The Conspiracy Against America

National Populism and the United States

Man in the Room, James Jarvaise, 1965

Since the Greeks first wrote about political communities, people living within polities have asked themselves what it is exactly it means to be a community.

The Athenian statesman Pericles once claimed that a political community was a shared project that you freely undertook with your fellow citizens.

In his funeral oration, he claimed a different view that was unbound from the particulars of any one person or any single tribe. In memorializing Athenian soldiers who had fallen in the Peloponnesian War, Pericles articulated a notion of citizenship as nothing more than seeking to fulfill the highest civic ideals of a free and democratic people.

To Pericles—regardless of how true it was in practice—Athens did not discriminate based on wealth or status. The most impoverished Athenian was only measured by his willingness to do great things on behalf of others. Athens was not made by any particular type of blood. It was not excellent due to the land on which she rested. There was no divine providence that led to her becoming prominent in Greece.

Athens did not discriminate based on wealth or status.¹ The most impoverished Athenian was only measured by his willingness to do great things on behalf of others.

They were a people who relied upon nothing more than their own hearts and hands. To be an Athenian, you merely needed to believe in the highest ideals of citizenship and work towards that end.

Lincoln took up Pericles’ claim at Gettysburg, when he radically asserted that the United States was conceived in Liberty and founded on the principle that all men were created equal.

It was, however, not merely enough to be founded on lofty ideals. The men who died at Gettysburg were living in accordance with a view of civic service not dissimilar to what Pericles had once articulated about Athens.

The United States could not simply exist as an abstract entity—it took real living citizens to make those ideals real. The United States as a Nation exists only insofar as those living within its borders strive to create a country that exists in accordance with our most revolutionary founding promises.

When Union soldiers fought and died at Gettysburg, they were engaging in the same sacrifice as Athenian soldiers at Pylos. They were embodying what it meant to live in a free society. It wasn’t wealth, vain glory, or blood they fought for. It was for the great promise of their cities.

The plot against the United States is not a Philip Roth-esque conspiracy built by conspiring fascists in the shadows. The plot against America is more banal.

It is the desecration of our basic sense of what it means to be a good citizen of our Nation.

Populism in the United States reaches for nothing higher. It only trades in the lowest form of venom. It directs the eyes of all Americans towards the dirt.

Instead of the worthy cause of the Union, you are merely offered strangers to hate. There is nothing to set your heart and hands to except for an endless stream of made-for-social-media content that denigrates other Americans. The only purpose that you’re given is in the vicarious thrill of seeing pain inflicted on others.

American populism promises nothing by way of a life worth living. It does not claim you can build anything. It does not ask that you struggle for a cause that reaches beyond your immediate surroundings. There is no thought towards building a community that we ought to be proud to be a part of.

It sneers at the concept that America is a free nation. It dismisses lofty speech about how all men are equal. The idea that Americans used to fight for liberty and embark on Great Crusades is treated as cringy and overly earnest.

Behind the glow of your screen, you merely get to play spectator to the daily cruelties and corruption of an administration that would have left earlier generations ashamed.

It strips from us our belief in our profound ability to create the country that we ought to be. It merely serves to create an apathetic hole in the soul of America. Instead of being called to be citizens among equals, we only grow more cynical about our own ability to ever create the world we wish to live in.

Slowly and steadily, we will give up on a community that can work towards a shared sense of higher purpose.

There is no bang. There are no great rallies. Only a slow and steady erosion that leaves an entire generation listless and unwilling to believe.

Populism only promises a world in which we are detached spectators from our shared projects. Nothing more than a passive observer to a series of images that swirl around us. It denies that we are all members of a shared civic body.

When there is no Pericles or Lincoln to remind us that it is our task to consecrate our communities with our own hands, who will remind us of our duties?

1. Yes, before you yell at me, I know that this wasn’t particularly true in practice.