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.

I am as guilty as anyone of overusing the word “existential,” but there is no other term for this forced recognition that most of the people of the United States do not care about being good. The wisdom of Dickens’s Mr. Micawber—“Mutual confidence will sustain us to the end!”—cannot be embraced as some kind of universal truth simply because it’s been with us since 1850. Same for that line in “America the Beautiful”: “and crown thy good with brotherhood.” If we’re counting by “thy good,” we may never get more than 48.3%.

I think people have intentionally held on to the shock for weeks because no response can fill the void when shock subsides; they prefer stumbling around the dark in this numb state. Many from the professional classes calmly assure us that our institutions will save us from Trump 2. They can grab from anywhere in the key rack of history to find examples of predicted upheaval that faded into much ado. They could happily remind you, for instance, that The Communist Manifesto has been wrong since 1848. Remember Chapter 1? “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”

Then there are the smug analytical podcasters who love pointing out reactions and behaviors that seem to them emotional (maybe because women are emotional?). Although they’d never put it this way, they see this reaction as catastrophizing the election to mask demoralization and loss of pride. Their mordant view oddly echoes Ecclesiastes 1:9: “What has been will be again, / what has been done will be done again; / there is nothing new under the sun.” They act like Trump 45 was A Fistful of Dollars and Trump 47 For a Few Dollars More.

Although I greatly admire those who pick up the shards and porcelain handles and start over again, starting over in the same rut, only deeper, is absurd. As Richard Kreitner, author of Break It Up: Secession, Division, and the Secret History of America’s Imperfect Union (2020), writes in the journal Democracy: “The rah-rah take on the national past has never rung hollower than it did on the morning after Trump’s reelection. ‘We are a nation that has always emerged from a crucible with its ideals intact and often toughened and sharpened,’ The New York Times editorialized. It is a sentence impossible to gloss, with not a single word bearing a concrete and stable meaning, the whole immediately contradicted by the summoning up of any particular example.”

As the mainstream press dutifully covers the Trump transition and planned appointments like it’s the 1990s, the cynics keep reminding us that things were never good before, no matter how far back you go; it was all self-imposed deception. People like James Carville never tire of beating up the Democrats over tactical errors. Pundits retrofit outcome-determined failings in books that tell Democrats what not to do the next time, as if (a) the world will be the same next time and (b) there will ever be a next time. Facing Marx’s “real conditions of life” doesn’t ever seem in the cards for Americans. Even now, we are masters at creating an illusory sameness day after day, believers in what the Catholics call Ordinary Time.

Trump’s propagandists in Congress are already calling his reinstallation a “Golden Age,” embracing their role as dystopian stooges with hambone justifications that taking away most government functions will make a beautiful society. This kind of celebratory ignorance among the college-educated must be cultivated, but the billionaire class has done its part by turning citizens into consumers who measure freedom materially. According to Yuval Noah Harari, the author of Sapiens, one of the most illusive myths humans created was that “the answer to all the problems of humankind on the collective level is economic growth and on the individual level it is buying more stuff.” To displace panic after 9/11, Americans went shopping for everything but especially mortgages they couldn’t afford; during COVID, they bought fancy gadgets for the home while complaining about inflation. You could say that in this election, America willingly put on the block an entire entitlement system, the value of which has never been assessed, all to squeeze out those pre-COVID consumption dollars.

But there’s much more to it than consumption dollars. There’s been a constant “side” in this country since the disaster of the colonial Jamestown settlement: people who will breach any strain of morality for sacred self-enrichment, who pursue not just wealth but a system whereby their own wealth guarantees the impoverishment of the mass of society. This side contains both the very rich and the very poor. The plantation class convinced poor white sharecroppers to accept a slave economy by giving them a category of human beings to look down on. The Civil War only strengthened this race hierarchy, and the erstwhile plantation class gave poor whites a new enemy to place alongside Black Americans: educated northerners. This has been one of the most successful mind manipulations in Western history: making the poor despise the thinking class trying to improve the lives of the poor while admiring the money class trying to make the poor stay poor. As Lee Siegel writes in the New Statesman, Trump can call his intellectual enemies “low IQ” because “they have the ‘high IQ’ of people who refuse to acknowledge the gutter wisdom of every-day life. Which, in the terms Trump has won on, is that whoever has the most money, or whoever is led by those with the most money, wins.”

In his farewell column for the New York Times on December 9, the normally optimistic economist Paul Krugman struck a dour note: “Some of the most resentful people in America right now seem to be angry billionaires,” he wrote. “At some point, the public will realize that most politicians railing against elites actually are elites in every sense that matters and start to hold them accountable for their failure to deliver on their promises.”

I admit that I hope-believed that Trumpism would be defeated on November 5. But two things in September gave me a bad feeling about what was to come. The first was a photo of Ryan Wesley Routh’s handwritten letter explaining his attempt to assassinate Donald Trump. The letter begins “Dear World,” like a ten-year-old’s case for why he is running away from home. What struck me about that salutation is the helplessness and hopelessness, the weariness and exhaustion, like something America itself would write about running away from home: We are sick of pretending to be a global power. We just want decent healthcare. “Dear World” made everything in America feel small and ourselves emotionally and developmentally backward.

The second thing was the campaign slogan “we’re not going back.” It’s a catchy phrase, but when I heard it chanted in an airport hanger, I didn’t think of the Trump years but the idea of an activist government ensuring equal economic opportunity for all. It’s terrifying to realize that what was once real because the average person’s outlook made it real was now just idealistic incentive, like something to get people to dance at a wedding before everyone’s sufficiently drunk. It reminded me of how COVID made us heartsick dreamers, longing to pick up life where we left off in March 2020. Even if the Democrats can take back the House in two years, the America that Kamala Harris and Tim Walz conjured in beautiful language ceased to exist at some unknown point in the past. The economist Richard Wolff pegs it at 1970 and has perfected a Bernie Sanders way of explaining how we are an empire in decline and why China and the BRICS nations have already won.

Early in Trump’s first administration, I remember thinking about Mar-a-Lago meaning “sea to lake” and wondering if that’s what would happen to our country—we would shrink from the formidable power of a sea linked to multiple landmasses to the limited context of a lake. When we think of a sea or a river, we think of motion and force, of renewal and vitality. Lakes can be large and majestic, but they are static. The Finger Lakes in upstate New York are a series of glacial-made depressions that eventually filled up with water. They are lovely, but they are a passive aftereffect of something dramatic. I am wondering again about this self-imposed contraction but with much less whimsy.

This does not mean we don’t keep fighting. Krugman didn’t sign off without scattering some words of hope: “If we stand up to the kakistocracy—rule by the worst—that’s emerging as we speak, we may eventually find our way back to a better world.” Yes, we keep fighting, but we need to offload the idea of “greatness” and instead offer all Americans a better standard of living. We are now the U.K. of a century ago. Recalibration is inevitable. A half century of education failures and neoliberalism has left us with a problematic electorate. You cannot fix that overnight if at all. The low-information voter is part of a low-information national culture, an extremely porous construction where everything valuable becomes runoff. And with AI, it may soon be the low-information Homo sapiens that dwindles in the twilight of the idols.

In the short term, we will be forced to live within a billionaires’ cartoon, with much stupidity and cruelty. The only consolation I can offer is from the Harvard theologian Peter Gomes, who said that we will never beat or banish the devil and his seductions, so we need to put all our efforts into outlasting him, to keep on banging that drum like the Energizer Bunny. I don’t believe in the devil, but I certainly believe that the cult around Trump presents the same kind of dangers. Even when their foolishness blows up in their faces, we must never relax our resolve. There will be no more Ordinary Time, just outlast, outlast, outlast. As the marquee of Brooklyn’s Nitehawk Cinema bid with the COVID lockdown: see you on the other side. §