That world is over, replaced by one that no one fully understands

 Bill McKibben

I think we’ve finally come to the end of the FDR era. The Depression and World War II were such enormous all-encompassing shocks that they produced a new politics that had to do with solidarity—America as a group project. That was badly frayed by Reaganism, with its every-man-for-himself ethos, but it survived in some form through yesterday. Biden, in fact, was very much a throwback to LBJ, complete with a national manufacturing policy. But that world is over, replaced by one that no one fully understands—a world in which some amalgam of Joe Rogan and TikTok define political attitudes. It’s more of a vacuum.

Which means it will be replaced eventually. My candidate for the exogenous shock on the scale of the Depression and World War II is climate change and the energy transition. I think that the need and the opportunity to convert the world’s economies to cheap renewable power will produce some kind of different politics: more local, and less plutocratic, if we are lucky. But I have my doubts if it will come fast enough to prevent climate disaster on an almost unimaginable scale.