You want to talk about the root of the problem? Fine. Let’s actually do that. Not the symptoms. Not the headlines. Not the daily outrage scroll that lets everyone feel righteous and implicated in nothing. The root.
We are a country that has spent two and a half centuries being told, and believing, that we are exceptional. Chosen. Set apart from the ordinary rules that govern other nations and other peoples. We are the shining city on a hill, the last best hope of earth, the indispensable nation. We have been marinated in that mythology since birth, and it has made us soft in the worst possible way. Not soft like kind. Soft like unaccountable. Soft like a person who has never had to genuinely reckon with what they’ve done because they’ve always been the hero of the story.
But, we were never the hero. We’ve always been the villain. Ask Indigenous people. Ask Black Americans. Ask Japanese Americans and Hispanic Americans. They hold the real stories.
According to the Pew Research Center, more than half of Americans agree with the statement that “our people are not perfect, but our culture is superior to others, and that was before Trump’s second term, before the blood supplies in Denmark, before the war in Iran. More than half. Sitting in the most powerful country in the history of human civilization, watching their government threaten to seize an ally’s territory by military force, and still, in their bones, believing they are on the right side of history because they are American. That belief is not a personality quirk. It’s a structural failure. It is the rot at the foundation of all of this.
Because American exceptionalism functions as a civic anesthetic. It tells you that the guardrails will hold, that the institutions will save us, that it can’t really get that bad… not here, not to us. Other countries fall into fascism. Other electorates make catastrophic choices. Not Americans. We’re the ones who write the cautionary tales; we don’t live in them.
Except. Here we are.
We are living in one right now. And a significant portion of the country still cannot bring themselves to feel the weight of that, because feeling it would require admitting that we were never what we thought we were.
That myth, that comfortable, load-bearing, completely fraudulent myth, is how you get ninety million people who stayed home on Election Day 2024. Ninety million eligible voters who could not be bothered. Who looked at the world on fire and said not my problem, not today. Trump got 77 million votes. Harris got 75.5 million. Ninety million people watched from the couch. The voting rate among those at the bottom of the income ladder is only half that of those at the top. The people with the most to lose are the ones most consistently staying home. Because somewhere along the way, we collectively decided that democracy is a spectator sport— something that happens to you, not something you do.
That’s not an accident. That’s a long, slow cultural project. Voter turnout declined steadily from the mid-1960s through the early 2000s, driven in part by declining trust in government and the erosion of civic duty felt by older generations. TIME wrote a piece about The Greatest Generation— people who survived the Depression, who fought a war against actual fascism, who understood in their marrow what the stakes of democracy were. That they voted like it mattered, because they knew it did. What replaced that wasn’t cynicism born of wisdom. It was cynicism born of comfort. The comfort of a country that had never made its citizens pay the real price of their own apathy. Until now.
And then there’s the third piece. The one that makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up, because it’s the most insidious of all.
The white moderate.
I’m not talking about white conservatives. They’ve been honest about what they want; I’ll give them that much. I’m talking about the people who said I don’t like his tweets in 2016 and voted for him anyway because their 401(k) was up. I’m talking about the suburban voters who clutched their pearls at the Access Hollywood tape, made very serious faces about norms and decency, and then, when it was their turn, checked the box next to his name again because they were scared of the alternative. The alternative being, slightly higher taxes, maybe, and a world in which their comfort was no longer the organizing principle of American politics.
These are the people who voted for chaos born from economic anxiety. Who burned the house down and then asked why it smells like smoke. Who have spent the last three years oscillating between this is not who we are and quietly returning to normal, as if normal wasn’t the thing that built the runway for all of this.
This is not a Trump problem. Trump is a symptom. He is what happens when you combine a mythology of invincibility with fifty years of civic rot with a voting bloc that will choose its own comfort over everyone else’s survival every single time. He is the logical conclusion of a country that never had to genuinely account for anything it did.
The world figured this out before we did. They watched us elect him once and thought it was just an anomaly. They watched us elect him twice and started pre-positioning blood supplies.
That’s the picture. That’s the root. And until we are willing to stand in front of it without blinking, without pivoting to the Electoral College, or Russian interference, or third party voters, or any of the other thousand ways we’ve found to distribute the blame thin enough that no one has to actually hold any… nothing changes. Not the midterms. Not 2028. Not any of it.
We built this. Brick by brick, excuse by excuse, election by election.
Own it or get the hell out of the way of the people who will.
And now let’s talk about what owning it actually costs. Because it isn’t free. And anyone telling you there’s a quick fix is selling something.
The world does not trust us right now. Not the way they used to. Not even close. Trust in international relations is acquired slowly and lost quickly. It is hard to build and easy to lose. We have spent the last fifteen months lighting it on fire with a blowtorch, and the bill for that is going to come due in ways most Americans haven’t even begun to calculate. In 2016, many Europeans thought Trump was a historical exception, that after 2020, the relationship would return to normal. This time, it is far harder to make that claim. Trump’s re-election demonstrates the enduring appeal of his message to the American electorate. They aren’t waiting for us to come back to our senses.
They are building a world that no longer requires us to.
Europe is rearming. Supply chains are rerouting. Trade agreements are being signed without us. Intelligence sharing is being reconsidered. Allies who once built their entire defense posture around the assumption of American reliability are now, quietly and methodically, planning for a future in which we are absent… or worse, adversarial. That doesn’t get undone by a new president and a charm offensive. That takes an entire generation. Possibly two. Trust and soft power take time to build and to maintain and the trust that accrues from long-term relationship building can transcend the ups and downs of politics, but only when those relationships are cultivated over years, not months. We blew through decades of cultivated trust in fifteen months. The math on that recovery is brutal.
And your children will do the math. They will live in it. As of early 2026, only 21 percent of Americans believe the next generation will be better off— a 9-point drop in a single year. One in five. That number should gut you. These are not abstract future people we’re talking about. These are our children who will graduate into an economy destabilized by a trade war we started, into a geopolitical landscape we fractured, into a job market shaped by the $1,500 per household tax increase our tariffs imposed, into a country whose word means nothing on the world stage. They will pay for our apathy with their entire lives. Every kid sitting in a classroom right now will spend their adulthood cleaning up what we refused to prevent.
So. You want to know how we fix it.
There is no single lever. There is no election, no movement, no charismatic leader who makes this go away. Anyone who tells you otherwise is the problem. This is slow, grinding, generational work, and it starts, every single time, with the same first step. You have to actually show up.
Vote. I know you’re tired. I know the system is broken and the choices are imperfect and the whole thing feels designed to make you feel powerless, because in many ways it is. Vote anyway. Vote in the presidential election and the midterms and the primaries and the school board elections and the city council races and the judicial retention votes. Vote in every single election that appears on your ballot, all the way down to the bottom, because the people at the bottom of that ballot are the ones who draw district lines, run your local courts, decide your kids’ curriculum, and shape the political pipeline that produces your future senators. The people who want authoritarianism to win are counting on your exhaustion. Don’t give it to them. Like June Osborne said in the Handmaid’s Tale, “Don’t let the bastards grind you down!”
Know who you’re voting for. Not just the name. The record. The donor list. Always follow the money. If it’s dirty money, it’s a hard no. The votes they cast when no one was watching. The ideology of the party apparatus they belong to. American voters have been historically, embarrassingly illiterate about the people they put in office, and that ignorance is not innocent. It is the soil that grows everything you’re watching right now.
Talk to people you’d rather not talk to. Not to debate. Not to win. To ask questions and actually listen to the answers. The 90 million people who stayed home in 2024 are not a monolith. Some of them are checked out from exhaustion. Some of them feel like no one is speaking to their actual lives. Some of them have been deliberately suppressed and discouraged. Some of them need someone to walk through the process with them. You know people in all of those categories. Find them.
Stop performing and start organizing. The outrage scroll is not activism. The angry post is not a vote. The subtweet is not organizing. If you are furious— and you should be, put that fury somewhere it can do structural damage. Phone banks. Canvassing. Voter registration drives. Mutual aid networks. Local party infrastructure. Run for something. Fund someone who is running for something. Show up to your city council meeting. Show up to your school board meeting. Show up even when it’s boring, especially when it’s boring, because boring is where the actual decisions get made while the rest of us are watching the chaos on our phones.
Teach your children what democracy actually requires. Not the mythology. Not the shining city on the hill. The real thing. The hard, imperfect, ongoing work of self-governance. Teach them the history we covered up, the people we erased, the price that was paid by people who looked nothing like the faces in the textbooks. Teach them that the rights they have were fought for, bled for, died for, and that they can be taken away by people who are counting on the next generation to be too distracted to notice. Teach them to show up.
Hold your elected officials accountable like your life depends on it, because it does. Call their offices. Show up to their town halls. Primary the ones who fail you. The white moderate who enabled this while clutching their pearls about civility needs to understand that the cost of their comfort is being extracted from everyone around them.
Make that uncomfortable. Make it loud. Make it specific.
Vague disappointment is not accountability. Accountability has a name, a district, and a voting record.
This is not a sprint. I want to be honest with you about that, because false hope is its own kind of harm. Rebuilding what has been destroyed… domestically, internationally, institutionally, will take longer than any of us want it to. It will outlast Trump. It will outlast the next president. It will be the work of your children and possibly their children. The world that existed before all of this is not coming back. What comes next will be built from scratch, by people willing to do the work without the guarantee of living to see the result.
That is what democracy has always asked of its participants. That is what the people who came before us. The ones who marched, who organized, who were beaten and jailed and killed for the right to be counted, understood that we have spent decades forgetting.
You don’t get to opt out and then complain about the outcome.
You don’t get to stay home and then ask what happened.
The people who will rebuild this are already here. They are already working. The only question is whether you are one of them or whether you are still waiting for someone else to do it, in a country that cannot afford your comfort anymore.
Excellent analysis! And taken to heart. Thank you.
…excellent essay! Your authentic style, voice, honesty, and message are critical to meet this moment. Keep speaking truth, no matter how difficult it is for some to acknowledge and accept.