-- A little 2025, a little the last 80 years, and a Gore Vidal novel I just finished.
There is no doubt that 2025 was a year of a distinct and recognizable change in the USA. What it portends for the future is much in doubt--ain't it always that way?--but this year, taken as a data point, is truly what President Biden used to say, an inflection point.
The effect of the attempted destruction of the federal government that was the chief initiative of the Trump Administration in this year may take long to fully reveal itself, whether or not there is ever a serious effort to reverse it. The damage sought to our climate, cruel and casually imposed, may or may not be fatal in the larger, global sense.
The damage to our international relations, though, and to our nation's position in the world order, is permanent. Even if we somehow regain our footing as a nation and can refrain from piratical kleptocracy in the new A.D. (After Dickhead), we will never again be the monopole, the only superpower, able to set and maintain the primary rules of geopolitics on the grand scale. Diplomatic primacy, military superiority, the security of owning the world's reserve currency, the best military alliances, somewhat real economic dominance--these are all in question, even if we can maintain our momentum in a frenetic technological race. We can talk about the loss of moral posture below.
What we shattered in 2025 was cracked by the fall of 2024. It was no longer possible to dismiss the freakish Trump win in 2016 as an aberration. This was the great realization abroad, and the implications of that fact, although not always viewed in the same way for its effect locally, always provides critical guidance on the national interest, because always relevant. The USA was, indeed, that important. It will never be the same in that regard.
A 2025 retrospective post on Substack by Phillips O'Brien, an expert on the military-diplomacy nexus and the war against Ukraine, was titled "2025 In Review: The Year We Switched Sides". That tells a lot of the story, and is almost incontrovertible in that case, but I disagree with the notion that this applies to us all (in the US) and across the board, but merely that, in the world to come, all will know that we can change sides without any consistency. Except greed, maybe. What has changed is that we are not in the clear leadership position anymore.
"The Golden Age"
The seventh and final novel in Gore Vidal's series of US historical novels came out in 2000. He lived until 2012, but he was already 75 then and near the end of his highly productive writing career. Like others in the series, he mixed real historical characters, using their authentic statements and writings to drive dialogue and interactions with invented characters which he strategically placed close to "the room where it happens" (to quote the play "Hamilton").
The narrative centers around the journalistic career of an invented D.C. newspaper editor and publisher, Peter Sanford, spanning the years from 1940 all the way to contemporary time in 2000, though its focus was mostly on the time just before the US' entry into WWII and the immediate postwar period. For the characters in the story (and clearly for Vidal), the intentional entry into that war was in order to launch a period of global dominance, though its gleam was ended after the (again, intentional) fabrication of the Cold War, which soon transformed into the Korean War stalemate (his character's view: defeat and surrender), and by the betrayal of our values of the anti-Communist witch-hunt. So, from that view, the Golden Age only lasted from 1945 to 1950.
Vidal's cynical view of American history reveals itself frequently through the story. FDR knew the Japanese were going to attack; in fact, he welcomed it and forced it to happen. The sudden Wendell Wilkie rise to the Republican nomination to challenge Roosevelt's unprecedented third term was driven by by big money of New Dealers who wanted to make sure both parties were inclined to war, against popular opinion and the positions of the top Republican candidates, and included a murder to help ensure that the dynamics of the Republican convention favored the dark-horse candidacy of Wilkie. Such are the creations Vidal puts into his story behind history. I was somewhat surprised he never mentioned the shocking story of the internment of Japanese on our West Coast.
Sometimes he deals with known fact, often with popular underground wisdom, frequently he grants his characters the prophetic quality which comes only with hindsight, and he is not beyond inventing history. In The Golden Age, Sanford's foil is an opportunist, Clay Overbury, who is a Senator due to take the Presidency in 1960 (instead of JFK, in the knowing whispers in Washington drawing rooms) before he dies in a plane crash. The Sanford character is part of a family particularly close to FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt, and then later he has personal interactions with President Harry Truman.
Vidal breaks down that fourth wall to some extent in this novel, which covers some events Vidal, as someone within the elite, witnessed personally, if peripherally. He even puts himself, "Gore Vidal", in a couple of scenes and ends the novel with Gore fictitiously interviewing Sanford, now Vidal's age of 75 and physically infirm, at Vidal's (real) home in Ravello, Italy. Then the final chapter is told by Vidal in first person and wraps up the series with some philosophical musings about the existential reality, or lack thereof, of history, reality, and the greater historical context. It includes some unfortunate comments sarcastically referring to the fear of Arabs blowing up planes, just a year before the reality hit.
I would point out that Vidal was also something of a scholar of ancient history and his whole limited 1945-50 range of US' period of true greatness is a slight at ourselves in comparison to the greater Golden Age of Athens. It is instead to empire that the US is and was destined, in Vidal's view, something developing over several of his novels and many of his essays.
With respect to Vidal's view, our Golden Age was not really ended by the Korean War or the rise of our stultifying military-industrial complex. Our culture and its impact has been much more than military rule, domestic or abroad, and much less about governing the savages than about guiding them toward our interests. With plenty of advantage over our rivals, we've been able to more than keep pace, militarily, economically, and above all, technologically. Until now.
Last Words on this Regrettable Year:
AI has achieved the right level to interact with American culture--that's why it's called "slop".
I cannot complain too much about the year, as I have had little or no personal impact of the government insanity. Just some people who've lost their jobs; I'm sorry for them, but that happens all the time as employers take it out on those below in the hierarchy. The stress of constant challenge to our confidence in our supposed political leadership hurts deeply and reminds us of the need for reform, but we all recognize the failure in the scenes we are presented daily. The most common injury is to morality and decency.
And honesty. My greatest concern for 2026 is that the flood of fraud, combined with the tariffs, will inhibit consumer spending to the point that recession does come, and that Washington will then create some war as a distraction. In my view, that is the only way the Republicans will be able to hold onto power in Congress.
Postscript: The Golden Age of Food
The organic food movement grew some surprising legs, so it may survive locally, but global food availability--the incredible variety of food that is available today, because of both sea and air shipping--may be in serious danger. The price of imports and supply chain issues may combine over time to end broadly-available exotic produce and narrow our diets, though there may remain pockets of gourmet for the most wealthy.
Posts
