The latest case in point: the nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia. The Saudis thought they had struck a bargain to buy nuclear reactor technology from the United States. This is of course a fraught area of international diplomacy, especially at a time when the United States is engaged in a war with the Saudis’ neighbor Iran, ostensibly to prevent the Islamic Republic from building a nuclear bomb.

Now, there is of course a difference between a reactor and a bomb, but there is also a worrisome family resemblance, not least because the exploitation of nuclear technology for civilian uses necessitates the creation of a community of expertise whose knowledge can easily be shifted from civilian to military use. Since non-proliferation remains a paramount policy goal of the United States, one would expect any agreement to transfer nuclear technology to be accompanied by strict and enforceable controls.

When the lack of such controls in the current agreement was immediately pointed out and contrasted with the terms of previous agreements negotiated by presidents despised by the present one, the response was as bizarre as it was immediate. Rather than seek to remedy the absence of controls, our feckless president announced that “the deal is off” unless the Saudis recognize Israel, as other Arab states did under the so-called “Abraham accords.”

The Saudis must be puzzled. They have in their hands an agreement signed by the American chief of state, which the same chief of state has now repudiated before the ink was even dry. If that is not the very definition of feckless rule, I can’t imagine what is. Pacta sunt servanda, the Saudis may be tempted to protest if they studied Latin: “Agreements must be kept.” But, knowing the feckless and faithless fool with whom they are dealing, they will hold their tongues and try to finesse their way through this embarrassing episode. What they really want out of their reactors is known only to themselves, as are their true intentions toward Israel. But two things are clear: they cannot allow themselves to be “jammed up” by a blundering and incompetent American administration, and they won’t easily relinquish the access to long-coveted knowhow that they believe they have been promised.

As so often, the French, whose venerable monarchy saddled them with a fair number of incompetent rulers, have an expression for feckless kings: rois fainéants. Although the literal meaning of the word fainéant suggests that the problem with such rulers is that they are lazy and do nothing, the real problem is more complicated. It is that, while they do nothing much of the time, they are apt to spasmodically assert their claim to absolute power at the most inopportune moments: after a treaty has been arduously negotiated or when a momentous decision—to wage war, for example, or to grant terms for peace—hangs in the balance.

Trump’s fecklessness has been on abundant display of late. When he realized that Iran could not be pulverized into submission, he pretended to believe that his bombing had effected a regime change in Iran, whose new rulers, unlike the old, were “smart people” who might be amenable to an agreement in exchange for a little baksheesh derived from a sharing of tolls on traffic in the Strait of Hormuz. When that fantasy proved to be a will-o’-the-wisp, the threats of war crimes resumed despite the repeated assertion that the enemy was “desperate” to return to the negotiating table.

Trump, as we know, is fond of comparing international relations to a game of cards. What is more feckless, what is more inept, than a poker player who tells an adversary holding three-of-a-kind that he is desperate to fold? You can bluff about your own hand, but you can’t tell your opposite number that he doesn’t actually hold the cards he can see with his own eyes, as can kibitzers the world over.

In truth, “the exception,” der Ausnahmezustand, is not a singular thing, not a “condition” or “state,” as the Nazi jurist’s German would imply, but a steady numbing of the senses, a persistent denial of the obvious, a painstakingly constructed consensus in falsehood, inculcated by repetition and legitimated by shameless brazen defiance of all normal standards of reasonable discourse. “Gaslighting” is too genteel a term: it implies a certain subtlety in deception. The despot’s exception is not subtle: it is a state of public stupefaction achieved by a brutal bludgeoning of language, a dull deafness to all critique, a puerile pretense that reality must conform to desire rather than the other way around.

We’re now two years into this banalization of the exceptional. Witness the extraordinary assertions that we are daily asked to embrace as prima facie truths. Iran’s military capabilities have been obliterated. We control the Strait of Hormuz. In Springfield the Haitians ate cats and dogs. Trump won the 2020 election. Washington was a hellhole until the new regime banished the criminals, drained the swamp, restored the Reflecting Pool to its pristine beauty, and ended corruption. Tariffs are paid by foreigners and have revived America’s industrial base. ICE arrests only criminals, “the worst of the worst.” Our leading universities are terrorist training camps. Israel’s wanton destruction of Gaza is fully justified by, and entirely proportionate to, Hamas’s wanton attacks on Israel.

This normalization of the abnormal is what is truly exceptional. The theorist of our downfall is not Carl Schmitt but Steve Bannon, who astutely observed that “flooding the zone with shit” would confront defenders of the reasonable with an impossible task. There is no Hercules capable of cleaning these Augean stables. But the enormity of it all must be pointed out over and over again, tedious though it may be to do so. Because the flood never ceases, the pumps must also be kept going day and night.

In addition to this Substack, I write frequently on French and European politics at Tocqueville21, the website of the Tocqueville Society.

I also run a news aggregator site that collects articles from various European and American newspapers. The password (intended only to keep bots out) is “shazam”.

Finally, I aggregate polls from France, Germany, Italy, and the UK at this site. This site updates automatically every few days. Happy to add other countries if there is interest and I have time.

This is extraordinary, but it’s by no means the most extraordinary comment in this piece on our contemporary torpor. Wallace-Wells goes on to say this:

That alone is a kind of depressing, distressing development: that the public could come to hold those two thoughts in their head at once, to say, “We understand that this is irresponsible imperial behavior by a madman president, and we’re not even paying all that close attention to it.” [emphasis added]

To which Cottle responds: “Yeah, we just shrug. ‘Yeah, whatever.’”

Let me be clear. I’m not disagreeing at all with this view, shocking though it is. I agree that the United States has just lost a war with Iran. I agree that this loss was the result of “irresponsible imperial behavior.” And I agree that this irresponsible behavior was authorized and intermittently overseen by a president who, while he may not be a “madman” in any sense recognized by DSM-5, is nevertheless so feckless, corrupt, ignorant, and consumed by petty grudges and grandiose obsessions that a mad king might well be preferable to the concupiscent kingpin with whom we are currently saddled.

And yet, and yet … We the People remain strangely unmoved. We just shrug. Perhaps this is because we are convinced that retribution is just around the corner, that the democratic process that has brought us to this juncture will soon correct itself—doesn’t it always?—and reintroduce the vaunted checks and balances that have lately gone missing.

And yet if we believe that this confidence in ultimate vindication explains our torpor in the face of such extraordinary events, we owe it to ourselves to explain why we seem able to shake off our somnolence long enough to protest vociferously the lapses of judgment on the part of the young activists who recruited a candidate as flawed as Graham Platner to run for the Senate in Maine. Of course, if we lose Maine, our chances of retaking the Senate plunge dramatically, and if we don’t retake the Senate, what chance have we of halting the “irresponsible imperial behavior by a madman president”?

Could an empire of this magnitude—”like nobody has ever seen before,” as the “mad” president likes to say—really have been brought this low by a handful of twenty- and thirty-somethings drunk on the notion that the way to the People’s heart is to find a candidate who can put on a flannel work shirt and swear like a sailor? Isn’t the more pertinent question to ask how a polity with a constitution like that of the United States, with its myriad veto points, and a central government structure designed to place numerous institutional hurdles in the way of any executive, no matter how mad or irresponsible, could have been so thoroughly and rapidly commandeered by this lamentable band of rogues? Were they exceptionally ruthless and cunning, or have the termites been eating away for decades now at barriers that once seemed as solid as the doors of the Capitol before January 6, 2021? I incline toward the latter theory; the rogues in question, with a few notable exceptions, resemble the Three Stooges, not Ocean’s Eleven.

If institutional decay has brought us to this pass, we need to know more about where the wormholes have developed. This strikes me as a question in regard to which liberals and conservatives might find common ground. No one, right or left, has an interest in licensing irresponsible behavior by an unhinged executive. Everyone, right and left, has an interest in rousing the public from its dogmatic slumbers, its complacent belief that “democracy will provide,” as if We the People don’t from time to time need to hear words of wisdom whispered in our ears, even if the whisperer isn’t wearing a flannel shirt or sporting a pectoral tattoo. Perhaps the problem lies not with the judgment of the candidate recruiters but rather with widespread beliefs about what kind of candidate needs to be recruited. Donald Trump won the working-class vote despite, not because of, his sartorial choices and suspect grammar.

With old countries as with old men, age enforces awareness of another home truth, that maturation is eventually followed by decline and birth by death. Depending on where one stands along this ineluctable trajectory, one begins to think differently about the stages that mark the way, as suggested by the title of this Substack, “the sense of an ending,” which is intended to signal the melancholy mood in which it is written.

The trajectory of a human life is more clearly defined than that of a nation. When you reach 80, as I will soon, you can be quite confident that the end is nigh. Not so with a nation. If, at 250, the American nation is no longer a babe in arms, is it about to enter adolescence, middle age, or senescence? Only time will tell. Some nations die young, others aspire to live a thousand years, and some may even achieve that goal and more. Yet intimations of mortality have been known at times to haunt nations as they may haunt individuals during bouts of illness or after a momentary palpitation or a frighteningly close call.

Amid the cacophony of voices unleashed by the impending national anniversary, there is an unmistakable note, if not of mortality, then at least of morbidity. Despite the extreme polarization of our politics, there is general agreement that the national condition is critical.

Of course, the diagnoses of what accounts for that critical condition differ. On either side of the factional divide, partisans proclaim that the political enemy has deputized a posse of assassins and mercenaries, not to say lunatics, to murder the nation in its sleep and vanquish the only true defenders of its founding principles. Meanwhile, even relatively sober observers point to one form or another of rapid decline in the country’s vital signs: the economy is no longer the world’s largest; the military is no longer incontestably the world’s mightiest (and has in fact now suffered a long string of humiliating defeats by seemingly lesser powers); the position of self-appointed primus inter pares among liberal democracies has been voluntarily forfeited (both by apparent abandonment of the commitment to liberal democracy at home and by deliberate insults to erstwhile allies abroad).

Are these symptoms of impending doom or merely harbingers of a mid-life crisis? One might argue that America came of age at the end of World War II, when it both willfully and unwittingly assumed the hegemon’s role it has held ever since: willfully, because it knew full well that the postwar order it envisioned needed a leader capable of imposing discipline when necessary and that it could expect to profit handsomely from that role; unwittingly, because it lacked the experience to foresee the resentments and enmities that such a role would inspire and lacked the maturity to accept the criticism and blame that come with such responsibility.

If this analysis is correct, one could argue that the United States is now undergoing its second mid-life crisis. The first came when the first real challenge to its global hegemony emerged with the Soviet acquisition of first a nuclear weapon and then a thermonuclear one, as well as the Sputnik launch, which raised fears that the technological superiority that undergirded the self-confidence of an American nation now mature but still full of the robust vigor of youth might not endure forever. But the Soviet economy never overcame its internal contradictions; in the Cold War order of battle, the sleek refrigerators and microwave ovens that Nixon extolled in his “kitchen debate” with Khrushchev counted as much as the ICBMs and MIRVs, but decades of anxiety intervened before this would become apparent.

Now, middle-aged America is undergoing an analogous crisis of confidence. The Chinese threat, which the majority of us quite likely misconstrue as seriously as we did the Soviet one, seems more insidious because globalization has woven Chinese suppliers intimately into the very fabric of domestic production and consumption. A national consciousness formed around the idea of being always and inevitably at the top of the heap and in a position to set the rules that everyone else must follow cannot readily adapt to such a fundamental challenge to its identity. To cope, some have fallen back on what they take to be the bedrock of the earlier, more youthful stage of our history and identity, when we were isolated by geography from the vagaries of the rest of the world, ethnically homogeneous (if only in fantasy), and sufficiently autarkic to thrive without the assistance of others. But to assert such a credo as a viable ideology for today’s world is like trying to deny the consequences of middle age by indulging the fantasy of perpetual youth—a fantasy that, nevertheless, seems lately to have found a foothold among some of the aging Wunderkinder of Silicon Valley.

Perhaps it is true that this is “no country for old men,” or should I say “no world for old countries” (although China, it could be argued, is both the youngest and the oldest of nations). But the aging process, in nations and polities as much as individuals, can’t be stopped by wishing it away. The only acceptable response is to adapt. What we are witnessing at our 250th anniversary is the effect of failing to do so. Whether this signifies an early death for the Republic or merely a passing crisis on the way to life’s next phase remains to be seen.

Some write as scholars, to trace the evolution of ideas about particular aspects of political life; although I may occasionally fall into that vein, I'm not at heart a scholar and still less a controversialist of the sort who hopes to bring the benighted over to his side by showing them the light. I write, as they say, as I breathe, because I can do no other. My thoughts become clear only if I write them down, even if it is only to contradict them a few hours or weeks or years later.

One might therefore say that my writing about politics is the expression of a kind of passion, but often it's a passion aroused by resistance to the passions of others, which seem to me wrong-headed or dangerous or accelerants along the road to perdition.

The 18th-century French moralist Nicolas Chamfort wrote that “les raisonnables ont duré; les passionnés ont vécu” [the reasonable endured; the passionate lived]. This antithesis might at first sight appear to affirm the superiority of passion over reason, but then I would be hard put to explain why my first reflex upon encountering vituperative passions in others is to try to subdue them with sweet reason. On the other hand, the economist Albert Hirschman's book The Passions and the Interests argued that sometimes sublime passions need taming by sordid interests. For me, one function of writing about politics is to take the heat out of political passions by dousing them—some would say straitjacketing them—in cooler prose.

Hirschman's passions/interests dichotomy is different from Chamfort's passions/reason. It would be easy, and somewhat facile, to create a bridge between the two by noting that interests live in the realm of calculation—toting up benefits minus costs, profits minus losses—and are therefore amenable to a kind of reason. This may well be the kind of reason, or reasonableness, that Chamfort had in mind: reasonable caution allowed the merchant to survive the vagaries of a turbulent marketplace, whereas the knight's bold passion prevented “the native hue of Resolution” from being “sicklied o’er with the pale cast of Thought.” Political passions often arise out of “enterprises of great pith and moment, and an excess of reasonableness might well, as the Bard feared, “turn their currents awry and lose the name of Action.”

Hamlet was a prince, however, and I'm not. I'm under no illusion that my occasional forays into political writing merit “the name of Action” in any way, shape, or form. They are at best an exercise in mental hygiene in a world that seems increasingly unmoored from sanity.

Some Substack political commentators are former activists who hope that the pen might prove mightier than the sit-down, or perhaps incite a new sit-down in the real rather than the virtual world. They are more optimistic than I am.

Or is it rather that they are more passionate? To be honest, I don't think so. If there are activist passions, there are also quietist passions of equal intensity, and unlike Chamfort, I do not think it is correct to oppose passion to reason. What makes reason of the non-calculating kind worth aspiring to is that the quest to understand the world with all its contradictions justifies itself as a form of passionate affirmation. “L’homme n’est qu’un roseau … mais c’est un roseau pensant” [Man is merely a reed … but a thinking reed], said Pascal. The world—with its politics—may crush us, Pascal observed, but we know that we are being crushed, whereas the world is unconscious of its crushing power. Writing about politics is thus an exericse of passion as well as reason. Pace Chamfort, the passionately reasonable individual both lives and endures.

No political issue today has greater salience than immigration. The immigration issue has been central to the rise of far-right political parties in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Germany, and beyond.

The rhetoric around immigration often intentionally inflames passions. The issue can be conjugated in a variety of tenses, persons, and moods. Immigrants can be denounced for being too lazy or too ambitious; too abject or too privileged; too impoverished or too wealthy; too zealous or too lax in their religious practice; too ignorant or too educated; too ripe for exploitation or too haughty to accept relegation to a secondary status.

At bottom, the gravamen of the charge against immigrants is that they are different. Right-wing discourse thrives on difference, the basic building block of hierarchy, its raison d’être, whereas left-wing discourse, always yearning for equality and universality, is embarrassed by it. Despite this embarrassment, difference remains an obdurate fact, a durable problem for every variety of egalitarian ideology, which the left ignores at its peril. So what is to be done?

The very ubiquity of the issue suggests that transnational comparisons may be helpful. The conditions surrounding immigration, the political responses to it, and the ensuing political transformations and realignments vary from place. Immigration has ranked high on the French political agenda since the rise of the Front National (now called the Rassemblement National) more than half a century ago. Like the United States, albeit in somewhat different form. France has birthright citizenship (called droit du sol in French). The country is therefore a natural object of comparison.

To help us understand the French situation, we are fortunate to have a newly published book by one of France’s leading experts on immigration, Patrick Weil: De l’immigration en France. The immigration question has preoccupied Weil for much of his career. In 1997 he authored a government report entitled “Pour une politique de l’immigration juste et efficace” (For a Just and Effective Immigration Policy), and in subsequent years he has published often on the subject, including La France et ses étrangers: Qu’est-ce qu’un Français? (France and Its Foreigners: What is a Frenchman?) and De la laïcité en France (On laïcité in France). In 2003 he served as a member of the so-called Stasi Commission, appointed by President Jacques Chirac to consider whether the growing presence of Muslim immigrants on French soil warranted changes in the laws governing religious expression. Weil also teaches at Yale Law School for part of each year, so he is deeply familiar with the differences between French and American approaches to immigration issues.

Immigration is an emotional issue. A 2025 poll revealed that 67% of the French agreed with their then prime minister, the centrist François Bayrou, that the native population was being “submerged” by waves of immigrants. Taken to an extreme, this feeling of submersion leads to the so-called “great replacement” theory, most closely associated with the far right-wing writer Renaud Camus, according to which mass immigration has been encouraged by an elite cabal determined to perpetuate its ascendancy by creating an immigrant underclass. This theory of the extreme right finds its mirror image in the far-left idea of a dynamic and energetic “new France” that will sweep conservative elites from power and turn the country in a new direction—an idea that Jean-Luc Mélenchon hopes will carry him to the presidency.

Weil’s book has the great merit of situating these recent fears of submersion by immigration in a broader historical and political context. As long ago as 1889, the nationalist writer Maurice Barrès voiced fears that “new Frenchmen whom we are not strong enough to assimilate have slipped in among us … and seek to impose on us their ways of seeing and feeling. … The name ‘France’ might well survive, but our country’s distinctive character would nevertheless be destroyed.” Yet at the time the number of children of immigrants who became naturalized was quite small.

After World War I, political leaders envisioned a more liberal naturalization policy to help compensate for the massive population loss due to the war. The far-right newspaper Action française railed against the fabrication of “paper Frenchmen.” After adoption of the policy, François Coty, the editor of the mainstream paper Le Figaro, was even more virulent: “Three million robust, healthy, honest Frenchmen have been driven to the slaughterhouse so that they could be replaced by the world’s vermin. … The occult world government of ‘The Three Hundred,’ … a veritable International, has decided to replace the French race with another … [which will] impose its unpatriotic theories on us before driving us out or exterminating us.”

As extravagant and blood-curdling as this rhetoric was, it did in its overheated way reflect actual demographic changes. “In 1930,” Weil writes, “France had a higher percentage of immigrants in its population than any other country (515 per 100,000, compared with 492 for the United States.” In the wake of the Depression, 800,000 Polish immigrants were sent home from France, while Spanish refugees, German Jews, Armenians, and Russians were spared deportation, the right of asylum being deemed “one of the essential elements of republican doctrine,” according to Édouard Herriot.

French attitudes toward immigration continued to evolve with events: Vichy’s hostility to foreigners gave way in the postwar era to a desire to do away with national quotas, which were seen as unacceptable by many appalled by the racist atrocities of World War II. Huge postwar needs for manpower encouraged a loosening of immigration restrictions, and many new workers flowed in from countries such as Algeria.

When the labor market tightened after the oil shock of the 1970s, President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing envisioned sending half a million Algerian workers back to their homeland, at first voluntarily but later under compulsion. The left and some churches protested, and the Conseil d’État refused to ratify Giscard’s proposal. The president nevertheless ordered the minister of foreign affairs to seek Algiers’ agreement to accept 35,000 returnees per year. In the archives of the Quai d’Orsay, Weil found a document admonishing the negotiators to “avoid mentioning any child quotas.” In an interview with Claude Chayet, who was responsible for immigration issues in the foreign ministry at the time, Weil learned that the foreign minister, Jean François-Poncet, was appalled when Chayet pointed out that enforcing Giscard’s order would require canceling the residence permits of thousands of legal immigrants, arresting them, and “forcing them onto busses, trains, and ships before the TV cameras of the entire world. And the children—they’re French. What is to be done with them? Will you separate them from their families? Will you deport French children along with their parents?” When confronted with these unpalatable realities, the foreign minister agreed that Giscard’s policy was unworkable, and it was quietly dropped. An American reader in 2026 may be forgiven for wishing that such internal resistance had been mounted to the U.S. government’s deportation policies in the second Trump administration.

Skipping ahead in this history, Weil notes that “the great replacement theory” made its way back into French discourse well before Renaud Camus published Le Grand Remplacement in 2011. Indeed, the centrist intellectual review Le Débat published in 1990 an article by sociologist Paul Yonnet attacking the immigration policies of the socialist government of Michel Rocard: “The media constantly admonish us to respect the right to be different while saying nothing about the long-term project of cultural deportation of French identity.” Cultural deportation of French identity—a concept as meaningless as it is inflammatory, to the point where one wonders how it made its way into the sober pages of a respected journal.

In the same issue of Le Débat, demographer Jean-Claude Chesnais denounced “an unavowed policy of quasi-exclusive preference for Africans on foreign policy grounds on which the political establishment has achieved remarkable agreement.” In 1996, the sociologist Bruno Latour objected in the pages of Le Monde to a proposed ban on racist and xenophobic pronouncements. For Latour, the law would force the French to “look upon acceptance of foreigners as an actual fact, … a natural, ineluctable fact.” Antiracist laws, he argued, had the effect of “naturalizing” race. These words were written more than two decades before Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the Parents Involved decision that “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

As these examples make clear, the idea of a “great replacement” of the existing population by hordes of immigrants imported at the behest of a shadowy elite cabal has a lengthy history in France (and elsewhere). To counter the phantasmagoric image of wholesale civilizational transformation, Weil relies on a systematic exposition of the facts surrounding immigration. In 2025, for example, France issued a total of 384,000 new residence permits to foreigners wishing to live in France, of which 118,000 went to students, 92,600 to refugees and others seeking humanitarian relief, and 62,000 to “economic migrants.” Such numbers do not suggest a tidal wave of immigration. Nor does the fact that between 1999 and 2024, the immigrant population in France increased from 4.3 to 7.7 million out of a total of 68 million. An average increase of just 133,000 per year does not constitute a “submersion” of the tens of millions of natives but rather a manageable addition to an aging population.

Nevertheless, the stark fact remains that 67% of the population accepts the term “submersion.” In a democracy, an opinion shared by 67% of the population is significant even if it represents a distortion of reality. Why has this opinion become so prevalent? As Weil points out, between 1975 and 1999, the share of immigrants in the population remained virtually stable (7.4% in 1975, 7.3% in 1999), but between 1999 and 2024 it increased from 7.3% to 11.3%. This increase coincided with important economic changes, including a dramatic increase in global trade, offshoring of important aspects of manufacturing production, and increased industrial employment of immigrant labor. At the same time, the 1985 Schengen Agreement and the EU’s move toward a Single Market diminished the psychological significance of international borders, contributing to the perception that the barriers that had once defined the nation and culture had become permeable. Terrorist attacks linked to immigrants undoubtedly heightened suspicion of the alien Other. Although immigration was only one component of these large-scale changes, for many citizens it became the most tangible and immediate sign that the contours of the society they had known in the Trente Glorieuses period of postwar growth and improved living standards were changing in ways of which they disapproved. Sentiment gradually shifted against immigrants, and the xenophobic Front National gained new adherents.

Another source of resentment against immigrants is the so-called Aide Médicale d’État (AME), which pays for medical treatment for foreigners on French soil even if their status is irregular. In 2024, Weil reports, 484,000 persons benefited from the AME, costing the state one billion euros (0.5% of total medical insurance outlays). Not all AME recipients are in France unlawfully, but a substantial number are: some 124,000 were ordered to leave France in 2024.

Illegal immigration gives rise, Weil notes, to hypocrisies of both the right and left. On the right, people who vote for anti-immigrant parties freely admit that their businesses often rely on immigrant labor “because there is no one else to do the work,” while on the left, the most frequent answer to the question of how to deal with illegal immigration is “to regularize the illegals” [p. 51] “It is as if right and left, for different and even opposite reasons, refuse to recognize that France has once again become a land of immigration and therefore needs to develop an immigration policy.” He goes on to outline such a policy in some detail. His suggestions invariably have merit, although some will inevitably provoke more disagreement than others. To mention just one, Weil remains faithful to the conclusion of the Stasi Commission on which he served, namely, that the wearing of visible signs of religious affiliation should be prohibited in public schools. It reached this conclusion on the grounds that “wearing the [Islamic] veil or imposing it on others had become a matter not of individual liberty but of national strategy on the part of an organization, the Muslim Brotherhood, which was using the public schools as its principal battlefield.” There is no doubt that the Muslim Brotherhood did attempt to exert its influence in this way. But there is also no doubt that some young women would choose, if permitted, to express their cultural, religious, or even individual difference by wearing the veil if permitted. Much has been written about the difference between American and French liberal points of view on such matters. My disagreement with Weil on this point no doubt reflects the bias of my origins. That is why I find reading him so profitable: there is no better guide to the nuances of liberal thinking on such matters of cultural identity.

De Gaulle has now been dead for well over half a century, enough time for the turbulence and controversy that surrounded him as long as he occupied the center stage of French history to have subsided and for his story to have passed into myth, as magisterially recounted more than a decade ago by Sudhir Hazareesingh in his In the Shaow of the General: Modern France and the Myth of de Gaulle. In 2005, French TV viewers—perhaps not the most discerning of judges—voted de Gaulle the greatest Frenchman of all time, edging out Louis Pasteur and Victor Hugo.

The film, by French standards a lavish production (and only the first part of a projected diptych), takes the mythical status of its eponymous hero as a given and recounts the “passion” of its hero-martyr as so many stations on the path to apotheosis. From the opening sequence, in which a fearless Colonel de Gaulle unerringly directs his nervous driver to steer right and left so as to avoid the shells launched by onrushing German tanks, to the final sequence, in which a temporarily sidelined de Gaulle is recalled to life (resurrected, as it were) by the timely assassination of Admiral Darlan by a youthful Hotspur, the viewer is not allowed to forget that Destiny has from the outset stamped its mark on the Savior of France. That the film fails to mention the fact that said young Hotspur, whose path from naïf to assassin forms an important subplot, is not so much an idolator of General de Gaulle as an illuminated young monarchist enlisted in the non-Gaullist faction of the Resistance led by Emmanuel d’Astier de la Vigerie is perhaps the kind of simplification required to compress such a complicated history into an already extended (157 minute) film epic. But the accumulation of simplifications leaves us with a film that steps beyond mythification into the realm of the fantastic. As I watched, I found myself carried back to my youth as an American child of the 1950s, reading comic books devoted to the derring-do of our valiant GIs.

This came as something of a surprise, because I had read that the film was based on Julian Jackson's magisterial biography of de Gaulle. Hence I was astonished by the film's depiction of de Gaulle's crucial meeting with Churchill on June 17, 1940, the day before the famous Discours du 18 juin, which was broadcast from London to de Gaulle's countrymen and established him as the leader of the Free French (even though almost no one heard the speech at the time). Jackson is at pains to point out that a previous biographer, Jean Lacouture, had inflated the significance of this encounter with Churchill: “This is splendid purple prose,” Jackson writes of Lacouture's description of the scene, in which a perspicacious Churchill is said to have discerned qualities in de Gaulle imperceptible to others.;“It is not history. We do not know whether Churchill had such hallucinations [of de Gaulle's tenacious genius] since he did not deign to mention that meeting with de Gaulle in his own memoirs. The truth is probably that Churchill, happy to welcome any Frenchman ready to fight on, distractedly made de Gaulle a non-committal promise about being allowed to broadcast, and had him ushered out as fast as possible so that he could turn to more important matters.”

The cinematic translation of Lacouture's purple prose might have been redeemed by actors capable of imparting some nuance to the confrontation, but what we see is rather the transformation of the purple into the screaming red italics of those WW II comics I ingested so hungrily as a child. Churchill gruffly clamps his lips around his cigar; de Gaulle, impassive as a statue, as he remains throughout the film, does not so much as move an eyebrow.

The director, Antonin Baudry, comes to the comic-book style naturally. He is the author of Quai d’Orsay, a rather stylish reconstruction in bande dessinée format of Dominique de Villepin's resistance to the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, which Baudry witnessed at first hand as a foreign ministry staffer. I confess that I rather enjoyed Quai d’Orsay. Unfortunately, I can't say the same about this first half of the de Gaulle epic. Perhaps I remember too many of the WW II films I saw in a later stage of my childhood. Anyone who has seen the 1967 film Tobruk, for example, will know that there was more to the desert war than the Battle of Bir Hakeim, which of course takes pride of place in this very Franco-centric nationalist epic. It is perhaps not a mystery why a French director might think this a propitious moment to issue a resounding cocorico by contributing yet another embellishment to already towering edifice of the Gaullian myth. I may have a heart of stone, but I'm afraid this extravagant effort left me quite unmoved.

“A Quarter-Millennium of Franco-American Relations”: that is the title that my co-organizers and I came up with early in our discussions of what this year’s Tocqueville Society colloquium would look like. Obviously, we wanted to join in honoring the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

On reflection, however, it occurred to me that a better title might have been—with a nod to Charles Dickens—“A Tale of Two Countries.” And that might have led to a conference organized around the dual theme, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”

But of course that would have been hyperbolic: The times we are living through right now are neither the best nor the worst. Both France and the United States have seen worse and better. The word that I think best characterizes today’s mood is morose. We are morose because we have the sense that something fundamental in our societies is changing for the worse, but we can’t yet divine what the future will look like. So we live with a gloomy sense of foreboding not quite justified, for most of us, by concomitant changes in the texture of daily life.

In the course of our colloquium, we’re going to do what scholars do. We’re going to ignore the ambient morosity and devote ourselves to learned analyses of our two sister republics, the French and the American, with laudable objectivity and scientific detachment.

But just for the next ten minutes, I’m going to ask you to indulge me. I’m going to set scholarly objectivity aside. What follows will be purely subjective, and entirely my responsibility.

It so happens that I’m celebrating a personal anniversary: I first set foot in France 58 years ago, in the summer of 1968—which, as some of you will recall, was quite a chaotic moment to discover France. Despite or perhaps because of the chaos, I was smitten for life. So while I can’t claim to have personally witnessed all of the 250 years to which this conference is devoted, I can claim nearly a quarter of them as part of my passionately lived experience as both observer and participant.

For much of these past six decades I served as a humble go-between between France and the United States. I’ve tried to keep faith with both sides of that relationship. When Françoise Mélonio gave me a copy of her splendid biography of Tocqueville last year, her dedication touched my heart: “Au plus français des Américains, un livre sur le plus américain des Français.” To be sure, I’m no Tocqueville, but it is true that we are both intellectually métissé, mental hybrids, as it were.

Now, it so happens that on one of the streets with which I’m most familiar in Paris, la rue Rollin, there is a wall that bears an inscription attributed to another intellectual métis, René Descartes: “I never feel so free as when I stand with one foot in one country and the other foot in another.” He was referring to France and the Netherlands, but his adage applies in spades to those of us who stand with one foot in France and the other in the United States. These two “sister republics,” as my friend Patrice Higonnet called them in his book by that name—and Patrice happens to live on la rue Rollin—are like catnip to comparatists.

When I refer to France and the United States as “sister republics,” I want to be clear about what I mean. I’m using the word “republic” in Tocqueville’s sense. For him, “republic” referred to “the slow and tranquil action of society on itself.” This is not Plato’s Republic, which is a portrait of the ideal city conjured up by philosophical speculation. Nor is it Augustine’s City of God or the more recently propounded “common-good republic,” which proposes a theologically informed hierarchy of values.

For Tocqueville, society comes first, and society is neither a Platonic ideal nor a divinely ordained order but a product of history, with all its contingent messiness and diversity, and all its complex and often conflictual social relations. Like us, Tocqueville lived in a morose time, after the emancipatory hopes kindled by revolution had faded. Events were passing in rapid succession before Tocqueville’s eyes with no clear destination in sight: “Immersed in a rapidly flowing stream, we stubbornly fix our eyes on the few pieces of debris still visible on the shore, while the current carries us away and propels us backward into the abyss.”

Tocqueville’s strategy for understanding the democratic republic he saw emerging in France was, as we all know, to turn elsewhere. The democratic revolution in France had “proceeded more rapidly” than elsewhere, but in “haphazard” fashion. So he turned to the United States, whose history he hoped would provide clearer conceptual contours. In short, he became a comparatist, that is, an intellectual métis.

Now, one of the advantages of intellectual métissage is that it enlarges the ego. We are all born with egos—some would say burdened with them—and growing up is the process of integrating the world into which we are thrown at birth into those egos, from which there is no exit.

If we confine ourselves to exploring only the corner of the world into which we happen to be born, however, we limit our potential for growth. We remain intellectual nativists, stuck in un huis clos. When we study another country, we do so in part to escape the confines of our egos and the inherent limits of unnecessarily constricted native experience.

I don’t go as far as Pascal, who said “le moi est haïssable,” the ego is detestable. In fact, I’m closer to Montaigne, whom Pascal was criticizing. Like Montaigne, I take the Delphic commandment to “Know thyself!” to be an injunction to recognize the limits of the ego we happen to born with and of the society we happen to be born into. Nativists, by depriving themselves of the richness of the world’s diverse cultures and traditions, lead a stunted existence. The ego needs to be enlarged if it is to encompass the world, if it is to become not just an ego but a soul. We must know others if we wish truly to know ourselves.

That is why we study others, and that is why we study other cultures and other times. But if we’re to do our jobs properly, we need to look beyond the “pieces of debris” scattered on the shore. We must attempt to understand not just what remains of the past but where the current is taking us.

When I was a student at MIT longer ago than I care to remember, I sought respite from the very rich diet of math and physics that I was being fed by signing up for a course on existentialism. And there I was introduced to J-P Sartre’s Being and Nothingness and to Sartre’s concept of the “reef of solipsism,” l’écueil du solipsisme. I had not previously known the word “solipsism,” but I found Sartre’s warning against self-absorption salutary and his exhortation to go forth and encounter the Other inspiring.

Lately, it seems to me that my own American culture has run aground on the reef of solipsism. Some among us have become unduly fearful of the encounter with the Other, perhaps because we had become convinced of our own superiority, or because we had acquired certain forms of power—military and financial, cultural and technological, hard and soft—that made it possible to pretend that we were alone in the world, immovably and invulnerably ensconced on our solipsistic reef.

Tocqueville had already remarked on a certain self-centeredness in our national character. “Americans,” he wrote, “are pleased by the merest of commendations and seldom satisfied by the fullest. … Their vanity is not only greedy but also restless and envious. … It is simultaneously grasping and argumentative.” (DA III:16, 719). Among my compatriots, those who believe that America has only recently been made great again seem to me to be reviving the antebellum braggadocio that Tocqueville found so tiresome: “A patriotism more trying or loquacious is impossible to imagine. It wearies even those who honor it.”

To say this is not to deny that there is much in the American version of liberal democracy to be proud of, but pride is more adequately expressed by modesty than by boasting. Lasting achievement needs no meretricious self-advertisement. Superlatives are diluted by overuse. But what is a latter-day Descartes to do? Will he really feel freer if he lifts one foot from the rich Mississippi bottomland of the self-styled “indispensable nation” and plants it firmly on the cobblestones of the similarly grandiloquent “grande Nation”?

Has the usefulness of the Franco-American comparison perhaps run its course? Comparison works when similarities and differences mutually illuminate each other. In recent years our sister republics have simultaneously succumbed to crises that are striking for their similarities, while the differences that once set them apart have become less salient. Let me illustrate what I mean:

Both countries have witnessed insurgencies against allegedly out-of-touch elites by elements that have felt excluded, disadvantaged, or, worse, disdained.

Both have seen rising resentment against immigrant populations.

Both have experienced transformations, albeit of different kinds, of long-standing party systems and informal norms that had previously served to stabilize democratic competition and contain both majoritarian and minoritarian tyranny.

Both have blamed the other as a source of their woes: “French theory” has stood accused of deconstructing rock-ribbed Yankee truths and values and infecting American minds with the debilitating viruses of relativism and “cultural Marxism”; and then, turnabout being fair play, vigilant French officials, including one recent Minister of Education, felt it necessary to erect a cordon sanitaire around the “American woke mind virus” that allegedly threatened to end gender distinctions, enthrone identitarian politics, and give Alain Finkielkraut apoplexy every Saturday morning.

So the question I want to leave you with is this: Does this recent convergence of our two democracies on a similar failure mode pose a problem for comparatists? Or is it rather an opportunity to recast the Franco-American comparison, on which most of the conference papers will focus, in a broader, more global context? For now I will simply pose the question without answering it.

The reproduction:

The (modified) original:

Recall that for Benjamin reproduction had the effect of draining art of what he called its “aura,” which is a function of distance, “its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.” One might argue that this is the case with the second image above, the original of which hangs in the Metropolitan Museum in New York and must (some say) be visited and viewed up close to appreciate the material embodiment in pigment and brush strokes of what was once a living model in a black dress. The interest of the portrait lies in the uniqueness not of the woman portrayed but of the manner in which Sargent portrays her: the movement of his hand, the quality of his brush strokes, the placement of the figure, the featureless background, the decision to show the woman’s bosom frontally and partially bared but her head in profile, as if stamped on an imperial coin. She leans on a side table, oddly supported by knuckles and casually, improbably placed thumb, while gathering the fabric of her dress in her other hand, whose clutch, combined with the troubling ashen pallor of the shadowed neck and shoulders and elbow, hints at a quiet desperation or nervousness or loucheness otherwise belied by the regal confidence of the pose.

In reality, of course, the model in the second image, Virginie Amélie Gautreau, was no more a regal figure than Lauren Sanchez Bezos, the model in the first image. Like Ms. Bezos, Ms. Gautreau was an adventuress who married a wealthy older man and made a career as a “professional beauty.” Whether the endless reproduction of Sargent’s portrait of her deprives her of her aura or endows her with an enduring aura that her actual earthly existence would not have sustained is a question that can be debated.

But I write mainly to consider the first image rather than the second. Ms. Sanchez Bezos’s corporeal reproduction of Sargent’s portrait seems expressly intended to clothe her (the verb may be poorly chosen) in a borrowed aura. Surely there is no shortage of reproductions of Ms. Sanchez Bezos’s likeness: we have seen her abundant, indeed overflowing, physical assets exposed, and overexposed, in all manner of settings from the Inauguration in the U.S. Capitol to the deck of a megayacht awash in soap bubbles to the Gatsbyesque wedding in San Giorgio Maggiore. Such overexposure has made us all familiar with her unique appearance, but as is well-known, familiarity breeds contempt. As Benjamin noted, a ubiquitous image forfeits its owner’s “unique existence at the place where it happens to be.” Yet we all remain impossibly distant from the source of that image. We can scarcely imagine life floating upon hundreds of billions of dollars in sufficient detail even to envy it. Instinctively, we turn away in disgust.

Sargent’s Portrait of Madame X has been called “the Mona Lisa of American painting.” That is not necessarily a compliment. The fate of the Mona Lisa is no doubt a testimonial to the curious inversion of the aura that distorts our relation to artistic tradition. Multitudes persuaded (by Benjamin?) that art can only be savored in intimacy, that all distance between the subject and the thing-in-itself must be removed, flock to experience the current that is presumed to flow between subject and aureoled object when experienced up close—in the flesh, as it were, rather than in the mind. And the result is Bedlam, not beatitude.

Could it be that Ms. Sanchez Bezos imagined that she could overcome the omnipresence of her reproduced image and achieve the uniqueness intrinsic to art by inhabiting the flesh, or at any rate a simulacrum of the clothing, of Mme Virginie Amélie Gautreau? That she would then acquire the aura of the American Mona Lisa that even the distance from her real presence enforced by her husband’s security guards could not guarantee?

Unfortunately, the experiment seems to have gone awry. One has to credit Ms. Sanchez Bezos with the audacity to restore the transgressive element of the original portrait that Sargent has chastely painted out in the image reproduced above: the left shoulder strap is allowed casually to fall, suggesting further carnal revelations to come. This sexual boldness is what scandalized the Salon patrons of 1884, who saw an affront to bourgeois standards. Even Virginie Gautreau was offended, and she and her mother came to Sargent in tears and begged him to withdraw the painting.

Ms. Sanchez Bezos is guilty of no such hypocrisy. She is as proud of her assets as her husband is of his and flaunts them with self-confident satisfaction. Indeed, she has magnified the ornaments that adorn her shoulder strap in proportion to the difference between Virginie’s already ample breasts and her own still more generously proportioned appurtenances. It’s hard to imagine any display of flesh that would provoke a scandal today, even in a setting as mondain as the Metropolitan Museum, because “high” society has long since gone so Hollywood that there’s no longer any distinction between a socialite and a sexpot.

I don’t know how much of the Bezos fortune was pledged to the Met to earn Jeff and Lauren the title of “honorary chairs” of the absurd Gala, which this year was dedicated to the conceit that “Fashion Is Art.” But if the concept of “aura” has applicability today, it must refer to the uniqueness that attaches not to the act of creation but to the absolute distance that stands between wealth of Bezosian magnitude and the ordinary run of humankind. The mass reproduction of the Sanchez Bezos parody of Sargent’s portrait ultimately conveys the message that extreme wealth is the only modern form of apotheosis, and digital reproduction its indispensable evangelist.

The workings of Trump's mind must baffle anyone not used to mucking about in the primary processes of the uninhibited and unrestrained id. Observing such a spectacle may give rise to a feeling akin to awe, as Proust remarked in La Prisonnière:

It is nonetheless true that a great fascination and even a kind of beauty may arise from actions stemming from a mind of a type quite remote from everything we feel and everything we believe, actions that we cannot come close to understanding and that unfold before us like a spectacle whose cause we cannot fathom.

As it happens, Proust's example of such a mind involves another Middle-Eastern strait—the Hellespont, better known today as the Dardanelles or Strait of Gallipoli—and another deranged leader, Xerxes, a Persian as it happens, whose vaulting ambition to conquer Greece ended in humiliating defeat.

Proust reminds us of Xerxes’ fury when a storm sank the pontoon bridge he was attempting to build across the Hellespont. In his rage he ordered the sea to be whipped with chains. “What could be more poetic?” Proust asks, no doubt with tongue in cheek, since the “great actions” on which he is commenting in this passage are those provoked by the incomprehensible “inclinations” and “tastes” (read: sexual vices) of the French aristocracy.

Trump has not yet ordered the sea to be scourged but one senses a similar Xerxian impatience in his order to the Navy to “escort” vessels from the Persian gulf, not in the traditional sense of “escort,” meaning to physically accompany, but rather to guide, by providing information as to where danger might lie without actually exposing the great American armada to the damage the “already defeated” and “obliterated” enemy somehow remains capable of inflicting.

My guess is that between the strains imposed on Iran's economy by the U.S. sanctions and blockade, and on the economy of the rest of the world by Iran's blockade and attacks on its neighbors in the Gulf, both sides will soon find themselves whipping the seas in fury at the necessity of coming to some kind of accommodation. The Iran War will then end in a whimper that will be lost in the booming braggadocio and bluster of both battered belligerents.

Meanwhile, to the east, both China and Taiwan, on either side of yet another strait, will have drawn the consequences of this misbegotten adventure. On April 10 of this year, Cheng Li-Wun, the leader of the Kuomintang, the main Taiwanese opposition party, met with Xi Jinping in Beijing. Trump's abandonment of America's oldest allies has surely made it clear to many in Taiwan that if its future depends on American guarantees, it has no future. Hence accommodation with the old enemy is inevitable.

Moreover, Iran's deft wielding of the economic weapon has surely made it clear that Taiwan's central role in the global semiconductor industry represents a choke point no less potent than Iran's position adjacent to the Strait of Hormuz.

If all of America's military might is not enough to extricate itself from the Hormuz debacle, the endgame in the Strait of Taiwan is not difficult to imagine. The dispute that has for some time defined the stakes for the United States in Asia could well be resolved not by the “arbitrement of swords” but rather by the reconciliation of old enemies, in opposition to a United States that has proved itself to be both an unreliable and an unworthy ally.

It would be ludicrous, of course, to compare Trump to Xerxes. One imagines him exercising his wrath not on the fickle seas but on the new reflecting pool he's ordered his “pool guy” to build on the Mall in Washington, D.C. And he will thrash its waters not with chains or cudgels but with rubber duckies bearing his iconic signature: “President Donald J. Duck. Thank you for your attention to this matter.”

At the end of the talk, the lecturer invited the audience to undertake a similar critique of the United States. Is it possible to imagine some essential goodness of American culture or the American character that might survive what we like to think of as the aberration of the present to redeem the country from its current sins? Which prompted a member of the audience to recall a remark made by then German president Frank-Walter Steinmeier to mark the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II:

Rabbi Nachman once wrote: "No heart is as whole as a broken heart." Germany’s past is a fractured past – with responsibility for the murdering of millions and the suffering of millions. That breaks our hearts. And that is why I say that this country can only be loved with a broken heart. (emphasis added)

I find much of the above analysis problematic. The concept of national character is flawed. The idea that “nations” can be identified with “cultures” ignores their internal heterogeneity. To assign didactic functions to works of art or scientific achievements, to present them as mere vehicles of “value,” is to suck the marrow from them, leaving only hollow bones.

In an earlier incarnation, during a previous world war, the Thomas Mann of Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen portrayed German culture in a rather different light, as the residuary legatee of humanist ideals discovered by the Greeks and subsequently cultivated in Europe until threatened by the rise of a commercial, capitalist Zivilisation embodied in the Allied Powers arrayed against the German Empire, the last bastion of the soulful Kultur whose pinnacle could be found in German Romanticism. In The Languages of Paradise (which I translated from French to English), Maurice Olender showed how German linguists sought to demonstrate similarities in the very structure of the Greek and German tongues that made Germany the ideal nation to embody and defend the humanistic heritage of the Ancients.

The idea that the humanist universal could find its most perfect embodiment in a particularistic national Kultur exerted an unfortunate influence on one very accomplished German scientist, Werner Heisenberg. Heisenberg had little use for the Nazis but great respect for German Kultur. He therefore felt that a defeat of Germany at the hands of the Allies would be a disaster for humanity and thus, rather than flee, which he could easily have done, chose to stay and lend his talents to the Third Reich (though he would later claim that he withheld just enough of his talent to deprive Hitler of the atomic bomb). This is the sort of doleful outcome to which the conflation of culture with nation can lead.

But I’ve been skirting the issue broached in the title of this post. What about collective guilt? Can one hold Germans as a people responsible for the crimes of the German government? Can one hold Americans as a people responsible for the crimes and corruption of the Trump regime? If so, can one atone for one’s share of the collective guilt simply by verbally dissociating oneself from the crime? Should Gunter Grass burn in hell because he served in the Waffen SS? Should Christa Wolf be pilloried for having collaborated with the Stasi? Should Mann be condemned for having been a conservative nationalist in World War I? Should I be excoriated for having served in Vietnam? How does one expiate what one might call a sin of subsumption by an enveloping category to which one had no choice but to belong?

No doubt this whole way of thinking is defective. “Goodness” and “sin” are not appropriate terms in which to speak of responsibility for political choices. Works of art are not coin of the realm that can be paid out as reparations for wartime damage. Stendhal wrote that “Politics in a literary work is like a gunshot in the middle of a concert, vulgar yet impossible to ignore.” Conversely, invoking Beethoven and Goethe to atone for the Kaiser or Führer, or Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington to atone for Donald Trump, may salve the troubled conscience of the cultivated while failing to grapple with the true nature of the trouble.

The answer depends in part on how you understand both the this of the question and the significance of the term “fascism.” Is it useful to attempt to link our current predicament to events that took place in Europe a century ago, in countries with histories, social structures, and political systems very different from ours? Comparative history is difficult and potentially misleading, but, as one of the panelists put it, “It may not be easy to learn from the past, but we have nothing else to learn from.”

But why this past? History offers no shortage of examples of blundering governments, lying leaders, authoritarian rulers, mad kings, rampaging empires, indiscriminate violence, persecution of minorities—a vast array of kakistocracies, or governments of the worst, of which ours is only the latest in a long line. Why focus attention on fascism in particular, rather than on political pathologies more specific to the United States?

The word, which history has incrusted with a variety of terrifying connotations, possesses a certain galvanizing potential. For many people, fascism denotes the most proximate incarnation of pure political evil, the thing that must “never again” be tolerated. If this is fascism, therefore, it must provoke resistance; it must be nipped in the bud before it fully evolves, which the panelists by and large agreed (contrary to many) it had not yet done in the United States, despite the many dismaying developments of the past few years.

But what then? Galvanizing resistance may be a goal as necessary as it is worthy, but is it sufficient? One of the panelists recounted a recent visit to the German Resistance Memorial Center in Berlin, whose purpose is to show that there was no dearth of resistance to fascism in Germany, and yet fascism still triumphed. So even if one succeeds in convincing substantial numbers of people that this is indeed something very much like renascent fascism and therefore to be resisted by all possible means, the question remains whether it can be stopped, because it was not stopped in its previous incarnation despite substantial resistance.

Antonio Gramsci's Prison Writings were invoked in what may have been an imprecatory gesture, calling upon the institutions of civil society to rise up in defense of an atomized citizenry, rendered passive by a lengthy period of peace and prosperity and thus incapable of defending itself against the power of a state asserting a monopoly of the legitimate means of violence. Only those civil institutions—schools and universities, centers of industrial and financial power, religious establishments, research centers, hospitals, law firms and those parts of the judiciary that remain unbowed before the asserted power of the unitary executive—possess the organizational capacity and knowhow to thwart the ostensibly fascisant state.

Gramsci's lessons have not been lost, however, on the very political actors he meant them to oppose. The far right has learned to cite Gramsci for its purposes—and not just to cite him but to put his teachings into practice by attacking precisely those institutions that he thought might spearhead resistance. It is no accident that the first targets of the Trump administration included universities, law firms, and medical research centers. The degree to which these bastions of civil society had become dependent on federal largess, rendering them vulnerable to a state determined to undermine them, came as a shock to many people working inside them, who should have known better but who had long enjoyed the benefits of a division of labor that freed them from the need to worry about how their work was funded or what needed to be done to earn continued public support. Gramsci's call for cultural hegemony has thus triggered an assault on civil society for the purpose of establishing a counter-hegemony. The “long march through the institutions” runs in two directions.

Even before Gramsci, Tocqueville recognized the importance of civil society institutions as a corrective to the self-aggrandizement of the centralizing state. The very passion for equality that defines democracy induces distrust of and enmity toward any form of elite, and we can easily recognize the role that the fomenting of such distrust and enmity has played in the consolidation of the this whose resemblance to fascism is here in question. Like Gramsci, Tocqueville hoped that society would secrete from its own organs the antibodies with which to ward off this particular pathology: he called those antibodies corps intermédiaires, or intermediary bodies.

Inevitably, however, such bodies take on an elitist coloring. The danger, then, is not that this, “fascism” or whatever it may be, is antidemocratic but rather that it is a consequence of democracy's fundamental egalitarian passion and therefore likely to recur again and again, even in flourishing liberal democracies. The passion for equality, pushed to paroxysm, refuses to acknowledge any hierarchy of reasoning; if one person's opinion is as good as any other's, there can be no general will but only an atomization of individual wills among which coordination is impossible except by the imposition of a supreme authority: the polity is reduced to “dust,” to borrow Tocqueville's term. The instincts of the supreme authority are embraced as superior to the contested contentions of other public voices in what passes for rational political debate, which by its nature can offer only tentative propositions in lieu of the specious certainty promised by the authoritarian leader.

This, of course, is one of the features of “fascism” singled out by Robert Paxton, in his influential attempt to “anatomize” the fascist beast. No one has given a better definition than Paxton's, but the very “rationalization” of the object that such an exercise implies robs it of the terror that makes its use in political debate so potent and problematic. Many political movements that exemplify some or all of Paxton's criteria may be remembered as deplorable but not damnable. Colonel de la Rocque's Croix de Feu comes to mind. Or Huey Long's bayou populism. Even Mussolini's fascism, the nominal fons et origo of the question at issue, might occupy a far less salient place in our historical memory had it not been enlisted in and subordinated to Germany's “national socialism.” Perhaps a cautious nominalism is preferable to incautious abstraction when hunting these apex predators. The successful hunter of lions might fail if his quarry were tigers or panthers and would surely be out of his depth if attempting to spear a shark.

What kind of beast is the American this, then? Paxton already warned that if fascism were ever to come to America. It wouldn't wear jackboots or carry swastikas; it would rather swaddle itself in the American flag, profess a divine Christian mission, and draw inspiration from a supposed golden age of American greatness when its only nonwhite population was enslaved. Check. But perhaps the most remarkable thing about the American beast is just how deeply American it is. Its cultural shrine is not the Bayreuth opera house but the golf course. Its philosopher is not Friedrich Nietzsche but Curtis Yarvin. Rather than cast himself as a latter-day emperor to be apotheosized by torchlight parades and Roman salutes, our leader transforms the White House driveway into a car lot and makes himself the huckster-in-chief for Elon Musk's automobiles. Even the regime's most grandiose architectural realizations—the proposed White House ballroom and the Arc de Trump—are more kaiserish kitsch than anything else. The emperor's headgear is not a crown or a laurel wreath but a baseball cap emblazoned with a campaign advertisement. If this is fascism, it is a fascism determined to advertise the emptiness at its core.

Odd though the concept may be, one can't help thinking that the stock of moral credit in the current account of the United States has now fallen deeply into the red. A leader who asks his countrymen to lay down their lives in pursuit of some prize or advantage has a moral obligation to be clear about what that prize or advantage might be. He is not at liberty to say on one day that achieving some particular end is indispensable and on the next that he “doesn't care” about failing in that endeavor because some other end has taken its place. To do otherwise is morally bankrupt. It's to pay the moral price of one's action in counterfeit currency.

Consistency has never been the forte of the current President of the United States. A foolish consistency, it has been said, is the hobgoblin of small minds, but persistent and egregious inconsistency about matters of state is nevertheless, in light of the foregoing, a sure sign of moral bankruptcy at the highest levels.

A few days ago the President asserted that he was prepared to destroy Iranian civilization if the new Iranian leadership—composed, he said, of more reasonable and rational people than the old—did not open the Strait of Hormuz. He then retreated from that threat on the ground that they had allegedly acceded to this demand, despite their explicit statement that they retained “control” of the Strait. Thanks to this fabricated and wholly fictional concession by the adversary, the President agreed to negotiations, whose prompt collapse exposed his duplicity. In response, Mr. Trump now asserts that he will “blockade” the Strait, ensuring that the blame for ensuing shortages of fuel and other essential supplies will redound to the United States rather than Iran. Well-played, Mr. President.

Has a war ever been more ineptly prosecuted? Has a great power ever displayed such strategic incompetence? Has a rogue state, known for repressing its own people, fomenting terror abroad, and subverting governments beyond its borders, ever been so carelessly granted the martyr's role it covets by a blundering superpower blinded by the shock and awe of its enormous but heedlessly squandered firepower?

Donald Trump's one great gift has always been his ability to believe his own lies. Today he professes to believe that fate of the Strait no longer matters because “we've already Won,” capital W. Presumably, it will now be up to the Europeans, the Indians, and the Chinese to fetch their own oil by hook or by crook. If they pay the Iranians for the privilege of passage, they declare themselves enemies of the United States. If they respect the U.S. blockade and thus bring their economies to a halt, their people will join the Iranian leadership, “reasonable and rational” though they are now declared to be, in viewing the United States as the Great Satan. “Moral bankruptcy” is too mild a term to apply to the regime that has brought us to this pass. “Moral idiocy” might come closer to the truth.

Consider, if you will, some of just a few of the ten points of Iran’s proposal, as compiled by the WSJ:

Point 2: Continuation of Iran’s control over the Strait of Hormuz.

Yes, indeed, the tankers may again begin steaming through the Strait of Hormuz, just as they did before the war, only now under Iran’s continuing “control,” which may include a new tariff of as much as $2 million per ship. But as we know, “tariff is the most beautiful word in the English language,” according to Trump, so this is indeed a development to be celebrated.

Point 3: Acceptance that Iran can enrich uranium for its nuclear program.

You may have thought that the purpose of the war was to end Iran’s uranium enrichment program once and for all and to seize its stockpile of highly enriched uranium, but clearly this was merely a clever feint by the brilliant author of The Art of the Deal. In reality, the war was fought to guarantee Iran’s right to enrich uranium in the future, thanks to Point 1: “The U.S. must fundamentally commit to guaranteeing non-aggression.” This guarantee will presumably also entail preventing Israel from interfering with Iran’s newly recognized right to enrich uranium.

Points 6 and 7 put an end to all UN Security Council and International Atomic Energy Agency resolutions regarding Iran’s nuclear program.

Point 9 calls for “withdrawal of U.S. combat forces from the region, while Point 10 calls for “a cease-fire on all fronts, including Israel’s conflict with Hezbollah in Lebanon” (where the Israelis are in the process of occupying 10% of Lebanese territory south of the Litani River, expelling the population, and cutting all bridges to the north). I’m quite sure that Trump will have no difficulty un-scorching the earth that the IDF is so effectively scorching.

You may be forgiven for mistaking this “workable basis on which to negotiate” as a demand for unconditional surrender by the United States, but this is precisely the brilliance of Trump’s strategy. He has masterfully camouflaged his annihilation of Iranian civilization as an American surrender, thereby rendering it acceptable to the Iranians. As we know, he had already achieved what he described, with his colorful orthography, as “Complete and Total Regime Change” in Iran, replacing a hard-core cadre of intransigent fanatics rushing headlong for a nuclear weapon with “different, smarter, and less radicalized minds” who insist only on the right to enrich uranium and complete withdrawal of American forces from the region.

Reporting by Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman shows just how bold and imaginative Trump’s prosecution of this war has been. The president was quick to grasp the brilliance of Benjamin Netanyahu’s “mow the lawn” strategy, whose notable success in Gaza has encouraged its extension to the entire region. Despite the skepticism of U.S. officials, including CIA chief Ratcliffe, who called Netanyahu’s proposal “farcical,” Secretary of State Rubio, who more bluntly labeled it “bullshit,” and JCS Chair General Caine, who gently suggested that the Israelis were wont to “oversell and their plans are not always well-developed,” Trump imaginatively fixed on the glory that would soon be his as the conqueror of Persia and ruler of all he surveyed. Alexander the Great would soon be joined by Donald the Great in what Trump memorably encapsulated as “the long and complex history of the World.”

Of course, the long and complex history of the World may prove to be still longer and more complex than even our very stable genius has yet conceived. Although the stock market, in its infinite wisdom, is poised to shoot up this morning in sheer relief that the United States, despite having blackened its reputation by threatening genocide, has drawn back from the brink, the President may yet discover that not everyone recognizes his stunning achievement for the glorious feat of arms that he and his Secretary of War know it to be. All too many voices are already deriding it as a monumental defeat and one of the greatest strategic blunders “in the long and complex history of the World.” Such mockery may prove to be too much for Trump’s fragile ego. “Il n’y a que le ridicule qui tue.” And there is always the off chance that Israel may not see the wisdom of agreeing to a cease-fire in Lebanon and permanent non-aggression pact with Iran. Some unsympathetic observers might even begin comparing Trump to Neville Chamberlain and his embrace of Iran’s 10-point plan to Chamberlain’s declaration of “peace for our time.” This might sting Trump to the quick, as soon as one of his aides explains to him who Neville Chamberlain was.

Lately, I see that I'm not alone in feeling that things can't continue on their present trajectory for much longer. For example, Paul Krugman fears that Trump's Truth Social post promising that “all hell will reign [sic] down” on the Iranians if they don't open the Strait of Hormuz, despite his previous protestations that the fate of the Strait is up to the countries who depend on the oil passing through it, presages the imminent commission of a monumental war crime, for which he is begging forgiveness in advance by appending an uncharacteristic hosanna, “Glory be to GOD,” to his most un-Christian threat to “bomb them back to the Stone Ages [re-sic].”

The president is not known for being a patient man, and he is clearly frustrated that the decapitated Iranian leadership has not acceded to his wishes and his corrupting blandishments as eagerly as the Venezuelans did. An American airman is apparently down somewhere in Iran, and the prospect of his capture and exhibition surely haunts the mind of the TV-obsessed Trump, who must fear being humiliated as Jimmy Carter was by the inevitable contingency of all military adventures.

Like our Secretary of “War,” who speaks so facilely of “lethality,” “destruction,” and “obliteration” of the “enemies of righteousness,” the commander-in-chief seems not to have allowed for the possibility that the enemy's reciprocal invocations of righteousness might find favor with a capricious deity determined to demonstrate to the insufferably proud Americans that sometimes pride goeth before the fall. Indeed, the recently installed American Pope, perhaps hoping to forestall divine retribution, has preemptively stepped in to issue a rebuke to the “warriors” who have sought to sanctify the carnage by citing Scripture for their devilish purpose.

The danger of course is that such short-sighted, unreflective, and historically ignorant leaders will have so thoroughly convinced themselves of America's invincibility that they won't be able to tolerate the impasse into which they rushed headlong and will double down in the hope of finding an easy way out. The massing of ground troops in the region without any obvious use to which they might be put is one sign that full-blown panic is nigh.

Some years ago, then Secretary-of-State Madeleine Albright asked Colin Powell what the point of having a “superb military” was “if we can't use it.” Powell, who at that point in his career appreciated the difference between a bludgeon and a scalpel, reportedly felt apoplectic. Unfortunately, he, too, later succumbed to the temptation to attempt surgery with a shillelagh. It didn't end well. And in comparison with the present lot, both Albright and Powell were figures of great wisdom and salutary sobriety. God—or should I rather raise my voice with the president and say, GOD—help us.

[Louis-Napoléon] owed his success more to folly than to reason, the theater of the world being the very strange place it is: on its peculiar stage the worst plays sometimes enjoy the greatest success. Had Louis-Napoléon been a wise man or a genius, he would never have become president of the Republic.

…

Like every mediocre prince, he was fond of flatterers, a taste he had had ample time to develop before coming to power thanks to twenty years of conspiring with low-life adventurers, bankrupts, crackpots, and dissipated youth—the only people who in all that time were willing to serve as his henchmen and accomplices. … [T]races of the adventurer and gambler remained. He continued to enjoy the company of such inferiors even though he was no longer obliged to share it. I think his difficulty in expressing his thoughts … drew him to people who were long familiar with his ideas and dreams, while his inferiority in discussion made it painful for him to endure the company of intelligent men. What he desired above all was devotion to himself and his cause (as if either could inspire such devotion). Talent annoyed him if it was in any degree independent. He needed people who believed in his destiny and were willing to prostrate themselves before his future success. Hence it was impossible to get near him without passing through a group of trusted servants and friends, whom I recall General Changarnier describing to me at the time with two words: crooks and scoundrels. Nothing was worse than his familiars, unless it was his family, made up mostly of good-for-nothings and painted women.

The likeness to Trump is uncanny. And now our would-be emperor has gone and launched a war that may prove to be his undoing, just as the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871 undid Napoleon III. The intoxication of high office, the assurances of his flatterers, delusion as to his innate genius, and serious underestimation of his enemy's capabilities and resolve led Louis-Napoléon to his ignominious doom. France was a great power at the time; its leader's disastrous hubris made a great power of its adversary Prussia.

In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx famously wrote: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” We are now beyond farce. I'm not sure what the apt comparison for this third act is. History as reality show? From the man on a white horse to the man on a golf cart? Suggestions welcome.

If it weren't so serious, it would almost be funny.

Hence the temptation of warfare is not resisted as strongly as it ought to be. We've seen this in the past, but even though we've often been guilty of treating war (or its doppelgängers hidden behind euphemisms such as “limited police actions” or “military assistance missions”) as just another tool in the foreign-policy toolkit, we've generally insisted on maintaining, or feigning, a certain gravity whenever the subject is broached. Commanders-in-chief once professed awe before the “solemn responsibility” they bear for the death and mayhem they authorized; they begged forgiveness from the families of those whom they sent to their graves; they labored over elaborate apologia for the greater good they believed they were seeking through the most violent of means; they lavished all the hoary epithets of honor and glory on the “fallen heroes” of whose actual duties and intimate suffering they have little inkling.

The solemnity of this ritual dramatization of war had at least one virtue: it raised the commitment of forces above the quotidian din of politics and therefore served as a warning that such action was not to be undertaken lightly.

But you, in your consummate self-absorption, chose to ignore the warning. Courage, André Malraux once said, is a banal consequence of a lack of imagination. A country can suffer the misfortune of finding itself led by blithe, ignorant, careless, incautious, ignorant men. Having seen little of war and read nothing of history, they may find themselves misled by easy victories against helpless victims. It’s no great feat of arms to demolish unarmed boats with fighter jets or to abduct a minimally defended and widely despised despot in the dead of night. It costs nothing in blood or tears to permit an ostensible ally to make uninhabitable a meager strip of land occupied by two million people unable to make their protests heard.

Encouraged by such simulacra of victory, you acquire a taste for the “arbitrement of arms.” Your blithe ignorance and carelessness alleviate the once-solemn question of war of its former gravity. Your inveterate confusion of leadership with showmanship transforms the justification of war from grave duty into pyrotechnic display, juxtaposing images from video games and action movies with high-tech snuff footage. You send your spokesman, as grotesquely tattooed as a savage spearman, in front of the cameras to rant about the warrior ethos and boast about the jettisoning of all rules of engagement and laws of war once thought, in a more civilized age, to redeem interstate bloodletting from the savagery symbolized by those tattoos. To welcome the “fallen heroes” home you transform the “dignified transfer” of their remains into a photo op in which you appear in a white baseball cap from your stock of campaign merch, and you don't remove it when their bodies are paraded past. Even your own propaganda network felt compelled to edit out that moment of narcissistic contempt.

And of course you are firmly convinced that you will never be punished for this wantonness. You firmly believe that your nonpareil military will forever shield you, and us, from all retribution. You provoke right and left, north and south, without ever imagining that right might someday join with left, north with south, to deal us the kind of blow you so thoughtlessly mete out to others. Your courage is indeed a banal consequence of your lack of imagination, your want of intelligence, your erasure of history. You are a fool with a nuclear blunderbuss. Your ignorance is the ultimate weapon of mass destruction.

Consider: In 1991, the First Gulf War was justified on the lofty grounds that Iraq's attack on Kuwait threatened to topple the whole Westphalian System. No country would ever be safe within its own borders, it was claimed, if Kuwaiti sovereignty were not defended by turning back Iraqi aggression. To be sure, our intervention inflicted severe damage on an enemy of the U.S. and rescued a beleaguered ally, but these self-interested motives could be played down relative to the high-minded intention to preserve the international order. La Rochefoucauld smiled indulgently at the hubristic proposition that international law had at last found the disinterested enforcer it had always been presumed to lack.

By 2003, the ground had shifted. No longer was Iraq threatening the Westphalian System. It was rather the Coalition of the Willing, assembled in the name of a “responsibility to protect” (R2P, in the jargon) the Iraqi people from the depredations of their own evil rulers, that thumbed its nose at the concept of sovereignty. Alleged “weapons of mass destruction” were conjured up to create a jus ad bellum justification for preventive attack in the absence of external aggression. The Bush administration openly touted regime change and even had a substitute regime waiting in the wings with the Iraqi National Congress and Ahmed Chalabi (remember him?).

In 2026, the current administration no longer invokes the preservation of any country's national sovereignty. The president had already proclaimed himself unbound by international law, which his advisor Stephen Miller dismissed as a quaint set of “international niceties” no longer relevant to a world divided into spheres of influence dominated by hegemons free to do as they pleased within their respective domains. Regime change remains the goal, but there appears to have been no planning for it. Instead, Trump has urged the “Iranian people,” including their oppressors of the last four decades, the Revolutionary Guard, to “finish the job” once the United States and Israel have completed their campaign of decapitation and “obliteration.” How they might go about this is no concern of his.

Compared with this latest onslaught, the Iraq War of 2003 might be described as a paragon of careful preparation and planning. International authorities inspected nuclear and chemical weapons facilities and issued reports. Interested parties presented evidence to the U.N. Security Council. Economists published estimates of the cost of prolonged warfare. Debate raged for months in the press and specialized journals. Congress was consulted, and even voted on the matter, if such a thing can be believed. And yet it all ended in fiasco.

This time the hypocrisy was limited to the pretense of negotiations. Trump claimed that he preferred a diplomatic solution but that the Iranian side refused to utter what he called “the secret words” (I presume he meant the "magic words” since he made no secret of them), namely, “We do not want to build nuclear weapons.” But this is false: they did repeatedly utter those precise words, no doubt no less hypocritically than Trump proclaimed his preference for peace. But neither Trump's hypocrisy nor the Iranians’ was the kind of hypocrisy that La Rochefoucauld had in mind, since neither side pretended to any virtue other than the right to do as it pleased while denying the purpose of doing so.

So now the dogs of war are on the loose in a world so devoid of virtue that hypocrisy has nothing toward which it can gesture. I wish I had an aphorism for this moment as apt as La Rochefoucauld's for his, but I can't think of one.

I am an American, Chicago-born—Chicago, that somber city—and go
at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in
my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent
knock, sometimes a not so innocent. But a man’s character is his fate,
says Heraclitus, and m the end there isn’t any way to disguise the nature
of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles.

The opening phrases of this passage, asserting a nationality and a place, stake a claim to a shared collective identity, but what follows abruptly modulates to a new, individualistic key. We are marked by the group to which we belong, but character—a property of the individual, not the group—is fate, or so says Heraclitus. Yet individual character and collective identity are seldom a perfect fit. Individuals with character may squirm in their collective identities as one might squirm in a shirt with a stiff collar or a suit with itchy trousers.

To be sure, Bellow links the two moments of the self—the communal and the characterological, the outer husk and the inner fiber—with the conjunction “and,” asserting not only an absence of contradiction between the two but an apparent logical entailment: I am an American, therefore I am an individualist undeterred by convention and prepared to assault closed doors with my bare fists if necessary to get what I want.

This stereotype had a venerable pedigree. Our democracy of ever-receding frontiers was said1 to breed a population of rugged individualists, each different from the others but united by mutual recognition of the conjoined virtues of ruggedness, implying indifference to convention, politesse, and empathy, and individualism, or the conviction that freedom means nothing more than looking out for Number One (as the vernacular would have it).

Well, I, too, am an American, New Jersey-born—and if Bellow thinks Chicago is a somber city, he should try growing up in suburban New Jersey. Yet I've always experienced my American suit of clothes as something of a hair shirt. Like Bellow, I take it as my birthright to go at things in my own way, but I'm prepared to take instruction from anyone, American or not, and, like Tocqueville, I can be impatient with “the national vanity of the Americans”:

They are pleased by the merest commendations and seldom satisfied by the fullest. … Doubtful perhaps of their own merit, they wish to have its portrait constantly before their eyes. Their vanity … is … greedy. … It gives nothing yet is always asking to receive.2

This national vanity has achieved its apotheosis in our current commander-in-chief. I needn't belabor the point; it should be obvious enough to anyone with eyes to read a newspaper. The wonder is that so many of my compatriots—the majority that elected Trump in 2024—cannot see this and so many other gross character flaws—greed, prevarication, invincible ignorance, cruelty, belligerence, sloth, vulgarity, etc.—as utterly disqualifying for high office. At what point does such widespread lack of judgment become a concern for proponents of democracy, who stake their on all on the sovereignty of the People—those people? Benjamin Franklin told a man seeking news of the Constitutional Convention that the Founding Fathers had given us “a Republic, if you can keep it.” The question is then whether a citizenry capable of such stunningly bad judgment is also capable of sustaining a republic?

To raise such a question is to run the risk of being dismissed as “elitist.” Isn't it necessary for anyone professing to support democracy to recognize the legitimate grievances of those who find no fault with the president, or at least no fault serious enough to undermine his fitness to govern? If the majority is content to be led by such a man, what right has the minority to complain? And don't these complaints about disqualifying flaws of character stem mainly from a privileged elite untouched by the very threats that the challenged leader is fearless enough to name and confront? If he is also looking out for Number One, well, isn't that a vice of which we rugged individualists are all guilty? As long as the majority are getting what they want, isn't that the best that democracy can hope to achieve?

Some who agree me with me on the question of flawed judgment will try to deflect the worry by pointing to a recent shift in public opinion. The president's popularity is plummeting, they will say, and this should offer reassurance that the majority is coming around. This shift is admittedly heartening, but it begs the question of the electorate's flawed judgment by pointing to its volatility rather than to any newly acquired wisdom. Yes, a lot of people have changed their minds about whether they're willing to support Trump and his party of spineless toadies, but how could they not have seen two years ago where his election would lead? And what is to prevent such a volatile body of opinion from veering off yet again in some foreseeably disastrous direction?

Am I then guilty of the sin to which Bertolt Brecht pointed in his poem Die Lösung? Am I not, while professing to be a democrat, asking “to dissolve the People and elect another” simply because the existing majority does not agree with me? Isn't this the quintessence of elitist arrogance? On what basis do I conclude that my judgment is superior to the (erstwhile) majority's?

But that is not what I'm asserting. I fully recognize that democracy is perpetually contentious and that majorities are ever prone to blindness and folly. My readiness to live with that permanent uncertainty is my American hair shirt (or is it rather a tunic of Nessus?). American-born, I cannot see my way past democracy,3 yet the potential extravagance of democratic misjudgment, so vividly evident in our recent history, leaves me squirming and anxious about the immediate future, for we are still a long way from seeing a way out of the present nadir of our history (“like nothing you've ever seen before,” as the presidently rightly albeit unwittingly observes).