Good news. No, really.

Among my year-end musings are two very positive developments, one idiosyncratic, one societal/political.

Idiosyncratic to me: the migration of many thinkers and writers to the Substack platform has been a change maker for my media diet.

I work moderately diligently to stay current with observers who seem to me to delve into subjects that need to be explored or something that just needs to be said somewhere. In the past I would scan online newspapers, magazines, and Twitter for voices that broadened my field of vision. I still do that. But with the Substack phenomenon, I can ensure I see the new output of the most interesting writers regularly. Yes, I put some money into subscriptions, but I also appreciate free content that some authors share.

Some of my favs:
The Corners by Nadia Bolz-Weber
Jill Filipovic
The Beinart Notebook
Adam Tooze Chartbook
The Crucial Years by Bill McKibben

Societal/political good news: You may not have noticed, but the United States has a mainstream political party which is closer to being a unified, multi-racial, multi-gender, economically progressive force than at any previous moment in my lifetime. Here's a version of something I wrote recently on a Democratic Party discussion substack -- and I believe it:

The wonder of this time is that you can write "Democrats will always be in the position of persuading and compromising with people more conservative than we are." You are accurately (I think) annexing and identifying "Democrats" -- a broad "we" -- with a progressive agenda. 

For most of my life, that would have been a fantasy. Apparently some combination of demographic change, encroaching fascism, imperial decline, and climate crisis have got us here. Do we still have the time and talent to do anything with that democratic (small "d") development?  

We should not sell the democratic impulse short. Americans really do tend to believe that "governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed." With organizing help, and luck, we act on that. ...

Pretty much all of Dem Congresscritters, 48 Dem Senators, and Joe Biden have drifted, under pressure, into espousing an agenda that is miles to the left of anything on offer since Ronald Reagan.

As Grace Segers writes in a deeply reported discussion of the Democratic House of Representatives:

[A] progressive Democratic member who spoke with me on condition of anonymity agreed. “It’s unfortunate that we’ve got a 50–50 majority, so to speak…. But we’ve got 98 percent or 99 percent consensus.”

As the future of majoritarian democracy itself comes into question under our broken Constitutional framework, that's amazing and heartening. And provides a platform from which a democratic left can build.