Once again thank you, Dr Glaude, for leading the way, it allowed me to contemplate the following narrative. I hope you do not mind.
The Republic at 250: Hubris, Memory, and the Death of the Heart
There is a temptation, when confronted with the words of Donald Trump on the death of Robert Mueller, to retreat into the language of outrage. The instinct is understandable. A president responding to death with satisfaction feels like a violation of something basic, something prior to politics, something we imagine to be human.
But outrage, by itself, is insufficient. It mistakes the moment for an aberration. It assumes a fall from a moral height that may never have existed.
The question is not whether this is indecent, it plainly is. The question is what this moment reveals.
We are now approaching two hundred and fifty years of the American experiment. A nation that declared, with extraordinary clarity, that all men are created equal and endowed with certain inalienable rights. And yet, at this symbolic threshold, we find ourselves asking a question that should trouble us more deeply than any single remark:
Is this a nation still at odds with its own founding creed, still unable to reconcile what it says with what it is?
To answer that question, we must leave the comfort of contemporary commentary and return to an older grammar. The grammar of epic. The grammar of hubris.
In Homer’s Iliad, the crisis of the Greek camp is not simply war. It is disorder within the order. Agamemnon exercises power without measure. Achilles withdraws into wounded pride. Between them, the collective body begins to rot. The plague that opens the epic is not incidental. It is diagnostic. It reveals a failure at the level of sovereignty itself.
Hubris, in this sense, is not arrogance alone, but the inability to recognise limit and the refusal to see the other as fully human. It epitomises the collapse of the proportion between power and responsibility.
What we are witnessing is recognisable, it is not new.
When a president declares himself glad at the death of another, the issue is not simply temperament, but sovereignty speaking without restraint. It is the sovereign deciding, in public, who is worthy of dignity and therefore grievable and who is not.
And yet the deeper disturbance is not the statement alone. It is the echo that follows it. The likes, the shares, the quiet assent. The absence of shock.
We are looking past the individual, into an order that permits such words to land, one that has schooled a people in selective empathy.
Here the language of moral decline, for all its force, begins to reach its limit. It is true to say the heart has hardened, but it is not enough. Hearts do not harden in abstraction. They are formed, conditioned, organised.
This is the deeper question.
What kind of republic produces a moral economy in which empathy is selective and recognition is uneven?
Here, the American story must be read not as deviation but as continuity. The line from slavery to segregation, from the racialised distribution of post-war prosperity to the architecture of the carceral state, is not incidental, but constitutive. It establishes, over time, in the words of Judith Butler, a hierarchy of whose life is grievable and whose is not.
Du Bois saw it in the wages of whiteness. Fanon saw it in the colonial ordering of the human. Mbembe names it as the power to decide who may live and who may be left to die. Agamben identifies the figure who stands outside the protection of the law, exposed, ungrievable.
In that sense, what shocks is not the statement. What shocks is that we still expect something different.
Trump is not an interruption of the American narrative. He is its condensation. He is what happens when the language of restraint is removed and the underlying structure speaks more plainly than before.
If this is true, then the coincidence of timing is not a coincidence at all.
That this figure will preside over the two hundred and fiftieth year of the republic is not an accident of history, but a revelation of it.
Anniversaries are not neutral. They are acts of memory. They tell a story about what a nation believes itself to be. But what happens when the story and the structure diverge too far?
The temptation, at such moments, is spectacle. To project strength outward. To reaffirm power through gesture.
We see it in the renewed posture toward Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran. The language of pressure, containment, confrontation.
We should ask, without sentimentality:
To what extent is this geopolitical muscle-flexing an attempt to stabilise an internal narrative, to project coherence outward where it is fracturing inward?
Empires have always done this. When coherence weakens at the centre, projection intensifies at the edges. Power becomes theatre and strength becomes performance. The external enemy becomes a way of avoiding the internal contradiction.
This too has an epic precedent. The Greeks at Troy are united against an external foe, but their real crisis lies within. The war continues, but the order that sustains it is already compromised.
And yet, even within this history, there has always been another possibility. Another voice.
John Lewis stood within that tradition. When he declared that Trump was not a legitimate president, many heard only partisanship. But what if he was naming something deeper? Not a procedural defect, but a moral one. A failure of recognition at the level of the republic itself.
Because legitimacy is not only a matter of election. It is a matter of whether power recognises the humanity of those over whom it is exercised.
Lewis understood that democracy rests not only on institutions, but on moral imagination. On the capacity to see oneself in the other. Without that, the forms remain, but the substance disappears.
So we return to the question that sits beneath all of this.
Not what Trump has said. Not even what his supporters affirm.
But what the republic itself is capable of recognising.
Because the ultimate danger is not the death of decency, the normalisation of its absence. It is the quiet adjustment of expectation to the moment when the extraordinary becomes routine.
In that sense, the crisis is not at the level of policy nor even at the level of institutions, though they are clearly strained.
It is at the level of recognition of who counts, who is seen and who is mourned.
Until that question is answered honestly, the republic will continue to circle its founding contradiction. Two hundred and fifty years on, still speaking the language of equality, still struggling to embody it.
And so the final question is not about Trump at all.
It is about whether the nation that produced him is prepared to see itself clearly.
Or whether, like the figures of epic, it will continue forward, certain of its righteousness, unable to recognise that the crisis it confronts is of its own making.
Once again, Dr. Glaude you inspire me with your prose, shelter me with your heart, and give me confidence in my moral compass by sharing yours. I can’t think of anyone I’d rather be able to turn to when I’m at my wits’ end. Thank you and hoping your mother’s news at the beginning of the new year was as good as mine. Peace to you both.
I was tempted to weep while reading this, Dr. Glaude. Not so much because what you said was true(and it is, sad to say, only too true) but for the pulling back of the veil to reveal the heart and soul of a prophet for our time, a man fearless and loving enough to give his all to save us from ourselves. Definitional, and descriptive, of you. Trump is a troglodyte, and what's harder to face, a magnifying mirror of the horrors of our sins. Thanks for reminding us of the tough love of grace.
His nasty rude comments are still an affront to those of us who believe in respect, decency and gratitude for those who have served and have gone on to their next home. His remembrance when he goes will be one of THANK GOD it is done. And then complete indifference and forgetting and removal of everything connected to it. Yes. IT. Inhumane monster.
Thank you Professor for your unique voice, offered yet again, noting this moral rot that seems to have been unleashed, once again, and risen to the surface in all its horror. It feels like a demonic force has taken hold with a grip that seems unable to be loosened by any usual means. A battle for the soul of our nation. Bless you and always such gratitude for your grace and generosity.
I said this exact same thing but only using two curse words. Thanks for giving detail and depth to what I actually meant. I am not so eloquent and most times, people miss what I actually mean.
Yes to all you say. Amoral Troglodyte is such a perfect descriptor, but it's the mass of folk who like and amplify his sick "stuff" that scare/ sadden/ horrify me. Thanks for giving voice to resistance and standing with decency.
Trump is, literally, heartless, as are too many of his followers. Our ignorance of malignant narcissism is both appalling and perilous. Thank you, Dr. Glaude, for your Good Work!
Wonderful insight. I fear the moral decay that has occurred is irreversible. I pray I am wrong
Once again thank you, Dr Glaude, for leading the way, it allowed me to contemplate the following narrative. I hope you do not mind.
The Republic at 250: Hubris, Memory, and the Death of the Heart
There is a temptation, when confronted with the words of Donald Trump on the death of Robert Mueller, to retreat into the language of outrage. The instinct is understandable. A president responding to death with satisfaction feels like a violation of something basic, something prior to politics, something we imagine to be human.
But outrage, by itself, is insufficient. It mistakes the moment for an aberration. It assumes a fall from a moral height that may never have existed.
The question is not whether this is indecent, it plainly is. The question is what this moment reveals.
We are now approaching two hundred and fifty years of the American experiment. A nation that declared, with extraordinary clarity, that all men are created equal and endowed with certain inalienable rights. And yet, at this symbolic threshold, we find ourselves asking a question that should trouble us more deeply than any single remark:
Is this a nation still at odds with its own founding creed, still unable to reconcile what it says with what it is?
To answer that question, we must leave the comfort of contemporary commentary and return to an older grammar. The grammar of epic. The grammar of hubris.
In Homer’s Iliad, the crisis of the Greek camp is not simply war. It is disorder within the order. Agamemnon exercises power without measure. Achilles withdraws into wounded pride. Between them, the collective body begins to rot. The plague that opens the epic is not incidental. It is diagnostic. It reveals a failure at the level of sovereignty itself.
Hubris, in this sense, is not arrogance alone, but the inability to recognise limit and the refusal to see the other as fully human. It epitomises the collapse of the proportion between power and responsibility.
What we are witnessing is recognisable, it is not new.
When a president declares himself glad at the death of another, the issue is not simply temperament, but sovereignty speaking without restraint. It is the sovereign deciding, in public, who is worthy of dignity and therefore grievable and who is not.
And yet the deeper disturbance is not the statement alone. It is the echo that follows it. The likes, the shares, the quiet assent. The absence of shock.
We are looking past the individual, into an order that permits such words to land, one that has schooled a people in selective empathy.
Here the language of moral decline, for all its force, begins to reach its limit. It is true to say the heart has hardened, but it is not enough. Hearts do not harden in abstraction. They are formed, conditioned, organised.
This is the deeper question.
What kind of republic produces a moral economy in which empathy is selective and recognition is uneven?
Here, the American story must be read not as deviation but as continuity. The line from slavery to segregation, from the racialised distribution of post-war prosperity to the architecture of the carceral state, is not incidental, but constitutive. It establishes, over time, in the words of Judith Butler, a hierarchy of whose life is grievable and whose is not.
Du Bois saw it in the wages of whiteness. Fanon saw it in the colonial ordering of the human. Mbembe names it as the power to decide who may live and who may be left to die. Agamben identifies the figure who stands outside the protection of the law, exposed, ungrievable.
In that sense, what shocks is not the statement. What shocks is that we still expect something different.
Trump is not an interruption of the American narrative. He is its condensation. He is what happens when the language of restraint is removed and the underlying structure speaks more plainly than before.
If this is true, then the coincidence of timing is not a coincidence at all.
That this figure will preside over the two hundred and fiftieth year of the republic is not an accident of history, but a revelation of it.
Anniversaries are not neutral. They are acts of memory. They tell a story about what a nation believes itself to be. But what happens when the story and the structure diverge too far?
The temptation, at such moments, is spectacle. To project strength outward. To reaffirm power through gesture.
We see it in the renewed posture toward Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran. The language of pressure, containment, confrontation.
We should ask, without sentimentality:
To what extent is this geopolitical muscle-flexing an attempt to stabilise an internal narrative, to project coherence outward where it is fracturing inward?
Empires have always done this. When coherence weakens at the centre, projection intensifies at the edges. Power becomes theatre and strength becomes performance. The external enemy becomes a way of avoiding the internal contradiction.
This too has an epic precedent. The Greeks at Troy are united against an external foe, but their real crisis lies within. The war continues, but the order that sustains it is already compromised.
And yet, even within this history, there has always been another possibility. Another voice.
John Lewis stood within that tradition. When he declared that Trump was not a legitimate president, many heard only partisanship. But what if he was naming something deeper? Not a procedural defect, but a moral one. A failure of recognition at the level of the republic itself.
Because legitimacy is not only a matter of election. It is a matter of whether power recognises the humanity of those over whom it is exercised.
Lewis understood that democracy rests not only on institutions, but on moral imagination. On the capacity to see oneself in the other. Without that, the forms remain, but the substance disappears.
So we return to the question that sits beneath all of this.
Not what Trump has said. Not even what his supporters affirm.
But what the republic itself is capable of recognising.
Because the ultimate danger is not the death of decency, the normalisation of its absence. It is the quiet adjustment of expectation to the moment when the extraordinary becomes routine.
In that sense, the crisis is not at the level of policy nor even at the level of institutions, though they are clearly strained.
It is at the level of recognition of who counts, who is seen and who is mourned.
Until that question is answered honestly, the republic will continue to circle its founding contradiction. Two hundred and fifty years on, still speaking the language of equality, still struggling to embody it.
And so the final question is not about Trump at all.
It is about whether the nation that produced him is prepared to see itself clearly.
Or whether, like the figures of epic, it will continue forward, certain of its righteousness, unable to recognise that the crisis it confronts is of its own making.
Once again, Dr. Glaude you inspire me with your prose, shelter me with your heart, and give me confidence in my moral compass by sharing yours. I can’t think of anyone I’d rather be able to turn to when I’m at my wits’ end. Thank you and hoping your mother’s news at the beginning of the new year was as good as mine. Peace to you both.
Trump works as an accelerant in a diseased body. Amen. Well spoken through and through.
I was tempted to weep while reading this, Dr. Glaude. Not so much because what you said was true(and it is, sad to say, only too true) but for the pulling back of the veil to reveal the heart and soul of a prophet for our time, a man fearless and loving enough to give his all to save us from ourselves. Definitional, and descriptive, of you. Trump is a troglodyte, and what's harder to face, a magnifying mirror of the horrors of our sins. Thanks for reminding us of the tough love of grace.
Eddie thank you. You speak for all of us. Hope your mom is doing her best
His nasty rude comments are still an affront to those of us who believe in respect, decency and gratitude for those who have served and have gone on to their next home. His remembrance when he goes will be one of THANK GOD it is done. And then complete indifference and forgetting and removal of everything connected to it. Yes. IT. Inhumane monster.
Thank you Professor for your unique voice, offered yet again, noting this moral rot that seems to have been unleashed, once again, and risen to the surface in all its horror. It feels like a demonic force has taken hold with a grip that seems unable to be loosened by any usual means. A battle for the soul of our nation. Bless you and always such gratitude for your grace and generosity.
How often I have said “I would love to sit in on one of his lectures“ but I will never see that day however, I do get to read your words. Thank you.
I said this exact same thing but only using two curse words. Thanks for giving detail and depth to what I actually meant. I am not so eloquent and most times, people miss what I actually mean.
Yes to all you say. Amoral Troglodyte is such a perfect descriptor, but it's the mass of folk who like and amplify his sick "stuff" that scare/ sadden/ horrify me. Thanks for giving voice to resistance and standing with decency.
Trump is, literally, heartless, as are too many of his followers. Our ignorance of malignant narcissism is both appalling and perilous. Thank you, Dr. Glaude, for your Good Work!
Eddie,
As always, you are so succinct in your words. Your passion for what is right is boundless and relentless.
God bless you always.