It Just Becomes the Weather

The Void Doesn't Announce Itself

Image AI generated by author

An expatriate friend was visiting this week. We’ve known each other for over 25 years, met overseas, and when I came back to the States he stayed. Over dinner he said, “All we need is for the Democrats to sweep the midterms and this gets fixed.” What followed was silence. I looked at him across the table, his look almost pleading, and felt something I couldn’t name. Not quite anger. Not quite sadness. Something emptier than both.

We’ve been saying it for years, both of us, from opposite sides of the world. Someone will stop this. The courts. The Senate. A principled Republican. A Democrat with a spine. Someone will draw the line.

No one has.

And I don’t mean no one has succeeded. I mean no one has genuinely tried. What looks like opposition is theater. In the Boundary Waters, the ritual of the vote results in the literal poisoning of our soil, handing a pristine wilderness over to Chilean mining interests and Chinese processing plants.

Seven House Democrats crossed the aisle to hand Republicans a $64.4 billion DHS funding bill, $10 billion of it straight to ICE. Without those seven votes, the bill dies, 214-213. They knew that. They voted yes anyway. The names: Jared Golden, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, Henry Cuellar, Tom Suozzi, Laura Gillen, Don Davis, and Vicente Gonzalez.

Write them down.

Cuellar and Gonzalez weren’t stumbling into a hard vote. They’d already voted to thank ICE, already voted to allow strip searches of minors, already established the pattern. This wasn’t a difficult decision for them. They were already comfortable thanking masked gunmen attacking their own cities.

No, both sides are not the same. But the betrayal has a structure. The names rotate so the fingerprints spread thin, so no single Democrat absorbs all the heat, so everyone gets just enough cover to keep their seat and keep delivering. It isn’t chaos. It’s a system.

I wake up. I make my coffee. I check the news and confirm what I already knew, that it continues, and then I close the laptop and go about my day because denying reality is not a choice. The sun came up. The dog doesn’t care. My Mom needs her breakfast. I’m living inside the gap between the slow-motion collapse I can see clearly and the moment it finally becomes undeniable to everyone else, and that gap is not dramatic. It is just Tuesday. It’s just every day.

Sitting across from my friend I realized I couldn’t name the emptiness because I had been looking at the wrong thing. I kept watching for the moment of collapse. The coup. The invasion. The singular act of destruction. That’s not how it happens. The form persists long after the function is gone. Elections still occur. Courts still convene. Speeches are still made about freedom and democracy. The machinery runs. It just no longer does what it was built to do.

The Constitution was not just a legal document. It was a lid. The free press, the independent judiciary, the balance of power, these were not the foundation. They were what grew in the space the Constitution protected. Strip the function and they fail together, because they were always downstream of the same source. They had been prying at it for years. The end of the Fairness Doctrine. Citizens United. Climate denial. Each one a lever, each one gaining purchase. The lid came off when Mitch McConnell dishonored tradition and refused Obama’s right to seat a justice. He decided the rules were inconveniences and opened the floodgates. When the container empties, what rushes in is not our better angels but the baser demons.

When a system is stripped of its function but holds its form, the result is not collapse. It is a void. And the void does not fill randomly. It fills with precisely what the system was built to constrain.

These movements always run out of outside enemies eventually. Then they turn inward. Crusades against evil generate evil. The more righteous the cause, the more dangerous the crusade. The Khmer Rouge killed the prisoners first, then the guards, then each other. Then the executioners became the victims.

“Donald doesn’t plague himself with doubt about what he’s creating around him. He is proud of his monster. He glories in its anger and its destruction and, while he cannot imagine its love, he believes with all his heart in its rage. He is Frankenstein without conscience.” — Charles P. Pierce

A few months ago I sat at a table hearing how Marjorie Taylor Greene was saving America. A few days ago I sat at the same table and heard how she was an evil traitor. The monster this movement was built on has nowhere left to go but inward.

The emptiness I felt across that dinner table wasn’t about my friend being wrong. It was about recognizing the specific loneliness of someone who has been cured of a comforting lie sitting across from someone who still needs it.

What I saw was a system not broken but functioning exactly as designed. A company town dressed in the language of freedom.

The recruitment begins long before the inauguration. I watched it first with Aung San Suu Kyi. I was there. I met her. I believed. She was just another gear in the machine. I saw it in the domestic memory of the Reagan era, where we were sold a shining city built on a blueprint that never actually included the people in the basement.

But Montaigne cuts deeper than the mere observation that power corrupts. People don’t wait for the scepter to abandon their neighbors. They run to make a difference but when they can make a difference they trade the opportunity for sway and call it compromise. The corruption isn’t a side effect of the office. It is the entry fee. By the time they pull the lever, they have already been recruited.

This isn’t pessimism. It’s pattern recognition. We don’t stumble into a Washington or Mandela. The odds have always favored the corruptible, because power doesn’t just corrupt, it recruits. It finds the people who wanted it badly enough to do what it takes to get there. Camus would recognize this too. The absurd is the gap between the leaders we require and the ones the system reliably produces. Sisyphus doesn’t scream. He picks up the rock.

Pete Buttigieg hands me a rock:

‘We’re not out to go around and just find all the little bits and pieces of everything that they smashed and tape it together and say, Here you go, I give you the world as it looked in 2023. That’s not going to work.’

I pick it up.

“You don’t actually want 2023 back. You want the feeling you had in 2023. Those aren’t the same thing. Too much has been broken to rebuild and too much has been revealed to pretend we didn’t see it. We don’t need to save what we had. We need to build what we never quite managed to have.”

He looked down at his plate.

I asked for the check. Paid the bill. We parted.