, and ignorable. The United States typically operates under an individualist logic that says housing, food, and other necessities are earned through work. We intermediate all of this with money, and that is why there is this assumed logic that working hard earns you a comfortable life. This logic is so pervasive that it can be hard to see, it is the air that we breathe as a country. Yet even though it is unseen, it exists, and as the uprising in Minnesota showed, it is optional. We—everyday Minnesotans of all backgrounds and class—chose a different way of working, and it was and continues to be wildly successful.

What I want to make clear is that this collective response was a collective act of imagination. Specifically, of political imagination—a collective reimaigining of how the world should work.

The period after Trump’s disastrous administration will offer so many opportunities for similar political imaginations; for addressing the many catastrophes we will inevitably be dealing with. These catastrophes will demand political responses, which is to say they will demand collective responses because individuals will not be able to address them. Politics being—as I understand it—the process of collectively determining how we want things to be.

In that period, we know that the right wing will be useless; they are on board with the Trumpian project. So the battle will be between the centrists, who are fighting to return to some impossible to attain past, verses some large portion of the US citizenry who want better futures.

But better how? That is the question that demands political imagination, and does not require us to wait to start.

The war on Iran at this point guarantees that oil will be expensive forever more. That’s terrible for us now, because we are so reliant on it. If we can’t (and shouldn’t, for climate change reasons) make it more affordable, how do we expedite the process of making it unnecessary? That is not simply a question of transportation. It’s a question that affects so many dimensions of life; oil is the core ingredient for plastic, which we are possibly even more dependent on than gas.

There are many many people already dreaming these dreams, imagining these futures, exploring these challenges. I hope to write about more of them soon, but you don’t need me to find the ideas.

The main thing I was thinking about today, that led me to write this blog post, is the urgency I feel that dreaming big dreams about worlds we could inhabit, or our kids could inhabit, is wildly important. Talking about those dreams, refining them, figuring out what they are overlooking, all of this is work we can start doing now. Dreaming is free, as many like to say.

Cultivating political imagination is an act of hope. It reminds us that even though the institutions and centers of power in our world are currently captured by the dumbest, most evil humans; that is not a permanent state. The future has not occurred yet. The dreams you imagine and the beliefs about how the world should be you develop based on those dreams will inform the actions you take in the future. They give you new stories to tell, new futures to paint, new invitations to extend to your neighbors.

Before January 2026, I could not imagine that thousands (maybe millions?) of Americans would choose collective well-being over personal safety. I did not think we had it in us. That was a failure of imagination on my part, and I will never again fail to believe in that possibility, thanks to my comrades here in Minnesota.

We don’t know what catastrophes are coming, and we don’t know how hard it will be to fight them. But we can start imagining the worlds we want to inhabit, start imagining the ways we wish to remake this dumbass world, and then when we’re given opportunities to change things, we will have a strong vision of what changes to make.

I despise this administration and all of the horrors its leaders are sowing upon the world. The harms are real, and will not be diminished by our imagination. Please don’t take me to be naive or a magical thinker. But I also think that the US is on the threshold of some opportunities for structural change that haven’t been seen in over a century. I hope we can collectively take advantage of those opportunities to make futures with far fewer horrors and harms. I remain firm in my knowledge that the future has not happened and no outcome is inevitable. Better worlds always remain possible.