This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
I am taken aback, and not for the first time, that terrible and shocking things now just flow over Americans as if chaos is part of a normal day. We don’t have to accept the new normal.
But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
The Widening Gyre
I began the morning, as I often do, with a cup of coffee and a discussion with a friend. We were talking about last week’s nuclear warnings from Russian President Vladimir Putin, and while we were on the subject of unhinged threats, I mentioned Donald Trump’s bizarre statement over the weekend that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell had a “DEATH WISH,” with a racist slam on McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, added in for good measure.
“Oh, yeah,” my friend said. “I’d forgotten about that.” To be honest, so had I. But when I opened Twitter today, The Bulwark publisher Sarah Longwell’s tweet that “we are still under-reacting to the threat of Trump” jumped out at me. She’s right.
We are also, in a way, underreacting to the war in Ukraine. Our attention, understandably, has become focused on the human drama. But we are losing our grip on the larger story and greater danger: Russia’s dictator is demanding that he be allowed to take whatever he wants, at will and by force. He is now, as both my colleague Anne Applebaum and I have written, at war not only with Ukraine, but with the entire international order. He (like his admirer Trump) is at war with democracy itself.
And somehow, we have all just gotten used to it.
We are inured to these events not because we are callous or uncaring. Rather, people such as Trump and Putin have sent us into a tailspin, a vortex of mad rhetoric and literal violence that has unmoored us from any sense of the moral principles that once guided us, however imperfectly, both at home and abroad. This is “the widening gyre” W. B. Yeats wrote about in 1919, the sense that “anarchy is loosed upon the world” as “things fall apart.”
For many years, I have often felt this way in the course of an ordinary day, when it seems as if I am living in a dystopian alternate universe. A time of hope and progress that began in the late 1980s was somehow derailed, perhaps even before the last chunks of the Berlin Wall’s corpse were being cleared from the Friedrichstrasse. (This was a time, for example, when we started taking people like Ross Perot seriously, which was an early warning sign of our incipient post–Cold War stupor.) Here are some of the many moments in which I have felt that sense of vertigo:
- In my lifetime, I have seen polio defeated and smallpox eradicated. Now hundreds of thousands of Americans are dead—and still dying—because they refused a lifesaving vaccine as a test of their political loyalty to an ignoramus.
- After living under the threat of Armageddon, I saw the Soviet flag lowered from the Kremlin and an explosion of freedom across Eastern Europe. An American president then took U.S. strategic forces off high alert and ordered the destruction of thousands of nuclear weapons with the stroke of a pen. Now, each day, I try to estimate the chances that Putin, one of the last orphans of the Soviet system, will spark a nuclear cataclysm in the name of his delusional attempt to turn the clock back 30 years.
- As a boy in 1974, I delivered the newspaper that announced the resignation of Richard Nixon, who was driven from office in a political drama so wrenching that part of its name—Watergate—has become a suffix in our language for a scandal of any kind. Now the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination is a former president who is a walking Roman candle of racist kookery and unhinged conspiracy theories, who has defied the law with malicious glee, and who has supported mobs that wanted to kill his vice president.
Against all this, how can we not be overwhelmed? We stand in the middle of a flood of horrendous events, shouted down by the outsize voices of people such as Trump and his stooges, enervated and exhausted by the dark threats of dictators such as Putin. It’s just too much, especially when we already have plenty of other responsibilities, including our jobs and taking care of our loved ones. We think we are alone and helpless, because there is nothing to convince us otherwise. How can anyone fight the sense that “the center cannot hold”?
But we are not helpless. The center can hold—because we are the center. We are citizens of a democracy who can refuse to accept the threats of mob bosses, whether in Florida or in Russia. We can and must vote, but that’s not enough. We must also speak out. By temperament, I am not much for public demonstrations, but if that’s your preferred form of expression, then organize and march. The rest of us, however, can act, every day, on a small scale.
Speak up. Do not stay silent when our fellow citizens equivocate and rationalize. Defend what’s right, whether to a friend or a family member. Refuse to laugh along with the flip cynicism that makes a joke of everything. Stay informed so that the stink of a death threat from a former president or the rattle of a nuclear saber from a Russian autocrat does not simply rush past you as if you’ve just driven by a sewage plant.
None of this is easy to do. But we are entering a time of important choices, both at home at the ballot box and abroad on foreign battlefields, and the center—the confident and resolute defense of peace, freedom, and the rule of law—must hold.
Related:
Today’s News
- Russian officials admitted setbacks in the war in Ukraine; over the weekend, the Ukrainian army reclaimed the eastern city of Lyman and further advanced on the Russian-annexed southern region of Kherson.
- The trial began for Stewart Rhodes, the leader and founder of the Oath Keepers, as well as four other defendants. Rhodes is accused of seditious conspiracy and other felony charges for his role in the January 6 Capitol attack.
- Indonesia announced that it will set up a commission to investigate the incident at a soccer stadium over the weekend where at least 125 people were killed.
Dispatches
- Humans Being: Ramy, back on Hulu for its third season, takes viewers outside their American bubble, Jordan Calhoun writes.
- Deep Shtetl: Yair Rosenberg explains what his “favorite” anti-Semite taught him about forgiveness.
- Up for Debate: Readers tell Conor Friedersdorf what the rest of the world does better than the U.S.
- Famous People: Kaitlyn and Lizzie attend a birthday party inspired by a 1996 movie about death.
Evening Read
Why the Florida Fantasy Withstands Reality
Five years ago, after Hurricane Irma pummeled Florida’s Gulf Coast, I rode a boat through the canals of Cape Coral, the “Waterfront Wonderland,” America’s fastest-growing city at the time. It was a sunny day with a gentle breeze and just a few puffs of clouds, so as I pointed to the blown-out lanais and piles of storm debris, my guide, a snowbird named Brian Tattersall, kept teasing me for missing the point of a magical afternoon. He said I sounded like his northern friends who always told him he was crazy to live in the Florida hurricane zone.
“Come on. Does this feel crazy?” he asked, as we drifted past some palm trees. Cape Coral is a low-lying, pancake-flat spit of exposed former swampland, honeycombed by an astonishing 400 miles of drainage ditches disguised as real-estate amenities, but to Tattersall it was a low-tax subtropical Venice where he could dock his 29-foot Sea Fox in the canal behind his house. When I asked if Irma would slow down the city’s population boom, he scoffed: “No way.”
More From The Atlantic
Culture Break
Read. A new poem by Mairead Small Staid.
“Though each night he cried out, each night / no angels came, no ministers of grace to save the son / from the spotlight glare of grief.”
Watch. Hocus Pocus 2, on Disney+. The sequel wears its ridiculousness so proudly that it’s impossible to disdain.
P.S.
My colleagues will be writing the Daily for the next few days; I’m back on Friday. But I don’t want to start off the week on such a grim note, so let me suggest a bit of light reading if you’re looking for an escape from the news.
Often, when I see a reference to the Yeats poem “The Second Coming” (which includes the expression “the widening gyre”), I think of one of my favorite books, The Widening Gyre—an entry in the Spenser detective series by the late Robert B. Parker. Spenser, an urbane and wisecracking Boston gumshoe, was played capably on television by Robert Urich (and later by a woefully miscast Joe Mantegna), but the books are a delight, especially if you read them in order. The Widening Gyre, however, is great as a quick stand-alone read. Written in the mid-1980s, it’s a political blackmail mystery set in Boston, Washington, and my hometown area of Springfield, Massachusetts. It has some wry laughs in it too: Spenser, good Bostonian that he is, rolls his eyes at Washington’s inability to deal with snow, protects his clients while calling himself a “policy implementation specialist,” and downs a thug with what he considers “maybe the best left hook ever thrown in Springfield.” It’s a nice visit back to an earlier and simpler time—especially in politics.
— Tom
Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.