The End of Inevitability

I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time – when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...

~ Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World, 1995

I've given it time. I've let it settle. I've tried to explain it to friends, but I'm still lying in bed each night thinking about NATO and kids being deported and oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and as each day passes, the same pundits who were so wrong about what would happen insist they have an answer for why it happened, and a dread I can't put into words squeezes a little tighter around my chest.

The takes keep rolling in. It was inflation. It was incumbency fatigue. It was the podcasts, it was Latinos, it was young men, it was white women, it was a lack of authenticity, it was Biden's arrogance and the Democratic party losing touch with middle America and the weaponisation of the information sphere and the triumph of a regressive idea of masculinity. The columnists furiously slice and dice bad data, searching for an explanation that confirms their priors. As if understanding it will somehow make it less real.

Viewed from abroad though, there's something none of them are saying, something that cuts to the bone of how we make sense of the world. For those of us who have built our lives around facts and data, around careful analysis and rational thinking, this election forces us to confront the most inconvenient truth of all - that no matter how good your argument, and how much evidence you marshal in its support, people don't believe what they see; they see what they believe.

The America that I've known my whole life, for all its flaws and hypocrisies, stood for something. It wasn't just about military power or economic might - it was about values. Democracy. Rule of law. Human rights. The idea that nations could work together to solve shared problems. Facts matter. Truth is truth. This is what made it exceptional, what set it apart in the course of human history. The country has of course, repeatedly fallen short of its own professed standards, but the ideals themselves never seemed to be in question.

The billionaires got there in the end though, convincing a majority of Americans to buy into the lie that personal prosperity and the pursuit of equal rights and social justice cannot coexist. When the rest of the world looks at Trump, we no longer see an aberrant exception to American exceptionalism; we see what the country now stands for. That's why the clever explanations all ring so hollow. The worst possible people have won; a kakistocracy that believes tariffs are smart and that drag queens are more dangerous than guns. This is not how stories are supposed to end.

My daughters are three and four, and every evening since they've been able to sit in my lap I've read them books about rabbits and comets and different ways to be brave. On weekends we guiltily plonk them in front of the television where they watch talking dogs and intrepid princesses, and in every single one of those stories they learn that tolerance matters, that power comes with an obligation to protect the less fortunate, and that bullies eventually get their comeuppance.

I'm trying to teach them that certain things are right. Honesty. Kindness. Respect for others. Basic decency. I don't believe that those values are the privilege of the educated class or a luxury for someone for whom the system is working. I believe they're universal, which is why they keep on showing up in all our stories, passed down through generations in every culture on Earth. The challenges we face as a species change, but the fundamental choice between selfishness and generosity, between cruelty and compassion, is supposed to have a correct answer.

That's what makes this moment so gut-wrenching - discovering that for 75 million people, that choice is optional. American voters have had nine years to take Donald Trump's full measure: his breathtaking cruelty, his sexual assaults, his conviction for corruption by a jury of his peers, his bigotry and his pathological need to lie. They've heard the warnings from the most senior people who have worked with him. And with eyes wide open, they have chosen him anyway.

If someone is able to say to themselves, "Well, I don't really care about any of that stuff," then I honestly have no idea what kind of language or argument was ever supposed to reach them. You can't pin that on misinformation or economic anxiety or a failure to listen to the working class. If you're willing to accept a culture where justice serves the wealthy, prejudice is trivialised and power diminishes equality, then we inhabit completely different moral universes. I'm not American, but I know that authoritarianism doesn't get embraced by the world's wealthiest and most militarily secure democracy unless something fundamental has gone horribly wrong.

Look, this isn't the end of the world. Global poverty is going to keep declining. Next year, tens of millions more kids will receive an education and get a solid meal. Humanity will keep making inroads on malaria and AIDS and tuberculosis and a whole lot of other horrible diseases, and marriage equality will keep spreading across the globe. Deforestation in the Amazon matters far more for life on Earth than any of Elon Musk's rockets, and right now it's at its lowest level in nine years. Donald Trump can't do anything about the plummeting price of solar and batteries, and the United States only accounts for about a tenth of global carbon emissions anyway.

It does, however, feel like the end of something important. For as long as I can remember, I've believed that the argument for liberal democracy wins on its own merits. I grew up in apartheid South Africa, and the end of that political system forms the bedrock of my early memories - I was six years old when Nelson Mandela was released, and 11 years old during the country's first democratic elections, a time when the good guys won, justice prevailed, and people sang in the streets. Subsequent years showed that bad men can hijack even the most noble of revolutions but underneath I've always assumed that after each setback, sanity would prevail.

The end of apartheid wasn't just history to me. It was a personal vindication of the belief that moral progress was inevitable. I watched as my country transformed itself from an international pariah into a rainbow nation. Yes, the path was messy, complicated, often painful. But the arc bent toward justice, toward inclusion, toward democracy. When I moved to Australia years later, I carried that lesson with me: that no matter how entrenched the forces of prejudice might seem, the future belonged to progress.

This belief has shaped my work with Future Crunch, and now Fix The News, for almost a decade. In that time I've found and shared thousands of news reports and mountains of data showing clear and sustained evidence of improvement - in public health, in poverty reduction, in human rights, clean energy adoption, in conservation. I've made it my mission to counter the relentless negativity of the news cycle with facts, with careful analysis and proof that humanity can solve its biggest challenges when we put our minds to it.

When people would ask me how I maintained optimism in the face of seemingly endless bad news, I had an easy answer: look at the data. That's truth. It's evidence. It's journalism. It's science. It's an intellectual tradition that stretches back to the Enlightenment. If we just show people the facts, if we just help them see the evidence of progress, they'll join us. After all, who could argue with data showing fewer people in poverty? Who could dispute numbers showing cleaner air, healthier children, longer lives?

In recent years, that belief has been shaken by the rising tide of authoritarianism, and seriously called into question by the humanitarian catastrophes unfolding in Syria and Gaza. The election of Trump for the second time however, has blown it out of the water. We now face grim years which will force us to unpack the meaning of an emboldened and unencumbered MAGAism for the world order, for democracy itself, for the respective responsibilities of nations toward their citizens and toward each other, for humanity's shared pursuit of progress.

So much of what has worked in my lifetime now seems to be in jeopardy. For the first time since I can remember, I'm not sure the good guys are going to win, and I can't tell you how unsettling that is. It's more than unsettling - it's terrifying, because it means everything I thought I knew about how the world works might be wrong. I thought I belonged to the sane majority, and now I find I'm part of the resistance.

Like a lot of people, I've found poetry and fiction far more useful for this moment than the opinion pages of the New York Times. I've gone back multiple times to Cat Valente's short story about the beasts who fought for Fairyland, I have, finally, after years of reluctance, started reading Candide by Voltaire - and I've been thinking a lot about Andor, the most well written and best acted of any Star Wars project. They're all reminding me that sometimes hope is measured in data and graphs, sometimes in fables.

Progress doesn't feel like a guarantee anymore. Overnight, the thousands of examples we've documented here over the last few years suddenly seem like miracles. Each victory we've reported now feels more precious, each step forward more meaningful. My faith in the moral arc has given way to something harder but clearer - the understanding that nothing good happens by itself.

I find myself returning to the lessons of South Africa. That change happened, not because it was inevitable, but because people made it inevitable. Each step forward mattered and people kept on believing in the right thing, even when that belief seemed foolish. In the end the impossible happened not because history ordained it, but because ordinary people kept pushing against the darkness until finally, impossibly, the light broke through.

So where does that leave us? Well, we'll still be here, tracking the data, finding the patterns, telling the stories that matter. Not with blind optimism or calls to "get back into the fight!" - as though everyone hasn't been doing exactly that for years. Instead, while every media outlet in the world is going to spend the next four years shrieking about Trump, we'll be showing you what's happening out there, beyond the headlines, where the resistance is working to keep the lights on.

The stories we tell will be different though. Stories about how progress happens not through some invisible hand of history, but through the visible hands of people who refuse to give up on it. Stories about how facts still matter, how truth still matters, even when the path forward seems darker than before. The bullies might not get their comeuppance like they're supposed to, but we'll keep telling those stories anyway - not because progress is guaranteed, but because tracking it, measuring it, and sharing it is more important than ever.