Year of Blood and Madness

 Now that we have reached the last day of 2025, more than one person is commenting on what a truly awful year it was. And indeed, stepping back and beholding the entire thing in retrospect, it is plain just how rotten it was from the standpoint of the human spirit. We can see this most clearly by comparing how things stood a year ago with where they stand today. 

This time, a year ago, 150 innocent people had not yet been abducted from their homes and deported—in violation of a U.S. court order—to a secret torture prison in El Salvador. The man who masterminded this atrocity and willfully chose to breach court orders had not yet been rewarded for his efforts with a lifetime appointment as a federal circuit judge. 

This time, a year ago, 107 people in the Caribbean and Latin America were still breathing, working, laughing, spending time with their families—instead of floating in charred, dismembered pieces in the ocean, because the U.S. government had appointed to itself the right to kill anyone in the world without charge, trial, or legal cause. 

This time, a year ago, the U.S. media was still largely free of government interference—instead of being consolidated into the hands of a small coterie of Trump-friendly billionaires who have proved themselves abjectly willing to compromise their editorial integrity in order to flatter Trump's ego.  

This time, a year ago, U.S. universities and law firms were proud members of an independent civil society—instead of craven arms of federal power that had signed humiliating agreements with the Trump administration, the terms of which transparently require them to chill dissent in their ranks and reserve the lion's share of rewards they dispense to privileged white men. 

This time, a year ago, the U.S. president hadn't yet fawned over Gulf State autocrats in the White House and eaten out of their hands, while denigrating American journalists for daring to ask about their human rights records. 

What a disgraceful year! What a rotten, miserable setback for human freedom and honor and decency! A year of narcissistic billionaires, of craven political toadies and courtiers and flatterers. A year when every different variety of creep—from crypto bros to new-age drips; from petro-state tyrants to Russian dictators—seemed all to have joined forces. 

"A curse upon you, year of blood and madness," as Alexander Herzen once wrote, in his From the Other Shore (Budberg trans.), "year of triumphant vulgarity, bestiality, stupidity—a curse upon you! [...] From the first day to the last you brought only misery; not one bright minute, not one peaceful hour did you contain."

Herzen was writing about a different year, of course—1849. Another year of political reaction. Another year in which all hopes for human progress and liberty seemed suddenly to go into reverse. A year when all the forces of superstition, ignorance, and bigotry—a "Walpurgisnacht," as Herzen put it, of every evil incarnation of the ancien régime—seemed to be fighting as one. 

That sounds an awful lot like the year we just had—our own year of reaction; our own Walpurgisnacht, when everyone from George Santos to the Wincklevoss twins to Rod Blagojevich to Emil Bove to the former Honduran president who was convicted of cocaine smuggling, Juan Orlando Hernandez—now pardoned by Trump—came out to dance around the same camp fire on the same witch's peak.

But this comparison should give us hope. As dark a year of reaction as 1849 was—it did not actually represent a final victory of the forces of political conservatism and autocracy. Mere decades later, France would be a republic again. Italy would be unified and free. A century later still, all of Western Europe would be liberal-democratic and participating in a transnational political union—something liberal writers of the 19th century could only contemplate as a distant dream. 

As another writer—Arthur Hugh Clough—put it in 1849, contemplating the same bitter events that prompted Herzen's outcry: 

If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars;

     It may be, in yon smoke concealed,

Your comrades chase e'en now the fliers,

     And, but for you, possess the field.

For while the tired waves, vainly breaking

     Seem here no painful inch to gain,

Far back through creeks and inlets making,

     Comes silent, flooding in, the main.