Recently, I was enjoying my favorite activity: doom-scrolling Twitter and listening to Spotify. My feed was filling with news of ICE’s raid on MacArthur Park. At that moment, Spotify played Richard Harris’s cover of “MacArthur Park.” I listened to Richard Harris sing about the end of a relationship that wasn’t his. At the same time, ICE agents on horseback lined up for a TikTok video after scaring off a summer camp of children. It was a moment of perfect clarity that crystallized everything I had felt since January.

MacArthur Park is melting. The dream of the last century is melting. We are melting. The cake that we have and have eaten, too, is melting, and we’re only now realizing we’ve lost the recipe. For those born after America’s peak – all the Millennials and Zoomers – we’re all Richard Harris. We’re all singing about the end of a relationship that was never ours. 

The American Dream was never ours, but it is only now that we realize what that means. We had resigned ourselves to lives of mediocrity, but that was only an illusion of the stagnant 2010s. That stagnation is over. Now our days echo with the din of drums, heralding calamity as they draw closer and closer. MacArthur Park is melting, and I never even got to visit.

It’s been a week since the ICE raid on MacArthur Park. In that time, MAGA has shown deep cracks in its foundation. Trump has made the mistake of pushing too hard on the Epstein issue. He is insisting that the files both never existed and did exist, but that Clinton, Obama, and Biden made them up. Of course, the Clinton administration never investigated Epstein. Bill Clinton was also a close associate of Epstein, but it doesn’t seem to matter. Now MAGA chuds are calling each other retards on Twitter. At the same time, their influencers chide them for ever caring about Epstein. We’ll see whether this has long-lasting consequences for Trump. 

Trump has also begun to test the waters on his latest act of fascist authoritarianism. He is threatening to revoke the citizenship of a natural-born American. There is confusion about why his target is Rosie O’Donnell, a comedian with whom he had a beef back in the 2000s. But why would it be anyone else? O’Donnell is so perfect that it couldn’t be anyone else. Trump – like many of his faithful die-hard followers – isn’t animated primarily by material issues. Those do matter, but they’re secondary to resurrecting irrelevant vendettas. Any MAGA person who has never posted on 4Chan is somebody whose concept of gay men is 1980s John Waters. It’s somebody who thinks all Mexican gangsters are the spitting image of Danny Trejo.

Neither Trump nor this subset cares because they’ve avoided the bill all their lives. For Trump, this is very much literal. The only shrewdness Trump has shown is realizing that billionaires never have to pay. Instead of paying construction workers, he has them deported. He offers his lawyer free parking and hotel stays. He avoids responsibility by trusting that his power and wealth insulate him. He is the living embodiment of the saying: “If you owe the bank a thousand dollars, you have a problem. If you owe the bank a million dollars, the bank has a problem.”

For his followers, this is true more on a conceptual level. These people are small business and car dealership owners, America’s petty nobility. They are people who have fallen into a dangerous intellectual trap. On the one hand, they’re wealthy enough to avoid any consequences for their actions. As a result, they cannot conceive that anything they do can have consequences. But, they’re not so wealthy that there isn’t somebody higher on them on the social ladder with more power. This breeds a resentment and a feeling that they are far weaker than they think they are. 

Marx said that history repeats itself twice: first as tragedy, then as farce. The great tragedy of the 20th century – the World Wars – had the exact origin as the farce of the 21st century will. In both cases, it is the butcher’s bill of the world-spanning empires coming due. The great powers of Europe sought to force each other to pay the bill to their maximal extent. Each believed that once the bloodletting had stopped, they would be atop the pile by having bled less. But when the bill comes due for America, we will refuse to pay it. The farce comes from the fact that nobody will be able to make us pay it. Any attempt on the scale of the 20th century will result in a general nuclear exchange and humanity’s end. Any lesser attempt runs into America’s indomitable ability to fold its arms and say “no.”

If you want to know what the next few decades will be like, it’s this image, repeating forever:

That picture is from a climate change conference. Climate change will be how the wheels of history ensure somebody pays the butcher’s bill. America will have to pay some of the bill, of course. But we won’t be the only ones, nor will we pay the most significant share. Bismarck said a special providence protects idiots, drunkards, and America. This is true especially now that we are the supreme idiot, drunk on our power.

But what does that mean for us, at this moment in history? It means things are about to get even stupider. It also means that things are about to get even more evil. Alligator Alcatraz is only the beginning. It is the harbinger of the next few years, where the dumbest people alive will slaughter and rape on scales unimaginable to the sane, then do TikTok dances on the corpses or soyface at their victim’s bleeding orifice. 

Anyone who lived through the Bush II years will have some inkling of what I am talking about. The Iraq War was the canary in the coal mine for what this century was going to bring. Soldiers torturing naked prisoners at Abu Ghraib and taking funny pictures with their victims. An occupation force reluctantly offering an impoverished nation credit cards full of money they couldn’t use. The supreme imperial world power sends a dick enlargement surgeon to speak with the religious leader of Iraqi Shi’ites. This was the warning; what comes next is going to be both far more horrifying and far more farcical, a genocide done as a slapstick routine. 

And what of the Democrats, the official opposition? Well, they’re attacking Zohran Mamdani, who won the New York City Democratic primary. They call him an “anti-semite” who doesn’t love Israel enough. This tactic didn’t work for his opposition in the primary, but that doesn’t matter to the party as a whole. The Democrats have always acted like one of the “natural parties of government.” Those are the centrist parties in multi-party parliamentary democracies that stay in government. The only problem is, America isn’t a multi-party parliamentary democracy. 

There is no center in American politics, no stable roost from which the Dems can dictate policy. This is clear now, more than ever. The Republicans embrace open fascism and make clear they intend to govern forever. The only way the Democrats can oppose this is by abandoning their self-image. They must form a left-wing coalition that can overcome the Republicans. This is only possible through elections and organized protests. Suppose their response to Zohran is any indication. In that case, they will not do this, and any attempt from the grassroots level to force them to will face opposition.

Many people criticize the Communists for not allying with liberals to oppose Hitler. But when Hitler became Chancellor, the Social Democrats urged calm. They believed the Weimar constitution would survive Hitler.

There will be protests against ICE, the deportations, and Trump. They’ve already started, and no amount of Democratic tut-tutting will stop them. But these protests must organize themselves into a coherent movement. Otherwise, they will not have the staying power necessary to defeat American fascism. Any success thus far has stemmed from Trump’s cowardice, which permeates his administration. This won’t last forever. Either Trump will feel cornered and compelled to double down, or he’ll die and a new cadre of leaders will emerge. In either case, the other shoe drops. What happens after that, nobody knows, beyond the fact that it’ll be a bloodletting of one kind or another. 

What worries me the most is ICE, which the Big Beautiful Bill has enlarged considerably. By the 2026 midterms, it’ll be a proper paramilitary force, Trump’s paramilitary force. It currently focuses on mass deportations, but that’s due to its name. Its purview can change even if it officially remains the same. The Nazi SS started as a mere bodyguard for Hitler: its name is an acronym for “Protection Squad.” It kept this name even as it became both the Reich’s central law enforcement body and the armed wing of the Nazi Party. Come the 2026 midterms, ICE might be “providing security” for voting stations.

Doomer, as I may be, I don’t think this situation is hopeless. But I do believe time is running out. With each passing day, the available paths that avoid fascism become fewer. The aperture of history is narrowing around us. If we continue to let inertia control the flow of events, we face a dark future ahead. The cake in MacArthur Park is melting, and we’ll never have that recipe again. But that doesn’t mean we’ll lose the good things in life with it. That only happens if we continue to allow those above us to prance around on horseback. Every day they get to hold office is another day where things get worse. 

I’m not one for “call to actions”. I have no plan, and I wouldn’t know where to start. I trust you as much as I trust myself. I think you know what you have to do to fight back against the encroaching darkness. Whether that’s taking part in a protest or helping out the oppressed indirectly, you know what you have to do. Success isn’t certain, and the odds are stacked against us. But if we don’t do something, how can we look at ourselves in the mirror after all is said and done? So do something, even if that something is as simple as screaming in the face of the people who keep you down. Scream enough that they can’t enjoy oppressing you. Scream so much that they can’t look themselves in the mirror.