There are mornings when the Cynic arises and believes with his first blinking half-thought that the righteous already have lost. That the forces of apathy, stupidity, and anesthetic comfort, enabled and armed for battle by the forces of radical religion and corporate oligarchy, have broken through all the barricades. That they’ve worn down any who were still hoarding a stubborn and invulnerable hope. The Cynic remembers what Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence:
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.
Yes, Jefferson goes on with all that “It is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government” business. But he did not reckon with all the ways that human beings can convince themselves that actual evils are actually sufferable.
One of the ways they do that is by creating a puppet universe of evil, a wax museum of artificial villains. Mask requirements become a bigger threat to liberty than unchecked greed and authoritarian Bible-banging. Dr. Anthony Fauci becomes Karl Marx in a lab coat. Voters trust the ranting of radio hustlers more than they do medical science. The country of Jonas Salk and Walter Reed now takes its diagnoses from Alex Jones and Lauren Boebert.
Meanwhile, as people are battling counterfeit banditti of their own creation, the Cynic sees the real thieves slipping out the back door with all the real valuables, perhaps never to return. The Cynic feels sour and prescient. The Cynic feels like giving up.
Occasionally, the Cynic grows bereft in his belief that our current political moment all started with the rise of Barack Obama to the presidency. In 2004, when the young Illinois state senator roused the Democratic National Convention in Boston, he affixed a golden Band-Aid to our suppurating national wounds with these words:
Yet even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes. Well, I say to them tonight, there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America—there’s the United States of America. There’s not a Black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America. The pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and have gay friends in the Red States. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and patriots who supported it. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.
And the Cynic thought in rebuttal, All right, we are two nations. Back then, he assumed it was just his native distrust of his fellow citizens that led him to scoff at what Obama said. He never dreamed he’d live out his misgivings in real time.
When the Cynic gets like this, you see, he reads a lot of John Dos Passos:
America our nation has been beaten by strangers who have turned our language inside out who have taken the clean words our fathers spoke and made them slimy and foul
their hired men sit on the judge’s bench they sit back with their feet on the tables under the dome of the State House they are ignorant of our beliefs they have the dollars the guns the armed forces the powerplants
they have built the electric chair and hired the executioner to throw the switch all right we are two nations. . .
—John Dos Passos, The Big Money, 1936
Dos Passos is writing here about the execution by electrocution of two Italian anarchists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, just after midnight on August 23, 1927, in the Charlestown State Prison in Boston—about a mile from where the Democratic National Convention was held in 2004. The two had been convicted six years earlier of murdering a paymaster and a payroll guard during an armed robbery at a shoe factory in South Braintree. It was the time of the Red Scare and of anarchist bombings, and the two men never had a chance.
The judge in the trial, a crabbed old Yankee from Worcester named Webster Thayer, had no problem sentencing the two men to death.
After the conviction came six years of appeals, habeas corpus petitions, and new-trial motions, all of which were denied, but many of which illustrated serious problems with the prosecution’s case. The governor of Massachusetts, an auto-sales millionaire named Alvan Fuller, refused to grant clemency. And a day after twenty thousand people had stood vigil on Boston Common, Sacco and Vanzetti went to the chair at the appointed hour. Some two hundred thousand people lined the streets for the funeral procession.
Meanwhile, all hell was breaking loose. Somebody bombed the American embassy in Buenos Aires and hatched a plot to kill President-elect Herbert Hoover when he later visited that city. They bombed the home of a juror from the trial and the home of the executioner. On September 27, 1932, someone blew up Judge Thayer’s house in Worcester. One of the Worcester Police Department officers sent to investigate was Detective Sergeant Patrick J. Pierce, the Cynic’s grandfather. Thayer moved to Boston and lived under guard at the University Club for the rest of his life. The crime remains unsolved.
Where has the Cynic heard this song before? Dissatisfaction with a jury verdict? A violent reaction to an official proceeding? Pipe bombs outside both party headquarters, a crime that is yet unsolved? Our anarchists now are on the other side of our political divides, which, though artificially constructed and artificially maintained, are no less real for that.
Now, from the vantage point of 2024, with a convicted felon—as convicted a felon as Sacco or Vanzetti ever was—as the presidential nominee of one of our two major political parties, a two-bit grifter who lies like he breathes, is there anything from Obama’s speech twenty years ago that can remotely be seen to be true? The past ten years have been a living, breathing, rock-throwing, bear-spraying refutation of everything Obama said in that speech. From where the Cynic sits now, the speech seems the source of a dangerous, narcotic belief in our own fundamental greatness as a people.
What, after all, did the eight years of the Obama administration produce as evidence for the truth of what he said in Boston, other than his reelection in 2012? He wasn’t in office for six months before the oligarchy and the religious furies packed congressional town halls and public squares with willing, deluded sheep, caterwauling about wanting their country back. The voices of the angry Right filled the airwaves, and the Congress, and ultimately the presidency. In 2016, those voices turned out to be Yeats’s rough beast, its hour come round at last.
They came damnably close to drowning out the election results of 2020 entirely. Their hirelings in Congress, and on the Supreme Court, consistently push policies on the country—from revocation of a woman’s right to bodily autonomy, to the destruction of all gun control, to the right of a president to do almost anything he wants, inside or outside the law—that are manifestly, almost ludicrously, unpopular, because they believe firmly that if the country can elect Donald Trump to be its president, then they can get away with anything. On July 1, 2024, the Supreme Court of the United States volunteered to drive the getaway car.
In the case of Trump v. U. S., the court made it nearly impossible to hold a criminal president legally responsible for crimes committed while in office. Chief Justice John Roberts led the court’s carefully manufactured conservative majority into a decision as constitutionally cataclysmic as Dred Scott v. Sandford was. But the general electorate has become so anesthetized that it can’t recognize history when it slaps it upside the head.
The Cynic hears the bell tolling, and the echoes of the bomb that went off in Worcester that his grandfather had to investigate, and he thinks, All right, we are two nations.
On January 20, 2017, the Cynic sat with some campaign journalist pals directly beneath the podium on the west front of the Capitol. We were all interested in seeing whether or not President-elect Donald Trump’s hand would burst into flame when he touched the Bible. We were also a little interested in what he was going to say in his inaugural address. Franklin Roosevelt used his to warn a battered country of the dangers inherent in fear itself. Lincoln commissioned an even more battered country to act with malice toward none and charity for all. Kennedy had his Sorensenian thunderclaps about torch passing and burden bearing. That’s what we expected to hear from the new president on that day in January. This is what we actually heard:
But for too many of our citizens, a different reality exists: Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system, flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of knowledge; and the crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential. This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.
It was a moment in which you could hear the rusty hinges of history groaning open so that another nation could pass through—a nation of anger, a nation of hate, a nation of manifest stupidity, a nation of superstitious gobbledygook, a nation of dark imaginings and orchestrated vandalism. And Walt Kelly’s Pogo was right again—we have met the enemy and it is us. All right, the Cynic thought, and not for the first time, we are two nations.
When the pandemic struck, we sank backward into aquarium lives, watching the world through our living-room windows, or on screens of various kinds. Out in the country, this new nation that had walked into history was building a fearful momentum, but unless you were living your aquarium life in the middle of it, you really had no idea of its power and its depth. A vaccine was discovered and, for the first time in modern American history, there was an organized political opposition to the cure for a deadly disease. The Cynic remembered the unconfined joy that had greeted the Salk and Sabin vaccines. His mother, who had spent months in an iron lung with polio, which gave her a lifetime dread of doctors and hospitals, rushed him to the pediatrician so he could get the shot. Now, with people dying alone on stretchers in hospital hallways, there were actual votes to be gotten by opposing the vaccine that would keep people from dying alone in hospital hallways.
We were still in our aquarium lives, most of us, when the 2020 election happened, and when January 6, 2021, happened on all our screens, and the spirit of that weird speech four years earlier took on vivid and vicious life. This was not what Jefferson had in mind. One guy won an election and another guy lost it. Everything else was dark imaginings leading to orchestrated and unbridled vandalism. Some things, important things, were broken that will take decades to fix, if they’re even fixed at all.
The 2024 primary campaigns were conducted independently, each in its own independent political universe. The president ran against nobody. The former president* might as well have. He rode his name recognition, a feral lust for vengeance, and a huge campaign-finance advantage roughshod over a stage full of obscurities like Vivek Ramaswamy and retreads like poor Chris Christie, who was the only one of them who made any pretense of actually running against him. By June, Christie had vanished and Ramaswamy was appearing at rallies calling the former president* the “George Washington of our moment.” Nikki Haley attempted to run with one foot in each universe until her campaign simply toppled over from the effort.
The rest of them seemed content to give their little speeches without incurring the full wrath of the MAGA hordes or their preferred candidate. None of them was capable of navigating the independent, fantastical universe in which the campaign was conducted.
Joe Biden won in one universe, and Donald Trump won in the other, alternative universe. Biden was the champion of a fractious political party full of self-destructive malcontents. Trump was the golden idol of a strange political cult. One side has a political agenda. The other has a set of rituals, arcane and unfathomable to the uninitiated. One side has a vision; the other side sees visions.
It is the summer of 2024 now, months that are gravid with national peril and constitutional import. It began with a president and a former president* running against each other. The president had presided over something of an economic miracle, knocking down both inflation and unemployment. The former president* had already been adjudicated to be something close to a rapist and had been convicted on thirty-four charges in a New York courtroom. And yet the race appeared to be something of a dead heat. That is, until the debate.
Not long after the Supreme Court handed down its epochal ruling, President Biden crashed and burned in the face of an avalanche of lies from the former president*. Biden’s halting, passive performance set off one of the frenziest feeding frenzies in the history of feeding frenzies. The press went full Whitewater. Important Democrats ran for the lifeboats. The president was said to be at best genially senile, at worst a drooling husk of a man. Somehow, between the absolution bestowed on him by the Supreme Court and the mad rush of long-distance neurological diagnoses, the Republican candidate vanished from the news. That is, until a troubled twenty-year-old named Thomas Crooks took a potshot at him from an undefended rooftop, winging him in the ear and transforming a political cult into a martyrdom cult in which the martyr wasn’t even dead.
Then, after a GOP convention that was like a profane version of Fátima, Biden pulled the prie-dieux out from under the acolytes by stepping away from re-election and, in the real coup de main, swiftly endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris, who hit the ground running in her first public address as the nominee in waiting:
Before I was elected vice president, before I was elected United States senator, I was elected attorney general of California, and before that I was a courtroom prosecutor. In those roles, I took on perpetrators of all kinds. [Candidate: Knowing grin. Audience: Bursts of expectant laughter.] Predators who abused women. Fraudsters who ripped off consumers. Cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump’s type.
Normalcy, to borrow a phrase from political antiquity, seemed finally ready to reassert itself. Harris found herself riding a sudden tsunami of contributions. The game was afoot, and it was wearing hobnailed boots. The former president* was raging and going even further off the rails. Normalcy isn’t what it used to be, but the election seemed comprehensible again.
Over the past seven years, the Cynic had sat through dozens of congressional hearings and several oral-argument sessions of the Supreme Court. He had been there through two impeachments of the same man. He had watched the previous administration stock the executive departments with the unqualified and the dishonest with head-spinning speed. He had watched the previous administration stock the Supreme Court with larval Scalias. He had watched one of them have a red-faced, screaming tantrum before the Senate Judiciary Committee. He had watched the apotheosis of political theater in the two impeachment efforts, which were completely justified. The second impeachment, which dealt with the January 6 riots, could have choked off any attempt by the former president* to run again. But not enough Republicans voted for the articles of impeachment drawn up by the House of Representatives, so the pretend government lived on, a parallel political universe in direct conflict with the real one.
On Friday, June 14, 2024, a deservedly obscure congressman from Florida named Greg Steube rose to introduce a bill that would name the Exclusive Economic Zone, which consists of 4.4 million square miles of the planet’s oceans, after Donald J. Trump. The Cynic was unclear whether this reminded him more of King Canute trying to hold back the tides or the old International Star Registry, through which you could name a star after yourself, or your mom, or the person with whom you went to prom.
All right, we are two nations.
But, for no reason to which he could put a name, Steube’s quixotic devotional made the Cynic feel at last that his cynicism was inadequate to the current political moment. He remembers what he once wrote about the confrontation between candidate Barack Obama and the dark, satanic mills that produced the administration of George W. Bush, the previous Republican worst president of all time.
It had been happening, bit by bit, over nearly forty years. Ronald Reagan sold the idea that “government” was something alien. The notion of a political commonwealth fell into a desuetude so profound that even Bill Clinton said, “The era of Big Government is over” and was cheered across the political spectrum, so that when an American city drowned and the president didn’t care enough to leave a birthday party, and the disgraced former luxury-horse executive who’d been placed in charge of disaster relief behaved pretty much the way a disgraced former luxury-horse executive could be expected to behave in that situation, it could not have come as any kind of surprise to anyone honest enough to have watched the country steadily abandon self-government over the previous four decades. The catastrophe that is the administration of George W. Bush is not unprecedented. It was merely inevitable. The people of the United States have been accessorial in the murder of their country.
And at the end of Obama’s second term, as the campaign to succeed him was warming up, the Cynic, sitting on a windswept porch in Clarion, Iowa, revisited his original conclusions.
It was remarkable that the president had done as much as he had in the face of a country that, having been absolved of its sins without ever having atoned for them, went right back to committing them all over again—sloth in governing itself, wrath upon its fellow citizens, gluttony in its appetite for indulgent ignorance, and greed for virtue it had not earned. If the president believed in his inevitability, the Cynic believed just as strongly in the country’s reaction to it.
Then, against all possible odds, in the following autumn, the people of the United States, duped by foreign actors and their own lamentable sloth, found an even worse catastrophe than the Bush administration in which to be complicit. And once the catastrophe had been proven to be so, and after four years of remarkable accomplishments from a Democratic president, the people of the United States seemed inclined to repeat the catastrophe the first chance they had. This was beyond even the capacity of the Cynic to be cynical. This was something from an unfamiliar place, dark and deep and terrifyingly single-minded. There was power behind it, blank-staring and implacable. It was a creature from the parallel universe, its hour, as Yeats warned, come round at last.
All right, we are two nations.
The cynic goes to visit the courthouse in Barnstable on Cape Cod, where there is a bronze statue of a wise and fearsome woman. She is holding a book at arm’s length and a pen in her other hand, and she is looking dead-on at her country and its future. She was the first real chronicler of the American Revolution and the events that led up to it; in 1805, she published her History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution. In it, she expertly dissected the intellectual currents that boiled over in the mid-eighteenth century. She was a protofeminist, a brilliant satirist, and such a towering polemicist that even John Adams, that hopeless old fud, was an early admirer. Her name was Mercy Otis Warren.
The Cynic has a severe historical crush on Mercy Otis Warren. He believes that the most compelling facet of her career was not her gifts for political invective, although those were profound, but her unerring talent for spotting crises years before they actually struck. She wrote in opposition to slavery and to the cruelty practiced against the Indigenous peoples of the continent. Her relationship with Adams soured when she wrote scathingly of the new Constitution that had emerged from the Philadelphia convention. Adams grumpily cut her off, but Warren won the general controversy. One of her prime complaints was the lack of a Bill of Rights in the new government. Her agitation helped ensure that we have one.
The Cynic always finds himself comforted in the presence of the truly righteous, by Ms. Warren and her unshakable bronze gaze into an uncertain future:
The principles of the revolution ought ever to be the pole-star of the statesman, respected by the rising generation . . . . The people may again be reminded that the elective franchise is in their own hands; that it ought not be abused, either for personal gratifications, or the indulgence of partisan acrimony.
The Cynic felt that way once, and he would like to feel that way again. Instead, all he hears is a dozen clocks ticking, ticking down against the survival of things long thought undying, against the golden dream of an orderly progress toward genuine human liberty. The Cynic cannot find much stubborn righteousness in himself anymore, so he warms himself like a hobo in a train yard, huddling around figures of the past, and around those figures of the present moment who seem to have preserved the warmth of that hope against the long, cold winds that seek always to extinguish it.
