Social Studies

Yesterday, Lee and I tried out Substack’s new livestreaming feature to record Le Pod. We like it; it was fun. About 300 of you joined, which was great for a first attempt with almost no promotion behind it. We’re going to start doing this every Wednesday at 3pm PT/6pm ET. If you can’t join us live, we’ll put out the non-live version each Thursday.

We spent pretty much the whole episode discussing the biggest question for our country right now: Are we in a pre-authoritarian moment right now — or have we even crossed the threshold into authoritarianism?

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I’m still trying this no-paywall thing. So far it’s not going very well. I’ll probably go back to paywalling most of these posts if that doesn’t change. But for now, I’m still just asking for you to become a paying subscriber out of your generosity of spirit and your appreciation for my work. If that fails, then it’ll be back to the capitalist mode of production for Social Studies. —LW

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I’m not clairvoyant. I’m not going to make predictions about the future. But a couple of weeks ago I asked the question, “Do we still have rule of law” in America? Nothing that has happened in the intervening days indicates that the question was hyperbolic. If you’re watching a ball roll downhill, it’s safe to assume that, absent external intervention, it’s eventually going to reach the bottom. That’s about where we are, I think, in the process of losing our democracy.

It’s natural to assume it will be obvious when the moment finally arrives that you don’t live in a republic anymore. Maybe it’s armed men in unmarked vans snatching up Americans off the street who voice disfavored opinions. Maybe it’s the President completely ignoring the legislature and issuing new laws by mere proclamation from the White House. Maybe it’s the administration openly defying direct orders from federal judges.

None of these things are all that far from what has already happened. People are being snatched off the streets and thrown in dungeons with no due process. So far, they’ve all been non-citizens. That could change. The President is ignoring the legislature and issuing new laws by executive order, including one that attempts to amend the Constitution by fiat. Many of those orders won’t survive their first day in front of a judge, but that only begs the question of whether this President believes himself to be constrained by the courts at all, to which we have the semblance of an answer: Trump is defying direct orders from federal judges, including the Supreme Court. He’s not yet “openly” defying them, as the White House still deems it necessary to put forth a fig leaf of a legal justification for its failure to comply with judicial rulings. But how long will even that pretense of legality last?

Still, there’s a big difference between being close to losing our democratic rights and actually losing them. This nether region is the space we currently occupy, less than three months into Trump’s second term. Do we still live in a democratic society? Depends on how you look at it. It’s sort of a glass half-empty or half-full kind of question. That’s not a good situation to be in, when you’re not entirely sure whether or not the laws will actually protect you.

It may not even be possible. It’s like being half-pregnant. If you only have a tentative democracy, you can’t live as if you’re in an actual democracy. You’re careful what you say, just in case the alarmists are right and you don’t actually have freedom of speech anymore. You’re careful about what you do, because even if it’s clearly legal, there’s always the off chance that the government might not abide by a court ruling if it comes to one. You’re cautious about what petitions you sign with your full name, ambivalent about the wisdom of participating in public protests. If you’re a university president, you capitulate to the government’s endless demands; if you’re a partner at a white shoe law firm, you make a deal with the administration. You stay on the safe side, keep your head down, hope that things will blow over. You start acting like a subject instead of a citizen. You bend the knee.

Whether you still have rights or not largely depends on what mood the people running the government wake up in tomorrow. If Trump feels like it, maybe he’ll respect the institutions that check his power. Hopefully that lasts. But if something really works him up into a lather one day, then who knows? Suddenly all bets are off, and your sneaky suspicions are confirmed: your rights were actually privileges that existed only at the pleasure of the ruler. Good thing you stayed under the radar, because the hysterical libtards on MSNBC turned out to be right: we didn’t really have a democracy after all. Thank god you were an early adapter.

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One sign that maybe we don’t live in a democracy anymore is that we all start getting used to trying to mind-read the President. Why did Trump reduce tariffs this week, after jacking them up a few days ago? Is this a game of 4-dimensional chicken with China? Is it something very complicated about interest rates and global reserve currencies that you’ll never understand? Or is there no real reason at all, and it’s just an expression of Trump’s emotional state?

Why is he so mad, anyway? Does he feel the righteous anger of the American worker? Or is he just pissed that Xi is making him look like a weakling? Or is he trying to prove all the haters wrong who accuse him of being Elon’s stooge? Or maybe something’s going on in his personal life? Who the fuck knows? And . . . you might be tempted to say, “Who the fuck cares?”, but unfortunately, we all have to, because another tariff hike could destroy the company we work for, our social media posts may or may not get us on some government list, and if we start bombing Iran because Trump felt cucked by the Ayatollah, maybe we end up in World War 3.

A few years ago I wrote about Norbert Elias’ book, “The Civilizing Process,” which is about how our social manners have their roots in early modern state formation. As the kings and queens of Europe pacified the lands and came to monopolize the legitimate use of violence, the political power of aristocrats became less a function of the military might each could amass to himself, and more a function of one’s social proximity to the monarch. In the intrigues of royal politics, mastery of flattery, charm, subterfuge, patience, self-restraint, the forming of alliances, and the ability to anticipate people’s reactions got one much further than the threat of force. These social manners of court came to be called “courtesy.” Those most expert in their practice were best positioned to earn the trust and confidence of the king, and to steer the king’s decisions toward their own private interests.

That’s how politics works under Trump. When normal presidents are in charge, we tend to interpret their choices through the logic of mass politics: they did this thing because it would attract support from that crucial electoral demographic; they did that thing because they needed to position the party on this side of an issue for the midterm elections. But with Trump, our interpretations tend to be much more personal: he sided with this guy because he has a festering, jealous hatred for that guy; he did that thing because he needs to remind this guy of his place. It’s all very soap operatic, like the court of Elizabeth I.

What that means is not just that the White House under Trump is a nest of vipers all waiting for their chance to strike at their rivals and bask in the short-lived attention of their king — it’s that we all have to sit around psychoanalyzing Donald Trump, trying to trace the precise contours of his narcissistic personality disorder. We have to, because his temperament is mercurial and the exercise of his power is arbitrary. He wears the crown, and his will is law. What’s left to us is merely to adapt to his shifting moods.

This is not democracy. It’s more like the feudal order of things, in which political power was a function of private, personal fealty rather than of public laws and offices. Worse than that, it’s like absolutism, in which there was a single monarch with an uncontested grip on power, rather than an array of dueling petty despots. Under absolutist regimes, the state became a mere appendage of the king himself — “L’etat, c’est moi.” Whether this describes the present moment under Trump, or just the general direction we’re headed in is a matter of opinion. But as with a ball rolling downhill, the destination is plain for anyone to see.

I’ll have some more original writing here soon, but for now, just a couple links to pieces I’ve published in the last few days, both on the special mayoral election in Oakland tomorrow:

• The first is a reported story for The Free Press.

• The second is an opinion piece for the San Francisco Standard.

Most of you don’t live in Oakland, of course, but as I argue in The Free Press, this election should interest you anyway, as a litmus test for the mood of the Democratic base in cities that have been driven into chaos by the party machine.

Apologies for any paywalls.

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This is Chapter 2 in my ongoing experiment with fiction writing. Chapter 1 is here.

II. Wilson

Wilson’s great-grandfather had come to this land from Ulster. Wilson knew this from the songs the parents of his parents had written, which his mother used to sing to him, and that her father had sung to her. He’d forgotten most of the words long ago; if he had any children in the future, he wouldn’t be passing along this tradition. But he knew that his great-grandfather had landed in Philadelphia, and then quickly beat a path to the Upper Savannah River. Within a decade he had sold his farm to some Germans and relocated again, to Virginia, then once more to Tennessee. All these words were in the songs. Beyond them he knew little of his family’s history before his mother was alive.

His mother had been born in Knoxville, which is where she met his father, who worked as a carpenter and an itinerant preacher. His father had seen the city burn. Wilson was alive at the time but too young to form memories. He was told later that the army had ridden all the way in from Michigan, which by then had joined the Commonwealth. Everyone knew they were coming from the reports of lookouts along the way; it was hard to keep such a large regiment a secret. But they assumed if they didn’t resist, it would be a peaceful occupation like ones in the past.

Instead, the army razed the city. Among the first places they burned were the fire stations. Then they went house to house, torching each in turn, and shooting whoever ran out. His mother had been shot through the stomach before she even got to the door. His father had to put a bullet through her temple to spare her from bleeding out slowly. He escaped with the rest of the family through the woods to the rear of the house. His older brother and sister died a few weeks later, somewhere in Arkansas. They died the way most people on the trail did: cholera. They got sick at the same time and were both buried within 48 hours.

Young Ford Wilson and his father continued on to Missouri and Nebraska, bivouacking in the forests off the trail. His father nursed him on cow’s milk, which, he was reminded often in later years, was a daily feat to obtain. When they got to Nebraska his father built a lean-to by a creek. They lived in it for five years, tilling the land and seeing no one but refugees, with whom they traded produce for coats and boots and flour and whiskey. Then one winter afternoon the lean-to was raided and burned by Churchmen. Wilson and his father fled from the raiders on horseback, with nothing but what was in their saddlebags. They made it to Wyoming, where they found the commune. That was where he had buried his father four years ago, when he was 14 years old. Like his wife, he’d been shot in the stomach. But he’d had to bleed out.

Ten days ago, from a high bluff, watching through a spyglass, Wilson had seen the wagon train passing. They were fleeing the Commonwealth. He knew that already. Caravans like this had been coming for months. Refugees from the wars in the east.

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By the time he arrived the sun hovered over the horizon. The hills that had glowed red like lava at dawn had already faded into a dull brown. Wilson swung his right leg over his saddle and dismounted his horse. He was about a hundred feet up a slope, overlooking the trail. Here the vast plain began to crumple into small hills. Another 20 miles and those hills would become mountains, with creeks and game. His oxen were recruiting on the sparse patches of grass below. There was a boulder wedged at an angle into another boulder, with enough empty space between them to crawl into. It would provide some shade to sleep through the morning.

He set up the bivouac, crawled into it, and gazed in a northeasterly direction. He could see most of the spread of the canyon from here. On the other side there were faint pillars of smoke, pencil thin from this distance. The extinguished camp fires of the sentries from the Church.

Wilson took a slug of water from his canteen, filled for the first time in days from the spring below, which trickled from the rock like a stream of urine. He lay on his belly on a flat rock and looked at the smoke through his spyglass, trying to gauge the distance. Probably about three miles.

The Church was at war. It would never not be at war. War was part of its doctrine. Wilson had heard the sermons a hundred times. And God became the enemy of the world, and he its enemy. Whenever he rode through its gates to sell hides, they would ask him to wait, to sit in the rickety pews and hear the sermon before doing business. He was a captive audience and thus an opportunity to spread the Word. The goal wasn’t so much to convert him as to warn him. The more outsiders knew of the Church’s readiness to kill, the more they would fear and respect its designs.

Wilson had always found the sermon gratuitous after the spectacle one was subjected to just to get inside the fort on the bluff. The walls were made from the logs of giant trees — bigger trees than any that grew around here. Their very presence here in this desert, transported as they had to have been over hundreds of miles, was a testament to the extent of the Church’s conquest of the land. Few visitors missed that message. If they did, a less subtle one came into view as they came closer. Strung along the tops of the wall were hundreds of crucified bodies in various states of decay. Most of them were skeletons bleached by years in the sun. Some still had flesh and meat hanging from their bones, picked apart by vultures. A few of them weren’t yet dead. These were the enemies of the Church — those who had refused to bend to its will by giving up their land. The men, their wives, and their children.

The train had secured safe passage through the territory. As long as they weren’t settling in these lands, they were no particular threat to the Church’s interests. Still, Wilson thought it prudent to keep his distance.

Pedro Gonzalez is a great writer and, in my opinion, has one of the most interesting perspectives on politics today. In a similar way to how both Lee and I became fed up with the excesses of the left several years ago, Pedro is an alienated right-winger who has watched MAGA turn into a cult of personality. I was recently on his podcast, and now he joins us for ours.

This episode is a bit different from our usual fare. It’s more personal and, in a way, less “political,” even though we’re discussing how politics shapes each of us, for better or (more often) for worse. I hope you’ll listen.

Social Studies is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

I also want to mention a new Substack by an old friend of mine, Professor Charlie Eaton. Decades ago, I worked with Charlie as a union organizer. Now he’s perhaps the country’s foremost expert on the economics of higher education — in particular, how universities have been transformed into cash cows for Wall Street hedge funds. He just started Progressive Disclosure (only one post to date). I’m confident it’s going to be an intellectually robust and informative newsletter. I hope you’ll sign up for a subscription.

I’m running an experiment in lifting the paywall for a little while from Social Studies. To compensate, I have to pitch more aggressively. To that end: please become a paid subscriber if you’d like to see this newsletter continue and develop. I’d love nothing more than to be able to afford to spend more time writing and producing more and better stuff for you.

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I don’t think people quite understand how bad things have gotten.

Two days ago, masked plainclothes ICE agents snatched a Tufts graduate student from Turkey off the streets of Boston and threw her into a car. You could be charitable and call it an “arrest,” but that word tends to connote other things like lawyers and hearings and judges that are unlikely to ever enter into the picture for Rumeysa Ozturk, the PhD candidate in question.*

I say there’s unlikely to be any due process because that has been the demonstrable pattern to date. When ICE agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil at Columbia University, they Shanghai’d him off to a detention center in Louisiana where they refused to let him see an attorney. The only reason they didn’t deport him is because a judge blocked the order. Ozturk is now in a Louisiana detention center, too.

Other deportees have fared even worse. The Trump administration has been rounding up Venezuelans on the basis of having tattoos. Not gang tattoos — any tattoos. Mother Jones reports on one such Venezuelan who used to teach swimming to kids with developmental disabilities. One of his three tattoos was for autism awareness, because his little brother is autistic. After arresting him, ICE interviewed him about his tattoos. “You’re clean,” they told him after he explained the meaning behind them. “I’m going to put down here that you have nothing to do with Tren de Aragua.” Then they sent him to a Salvadoran supermax prison anyway (Venezuela wasn’t accepting deportee flights). Unlike with Khalil, this time even a judge couldn’t save him; the Trump administration simply ignored a court order on the flimsy and yet-to-be-proven pretext that the plane was already over international waters.

Other Venezuelans sent to El Salvador didn’t even reside in the U.S. in the first place, unless you call being locked in a detention center “residing.” Jerce Reyes Barrios, a Venezuelan professional soccer player, followed the legal protocol for applying for asylum: waiting in Mexico for months and making an appointment on the CBP One app for an interview at a port of entry. As someone who had been detained and tortured by the Maduro regime, he had a credible basis for his claims. He was given a hearing date and locked in a San Diego detention center while he awaited it. Then the Trump administration accused him of gang membership because he had a tattoo of his favorite Spanish soccer team. He was shipped off to El Salvador, where he’s imprisoned alongside the most dangerous gang members in the world. Mother Jones describes another, similar case of an asylum applicant who waited in Mexico, made an appointment at a port of entry, was detained in the U.S. and then exiled to El Salvador.

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The American government, in other words, isn’t just expelling foreigners who are legally in the United States and sending them back to where they came from. They’re snatching up foreign nationals who dared to apply for asylum, following our rules to the letter, and sending them to foreign gulags. This is just kidnapping.

The justification for these actions are, if anything, even scarier than the actions themselves. Marco Rubio doesn’t even bother to claim that any of these deportees have violated any laws, because he doesn’t need to. If you’re here on a visa or, arguably, even with a green card, the Secretary of State condemning you as a threat to U.S. foreign policy goals is enough to warrant removal. You’re simply guilty by accusation. Even then, you’re supposed to at least appear before an immigration judge to hear your case. But the Trump administration is doing everything it can to prevent even that minimum of due process from happening.

When asked, Rubio proudly proclaims that if you’re here on a student visa but you secretly want to “start a riot,” he’s going to kick you out. If you’re in the U.S., he explained earlier today, “because you want to participate in movements that are involved in doing things like vandalizing universities, harassing students, taking over buildings, creating a ruckus, we’re not going to give you a visa. If you lie to us and get a visa, and then enter the United States and with that visa participate in that sort of activity, we’re going to take away your visa.”

Doing all those rowdy things sounds pretty bad at first, but look at how much work “participate in movements” is doing in this statement. You don’t have to actually commit any of these crimes yourself to be guilty of them. It’s enough that you’re part of a movement in which others have done these things. And what does “participate” mean, anyway? Do you need to be a leader, or just have attended a demonstration before? We got that answer a few days ago, when the Trump administration arrested a South Korea-born permanent resident who has been here since she was 7 years old and who once participated in a pro-Palestinian sit-in at Barnard. She, too, is being held in Louisiana.

But the bar can be brought lower still. Ozturk isn’t even accused of participating in an act of civil disobedience, like the student from South Korea. She wrote an op-ed in the student newspaper. For expressing her views on Israel’s war on Gaza, she has, by Rubio’s estimation, “participated in a movement” in which other people at other schools who she’s never met in her life committed criminal acts, and can thereby be deported. This “participated in movements” canard means that if you’re here on a student visa, and possibly even as a permanent resident, criticizing Israeli government policy is a violation of your status that can get you deported. Much to my chagrin, I’ve gotten into enough Twitter arguments about this over the last few days to know that a not insignificant number of Americans think that’s totally fine.

If you think your rights are safe from this arbitrary power because you’re a U.S. citizen, just think about it for five more seconds. If the government’s accusation alone is enough for them to arrest and detain you, and you don’t even get to go to immigration court to dispute the charges, and even if you did, the administration has shown itself willing to ignore court orders anyway, then the government can call anyone they want — you, for instance — a “visa holder” and deport them. You were born in San Diego, you say? Well, who are you going to tell that to? The ICE officers arresting you? The ones escorting you, shackled, onto a plane to El Salvador? Good luck with that.

Trump is going after lawful immigrants for two reasons: to show the immigration hardliners in his base that he’s deporting foreigners, whoever they are and for whatever reason, and because they’re easier to persecute than citizens. If you think this is just an immigration thing and it has nothing to do with your rights as an American, then consider the fact that as he carries out these deportations, he’s also blackmailing Columbia into clamping down on student protesters, citizen and non-citizen alike, and into appointing a third party to monitor one of one of its academic departments. And there are 59 other colleges and universities being investigated. The obvious goal here is to chill speech that’s critical of Israel, whoever’s saying it. They’re just declaring it straight up: writing an op-ed is the same as vandalizing a building, which is the same as materially supporting a terrorist organization. Citizens can be caught up in this Orwellian dragnet, too. This doesn’t stop with the foreign-born.

In fact, it doesn’t even stop with Israel. If ICE can arrest, imprison and deport people on the theory that because they have tattoos, that means they’re foreign-born gang members, what else can they snatch you up for? Wearing a suss-looking hat? Talking shit? Posting stuff they don’t like on Twitter? Well if they did, you might be tempted to counter, it would be laughed out of court. But are you sure you’re getting a court date? What if they suspect you’re a Venezuelan, or just pretend to suspect it? Can they load you on a plane and ship you to Bukele’s high-tech dungeon before you even get a chance to talk to a lawyer? Say you do get a court date — are you sure the Trump administration is going to unlock your cage when the judge finds you innocent?

How sure are you that the systems you’ve always taken for granted are still intact? How confident are you that this government respects your so-called “rights”?

*Update 03/28: According to CNN, Ozturk has a removal hearing scheduled for April 7. So I was wrong in predicting there would be no formal due process. Whether the April 7 hearing provides substantive due process has yet to be seen. Immigration hearings are notoriously rapid-fire, often without any defense counsel present, and immigration judges work for the Department of Justice and are thus part of Executive Branch, not the Judicial Branch — in short, they’re part of the Trump administration. I do not equate the mere occurrence of a hearing as due process anymore than I would a trial in a kangaroo court in a country run by a dictator. But I am open to the possibility that the process will be a fair and meaningful one.

I’m still deciding whether and how to change my paywalling practice, but I’m defaulting for the time being to lifting the paywall. That means I need your support more than ever to make this newsletter sustainable. Please become a paid subscriber:

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I’m ambivalent about paywalls. Most Substack writers probably are. On the one hand, they make money — my paywalled stories usually turn at least a few free subscribers into paid ones. On the other hand, they limit each story’s reach — I count my paid subscribers in the low hundreds, so that’s the ceiling of my total readership for each of my paywalled essays.

My aspirations for Social Studies are pretty modest. I don’t plan to get rich off of it, and in fact I don’t expect to ever make a living off of it, either. That’s fine with me. I enjoy freelance writing for other publications. Even better when I can get paid to make the occasional short documentary film. Substack doesn’t need to be my sole or even my main source of income.

But I do have to earn enough off of it to make the time I put into it economically feasible. Right now that’s sort of happening. I make enough to keep up a pace of about a post a week, sometimes more, sometimes less. But on a per-word basis, it pays poorly compared to freelance work. If it were just a question of money, I’d be better off discontinuing Social Studies and spending that time freelancing instead.

But it’s not just a question of money. I enjoy writing this newsletter and I benefit from it in important, non-monetary ways. It’s a place where I can experiment with ideas. Most of the places I get paid to write for aren’t dying for yet another essay on Pierre Bourdieu or Michel Foucault or Karl Polanyi or feudalism or colonial American history or westward expansion or a history of mental asylums or whatever I just happened to read an interesting book about. Here, I can just hit publish. Sometimes those posts do well with you, my curated and self-selected audience. Sometimes they don’t, but even then, it’s usually worth it anyway, because each piece I write affords me the chance to hone my opinions and learn a few new things.

I’d like to paywall less. That would allow my stuff to reach a slightly larger audience. It would also mean that readers could post links to essays they like without bait-and-switching your followers right smack into a paywall.

Of course, what removing paywalls would mean for paid subscribers is that you’re paying money for writing that you could get for free, and that thousands of others are getting for free. But my suspicion is that most people who pay for their subscriptions don’t really think of their decision to do so in these kids of transactional terms (I could be wrong). I imagine most are just chipping in because they like the content and would like to see the project continue, like you would with your local NPR station. Once you’re paid, I don’t think you can tell what is or isn’t paywalled in any case.

If I’m right about that, then it makes sense to lift the paywall. What it will mean for me in the short term is that my growth in paid subscribers will slow precipitously. With attrition, it might start going backwards. If that happens and doesn’t stop, then I’ll have to go back to putting up the paywall again for most of my content.

But if my hunch is correct that, with my periodic entreaties, people will still chip in even though the posts are free, then I can switch over to a largely paywall-free format. I would like that.

I’m considering trying this out on a trial basis — say, a month or two of no paywalls, but more frequent appeals to your conscience to switch from free to paid. Then I can find out for sure whether such an approach is realistic or not, and I can share what I learn with you.

My goal for this year is to roughly double my number of paid subscribers. That would put the economics of writing for Social Studies on a more equal footing with my freelance work. That, in turn, would allow me to spend more time writing here, which means more frequent and better posts. I’m hoping that moving to this less transactional and more voluntary subscription model will get me closer to that goal. It’s a little counterintuitive and a bit of a gamble.

But before I run that experiment I want to invite your feedback. Maybe my assumptions are wrong, and most of you will say no way will you pay for a free product, and will cancel your subscriptions if there’s no paywall standing in your way. If you feel that way, I would love to hear it — I’d much rather know that upfront than find out by spending the next two months losing money.

So I’m opening up the comment thread here to both free and paid subscribers to let me know what you think. I’ll also start the discussion on Notes.

Please let me know what you’d like to see happen here. I’ll decide which direction to go in largely based on what you (collectively) say.

Thanks for your thoughts!

P.S. If you’re a free subscribers and you want to, of course, you can just switch to paid right now!

Andy Hasselwander is an old friend and was once my college roommate. He doesn’t write for a living, but he’s quite possibly the most talented writer I know. He wrote this and I wanted to share it with you because it’s beautiful. It’s also long, so be sure to settle in with it when you have time, or read it in chunks. But please read it.

Afterword from Andy at the end.

—LW

I.

My mother is dying. She is 82 years old. She was born in 1941, the August before Pearl Harbor was attacked. She grew up on a leafy street in Rochester, New York. Her father worked for Kodak and overachieved his German-American immigrant status and two-year business degree to become an upper middle manager. Her mother was an Irish Catholic homemaker. She had a brother, Tom, who was younger than her, but died almost a decade ago. Her circle of friends and family has shrunk, like her body. She has her husband, me, my wife, and three stepchildren—my brothers and sisters.

The 1980s and early 1990s were her golden age. She was a socialite, wife of an executive, naturalist, quilter, and mother. She bought a sports car and drove it fast, bragging about how she didn’t need to shift out of first gear until it hit 50 mph. She spent her summers in the Adirondacks, walking the trails around her house and swimming a mile a day in the wilderness lake down the road. She became a 46-er—someone who has climbed all 46 peaks in New York State higher than 4,000 feet. She traveled all over the world with my father, chronicling her travels in albums with each photo carefully placed and labeled. She read voraciously—Roth, Updike, Atwood, Bellow, Stegner—and understood what she read. She painted watercolors, took up collaging, and played piano—Bach Etudes and Beethoven Sonatas—every day. I love her very much, especially this remembered version.

II.

Dying isn’t what you think. Doctors don’t give you “three months” or anything precise. People want answers—but the dying don’t have them. At the same time, nurses have an intuition for it. Yesterday, she wasn’t dying, but today, I have been told, she is. You want to know “will it be tonight” and it shames you to say it, but the thought of it is exciting. At least something will happen.

My mother hasn’t been herself for a long time. She has what we call vascular dementia, but we don’t really know if it’s that or Alzheimers or something else. No Doctor has ever really diagnosed her; she eased into it, and several years ago, caregivers would start using the term casually. She’s had something wrong with her for at least 15 years—or maybe longer. We talk a lot about “when it started”, rehashing strange events or bizarre behavior. “Was that it?” we ask. It’s a foolish exercise, but somehow it is comforting to try to separate her from her illness.

What dementia means, having seen it all too closely, is a decade-long shutdown of the brain and body. In hindsight, it progressed very methodically and predictably, but going through it, it moved unpredictably and chaotically. Long periods of stability would be followed by sudden degradation. Every prediction and decision we made to help her or ease her suffering or make my father’s life easier was wrong and foolish in hindsight, but in retrospect, with the information we had at the time, was rational. Even now, her body surprises us with its resilience over the short run, even as it decays inexorably.

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The curve steepened sharply four years ago. When Covid arrived on the scene, she was still living in my childhood home. Like many elderly people, she and my father locked themselves up to avoid the virus for five months. I would call them every other night to see how they were, and to remind them to wear masks when the grocery delivery people came from Wegmans. She would tell me each time we spoke that “we don’t know anything about this virus.” I kept saying no, mom, we know a lot, but I realized eventually that she meant that she was confused about the world generally, and wanted me to agree with her. So, I told her she was right--we don’t know anything.

Their isolation ended when I met my parents at their—now my siblings’ and my—second home in the Adirondack mountains on a warm week in August. Cuomo had given the all-clear for Marylanders to enter New York; my adopted State had temporarily gone below some made-up threshold metric of cases or something. I was thrilled to see them; it had been eight months since Christmas, when they had been able to fly to Reagan National Airport and visit for a week or so. We agreed that I would get to the house first, and wait for my test result to come back negative before they came, to avoid any infection risk.

I remember their car pulling up the driveway—the last time I would ever see my father drive. They were feeble but in a normal eighty-year-old way, and we had a happy reunion. I gave my father a haircut with the clippers we had bought to avoid barbershops. My mother enjoyed this spectacle greatly, watching the long silver locks fall to floor to reveal a pink scalp and a #2 buzz cut.

She seemed fine at first, but her energy waned within hours. People who have lived with someone with dementia know the “act”, a temporary show of normalcy, similar to a drunk taking extra care speaking and moving to avoid slurring and stumbling. This theatre drains the person’s energy quickly. My mother’s retreat was always the couch—first with a book, then with television, and eventually with nothing. That warm summer day, she retreated to her favorite couch by the gas stove while my father and I talked about the past year.

A few days into the reunion, I was walking in the woods and saw an older man. He was spry and agile, and I realized that I knew him. He was my mother’s age, and as a child, he had brought his family up to camp at the same campsite every summer for a week. We had gotten to know them over the summers, and I became close with his children. For several years, we reunited, they at their campsite, and us at our cabin, making the two-mile walk back and forth, swimming in the lake, and playing in waterfalls. My mother and he became close friends.

He asked about her, and I said believe it or not, she was there. He came by the house later, and my mother couldn’t—wouldn’t—come down to see him. I didn’t press the issue. I told him it was probably for the best. I wanted him to remember her as a 45-year-old swimmer and hiker, dressed in royal blue cotton shorts and a white t-shirt.

Later that evening, I was cleaning the house up, and brought her a disintegrating bath mat. I told her it needed to go. For the first time in her life, she acquiesced. Never before had she let me throw away one of her things. That was the start of a massive purge spanning two homes and three apartments, a four-year marathon of black plastic contractor bags, rolls of paper towels, cleaning spray, consignment brokers, and trips to the dump. When I was five years old, my mother and I would sing a made-up song: “To the dump, to the dump, to the dump-dump-dump” when we would make the trip to town to throw away trash. Now I was singing it again.

My father knew that the 220-mile drive from Rochester to the Adirondacks would be too hard for him moving forward, so he had made a plan. He would leave one of his two cars in the garage at the cabin, and then—this part gets sketchy—would have someone drive him back and forth. So, at the end of our week, my brother drove them back to Rochester and their car was left, battery attached to a slow charger. The car would never be driven by anyone in our family again; my brother sold it to his mechanic for peanuts the next summer.

III.

My father made plans to move into an “independent living” apartment a few miles from their house in Rochester in the Fall. They were in no rush to sell the house, my father said—they had plenty of money—but they needed to downsize. My mother didn’t fight him, which was another surprise. For years, as their house became dirtier, we tried to get her to accept a housecleaner. She refused, alternating between “they will steal my things” to “they wouldn’t be up to my standards.” Now, she was flat out OK with leaving her dream house.

My sister died that first Covid Halloween. She had been ill for a long time, confined to a bed in a Medicaid nursing home, but her death was still a shock. My mother pulled herself together for the memorial service and the burial. We dialed in from Maryland on Zoom, as Cuomo had decided Marylanders were no longer safe to cross the State Line. My father had purchased a green burial plot for her, having read about the trend in the New York Times. He got two extra plots for himself and my mother.

They moved into the apartment a few weeks later. It seemed to be going well for a couple of months. My nieces visited them frequently. They ate dinner in the dining room, but my father told me that people were complaining about mom; she never changed her clothes and wore the same dirty outfit every meal.

I first saw their new apartment—which they would only inhabit for six months—the next April. It was like a way station. Half of their furniture—all faux antique cherry and mahogany that had been all the rage among a certain suburban set in the 1980s—had made it, crammed into about a quarter of the space.

We were there because my mother had broken her hip going to the bathroom in March. After a week in the hospital and another in rehab, she called my father begging to come home, and against Doctor’s orders, he had a medical transport drop her off at their apartment. If he had picked her up himself, he would have realized it was foolish to bring her home when he attempted to get her into the car—but he couldn’t; he had crashed his car and vowed to never drive again a few weeks before.

Within hours of her arrival back at the apartment, it became clear he had made a mistake. She couldn’t walk, and he couldn’t lift her. She soaked their sofa with urine because he couldn’t change her diaper. We were there the next day, my wife and I carrying her to the bathroom to get her cleaned off, and then throwing the couch away, the first of many, many items of previously pristine furniture ruined and then tossed. While we worked, our son and daughter threw a football on the tiny grass strip at the front of their place. I learned that the only way to get her back into rehab was to get her back into the hospital. We called 911, and the paramedics took her away. My father looked down at the floor, in shame and hopelessness.

On that trip, we started the process of selling their house—my childhood home. Most of the furniture was sold for pennies on the dollar, or given away. No one even wanted the Yamaha baby grand piano. In our naivety, we thought that at least an annually-tuned, well-loved piano would find a meaningful home. It turns out no one plays piano anymore. No one wants Stickley furniture or Persian rugs anymore, either.

After we met with the realtor at the abandoned house, my son and I tried to find my father’s lost gold ring where the garden had been. He’d gotten into YouTube videos of metal detection, and I thought we might save the ring, given to him by my mother when they were first married, and lost while he roto-tilled his new vegetable garden, but we only found some nails and bottlecaps. It was a dreary, rainy day as I watched my son scan over the yard where I had spent many summers, looking for one last piece of an old life.

IV.

We moved them to an Assisted Living facility in Maryland in May of 2021. My wife busied herself with buying adjustable motorized beds, linens, and new clothing for my mother to replace the same worn jeans and denim jacket she wore every day. We were impressed with the facility’s dining room, movie theatre, and fitness center. It was just like any other upscale apartment building in downtown Bethesda, we thought. They would thrive here. I imagined my mother regaining her mobility, and walking to our house, or finding a new coffee shop to patronize.

I drove my father from Rochester to Bethesda, taking the scenic route through small Finger Lakes towns, and a medical transport followed us with my sedated mother, who still could barely walk. My father and I were waiting for them in the new, one-bedroom apartment at the upscale building when they arrived in the evening. My mother made a scene, saying that she wanted to go home. We calmed her down eventually. She asked my father how long they were going to stay in this hotel.

I wonder what she knew and didn’t know. Did she know she was slowly dying? Did she ever grapple with the fact that she would never see her home again, or swim in the lake in the Adirondacks? Many caregivers advise subtle mendacity when dealing with the demented; I am not so sure.

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I told her the truth once. She was again upset about the hotel they were staying at (it’s nice, but the staff are rude to me), and wanted to go home. I wrote up a detailed chronology of the events that had happened over the past decade—the hospitalizations, falls, moves, the death of her brother and step-daughter, and her current situation. I handed it to her and watched her read it carefully. She understood and seemed relieved. As I left, she teared up. I asked her what was wrong. She pointed to her head, and said “this isn’t working.”

She kept the sheet by her bed for a few months and would read it every morning. It provided solid ground for her for a little while. Eventually, she lost interest in reading, and the sheet was lost in turn. After that, I never told her the truth. I got very good at lying.

V.

They moved again, in early 2022, to a different “hotel” further out into the suburbs. Bethesda had been too loud and crowded, and we collectively, mistakenly believed that one Assisted Living Facility’s promises were more trustworthy than another’s. In reality, they had traded in their close-by one-bedroom apartment for a harder-to-reach two-bedroom—which ended up being a great thing. It would have been impossible for them to share a bedroom while she was dying.

The new facility was nicely built and had better furnishings, but was having trouble selling units, so the Private Equity company that owned it had clearly put down the thumbscrews on hiring staff. The food was lousy and the care was poor. It has since gotten better. It is now staffed almost entirely with African immigrants. I think they are the only people who want to—or can—do this job.

She fell again and broke her ankle just after New Year’s in 2023. She had broken the other ankle over the summer, spending a month in a rehab facility. I got a call from the Assisted Living nurse saying that an ambulance had taken her to the emergency room, with my father. She had been getting up off the couch and lost her balance. Her bones were so brittle at this point that pretty much anything would cause a fracture.

I assumed that they would admit her, but they didn’t. They put an air cast on, wrote a prescription for extra strength Tylenol (no opioids these days,) and referred her for physical and occupational therapy. My dad called me from the hospital at about 9PM. The new hotel had stranded them there and they had no way to get home. I drove to get them.

It was then that I realized then that she couldn’t move her legs other than pivoting them a bit. She was essentially paralyzed. She couldn’t feel it when I touched her thigh. I dead lifted her into the car, somehow avoiding an injury to either of us.

VI.

There were other medical issues that had piled up, too—diabetes, liver issues, vascular problems, all kinds of whacky blood work. She refused the physical therapy for her ankle, and permanently moved herself into bed. She now slept about 18 hours a day. Her physician finally recommended comfort care—hospice. It would be inhumane to keep shuttling her back and forth to the hospital for tests and scans and treatments.

I was worried when hospice admitted her. She was smart, she would know that hospice meant death. I was surprised that she didn’t seem to care. No, she didn’t ever want to go to the hospital again. No, she didn’t want to be put on life support. That Doctor was nice, she said, but so young!

I assumed that she would die quickly. Hospice, from what I had heard, usually lasted a few days. She has lasted a year and a half, eventually running out the clock on Medicare and “graduating” from her first hospice stint (that’s the literal term they use.) Of course, she just didn’t die quickly enough for them. It’s a funny conversation you have with the nurse; they push you into saying things they can write down to keep the Medicare money flowing.

“So, is your mother eating less? Yes?”

“Uhhh… yes, much less.”

“Good, good.”

She only remained a graduate for about a month. She went back into hospice almost exactly a year after she started the first one.

The waiting is the hardest part, to quote Tom Petty. When I call my father to ask how she is, it’s some variation of “she’s sleeping more” or “same.” There have been no dramatic events since she permanently moved into bed. Her routine is sleep, get her diaper changed (which she can’t feel, and has lost all embarrassment over), and be fed.

For a while, the newspaper was still delivered, until it became clear that she would only hold it as a kind of literacy totem. Television went from talk shows (Dr. Phil) to old movies to World War Two documentaries, played on repeat, sometimes in Spanish (she doesn’t speak Spanish), to nothing at all. Now, she speaks a few words a day “hello”, “yes”, “no”, all in response to questions if at all.

The decline is peaceful in a way. She doesn’t seem to be in pain. The hospice nurse has told us that signs of pain include grimacing, furrowing of the brow, sweating, and moaning. We think that her nerves are so shot that she can’t feel the pain of the bedsore that is currently eating into her bones. That is what will kill her, the nurse says.

So now, we wait. Hours, days, weeks, or months. Certainly not years. That is what we know. That is all we know. I am the family correspondent. We communicate on various group chats. The level of detail in the group chat is based on trust and intimacy. The one with my wife is brutal. The one with my brother and his wife is very direct. The one with my kids is sugar-coated. You get to be a very good propagandist.

VII.

The past four years have aged me and aged my marriage. I felt like a young man before all of this started; I now feel like an old man. Some of this is that I am older. I am now almost 50. Part of it has been watching my mother die and my father helplessly watch her die. You cannot understand the end of life until you see it happen. It accelerates time, while it relentlessly drags on.

My wife is a saint, and will not simply stand by and let this play out. She is always at their apartment, cleaning dishes, dealing with pantry moth infestations, attempting to reorganize and throw away my father’s endless trinkets purchased from Amazon, and most recently, cleaning my mother’s hands, feeding her, and washing her face. Ultimately, though, these acts withdraw equity from our marriage that I don’t know we will ever get back. Perhaps when she is gone, we will have some peace and can refill our tank of goodwill. Even writing this makes me feel guilty.

Modern society does its best to insulate everyone from death. Death is an abstract concept for most, and we have all collectively held hands and decided to whistle past it until the very end. We spend vast quantities of money warehousing the old away from the young; more and more I think that luxury assisted living is really for the children, not for the elderly. The granite countertops, stainless steel appliances, and lobby fireplaces are there so that you can feel good when you get in your car to drive away.

Ultimately, though, we can only hide the dying for so long. At some point, someone has to change the diaper, debride the wound, feed the mouth, and clean under the nails. I am amazed that some people seem to be able to do this every day and remain happy. It’s not fun for them, but it provides them meaning. Someone told me that the reason that all of the nurses and caregivers at care homes are Africans is that certain countries have built nursing schools specifically to staff the American aging industry. That me be true, but there also seems to be some deep cultural well of beneficence my mothers’ caregivers are drawing on that I personally cannot imagine here in the United States.

I wish I could say that this process has brought me peace or made me happier—even in the long run. It has not; it has deadened my nerves, made me cynical, and made me feel guilty for wanting God to take my mother. I imagine that the African nurses and caregivers who we pay to care for the woman who raised me judge me every time I ask them why they are waking her to feed her; I do not have their fortitude. I suppose that what the last four years has done is to make me understand the limits of self-deception. At some point, all of the trappings of modern life—the marketing and the furniture and the travel—fall away, and pain and suffering is met with mercy and compassion in a final act, and I am not up to the task. This knowledge, for me, has been sobering, but not transcendent.

Afterword: I wrote this a year ago, in the Spring of 2024. My mother passed in June, the morning after Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance (this is how I remember the date.) I have reread this essay many times since and it still feels very true. I miss my mother very much—even though she was not “there” for the last few years of life, my brain acknowledged something had changed after she died. I dream about her often, and in a small mercy, I now dream of her as she was before she had dementia.

I recently appeared on a few podcasts I thought I’d share in case you find yourself stuck in traffic or walking the dog and are tired of your playlists.

• I’ve been somewhat of a regular on Razib Khan’s show over the years. A few weeks ago we talked about the tech oligarchy’s hijacking of the new Trump administration. I love Razib and looking forward to many more conversations with him both on his podcast and on mine.

• I also talked to Pedro Gonzalez for the first and certainly not the last time on some similar themes. I enjoyed this conversation and have already learned a ton from Pedro’s perspective as a former far right-winger. I recommend his Substack.

• My friend Jenin Younes invited me on her podcast with her co-host Melissa Witte. Jenin is a civil rights attorney who was part of the legal team on the Supreme Court case Missouri v. Biden. She and I became friends over the last couple of years as we both worked to expose the online censorship of the Biden administration. In this episode recorded yesterday, we discuss the new threat to free speech and the First Amendment: the Trump administration and its attack on pro-Palestinian activists.

• Also yesterday, I published this story at UnHerd on the same topic: Trump’s brazen attacks on freedom of expression.

I’m in L.A. with the family this week so probably won’t be publishing anything until I’m home again. But at Lee Fang’s suggestion, going forward I’m going to use self-promotional filler posts like these to show off some of my photography (up top), apropos of nothing in particular.

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The Department of Homeland Security is now openly equating pro-Palestinian protest activity with “supporting Hamas.” From an NPR interview with DHS Deputy Secretary Troy Edgar about Mahmoud Khalil:

Elsewhere in the interview, Edgar effectively compares Khalil’s protest activity to “terrorism,” and directly calls it “antisemitism activity.”

We just spent the better part of the last decade suffocating under an ideology that equates words with violence, condemns people for guilt by association, and accuses anyone who dissents from its orthodoxy of racism. The Trump administration has adopted this same idiotic dogma to vilify its enemies.