This issue was completed in the aftermath of the 2024 election in November, and will be going to press around the time Donald Trump begins his second term. As many have noted, the response in the country has been different the second time around. Nowhere is the difference starker than in the liberal intellectual world, where Trump’s first term notoriously became the flash point for a “resistance” that swept its way across establishment media, academia and the arts. This time, the fashionable thing to say is that the response is closer to resignation; in fact, many artists and intellectuals have gone further, expressing relief at the idea that they will now be able to move on from the censorious moralism that characterized the #Resistance years. (Such thinkers have plenty of company among the powerful; Mark Zuckerberg recently announced that Meta will dissolve its fact-checking and DEI programs, citing a desire to “restore free expression.”) Some writers and artists have gone further still, prophesying that Trump 2.0 will coincide with a new era of freedom, cultural liberation and epic art—perhaps even a second Romantic age.
It is—obviously!—too early to tell. As Becca Rothfeld points out in our opening letter on the “Old Romantics,” the heady optimism of the self-proclaimed New Romantics has not so far been justified by much cultural output, and it would likely benefit—as would so many of our cultural tendencies today—from a less facile engagement with its philosophical and historical reference points. More importantly, as Becca also argues, critics should not be “in the prediction business.” Neither, in our view, should philosophers, artists or historians, no matter how many have volunteered for such roles in recent years. From Silicon Valley to Substack, we have no shortage of prophets or pamphleteers these days, each of them eager to tell us why utopia or apocalypse lies right around the corner. What we lack, oddly enough, is thinking and writing that makes us more attentive to the world right in front of us—the here and now in all its mystery, strangeness and often tormented reality. Thinking and writing that helps us not to predict the future but to act as self-conscious citizens, who are both in touch with our historical moment and capable of determining our own course within it.
To find and publish such writing will continue to be The Point’s mission during these next four years, as it has been since we started the magazine at the beginning of Obama’s first term. The challenge, as always, is figuring out how to see our present as a whole, as opposed to picking and choosing what counts as “representative” in it. This does not mean trying to include every view, no matter how thoughtless, or attempting to triangulate between them. It does mean being committed to following our perceptions wherever they might lead, and regardless of whether they end up contradicting previously agreed-upon parameters. To the extent that intellectual conversation felt constricted during Trump’s first term, it was often because certain factions in the country became convinced that it was up to them to prescribe what was “normal” or permissible for the rest of us to discuss. These attempts failed. Mercifully, from the point of view of intellectual life, the history of culture records very few total victories. Which is one reason why those who feel emboldened by the “vibe shift” today would benefit from keeping in mind the fate of progressives who believed history was bending their way eight years ago.
In this issue of The Point we are proud to present as diverse and original a set of perspectives on the American present as you are likely to find in any intellectual magazine. That begins with two reports on political life from this past summer leading up the election, which read like dispatches from different worlds. One is Mana Afsari’s reflection on a cohort of young, right-wing professionals in Washington, D.C., including conversations with some of Trump’s most passionate supporters, during and after the fourth annual National Conservatism conference. The other is Lauren Michele Jackson’s report from the Democratic National Convention in Chicago last year, where Jackson finds a party that “would prefer politics be anything—ineffectual, genocidal, even—but embarrassing.” Approaching the Democratic Party from another direction, the novelist Jessi Jezewska Stevens writes about how liberals might respond aesthetically and stylistically to the advance of “right-wing irony” in culture, suggesting that the first step will be surmounting their habitual reliance on a “politics of contempt.” Journalist Emily Jashinsky describes how that politics of contempt feels from the other side, in her reflection on her journey from a Milwaukee exurb to the East Coast, amid the decade-in-the-making effects of “trickle-down culture.”
In our literary section, rather than trend forecasting, we present for our readers the kind of fiction, both old and new, that feels surprising and alive to us right now. The section begins with an excerpt from the 1981 novel White Masks by the Lebanese novelist and intellectual Elias Khoury, who died last year. Written at the height of the Lebanese Civil War, we print it here as a tribute to Khoury’s career—and for its depiction of the political disillusionment brought on by the brutality and absurdity of war, still unsettling forty years later. Following it are two contemporary stories, by Kenyan and Finnish writers, both of whom write in the wake of autofiction, playing with the conventions of the genre while also, partially, inhabiting it.
The rest of the essays in the issue are devoted to evaluating the rapidly shifting cultural dynamics of our moment, from Sam Kriss’s comprehensive review of the alt-lit or Dimes Square canon, to Apoorva Tadepalli on what a spate of “millennial divorce memoirs” tell us about prevailing attitudes toward long-term coupling and marriage, to two distinctive reflections on contemporary gender dynamics: one, by Rafael Frumkin, arguing for the priority of the “narrative self” in discussions of trans identity—even if it throws a wrench in some popular political slogans—and another, by Grazie Sophia Christie, on sick girls, TikTok realists, witches, Jane Austen and what they all have to do with the seductions of post-feminism.
One thing it does not take any prophesying to know is that there will be surprises in the next four years, in both culture and politics. Our responsibility as a magazine will be to remain open to those surprises no matter where they come from, or how they challenge our preconceived ideas. This is not because we as editors do not have our own strong convictions and commitments, or that we wish to participate in some fantasy of objectivity. Rather, it is because we believe it is the job of intellectuals and writers to try and to test our ideas against our experiences and the experiences of others. This remains, too, one of the distinctive roles that magazines, which by definition are not individualistic or solipsistic enterprises, can continue to play today. For many intellectuals during the Trump years, hell was other people; but the limitations of the discourse that resulted suggest to us a different lesson: that we think either in dialogue with others, or not at all.
This issue was completed in the aftermath of the 2024 election in November, and will be going to press around the time Donald Trump begins his second term. As many have noted, the response in the country has been different the second time around. Nowhere is the difference starker than in the liberal intellectual world, where Trump’s first term notoriously became the flash point for a “resistance” that swept its way across establishment media, academia and the arts. This time, the fashionable thing to say is that the response is closer to resignation; in fact, many artists and intellectuals have gone further, expressing relief at the idea that they will now be able to move on from the censorious moralism that characterized the #Resistance years. (Such thinkers have plenty of company among the powerful; Mark Zuckerberg recently announced that Meta will dissolve its fact-checking and DEI programs, citing a desire to “restore free expression.”) Some writers and artists have gone further still, prophesying that Trump 2.0 will coincide with a new era of freedom, cultural liberation and epic art—perhaps even a second Romantic age.
It is—obviously!—too early to tell. As Becca Rothfeld points out in our opening letter on the “Old Romantics,” the heady optimism of the self-proclaimed New Romantics has not so far been justified by much cultural output, and it would likely benefit—as would so many of our cultural tendencies today—from a less facile engagement with its philosophical and historical reference points. More importantly, as Becca also argues, critics should not be “in the prediction business.” Neither, in our view, should philosophers, artists or historians, no matter how many have volunteered for such roles in recent years. From Silicon Valley to Substack, we have no shortage of prophets or pamphleteers these days, each of them eager to tell us why utopia or apocalypse lies right around the corner. What we lack, oddly enough, is thinking and writing that makes us more attentive to the world right in front of us—the here and now in all its mystery, strangeness and often tormented reality. Thinking and writing that helps us not to predict the future but to act as self-conscious citizens, who are both in touch with our historical moment and capable of determining our own course within it.
To find and publish such writing will continue to be The Point’s mission during these next four years, as it has been since we started the magazine at the beginning of Obama’s first term. The challenge, as always, is figuring out how to see our present as a whole, as opposed to picking and choosing what counts as “representative” in it. This does not mean trying to include every view, no matter how thoughtless, or attempting to triangulate between them. It does mean being committed to following our perceptions wherever they might lead, and regardless of whether they end up contradicting previously agreed-upon parameters. To the extent that intellectual conversation felt constricted during Trump’s first term, it was often because certain factions in the country became convinced that it was up to them to prescribe what was “normal” or permissible for the rest of us to discuss. These attempts failed. Mercifully, from the point of view of intellectual life, the history of culture records very few total victories. Which is one reason why those who feel emboldened by the “vibe shift” today would benefit from keeping in mind the fate of progressives who believed history was bending their way eight years ago.
In this issue of The Point we are proud to present as diverse and original a set of perspectives on the American present as you are likely to find in any intellectual magazine. That begins with two reports on political life from this past summer leading up the election, which read like dispatches from different worlds. One is Mana Afsari’s reflection on a cohort of young, right-wing professionals in Washington, D.C., including conversations with some of Trump’s most passionate supporters, during and after the fourth annual National Conservatism conference. The other is Lauren Michele Jackson’s report from the Democratic National Convention in Chicago last year, where Jackson finds a party that “would prefer politics be anything—ineffectual, genocidal, even—but embarrassing.” Approaching the Democratic Party from another direction, the novelist Jessi Jezewska Stevens writes about how liberals might respond aesthetically and stylistically to the advance of “right-wing irony” in culture, suggesting that the first step will be surmounting their habitual reliance on a “politics of contempt.” Journalist Emily Jashinsky describes how that politics of contempt feels from the other side, in her reflection on her journey from a Milwaukee exurb to the East Coast, amid the decade-in-the-making effects of “trickle-down culture.”
In our literary section, rather than trend forecasting, we present for our readers the kind of fiction, both old and new, that feels surprising and alive to us right now. The section begins with an excerpt from the 1981 novel White Masks by the Lebanese novelist and intellectual Elias Khoury, who died last year. Written at the height of the Lebanese Civil War, we print it here as a tribute to Khoury’s career—and for its depiction of the political disillusionment brought on by the brutality and absurdity of war, still unsettling forty years later. Following it are two contemporary stories, by Kenyan and Finnish writers, both of whom write in the wake of autofiction, playing with the conventions of the genre while also, partially, inhabiting it.
The rest of the essays in the issue are devoted to evaluating the rapidly shifting cultural dynamics of our moment, from Sam Kriss’s comprehensive review of the alt-lit or Dimes Square canon, to Apoorva Tadepalli on what a spate of “millennial divorce memoirs” tell us about prevailing attitudes toward long-term coupling and marriage, to two distinctive reflections on contemporary gender dynamics: one, by Rafael Frumkin, arguing for the priority of the “narrative self” in discussions of trans identity—even if it throws a wrench in some popular political slogans—and another, by Grazie Sophia Christie, on sick girls, TikTok realists, witches, Jane Austen and what they all have to do with the seductions of post-feminism.
One thing it does not take any prophesying to know is that there will be surprises in the next four years, in both culture and politics. Our responsibility as a magazine will be to remain open to those surprises no matter where they come from, or how they challenge our preconceived ideas. This is not because we as editors do not have our own strong convictions and commitments, or that we wish to participate in some fantasy of objectivity. Rather, it is because we believe it is the job of intellectuals and writers to try and to test our ideas against our experiences and the experiences of others. This remains, too, one of the distinctive roles that magazines, which by definition are not individualistic or solipsistic enterprises, can continue to play today. For many intellectuals during the Trump years, hell was other people; but the limitations of the discourse that resulted suggest to us a different lesson: that we think either in dialogue with others, or not at all.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.