I feel it—alongside the anger, fear, and disbelief—a deep, escalating, and pervasive sadness. 

It’s in conversations with friends, in the weight of unrelenting headlines, in the sheer pervasiveness of the onslaught. So many people I know, and those whose work I read or listen to, are moving—stumbling, really—through sorrow. We may not be traveling in unison through the same stage of grief, but we are bound by the same sense of dread: Something we’ve known, and even loved, is dying.

So many of us wanted to believe there was something—however flawed—that held our imperfect union together. Tenets, norms, a shared belief in democracy, a foundation meant to serve the common good. We were taught in school that the steadiness of our nation, in the sweep of human history, was a remarkable outlier.

Or so we convinced ourselves.

The truth is that our experiment in self-governance has always been tumultuous and fragile. We live in a present indelibly shaped by a history where progress has had to compete with entrenched cruelty and injustice. Those of us alive today will never fully comprehend the pain and hardship so many who came before us endured—just to try to force this country to make good on its founding promises of freedom.

All the while deep corrosive currents endured, eating away at our democratic identity—greed, hatred, white supremacy, and fear sharpened and deployed for power.

Is a nation that enslaves people really a democracy? Or subjects citizens to the oppression and horrors of Jim Crow? That displaces and erases Native people? Exploits immigrant labor? Sends citizens in wartime camps? 

In recent years, it was possible to persuade ourselves that the most dangerous threats to our democracy were in the past. But now, like a sudden eruption of malicious magma, we see this nation’s weaknesses exposed at hyperspeed—the guardrails we once believed were immutable swept aside in a rush of corrupt, authoritarian glee.

I’ve been reflecting on many of the problems I once saw as most pressing—racial justice, the climate crisis, income inequality, gun violence, affordable housing. I still believe in the urgency of each. But I see them now as more clearly connected, all threatened by a superseding crisis: a government that is fundamentally broken.

This reactionary regime knew that a changing American electorate would never willingly embrace their radical vision if the individual elements were put to a vote—eliminating Social Security and Medicare, rolling back reproductive rights, banning books, gutting environmental protections, shielding corporations from taxes and accountability. So they seeded distrust. They stoked animosity, and exploited vulnerabilities. They played on our divisions and set out to break the government—and, by extension, democracy itself.

Congress no longer functions as a deliberative legislative body, and it has ceded power to the executive branch in ways that would have horrified the nation’s founders. Corporations and individuals of extreme wealth exert undue influence while inequality grows. Marginalized communities continue to have less say over their self-governance. A Supreme Court sits atop a judicial system stacked with ideologues—politicians in robes. Gerrymandering and other anti-democratic measures now exacerbate the original flaws in our Constitution—the unequal distribution of power between the states, largely a legacy of protecting the institution of slavery—exploited today to entrench minority rule.

These were the underlying conditions—too long ignored while they quietly worsened. And now they encounter a contagion designed to overwhelm the system, to bypass every remaining check and balance. We were more vulnerable than most of us ever knew.

So here we are—forced to confront the illness that infects our body politic, and the alarming rate at which it spreads. What once looked like isolated symptoms now point to systemic failure.

And this is why so many are in mourning. To talk about the “death of American democracy” doesn’t feel like a metaphor. 

Strangely, I’ve found it helpful—grounding, even—to focus on how much was already broken. To understand how delicate this experiment has always been. One of the remarkable qualities of nature, and by extension human society, is resilience.

When I look at what this regime is trying to destroy, I see the accumulated efforts of generations that came before—people who endured catastrophe and chose to rebuild with intention, determination, and hope. A social safety net, born out of the wreckage of the Great Depression. A network of global alliances forged in the aftermath of world war. Public investments in science that turned the tide against deadly diseases. Civil rights laws that, while incomplete, marked a national attempt to reckon with the hatreds of the past. And a professional civil service—established to replace a system once ruled by cronyism and spoils.

None of these gains were inevitable or even likely when the process started. They were constructed, defended, expanded—sometimes painfully, often imperfectly—by people who refused to give up on the idea that government could and must serve the public good.

So here we are. Grieving. Watching. Waiting. Still trying to make sense of where this all leads. I don’t minimize the dangers ahead, or the pain and suffering already unfolding. But alongside the sorrow, there is motion. We are also acting—strategizing, organizing, protesting, dreaming. If history teaches us anything, it’s that resilience isn’t about restoring what was; it’s about refusing to be confined by the imaginations of a vanished status quo.

Progress means adapting. It means insisting that we remember our history, and refusing to let it be rewritten. It means holding on to the idea that even now—especially now—there is still something worth saving. And not only worth saving, but worth reimagining.

My eldest daughter, Eva, loves studying history. She’s drawn to public service. Her childhood has been shaped by a pandemic and by the most destructive presidency in American history. And yet she is full of hope. She’s determined, steady. She’s phone banking and volunteering. She’s organizing her peers, registering them to vote, and urging them into the democratic process.

I look at her with pride, and I tell her: Yours will be the next great generation—shaped by crisis, yet undeterred. You will be the builders and the helpers. You will come with fresh ideas, unburdened by the biases of the past (but informed by them). You will be the ones to carry forward this glorious, unfinished experiment—the long, imperfect, essential work of forging a more perfect union.

And then we will not be in mourning. We will be celebrating a rebirth.

Note: If you are on Bluesky and wish to follow me, you can find me at: @elliotkirschner.bsky.social

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