Post-Election Malaise

My latest New York Magazine column

Just wanted to share with you my first post-election column. It’s a bit post-mortem, but really mostly reflection on the emotional atmosphere of Trump’s reelection, and how it differs from 2016. Here’s an excerpt:

Shame, I think, is what afflicts us when we refuse to be humbled. One feels shame for having missed something, misapprehending political reality, misunderstanding one’s country. One feels shame for risking too much hope, for encouraging others to do the same. And most of all, one feels shame — humiliation, even — over feeling powerless: powerless to stop bad things from happening to people we love but also simply less powerful, ousted from the driver’s seat of history. Shame causes people to act out, to cling to the flimsiest satisfactions: to reciprocal cruelty, recrimination, illusions of control, self-pity. All of these too are exhausting, though they can easily be mistaken for solutions.

I’ve been remembering a line from Bertolt Brecht: “It takes courage to say that the good were defeated not because they were good, but because they were weak.” Trump himself teaches a different lesson: self-doubt should be avoided at all costs, especially when you lose.

But if humility is a bad way to win, it’s a better way to live. And democracy requires it: We have to be curious about what other people want. In a functioning democracy, politics isn’t separate from living. It is attained, Jane Addams wrote, by “mixing on the thronged and common road where all must turn out for one another, and at least see the size of one another’s burdens.” In our decrepit Republic, we exhaust ourselves most grievously in isolation, rooting for politicians we’ll never meet to protect us from each other.

Look out for more columns like these — situated at the intersection of politics and our psychic life — in the coming months.

Also, I forgot to share this with you: I compiled a list of the best books about American policing for the New York Times Book Review. Now that Trump is president and promising to empower police and the military — including as part of his mass-deportation plans — I think these books are more relevant than ever.