Much about the world in which we are celebrating the fifth anniversary of The Drift would have startled us when we published our first issue in the summer of 2020 — including the fact that we’ve managed to hang on for this long. At the time, it was difficult to imagine any aspect of the future with much clarity. A global pandemic had thrown our lives into a still, repetitive kind of chaos, and then a momentous uprising against police violence and white supremacy had given us a more welcome glimpse of the social order overturned. The president had begun to suggest that he might not accept the results of that fall’s election if they didn’t go his way. We had scrapped many of our plans for the launch of The Drift after the outbreak of Covid, when the pieces we’d been working on for a year suddenly became irrelevant to a world transformed. After George Floyd’s murder, we went back to the drawing board for a second time. We finally went live in June, somewhere in that summer’s endless circuit between the living room and the street. 

We would have been taken aback, at that point, to learn that what felt like a great historical rupture would be swiftly sutured shut. Over the past five years, the pandemic and its social consequences never fully disappeared, but a traumatized nation has done its best to shunt Covid out of its conscious consideration; early speculation about how we might all learn to revalue care or reassess the pace and scale of our economic activity now seems painfully naive. The George Floyd rebellion failed to reverse the metastasis of police budgets and arsenals, and corporate America is now repudiating even the token antiracist gestures it offered to avoid real accountability. The president did, in fact, refuse to accept the results of the 2020 election, after which he retreated to his mansion in Florida to regroup, cast off the dead weight of insubordinate staff, and plot his triumphant return. 

As thoroughly as our expectations have been confounded since our start, our contributors have often managed to provide a clear view of the horizon we’ve been moving toward. If you’ve been reading The Drift diligently these years, you were warned, in January 2021, that “the cult of Fauci” deserved scrutiny from the left; in February 2021, that the choice of Kamala Harris as vice president was “an insulting tokenization”; in May 2021, that the “politicized conflation of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism” was a greater threat to free speech than leftist political correctness was; in September 2021, that the American foreign policy establishment was still dangerously enamored with so-called democracy building; in January 2022, that Democrats had no clue how to communicate with rural voters; in October 2022, that the Hunter Biden scandal wasn’t some right-wing conspiracy that could be wished away by party insiders; in July 2023, that new adaptations to the criminal justice system could be wielded against political dissidents; in October 2023, that the idea that “with enough violence, the status quo ante [could] be salvaged” by Israel was “a fantasy underwritten by vengeance and bloodlust”; in November 2023, that the phrase “conspiracy theory” was being “thrown around as a way of halting dissent,” especially with regard to the lab-leak hypothesis about the origins of Covid; in March 2024, that the veneration of Elon Musk exposed the fundamental rottenness of tech culture; and in November 2024, before Trump’s win, that the Biden-Harris administration’s tough-on-immigration pivot would do nothing to stem the increasing rightward shift of Latino voters in border communities.

At the time these judgments appeared in our pages, they were by and large heresies in the mainstream liberal echo chamber. Only later did they become common sense. The New York Times called Fauci “a scientific superhero to counter all the bad information that is spewed out to vulnerable citizens,” and the idea that Covid might have escaped from a lab in Wuhan both a “conspiracy theory” and an example of the way the right-wing “contempt for science has undermined America’s coronavirus response” — before deciding, in 2024, that the pandemic “probably started in a lab” (the same assessment has been made by the CIA and by other government agencies) and, in 2025, that “we were badly misled” about its origins. “Trump’s chances of winning are slim,” The Atlantic insisted in December 2023. Yet it turned out there were reasons besides contrarianism and a secret affection for Donald Trump to warn that the Democrats were sleepwalking into disaster. Thirteen months later, once its prediction had been disproven, the magazine didn’t skip a beat in declaring that Biden “created the ideal conditions for Trump’s return.” Publications that once rushed to tar supporters of Palestinian freedom as anti-Semites now fret about the Trump administration’s weaponization of concerns about Jewish safety and entertain the possibility that Israel may indeed have committed a war crime or two in the course of annihilating the basic conditions for life in Gaza. 

These pivots are never accompanied by introspection about the factors that enabled the initial misjudgments. That would be antithetical to the spirit of the legacy media, which habitually vocalizes the perspective of a rarified class of political insiders and self-styled experts as if it were an ideologically disinterested view from nowhere. The fiction of objectivity makes accountability impossible. At The Drift, in contrast, we’ve always been committed to publishing writing that is not embarrassed that it comes from somewhere: from a set of values that we wear on our sleeves and that shape our intuitions about how the world works and how it should work. 

“These are times in which the world needs fresh voices,” we wrote in our first Editors’ Note. “We’re certain that there’s more to say, and more fun to be had saying it.” You’ll have to take our word that we’ve had a lot of fun making The Drift these last five years. But there’s no doubt anymore that it was desperately necessary to introduce a new cohort of young writers to the ossified media establishment that was lumbering, at the dawn of the pandemic, into a series of crises that it was woefully unequipped to confront. We haven’t been alone in contributing to that project, of course. Yet we feel affirmed in our initial judgment that the bewildering times in which we launched have made it urgent to cultivate untried and irreverent new voices — from rural Colorado and El Paso and Nairobi and Ramallah; from the precarious underclass of the academy and the journalism industry — equipped with fresh perspectives capable of surprising readers, not merely ratifying conventional wisdom.

For this special fifth-anniversary issue of The Drift, we got back in touch with some of the writers who most surprised us when we first published their work — and whom we regard as some of the most provocative and insightful voices in the media today. We asked them to tell us something about the new administration we didn’t already know. They rose to the occasion, providing a composite portrait of the unsettled and unsettling times we’re living through that is challenging and enlightening in equal measure. Against facile stories about Trump’s norm-breaking, our writers discover new precedents for his abuses threaded throughout American history; against attempts to localize the blame for the Democrats’ struggles, they illuminate a pervasive pattern of political failure; and against fatalism and resignation to right-wing backlash, they show us the potential latent in the collapse of old certainties and underscore the necessity of continued struggle for the world we believe in.

Piper French shows that Trump inherited a paradoxical Department of Justice, and that he has resolved its historical contradictions in favor of repression. Mitch Therieau traces the disturbing uptake of the deadening style of internet culture by the Trump administration. David Klion reveals how the national security state built during the Cold War and the War on Terror paved the way for Trump’s authoritarianism. Elisa Gonzalez situates the current assault on the Fourteenth Amendment’s legal protections within a series of creative misreadings that have underwritten disenfranchisement throughout the U.S. and its empire. Rhiannon Hamam documents how the reigning interpretation of the First Amendment constricted gradually over generations, at the expense of our right to protest.

The salvos we’ve collected also cast new light on the intellectual and strategic mistakes that brought us to this point. Jake Bittle demonstrates that the last few months have already falsified many of the assumptions underpinning the dominant Democratic approach to climate policy. Nick Bowlin critiques the widespread tendency in liberal media to dismiss rural voters as irretrievably right-wing. Jamie Hood explores the tragic shortcomings of the #MeToo movement and the moral vacuum created by the retreat of anti-rape politics. 

These essays encourage us to think creatively and ambitiously about the path forward. Gaby Del Valle reminds us of the fragility of Trump’s coalition and the indispensable role the man himself plays in holding it together. Becca Rothfeld explains why the anti-feminism of today’s online right is the “socialism of morons,” and can only be successfully contested by a feminism that also reimagines the economic order. And Tope Folarin urges the left to cultivate the spiritual resources necessary to resist the seductions of despair and continue fighting against apparently insurmountable odds. 

We also returned to some of our favorite past interview subjects to ask them about how their thinking had changed since we’d last talked. Nikhil Pal Singh reports that he underestimated the staying power of American nativism, and explains how we can confront it. Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò tells us the left has overemphasized what language we use to communicate and underemphasized the issue of control over the platforms on which we’ve been communicating. Wendy Brown suggests that the left can learn some important lessons from the right’s success in seizing and wielding state power. Adam Tooze explores the reasons the Biden administration’s much-vaunted industrial policy looks so chimerical in retrospect. To this roster of returning guests we added a new luminary, Eman Abdelhadi, who spoke with us about the liberal hypocrisy on display in the repression of the movement for Palestinian freedom. 

In our fiction section, Matteo Ciambella, Owen Park, Mariah Kreutter, and Samuel Jensen conjure up a desert that changes continuously, “a narrow glob of auburn light with bones,” a fuckable mother, and robot dogs with guns, alongside previews of Stephanie Wambugu’s debut novel, Lonely Crowds, and the next installment of Solvej Balle’s septology On the Calculation of Volume. Poems by Jessica Laser, Benjamin Krusling, Sasha Debevec-McKenney, and T. J. Cusano consider real madness, obscene pop-up ads, “the sky over a vast and uncompromising sea,” and Jake Tapper. And our Mentions review a grisly piece of dance theater, the aesthetics of asset management, dressing room lights fit for a starlet, and more.

Good students of history that we are, we’re wary of drawing up any plans for our next five years that are too ambitious. But we’ve never gone wrong betting on the support and generosity of our readers. If, with your help, we get to celebrate a tenth anniversary, for once we won’t be surprised.