Today the YouTube algorithm fed me a series of videos that left me sobbing. Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill joking and sharing a drink as friends after a day of political conflict; George H. W. Bush congratulating Bill Clinton with immense grace and sincere wishes for his success; Republicans and Democrats gathered in the White House clapping and singing Hey Jude with Paul McCartney; McCain, himself battling cancer, embracing Joe Biden in a Senate hearing room after the loss of Biden’s son Beau; Obama holding hands with Laura Bush. When these things happened, they seemed like little things. Expected gestures of civility and respect. But as one video followed another, I felt an emerging sense of grief and emptiness – just as one does upon the loss of a loved one. I had realized the magnitude of what we have lost.
Consider what we have long taken for granted. America was the world’s grown-up. Our institutions had stood the test of time. Our democracy – tempered by constitutional checks and balances, rule of law, norms of decency and civility, and a tradition of compromise – had largely prevented swings between ideological extremes and dampened the worst instincts of individual leaders. Although imperfect, we were the steady hand on the world’s tiller.
After Trump’s first term, the world was spooked but prepared to give us the benefit of the doubt that this had been an aberrational folly. Not any more. They will never trust us the same way again and for good reason.
Our democracy has been exposed as antiquated and inadequate to the challenges of the information age and the popular culture that accompanies it. We thought that rule of law was enough, but it turned out that the architecture of our government relied heavily on unwritten norms, now extinct. Our political culture of decency and compromise has collapsed. Despite our enormous wealth and economic leadership, our population overall is now less educated and more vulnerable to demagoguery than many others. Many of the institutions that guaranteed competent and professional government have been gutted and inverted – handed over to unqualified hacks or wholly politicized. The state now serves the party, and the party uses all the instruments of state power to advance its ideological vision. Overt corruption on a massive scale goes unanswered, subjecting us to ridicule previously reserved for places such as Kazakhstan and Russia. And the country that liberated the Nazi concentration camps and refused to accept the excuse of “only following orders,” now prosecutes political opponents and maintains a military force answerable only to the leader that herds minorities into camps. I could go on. If you are still under the illusion that our beloved country occupies the world’s moral high ground, think again.
As a friend in Japan reminded me recently, the outrages that have lost us the good will of the world cannot be dismissed or excused as things done by Trump. It was America the country - my country - that did these things. It was our institutions, our laws, our courts, our Congress, and our Constitution that permitted imposition of absurd, chaotic and illegal tariffs, dismantling of the post-war international order, the embrace of countries the civilized world views as pariahs, threats to “take” the territory of allies, and – the ultimate sin – causing untold suffering and global trauma through the launching of an illegal and immoral war. America, he said, is no longer the world’s policeman; it has become the world’s gangster.
As a people we have been changed by our daily immersion in the darkness of Trump’s relentless vulgarity, infantile nastiness, epic narcissism, and ridiculously transparent (but fabulously successful) mendacity. Trumpism is a virus slowly infecting our children, our popular culture and public life at every level. To watch it happen is a terrible daily burden, and millions of us are torn between a desire to tune it out, on one hand, and the moral teaching that you must not avert your eyes when evil is being done, on the other.
But for all its awfulness, the continuing darkness of Trump pales beside the crippling damage that has been done to America’s civic fabric and standing in the world. It will not be restored in my lifetime. You don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone.