After the midterms, I don't need to travel to the US in panic mode anymore

The odd thing is that I always felt silly while doing it. It never truly became a normal part of my routine. I’d pack my suitcase, check in for my flight, locate my passport, and then I’d wince and delete my Bluesky account.

I took to telling people after the first time, as my sudden disappearance last year made people panic. It was both nice and embarrassing, as I’d only gone for – oh, around 12 hours at most? – and surely no-one should notice you being offline for this short an amount of time.

Still, people did and so I had to warn them, though I did so with a wink instead of a full explanation. The first rule of deleting your social media account before crossing the border into the US because you’re worried about not being let into the country by its authoritarian and increasingly mad government is to not say what you’re doing out loud. It’d defeat the whole point.

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Watching the fall of Trump with New York’s MAGA hardcore

Marie Le Conte

Was it overkill? I asked myself every time I crossed the Atlantic, but then I looked at all the stories of legal tourists and immigrants being held, hidden and deported by ICE, and I decided that being safe and vaguely mortified was infinitely better than being sorry.

Mostly, it made me feel sad. I’ve spent a lot of time in New York, and it’s a city that’s important to me for many reasons; feeling like it had become cold and hostile was a real blow.

What a joy it was, then, to be not only in the United States but in my adopted home there as the midterms unfolded earlier this month. The mood just felt surreal. I went for dinner with friends the day after the results were announced, and they all seemed oddly yet pleasantly dazed; so overwhelmed by what had just happened that they couldn’t quite contend with all of it yet.

The dust has settled some more since then, and there are so many lessons everyone ought to be learning from what happened. You can, for example, look to people like Beto O’Rourke in Texas and Stacey Abrams in Georgia and realise that what looked like incredible efforts followed by stinging failures for years were really crucial steps taken towards victory.

You can look to the Democrat voters in places like Mississippi, who kept going while feeling like their own preferences didn’t matter, and conclude that even seemingly futile gestures can end up changing everything.

You can look to governor-elect Gina Hinojosa, who was outspent 10 to one by her Republican opponent and still won, and hold onto the idea that money just isn’t everything in politics, and good, relentless people can still come out on top if voters have faith in them.

These are all things we should keep in mind even on this side of the channel, as our country and political sphere keep feeling quite broken, and unlikely to get better anytime soon.

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Slavoj Žižek: Beating Trump isn’t the wild triumph you all seem to think

Slavoj Žižek

The situation was so much more dire in the US but, against all odds, this coalition of brilliant, hard-working, idealistic, pugnacious people managed to change things for the better, to an extent few of us could have predicted even earlier this year. It should be a cause for celebration and, on a more personal note, must act as a reminder that giving into doom and gloom helps no-one, least of all ourselves.

The two years I spent convinced that America had gone down the drain and would never feel warm again were intensely depressing but, in retrospect, also morally flawed. By giving up on the idea of the US I’d once had, I’d also implicitly given up on the people working so hard to bring their country back from the brink.

I feel I now owe them an apology, and am so pleased to say that, when I return to New York in the spring next year, I’ll do so with my head held high, and all my daft, progressive posts still up online for everyone to see.