The following essay was written right after the 2016 election. I think it useful to revisit it now. The age of Donald Trump is an age of uncertainty. White progressives are particularly unequipped to cope with political and social uncertainty. Contrary to popular opinion this isn’t because of hardline idealism. It isn’t because we have pandered excessively to special interests and its neighbor identity politics. It isn’t even because we’ve ignored the economic precarity of the rural, white, working class. The reason we fail is because we don’t understand how change happens. And because of that failure we’ve adopted tactics that blow up in our faces, as my Dad used to say.