Americana, Rebooted

Announcing "Diary of the Late Republic"

Diary of the Late Republic, #1

I am, by temperament and training, a historian: I’ve spent most of my life reading, thinking, teaching, and writing about the past. But I have long had an ambition to somehow capture and document my own times. I have in fact made such attempts—as in a textbook I wrote about the history of the United States since World War II, for example, and some modest forays into fiction centered on teaching. When I launched this Substack almost two years ago now, I used it as a vehicle to share, in 750-1500 word sequential segments, an unpublished manuscript (one of two of about twenty I was unable to turn into a book) with the working title “Everyday Life in the Late American Empire.” Perhaps you were kind enough to peruse these pieces, which covered school, work, play, home, love, and faith in a contemporary context from a historical perspective.

My writing life has proceeded in cycles, and I am now at the end of a seven-year period in which I’ve worked on a set of about eight projects, the last of which is slated to surface next year. I am exhausted. I don’t exactly mean that in the sense of fatigue, but rather a sense of being tired of what has begun to seem like doing the same thing over and over again. And more importantly, feeling I have run out of things I’d care to say at book length, which has constituted most of my output. I don’t know how much, if any, productive work I have left in me, but insofar as I do, I believe I need to change my rhythm, which is what brings me to the matter at hand.

I still haven’t relinquished my ambition to crystallize a document of our time. But I think I have to go about it in a different way. For one thing, I don’t think I can keep churning out books. I say so not only as a matter of finite talent, but also access: books are receding as a functioning means of discourse for anyone but those with a major cultural platform—and books are now a means of promoting one’s place on the platform at least much as the platform enabling the publication of the book. I say so in sorrow, both as a matter or confronting my personal limits, as well as watching a part of the life of a civilization change, as all civilizations do. But the soul of vitality is the will and ability to persist amid them, however imperfectly. And so I proceed.

In recent days, I have become interested in a modern literary form that generally has little prestige but on occasion can be exceptionally useful and revealing: the diary. Diaries tend to be loose, repetitive, and irregular. But at their best, they can be vivid and illuminating, and they furnish the very tissue of history, the basis of so many stories we subsequently tell.

In our collective imagination, diaries begin as blank books that are filled with handwritten entries. They are usually personal, but always have an implicit audience—an at least imaginary set of eyes that furnish the sense of perspective and detachment that the very act of writing requires. That sense of distance may be spatial or temporal. Indeed, one of the most useful and revealing aspects of diaries is the way they show what their writers did, and didn’t, understand in retrospect on any given topic. That’s why they’re such compelling works of primary source history—as much for their mistakes and misperceptions as any predictions that turned out right.

Technology affords a change in form, if not of essence. What I have in mind here is what might be termed a digital diary: online postings of whatever topic grabs my fancy on a given day, filtered through the perspective I have honed for many years as a historian. The topics may range from presidential politics to the Gala apple I just bit into. I’ll be playing a game of percentages: some of these pieces are likely to be more compelling than others, whether as a matter of insight or happening to broach a topic that you’ve often thought about as well. My hope is that over time, a usefully consistent perspective may emerge, perhaps pointing the way as to where I might go next. Which may well be retirement.

My thinking is that these pieces will be shorter, but more frequent, than the typically weekly postings I have put up on this Substack. I may continue to publish longer and more polished pieces of the kind I have all along, though I’m hoping my work for Current magazine (check it out!) will become the primary vehicle for such essays. But it is in the nature of experiments that they be, well, experimental, and I am trying to honor the spirit of that enterprise. I don’t rightly know what will happen.

One last point—one that is likely to recur many times in many ways in the coming days. I’m calling this little project “Diary of the Late Republic.”  I have spent my whole life thinking I was alive at the end of something, a belief that is rooted in temperament more than any argument I’ve made successfully. But I do believe that here at the end of the first quarter of the twenty-first century, there is a widespread and pervasive perception in the culture at large—much bigger than my own fallible notions—that a way of life that has sustained us geopolitically is about to end. That perception, even if it’s wrong, is an artifact worthy of examination in its own right. That’s why I’m using the designation late republic: because I simply can’t imagine the Constitutional framework that has sustained the United States for almost 250 years can last anything like that in the future. In reality, we might already just be going through the motions: “late” might also connote “dead.” The Roman Senate continued to meet for centuries after the Republic was replaced by the Empire, because the Caesars typically found it more convenient to sidestep senators than formally overthrow them.

I am nervous and uncertain. Which I think is the right place to be. Shall we begin?