Christmas behind us, New Year’s day ahead.

This is always a mysterious week on the calendar, I think, a long, reluctant farewell to the year. The days seem to slow down.

Leftovers. The Christmas tree softly showering dry needles on the rug. Is it Tuesday? Wednesday? Those lesser college football bowl games. Sales. Snow, if we’re lucky.

What do we call this week, the long days suspended in a not-quite stasis of sleeping in and no school for the kids? It isn’t a holiday, exactly, but it isn’t ordinary life either. It’s the pause between the chapters of the book of our lives; the held breath before the page turns. A week that asks nothing of us—and so becomes a rare opportunity. We can think. Breathe. Gather our strength. And prepare.

Last year was a battle in this country, the most tumultuous and divisive year that I can remember. For most people, it was exhausting and at times frightening. Before he shuffled off the political stage, Joe Biden told us over and over that America was locked in “a battle for the soul of our nation.” He was right—then.

But now, with Donald Trump back in office, occupying a presidency that’s been super-charged with power by the Supreme Court, the stakes are even higher. This is it. This is the real deal. Trump and his administration are executing on an aggressive plan to centralize great authority in his hands, much of it beyond the previously understood boundaries of our Constitution, and so change the nature of our democracy. They seek to take this Republic in an authoritarian direction that would have shocked previous generations of Americans. That’s why the days of 2025 seemed so fraught, the issue so consequential. We are engaged in a great battle, a real-world, desperate struggle to preserve American freedom as our forebears understood it. We cannot look away, or wish it were otherwise. We must fight; we must win.

I believe we will. Most of our fellow citizens, as polls and basic common sense about our country show, do not want revolutionary, authoritarian change in the United States. Americans are not wild-eyed ideologues. We are pragmatists; we like what works. For years, voters have been crying out for major changes in systems that are simply not working for far too many of our people. They are demanding practical results.

But Trumpism—while it is many things—is not a practical approach to constitutional governance. It is a farrago of one man’s atavistic fantasies, personal prejudices, and corrupt appetites. It’s not even a political ideology, but rather a vision of a world arranged to prove that Trump is always right and to glorify him forever. That’s why we have to put up with those grotesquely obsequious cabinet meetings; that’s why he’s slapping his name on everything he can, before he dies. That’s why he’s frantically demanding a Nobel Peace Prize, and solemnly accepting the farcical FIFA Peace Prize instead.

And what about those practical results voters want? They are almost irrelevant to Trump, since no matter what happens he will claim everything good in the world as his own personal triumph, or blame everything bad on someone else, anyone else. Or he’ll just lie and deny any inconvenient truths.

Meanwhile, the electoral clock is tick-tick-ticking. Voters gave Trump a four-year presidential term to solve problems, not a crown and scepter. People are already looking beyond him; Republicans, too. Erika Kirk has actually endorsed J.D. Vance in 2028, which must infuriate Trump, because he can’t lash out at the widow of Charlie Kirk. The midterms are coming, and might well end his authoritarian ambitions for good. Lame-duckery fast approaches.

And there is also this, a bedrock belief I have about our country: Most people are still decent. They do not want to be forever locked in permanent political combat, in a cultural fight to the death. The steady diet of rage and hatred that is force-fed to us by the Lords of the Algorithms is malnourishing, and people know it. They want alternatives to this dead-end politics. They know better.

And so we will have to get to work, all of us—Democrats, independents, and, yes, many Republicans—Americans who, whatever our differences, share one great thing in common. Call it real patriotism: A love of our country that isn’t about loyalty to one man but loyalty to a shared future. It’s about limits, and the humility to accept loss. Real patriotism respects our institutions, and insists that no leader is bigger than the republic itself. This ideal is old, not new, and it has survived worse than Trumpism. It will survive him, too—if we choose it.

Ahead of us, then, is the great, hard work of democracy: We will have to persuade our fellow Americans. Conversation is, ultimately, the only way out—after we defeat the Trumpist project for authoritarian power. Not vitriol; not rage-baiting or trolling. But conversation, the greatest innovation in human history, is how we will rebuild our democracy. Settle your hearts on that goal, trust in the power of truth over lies, and we’ll surprise ourselves and our neighbors. That’s a real resolution for 2026.

Again: None of this is going to be easy. It’s going to be hard. We may want to turn away from it and give up, but we know there is no one else to get the job done. It’s like hard work that we must do on a cold winter morning, work that we take up not just out of duty, but out of love.

Our poem this week takes place in the memory of a midwinter morning. It’s written by Robert Hayden, the first Black American Poet Laureate of the United States. This is a bracing, fearsome, even heartbreaking poem about hard work, and about the love that fuels it. It’s deeply personal, a son’s memory of the father with whom he had a distanced and difficult relationship, but whom he loved and was loved by. The courage in this poem, intimate and hardly understood, has always moved me. It is personal—and so much more. To me, it’s one of the great American poems.

—Terry

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedSundays too my father got up earlyand put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,then with cracked hands that achedfrom labor in the weekday weather madebanked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.When the rooms were warm, he’d call,and slowly I would rise and dress,fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,who had driven out the coldand polished my good shoes as well.What did I know, what did I knowof love’s austere and lonely offices?