A Death in the Family
January 20, 2025·88 comments·In Brief
A unifying symbol died this week. Not a person, but the idea that the American Presidency represents shared national meaning. Two recent administrations, two different parties, and a series of acts that proved the office now exists only to serve those who hold it, not the nation they claim to represent.
• The institution no longer masks its self-interest. Biden issued preemptive pardons for allies. Trump issued executive orders on TikTok and created memecoins. These weren't policy decisions debated on their merits. These were acts of pure power exercised without pretense.
• What's lost isn't recoverable through effort or goodwill. A family patriarch or matriarch dies and relatives must intentionally work to stay connected. Most won't. The default is drift and disconnection. A unifying presidency dies the same way.
• The rational response to this death is defection. If institutions no longer serve common good but only private gain, loyalty to them becomes a sucker's game. The only move left is self-interest, just like everyone in power is playing.
• Patriotism now points to something that no longer exists. The author held hope that reclamation was possible, that someday leaders would emerge committed to shared American meaning. That hope has collapsed. What remains is grief for an idea, not anger at policy.
• The question isn't whether the Presidency can be fixed. The question is what binds Americans together now that the symbol is gone. There's no shared meaning waiting in government. That absence changes what community has to mean.
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Comments
I am unsettled. In my gut. A strong feeling of “things aren’t right, and I don’t know what to do about it.”.
My first instinct is truly instinct - survival. “How do I take care of me and mine?”. But that hits my gut as unsatisfactory and too solitary.
So…… I declare a commitment of love to family and close friends - including this Pack.
I think the only thing to do is explore your foundational beliefs, look for those who reflect them and defend them and then tighten the strap on the shield and keep going. Ben often talks about how comics or the pulp of society are a lens to look at reality of the world we are in. Captain American in End Game tightening the strap on broken shield while all looked hopeless seems like the appropriate totem for this.
I feel this too Ben,
All I can add is thank you for sharing your thoughts. You bring words of courage. I hope to cross the ravine with the pack.
Timely publish, Ben.
I have felt wary of our country/leadership for a long time, ever since 9/11 and the Iraqi invasion.
I’m currently plodding thru Chernow’s “House of Morgan” and every finance undergrad/mba should have to read it. Provides a very different context to our current financial plumbing and Governments. I don’t have one or two A Ha(s) yet, but they are brewing (i’m only 60% thru).
The only thing i am hopeful about are that our people overall have decent guts and the recent admin’s quelling of info flow, pardons, media game, legal games, just blew up in their face.
This is not a Trump promotion. He’s going to have a really rough road IMO to get more than 2 big things accomplished (maybe 1).
A lot of what we experienced the last 4 years didn’t make sense and we were told that it did make sense - and that team spent a lot of dough trying to further brainwash people - they were in power - and were simply rejected.
I have hope in that. I think America is still there it’s just really hard to see and has been becoming blurry for decades.
I understand. Know that there is a huge electorate out there that disagree. I have to respect that. I am not angry. My primary emotion is of great sadness that too many of my friends, neighbors and citizens may have put their faith in a false idol.
History will be the judge. The judge will write the history.
I too am fully committed to bend the moral arc of the universe towards justice, not just for my grandchidren but for all grandchildren yet to be. There are no other peoples children.
Grandpa Jim, one year older than Clinton, Bush, and Trump
Daniel Patrick Moynihan:
“The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.
Winston S Churchill:
Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…’
Twenty years after The Second Coming, on the eve of WW2, Yeats wrote Lapis Lazuli.
In an insane time, take the long view to try to keep your sanity.
It has dawned on me that I actually am grieving. Grieving for what was and is now lost. Grieving that there is no going back, no path of return.
Yes, that is it exactly, Craig.
there’s a quote, from Khe Hy, that I always go back to on this - pretty much whenever, like you @CSWilson, I realize/accept I’m grieving.
It goes, When someone we love dies, we get so busy mourning what died that we ignore what didn’t.
It doesn’t undo what can’t be undone, but it does jog my brain to go and water those seeds. It’s the only way something new grows.
While I enjoyed this note (enjoyed isn’t the right word; appreciated is maybe more appropriate) I have to say that it does not resonate with me on a number of levels, and I think I know why. This is a generational divide that cannot be breached by words. I cannot grieve for the loss of the American presidency because for me it was sort of always lost.
My formative years, or at least the ones where I learned about what is and is not appropriate conduct for a man, were during the Clinton administration. My college years were the first Bush term, and despite some of the good he did—and I still to this day have positive feelings towards him in a number of ways—he got a lot of my contemporaries killed in another man’s desert fighting another man’s war. It took me all of eight seconds to sniff out Obama as a cynical manipulator and his two terms did nothing to dissuade me from that initial impression. Trump term one was exactly as chaotic as expected. Biden wound up pulling off two of the greatest scandals in modern history. Now we’re on to Trump II: Meme Shitcoin Boogaloo.
At no point in that timespan—from age 10 to my current point of 42–was there a sustained period where I held a strong belief in the idea of a shared notion of what the American Presidency was supposed to be.
I grieve with you Ben, but not because of some great loss, as I have suffered no such thing. Instead I grieve for my inability to grieve.
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