Good Night America, I Love You
An elegy
American music is everywhere in Europe. I’ve cried in a lot of cafes.
I’ve been in mourning for 18 months, and much of the last decade.
America didn’t make it to its 250th birthday, it stalled somewhere around year 248.
The country that still calls itself the United States of America is unrecognizable to me.
Since Trump’s second inauguration, the Constitution and the institutions that protect it have sustained so much cumulative damage that it’s difficult for me to imagine how the federal government we once had could be easily restored.
The only example in history that I can think of where such a restoration occurred was accomplished by a foreign invasion the scale of which the world has never known before or since.
The precedent set by the acceptance of morally repugnant and extralegal law enforcement — the extraordinary passivity, as my friend Keir Giles says, to such cruelty and such criminality — is empowering the authoritarian regime even further.
History shows that a government that employed such tactics doesn’t easily return to a tangible rule of law, if ever. The officers have no interest in relinquishing their newly acquired unfettered power, and those at the top of this chain of corruption are profiting in numbers that surpass anything ever seen in human history. Never before has autocratic capture occurred with such speed and in broad daylight. There are no fig leaves.
And they will not go gently. January 6, 2021 wasn’t gentle. Trump’s regime is making too much money thieving and grafting, as are the corporations and billionaires who prop him up. As he enriches himself and his criminal associates, he is taking a sledgehammer to America, benefiting Russia and China, and further alienating us from Europe.
And once kleptocracy takes hold in the culture of a nation, how do you root that out? How do you convince a generation that grows up paying bribes to get their trash collected to adopt the rule of law?
I’m not here to relitigate US history — we did terrible things, as most countries did, but we also evolved. We made huge strides and were leaders on universal enfranchisement and protection of human dignity.
We could always improve our imperfect democracy, but democracy takes labor, hard work and trust. We allowed that trust to be broken by influence campaigns on the Internet and the worst people rose to power.
When I speak with friends who grew up under communist totalitarianism, they say America was their hope, it held light and promise for them.
They are so sad, and want people to push back, whatever it takes.
I will celebrate America’s rebirth when Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel are facing Special Tribunals for crimes against humanity they have already committed. When every rotten scam artist associated with Trump’s regime has been sentenced to terms that exceed the life sentences recently meted out to Texas activists.
When the words on the Statue of Liberty define America again.
I will cherish that day.
