A Thought on Living in the "After Times"

Thanks for the strong response, again, to this weekend’s column imagining with moral clarity how the US media should be writing about the wreckage unfolding across our country right now — there is so much craziness right now that I need to stop myself from asking William Boot to write even-more-than-weekly dispatches in his role as a foreign correspondent covering the coup of Musk’s junta. (First installment here if you missed that.)

I wanted to write this morning with something very different — if not with exactly good news, then at least some positive thoughts, which feel in such very short supply these days.

I know from so many of your emails, texts, and direct messages that many of you feel lost — you are trying to figure out what you want to do in this moment, who you want to be, and how you want to exist in this deeply troubling time for our country. I hope that in the paragraphs that follow you might find some answers and inspiration for how to approach your own life and work right now.

Let’s dive in:

Saturday night, after working far more than I should have on a weekend, my brain was emptied and I was desperate to read something that was going to use a different part of my brain than all this political news.

I semi-randomly picked up Eddie S. Glaude Jr.’s book about James Baldwin, BEGIN AGAIN, which has been unread on my shelf for a year — figuring only that it’s a subject that I know little about and that presumably didn’t intersect my current research work and thus might give my brain a break. From the cover and subtitle, I knew it was a book about Baldwin and his lessons for today, but I was completely unprepared for how right now it would feel.

Professor Glaude teaches African-American Studies at Princeton — you might know him too from Morning Joe or other public commentaries — and is the kind of beautiful, thoughtful writer where I find myself sinking, happily, into his words. I’ve been a big admirer, but have always been too intimidated to introduce myself when we’ve crossed paths at one festival or another.

This book rocked me. I found myself newly inspired on page one and my soul filling ever more as I got deeper in. As the pages unfurled, I saw emerging a new sense and clarity of purpose of how I want to show up in these times — and the positive mission I want to contribute right now.

Glaude set out to write the book in the first Trump era — it was published in 2020 — and explore how “the idea of America is in deep trouble,” but it feels in many ways as if it’s written for right here and now in February 2025 as we struggle through the very real possibility that the United States that I have known my entire 44 years of life may unravel in the months ahead. As he writes, “Though many will find consolation in the principles of the founders or in the resilience of the American story, the fact remains that we stand on a knife’s edge.” He continues:

America, he says, already has two strikes against us — we turned our backs both on Reconstruction, our chance at our second founding, and we turned our backs on the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, our chance at a second Reconstruction. Whether and if we make it through this moment is a very open question.

There are across recent weeks plenty of arguments that we will not.

Historian Manisha Sinha, who wrote a book last year entitled THE RISE AND FALL OF THE SECOND AMERICAN REPUBLIC, about the country’s trials from 1860 to 1920 and the forces of progress and reaction, argues in her work that we should look at our country less like we do — as one continually existing historical story — and more like the French view their state — as distinct incarnations of different moments and governments; France’s current republican government is known as the Fifth French Republic. Sinha has argued in recent days that we are witnessing right now the collapse of the “Third American Republic,” and that the fight is on to define what the “Fourth American Republic” will be.

Maybe. But across any era of history or life believing in America — truly believing in America — America as it actually exists in our lived experience, not as the gauzy everything-is-rosy patriotism that we might experience at moments like, say, the Super Bowl — has always been difficult.

We are a land of abundance and the wealthiest country in the world, and yet so many still go hungry and live in poverty. We are a nation of immigrants, one that celebrates as a basic creed, carved into our literal most famous beacon of liberty “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” and yet generation after generation are hostile to our most recent arrivals. We are a giant nation, with room aplenty, and yet so many go homeless. We are a nation where, for craven political and ahistorical reasons, we have decided in recent decades that the Second Amendment trumps all other rights and freedoms and allow our children to live in fear at school and the religious to fear while they worship. We are a nation founded on a premise on equality — literally that “all men are created equal” — and yet for every one of our 249 years have failed to deliver on that promise to large portions of our citizenry, not least of all to the half of the population that are women.

Glaude examines in his book how James Baldwin dealt with that disappointment of America, particularly after it became clear that the country’s struggles in the 1950s and 1960s would not lead to a true reckoning of our past and different path for the future. Instead, Glaude says, “white America chose itself over a truly just and multiracial society.” (For those of who are new subscribers I wrote some about the lessons from Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in my post-election column in November.)

“It is, alas, the truth that to be an American writer today means mounting an unending attack on all that Americans believe themselves to hold sacred,” Glaude quotes Baldwin writing in 1962. “It means fighting an astute and agile guerrilla warfare with that American complacency which so inadequately masks the American panic.”

Baldwin, Glaude describes, is a “critic of the after times… bearing witness to a time when many though the nation was poised to change, only to have darkness descend and change arrested.”

It was a moment of “disruption and the splintering of the old ways of living and the making of a new community after the fall. The after times characterize what was before and what is coming into view. On one level, it is the interregnum surrounded by the ghosts of the dying moment, and on another, the moment that is desperately trying to be born with a lie wrapped around its neck.” As Glaude says, “the after times also represent an opportunity for a new America—a chance to grasp a new way of being in the world—amid the darkness of the hour.”

I am terrified about the darkness of the hour. I spend my days alternating between the news and working on my next book, an oral history of the atomic bombs, a story centered on so many eminent scientists watching fascism and darkness descend across Europe in the 1930s. The past feels prologue. The vice president tweeted yesterday that he does not believe the executive branch answers to the judicial branch. Hic sunt dracones — here there be dragons.

And yet I am by nature an optimistic, happy person. I believe, wholeheartedly and deeply, in the myth and promise of America. I am an institutionalist, watching as our institutions are fed—as one who shall go unnamed said—into the chipper.

But Glaude and Baldwin gave me a new way to look at this moment and how to find hope in this time. Yes, we are in the After Times. But we can do now is bear witness. And critique. And push forward the effort to have an honest reckoning right now with our country’s past and our future.

That means don’t shy away from learning history when people are telling you not to. That means reading the books that others are trying to ban. That means supporting your neighbors when they are being persecuted. Standing up for the transgender. The immigrants. The teachers. The scientists. The civil servants.

We have to remain strong in telling a different story, Glaude reminds us, not just for ourselves and our children and our future, but because of everyone who came before. “We have to do this for all those young people who risked everything to change the country—for those who have gone mad, who gave us their last breath, and for those who now face the temptation of accepting the world as it is as opposed to what it can be,” he writes.

From my own work, I can’t help but think of the examples of the young teens — teens! — who stormed ashore at Omaha Beach, Guadalcanal, and Iwo Jima. Of those who marched at Selma and who sat in Greensboro. Of the prosecutors and Members of Congress who stood for the rule of law during Watergate. Of the FBI agents who chased al-Qaeda in the 1990s and the firefighters, Port Authority and NYPD officers who ran toward the Twin Towers on 9/11. And, of course, the CIA officers who sacrificed their lives and the Navy SEALs who risked theirs to make it to a compound in Abbottabad. Those, like Alex Vindman and Cassidy Hutchinson, who stood up in recent years to defend American democracy now. And so many others, past and present.

This — right here — is the future they and so many others — from Lexington to Gettysburg, from Blair Mountain to Stonewall, from Brown to Obergefell — fought for, a future that we must do our best in our time to carry forward on their behalf.

I don’t want our current moment to be remembered — as Baldwin once wrote of the end of the Civil Rights Movement — as an “enduring monument, which we will not outlive, to the breathtaking cowardice of this sovereign people.”

This cannot be a moment for cowardice.

Heroes come in many forms across American history. And our time is filled with them now if we look around and pay attention.

America is not and never has been perfect, but generations have believed that we are better than the moment we are living through right now.

Let us fight for them.

GMG