RANDALL WHITE, NORTH AMERICAN NOTEBOOK, TORONTO. SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 2026. While tidying up the office (to escape all the snow still outside), I came across two quotations from eminent Americans, successively posted on my office magazine rack.

The first is from Harvard historian and New Yorker writer Jill Lepore. It’s in an article dated December 6, 2019 and entitled “The Impeachment Hearings and the Coming Storm.”

(For those of us who may have forgotten President Donald Trump was first impeached by the US House of Representatives on December 18, 2019, after Democrats won the House in the 2018 midterm elections. Republicans remained in control of the Senate in 2018, however, and on February 5, 2020, the Senate voted to acquit Trump.)

The December 2019 Jill Lepore quotation that caught my eye was : “A farmer walks across a field, bracing against the wind. Hardness is what’s required to get through a political winter: determination, forbearance, sacrifice, not bitterness but a certain sternness.”

At the time getting through a political winter this way seemed to me a key part of the ongoing US progressive response to the first Donald Trump presidential regime, especially after Democrats won the House in 2018. And the winter sternness seemed to draw on old New England values that may still have some 21st century democratic traction.

The second of my two eminent American quotations is from March 2025. Among other things it may suggest how much times did change between late December 2019 and mid -March 2025.

This quotation came from Washington Monthly editor Paul Glastris, in “The Hot (or Not) New Theory of ‘Abundance Liberalism’” — a wider conversation with his colleague Nate Weisberg (guided and ultimately set to text by Anne Kim).

Mr. Glastris’s most memorable words, for me less than a year ago now, were : “We need policies that create more millionaires and fewer billionaires. That’s classic American stuff—spreading opportunity, promoting competition—and we’ve moved away from it.”

I’d guess that these words are at least one reflection of the broader political theory of “abundance liberalism”. And the theory itself may signal some wider US left-wing yearning to revive such “classic American stuff”.

What seems to be fueling the current trend to repeated Democratic success in US politics down on the ground, however, is just a growing popular revulsion against a Trump Republican 2.0 regime, that is really not what many thought they were voting for back in November 2024

If I had to guess (which of course I do not) I would say “abundance liberalism” is not a crucially important cog in the Democratic machine for the imminent midterm elections on Tuesday, November 3, 2026.

And neither is a certain sternness required to get through a political winter.

But I still find both anti- Trump’s-America quotations of 2019 and 2025 interesting — and some kind of serious reflection of what has been and no doubt in some ways still is happening in crazy Donald Trump’s crazy Make America Great Again world of profound political illusion.

(Oh and btw Happy Valentine’s Day 2026, on a rare enough weekend scheduling for this traditional Western celebration of love among human beings!)