America Is at Its Wits’ End. What We Do Now Matters.
MAGA men oil their guns with liberal tears, I know, but I have to admit I’ve been shedding them. Or not tears exactly, but a touch of liberal blood. Maybe that works on their guns too. A few days ago, back when I was forcibly trying to tune out the drumbeat of war in Europe, I suddenly blacked out. When I came to, I was bruised and bleeding from the bridge of my nose. A sketchy medispa offered intravenous hydration, and, settling into a big chair with a needle in my vein, I went right back to scrolling. At Davos, Mark Carney, the prime minister of Canada, declared American hegemony dead: “This is a rupture.” He’s looking for allies to organize a free world without us. Fascism is revving up here, but to the rest of the world, we’re at an ending. It’s curtains for the Pax Americana, and maybe even the dollar.The night before I passed out, my timeline was seized with videos showing young men heading north to confront ICE. The street clashes and wails of imprisoned children are driving Americans, once again, to clash and put themselves in harm’s way, while others bear anxious witness. “Doomscrolling” should no longer be framed as a bad habit, unless you’re sold on denial. In A Chill in the Air, Iris Origo’s Italian war diary (1939–40), she describes her utter dependence, as Mussolini’s Blackshirts thronged her village, on “the confused, discordant voices coming out of a little box” that foretold “inevitable, imminent catastrophe.” The same dread is here. Will there be more bloodshed in occupied cities, economic collapse, war with NATO? Reels and TikTok now bleat like the AM tube radio that kept Origo informed and misinformed in equal measure. “‘It’s Now Happening’—Urgent $38 Trillion U.S. Dollar ‘Collapse’ Warning Issued as Markets Brace for Gold and Bitcoin Price Shocks,” read a recent headline, which I first took for propaganda and spam, until I saw it was Fortune; but is Fortune now propaganda and spam like CBS News? Origo later remembered the truth-lies mix from the radio as the worst noise of the war, more disturbing even than the roar of bomber planes. On the night before I fainted, Minneapolis adrenaline seemed like the only response to the fact that, incontrovertibly, it has happened here. Evidently, the old “the Resistance is cringe” wankers who scoffed at the f-word now concede that the “hysterical pussy hats” were right. Shoulda listened, gentlemen. And who’s hysterical now, ye Chapo graduates with your bear spray and Rambo dreams? Where was that ferocity a decade ago when you couldn’t be bothered to so much as join up with the bow-tied Never Trumpers, let alone knit a damn hat and march with us pussy prophets, back when this might actually have been prevented?But I’m not mad at you, as Renee Good once said. No, no, no. Nearly 60 percent of Americans now consider Trump’s first year a failure—you don’t say—so the majority of the United States is at least thinking clearly again. And there’s more than one way to skin a cat, so it should be OK that our fellow Americans choose variously to fight, flee, freeze, fawn, or even flop. Surely some of those sucking up to brain-broken Trump at Davos (like aviator-wearing French President Emmanuel Macron with that vomitous “my friend” text) are fawning to protect themselves, just as Renee Good was fleeing to protect herself and her wife. No emergency behavior may be a noble choice, and fawning for Trump is of course immoral, but here we are. On the little boxes of 2026, the murder of Alex Pretti, hard on the heels of the murder of Good, has been met with moral stupefaction. Minnesota sure looks like a battlefield. Erin Maye Quade, a state rep in a Minneapolis suburb, describes the scene. “I’ll just see abandoned cars on highways, and neighborhood streets. Sometimes the doors are still open and the car is still running.… You could be in line at Burger King and an ICE officer snatches a random worker on the way into work. You could be at a restaurant, and all of a sudden 14 ICE officers come in and kidnap every single worker.”But in New York, on the sidewalks and in the subway, people seem to be Brits-during-the-Blitz-ing it, keeping passably calm and carrying passably on. When I first heard tales of that famous pose in London in 1940, I pictured it with admiration. Now, a dumb bandage on my nose, I can only guess at the blood pressures of repressed people stoically punching the clock in pinstripes. At night, they were allegedly having lots of sex, but were they fainting too?In the videos from Minneapolis, no one seems to be keeping calm or suppressing anything. Good for them. Various Minnesotans keep telling us they have Viking blood up there and not stiff Brit upper lips. It takes all kinds. Some people genuinely think of themselves as Vikings, some as British stoics, some as Black Panthers. In Philadelphia, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense cases the city while carrying big guns. (“Those who serve in the public, they should be fearful of the public,” their leader said recently.) Until now, maybe, presidents have counted on cultural norms, federalism, inertia, the regal dollar, and general human benevolence to get us to believe we’re all American and throw in with this implausible experiment. As we know, the laws, norms, benevolence, and even inertia and federalism are in flames now. So some of us are going to land on the fainting couch, and supply MAGA with gun oil, while others like Pretti and Good are going to head toward danger. On the other side, a Border Patrolman is going to slip and fall, wham, on the Minnesota ice—and give our side video for days. As a liberal-tears-shedder from the icy north, I felt no pity. Then I trudged back to Union Square to protest ICE.