The city was a shifting canvas of gray and neon, its streets humming with the restless energy of a movement that had tasted power but not permanence. It was 2026, deep into the heart of an increasingly authoritarian second Trump administration. The United States had transformed, its democratic institutions hollowed out by executive orders that dismantled federal diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, centralized power within the executive branch, and sidelined congressional authority. Civil liberties eroded under the weight of aggressive policies aimed at curbing dissent, with birthright citizenship under attack and inspectors general dismissed without congressional oversight. The nation, once a beacon of democracy, now grappled with an administration many legal experts described as a “blitzkrieg on the law and the Constitution.”
Inside an unassuming office tucked away in a converted warehouse—the kind claimed by every urban revolution, walls plastered with slogans long faded into aesthetic artifacts—the leadership of the Progressive Unity Coalition gathered. They called it a strategy meeting. It felt more like a funeral.
Chris Hedges sat at the long, scarred table, his fingers drumming a slow, arrhythmic beat against the wood. His eyes, sharp as ever, flicked from face to face, reading the room with the precision of a man who had spent decades deciphering the language of power. Across from him, Nathan J. Robinson adjusted his glasses, his meticulously tailored suit at odds with the movement’s professed disdain for bourgeois trappings. His smile was thin, brittle, as if stretched over something sharp and unspoken.
“Chris, it’s not about you being wrong or right,” Robinson began, voice smooth like polished glass. “It’s about stability. The movement can’t afford to be fractured when we’re facing the most authoritarian regime in American history. Your rhetoric is… disruptive.”
Hedges leaned forward, his voice a low growl. “Disruptive? Trump is dismantling democracy brick by brick, and you’re worried about my tone? We’re not here to preserve a brand, Nathan. We’re here to fight. But you’re too busy managing optics to see the walls closing in.”
Bhaskar Sunkara shifted uncomfortably between them, the perennial mediator. His voice, when it came, was soft but firm, laced with the exhaustion of someone who’d brokered too many peace deals between people who never really wanted peace. “We need to be strategic, Chris. Provoking internal conflict only gives the right more ammunition. We’re not abandoning our principles—we’re adapting.”
“Adapting?” Hedges snapped, eyes blazing. “You mean compromising. Selling out piece by piece until there’s nothing left to fight for. History doesn’t remember the careful men who sat on the fence while fascism marched past their doors. It remembers those who stood up, even when it was inconvenient.”
At the far end of the table, David Sirota said nothing. He didn’t need to. His silence was a statement, his stillness a strategy. But there was a faint, almost imperceptible curl at the corner of his mouth—the satisfaction of a man who knew the battle had already been won in whispers and backroom deals long before this meeting was called.
The conflict had been brewing for months, perhaps years if one cared to trace the fault lines back far enough. Hedges had published an essay—a scathing indictment of the Coalition’s leadership, its drift toward bureaucratic stagnation, its betrayal of the very ideals it claimed to uphold. It was called “The Ghost of October,” a not-so-subtle nod to revolutions past, and it had landed like a Molotov in the middle of the movement.
Robinson had responded with precision strikes, essays dressed as critiques but sharpened like knives. He accused Hedges of factionalism, of undermining unity when solidarity was most needed. His words were surgical, designed not to wound but to excise, to remove Hedges from the body politic without the mess of open conflict. Sunkara had tried to mediate, to remind them of shared goals, common enemies. But pragmatism, as it turned out, was no match for ambition and ideology.
The meeting was the culmination of it all. A formality, really. The votes had been counted long before anyone entered the room. Hedges knew it. He rose slowly, the scrape of his chair against the floor the only sound in the suffocating silence.
“I won’t give you the satisfaction of forcing me out,” he said, his voice steady, cutting through the tension like a blade. “I resign. Not because I’m wrong, but because this movement is no longer what it pretends to be.”
There was a beat of silence, then Robinson nodded, his smile brittle as ever. “For the good of the cause, sometimes difficult decisions must be made.”
Hedges chuckled darkly, shaking his head. “The cause? You don’t even recognize it anymore. You think you’re steering the ship, but you’ve already been swallowed by the storm.”
Sunkara looked away, unable to meet Hedges’ gaze. And Sirota? Sirota finally spoke, a simple sentence delivered with the quiet confidence of a man who had already won.
“We’ll ensure the transition is smooth.”
Hedges left the room, his resignation letter left on the table like an unburied corpse. Outside, the city buzzed with the noise of a movement that believed itself untouched by the quiet coup that had just unfolded. But revolutions, Hedges knew, didn’t die in the streets. They died in rooms like this, with polite words and silent betrayals.
In the weeks that followed, Robinson’s influence would wane, his carefully crafted rhetoric no longer inspiring action but instead serving as a hollow echo of past fervor. Sunkara would fade into irrelevance, his conciliatory politics leaving him stranded between factions that no longer cared for compromise. And Sirota would rise—not with fanfare, but with the quiet inevitability of rot spreading through wood, his power rooted in administrative control rather than genuine leadership.
The Coalition persisted, outwardly unshaken, its slogans repeated like sacred mantras devoid of meaning. Its leaders clung to their positions, more concerned with maintaining internal stability and their personal status than with confronting the growing authoritarian regime outside their insulated chambers. Policies once radical were watered down into toothless reforms, and alliances of convenience were forged with figures who, not long ago, would have been denounced as enemies of the cause. They called it pragmatism, but it was little more than self-preservation disguised as strategy.
What had once been a force for revolution decayed into a mechanism designed solely to protect its own hierarchy, an institution too consumed with self-preservation to risk genuine defiance. The bold rhetoric that had once galvanized thousands was reduced to safe, sanitized platitudes, carefully crafted to avoid controversy rather than inspire action. In its desperation to remain relevant, the leadership forged quiet alliances with the very structures it had sworn to dismantle, justifying each concession as a strategic necessity, though it was little more than fear masquerading as pragmatism.
Its transformation was complete, the original mission now a faint echo lingering in sterile meeting rooms where radical dreams had withered under the fluorescent hum of bureaucracy. What remained was an empty shell, polished on the outside but hollow within—a monument to convictions traded away piece by piece. It had become less a movement and more a brand, obsessed with maintaining appearances, more invested in controlling narratives than confronting the oppressive reality it was meant to challenge.
But its soul? That had walked out the door with Hedges, never to return.