Elections are upon us, and most of the people I talk to keep saying the same thing. They feel politically homeless. It’s easy to fold that into a complaint about our two party system, but the sentiment is too widely shared to sit there. I hear it from people who wear the red hat, and I hear it from the people who used to chain themselves to trees. When those two arrive at the same feeling by different roads, the feeling can’t be explained as partisan. It’s pointing at something underneath the parties, something both of them have stopped answering to.
I have been writing about the same thing, just wearing a different hat, and the shorter way to say it is this: our institutions have decided that people rank second or third, behind business and behind government. Once you see it in one place you see it everywhere, and the homelessness so many of us feel is the ordinary, reasonable response to living inside that arrangement.
But before we walk into what that arrangement seems to cost us, lift your eyes for a moment. We spend our days bent over the bill in front of us and the prospects of the months yet to come, and with our heads down that bill looks like the whole of the world. It isn’t. Every person reading this is the living end of a long human line that never once broke. Whatever it cost to keep that line unbroken across thousands of years was paid before you arrived, and it wasn’t paid by strangers.
Trace any of us back far enough and the lines converge. The person across the aisle, across the border, across every division we have learned to defend, is kin, and not distantly. We can fracture ourselves however we choose, and we have, but underneath the fracturing we remain one people. Almost everything that ails us now depends on our not seeing it that way.
A country is its people and what they’re able to become. Not its borders, which are lines agreed upon, and not its institutions, which are arrangements made and unmade. Strip those away and what remains, the only thing that was ever really there, is a people and the range of what they might yet be. Everything else a country appears to be is built on that truth and borrows its worth from it.
So the question that decides whether a country is well or failing isn’t how its markets closed or which party holds which office. It’s simpler and harder. Are its people able to become what they might become? And the answer turns entirely on whether the arrangements they live inside still carry a person’s wants into the decisions that shape their lives, or whether they have quietly stopped.
They have quietly stopped. This isn’t a suspicion, and it’s not new. The most careful study of this idea lined up what ordinary people wanted against what the government actually did, across nearly eighteen hundred policy decisions over three decades, and it found that the preferences of most people had almost no independent effect on the outcome, while the preferences of organized economic interests had a great deal. Honest critics have pressed on the edges of that result, and the fair version that survives the pressure is still this: where what most people want runs against what concentrated money wants, people reliably lose. The vote still happens, but the conversion of that vote into an outcome that reflects the will of people is what comes apart.
Representation was never only about elections. It’s the standing to have your life's wants carried into the rooms where your life is decided, and that standing reaches into every part of a life at once. Wages. Health. What you can own and what you can only rent. What your children are permitted to become. The road you drive, the water you drink, the emissions the manufacturing plant across town is allowed to release. When the standing is gone, a price is quietly set on all of it, and set by the same mechanism, because there’s no one in the room converting your want into the decision-making process.
And here is where this loss differs from the ones I have written about before. Some losses are silent. A person who might have become a healer never becomes one, and the country never feels the absence, because the healer never existed to be missed. This loss isn’t like that. This one is felt in every move you make. You go to vote and find no one on the ballot who’s fighting for you. You open bills that climb every year while no one with power is trying to bring them down. A firm sheds its obligations one by one. Its taxes, which become your taxes. The cleanup of what it broke, which becomes your cleanup. The cost of moving itself to where labor is cheaper, which becomes your lost work. The risk it used to carry, which becomes your risk. Every obligation it sheds lands somewhere, and it lands on you. It’s not a handful of separate complaints. It’s one transfer, run over and over, and you are always the destination.
Gore Vidal called us the United States of Amnesia, and this is the forgetting made concrete. The arrangement can only move the cost from one member of the family onto another because we have been taught to see one another as strangers, as competitors and constituencies and customers, as winners and losers, as us and them. So the not-seeing isn’t a side effect. It’s the condition the whole thing runs on.
Follow that far enough and you reach the real measure, which isn’t that the country is performing below what it could be. That would be waste, and waste is recoverable. It’s that the country is operating near the floor at which people stop believing that effort connects to outcome at all. That belief is the quiet engine under every functioning society, the reasonable expectation that what you do tomorrow can change where you now stand. Sever the connection between what a person does and what a person receives, and the belief dies, not as weakness but as an accurate reading of a closed system. When people say there’s no light at the end of the tunnel, they’re not being dramatic, they’re describing, correctly, a mechanism from which the exit has been disconnected.
This is where the health of the country stops being a figure of speech. A people who have correctly concluded that effort no longer moves their position don’t merely grow discouraged. The conclusion enters the body. The deaths of despair that the statistics show us have been climbing for years, and they’re not a metaphor for the political condition. They’re the political condition, in flesh. So is the quiet withdrawal of people from the workforce, who stopped being counted as participants, who read the closed system accurately and stopped spending themselves against it.
And it reaches higher than the floor. Consider the person who is doing well. Their success, in a country where the standing is gone, isn’t backed by any working order that would protect it, so it becomes a thing they must defend rather than a thing they hold. The private school, the walled neighborhood, the distance built and maintained. These are fortifications, and a person fortifies because they sense, correctly, that nothing stands behind them either. The one at the bottom withdraws. The one near the top builds walls. Both are answering the same severed connection, and there’s no altitude inside this system that clears the wound, because the wound is the system.
The picture is grim. I won’t soften it, because I climbed to the top of the tallest tree at hand and surveyed the land around us, and a scout who invents a light he can’t see has stopped scouting. But grim isn’t the same as new, and a reader who believes that this moment in time is uniquely doomed is misreading the land as badly as someone who believes it’s fine.
A dear friend of mine was born in 1968. It was a terrible year for this country. Leaders were shot. A war was tearing the nation against itself, and cities were burning. If you had stood in that year and read the forecast, you would have had every reason to expect to find a dry field ahead of you, an inhospitable life. In this case, that’s not the life the year produced. The people living under that grim view did the thing the forecast never accounts for, they kept going. A forecast is not a future.
I made that choice myself last month, in the smallest possible way. I planted a fruit tree. I wasn’t weighing the odds on rain, or the price of fuel, or the state of the world that tree will grow into. I was putting my future into the ground because I’ve decided to have one. That’s not hope as a feeling, it’s hope as an act. It’s a future you choose and then plant, and it answers the closed system without ever once arguing with it.
An elder of mine would say that fire cleanses, that fire isn’t the end of the forest. It’s how the forest clears what has finished its purpose and readies the ground for what has been waiting to grow. There are seeds that will not open until the heat reaches them.
The arrangements that have inverted our lives back onto us, the party, the standing, the invented line between us and them, are temporary things, and temporary things are what fire takes. What stands when the fire has passed is what was always underneath and was never a thing to price: a people, and what they’re able to become. That was the origin the whole time.
Fire cleanses. So shall we be.