Vale America

From the shining city on a hill to a seedy Atlantic City Trump casino, morally and patriotically bankrupt.

There are many, many deeply depressing outcomes of the past few weeks. The fracturing of the 80-year alliance between the United States and Western Europe. The gutting of USAID. The brazen disregard for the Constitution. The senseless sacking of thousands of dedicated government workers. The persecution of immigrants—illegal and legal—simply seeking a better life. The pardoning of domestic terrorists. The gutting of efforts to advance diversity, equality, and inclusion.

Each of the actions of the second coming of Donald Trump and his enablers is a discrete tragedy. Yet the mood here today reflects something beyond individual actions with destructive consequences. And while last week I grasped that the American empire was collapsing, it’s taken me a little longer to figure out just why the collective impact of the past month-and-a-bit has been so jarring.

When people talk of the “American dream,” it’s typically wrapped in the notion the United States is a land of opportunity. For a long time, I convinced myself I chose to build a life here largely for that very reason. Yet what I’ve come to realize and to mourn in recent days is the loss of a different vision of the American dream.

The America of the past century—the one I grew up with—was about much more than personal freedom and professional opportunity. That America was a beacon for the world, and not in terms of financial success and economic dominance—those merely seemed natural consequences of being “America,” and few begrudged it because of what the country was. It represented an idea and an ideal. A country that—despite its obvious, deep, regular, and lasting imperfections—aspired to be a force for good in the world.¹

That version of America allowed generations to paper over the country’s widening cracks and often cruel reality. The United States is the only developed nation that doesn’t guarantee annual or family leave. There’s no right to healthcare, and the country spends far more for worse outcomes. The right to own firearms is sacrosanct, leading to insane levels of not only mass shootings, but gun deaths generally. America’s top 1% of households own 30% the country’s wealth and about half of all stocks. Racism remains endemic and systemic. America’s kids rank first in the world for self-esteem, yet get dumber by the year.

And yet …

America’s the country that helped rebuild Europe and Japan after World War II. It drove the global institutions that resulted in 80 years of relative peace and prosperity. It stormed the beaches of Normandy and put men on the moon. Triumphed over Communism. Invented the lightbulb and airplanes, computers and microwave ovens. It’s the home of Hollywood and Silicon Valley. Tom and Jerry. Steven Spielberg and John Hughes. Of some of the world’s greatest universities. And, yes, it’s a nation that historically shouldn’t exist: a population three-quarters the size of the European Union but instead of being 28 separate countries, it’s just one.

These facts remain, yet the aura around America is now extinguished. It had been on life support, slipping for 45 years since the election of a C-list actor and the sowing of deep distrust in the institutions that, while imperfect, made the whole thing tick. By the election 25 years ago of a feckless son who lied the country into war. By the evolution of a major political party bereft of constructive ideas, using wedge issues to scare and divide rather than inspire and unify. In hindsight, the apotheosis of this decline seems entirely natural: the election of a criminal unqualified and unfit for any office of any kind; amoral, ill-informed, and utterly disdainful of the notion any country or person should do something merely because it’s the right thing to do.

All of which leaves America where it is today: dysfunctional institutionally and operationally, and inferior to other developed nations on all the metrics that really matter. When you cast aside the veil of the United States’ soft power and cultural influence, that’s what we’re left with. Trump and his cronies have formalized the country’s decline from the shining city on the hill to a callous and cruel country that defines winning purely in financial and transactional terms.

“At our best, the US has played a key role in the movement toward freedom,” Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders wrote today in the Guardian. “From Gettysburg to Normandy, millions of Americans have fought—and many have died—to defend democracy, often alongside brave men and women from other nations.

“This is a turning point—a moment of enormous consequence in world history. Do we go forward toward a more democratic, just and humane world? Or do we retreat back into oligarchy, authoritarianism, colonialism and the rejection of international law? As Americans, we cannot stay quiet as Trump abandons centuries of our commitment to democracy. Together, we must fight for our long-held values and work with people around the world who share them.”

I agree with all of that, but here’s where things stand. The United States this week cast aside 250 years of history to openly back Vladimir Putin. The Constitution is being treated as an inconvenience; something a broligarchy of nerdy men desperate to avenge a lifetime of never being cool are ignoring to wreak wanton destruction. And the president has determined America was a sucker for supporting Ukraine because it was right and just, and he’s extorting payback in what one ambassador called “mafia stuff.”²

So, this relatively new US citizen approaching half his life in this country is mourning the loss of the America that, through it all, clung to the deep-rooted belief that “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.” The speech in which Martin Luther King, Jr. uttered that phrase was delivered precisely 60 years and two days ago, just two years after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Three years later, King himself was killed.

“What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black,” Senator Robert F. Kennedy said when informing supporters of his presidential campaign of King’s assassination.

“We can do well in this country. We will have difficult times; we've had difficult times in the past; we will have difficult times in the future. It is not the end of violence; it is not the end of lawlessness; it is not the end of disorder. But the vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black people in this country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our life, and want justice for all human beings who abide in our land.

“Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world. Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people.”

Two months later, Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated. That’s America for you.

Note: The image accompanying this post is by Doug Mills of the New York Times.

A note about whatever this is …

After writing a few thousand articles for newspapers and magazines, I spent a long time trying a bunch of other stuff. I guess I figured what came (relatively) easily must by definition be less valuable, so I wandered in the corporate wilderness, becoming increasingly frustrated and doing work that felt increasingly lousy.

Sometimes with age comes wisdom, and I’ve realized finding something (relatively) easy ain’t a bad thing. So, this is a space where I’m resurrecting writing for myself, on topics weird and wild and wonderful.

Posts will appear when the mood takes me, but I do try to be consistently inconsistent—sometimes it’ll be a couple of days between drinks; sometimes a week. But if you subscribe, you’ll get a email letting you know I’m ranting. Again.

1. Before anyone labels me naive, I’m well aware the United States has generally acted in its own self interest, in the process regularly being the opposite of a force for good for many other countries. And perhaps I’m nostalgic for the (relative) selflessness of seeking to rebuild the world in the aftermath of two brutal, century-defining wars.

2. An asterisk on this: today’s Oval Office dressing down of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky by Trump and his cynical sycophant JD Vance. As the Atlantic’s David Frum quickly noted of Trump’s clear alignment with Putin and Russia in clear opposition to the interests of the free world, “at least now we know the truth.” “Both the president and vice president showed the US-led alliance system something it needed urgently to know: The national-security system of the West is led by two men who cannot be trusted to defend America’s allies—and who deeply sympathize with the world’s most aggressive dictator,” Frum wrote.