Is This Really Us?

Diplomats and former diplomats like me think a lot about representation. We ourselves are said to represent—our government, our country, our fellow citizens. This means different things in different times and circumstances, but it mainly means that you signify, and speak and act on behalf of something other and bigger than yourself. “I am not I”, the poet says. The same can be said of the diplomat.

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In a democratic republic like ours, political leaders also represent—their communities, their constituencies, their states. But this, too, is less clear-cut than it sounds. To represent can mean different things for different representatives. One recent interview with a Republican political consultant that ran in the NY Times, for example, noted that Republicans in Congress consider their duty as representatives to mean serving as “proxies” for their constituents rather than “trustees” who make judgment calls on behalf of them. This is the main reason why most Republican members, who are on the whole (with obvious exceptions) intelligent, well-informed, and more acutely aware of the unfathomable depths of the current folly than most of us, remain stubbornly supportive of the current president. They lead not by leading but by following, not by actively showing the way forward to the best of their knowledge and abilities, but by passively reflecting the opinions and prejudices of the people they represent, which remain fixed and largely unchanged in otherwise turbulent circumstances. (We can save the “why” for a separate post.)

The President is America

For his part, the president represents the great collective of the nation. When people outside the United States think of this country, most think of the president. Like it or not, the president, as Representative in Chief, serves as a symbol of the American people, a convenient short-hand for the country, our proudly duplicitous and blunt-speaking face to the world. This brings us to the title I chose for this post, a phrase spoken in a range of volumes and tones depending on the person doing the asking:

“Is this really us?”

The first and most obvious answer is,

“Of course it is, absolutely, emphatically yes!”

This president unequivocally represents us. He has been elected twice in national elections (he claims three times), the most recent time also winning the popular vote. By the rules of our constitutional democracy, the case is open and shut. As much as or more than anyone else in the past generation, he represents the United States of America. Some pundits anticipate we live in what will come to be called “The Trump Era.”

No small accomplishment, that. Think of the tomes to be written under that august name.

Not only that, figures like him are deeply rooted in the history of our politics, and have surfaced at different times in different strains and ways since before the beginning of the American Republic. We tend to forget the hard-fought battles of the past, lost in the romanticized mists of history. For example, that a third of the people living in the colonies defended the British crown and another third hedged their bets at the time of our founding revolution; that close to half of the country favored slavery, and even more did not oppose it, while many actively fought to sunder the union in a great Civil War; or that the modern roots of the America First/MAGA movement run back to such illustrious figures as Woodrow Wilson, Charles Lindbergh, and George Wallace. They have been conspicuously present in American politics during my entire conscious life—from the John Birch society through Barry Goldwater, Ross Perot, and Pat Buchanan, and other luminaries like them.

Beyond mere politics, the current president represents America in other important ways too. He cuts a familiar figure in American society and culture, a master marketer and brilliant bombastic boaster, a media genius and reality bender, an unmatched image maker and superb spinmeister, a circus-like, “now-you-seem-him, now-you-don’t” representative extraordinaire. If this malignant political magician does nothing else, he represents. He makes one thing appear as another. He is indeed America.

No question.

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But this pat answer begs a deeper question about representation, especially political representation. How can one person represent 340 million plus people? How can one single president contain the multitudes of this country? If anything can be said to be true about the United States of America, it is big and enormously diverse. In some ways it is more different from itself than it is from other places, with many distinct, contradictory, even colliding parts: The land of the free and the (former) home of the slave. The puritanical capital of the global porn industry. Woke extremism and Indian removal. (Or, if you prefer, the land of immigrants that killed off its natives yet goes through periodic violent spasms of nativism.) Lancaster County, Pennsylvania (of Amish fame) and Silicon Valley (the seat of the AI take-over). Texas and California. You get the picture. Compared to, say, a relatively populous but monolithic place like Japan, the United States is a veritable multiverse. It is the elephant in the parable of the blind man, trunk and tail and everything in between. Or more like ten or ten hundred different kinds and species of animals and plants from all possible continents. How on earth can you represent all that in one? E pluribus unum.

You can’t.

Many Americans, including those of us who have served as official representatives of this country over years and decades across administrations from both parties and varying persuasions, understand the intrinsic challenge of representing it faithfully and accurately. We are this, but we are also that, and many other things too. So let me put a caveat on what I said before. However representative he may be of a certain strain of the American spirit and political project, rarely if ever have the likes of our current president acquired the actual keys to the kingdom. If always present and more or less noisy and quarrelsome on the margins, rarely if ever has anything like the incompetent and corrupt current motley crew stood at the red-hot center of power. Never has such a strange coalition of wing nuts, ideologues, corrupt actors, and seeming anti-democrats been so doggedly determined to push the authority conferred by their provisional democratic representation to the breaking point, testing institutional norms, legal constraints, and the overall limits of what the system will bear without becoming something else. Something that is not a democracy.

That much, including the overt intention whatever the rhetoric, I think, is new.

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The Other America

If America is indeed MAGA and vice versa, we are also much more, much better, more noble and generous than that. Sorry if that sounds maudlin, elitist, or out of touch. Pope Leo, for example, is American. A representative, among other things, of the best of America (and Peru, of course). One might also think of the “dialogue” underway between the president and the pope as a dialogue between Americans.

What’s lost in the current blizzard of insanity and nonsense is the other America. The bigger and better-than-that one. The calm and sober one who listens and tries to understand, who doesn’t spout incoherent, contradictory, dangerously delusional orders to everyone in the world and no-one in particular, locked in constant transmit mode. The one who uses his inside voice most of the time because yelling and screaming and USING ALL CAPS is not only pointless and counterproductive but also redundant.

That America is still here, close to the surface, taking stock, biding its time, in tactical retreat perhaps, but far from decisive strategic defeat. Not yet. And there are quite a few of us.

How many?

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Taking full advantage of the mild early spring East Coast weather, I’ve been riding my bike as often as I can down the Capital Crescent trail alongside the Potomac to the National Mall in Washington DC. Twice in the past weeks, I’ve headed to the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial across Independence Avenue from the Air and Space Museum. To take a quiet hour to sit in the shade, contemplate the state of affairs, and stroll through the stately half block-sized grounds. Eisenhower may be the quintessential expression of that other America, the generous, pragmatic, works-well-with-others America. America the responsible and open-minded and hopeful. America the adult in the room. America the principled and democratic, not perfect by any means but always trying to become better, more perfect.

Above the section of the memorial representing his time as president are etched in light tan lime-stone a sentence from his second inaugural:

“We look upon this shaken earth and we declare our firm and fixed purpose – the building of a peace with justice in a world where moral law prevails.”

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So bear with us, world, as we the people in this great big messy continent-country of ours try to sift through the madness, get our shit together, and salvage our democracy. Whatever emerges on the other side, we hope you won’t hold it against us forever. Feel free to cross your fingers, but we hope to be part of the solution soon.