Is America Done?

Folks, I am writing to you from a black hole. Or perhaps I'm writing from one black hole to another, if you're in one of your own.

For weeks now, I've found myself incapable of putting ideas coherently onto the page. At the same time, and perhaps as a result, I've been subject to the pull of a deadening nihilism.

I've begun essays on why language is inadequate to the moment confronting us, on rock and roll as a lifeline in difficult times (I've taken three different stabs at that one), and on why I find it impossible to be a Christian. Each of them has turned slowly to sludge, ground to a halt by a sense of deafening incapacity.

The source of this malaise? Look around, friends.

The notion that climate change is a concern has essentially vanished from public discourse. The fact that AI is going to make the world worse rather than better seems to be both widely accepted and widely yawned at.

There is a genocide occurring in Palestine, and to the extent that the American public and political class can be convinced to pay any attention whatsoever they seem thrilled to treat it as a combination of gruesome sporting event and political cudgel with which to beat their liberal foes.

The one bright spot, if we can call it that, is the astonishing bravery of the Ukrainians in the face of nightmarish aggression, and our nation has responded by…abandoning them, siding with the nightmare, and actively working to destroy 80 years of post-WWII order in Europe.

And in our domestic politics?

Herr Trump has turned the presidency into his personal ATM. Herr Kennedy is destroying not just the infrastructure but the very notion of "public health."

The Republicans are taking out their decades-long resentment at the fact that they are incapable of understanding either academia or the scientific method by attempting to destroy both the American university system and the entire American scientific research establishment.

And the weekend-news-host who now runs the U.S. military is, at Trump's instruction, deploying active-duty U.S. Marines to the streets to L.A., an occurrence which will naturally pull me into the street to oppose them, because who could possibly stomach being the one who has to say, "Yeah, remember when the President set the United States military against the people of the United States? You know what I did? Sat at home scrolling TikTok, being distressed by CNN, and binging the new season of my favorite TV show!"

The lure of nihilism is strong, friends. And as I've wandered its dark paths, I've begun to wonder something: Is America done?

The answer, I think, is yes.

Too many things have changed too radically for our nation to ever return to the way it was in the pre-Trumpian times.

Take the MAGA assault on knowledge. Because most commentators are functionally invertebrates, this is usually framed as an assault on "expertise" or "experts" (or in its most nonsensical framing, "distrust of the elites"). This language is, of course, an attempt to give sociological chaos a veneer of rationality, as if Americans – betrayed by the experience of COVID, in most tellings – have finally gotten fed up with that class of hoity-toity pencil-necks (the "experts") who are always telling them what to do.

But this really isn't the case. In truth, the "assault on expertise" is nothing more than a petulant assault on knowledge itself, or put more precisely, on the idea that something we don't like can be true.

The Trumpian annihilation of things like the CDC's disease-prevention abilities ("We don't like the idea that vaccines are actually beneficial!"); the Trumpian reduction of the amount of U.S. government resources either researching or doing anything to prepare for climate change to, functionally, zero ("We don't like the idea that humans are in the process of radically changing the planet's climate!"); the Trumpian attempt to excise from history the notion that America might be a flawed nation and to eliminate from library shelves any celebration of difference ("We don't like it when people make us feel bad about ourselves and the way we've treated them!");– all of this is not about "experts."

It's about a massive epistemological shift. We are rapidly becoming a nation that believes reality is shaped by power – if someone is powerful enough to convince people of something, it becomes true – a delusion enabled by the astounding fact that we are so goddamn rich that we can do this kind of shit for a long time before the material effects of it catch up with us.

Can America as a political entity survive this? Sure. But we will not emerge from this moment, I'm sorry to say, distressing as it is, as the same kind of entity that went into it.

Or how about our seismic political changes?

To take one of many, many examples, it is now the case, the precedent having been fully established, that one of the prerogatives of the President of the United States is to use their position to enrich themselves and their hangers-on to the fullest extent possible.

You, sweet, gentle soul that you are, might be tempted to say that this is a bad thing, and that what needs to happen is that we elect a President who renounces that prerogative and signs into law all kinds of legislation outlawing it (and this time, let me tell you, we'll really mean it).

But how exactly is this going to happen? When was the last time that a President voluntarily restricted the scope of their own capabilities in office? When Obama declared that the President was allowed to assassinate U.S. citizens, for example, his successors naturally came into office claiming that this was a bridge too far, and that they needed to reduce their own power because they weren't fit to make good decisions regarding it…right? Wait…you mean they didn't? And this is now a power that Trump's hobgoblin lawyers have at their disposal?

Okay, okay, but what about the other branches? you cry. To which I reply, in what world do you see the enfeebled body of Congress or the piss-down-their-legs Supreme Court actually working in some functional way to reduce a now-established Presidential privilege? There may be a world in which that would occur, but it is certainly not the world of our near future.

Again, can America as a nation survive this? Sure. But the America that you and I used to be familiar with? For better or worse, that America is done.

Or dare I mention the transformation of the entire executive branch, including the U.S. military, international economic and tariff policy, and immigration policy, into tools used to service the whims of the President? How, exactly, does this get walked back? Not to bring up the Clown Show On Capitol Hill again, but do the majority of folks in the U.S. Congress strike you as the kind of mature, responsible people who would set up something akin to the Church Committee, which investigated and addressed some of the madness of the Vietnam era?

I'm unsurprised that you just muttered "No fucking way," under your breath.

And international relations? Do you think that all of the countries around the world are stupid enough to believe that this is just a problem of Trump and his cult of personality? Or do you think they understand that we elected him once, saw who he was, and then went ahead and elected him again, and that because of this, at least until there are some radical, long-term changes on the ground, we have a population that simply cannot be trusted?

If you and I know that fully half our population sees the kind of images I'm posting here and says, "Hell yeah, let's teach them goddamn blue-state city folk some manners!" then you can bet that folks in Europe and Asia and everywhere else know it too.

The America you and I knew, my friend, is done.

So what will happen?

The America that is to come may be shaped in part by us. Or we may simply get run over by history. There's no way to tell. Because that's how history works. Sometimes they get better, and sometimes they get unimaginably worse.

And so how shall we respond? By nihilism? By retreating to our offices or our screenplays and making as much money as we can and losing ourselves in the numbing hypnosis of our streaming services and podcasts and food deliveries and snarky group chats?

Some of us may. But I hope not to.

I've been listening to a lot of rock and roll lately. And as a part of that I've been listening to some punk bands, and thinking about what that branch of music throughout the years has had to say about our existence.

Now, you may not be aware of this (and it's an point I'd like to make in more depth if I could ever return my mind from its liquefied state and write that goddamn essay on music), but a great deal punk music, like a great deal of rock and roll, has something profound at its heart.

This is the recognition that the battle against oppression and conformity and stupidity is not one that can be won.

It cannot be won because it cannot end.

The battle against reactionary people is the state of things. It's one of the constituent elements of human existence.

There will always be people trying to impose this shit on the rest of us, and they will periodically rise to terrifying positions of power. And there will always be people who try to stop them.

Not even the retreat into nihilism can help you avoid this basic truth.

And as long as that's the case, you might as well pick a side, and get out there and try to kick some ass while you still can.

On Saturday, June 14, the United States is going to witness perhaps the vilest public spectacles of our lifetime: Trump's military parade.

There will be demonstrations around the country that day to protest him and that moment.

Get out into the streets, folks. My suspicion is that when it's all said and done you're going to want to be able to say you were one of the people who tried.