After the Pleasant Fiction

What Happens When America Must Be Managed Rather Than Followed

In Davos last month, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney lamented “the end of a pleasant fiction and the beginning of a harsh reality.” As Americans, we are accustomed to lecturing others about the importance of rules and norms. So it was jarring to hear those same principles invoked not as our calling card but as our indictment.

For those who still care about the idea of a rules-based order, it was also striking to hear Carney invoke the old Thucydidean aphorism that the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. This was not an endorsement of brute power so much as a refusal to flinch from it. Our neighbor to the north answered the logic of the playground bully’s repopularized meme “FAFO” without theatrics or outrage, simply by saying: Very well. Let us be clear-eyed about the world we now inhabit.

When any leader spoke of the power of legitimacy, integrity, and rules at any point after World War II, the assumed reference was obvious. The United States did not merely enforce the postwar order; it lent that order moral language. Today, such appeals land differently. They are heard less as descriptions of American leadership than as contrasts with it. One is left to wonder whether there remains any voice capable of singing, as Walt Whitman once did, of “companionship thick as trees along all the rivers of America,” or of “inseparable cities with their arms about each other’s necks.”

For more than two centuries, some of the world’s greatest thinkers, writers, and statesmen have spoken with reverence about the virtuous American ethos, if not always in practice, then at least in aspiration.

Winston Churchill understood those stakes acutely when he accepted President Harry Truman’s invitation to speak at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri in March of 1946. “The United States stands at this time at the pinnacle of world power,” Churchill warned. “It is a solemn moment for the American Democracy. For with primacy in power is also joined an awe-inspiring accountability to the future.” Barely six months had passed since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, yet the Old Lion voiced extraordinary confidence in this “great Republic,” as the Prime Minister referred to our nation: “No one in any country has slept less well in their beds because this knowledge and the means to apply it are at present largely retained in American hands.”

Four decades later, Ronald Reagan, our own Great Communicator, struck a similarly hopeful chord as he prepared to leave office. “Countries across the globe are turning to free markets and free speech,” he declared. “For them, the great rediscovery of the 1980s has been that, lo and behold, the moral way of government is the practical way of government: Democracy, the profoundly good, is also the profoundly productive.”

Today, America herself is turning away from free markets and free speech. That is no partisan provocation; it is a civic observation. We are witnessing a shift toward what Jonathan Rauch calls “patrimonialism,” a political order in which public office is treated as personal property and access, advantage, and protection flow to those who demonstrate loyalty rather than merit, a shift met less with resistance than with conspicuous accommodation by those once thought insulated from political coercion.

Simultaneously, we see a record number of attempts to restrict lawful expression, from the use of state power to intimidate journalists to the arrest, detention, and forced removal of students after government authorities combed through speech and associations for signs of disloyalty. The pattern is unmistakable. A nation once trusted with unmatched power because it spoke the language of restraint now struggles to speak that language at all.

By way of contrast, one could take almost any speech on any given day from the individual now occupying the White House, or what remains of it. But since this program and this essay are about “Talkin’ Politics and Religion,” it’s worth considering this year’s performance at the National Prayer Breakfast, the annual gathering of political and religious leaders in Washington, D.C.

The first thing that stands out is what a friend of mine would refer to as the number of “I’s per minute.” It takes a peculiar kind of talent to maintain that volume and frequency of self reference, especially in a setting ostensibly devoted to humility and prayer.

Specifically in Trump’s remarks, the frequency of first-person singular pronouns was strikingly high by any reasonable standard. Contrast this with Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, which contains zero first-person singular pronouns. Even allowing for a less exacting standard, the contrast is stark. Presidents from Eisenhower to Obama typically used the Prayer Breakfast to speak in the first-person plural: i.e.”we,” “our nation,” “our Father;” not the first-person singular. An “I” every 12 seconds would have been unthinkable; it would have been viewed as a collapse of the sacred pause the event is meant to represent.

Within the opening minute of Trump’s remarks, the listener is oriented not toward confession, gratitude or even supplication but toward biography. When the president was not referring to himself at this year’s event, he was recounting moments when others would address him, often prefaced by the now overfamiliar “Sir,” a detail offered so repeatedly that it functions less as color than as credential, a signal of status rather than substance. At a prayer breakfast, such insistence distinctly redirects reverence away from God and toward the speaker.

Over the course of roughly seventy five minutes, the address oscillated between personal boasts, political grievances, and casual asides that treated our National Prayer Breakfast less as the sacred pause that it is meant to be than as another opportunity to indulge the Trumpian id, a performance space to test applause lines before a fawning crowd.

The language of faith was conspicuously absent. Religion entered the speech primarily as a constituency and a credential, a way of affirming those in the room and recounting what had been done on their behalf, rather than as an invitation to reflection, confession, or awe.

This rhetorical obsession with the “I” is the terminal stage of a disease Alexis de Tocqueville diagnosed two centuries ago. Writing as a sort of political Mary Shelley, Tocqueville looked at the vibrant, raw energy of early American democracy and saw the potential for a monster. He warned of a time when the American citizen, having retreated into a “small circle” of family and friends, would gradually lose the habits and imagination required for public life altogether. “As for the rest of his fellow citizens,” Tocqueville wrote, “he is close to them, but he does not see them; he touches them, but he does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone.”

Today, that monstrous individualism has moved from the private living room to the Resolute Desk. The creature has gone mad with the rage of its own perceived grievances, yet it has not yet reached the stage of existential despair or remorse, such as where Shelley’s monster ends up. It is, as Carney suggests, a “rupture.” That is, a soul that has withdrawn from the obligations of the body politic.

One could note that Trump’s “I’s per minute” isn’t just a quirk of personality; it is the manifestation of what Tocqueville once described as a “virtuous materialism,” now curdling beyond individualism into a pathological narcissism. Indeed, in the same week that this “religious” address was meant to model unity and moral seriousness, the president’s social media account reposted and then deleted a video depicting former President Barack Obama and former First Lady Michelle Obama as apes, a racist trope with a long and ugly history.

No, this was not meant as a joke, as Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt argued. No, blaming a staffer does not suffice, as the president insisted. No, we cannot pretend he was blind to the malice he shared. Nor can this be dismissed as the work of the so-called “fake news.”

Taken together, these gestures are not merely stylistic. They speak to character. The self-centered form of religiosity on display at the Prayer Breakfast and the ease with which dehumanizing imagery was amplified elsewhere reveal a conception of leadership radically at odds with the ethical moorings that undergirded Whitman’s poetry, Churchill’s wartime trust, and Reagan’s confidence that the moral way of government could also be the practical one.

This is the bitter implication of Carney’s warning. The United States is now the “great power” whose economic leverage must be accounted for, whose retaliation must be anticipated, and whose conduct requires others to reduce their vulnerability before they can afford to take principled stands at all.

History offers an unsettling precedent for such a moment. There are periods when societies that once generated deep ethical and philosophical frameworks, long before they cohered into modern nation states, become forces to be managed rather than followed. In those moments, other countries must organize their economic and political lives around minimizing exposure to retaliation rather than deepening cooperation. “Principled” action does not disappear, but it becomes contingent, defensive, and costly.

The presence of figures such as Paula White-Cain at the National Prayer Breakfast, together with the continued acquiescence of the remaining leadership of the Southern Baptist Convention, inevitably invites historical comparison. Not equivalence, but pattern. Across different eras and political systems, religious institutions have repeatedly faced this test. In the American context, it has appeared in accommodation to segregation, in silence during McCarthyism, and in the willingness to sanctify power in moments of national fear.

As Peter Wehner recently observed, nearly every white pastor today is confident that, had they ministered in the era of Jim Crow, they would have spoken up rather than remained silent, would have stood with Martin Luther King Jr. rather than with those urging caution in the name of unity. The conviction is sincere. The question is whether it is true.

History suggests that such accommodation is rarely born of theological conviction. More often, it arises from institutional fear, the desire to remain proximate to power, and the belief that influence can be preserved by blessing authority rather than confronting it.

Alexis de Tocqueville warned that democracy’s great danger would not arrive in the form of sudden tyranny, but through gradual withdrawal. Citizens, he wrote, would retreat into private grievance and comfort, leaving public life intact in form but hollowed out in substance. What followed would not be the end of politics, but its capture by those least constrained by conscience.

None of what we are witnessing was unforeseeable. The warnings were not subtle and they were not confined to one ideological camp. Senior officials from the first Trump administration have spoken openly about the erosion of norms, the contempt for law, and the danger of unchecked impulse. Many of these individuals once believed their presence could help contain Trump’s worst impulses. But by Election Day of 2024, military leaders, cabinet members, and a sitting vice president drew clear lines. Prominent Republicans broke ranks. Figures who had built their careers inside conservative institutions said plainly that this is exactly what it would look like.

And yet, here we are.

As one acquaintance of mine put it, reflecting on January 6th with unsettling candor, “No one cares.” And while was wrong in the absolute sense, he was not wrong about the margin. Enough people were willing to treat that day, and everything it revealed, as background noise. Enough to choose spectacle over warning. Enough to decide that the cost would be someone else’s problem.

This is not who Americans have always been. But it is who enough Americans chose to be. And so others now must adapt. Allies hedge. Middle powers insulate themselves. Principled action becomes costly because the great power that once lent moral language to the order must now be managed.

Resignation is an understandable response, but it isn’t the only one. The same Tocqueville who warned of democratic decay also believed renewal was possible when citizens refused to withdraw and instead reclaimed their responsibility. We see signs of this refusal in the explicit repudiation by former allies and in the public rebukes from those who once stayed silent. We see it in the resolve of people who refuse to let the spectacle of the moment drown out the signal of their own conscience. These gestures suggest the soul has not entirely left the body, even if its moral vitality has been badly diminished.

Which leaves the question where it belongs. Not with prime ministers in Davos or historians on the page, but with the citizens who can no longer claim surprise.

So what are you going to do about it: FAFO?

Very well.