It’s not a celebration. It’s a vigil.
Oh my goodness.
Everything that I have written, everything that I have thought, the advent of "America 2.0", RIP Original America.
Reading those words in somebody else's voice is crushing. But thank you.
Monday, July 06, 2026
"More eager to fight. To struggle is to live"
The triumph of liberalism is not inevitable. It can fail. And then, if we are bold, unrelenting, and lucky, it can be won back.
Maybe this knowledge—stripping America bare of her pieties—can make us less fatalistic and more eager to fight.
Because to struggle is to live.
Another text to same friend:
there's a theory about america, i'm not saying it's the consensus but it has been out there for some time, that this very peculiar nation needs a great bloodletting at times before it jerks itself into the next iteration, like the civil war, 80 yrs after founding. we're overdue by this theory, unless we count the '60's, and maybe we should. real violence, a quasi-civil war. god bless me, if it happens soon i'm already in my '70's, i won't be of much use, but i'll do my part if it comes to that. i don't even own a gun but i goddamn will if, as lincoln said in his second inaugural, "and the war came." it's just a theory but it feels a little like a great fit of violent vomiting may, i don't say will, come. i just don't think anyone much thinks we can go on like this indefinitely. the stress has already fractured institutions and norms. will it break people out of "comfortable numbness", or haven't we that much "virtue", and that much "fight" left? maybe we're gonna find out, idk.
"The America we knew and loved has passed"
So what happens next? At some point the vigil will end and we will make peace with the reality that the America we knew and loved has passed.
But we’ll still be here. A placed called America will still be here. Life will go on.
What are we supposed to do?
The same thing we do when any loved one passes. We live.
"Illiberalism born of tranquility and wealth"
...our lurch toward illiberalism is not the result of hardship or privation—it is the product of success. Americans did not turn to a corrupt strongman because they were suffering through a Great Depression or a World War. Illiberalism was not undertaken out of desperation.
...
Instead, this age is marked by something unseen in the history of our once-great nation: A surge toward illiberalism born of tranquility and wealth.
Liberalism
America is not more unjust or illiberal today than it was in 1800; or 1850; or 1950. But we have moved decidedly backwards: We are a great deal more illiberal in 2026 than we were in 2000, or 2008, or 2016.
We were founded in genocide (1) and then our new nation institutionalized slavery. We didn’t do (much) colonialism, but we did practice a brutal mercantilism. Even after the Civil War, we allowed authoritarianism to persist in half the country. Our hands have never been entirely clean.
My own formulation in a text to a friend last night:
You live in a fucking country that was acquitted by reason of insanity on a charge of matricide, that was erected on the backs of imported African slaves, that was reared on violence, nourished on (Jim) Crow and the "strange fruit" of lynchings. You think today's cruelty is "unamerican"???
(1) Genocide of Native Americans is a controversial topic among scholars. I disagree that the English settlers of North America committed genocide.
America 2.0
If you think it’s always “too soon to tell” then you don’t believe that America always has enough virtue for liberalism to prevail.
...
My own suspicion is that the hour is late. Liberalism in America as it was even ten years ago is gone. "The republic” still exists. It just isn’t the same thing we once loved.
"Has the republic been saved?" "There is only life": McDonald's, sports, work, struggle
Has the republic been saved? ...
From this vantage point, no outcome is ever determinative. You can’t say, “Well, there wasn’t enough virtue to save America in 2016. Or 2024.” Because the story never ends and there is no “emergency.” There is only life; there is only struggle. Which rolls in endlessly, like the tides.
Form vs Substance
A nation called “The United States of America” would still exist. It would still have books full of laws, and McDonald’s, and the Postal Service. Just as a for-instance: If Donald Trump’s attempted coup had worked in 2021, “America” as a place, a thing, would have persisted, even if the liberal republic as we had known it was gone.
Virtue
My best friend is fond of quoting William Seward’s line about America:
“There was always just enough virtue in this republic to save it; sometimes none to spare, but still enough to meet the emergency.”
Virtue goes all the way back. Before the Civil War, all the way back before the Declaration of Independence. It goes back to the pre-Revolutionary literature. A belief that Americans had superior virtue is what animated the Revolution.
That’s a nice sentiment, but I don’t think it’s right. For one thing: How would we know if the republic hasn’t been saved?
A good run spoiled
But beneath the surface a cancer was growing. And here, on the eve of our nation’s birthday, the America we knew is in hospice. After the cancer of illiberalism first presented itself, we chose a difficult course of treatment and beat it back for a few years. But then it returned, stronger and more aggressive. The illiberalism metastasized.
July 4, 2026 is not the celebration of a vital and prospering liberal society. It is a deathbed vigil.
We had a good run
We were fine. Maybe better than fine. We’d won the Cold War and reached the end of history, where liberalism was the inevitable conclusion of human affairs. Everything seemed good. We’d even elected a black president.
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