Bearing the Weight of a Crumbling Empire
The Private Grief of Public Service
They say you’re supposed to hate the world enough to change it but love it enough to believe it’s worth changing.
But what happens when you can’t?
If you’re anything like me, you slip into a deep depression. Maybe you stop taking care of yourself. Stop responding to friends and family. Ghost people. Fall by society's wayside. You lose track of time—of whether you’ve eaten, whether you care. Maybe, probably, you crash the hell out.
This past year was the hardest of my life, and 2026 isn’t getting any better. I could blame it on any number of personal circumstances. But the truth is that my identity—my entire sense of purpose—has been bound up in service to a country I no longer recognize.
I am one of those grifters who held a fake job, suckling at the teat of American taxpayers. All I wanted was to serve my country.
Like an idiot.
Captain Fucking America.
Consumed by a Republic with a heart of its own.
I.
I’ve tried denial. I tried four years of denial, then twelve months more.
Maybe this is just an aberration. Surely this can’t be popular. Surely there are limits to the depravity, to how far this can go.
The Constitution has survived worse—slavery, civil war, and mass internment. The fever will break, our institutions will hold. Someone, somewhere, will say no and make it stick.
I refreshed the polls, parsed the court rulings, clung to every retired general’s op-ed. I constructed elaborate theories for why each new outrage might finally be the moment Normal America would finally wake up.
Normal America did not wake up. Or maybe Normal America was just a mirage.
II.
I’ve been angry. Furious, in fact.
I know it’s not fair. I know I’m not owed anything for my service—I did not sign up to help our country for any promise of riches, glory, or any quid pro quo. And obviously—I say this with all sincerity—it is me that has been out of touch with the American people, and not the other way around.
But still.
I could have done anything with all that time. All those years, the weekends spent, the dinners missed. The friends who went to finance, to tech, to anywhere that rewards talent with compensation—they tried to warn me. I didn’t listen. I believed the work mattered more than the paycheck, more than the birthdays and game nights. Everyone knows the life of a martyr is a sad one—but at least, in his delusion, he finds some small comfort.
Public service is all I’ve ever known. All I ever wanted. And now that compact is being destroyed—by my own countrymen, who looked at what I spent my career defending and decided they didn’t want it.
III.
I’ve tried bargaining. Not all of his ideas have been so bad. In fact, he’s done some real good! The focus on working-class families and reindustrialization; the skepticism of forever wars; the willingness to smash through broken, sclerotic institutions. Maybe I can advise on the good parts and hold my nose on the bad.
I know many people in the administration—they are my friends. I have been to their weddings, hosted them in my home. I know they mean well. Many are smarter than I am. They want the best for our country. They tell themselves they are steering from within, shepherding their piece of the mission, holding the line against true absurdity.
Maybe the party will be different after he is gone. Maybe it will mellow out. You know—“Bad Tsar, good boyars.”
I wanted to believe this. I wanted to believe it so badly that I ignored all mounting evidence to the contrary. That my friends, for all their private anguish, were becoming complicit in ways they could not bear to name.
The bargaining ended when I realized I wasn’t negotiating with reality. I was negotiating with my own need to stay relevant. I wanted to matter to my country more than I wanted to be honest about what was happening to it.
IV.
I am depressed. Oh God, I’m depressed.
And ashamed. I’m not sure what to tell people when I cannot get out of bed in the morning. When I am so sick and so numb that the world feels like it’s happening behind glass. Our petty squabbles over talking points and NDAA amendments seem so irrelevant now, so insignificant—all subject to erasure by fiat. Like standing on the beach, throwing starfish back into a boiling ocean.
Whoa there, Patriot! Calm yourself down. Why take everything so seriously? Why make it your responsibility to fix things well beyond your control? Why not, I don’t know, get outside and touch grass?—My friends and family gently suggest.
Oh, if only they knew.
But I can make a difference! In fact, that is precisely the problem. I am one of those unfortunate few that, for whatever reason, some people, sometimes, seem to listen to. The staffers read my ramblings. My inbox fills with requests from people with power, who want to know what I think. I have access. I have influence. Not enough to steer the ship of state—but enough to feel its weight, and drown in the undertow as I throw myself ceaselessly against it.
If only I tried a bit harder. If only I had a bit more influence!
It’s 11:45 PM, and I’m settling in for another long evening in an undisclosed location. It’s quiet now; the building is almost empty. Maybe this is the memo that will make the difference. If I could just get the framing right, just make the argument so airtight that no one could possibly dismiss it—
I wake with a start. Dawn streaks through the reinforced glass, tempered to resist laser microphones.
But is anybody even listening?
I pick my head up off the keyboard; the soft glow of Outlook emails illuminates my face. Another night of noble effort expended.
It isn’t enough to save the Republic from itself.
V.
I am one of those poor saps who believed America stood for something more. I bought the mythology. I thought democracy and human rights and the rule of law were worth sacrificing for—worth spending my own life to maintain.
And now, here I slouch—crushed by the hubris that I could change the world.
Crushed by the weight of an empire with a heart of its own.
VI.
But I am starting to accept this. Starting to accept that the collapse is happening, that the cavalry is not coming—that my grief is not enough to revive the country I loved.
I’ve spent a lot of time reading the diaries of people who lived through moments like this. Post-imperial British mandarins watching the sun set on everything they’d served; Persian officers after the revolution; Russian kadets; Vietnamese civil servants who backed the wrong side of history. The literature of displacement, the memoirs of the suddenly irrelevant.
What I’ve learned is that there are basically four options when you find yourself on the wrong side of an insurgency:
You can fight. Join the opposition—the chorus of ResistLibs, the book club of NeverTrump Republicans. Keep sounding the alarm, posting the daily Instagram stories that insist This Is Not Normal. You can risk perpetual irrelevance, ideological extinction, or—in scenarios that no longer seem so far-fetched—actual imprisonment. There is room for everyone in the Resistance; just not a paycheck.
You can convert. You can try desperately to make their ideas palatable to your conscience. Find threads of continuity with the values you cherish. Convince yourself the new regime is natural evolution, not betrayal. This is what Soviet collaborators did, and German industrialists before them. It works, if your definition of working is to stay employed. The person you used to be won’t be around to object.
You can flee. If not the country, then the space. You can walk away from the cage entirely. Stop caring about policy, stop reading the news, stop pretending you have any stake in outcomes you cannot influence. Build a life so distant from Washington that what happens here becomes background noise. This is the path of many of my friends and family. Exiting politics has preserved their sanity—it only cost them their voice.
You can endure. You don’t fight, because you’re not sure it will accomplish anything. You don’t convert, because you can’t stomach the compromises. You don’t flee, because this is your home and your people and you cannot simply abandon them.
So you stay.
But you stop making public service the center of your identity. You find alternative sources of meaning—in your community, in your family. You pay attention to the small loyalties that have always been the bedrock of our society. When there’s nothing left to serve, you start finding things to live for.
Maybe that’s the antidote to whatever affliction ails our polity: remembering that the Republic was only ever supposed to be a means, not an end.
Enduring also means accepting that work becomes more of a job than a mission. You show up. You do what good you can. You cash the check and go home to the people who actually need you. You begin to experience the state as most people do: Not as an instrument to be wielded toward some awesome purpose, but a cage to be survived as you do the difficult task of forging your own.
VII.
My therapist tells me grief is not linear. That’s for sure. I find myself cycling through all of its stages—and, if I’m being honest, considering which of these four paths to take—sometimes in the span of a single afternoon.
In my 12 months spent haunting Washington I have learned that acceptance is not something you achieve. It’s a discipline you practice, again and again, each time you tell people—each time you remind yourself—bitterly, defiantly, wearily, proudly:
You are an American.
They say you’re supposed to hate the world enough to change it but love it enough to believe it’s worth changing.
I don’t know if I believe that anymore.
But I’m still here. I have not fled. I will not convert. I’m not sure I have the energy to fight.
So I endure. I get up. I answer the emails, prep the papers, and take the calls.
I walk back into the cage. And I try, for one more day, to believe it matters.