Dana R Fisher

What apocalyptic optimists need to be thinking about as the new year begins

1.  Elections 2026: By November, we will see if free and fair federal elections in the US have survived the many efforts to change our system, but the efforts to chang elections through partisan redistricting in various states, the new rules about when a mail-in ballot will be considered officially mailed, and more are already underway.
2. The Federal Government: 2026 gets started with a federal government that is straining under expansive firings, lay-offs, and restructuring.  With all of these cuts, it’s unclear if the government will be able to serve the American people.  Additional cuts to agencies and programs will no doubt continue in the new year and another government shutdown is highly likely at the end of January when the current stopgap budget expires.  
3. Disaster Response: When the first disaster of the year strikes, (recall that in 2025, the LA Wildfires started on January 7^th and burned more than 37,000 acres and destroyed more than 16,000 structures), how will the federal government respond, and will it be able to support states so they are able to support those affected as they respond to and recover from the disaster?
4. Climate Action: After the COP30 climate negotiations failed to make any progress towards a fossil fuel phaseout (which is well acknowledged to be a necessary step in addressing the climate crisis), at least 18 countries will be participating in an alternative meeting to push for meaningful progress. The First International Conference for the Just Transition Away from Fossil Fuels takes place in Colombia in April.
5. The Climate Regime:  10 years after the Paris Agreement, concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere continue to go up, global temperatures have surpassed the 1.5 degree threshold that was built into the agreement, and there is no evidence that progress is forthcoming.  Can the climate regime, which is built on a consensus approach that has enabled fossil fuel interests to limit progress for years, survive now that a subsample of countries are moving forward independently?  
6. (In homage to my 14 year-old and the dumbest new word-of-the-year EVER, as well as its importance to our democracy and beyond, this really should be 6/7). The Resistance: In 2025, we saw Resistance 2.0 rise up to push back against the Trump Administration and its policies through massive days of action, as well as more targeted efforts around the US that aimed to protect immigrant communities, and push back against the occupation of US cities.  As someone who has studied protest in the US for decades and wrote American Resistance about the Resistance during the first Trump Administration, it is unclear what comes next.  There is no question that we will continue to see large scale protests against the Trump Administration (in fact a national day of action has been called for January 20^th), but the form the protests take, including the tactics used, the specific targets, and the levels of violence that we will see is unclear, especially as the Trump Administration works to limit free speech and repress activism of all sorts in America.