The Golden Age is Behind You

On last night’s State of the Union

I watched it. I took notes. Here is what I found when I moved through it without being told in advance what I would find.

What I watched, of course, was the presidential State of the Union being performed by what is ostensibly a president of a free republic — so founded that its posterity, which is us, may live under conditions of freedom and justice so that we may pursue happiness. That is what I think I was expected to see. That is what I was being told to see.

But that is not, in fact, what I saw.

And if you will forgive me the very dangerous implication that the words which follow carry — I am saying this is an illegitimate president leading an illegitimate government. I do not mean this as a matter of opinion. I mean it as a statement of description. A description of what I see, according to the basic moral rules I understand to have been established at the founding of this republic about what a legitimate government means.

That distinction — opinion versus description — is the one I will not surrender. It is also the one the speech was designed to make impossible.

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The address was oriented entirely toward memory.

Not its content — its direction. Every framework has one. The golden age is not ahead. It is behind, being recovered. The border is “back.” The economy is “back.” America is “respected again.” The word again — the whole architecture of this movement — is the most revealing word in the political vocabulary of our moment. It is the linguistic signature of a framework that has pointed imagination backward and called it vision. You cannot move toward again. You can only defend it from what threatens its return.

A legitimate government describes the present honestly and orients toward what the republic has not yet become. It looks at the anomalous data — the people excluded from the golden age, the costs of the restoration, the gap between the declaration and the practice — and asks what it is actually being told. What I watched last night was the opposite: a government that has installed its own prior as the measure of all things, and is now managing the data to protect it. The anomalies are absorbed, reframed, applauded, awarded. The framework is fed. The imagination is annexed.

The state of the union is not strong. The state of the union is a community whose capacity to question its own prior is being systematically dismantled.

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He used the Olympians.

Those athletes won something real. They competed against the world’s best, in overtime, under pressure, and they prevailed. That achievement is complete in itself. It belongs to them.

What I watched was the conversion of a complete thing into an instrument. The achievement was not honored. It was annexed. We won. Our team. The athletes standing in the chamber, applauded, photographed, integrated into the prior — proof of the golden age, evidence of the restoration, absorbed into a framework they did not choose to enter.

The feeling I had watching this was rage. Patriotic rage. Not the hot, reactive kind that wants to break something — the cold, clear kind that comes from knowing exactly what is being desecrated and why it matters. On behalf of every athlete who ever competed for something larger than themselves. On behalf of everyone who believed the medal meant what it was supposed to mean. On behalf of all who came before and all who will come after, in whose name these institutions were built and are now being spent.

How dare you.

A legitimate government does not consume the achievements of its citizens. It creates the conditions under which those achievements are possible and then gets out of the way. What I watched last night was a government that cannot stop feeding.

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The Presidential Medal of Freedom, awarded mid-speech, on television, to a goaltender, while the chamber applauded.

The Medal carries weight because it has been given, across many administrations and across genuine political difference, to people who gave something that could not be taken back. Scientists. Artists. Dissidents. People who changed the world at cost to themselves. That accumulated history is what makes the thing mean something.

Last night the Medal was spent as currency. Not in recognition of a life but as spectacle inside a speech. The institution of the honor — its gravity, its history, its accumulated meaning — was converted into applause. Into proof of magnanimity. Into the performance of a man who loves the people he loves.

This is what illegitimate power does to the things it touches. It does not honor them. It consumes them. The Medal is now a prop. The Olympians are props. The rescued child is a prop. The widow in the gallery is a prop. Each one a complete human being. Each one reduced to a supporting role in a framework that cannot afford to see them whole.

How dare any of you.

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“The people that I love.”

“I love America.”

I wrote these down because they felt like the most important sentences in the speech. Not the tariff numbers or the border statistics or the claims about egg prices. These.

Love in the mouth of a legitimate leader is obligation. It is accountability to something that precedes you and will outlast you. The republic is not yours. You are its servant. You are answerable to its founding premises — the ones about dignity and conscience and the equal standing of persons before the law. Love for the republic means submitting to its constraints even when — especially when — they inconvenience you.

Love in the mouth of what I watched last night is possession. The people that I love are the people who belong to me. America that I love is America as I have defined it — the golden age, the restoration, the prior that cannot be questioned. To threaten the framework is to threaten the love. To question the prior is to be outside the love.

A man who loves what he owns is not a president. He is an owner.

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I am not above this. I am in it. Moving through it. Refusing to be captured by the despair it wants to produce — which is the final capture, the one that stops the movement entirely.

The imagination-oriented response to a memory-oriented performance is not nostalgia for a better past. It is orientation toward a republic that has not yet fully existed and is worth walking toward anyway. The founding premises were not fully honored at the founding. The posterity they were written for — us — has not yet honored them fully either. That incompleteness is not a failure. It is the direction. The republic is not a golden age behind us. It is a horizon in front of us, moving as we move toward it.

What I watched last night was a man who has mistaken the horizon for a wall. Who has stopped moving and called the stopping arrival. Who has turned the republic’s face away from what it has not yet become and toward what he has decided it already is.

The distinction between opinion and description is the one I will not surrender.

I describe what I see.

What I see is a government that has forgotten which direction it is supposed to be facing.

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Go Deeper into the Circus

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