With the government shut down, with ICE terrorizing American cities, with the National Guard used as strong-arm intimidation cutouts, and with Donald Trump’s Department of Justice indicting his political enemies, America’s proposed $20 billion bailout of Argentina initially flew under the radar.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent spun the move as a lifeline to Javier Milei, Argentina’s embattled president and Trump’s authoritarian pal. But the bailout would also help major U.S. hedge funds that made risky bets on the Argentine economy. During Milei’s October 14 visit to the White House, Trump clarified that Argentina would receive the $20 billion only if the ruling party of the chainsaw-wielding Milei won in the country’s elections on October 26. The next day, Bessent sweetened the deal by making it a potential $40 million bailout.

I was struck a couple weeks ago by a fairly banal headline amid the Trump administration’s daily authoritarian grease fires: “The Best Red Carpet Looks at the Venice Film Festival.” With the fracturing of democracy, I’d forgotten that mainstream entertainment media and luxury brands are still doing their thing according to a seasonal calendar. The annual parade of Venice gowns whets the appetite for Fashion Weeks in New York, Paris, London, and Milan.

Fashion Week ought to be a reminder that despite world wars and natural disasters, the cycles of institutional culture and the media that promote them always manage to carry on. Haute couture is the small-batch distraction from social ills just like professional sports is (or is supposed to be) the Big Gulp distraction. But the first thing I saw in the New York Times about the city’s 2025 Fashion Week was an article on Andrew Cuomo and other current and former local politicians walking the runway as part of Style Across the Aisle, a supposedly bipartisan charity event launched by a former journalist who “last year wore an ‘I Heart Cuomo’ T-shirt in the Hamptons.”

“God is not found in the soul by adding anything,” wrote the medieval German theologian Meister Eckhart, “but by a process of subtraction.” I assume he meant the letting go of worldly attachments, hence the Christian centrality of alms-giving and rituals of fasting and material abnegation. But humans—loss-averse by nature—and Americans in particular have found subtraction a difficult act.

Before there was athleisure and people still “dressed up” to go out, a sartorial rule held that before leaving the house you should look in the mirror and subtract one thing. But in today’s baroque culture of eternal abundance, even one thing seems too much. Americans’ preferred solution to any problem that involves themselves is to add. During COVID lockdown, our first impulse was to hoard and then to binge-buy superfluous gadgets. Despite the ignorance of anti-vaxxers, reasonable people aggressively wanted to be vaccinated (addition) rather than socially distanced (subtraction).

With Elon Musk “pulling back” from field-marshaling the Trump Administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), I’ve been wondering how long it will take for us to see and feel the disintegration of society that the loss of government programs will cause. Although the perils of Trump’s tariffs are already evident, the odds are still pretty good that he will cave if the whole of Wall Street turns against him. With the agency cuts, however, there will be no backtracking from ripping out the fixtures while ripping off the Constitution and the taxpayers. Even with the retreat of our unelected Property Brother from Another Planet sledgehammering beams and partitions before even seeing a building plan, the destruction is sure to continue if only out of spite.

It’s strange America’s newfound comfort with “strategic uncertainty” and “creative destruction.” As we learned from Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky and had confirmed by reality shows like Hoarders, people are notoriously loss-averse: we will forfeit opportunities for gain to hold on to what we already have. By nature, we don’t want to let go of something (a taxpayer-funded service, for instance) we may later need.

In February 2024, Rome’s Capitoline Museums placed in its garden a nearly 43-foot-tall copy of a marble statue of Constantine the Great that the Roman emperor had commissioned in the fourth century. Made from resin, polyurethane, and marble powder, the same-size reproduction was modeled from ten surviving fragments (including an elbow, a knee, and a hand with curled finger) and constructed by the Factum Foundation, a Madrid nonprofit.

Constantine is seated, wielding a scepter in one hand and an orb in the other, with a cloth tunic made from gold leaf and plaster. (For context, the statue of the seated Lincoln in the Memorial is less than half the height, at 19 feet from head to foot.) Some experts think the marble original was reworked from a colossal statue of the god Jupiter that Constantine selected to transform into himself. (As with those who get work done, they say you can see it in the face.) Although Constantine is thought to be the first Christian emperor, little is known about the extent of his faith other than that he thought it wise to stop persecuting Christians. He had bigger fish to fry—primarily beating back the “barbarians” beyond the Roman frontiers. He founded Constantinople and ruled at the start of the last 170 years of the Western Roman Empire.

Accepting the reality of having lost something critical to one’s well-being is not alien to my personal life, but it certainly is to my life as an American. I don’t think official America has ever grappled with the side of good having lost. I say “official” because the Confederate South certainly felt that their good side had lost in 1865. And they showed us so with Jim Crow laws and segregationist policies for a another century and counting. We knew we had lost in Vietnam, but by the time the last chopper left Saigon, Americans were questioning which side was the good side. Same for Iraq and Afghanistan.

What does living in this kind of “crisis” feel like? It’s not a war—at least not like the ones we’ve had since 1945, where civilians never have to sacrifice. It’s not another pandemic. It’s not like a recession or a depression, which used to be called “panics.” No one has the energy to panic. In a letter of October 3, 1961, the time of the Berlin Crisis, the poet Robert Lowell wrote: “there’s just a queer, half apocalyptic, nuclear feeling in the air, as tho nations had died and were now anachronistic, yet in their anarchic death-throes would live on for ages troubling us, threatening the likelihood of life continuing.” Poignant words, but how would he even know what a “nuclear feeling” felt like? Even the most lyrical among us have trouble describing the awful present until the distress has become mundane enough to seem old. In Lowell’s case, “nuclear feeling” dutifully returned almost a year to the day later with the Cuban Missile Crisis. Then it lie dormant again until the 1980s.