Disillusioned with America? Good. Use it.
From the Substack.
Every morning, in my email, in interviews, in conversations with people who stop me in coffee shops and airport terminals, and the little purgatory outside lecture halls, one word keeps showing up: disillusioned. They are watching a president take what he wants and dare anyone to stop him, while the people whose job is to stop him answer with sermons about norms and the next election.
So I understand what they mean. They mean they are tired, and they feel betrayed, that something they had taken for solid turned out to be made of smoke and Fourth of July bunting, and that the country they were told about does not seem to be the country they are living in.
The problem is not them, and it may not even be the word, at least not the way they are using it. To be disillusioned is not, strictly, to be broken. It is to be freed from an illusion. The dis- is a reversal, and illusion comes from the Latin illudere, to play upon, to mock, to make sport of someone. An illusion is a thing that plays you, so to be disillusioned is the moment the trick stops working, you see the magnet holding the coin in mid-air.
The feeling is usually miserable because nobody enjoys learning that the thing they built their public faith on was never made to carry the load. But the misery is not a sign that something has gone wrong; it is what a false belief feels like on its way out. What they are grieving is not the arrival of the truth but the loss of a lie that had made the truth unnecessary.
And right now, there is a great deal to be disillusioned about. The lies keep coming, fast and furious, in many versions, most of them old: that problems in America correct themselves; that the courts will hold, by which people usually mean the judges will rule the right way; that the institutions are there to protect us, by which people mean the men and women running them will turn out to deserve the titles and the deference; that progress is built into the country and arrives if decent people vote and wait and remain polite.
None of this is the same as saying courts and elections do not matter. They have simply never mattered the way today’s hope merchants pushing the theme of “America’s promise” need you to believe, as self-correcting engines whose natural output is justice; judges rule or they don’t, elected officials act or they don’t. Which way they go has never been a matter of institutional conscience. It has always turned on whether the people on the outside made the status quo more expensive than the alternative. Power does not concede to decency; it yields to leverage.
That is not history so much as civics sold as a scented candle, one of the great sedatives of American political life. What it trains people to call political maturity is, a good deal of the time, obedience dressed up as patience, the adult story about the country turning out to be a bedtime story with citations.
Losing that belief is not a breakdown; it is the labor that brings people closer to seeing America as it actually is, leaving behind those who still prefer the fiction.
So when they ask how to get over it, my answer is: don’t. Do not rush to repair it, and above all do not go looking for a new illusion because the old one stopped holding. That is the temptation, and it is a strong one: find the storyteller or candidate who makes America make sense again, the movement that makes the story feel inevitable again, the kinder founding and the better founders, the version in which the republic was always trying, bless its heart, and only misplaced several million people over generations on the way to liberty. The clear sight is the asset. It cost something, and it is worth more than the comfort it replaced. The question is not how they can feel hopeful again, as if hope were a civic vitamin, but what they can see now that the story used to hide.
There is a danger in it, though. Disillusionment can curdle into cynicism, which feels like clear sight but is really a fresh illusion, and a more flattering one, because it lets a person quit while feeling like the only adult in the room. The optimist was sure that good people somewhere would deliver the outcome; the cynic is sure that no one can; and both of them have arranged to stay out of the picture.
Resistance history is not kind to either. It does not show good outcomes arriving because they were destined, or bad ones prevented because power was total. It shows particular people, in particular places, deciding what could be moved and then moving it, usually from worse positions than ours and with far less reason for confidence, by building pressure outside the official channels and making certain outcomes more expensive than the men in power were prepared to pay. They acted not because they were optimistic but because they could see what was in front of them.
The people who most needed American liberty to be real were very often the first to know it was not, because the fraud was not in a monograph; it was in the auction block and in a body treated as collateral for someone else’s republican virtue. Ona Judge did not have to become disillusioned with the Founders, because she knew them. In 1796, she walked out of the President’s House in Philadelphia and freed herself from George Washington, who had already been rotating the people he enslaved in and out of the state to keep Pennsylvania’s gradual abolition law from reaching them. The Father of His Country knew exactly how to count to six months when property was at stake. After she ran, he used the reach of his office to try to recover her, writing letters and leaning on federal officials, treating a woman’s liberty as an administrative inconvenience and the tools of the government as his personal workshop. She never went back, and Martha’s descendants never freed her. The language of liberty did not fail because people misunderstood it. It failed because many of the men who used it knew precisely how far they meant it to go and exactly where they meant it to stop.
The illusion belonged to the people who could afford it, the comfortable white Americans whose republic was not correcting itself on their backs, who could call slavery an unfortunate inheritance to be managed by wise statesmen until time did what time is always hired to do in the American story. Time did nothing of the kind. People did, by refusing to wait for it.
By 1850, a great many Northerners who had made their peace with the old story were made to watch it come apart. Henry Clay’s compromise and Daniel Webster’s defense of it did not preserve a noble balance; they announced that the federal government would now reach into the North and make ordinary people part of slavery’s enforcement. The Fugitive Slave Act did not tell Northerners that slavery existed elsewhere. It required their cooperation, turned free states into hunting grounds, and punished those who refused, which made plain what distance and rhetoric had hidden: slavery was not a Southern problem that emerged over time but an American regime, established at the beginning, and it expected obedience.
Boston’s Black community had much less illusion to lose, since many of them had escaped slavery and knew exactly what a marshal and a warrant meant when they came for a body. They did not wait for a better Congress. Lewis Hayden, who had been enslaved in Kentucky, sheltered William and Ellen Craft after their escape from Georgia and let it be known he had gunpowder under the floor and would blow the house apart before he surrendered them. When federal authorities seized Shadrach Minkins in 1851, Hayden and a crowd did not write a sad editorial about institutional failure and call it courage; they walked into the courthouse, took him from the marshals, and got him to Canada. Theodore Parker, who had tried the petitions and the speeches and the elections and the whole cabinet of decent reform and learned what those were worth when the other side owned the locks, did not become a cynic; he became more useful, sitting on the Vigilance Committee, hiding fugitives, and within a few years helping enable John Brown.
They did not win every round. They could not save Thomas Sims in 1851, and in 1854 the Pierce administration marched Anthony Burns back to slavery through streets packed with Bostonians and buildings draped in black, spending a fortune and deploying troops not simply to return one man to bondage but to prove that it could. Boston watched, and learned something other than the lesson it was meant to learn. Men who had wanted the compromise to hold, who had trusted Webster and Clay and mistaken their own caution for wisdom, saw what the compromise required once it was stripped of speeches, and some of them “went to bed one night old-fashioned, conservative, Compromise Union Whigs and waked up stark mad Abolitionists.”
None of which is to say the disillusionment did the work. Disillusionment does not organize a committee or hide a fugitive or raise the money or break a man out of custody; it is not itself action, though it can make action possible, because as long as those comfortable, compromise Northerners believed Webster had it handled, they had no reason to lift a finger, and their own passivity could pass for faith. The Fugitive Slave Act took that convenience away. That is the use of it: it removes the alibi for doing nothing.
So when people tell me they are disillusioned, I do not hear failure. I hear what is often the first honest sentence they have spoken about the country, a story losing its hold on them. The work that comes next is less dramatic than despair and more demanding than hope, and it is almost always smaller than they want it to be, not “save democracy,” which lets everyone feel noble while staying pleasantly vague, but the one thing in front of them that they can actually move, whether that is an official they can pressure or a lie they can refuse to repeat.
The old faith told them someone else had it covered and cynicism tells them nothing can be, and the people who made resistance history believed neither, because they did not require a country worthy of their effort before they made the effort. The task is not to give anyone their illusion back but to keep them from buying a new one, since what follows the illusion is smaller and more ordinary than the despair makes it look, and there was never going to be anyone else to do it.
