The Tattered Republic

Reflections on a fraying nation.

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I: The Great Unravelling

When I was a boy, my parents organized and hosted an annual 4th of July parade in our neighborhood. Kids would enthusiastically decorate our bikes, scooters, or rollerblades, red, white, and blue streamers sprouting out of handlebars and patriotic bunting woven through wheel spokes. My Dad would lead the parade through our sleepy residential streets, wearing an Uncle Sam hat that he dusted off annually, carrying a comically oversized metallic boombox that bellowed Sousa marches throughout the neighborhood.

The parade ended in our backyard, where homemade brownies and frosted cupcakes were washed down with coffee and sickly sweet lemonade as unacquainted families tried their hands at an American history quiz, complete with a gag prize for the victors. It was Americana at its finest, performative feel good patriotism that brought people together.

I felt a sense of crestfallen and disjointed nostalgia for the beautiful, naive simplicity of those parades yesterday as I, like everyone else on the planet, grappled with the news of the impending return of Donald Trump as the most powerful man on Earth.

It’s a story of decadence and decline; of anger within a badly fraying society; of the long arc of history bending not toward justice, but toward grim fealty to one man.

The late Chinua Achebe, the great Nigerian poet, once remarked that “a functioning, robust democracy requires a healthy, educated, participatory followership, and an educated, morally grounded leadership.” The United States appears dangerously close to exhibiting none of the above.

Instead, America—the richest country in human history—is now a nation of endless grievances and perceived victimhood. We are perched on the precipice of meme-ing ourselves into authoritarian dystopia, handing unchecked power to a narcissistic criminal demagogue because the price of bacon increased.

This is not to imagine that economic malaise and grotesque inequality are mirages. The have-nots are struggling. But even then, how much does the price of eggs have to increase before you’re willing to dismantle democracy and snatch away the rights and sense of belonging from your most vulnerable neighbors?

Humans are the cleverest species to ever live, capable of astonishing cooperation, dazzling culture, and near-limitless ingenuity. Our collective intellect has allowed us to grace the heavens, to split the atom, and to explore the deepest mysteries of the universe.

But our species is also set apart in two far worse ways. We are the only species capable of clinging to ideological zealotry. And we are the only ones who can make ourselves extinct. These facets of unique peril cast long shadows over our most consequential choices. And now, induced by our collective foolishness, American voters have decided to confer the terrifying power to eliminate humanity to one of the most incurious and least empathetic specimens of Homo sapiens to ever live, backed by too many fawning fanatics who crave politics as entertainment.

Our social fabric has badly frayed.

But fear not, worried soul, for Rocket Boy says he will fix the government like he “fixed” social media—and an anti-vaccine, whale-beheading crackpot who generously donated part of his brain as an amuse-bouche for a worm will be tasked with keeping America healthy. (Plus, why worry anyway? Have you seen the latest episode of The Masked Singer)?

There will be plenty of time for necessary post-mortems and second guessing, for hot and spicy takes about the flaws of Democrats, the failures of campaigns, and the foolishness of pundits. (I, too, was badly wrong).

But first, it’s worth reflecting on two critical points—the first visceral and personal about America’s fraying identity, the second a hard-nosed pragmatism about what will be required to keep the tattered republic intact.

And for both points, as we’ll see, it requires jettisoning the more innocent version of flag-based patriotism, replacing the symbolic bunting with ruthless devotion not to a man, but to the aspirational ideals he imperils—with some long overdue precision about what that actually means in practice.