As our team edited this, The Progressive’s first issue to be published in the United States of America’s 250th anniversary year, I was reminded of a passage from a book on disaster recovery.
After something like a hurricane, wrote scholars Lucy Arendt and Daniel Alesch in their 2014 book Long-Term Community Recovery from Natural Disasters, “community actors are encouraged to avoid making a blueprint for recovery.” Blueprints, they explain, have precise goals that are achieved in a deterministic process. But “recovery is most certainly not a deterministic process. It’s a stochastic process. There is no one best way to move toward recovery and to be able to reliably predict the outcome of individual actions in pursuit of recovery.”
Stochastic, meaning “subject to chance.” What will happen in the aftermath of a different sort of disaster—the dismantling of U.S. democracy?
In her coverage of the contentious behind-the-scenes planning for the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, historian Jill Lepore noted the recent political assassinations and assassination attempts, the National Guard deployments against U.S. cities, and the rampant abductions by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as reasons to believe that “prospects for a peaceful anniversary appear remote.”
“A revolutionary year seems far likelier,” Lepore wrote, “and, politically, that could go either way.”
Our December/January issue is an opportunity to reflect on the past year and look forward to the one ahead. This year, we’re covering the ways in which people hold on, fight repression, and initiate change as they face an unknowable future. Paul Gordon reports from the Anacostia River, a long-abused but recovering waterway in the nation’s capital facing the loss of essential federal funding. Nyki Duda covers how U.S. President Donald Trump and El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele are egging each other on to abolish democratic norms inside both nations. Kurt Hollander writes about looming threats—including the U.S. military—to the sacred ancestral land of Gorgona Island, Colombia’s jewel of biodiversity. In our annual year-end “Favorite Books” feature, you’ll find recommendations for navigating this particular moment from your favorite Progressive contributors, including Cristina Jiménez’s Dreaming of Home from Ruth Conniff, and Alec Karakatsanis’s Copaganda from Sarah Lahm. My report from New Orleans on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina discusses the steps communities across the country have taken onto literal terra incognita in order to survive. Photographer Wali Khan and our associate editor Rachel E. Hawley bring readers to the front of ICE’s Operation Midway Blitz. Writer Nourdine Shnino takes us along on his reflection of fleeing Gaza City with his wife and son.
In a look ahead, our extremism and democracy correspondent Melissa Ryan writes about what lies ahead for the 2026 midterm elections. Ryan—whose long political career includes raising millions of dollars online for Democratic candidate Russ Feingold, former U.S. Senator from Wisconsin, and working on President Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign—writes about the destruction of the White House East Wing as a symbol of our political destitution.
“I have no desire to rebuild the East Wing or the system of checks and balances that has fallen and failed us,” Ryan powerfully asserts. “I want to be inspired by new ideas, new energy, and new voices I haven’t yet heard from.”
As for what comes next, if we borrow from the disaster recovery literature, Arendt and Alesch suggest that “without information and without known probabilities” community members will have to get comfortable “making ‘good enough’ decisions.” In other words, progressives must tap into the tool kit of resistance tactics that we know very well and rise to the moment. The answers we don’t have now will emerge as we move forward. And while Lepore is correct that a revolution could go either way, we can acknowledge another truth: Mass movements engaged in revolutionary efforts are the only mechanism through which the people win. So, revolution it is, and hopefully, rebirth.
“Depending on how you look at things,” as Ryan puts it in these pages, “2026 is either America’s 250th anniversary or its first.”