Catching Up on the Stew
Two essays, one through-line: how America keeps rewriting its own reflection.
Memory, Myth, and the Map We’re Still Drawing
The last two essays I wrote may seem disconnected at first glance, but they’re really part of the same thought stream that’s been swirling in my head for months: how America tells itself stories to stay afloat—and how those stories start to sink us when we stop asking who they serve.
How Never Trump Became a Memory Project traces how parts of the political class, particularly Never Trump Republicans and their centrist Democratic allies, became historians of their own virtue. I argue that what appears to be reform is often merely nostalgia: a desire to resurrect an America that only ever existed in glossy magazines and West Wing reruns. There’s courage in dissent, sure, but the hardest step is releasing the glow of the eras that made the mess.
Then there’s Clara Jeffrey’s Hard Truth of the Union, which takes a sharper look at the geography of our fracture—how the “blue states,” long subsidizing the “red,” are beginning to ask whether the union itself still feels mutual. It’s not just a budgetary argument; it’s a moral cartography of who reaps, who pays, and who decides what America even is. My piece grapples with her premise and delves into the deeper history of the United States as a continental empire—one founded on uneven bargains and selective belonging.
Clara Jeffrey’s Hard Truth of the Union
Author Note: This essay builds on Clara Jeffrey’s recent piece in Mother Jones about “soft secession.” It’s not a reply, exactly, more of a companion meditation on the empire we built within ourselves. It’s long, dense, and meant to linger. No paywall here, just thinking out loud about a nation that still doesn’t know how to talk to itself.
Both pieces circle the same orbit: what happens when a nation mistakes nostalgia for truth, or comfort for progress. Whether it’s the political elites yearning for an imagined past or the states renegotiating their sense of union, the question is the same: how do we move forward without dragging the myth behind us like ballast?
