I tend to think I’m pretty smart. Of course, that feeling only really flourishes in the periods between someone asking me what’s going on. “With the election,” at times—sometimes it’s “with the courts.” God help me, if it becomes “with the country.” That’s when the gears start to slip. And they’ve been asking more often.

I inevitably reach for phrases like “unprecedented” or “the erosion of norms,” but it’s like describing an avalanche while choking on snow. I can refer to history or half recall a tweet from 2019, but the truth is: I have no idea.

What makes it unequivocally worse is the fact that I feel like I should. I teach this stuff. I write and think about it. I’ve lectured on the implications of tariffs on consumer prices. But when someone looks at me with the hopeful eyes of a person that wants a professor-shaped answer to the chaos before them, all I can think is: “Buddy, I was hoping you knew.”

If I keep to my core competencies, I can pass for someone who knows what he’s talking about. I can explain the philosophy behind progressive taxation to undergraduates with the slow, theatrical confidence of someone outlining where the emergency exits are. I say things like “as the regulations make clear” even when the regulations, in fact, make very little clear. My students nod. My editor thanks me for “breaking it down.” I receive plaudits for my “policy analysis” like it’s a survival skill. This all adds to the general sense that I am, if not perhaps wise (as only the old can be wise and I am not old), then at least read up.

The confidence builds in ridiculous ways. I have opinions about tax exempt municipal bonds. I have thoughts about how externalities can be made … internalities is not a word. If it was a word, I would know. After all, well…

The point is, for years I’ve assumed a general air of professional adequacy—most of all with myself. I think I assumed it would scale in the event of, well, whatever all of this is. Like if I can explain how tax credits work, surely I can explain the government, the election, the Supreme Court, or why everything feels like it’s fraying like an old sweater in a cartoon.

But, alas, it does not scale. It collapses. The minute the topic shifts from my little fiefdom to the state of the world, I am left holding a very meticulously chosen pen and have no idea what to write.

It always starts innocently enough. Someone leans across a table and asks, “So what’s going on with the courts?” Or a fellow parent catches me to ask if the presidential immunity ruling means the president can now, quote, do all the crimes. Sometimes it’s a student, blinking earnestly: “So, when is it officially a constitutional crisis?”

That’s when it all unravels. I nod slowly and take a deep breath. I usually start the sentence with “Well…” or “So…” This suggests, mostly to me, that the answer is already apparent and I need only press play on that particular tape player and out will come the answer. I hear myself saying things like “deterioration of the legitimacy of institutions” or “concerns regarding the balance of power,” but they hang in the air like so much smoke. I begin to panic in the exact cadence of someone asked to explain a dream.

Let me be clear, it isn’t that I don’t have thoughts—I have so many thoughts. Too many thoughts, but most of them contradictory, caveated into oblivion, or so weighed down with hedges so as to challenge the bounds of spoken language.

You asked “what happens next?” And I would like to offer you 2,000 words on the potential sociological underpinnings of cuts to tax credits for wind and solar energy—does that help in any way?

The truth is, I’ve built a whole career out of explaining complicated things clearly—but this moment, this particular political epoch, resists clarity like it is a definitional attribute of the era itself. The ice age, I presume, was marked by a lot of ice. We are in the opaque age.

It is akin to asking a physicist to explain what just happened when someone rose from their armchair, floated, and walked through a wall. They’ve spent their lives learning rules—the formulas, constants, forces, and minutia that govern every interaction. Those rules are the whole point. But when the rules are broken, the physicist isn’t especially well suited to explain what happened—not right away. In fact, they may be the least equipped. Because they know just how broken the laws must be for that to happen. They can tell you what just happened shouldn’t be possible, but not what it means. Not yet.

For a time, this troubled me.

After enough of these encounters though, I’ve accepted that my role is less oracle and more an authority on the lack of precedence and the unknowability itself. People invite me into conversations not expecting a map, but confirmation that the new world is in fact unmappable. Where I once gestured at the concept of “rule of law” like Vanna White revealing a vowel, I now prominently provide that I can offer no closure. No one leaves reassured, but they do leave knowing that someone who spent their life reading the inside of the box has no idea how this particular portion of the game is supposed to be played.

I suspect, deep down, no one really wants answers anyway. They want tone. They want a cadence of certainty, a pastiche of calm. A professorial murmur that says, “it’s complicated, but someone is thinking about it.” So, I perform that cadence, even as a small voice inside me whispers, “You have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.”

I can read out the things that are happening like items on a grocery list. Court decisions stripping rights, secret police absconding with people, executive orders that smell vaguely of the apocalypse. But “what’s going on” implies a throughline, a narrative arc. It implies a plot. And, folks, we aren’t in a story. No one wrote this, because the very act of reducing thoughts to paper would bestow upon events more order and direction than they seem to have. No, friends, this is chaos.

People ask what I think will happen next, I want to say “entropy” and then sprint away. I want to say “a 5-4 decision that you cannot even fathom until it happens, and then you’ll forget it within a week only because of the next thing.” I want to say “you’ll be making your own clothes by week’s end.” But mostly, I just want to say: I don’t know.

Maybe that is the most honest thing any so-called expert in any of this can say right now. Not out of helplessness and not in a tone of a confession, but because the questions we’re being asked aren’t legal questions. They’re moral ones. The shape of the future, what legal legitimacy looks like, how we want power to be wielded, these aren’t questions of law at all. The longer I’ve been in this profession, the more I’ve realized that law is a structure, not a compass. It is scaffolding that answers the “how,” not the “whether.” For society it is a mirror, not a guide.

So, next time you’re looking to an expert in any of this to tell you what is going to happen, take heart. They don’t know, but they’re trying to figure it out too. The best anyone can tell you is that they don’t know what comes next, but that it seems like it’s getting harder to pretend that anyone does. The columnists, the analysts, the pundits who keep hitting “publish” or jumping on a podcast with increasing urgency, they simply can’t say with any certainty.

Maybe the most useful thing I can offer these days isn’t certainty anyway, and never was clarity—but presence. A voice that says, “I don’t know either, but I’m still here. And I still care.”

Of course I won’t say that. I’ll go home, open five tabs, convince myself that scrolling is professional engagement, then open a document called Whats Going On.docx, hoping nominative determinism can do some of the work for me. I already have the first sentence: I tend to think I’m pretty smart.