Year Two: When the Shock Wears Off

Normalization is the danger. Steadiness is the response.

The most dangerous moments aren’t when things fall apart—they’re when they keep functioning while something essential quietly breaks.

We are now one year into Donald Trump’s return to the presidency.

A second year is different from the first.

The shock has worn off. The chaos feels familiar. The headlines blur together. And the most dangerous temptation sets in—not panic, but quiet adaptation. The feeling that this is simply how things are now, and the best we can do is get through it.

History tells us otherwise.

When power runs ahead of accountability, when institutions hesitate, when checks weaken, when intimidation replaces persuasion, people rarely stop it all at once. What they do instead is far more important and far more effective.

They stay in their lane deliberately and refuse to shrink inside it.

Across countries and decades, from Eastern Europe to South Africa to the United States, the same pattern appears again and again. Ordinary people do not wait for permission to preserve what matters. They protect truth locally when national systems fail. They narrow their focus instead of trying to save everything. They build trust sideways, not upward. They keep records. They keep teaching. They keep showing up.

This is how societies hold together when the center strains.

Most resistance does not look like protest footage or dramatic speeches. It looks like competence. It looks like continuity. It looks like people deciding that even if they must adapt outwardly, they will not surrender inwardly.

Teachers keep classrooms honest.
Journalists keep documenting, even when it’s harder.
Lawyers keep defending the process, even when outcomes feel uncertain.
Artists and musicians keep memories alive.
Neighbors keep feeding neighbors.
Parents keep teaching kids how to think, not what to chant.

None of this feels heroic while in the moment. That’s the point.

Authoritarian pressure, in any country, depends on fatigue. It depends on people believing they must either burn themselves out or give up entirely. History shows a third path: steadiness.

Another lesson history teaches is this: economic “normalcy” often masks democratic risk. When people are still working, still paying bills, still managing daily life, it becomes easier for pressure to move quietly through institutions without triggering alarm. That’s why vigilance matters most when things feel just stable enough to ignore. What makes this moment especially deceptive is that the economy has not yet forced a reckoning. Markets are functioning, despite ongoing volatility. Inflation has cooled from its peak, even as household pressure lingers. There is no single, sudden shock demanding collective attention.

That apparent normalcy creates the illusion that nothing fundamental is changing.

Historically, democratic erosion does not require economic collapse. In fact, it often advances most quietly when the economy is stable enough to keep people focused on daily life rather than institutional integrity. When paychecks still arrive, and systems appear to function, pressure can be applied without immediate backlash.

Markets do not price democratic risk in real time. They respond after credibility breaks, when policy unpredictability hardens, when rule making becomes politicized, and when institutions once trusted to act independently no longer do. By the time economic signals flash red, the damage to governance has usually already been done.

This is also why language matters. Euphemisms soften reality. Repetition dulls response. Calling things what they are: accurately, calmly, without exaggeration, is one of the most underrated acts of civic resilience.

And finally, people don’t do this alone.

Every durable movement for accountability has relied on small circles of trust. Five people who talk honestly. Those who share information. Who remind one another what is real. Parallel trust networks don’t replace institutions, they carry societies through periods when institutions wobble.

So if you’re asking what to do as we enter year two, here is the answer history gives us:

Don’t try to carry the whole country.
Carry your lane, and carry it well.
Do not internalize the pressure.
Write things down.
Find your people.
Stay steady.

Moments like this don’t ask us to be heroes. They ask us to be reliable.

Stability can be comforting. It can also be anesthetic. What carries societies through periods like this is not outrage on demand, but people who remain steady in their work, their values, and their willingness to tell the truth plainly even when it’s easier to look away.

Power counts on people shrinking their lives. History changes when they don’t.

More soon,

-Olivia