People are heartbroken. Trump Derangement Syndrome has turned into Trump Depression Syndrome. Some of us predicted that a loss in 2024 wouldn’t be as traumatic as 2016. It wouldn’t be as much of a shock. The popular vote and electoral college would probably run together. It would feel like less of a fluke. What we overlooked is that depression, past a certain threshold, is highly stressful. Here we go again. But does it have to feel this way? Don’t we always live to fight another day? Opponents aren’t stressed, which is to be expected, but neither are many neutral onlookers. What follows is a search for an answer.
One possible solution is that people in despair are off their rockers. This is just politics. It waxes and wanes. Get over it. Bad things will happen, but bad things happen in every administration of a large modern nation state, even in the ones we favor. What’s more, the vast majority of those in despair enjoy a level of material comfort and political liberty rarely realized in human history.
We’re talking about liberals here. Whether it’s the pussy hat wearing wine moms, or the moderate legacy liberals of the establishment. They all watched The West Wing at one time or another. They’re all in mourning now. The point is, these people will tend not to have material skin the game the way, say, immigrants do. Many women would rightly claim an exception to this generalization, particularly those in red states, and there will be other exceptions. But the idea is that there is no great material risk only by virtue of possessing the liberal political identity.
So, some perspective is in order, at the very least. The Handmaid’s Tale is fiction, the North Korean dictatorship is a remnant on the other side of the planet, and we won’t have a Civil War. The last one is what people tend to muse about most, as in the movie, Civil War. (“What kind of American are you?”). But we’re too intertwined economically and socially to have a proper Civil War. Even Wyoming has a large portion of liberals, and California has its share of conversative voters. Families are mixed, as are workplaces. There is no stark regional separation, and no economic impetus, as in the case of the actual Civil War. It’s not going to happen.
No one will be moved off their current view of what’s happening any time in the near future, much less in the span of this writing. We’ll have to settle for making this heartbreak coherent. That is, if one believed the world were so and so, then that person would inevitably despair. It’s here where we find our footing.
The Handmaid’s Tale may be fantastical, but there are many rungs to fall from our pre-2016 democracy before we reach the fantastical. Each represents a loss and a distancing from the world before. Those who despair with each rung are cursed with the real time awareness that it’s happening, rung by rung, only to be hectored by the blissfully unaware around them.
But fascism is all anyone wants to debate. This will be a waste if we can lose our liberal democracy without ever becoming fully fascist. The heartbroken and anxious fear fascism. Others rest in their faith that we’ll never become Nazi Germany. They’re probably right, but here we go downward, rung by rung.
Our nearest risk is probably not Nazi Germany, but the authoritarianism of an Erdogan of Turkey or an Orban of Hungary. Short of that, it’s the political instability commonly associated with Latin America. That’s the most realistic range of the worst case. But that’s still awful. It was surreal to even consider this possibility for the United States in 2016. Today, it’s eerie in how boring it’s become. At least a Civil War would be interesting. Now we live through an absurd period, with culture stagnating, and more and more clownish figures taking the stage by the day. We grow numb to it all.
Nothing incredible will change in our day to day lives. The world will function just fine and those in political despair will be left with the feeling many have after losing a loved one, only to find the world spinning madly on (with apologies to The Weepies), as if no one realizes the tragedy that’s occurred. Only great celebrity can shield mourners from this empty feeling, because the world often does stop to notice when an icon passes.
Many are in mourning because it seems like something really did break this time. 2016 might have been an anomaly, with 2020 righting the ship. But 2024 is an eyes-wide-open choice, with January 6th more than adequately covered, and with the White House, Senate, and House trifecta achieved for the Party of Trump. This is the first Republican candidate to win the popular vote in 20 years.
If you’re France, Japan, Australia, or any number of countries in the American post-WWII order, you have to be thinking of how to defend yourself without simply assuming American leadership. This is even if nothing drastic changes. Internal American instability, along with the associated reemergence of isolationism, has to be priced in moving forward.
That means we’ve essentially fumbled the post-WWII order handed down to us, and with it the American Century (1945–2025). It’s going out before our eyes, with a whimper. If we retain it intact after this, it will be dumb luck. A hard separation between liberals and leftists comes in here. That is, between the socialist left on one hand, and on the other the Democratic Party with its base voters. Leftists are at least comforted by their crowing that they’ve been right all along about capitalism and American empire. Liberals go halfway with the socialists but buy into proverbs like Bill Clinton’s “there is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America.”
After election day 2024, the credibility of any remotely whiggish narrative of American progress and power is shattered. The apolitical appear here to ask, “isn’t this just more politics?” The question is, if we admit that most of us won’t be directly oppressed, through deportation, arrest, or disenfranchisement, then isn’t this like any other election? Important, to be sure, but not earth shattering?
Losing hurts after daring to hope, and the personal connection that grows over the course of the fight — to compatriots, allies, and leaders — represents a real emotional investment. But admittedly, every election is like that. What’s different this time is that the recovery will have to take account of a permanent change, a change in one’s identity as an American with a narrative that’s lost credibility. What the apolitical do not experience is the emotional consequences of a lost investment in a venture to achieve a higher spot on the hierarchy of needs, namely, a social identity based at least partly in the political.
Self-conception is deeply implicated in political commitment. To make this investment is to hope for a richer conception of self, but it also makes one vulnerable. Real relationships in human life are like this. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Nothing is lost either, other than the richness of personal and social growth. What’s lost in this specific gamble is confidence in any liberal momentum behind the American nation-state, the trust underwriting a lifetime of political argument with conservatives about the importance of personal character, and the orienting understanding of the logic of the age we’re entering.
Maybe Donald Trump and election denial will be a blip, but the strong incentive to concede elections is now eroded. Voters have spoken loud and clear that flouting this norm is forgivable. One wonders how long before it’s a common tactic in American politics, and the delegitimatizing of our election outcomes in the eyes of the public. Maybe we’ll get lucky, but the smart money is never on luck.
In any case, the philosopher Charles Taylor has explained how the political world can devastate us, even rising to the level of the death of a loved one, because of the intertwined meanings in public and individual life. Rich existence involves risk. The risk we’ve taken has resulted in a lost world conception. Maybe the next era will be better, but the best case for that future world will involve this one going through a worse phase first.
The everyday we find ourselves in these days is saturated with political contestation and significance. Everything seems to be coded with political meaning. You can’t escape it. In Overdoing Democracy, Robert Talisse tells us this is unhealthy for a democracy and that, ironically, preserving a healthy democracy sometimes involves keeping it at bay. Democracy is supposed to foster seeing one another as equals, and liberal democracy is supposed to provide the space for people to pursue their varying visions of the good life.
Constant political agitation creates a self-dooming loop for democracy itself, lowering the trust needed for the system to function, and for any version of the good life to have room to operate. Talisse tells us we need a return of roughly neutral political spaces, the proverbial bowling leagues and so forth, to mend civic structures and slow down this doom loop. But now, it seems that we’re in a race, on one side the hope of everyday people accepting one another regardless of politics, and the constant drum of the fight calling us from the other side.
Talisse give us a road map, and at the risk of sounding facile, we really do live to fight another day. This encouragement doesn’t have to come in the shallow wrapping we’re used to, but with real acknowledgment of the tragedy of this kind of loss. Other people in other epochs have been in this position before. It’s bracing for those who grew up seeing only gradual political ascendence and living through “end of history” periods when certain kinds of political struggle were supposed to be finished.
But even this ironic and out of time feeling has been here before. No one ever promised us total freedom from the human condition. Donations and door knocking are good, but there’s no guarantee they’ll save us. That goes double for our tweets. Take a breath. We should care deeply, but you don’t owe the world your despair. Enjoy a sandwich, go to the park, play with your kids.
“It ain’t all waiting on you,” Uncle Ellis tells Ed Tom Bell in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men. We are burdened by the feeling that not only are we experiencing something bad, but that it’s a kind of bad so surreal and strange that no one would have dreamed of it before now. There’s truth in that feeling, the way all local truths are unique. But zoomed out, it’s empty. The brand-new bad thing no one could have imagined has happened before. And we won’t be able to change it by tweeting harder or doomscrolling more faithfully. Listen to Ellis, that’s vanity.
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