Well, that about wraps it up for 2025. As I write this, the old year only has four days left to produce any delightful — or nasty — surprises before giving way to the new one.

I can’t say 2025 produced much in the way of good news. Many of its events and developments will continue to annoy and impoverish us  well into 2026. Rather than spend an entire column going over those things, allow me to offer a cautionary note on what is or isn’t worth expecting NEXT year.

We live in the age of the permanent campaign, and everywhere I turn I see Democrats, actual Republicans (as opposed to Trumpists), and supposed “independents” looking forward to next November’s midterm congressional elections with hope, even excitement: Democrats will take the US Senate and the House, they hope, thwarting Donald Trump’s policy agenda.

The odds are not with those hopes or that excitement.

The Cook Report, a sort of gold standard when it comes to predicting outcomes, rates only two Senate races as “toss-ups.” Both those seats are currently held by Democrats, who need to pick up a net four seats for a majority. Very unlikely.

The House situation isn’t as dire for Democrats, but Polymarket, a betting/prediction market with a pretty good record, only gives them a 45% chance of flipping three seats to get a majority.

But, let’s suppose that, through some quasi-miraculous chain of events, next November produces a Congress controlled by Democrats.

What changes?

The sitting president has demonstrated — multiple times over an entire first term and the first year of another — that when Congress doesn’t give him what he wants, he just takes it. The court system has proven itself fairly ineffectual at stopping him.

And even if, in a second set of miracles, Trump simmers down or gets routinely thwarted in the courts, it’s not like the Democrats are THAT different from the Republicans.

First-term Trump gave us massive tax increases in the form of tariffs. Joe Biden kept most of those tariffs and even expanded some. Second-term Trump put them on steroids.

First-term Trump escalated every war he inherited from Barack Obama, re-started an old war in Somalia, and handed it all off to Biden, who continued down the same path everywhere except Afghanistan.

And both Republicans and Democrats in Congress let both of them get away with it, while increasing government spending and increasing government debt, introducing new “national security” and surveillance state horrors, etc.

Neither Republican nor Democratic politicians want to fix things even if they could, and they can’t. Various third party and independent candidates might want to, but even given an opportunity they’d likely be unsuccessful.

Government THROUGH politics is not going to get us out of the mess we’ve been putting and keeping ourselves in WITH politics for more than a century now.

Our only hope is that the system collapses — which isn’t likely to happen in the next year — and that we can replace it with something better, which seems even less likely.

Happy New Year, I guess.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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