In the only article I allowed myself to read today, Tom Nichols of The Atlantic writes, “If I may invoke Winston Churchill, this is not the end or the beginning of the end; it is the end of the beginning.” Of course he’s correct. Complacency, despair, defeatism, and useless alarm are all acts of cowardice, and we can’t allow them to take root. However tempting. Likewise, he briskly lists a number of places people are likely to point fingers (and do so correctly), but adds that “as always, the power to stop Trump rested with American voters at the ballot box, and blaming others is a pointless exercise.”

He might have continued, but didn’t, that we ended up with this result because enough voters wanted that result. We had article after article before the election with titles like “How Is It This Close?” and the obvious answer is that people were looking at the ballot and making a terrible, terrible choice. Tom Nichols gives a strong, thoughtful, and intelligent argument for where to take things from here, and we can all get to that in an hour or two. For now, I’m left thinking:

O America thou art sick.

We’ve let in all the loathsomeness that came with Trump, and here we are. He hardly needed to campaign. We will have post-mortem after post-mortem full of finger-pointing and “what if” and “if only,” but the plain fact that the inflamed American imagination, full of fear and the desire to cast blame was awakened by this worm whose loathsomeness is destroying the American life is unlikely to make it into those articles. And yet that’s what happened at the ballot box, and that’s what so many voted for. The journalistic urge is to shy away and say, “Oh, we can’t say ‘people are just that bad, I guess,'” but people looked at 2016, at 2020, and at the ballot in 2024 and said, “Why, yes. I shall, indeed, vote for a convicted felon and abuser who with a passion for dictators and a deep-seated loathing for women and minorities.” No matter how you blinker yourself as you go to your writing, that’s what the people chose.

Are people that bad, though? I mean, if the country is that sick, is there a cure? Or should we just curl up in the aforementioned despair, defeatism, and alarm Tom Nichols warns against?

No! While we are absolutely that bad, because we did this and we’re responsible, that is exactly why we have to get up and clean up the mess we made. The precise danger is in complacency and useless alarm and finger-pointing blame. Give over those post-mortems right now, and just say, “We really messed up.”

Not so long ago, I was pushed into the ludicrous position of defending American literature. I am not a fan, really. I do have my loves: Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville. But overall, as I told my correspondent, I feel that American literature suffers from a soul which is fearful of exposure. The answer, I told him, was in E.B. White, a writer of essays, but also books for children. I told him:

E.B. White was a man who wrote love letters to his wife in the office, who wanted to be certain that he expressed his trust and confidence in her and, fearing he’d muck it up by speaking wrong, would write it out plainly, simply, and sincerely. He was honest about his struggles and forthright about his principles and views. He was passionate about beauty and poetry and, as he employed precision in language to express the nebulous plainly, championed a similar precision overall. He wrote a perfect book, Stuart Little, which ends wistfully but hopefully, mid-quest, as Stuart continues his search for Margalo, the bird he loves for her purity and beauty. He was bombarded for years by concerned readers desperate to know how it ended, not realizing that the quest was the point, that the book ended perfectly. Seeking beauty is an end in its own right, and E.B. White understood this so perfectly he didn’t feel the need to explain it. He just wrote it and did it, all his life.

E.B. White is not bombastic, and he doesn’t give up, and he takes responsibility for his own wrong actions when he acts wrongly. Steadily. This is the spirit of America we need now. Someone who apologizes readily and has no trouble opening his soul because he’s confident in who he is. This is not what we have chosen. But neither are we allowed to give up, because it’s up to us.

E.B. White wrote truly. Our relentlessness and curiosity have led us astray. But if we can own up to our mess, we can, I hope and I trust, pull ourselves up, and save ourselves from worse damage to each other, to the planet, and to the country.

But I do think that honesty is the first step.

We messed up. Americans messed up because, simply put, too many among us gave in to our pettiest selves and chose wrongly at the polls.