Appreciate your notion of a Second American Republic, akin to the France's Fifth Republic, here. That analysis that Biden bet on the wrong thing--the goodness of Americans--rather than strengthening our institutions will stand the test of time. But I do believe that this period will show in stark relief how those institutions have been irrevocably corrupted.
Perhaps, with the benefit of hindsight (do people learn history anymore?), we may, as Bill Clinton famously sloganeered, "build back better."
For now, it feels like we, our structures, our ideals, are in a slow state of internal combustion. Meltdown. Not sure whether to see America as being on fire, wherein a Phoenix may arise from our ashes.
But I choose to remain hopeful--for my baby granddaughters, if not myself or my kids. Otherwise, what's the point?
Robin, thank you for your thoughts. I agree about the irrevocable corruption of American institutions, which has been a long, slow process, inevitable, I think, in any edifice, machine, or nation, in the latter case a kind of entropy of human systems. What was already speeding up, Trump accelerated and will now, with this ratification, rush. If we choose to live, there is no alternative to hope in one form or other, and the realization of hope begins in our actions.
I have found this week that my response to the election was not what I expected. I thought we would have a maddening and prolonged close election, a la 2000, but with Trump’s emotional mayhem added. In the absence of such chaos, I feel that Trump gave permission for a previously shameful and shamed-to-silence part of America to assert itself even more than in 2016. The first time was a surprise. This time those voters saw a chance.
I don’t think the country changed on Tuesday. I think the people who’ve been silently frustrated have found a way to voice their frustration - to say “We’re here, dammit!” Whether their guy will help them or torpedo everyone remains to be seen (and fears are well founded).
But something positive could come if people insulated from this malaise (liberals in blue states maybe) can allow themselves to see Trump voters with compassion. Trump voters will continue to feel shunned and isolated if Dems continue to despise them. As long as there are Dems who sling the word MAGAt, we need Dems who ask, “Help me understand,” and listen. And yes, it is up to Dems to do it because surveys say we have education and books on our side.
I don’t wish to quarrel with anyone’s fear. But liberals have despised and name-called conservatives as much as the reverse. We can do better.
Don’t let my words add any weight to your already heavy heart. I write them in hopes of opening a window and letting in fresh air. If the air is chilly and unwelcome, friend, it’s fine to close the window.
Dear Tara, I would always open the window if it's you at it, especially arriving with so empathetic and inventive closing metaphor. :)
I shared my emotional response because I want those who read me to know that there is a person here undergoing a human experience, in this case a very painful one. But I didn't write an emotional response, and it was my emotions that I had to gather (still gathering) in order to write, not my thoughts on these matters, which have been sharp and clear for a long time.
Like all historical developments, this is a complex one, and I don't seek to simplify the causal dynamics of the process that led to where the U.S. has now arrived. But one also can't address problems with hundred-point plans of action. We need to essentialize and we also need to proceed through focused stages. It's a worthy truism that people always have reasons, often grievances, for what they do, even when they do wrong. It's also true that history clearly shows, in this country as well as many others before now, that whole nations -- majorities -- can do wrong. That's why, in principle anyway, we value minority rights. In a democracy, it may be the lawful decision because the majority voted for it, but it isn't right by virtue of that fact.
You argue here, I think, in your naturally empathetic way, for some listening, to hear the grievances of those who have voted for Trump. I'll liken that to the distraught person standing on a ledge or holding a gun to a captive's head whom we judge to be making a cry for help. First, you need to step off the ledge, or in this case, put down the gun, and Trump is the gun.
Of course, there is bad behavior all around. People are involved. People behave badly, "on the right" and "on the left" and everywhere. I place quotation marks around those phrases because I find them so unhelpful because reductive. There is little meaningful use of either broad expression, both of which seek to homogenize substantial differences and distinctions among their tendencies. Unfortunately, they are so commonly used and they so effectively filter fineness of thought out of the political discourse that they cheapen and ruin the politics of the nation. It's a propagandistic technique and Trump employed it with enormous success: virtually every Democrat became a "radical Marxist liberal." A time-honored equivalent among actual Marxists and "progressives" have been the various formulations that claim no difference between Democrats and Republicans.
It has little to do with "conservatism," which the heroic and even leading efforts of many well-known anti-Trump conservatives made clear these nine years. But to speak of listening, little was possible under Trump's pernicious influence.
Here's the thing, Tara. It comforts the many who are disinclined to recognizing the worst in their fellows and to conflict to speak of "having conversations." There's a whole faith-based and community and psychotherapeutic media world constructed around such conceptualizing. Our small local communities are communities, our counties, our states, our country. But at those larger levels, there's no sharing and having a good cry and hugging it out. A conversation at those levels is called politics, and what Trump is holding in his hands is not the microphone for the next person to share.
I agree with you on every point. I allow myself to refer to left and right when people act simplistic (e.g., name calling), but you’re right that swift labels like that are part of the problem. And Trump is no conservative. Agreed. The word has been bent beyond recognition.
I also think this business of “listening” is not “scalable,” as the capitalists say. It only works 1:1 or in small groups where reciprocity occurs. It requires an eye-to-eye encounter, the sound of a voice.
And it can’t be done on the ledge. You’re right. Fight-flight works against it. I would even add that the listener must be ready to stop listening if reciprocity does not occur. The object is not to encourage more bullying or codependent meekness.
And surely it is true that the actions whispered in all our ears will not be the same. We need litigators and listeners, protestors and preachers, and more.
"And surely it is true that the actions whispered in all our ears will not be the same. We need litigators and listeners, protestors and preachers, and more."
All will have roles to play, even, especially (I like both those differing modifiers) the poets.
Such a beautiful image of the chilly air Tara as already mentioned. I have found greater understanding through this discourse in your thread here 🙏🏻
I am British so I don’t pretend or presume to know why but I ask it. I have a number of good friends in US who are not able to express anything yet beyond sadness and shock. Finding this essay has helped add a fragment to my comprehension.
Thank you for your comment, Jacqui. We all struggle at such difficult times to understand. I'm glad you found any amount of understanding here -- and, yes, any exchange with Tara is always sure to deepen thinking.
The Plague defines Camus's work. Its humanity stands as a tribute to all else he wrote. I add only this to what you have so eloquently laid out: Its humanity stands against evil and the choices we all make. This is why, as I learn of the actions to kill Jews in Europe, the flooding of Portugal as one friend wrote me: including 20,000 applications for immigration to Portugal ~ since the beginning of the war in Gaza ~ as I write this, not in the past caused me to use Camus' novel in a post in 2023 on Inner Life and to argue this: "I argue that the plague represents anything that destroys life, that imprisons, exiles and deprives man of happiness and hope." The world has not changed as fascism has re-emerged in the nation I love. I will not lose hope, I will not turn inward though today I still mourn.
A resounding yes to all, Mary. The struggle against the plague's recurrence, always, is the Sisyphean task of being human in political connection to others. In the novel, there is that much prized scene in which Rieux and Tarrou swim in the sea together, a sensuous, life affirming liberation from dread and the battle against the plague. Last week on Notes I quoted Brecht about singing / about the dark times." We have to find our voices for that.
Regarding your point, "As France has had, by necessity and by choice, five republics, in recognition of earlier failures, America needs a second."
That is certainly true but there is a great difference. France is a deeply philosophical country that respects education and intelligence. People buy books and follow politics daily on TV, and their political opinions are usually thought through and coherent. Even today the French state school curriculum teaches philosophy!
None of the above applies to most Americans.
But also France has a very different philosophy about business than America. I sum it up as this;
In France the corporations are there to serve all the public. They are regulated, taxed, controlled on the basis of fairness and the public good. The critical industries and companies are controlled directly by the State and managed on behalf of the people.
In America the people are there to serve the corporations by supplying them with workers, customers or investors. Any other people are therefore worthless to them, and even parasitic on the corporations because they 'eat' taxes. The corporations therefore control the government to produce 'useful' people and disenfranchise and get rid of the others.
That basic difference, to me, explains why the French constitution has been updated to continue to protect the people, and the American constitution has been manipulated give corporations more and more power, and to demolish the protections for the people.
So if there is to be a Second Republic in America it is likely to be Trump, Vance, Thiel and Musk that will write its constitution. Which may well turn out to be what happens next.
Thank you for your own fine analysis. I agree with all you say. My analogy to France was intended to illuminate only one small point of (for now, contrasting) comparison: the possibility of forming succeeding republican structures -- of reforming more fundamentally than continually adding new patchwork amendments, which, among those American dysfunctions, has become almost literally impossible to do.
It is one of those arrogances of developed American self-regard to think that democratic and republican liberty can take form in one shape only: that of the originating American Constitution and its subsequent contingent history. France actually offers an excellent example of how people can develop the general structures differently and just as validly.
While I agree with all those cultural and structural differences you point out between the U.S. and France, I'll make a point I long used to make in an entirely different world political climate than now. France, and other successful European democracies, gained its opportunity to develop those advantages significantly at American expense -- the greater wealth of the far more robust American economy in the post-war years that paid for the American military that bore the lion's share of the burden of European defense during the Cold War and even after (France officially part of NATO or not). I think it was right for the U.S., able to do it, to bear that burden, but it paid a price for it and the advent of Trumpism is part of the price, I think. The European Union and NATO have improved in recognizing their own responsibility -- supercharged by the war in Ukraine -- and I fear that responsibility will be tested in years to come. Those discussions are certainly taking place in government offices all over Europe right now.
I agree, too, that it might be those Trumpian oligarchs and successors who write a new constitution and form a second republic, which would necessitate a third with any recovery. They might not bother, though. While Chavez came to power in Venezuela on the back of a movement for a new Bolivarian republic even before he took power, Orbán has so far been content with the pretense of maintaining the already existent republic and realigning how power is exercised within it. This is an area in which people like Bannon and Stephen Miller may well exert influence.
Finally, never before has a so large, powerful, and influential a modern nation descended into illiberalism and autocracy. There is no historical precedent for believing it can recover.
You are correct on all points. I'd add that America is currently heading in the opposite direction to Europe, particularly France, and I expect the Peak fossil energy crisis and the climate crisis and the debt crises to overtake America well before any political progress is possible.
In fact, as Musk said last week, I think Trump's plans will crash the economy in 2025, perhaps intentionally so rich investors can pick up the pieces, but also to steal away the wealth of the middle classes.
Here's an off-the-wall thought for you:
I have long said that there has never yet been a genuine Marxist Communist state, one where rampant Capitalism makes a super-wealthy elite and 'the masses' are destitute, and the masses rise up to overturn Capitalism, seize the means of production and create a Communist state. I have further proposed that of all the places such a thing might happen, I think the USA is the most likely - the first genuine Communist country as Marx envisaged it.
I have to say it doesn't go down so well in America!
What's more, I think that Trump's political pitch of representing the average guy, and then getting into power and crashing the economy and shafting his electorate, could be exactly the way to make such a thing happen.
I agree the chances are excellent that the destructive effects of illiberalism across the globe -- jet-propelled by the U.S. -- are likely to felt before any turn away from Trumpism is rejected. And definitely., any proletarian uprising in the U.S. would have to assume a different name from Communism, but I think that collectivist spirit so antithetical to American cultural history as to be very unlikely.
I think an essential consideration now is how unpredictable the future is, as always. Who would have predicted the Napoleonic future in 1792? Had Alexander Kerensky and the Russian Provisional government ended the Russian war effort, as the Bolsheviks later did, they might have prevented the October Revolution. The totally unforeseen, including the results of discrete decisions, is surely coming in the U.S. It's not unlikely Trump can't complete his term because of health or mortality. There are scores of people and factions hovering like vultures over the inheritable remnants of his political position, none with his unique set of characteristics. The in-fighting -- a ruthless internal struggle for power within a governing party unlike any ever seen in the U.S. -- could lead in so many directions.
I cannot tell you how appreciative I am of this essay. I write on Substack, but not to the heights that you have produced in this paper. I do, though, as an elder person, feel that I am recording things that not only are no more, but are incomprehensible to the current American generation that has elected this travesty. Please continue to record your observations. They will be vital to many of us.
Appreciate your notion of a Second American Republic, akin to the France's Fifth Republic, here. That analysis that Biden bet on the wrong thing--the goodness of Americans--rather than strengthening our institutions will stand the test of time. But I do believe that this period will show in stark relief how those institutions have been irrevocably corrupted.
Perhaps, with the benefit of hindsight (do people learn history anymore?), we may, as Bill Clinton famously sloganeered, "build back better."
For now, it feels like we, our structures, our ideals, are in a slow state of internal combustion. Meltdown. Not sure whether to see America as being on fire, wherein a Phoenix may arise from our ashes.
But I choose to remain hopeful--for my baby granddaughters, if not myself or my kids. Otherwise, what's the point?
Robin, thank you for your thoughts. I agree about the irrevocable corruption of American institutions, which has been a long, slow process, inevitable, I think, in any edifice, machine, or nation, in the latter case a kind of entropy of human systems. What was already speeding up, Trump accelerated and will now, with this ratification, rush. If we choose to live, there is no alternative to hope in one form or other, and the realization of hope begins in our actions.
I have found this week that my response to the election was not what I expected. I thought we would have a maddening and prolonged close election, a la 2000, but with Trump’s emotional mayhem added. In the absence of such chaos, I feel that Trump gave permission for a previously shameful and shamed-to-silence part of America to assert itself even more than in 2016. The first time was a surprise. This time those voters saw a chance.
I don’t think the country changed on Tuesday. I think the people who’ve been silently frustrated have found a way to voice their frustration - to say “We’re here, dammit!” Whether their guy will help them or torpedo everyone remains to be seen (and fears are well founded).
But something positive could come if people insulated from this malaise (liberals in blue states maybe) can allow themselves to see Trump voters with compassion. Trump voters will continue to feel shunned and isolated if Dems continue to despise them. As long as there are Dems who sling the word MAGAt, we need Dems who ask, “Help me understand,” and listen. And yes, it is up to Dems to do it because surveys say we have education and books on our side.
I don’t wish to quarrel with anyone’s fear. But liberals have despised and name-called conservatives as much as the reverse. We can do better.
Don’t let my words add any weight to your already heavy heart. I write them in hopes of opening a window and letting in fresh air. If the air is chilly and unwelcome, friend, it’s fine to close the window.
Dear Tara, I would always open the window if it's you at it, especially arriving with so empathetic and inventive closing metaphor. :)
I shared my emotional response because I want those who read me to know that there is a person here undergoing a human experience, in this case a very painful one. But I didn't write an emotional response, and it was my emotions that I had to gather (still gathering) in order to write, not my thoughts on these matters, which have been sharp and clear for a long time.
Like all historical developments, this is a complex one, and I don't seek to simplify the causal dynamics of the process that led to where the U.S. has now arrived. But one also can't address problems with hundred-point plans of action. We need to essentialize and we also need to proceed through focused stages. It's a worthy truism that people always have reasons, often grievances, for what they do, even when they do wrong. It's also true that history clearly shows, in this country as well as many others before now, that whole nations -- majorities -- can do wrong. That's why, in principle anyway, we value minority rights. In a democracy, it may be the lawful decision because the majority voted for it, but it isn't right by virtue of that fact.
You argue here, I think, in your naturally empathetic way, for some listening, to hear the grievances of those who have voted for Trump. I'll liken that to the distraught person standing on a ledge or holding a gun to a captive's head whom we judge to be making a cry for help. First, you need to step off the ledge, or in this case, put down the gun, and Trump is the gun.
Of course, there is bad behavior all around. People are involved. People behave badly, "on the right" and "on the left" and everywhere. I place quotation marks around those phrases because I find them so unhelpful because reductive. There is little meaningful use of either broad expression, both of which seek to homogenize substantial differences and distinctions among their tendencies. Unfortunately, they are so commonly used and they so effectively filter fineness of thought out of the political discourse that they cheapen and ruin the politics of the nation. It's a propagandistic technique and Trump employed it with enormous success: virtually every Democrat became a "radical Marxist liberal." A time-honored equivalent among actual Marxists and "progressives" have been the various formulations that claim no difference between Democrats and Republicans.
It has little to do with "conservatism," which the heroic and even leading efforts of many well-known anti-Trump conservatives made clear these nine years. But to speak of listening, little was possible under Trump's pernicious influence.
Here's the thing, Tara. It comforts the many who are disinclined to recognizing the worst in their fellows and to conflict to speak of "having conversations." There's a whole faith-based and community and psychotherapeutic media world constructed around such conceptualizing. Our small local communities are communities, our counties, our states, our country. But at those larger levels, there's no sharing and having a good cry and hugging it out. A conversation at those levels is called politics, and what Trump is holding in his hands is not the microphone for the next person to share.
I agree with you on every point. I allow myself to refer to left and right when people act simplistic (e.g., name calling), but you’re right that swift labels like that are part of the problem. And Trump is no conservative. Agreed. The word has been bent beyond recognition.
I also think this business of “listening” is not “scalable,” as the capitalists say. It only works 1:1 or in small groups where reciprocity occurs. It requires an eye-to-eye encounter, the sound of a voice.
And it can’t be done on the ledge. You’re right. Fight-flight works against it. I would even add that the listener must be ready to stop listening if reciprocity does not occur. The object is not to encourage more bullying or codependent meekness.
And surely it is true that the actions whispered in all our ears will not be the same. We need litigators and listeners, protestors and preachers, and more.
… And poets. Of course! :-)
As we say in the voice of W. H. Auden hereon Homo Vitruvius: "Sing of human unsuccess / In a rapture of distress."
😂 😅
Agree with all of that and this is so true:
"And surely it is true that the actions whispered in all our ears will not be the same. We need litigators and listeners, protestors and preachers, and more."
All will have roles to play, even, especially (I like both those differing modifiers) the poets.
We can do better.
Such a beautiful image of the chilly air Tara as already mentioned. I have found greater understanding through this discourse in your thread here 🙏🏻
I am British so I don’t pretend or presume to know why but I ask it. I have a number of good friends in US who are not able to express anything yet beyond sadness and shock. Finding this essay has helped add a fragment to my comprehension.
🙏🏻
Thank you for your comment, Jacqui. We all struggle at such difficult times to understand. I'm glad you found any amount of understanding here -- and, yes, any exchange with Tara is always sure to deepen thinking.
The Plague defines Camus's work. Its humanity stands as a tribute to all else he wrote. I add only this to what you have so eloquently laid out: Its humanity stands against evil and the choices we all make. This is why, as I learn of the actions to kill Jews in Europe, the flooding of Portugal as one friend wrote me: including 20,000 applications for immigration to Portugal ~ since the beginning of the war in Gaza ~ as I write this, not in the past caused me to use Camus' novel in a post in 2023 on Inner Life and to argue this: "I argue that the plague represents anything that destroys life, that imprisons, exiles and deprives man of happiness and hope." The world has not changed as fascism has re-emerged in the nation I love. I will not lose hope, I will not turn inward though today I still mourn.
A resounding yes to all, Mary. The struggle against the plague's recurrence, always, is the Sisyphean task of being human in political connection to others. In the novel, there is that much prized scene in which Rieux and Tarrou swim in the sea together, a sensuous, life affirming liberation from dread and the battle against the plague. Last week on Notes I quoted Brecht about singing / about the dark times." We have to find our voices for that.
Excellent analysis and commentary.
Regarding your point, "As France has had, by necessity and by choice, five republics, in recognition of earlier failures, America needs a second."
That is certainly true but there is a great difference. France is a deeply philosophical country that respects education and intelligence. People buy books and follow politics daily on TV, and their political opinions are usually thought through and coherent. Even today the French state school curriculum teaches philosophy!
None of the above applies to most Americans.
But also France has a very different philosophy about business than America. I sum it up as this;
In France the corporations are there to serve all the public. They are regulated, taxed, controlled on the basis of fairness and the public good. The critical industries and companies are controlled directly by the State and managed on behalf of the people.
In America the people are there to serve the corporations by supplying them with workers, customers or investors. Any other people are therefore worthless to them, and even parasitic on the corporations because they 'eat' taxes. The corporations therefore control the government to produce 'useful' people and disenfranchise and get rid of the others.
That basic difference, to me, explains why the French constitution has been updated to continue to protect the people, and the American constitution has been manipulated give corporations more and more power, and to demolish the protections for the people.
So if there is to be a Second Republic in America it is likely to be Trump, Vance, Thiel and Musk that will write its constitution. Which may well turn out to be what happens next.
Thank you for your own fine analysis. I agree with all you say. My analogy to France was intended to illuminate only one small point of (for now, contrasting) comparison: the possibility of forming succeeding republican structures -- of reforming more fundamentally than continually adding new patchwork amendments, which, among those American dysfunctions, has become almost literally impossible to do.
It is one of those arrogances of developed American self-regard to think that democratic and republican liberty can take form in one shape only: that of the originating American Constitution and its subsequent contingent history. France actually offers an excellent example of how people can develop the general structures differently and just as validly.
While I agree with all those cultural and structural differences you point out between the U.S. and France, I'll make a point I long used to make in an entirely different world political climate than now. France, and other successful European democracies, gained its opportunity to develop those advantages significantly at American expense -- the greater wealth of the far more robust American economy in the post-war years that paid for the American military that bore the lion's share of the burden of European defense during the Cold War and even after (France officially part of NATO or not). I think it was right for the U.S., able to do it, to bear that burden, but it paid a price for it and the advent of Trumpism is part of the price, I think. The European Union and NATO have improved in recognizing their own responsibility -- supercharged by the war in Ukraine -- and I fear that responsibility will be tested in years to come. Those discussions are certainly taking place in government offices all over Europe right now.
I agree, too, that it might be those Trumpian oligarchs and successors who write a new constitution and form a second republic, which would necessitate a third with any recovery. They might not bother, though. While Chavez came to power in Venezuela on the back of a movement for a new Bolivarian republic even before he took power, Orbán has so far been content with the pretense of maintaining the already existent republic and realigning how power is exercised within it. This is an area in which people like Bannon and Stephen Miller may well exert influence.
Finally, never before has a so large, powerful, and influential a modern nation descended into illiberalism and autocracy. There is no historical precedent for believing it can recover.
You are correct on all points. I'd add that America is currently heading in the opposite direction to Europe, particularly France, and I expect the Peak fossil energy crisis and the climate crisis and the debt crises to overtake America well before any political progress is possible.
In fact, as Musk said last week, I think Trump's plans will crash the economy in 2025, perhaps intentionally so rich investors can pick up the pieces, but also to steal away the wealth of the middle classes.
Here's an off-the-wall thought for you:
I have long said that there has never yet been a genuine Marxist Communist state, one where rampant Capitalism makes a super-wealthy elite and 'the masses' are destitute, and the masses rise up to overturn Capitalism, seize the means of production and create a Communist state. I have further proposed that of all the places such a thing might happen, I think the USA is the most likely - the first genuine Communist country as Marx envisaged it.
I have to say it doesn't go down so well in America!
What's more, I think that Trump's political pitch of representing the average guy, and then getting into power and crashing the economy and shafting his electorate, could be exactly the way to make such a thing happen.
Any thoughts or comments?
I agree the chances are excellent that the destructive effects of illiberalism across the globe -- jet-propelled by the U.S. -- are likely to felt before any turn away from Trumpism is rejected. And definitely., any proletarian uprising in the U.S. would have to assume a different name from Communism, but I think that collectivist spirit so antithetical to American cultural history as to be very unlikely.
I think an essential consideration now is how unpredictable the future is, as always. Who would have predicted the Napoleonic future in 1792? Had Alexander Kerensky and the Russian Provisional government ended the Russian war effort, as the Bolsheviks later did, they might have prevented the October Revolution. The totally unforeseen, including the results of discrete decisions, is surely coming in the U.S. It's not unlikely Trump can't complete his term because of health or mortality. There are scores of people and factions hovering like vultures over the inheritable remnants of his political position, none with his unique set of characteristics. The in-fighting -- a ruthless internal struggle for power within a governing party unlike any ever seen in the U.S. -- could lead in so many directions.
I cannot tell you how appreciative I am of this essay. I write on Substack, but not to the heights that you have produced in this paper. I do, though, as an elder person, feel that I am recording things that not only are no more, but are incomprehensible to the current American generation that has elected this travesty. Please continue to record your observations. They will be vital to many of us.