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To mark the final day of 2024, here are some of my favorite columns from the last year. They are favorites in the sense that they remind me of where we’ve been, the ups and the downs, but also favorites because I hope there are ideas that will inspire us in the coming year. I can’t offer the message of hope and accomplishment I would have liked to be sharing today. The simple truth is that we lost the election, and Donald Trump’s reelection says some devastating things about our country. But I remain hopeful that we can all stick together and get important work done. I still think that civil discourse is the path forward, even though our progress as a nation is not linear.
That said, here are some columns that stand out for me as I think about the past year:
In March, I wrote We Need To Talk About This after Donald Trump posted a video of a truck that had a picture of Joe Biden, bound and gagged, on its tailgate. It’s an important reminder of the unprecedented ways Trump is willing to flirt with violence, always laughing it off or claiming that’s not what he’s doing.
In September, Trump decided late one night that he should tell American women how they feel and what they should do. Unfortunately, too many of them apparently listened to him. I wrote Trump’s Happy Vision for Women at that time, but misogyny was a recurrent theme this year, even before Kamala Harris became the Democratic Party’s nominee. In July, I wrote We Need To Talk About Misogyny.
The Supreme Court was a disappointment this year, just like they were last year, and on so many different fronts. The Court’s decision in Loper Bright is going to have a long-term impact as Trump 2.0 tries to do away with the part of the “administrative state” that they don’t like—the parts that protect the environment from big business and billionaires, for instance, or kooks who don’t believe in the Polio vaccine. Why You Should Be Concerned About Loper Bright.
After the election, I wrote about The Importance of Information, the role misinformation and disinformation played, and the need to address how we handle this problem, which isn’t going away, in the coming years to strengthen democracy.
In late November, when so many of us were down, and a lot of people were out, I wrote Not Broken. If you’re still feeling that way, this might be the right New Year’s read for you, especially towards the end of the piece. “Donald Trump has not broken the rule of law. He has tortured it and stretched it out of shape insofar as it applies to him. But he has not broken it, and he has not broken us. He cannot do that unless we let him, and I don’t intend to.”
Where we’re headed: The Democracy Index, my focus in the coming year (years?) on helping us understand what is happening in a manageable way so that we can avoid the burnout and numbness that characterized Trump’s first administration for so many people. Yes, there is an election in 2026, and we need to be ready.
And, of course, there are chickens (with good pictures!) and the importance of Encouraging Civil Discourse.
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Thanks for reading Civil Discourse and here’s to a Happy New Year!
We’re in this together,
Joyce
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