The American First Republic

American Samizdat: Writing in the End Time

Part of a grave monument erected for an athlete in the Kerameikos cemetery in Athens, circa 510-500 BCE, via the National Archaeological Museum in Athens

It’s been a tough week for me, maybe you, too. I thought I might not be able to write for a long time. I didn’t think, suddenly, I had it in me to address the moment. I guess, despite the dreadful fear, I thought we’d pull it out, and I wasn’t emotionally prepared. Then, Wednesday afternoon, without planning to, thinking I couldn’t, I just sat down to write. I didn’t know what else to do. It’s what I do. It’s how I survive.

I still need to bring things more clearly into view for me, for my writing.

Those reading me long enough on Substack know I haven’t wanted to write about “politics.” I did that for about a decade, amid my other writing, and I felt I’d lost time and productivity away from my creative work because of it. This just concluded election, and the prospect of what has come to pass, drew me back in for a few months. I felt the obligation. I hoped it would all end this past Tuesday. But I also promised (myself, to start) that American Samizdat would serve not just to “warn against” and “prepare for” but also to “persevere until.”

For that first nearly 24 hours, the sense of despair and the feeling of disappointment were too great. By disappointment, I don’t mean in the election outcome, though of course, yes, that, but in my country and its people. I’d been feeling that for nine years already, a little bit better after 2020, but I knew a Trump victory a third time around would break something in me, and it has, as something broke in the country.

The United States, as it has been variously understood in its best ideals, representations, and actions over 235 years, is over.

Of course, some nation recognized in the United Nations and by international treaties as the United States of America will continue under that name, and the nation that goes by that name may someday be rescued from the fate that was determined for it on November 5, 2024. It may be rescued by the many brave, tireless, and committed people who devote themselves to their political ideals and to action, with some better nation to take its place, but even that rescued country, for the Americans of that time, whatever is made or comes of it, will be a different one. The country that declared its independence in 1776 and was founded in 1789 is over.

Because it isn’t just Trump anymore. It hasn't simply been Trump for quite a while. It is now more than half of the American voting citizenry, and the nonvoters don’t get a pass either. Two hundred and thirty-five years of evolving nationhood produced — out of the truly historic and exalted ideals articulated in the country’s founding documents — an American culture of crass, Roman circus commercialism (apotheosized by Trump’s campaign), suicide-murderous gun-love, blind, greedy material consumption, and, ultimately, an exalted national self-regard almost wholly devoid of any balancing self-reflection. The society branded and known to the world by that national culture constitutes itself, in major part, with people who had the opportunity to observe Donald Trump for a decade, and in the sharp relief of his campaign’s closing months, for exactly what he is — every vile character deformation and crime — and chose him. In full knowledge of all he displayed and bombastically proclaimed, of every accusation, indictment, conviction, corruption, and lie, those people chose him.

Two hundred and thirty-five years of striving toward those ideals — of a “shining city on a hill,” a “last best hope on earth,’ choose your own formulation of the country’s manifest destiny in American exceptionalism — produced that culture and that society that chose that man to be its president.

That's why the country is over. If that’s what all the elevated self-conceptualizing led to over all that time, then the great experiment was, as experiments can be, in the end, a failure. It failed.

“Posterity! You will never know, how much it cost the present Generation, to preserve your Freedom! I hope you will make a good Use of it. If you do not, I shall repent in Heaven, that I ever took half the Pains to preserve it.”

Wrote Anand Giridharadas in “How to Hope, Even Now,”

It is a shattering result. The return of Donald Trump feels like the end of something, more than a reversion. The end of a certain idea of America, the end of an era, the end of so much hope and faith and belief. The end of a complex of institutions and ideas.

For many of you, the result will break your trust in America and in the people around you. You may be tempted to turn away. That is entirely understandable. For some, it might be the right choice for right now.

But for those who, as ever, believe in America, the work remains. It becomes all the more urgent. It doesn’t go away just because a carnival barker wants to be a king.

[All emphasis added]

I respect Giridharadas. But those second and third paragraphs turn the first into a mere rhetorical flourish that hedges its claim. Feels like the end of something, or is?

I maintain that it is. “Believe in America”? What America? This one that has now chosen Donald Trump twice, in full knowledge?

Here’s Charlie Sykes, anti-Trump man of the right to Giridharadas’s man of the left, in “This Is Us.”

We can expect President Donald Trump to begin a massive purge of the federal workforce; and the process of mass deportations.

The reign of Stephen Miller, Elon Musk and RFK, Jr. will begin… Trump will pardon the January 6 rioters; and summarily fire the prosecutors who tried to hold him accountable. Having been immunized by the Supreme Court, he will instruct the DOJ to go after his political opponents. He will abandon Ukraine and begin the process of weakening our alliances. A newly empowered Trump will gut or kill Obamacare outright, while imposing massive new tariffs on the economy. 

We also know that the guardrails will not hold, because they did not hold before. If they had, none of this would have happened. Neither the impeachment process nor the justice system blocked his return to power. And now the ultimate guardrail has failed. 

Whatever the final margin, the American people have returned this blatantly, dangerously unfit man to power. In the end, nothing mattered.

What I believe in, what I always believed in, is the idea of America, exemplified by its best history, not in “America” itself. (What is that, anyway?) Early in my life, through education and experience, I fell in love with the country, the land and its people, married in my mind to that idea and the vital history. That’s how American patriotism forms for most people, I think. But the people and their culture are the glue that cement all the elements into a composed object of attachment. And the people and their society have failed — not all at once, but finally, as, over civilizational history, other societies have failed.

And that thing that failed — that was the American First Republic.

As France has had, by necessity and by choice, five republics, in recognition of earlier failures, America needs a second.

Sykes makes clear that the manifold catastrophe of Trump includes his exposure of the republic’s cracked and crumbling foundation, with its many patchwork fixes, jerry-rigged fixtures, and hand-ratcheted screws. From its legislative procedures to its justice system and electoral college to political processes and official norms, the easily manipulated contraption no longer works or works to serve democracy or justice. All this helped lead to Trump, and now Trump wants to corrupt, diminish, or eliminate what still does work.

None of this is empirically debatable, though it is deniable, and is denied by the millions happy to have their alienation, resentments, ideological rejections, and their bigotries placated. It is ever thus in the rise of popularly supported autocrats.

The decline into authoritarian oppression needn’t happen quickly either. Liberal democracy often passes into pluto- and kleptocratic, illiberal democracy, on the way to autocracy, at tortoise speed, so that the perpetrators of the crime and the willfully blind can claim to see nothing happening. This happened in Venezuela, in Hungary. This obstinacy of sight is aided in the U.S. by a kind of so-called moderate, not an outright or vocal Trump supporter, who believes somehow that the U.S. is recipient of some kind of unique (“exceptional”) dispensation from history rendering it immune to a befooled populace or to tyranny.

As liberal Democrat Simon Rosenberg put it,

I still think many on our side and in the establishment simply do not understand the nature of the conflict America finds itself in today. Trump and his global allies are playing a different game than we are used to. They have invented a whole new deeply illiberal game with all sorts of new pieces and rules. We have been slow, dangerously and recklessly, slow in recognizing how the rules of the game have changed.

Along those lines Jonathan V. Last of The Bulwark (and, formerly, the conservative Weekly Standard), who offered throughout the long campaign some of the most astute analysis, and who praises much of Biden’s presidency, stated, “President Biden bet everything on the innate goodness of the American people. We should learn from his mistake.”

In a funny way, it was JD Vance, and not Joe Biden, who understood what was happening.

“We are in a late republican period,” Vance said in 2021. “If we’re going to push back against it, we have to get pretty wild, pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”

This diagnosis is correct. The remaining rump of Americans who are committed to liberalism, the Constitution, and the rule of law had better embrace it.

Joe Biden was given the choice of betting liberal democracy on structures and the levers of power, or on the innate goodness of the American people. He put his entire chip stack on the American people and lost.

We ought not repeat his mistake.

What do I do? I started out at top. I don’t want to be doing this. I am in the midst of two novels. I’m working to get a play produced. I have, already conceived, all the major creative works to last out my lifetime. When I began writing this past spring, here on Substack, my intellectual and spiritual memoir Reason for Being in the World — much interrupted by the effort of American Samizdat — I said that I conceived it out of the sense that I had reached (very much kicking and screaming) the stage of life when it felt right for me to offer such a summative accounting of my development and commitments. As it happens, the themes of that in-progress work merge with what I seek to convey here and offer a vision to me of how I can do what I think I must.

If I’m lucky enough to live as long as my father, I have more than two decades of life left. Mac was intellectually vital to his final days, physically, until his last month. Even my far less healthy mother, than my father or I, lived another sixteen years. My older sister, eleven years my senior, is with us still. I’ll retire when I’m dead, so I can still get a lot of work done. Then again, maybe not – we all live on time borrowed from Chance, but Chance has been loitering in the shadows all along.

The fictional works I wrote in my twenties were the kind of autobiographical efforts common to sensitive young writers seeking to monumentalize their long painful struggle toward personhood. Life and other dimensions of that person shaped me into a different kind of writer, one who isn’t adequately fulfilled gauging the uncontrolled climate of the self. Currents carry over distant waters. Winds disturb a more general atmosphere. We’re all weathered, clinging to lifeboats.

In Les Temps modernes—the literary and political journal Jean-Paul Satre founded in 1945 with Simone de Beauvoir and Maurice Merleau-Ponty — Satre introduced his notion of a “littérature engagée.” His Existential philosophy argued for an engaged relationship with the world, an engaged existence: “One must be engaged, one must take sides, abstention is a choice.” We are thrown into the situation of our lives, but we freely author what we write on the pages of our circumstance: “The writer is in a situation in his time: each word has repercussions. Every silence too."

I understand that while many can, many others cannot engage like this. Most people are not constituted in this way, to struggle, to contend, to contest in the agon. It is clear in the first days after the election how many will seek to reconcile themselves with the unreconcilable, to reduce, as so many have tried to do all along, a profound national moral failing to “politics” — political differences, over which we should not lose our human connection. People long for that human connection and are loathe to feel themselves complicit in breaking it. From this reluctance springs the general shrinking among modern civilized peoples from war, until their backs touch the wall, with the knife at their throats — and even then, they will ask in desperation, Can’t we just be friends? Can’t we all be friends?

And yes, the fascist will be your friend, the roaring demos of the demagogue, the crowd in the Coliseum, with a generous thumbs up, will be your friend, as long as you go along. As Rosenberg, Sykes, and Last make clear, however, the Trumpist GOP is playing a different game now, their voters have endorsed it, and it isn’t “politics.” Did Donald Trump seem like he cares whether you’re his friend if you happen to oppose his ends?

As Albert Camus put it, in The Artist and His Time:

Considered as artists, we perhaps have no need to interfere in the affairs of the world. But considered as men, yes . . .. I have not written, day after day, fighting articles and texts, I have not taken part in the common struggles because I desire the world to be covered with Greek statues and masterpieces. The man who has such a desire does exist in me . . .. But from my first articles to my latest book I have written so much, and perhaps too much, only because I cannot keep from being drawn toward everyday life, toward those, whoever they may be, who are humiliated and debased. They need to hope, and if all keep silent or if they are given a choice between two kinds of humiliation, they will be forever deprived of hope and we with them. It seems to me impossible to endure that idea, nor can he who cannot endure it lie down to sleep in his tower. Not through virtue, as you see, but through a sort of almost organic intolerance, which you feel or do not feel. Indeed, I see many who fail to feel it, but I cannot envy their sleep.

I am not a political operative, a psychotherapist, or a pastor. I'm not looking to frame issues in the best possible way to curry votes, to ease the psychic challenge for anyone in confronting cultural change, or to soothe anyone's soul, though I care about souls, including the soul of a nation. I'm a writer, in various forms, and in every one of them, I am committed to telling the truth.

The stock phrase in that last formulation, when offered, is often an added "as I see it," but those words are simultaneously too deferential yet still self-regarding. They suggest too little commitment to the truth (it's just what I think, you might think differently, and that’s okay!) while also contrarily isolating and privileging the speaker's own personal experience as the thing that really counts for them: it's true for me and that's all that matters for me.

I am, as a writer, rather, committed to telling the universally accessible truth as I have faculty to discern it. When I engage ideas intellectually, alone or with others, I am committed to seeking the truth through empirically grounded and coordinate reason. Not the truth for me but rather the truth that is available to all to perceive: a truth for all.

I hold these truths to be supportable and self-evident to an unclouded mind:

• That Donald Trump is a false and indecent human being, ruinous of our culture, our characters, and our claim to our own decency as individuals.

• That whatever social or political ills of the left, imagined or real, motivated a vote for Trump, none was worse or as imminent in its ascent to ultimate power to befoul our world as was he and that this explanation as excuse for supporting him will not stand before reason, the moral faculties, or history.

• That no political analysis of the complaints and historical situation of those who voted for Trump can ever justify support and a vote for him, and while forgiveness is the business of whoever chooses to offer it, a vote for Trump like the cheers for authoritarians throughout history will forever remain a stain and inexcusable.

Americans get no exception. Of course, Trumpists think they’re good people. Everyone thinks they’re “good people.” Every nation or population that ever did wrong over the course of human history was filled with those who believed themselves good people. All the college protestors who championed Hamas over the past year think, in all their righteousness, that they’re good people. Yahya Sinwar memorized the entire Qu’ran.

I’d rather be staring at Greek statues, but if this is the situation, now in my life, into which I am thrown, I will throw my weight against it as a commitment of that life.

The motto of Homo Vitruvius is “a writer’s renascent light against the darkness, shined through literature, culture, and ideas.” That is very much the spirit in which, without writing any kind of politics and policy newsletter, I have sought to oppose Trumpism” on American Samizdat. It is the spirit in which I will strive to help “persevere until,” so how I will distinguish between the two Substacks I will need to work out over time. I can say that the thematic conclusion of Reason for Being in the World, which I will continue to publish on Homo Vitruvius, directly applies to the spirit of American Samizdat.

He knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.

Albert Camus, The Plague

AJA

Poet. Storyteller. Dramatist. Essayist. Artificer.

ajayadler.com