Political grief and the myth of the brink

“We’ve somehow managed to convert a country on the brink of actually making sense of its founding principles into an unholy mess of cruelty and self-dealing.”¹ The sentence carries a particular kind of political grief, and grief of this kind has a hidden premise worth pulling into the light.

There is a difference between mourning an achievement and mourning an expectation. If the country stood at the brink, then something real was destroyed and the right response is restoration: recover the position, punish the wreckers, resume. If the brink was a projection, an inference drawn from a few decades of visible progress by people who had reason to want the arc to be real, then nothing was taken. A forecast failed, and the right response is to revise the model of the country that produced it. Everything downstream depends on which of these you are doing, and the grief cannot afford to ask.

The founding principles—universal equality, consent of the governed, liberty, divided power—were in tension with practice from the first day, when enslaved people, women and Indian nations stood outside their reach. To make sense of them was never to rediscover them but to extend them to their full reach and stop pretending the gap between creed and conduct was incidental. The brink names a moment when that extension felt close.

The second reading is bleaker and better supported. Imminent reckoning followed by reaction is one of the deep rhythms of American politics: Reconstruction and 1877, the Second Reconstruction and its unwinding, 2008 and 2016. Every generation that felt itself near the brink was disappointed, which suggests the brink is not a place the country keeps approaching and losing but a feeling that reliably precedes the reaction. Grief that assumes restoration spends itself trying to return to a position never held. Grief that accepts the revision is harder on contact and more useful, because it stops treating reaction as an interruption of the norm and starts treating it as the norm, interrupted now and then by progress.

The revised model also dissolves the sentence’s weakest word. “We” did not manage this. That construction implies a collective agency American politics does not have; particular actors, factions, donors and courts did it, largely through structural advantage rather than persuasion. “Somehow” confesses that the mechanism is opaque, and it is not. It is the same mechanism each time, and a model that expects it can name it. “Unholy” is accurate to the experience. “Mess” is exculpatory, since a mess implies accident. Nothing about it was accidental or surprising. It was built, as it has been built before, by people who understood the country’s rhythm better than the people grieving it.