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The International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued long-awaited arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant over charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. The ICC said in a statement that there are “reasonable grounds to believe” that Netanyahu and Gallant have violated international law in…

We continue our look at COP29’s ongoing negotiations for an international climate finance agreement, which is still under contention as of Thursday morning due in large part to wealthy countries’ refusal to commit to a proposed monetary target on the financing of developing nations’ transition from fossil fuels. Countries that have already industrialized off the…

More than 143 million people in the United States may be exposed to toxic “forever chemicals” in their drinking water, according to a new analysis of water testing data. The findings come as environmentalists fear that the incoming Trump administration will weaken or repeal tough new standards designed to protect public health. Under new rules…

Texas wasted no time escalating its attacks on transgender people as the state GOP prefiled 32 anti-trans bills on the first day of the 2025 legislative session’s prefiling period. In recent years, Texas has become a hotbed for anti-trans legislation, with each session delivering harsher crackdowns. Last session alone, the state passed six anti-trans laws,…

The 2024 UN climate change conference, COP29, held in Baku, Azerbaijan, is now nearing its end and reports are that talks are deadlocked. The two biggest elephants in the room are militarism and climate financing. Wars generate more carbon emissions than many countries, while the U.S. military is the single largest institutional source of greenhouse…

The post-mortems on Donald Trump’s victory and the Democrats’ defeat are coming from all directions. Most focus on Kamala Harris’s shortcomings, and many are contradictory.

Did Harris lose because she was a weak candidate, despite the initial optimism surrounding her campaign? Did she move too far to the right, alienating a critical mass of potential progressive voters by palling around with neo-cons like Liz Cheney? Did she veer too sharply to the left, alienating moderate old-guard Republicans and independents who saw her as too woke? Did Harris’s stance on Gaza cost her the “Blue Wall” states, or was it inflation or the crisis at the border? Was she a victim of intractable sexism and racism? Or was it Biden’s refusal to step down until late July that sealed her fate? 

Each of these perspectives has some merit—especially the argument, concisely made by Bernie Sanders in a post on X, that the Democratic Party has abandoned the working class and that, as a result, the working class has abandoned the party. These voters instead backed a candidate whose actual policies undermine the interests of working people.

What these arguments all miss, however, is an essential element of Trump’s triumph—the simple and sad truth that hate sells. Ever since he descended the golden escalator at Trump Tower in midtown Manhattan in July 2015 to declare his candidacy for President, Trump has preached an unrelenting gospel of hate, scapegoating immigrants, the LGBTQ+ community, minorities, political opponents, journalists, academics, and scientific experts as the cause of our alleged national decline. He has flagged them as “the enemy from within” as a target that must be removed or neutralized.

It’s still tempting to think of Trump and the movement he leads as an aberration that will run its course over the next four years. But nothing could be further from the truth. Despots and dictators all over the world use hate as a psychological tool. Trump is simply the newest member of the club.  

In 1931, as Europe yielded to fascism, the League of Nations’ International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation invited Albert Einstein to start a dialogue with a scholar of his choosing as part of the committee’s mission to generate cross-disciplinary contacts between scientists, researchers, teachers, writers, and artists. 

Although Einstein had met Freud face-to-face only once, in 1926, he invited the famed psychoanalyst in an April 1931 letter to reflect on the “evils of war.” Receiving no reply, Einstein asked in a subsequent letter, written in July 1932, if there was “any way of delivering mankind from the menace of war” once and for all, and if hate could ever be erased from society.

In September 1932, Freud penned his response, offering a distillation of his renowned theory of the instincts:

You are amazed that it is so easy to infect men with the war fever, and you surmise that man has in him an active instinct for hatred and destruction, amenable to such stimulations. I entirely agree with you. I believe in the existence of this instinct and have been recently at pains to study its manifestations. 

“The upshot of these observations,” Freud added, “is that there is no likelihood of our being able to suppress humanity’s aggressive tendencies . . . . It is all too clear that the nationalistic ideas, paramount today in every country, operate in quite a contrary direction.”

As an antidote to hate, Freud offered the instinct of love, or “Eros” (as Plato used the term in his Symposium), writing: “If the propensity for war be due to the destructive instinct, we have always its counter-agent, Eros, to our hand. All that produces ties of sentiment between man and man must serve us as war’s antidote.”

Tragically, the antidote failed. Both Einstein and Freud were forced into exile as the Holocaust ensued. Hate proved supreme.

It doesn’t take an Einstein or Freud to draw parallels between the 1930s and the political climate today in the United States. While Trump may not be “America’s Hitler,” as J.D. Vance once described him, he is an aspiring autocrat who has mastered the craft of hate-mongering. 

In the face of Trump’s rants about immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country,” Harris’s “campaign of joy” proved unavailing. The bromide she invoked at the Democratic convention and throughout her campaign that “we have so much more in common than what separates us” was no match for Trump’s calls for retribution and revenge.

What, then, can be done? While Democrats and progressives cannot—and should not—attempt to mirror the right’s use of hate and bigotry, the left not only needs a positive program for social change, but a clearly defined enemy to mobilize against.

That enemy exists, and is staring us in the face. It is oligarchy—the extreme concentration of wealth and outsized political influence that has gutted the middle and working classes and corrupted our politics. 

Fortunately, we have a template for fighting back against oligarchy, in the way that Franklin Delano Roosevelt decried monopolies while promoting the programs of the New Deal. Here’s how Roosevelt framed the issue in his April 29, 1938, address to Congress:

Unhappy events abroad have retaught us two simple truths about the liberty of a democratic people. The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism—ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.

The second truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if its business system does not provide employment and produce and distribute goods in such a way as to sustain an acceptable standard of living.

Roosevelt’s admonitions could easily be applied to the enormous power wielded by our current crop of oligarchs led by Trump’s “first buddy” Elon Musk. Going forward, we need to revive the spirit of FDR and dig even deeper into what really ails this country. 

For those of us committed to protecting the ocean, it’s always been clear that restoring healthy seas will be the work of our lifetimes, and that of others who’ll come after us. 

Unlike the majority of Americans, I believe the Biden Administration did a decent job, particularly in responding to the climate emergency we’re currently living through. During his term, Biden signed into law two major pieces of legislation: the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).

Nonprofit groups including Blue Frontier, which I founded, created an “Ocean Climate Action Plan” which helped in adding $10 billion to the IRA law, with a focus on coastal resiliency, including $3 billion for greening ports. 

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently distributed that money in the form of fifty-five grants to ports around the nation. The money will help ports electrify and decarbonize, which will also reduce air pollution in many adjacent low-income communities. That being said, the EPA is one of the agencies that the incoming Trump team is likely to gut or abolish.

This year will almost certainly be the hottest in recorded history (last year was the hottest to date). The President-elect and the Republican Party have made Big Oil and denial of climate science central to their ideology, identity, and fundraising. It doesn’t help that Trump nominated Lee Zeldin, a former Republican congressman with no environmental background, to head (or behead) the EPA.

Whether you voted for or against Donald Trump, you should have no illusions that the health of our public seas is not one of his priorities. He’s made clear that he intends to “drill, baby, drill” and get rid of regulations and agencies that protect our waters, both salty and fresh. 

Trump’s stance poses all kinds of dangers for the global ocean, which absorbs 90 percent of the heat and a third of the carbon dioxide emitted by the burning of greenhouse gasses. This has resulted in warming, rising seas that intensify hurricanes, and ocean acidification that weakens shell-forming creatures. Warmer, more acidic seas also hold less dissolved oxygen expanding dead zones and harmful algal blooms.

However, protecting the blue in our red, white and blue is one of the few remaining areas of agreement among most Americans, both red and blue. This has helped, at least in the past, to minimize the damage that Trump has been able to do.

Trump’s efforts during his first term to open up the U.S. coastline to offshore oil drilling failed after they were met with massive grassroots opposition, as well as opposition from Senator Rick Scott of Florida and Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina, both Republican stalwarts.  As consumer activist Ralph Nader once explained to me, “No one takes their family to the beach and if it’s closed because of pollution says, ‘I’m OK with that because I oppose regulations.’ ”

And when Trump’s son Donald Jr. and a wealthy advisor took the side of the $2 billion local salmon industry, Trump shut down the Pebble Mine in Alaska that threatened Bristol Bay’s world-famous salmon runs. 

I believe there are dark days coming for our nation and our oceans. The divisions that mark our country and the world today will get worse before they might begin to get better. 

Still, the ocean conservation group that I founded more than twenty years ago will continue its work, with many others of its kind, to try and unite people to protect our ocean, coasts, and communities, both human and wild. 

We’ve had victories and we expect some major losses, but I still agree with author Isak Dinesen who wrote: “The cure for anything is salt water—sweat, tears, or the sea.”

So work hard and sweat because we need to toughen up. Cry some tears for the state of our nation. Then go visit the ocean. It will help clear your mind for the difficult days ahead.

This column was produced for Progressive Perspectives, a project of The Progressive magazine, and distributed by Tribune News Service.