Capital Punishment and the Machinery of Death

In December 2010, I wrote an essay entitled “Capital Punishment in an Age of Abolition.” I began with Justice John Paul Stevens, then recently retired from the Supreme Court, who had written about David Garland’s Peculiar Institution: America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition.

I wrote then that capital punishment was “a barbaric remnant of an earlier time,” when public executions satisfied a need for “community gratification and fascination with death.”

Sixteen years later, I find it difficult to understand why we are still doing it.

The recent grotesquely botched attempt by the State of Tennessee to execute Christa Pike illustrates the depravity of a system in which otherwise ordinary public officials can convince themselves that deliberately putting another human being to death is simply the fulfillment of their professional responsibilities.

Pike committed a horrific crime. At 18, she participated in the torture and murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer. Nothing I say here is intended to excuse that crime or diminish the suffering of her victim or her victim’s family.

But consider this peculiarity. Pike’s boyfriend and accomplice, Tadaryl Shipp, was 17 when the murder occurred—less than a year younger than Pike. He too was convicted of first-degree murder, but because of his age he could not be sentenced to death. He received life with the possibility of parole, became eligible for parole in 2025, and, although parole was denied, will receive another hearing in 2031. Pike, meanwhile, was old enough to die.

They were both teenagers. The law drew its line at eighteen.

I made essentially the same point in 2010. I understood then, and understand now, the argument of death-penalty proponents: some people commit crimes so monstrous that it is difficult to argue that they deserve to continue inhabiting the planet. I wrote that I held no brief for Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer and their like. I was glad they were gone.

That is not the issue.

The issue is what capital punishment requires us to become in order to kill them.

Pike is now 50. More than three decades have passed since the crime she committed at 18. During virtually her entire adult life she has lived with the knowledge that the State eventually intended to kill her. Whether the woman of 50 is in any meaningful human sense the same person who committed that terrible crime at 18 is worth considering. So is the punishment inherent in spending more than thirty years imprisoned under a sentence of death.

But Tennessee decided that imprisonment was insufficient. She still had to die.

And so the machinery of death was put into operation.

That phrase belongs, of course, to Justice Harry Blackmun. After years of participating in the Supreme Court’s effort to construct a constitutional system of capital punishment, Blackmun finally gave up. In his 1994 dissent in Callins v. Collins, he wrote: “From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death.”

Tennessee has now given us an almost literal demonstration of that machinery.

Lethal injection was supposed to make execution more humane. The condemned person would appear simply to go to sleep. Gone would be the rope, the electric chair, the gas chamber and the firing squad. Killing would acquire the antiseptic appearance of a medical procedure.

But killing is not medicine.

In the attempt to execute Pike, prison personnel repeatedly struggled to establish intravenous access. The execution failed. Instead of leaving the execution chamber dead, she left it critically ill and on a ventilator. She has since regained consciousness and is speaking, but she remains hospitalized and her prognosis is uncertain. We do not know whether she will fully recover or whether she has suffered permanent neurological injury.

Nor do we know what the State intends to do with her if she does recover. Her lawyers are again seeking clemency. The Governor has halted executions while the State investigates what happened, but he has not commuted her sentence. Thus the extraordinary possibility remains that a woman who survived the State’s attempt to kill her—and whose ultimate injuries from that attempt are not yet known—could someday face the executioner again.

Does any of this make sense?

There is something almost grotesque about calling this humane.

Indeed, the guillotine is more honest and, in a terrible sense, more humane. The condemned person endured the terror of climbing the scaffold, knowing that their head would soon be severed from their body and fall into the basket before them. It was bloody and brutal, but there was no ambiguity about what society was doing: we are killing you. The same was true of the gallows, the electric chair and the firing squad.

There was no pretense that killing had somehow become an act of benevolence.

Lethal injection permits us that pretense. We surround death with intravenous tubing, pharmaceuticals and medical terminology. We make an execution chamber look vaguely like a treatment room. But the purpose is precisely the opposite of medicine. The object is not to preserve a human life but deliberately to extinguish it.

And responsibility for doing so is conveniently fragmented.

The legislature enacted the law. The prosecutor sought the penalty. The jury imposed it. The appellate courts affirmed it. The Supreme Court declined to intervene. The governor declined clemency. The prison officials merely carried out the judgment.

Everyone is simply doing their job.

And at the end of that chain stands a restrained human being whom the State has rendered completely helpless and whom government employees are ordered to kill.

The State, however, is not an abstraction. It is us.

In 2010, I wrote that the central argument against capital punishment was not whether certain criminals deserved to remain alive. It was whether our society could administer death fairly and whether the deliberate killing of prisoners was compatible with what we claimed to be as a civilized society.

The intervening sixteen years have not answered those questions reassuringly.

The danger of executing the innocent remains. The enormous disparities in the administration of capital punishment remain. The interminable appellate process remains, because shortening it increases the possibility of irreversible error. Yet extending it produces the bizarre spectacle of a government imprisoning someone for decades and then announcing, after that person has reached middle or even old age, that the time has finally arrived to kill them.

Death is different from every other punishment for one obvious reason.

It cannot be corrected.

And America increasingly stands apart from the democratic nations with which we ordinarily compare ourselves. Most of Europe and much of the democratic world have abandoned capital punishment. Yet the United States continues to share the practice with countries including China, Iran and Saudi Arabia.

That was troubling when I wrote about it in 2010. It is no less troubling now.

Capital punishment does not become civilized because we substitute an intravenous line for a rope or an electric chair. Nor does a bureaucracy become innocent because responsibility for killing has been divided among so many participants that no individual participant feels responsible for the ultimate act.

Sixteen years ago I concluded that it was time for us “to move beyond this primitive enterprise, and to have some leaders who are politically brave enough to say so.”

I was wrong about one thing.

I thought sixteen years ago that we were closer to doing it.

Justice Blackmun understood where the endless effort to perfect capital punishment ultimately leads. The machinery can be adjusted. The drugs can be changed. The protocols can be rewritten. The executioners can be retrained.

But eventually one confronts the thing the machinery was constructed to do.

It kills a human being who is entirely within our power and no longer capable of harming us.

It is long past time that we stop tinkering with the machinery of death.

It is time to dismantle it.

Arch Fantasy

 

With the midterms coming and the polls showing Democratic advantages in many areas, people are beginning to hope that unchecked, unbounded Trumpism is at the beginning of the end. 

Hopeful Democrats are already planning House and possibly Senate investigations of the not only the incompetence of the administration, but also its unsurpassed corruption.
Consistent arguments appear around how this president has gotten away with more than would have any other president in the history of the Untied States, even from the time of its founding, including through the spoils system, the Andrew Jacson era, the robber barons, the corrupt influence of the railroads on the government, and the crimes of big oil influencing the members of prior administrations and congresses.
Why have Americans grown so accepting of the misfeasance? What are the reasons for people looking the other way? Surely it is not Jesus’s admonition to turn the other cheek, even though the right-side members of the government callously use religious proscriptions to justify their acquiescence as well as their complicity.
As I wrote this the administration was blatantly ignoring court orders to admit members of the press pool back into the White House who had been banned by Presidential fiat because Trump did not like the coverage.  
The pundits now say that MAGA is on the downswing and America will recover from the harms of this wrecking ball presidency, the destruction of the Bonwit Teller Friezes that Donald Trump falsely claimed he would preserve, imposed on America at large. The idea that Trump was gong to make America Great again now occupies the same neighborhood as that beautiful art deco work appearing on the facade of the iconic Bonwit Teller store on New Yorks's fifth avenue, disappearing in a cloud of Trumpian builder gluttony. The same voraciousness that demolished the East Wing of the White house, festooning gilded insignia everywhere, and plans for a Napoleonic arch, created not by a military genius commemorating victorious battles in the conquest of Europe, passing the ideals of the French Revolution, but instead, a hallucinogenic fantasy idealization of a spoiled child who thinks he is Napoleon.

An interesting 26-28

There was a time when I thought the Trump administration had a chance of saving itself. I no longer think that. What I do think is that the president has lost his grip and could be hurling the nation, in his last two years, toward an irredeemable disaster.

The Iran war has been seriously mismanaged. Early on, there was an opportunity to capture Kharg Island and militarily command the Strait of Hormuz. But it would have taken an immediate commitment of ground forces, and neither the political will nor the leadership ability of this president was up to the task. The president would have had to conduct a campaign to educate the public and make the case for war—gradually, convincingly, and with reason. He is surely no FDR. The reasons are there, but this president does not have the ability to make the case. He has other projects in mind rather than geopolitical success, except, perhaps, enriching his global business empire and favoring his corrupt family.

I hope the further economic strangulation of the Iranian hardliners will lead to a more favorable outcome. And I guess, if you look at the early years of any war, there is still hope. After all, the Japanese could have invaded the Hawaiian Islands after Pearl Harbor; they took the Philippines, Hong Kong, and almost all of Southeast Asia. The Germans could have decided not to invade Russia and might possibly have invaded England. Wars depend on more than just good strategy. They depend on smart leadership.

Some argue that the Iranian economy is being destroyed, but we do not know how much pain they can endure in Tehran. If one judges by the war with Saddam Hussein, which lasted eight years and caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands on both sides, I guess a lot. The Iranian mullahs—repressive, totalitarian, and ruthless—are more than a match for the American president’s lack of character, mendacity, spinelessness, and vacillation, and for his band of hapless cronies, all of whom, with perhaps the exception of Marco Rubio, seem equally inadequate. Rubio is keeping a low profile, perhaps out of Machiavellian expediency, maybe getting ready to sabotage JD Vance in 2028.

Vance thinks the country would be better off with more Christian values, a reflection of his recent conversion to Catholicism. That does not play well with many Americans who are now suffering as a result of Trump’s feckless tariff policies and his reinstituted spoils system, which the country was wise enough to replace in the 19th century. Boss Trump has accomplished a partial restoration. And if he had not been reelected by foolish MAGA voters, some of whom may now be suffering buyer’s remorse, he might be in jail, where he surely belongs.

It is going to be an interesting 2026–2028.

Why we have not won the Iran War

The last few weeks have been positively insane.

The off-again, on-again war in Iran has been spectacularly mismanaged. The President of the United States is conducting a war like a befuddled hamster trying to escape from a maze. He goes around and around with no possibility of freeing himself.

Trump needs to send in troops to take Kharg Island and dominate the land around the Strait of Hormuz. Cut off all Iranian revenue. He also needs to bomb Iranian infrastructure: bridges, train stations, airfields, roads, and water treatment plants. This is a war against an implacable enemy fueled by fundamentalist, fanatical, revolutionary religious fervor, seeking to become the hegemonic power in the Middle East, dominate the Sunni Muslim world, and destroy the Abraham Accords and any reconciliation between Arabs and Jews. Surely this theological Frankenstein cannot be allowed to acquire a nuclear capability that shields its aggression. And just as surely, the President needs to step up to the plate. We have been at war with Iran for forty-seven years. We need to end it on our terms.

Unfortunately, Trump is more concerned with maintaining power in Congress so that he is not impeached for corruption, prosecuted after leaving office, and possibly sent to prison. The big house instead of the White House. (I did not make that up.) It has been argued that this was the reason he ran for a second term.  His prime-time crazed rant, absent of evidence, this time may finally wake up some of his cultish followers to his bat shit crazy 2020 election loss obsessions.  Because Trump can never lose?  Right?  J.D?  What do you say?

Shortly after Putin's war began, I said that the Europeans needed to mobilize and prepare to fight the Russians. They, too, are acting fearfully. That will get them nowhere. They need to send troops into Ukraine and kick Putin out. Issue an ultimatum. Conscript an army. With the aid of the Ukrainians, Putin could be evicted in short order. Dictator-bullies respond to force. History has taught us that lesson very well. I will not bore you with examples; just trust me. Putin has stated his raison d'être—the restoration of the Soviet Union, the collapse of which he considers the greatest tragedy of his life.

But Putin knows he cannot use nuclear weapons. Finally, the Germans are rearming (isn't that a frightening thought?), but they have the wherewithal to defeat the Russians, especially with their French and British allies. They must not wait for the mercurial Trump to leave them twisting in the wind if they do not meet his transactional agenda. (We know he is a crude, money-grubbing, gilded parvenu.) Trump, however, was right to make the Europeans spend more instead of freeloading on American largesse. Even a broken clock is right twice a day. The perfect cannot be the enemy of the good. Yada, yada, yada. Sometimes clichés and memes work well. Originality in all things is not possible. It may not be possible at all. There's nothing new under the sun. Okay. I talk too much.

These days, immediacy has become the public's default expectation. There is less patience for results to emerge over time. Social media, television news, and diminished attention spans all push us toward instant conclusions. People can no longer concentrate on a book. They prefer doomscrolling on X, Facebook, or Instagram, where snippets of information appear by the minute. I do, too. But I am old and have read many books.

If one looks back to World War II, which for America lasted four years, battlefield losses did not provoke roundtable discussions on CNN. People waited for the next day's newspaper to report the news. They then went back to their lives, clipped ration coupons, and hoped for better news tomorrow. Columnists wrote weekly columns that allowed people time to think about what they had read and form their own opinions. They did not simply tune in to their favorite network to confirm what they already believed.

I do not know whether that was better, but it left more room for thought. Yet here I am sounding off and expecting people to agree with me. Or not. Well, mostly agree.

The Founders Return

"Well, Doctor, what have we got—a republic or a monarchy?"
"A republic, if you can keep it."
— Benjamin Franklin, September 17, 1787

Morning

Dawn breaks over Washington on July 4, 2026. The city is unusually quiet. The first light catches the Capitol dome, the Washington Monument and, beyond them, the Lincoln Memorial. Three familiar figures emerge from the morning mist. They stop without speaking.

For several moments they simply look.

Jefferson: It has changed.

Hamilton: Everything changes.

Jefferson: Not first principles.

(He looks toward the Capitol.)

Some things endure.

Madison: If they did not, we should not be standing here.

(A long silence.)

Hamilton: Two hundred and fifty years.

I confess, gentlemen, I doubted our experiment would endure so long.

Jefferson: I never doubted the people.

Hamilton: No. You doubted governments.

Jefferson: With reason.

Madison: Which is why we required both.

(Jefferson smiles.)

Jefferson: We entrusted our future to scarcely four million souls.

Now there are hundreds of millions.

Hamilton: We stitched together thirteen uncertain states.

They united a continent.

Their commerce circles the globe.

Their influence reaches every shore.

I confess, dear sirs, even my ambition did not extend so far.

Jefferson: Nor mine.

History has exceeded even our fondest hopes.

Madison: As it should.

The purpose of one generation is not to prescribe the future, but to preserve its freedom.

(Church bells begin to ring in the distance.)

Jefferson: Listen.

Hamilton: Bells.

Jefferson: No.

Freedom.

Many languages.

Many peoples.

Many faiths.

One Republic.

When I wrote that all men are created equal, I understood those words less fully than those who came after us.

History has enlarged them beyond their author.

Hamilton: There speaks wisdom.

History has corrected me more than once.

Madison: It has corrected us all.

The Constitution

Morning awakens the city.

Hamilton: Tell me, James.

Has the Constitution succeeded?

Madison: Better than its authors deserved.

Jefferson: Better than its enemies expected.

Hamilton: Better than its guardians?

Madison: It has survived civil war...

economic panic...

world wars...

assassinations...

prosperity...

depression...

and every variety of ambition.

No Constitution preserves liberty by itself.

Only a people can do that.

Jefferson: Franklin understood.

Hamilton: "If you can keep it."

Madison: Exactly.

The Constitution was never intended to govern in place of character.

It presumes restraint where the law is silent.

Hamilton: A commodity forever in short supply.

Jefferson: Especially in politics.

(They exchange knowing smiles.)

The Argument

They begin walking toward the Capitol.

Hamilton: What troubles you most?

Jefferson: Not disagreement.

We disagreed on almost everything.

Hamilton: With considerable energy.

Jefferson: Sometimes more energy than wisdom.

Madison: Disagreement is the price of liberty.

Contempt is its enemy.

Hamilton: Explain.

Madison: We imagined no perfect government because we knew there would never be perfect men.

The Constitution was not written to guarantee wisdom.

It was written to restrain folly.

Every generation discovers new ways to test it.

Every generation is tempted to believe its own necessities justify ignoring it.

If the Constitution has survived, it is because enough Americans have remembered that no victory is worth preserving if liberty is lost in winning it.

Jefferson: Every administration discovers reasons to enlarge its authority.

Hamilton: Every opposition discovers an affection for constitutional restraint.

Jefferson: Human nature has been remarkably consistent.

Madison: It was the only constant upon which we dared rely.

Lincoln

The three men stop before the seated figure of Lincoln.

None speaks.

At length...

Jefferson: Who is he?

Madison: Abraham Lincoln.

Hamilton: The Union was threatened.

Madison: It nearly died.

Jefferson: And slavery?

Madison: It nearly destroyed everything we built.

(Hamilton removes his hat.)

Jefferson: Then our greatest contradiction became their greatest trial.

Hamilton: And their greatest triumph.

Madison: They preserved both the Union and the Constitution.

That was no small achievement.

Jefferson: Then perhaps constitutions are not defended by lawyers after all.

Hamilton: No.

By citizens.

The Republic

Night settles over the National Mall. Fireworks illuminate the sky. Families gather. Children laugh. The Founders watch quietly.

Hamilton: Tell me honestly.

Knowing all that has followed...

would either of you begin again?

Jefferson: Without hesitation.

Liberty has never been safe.

That is no argument against it.

Hamilton: James?

Madison: I would alter very little.

We did not write for angels.

We wrote for men.

Jefferson: Then we understood human nature.

Madison: We understood enough.

(The fireworks intensify.)

Hamilton: What have we learned in two hundred and fifty years?

Jefferson: That liberty is harder than revolution.

Hamilton: That governing is harder than winning office.

Madison: That preserving a republic is harder than creating one.

(A long silence.)

Jefferson: Alexander...

Were we successful?

Hamilton: Not entirely.

Jefferson: James?

Madison: No generation ever is.

Each inherits the Republic.

Each enlarges it...

or diminishes it...

before placing it in the hands of those yet unborn.

That is the covenant of self-government.

(The bells begin to ring.)

Jefferson: They are still arguing.

Hamilton: Good.

Jefferson: Good?

Hamilton: Better argument than obedience.

Madison: Better still if argument leads to understanding.

(The three men turn toward the sound of a familiar voice.)

Jefferson: Benjamin is calling us.

Hamilton: Shall we go?

Madison: Our work was never to finish the Republic.

It was to leave it in their hands.

(The three walk slowly into the morning light.)

Only one voice remains.

Franklin: "A republic, if you can keep it."

Public Sentiment and the Iranian Threat

Franklin Roosevelt was always a politically astute observer of the American public. That understanding was one of the foundations of his success as a leader and one of the reasons he was elected four times. He understood well what Abraham Lincoln meant when he wrote that "Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed. Consequently, he who molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions."

Moving America from isolationism to a war footing was a herculean task. Mobilization required more than factories and ships. It required shaping public will. Roosevelt accomplished it incrementally through a long campaign of persuasion: a fireside chat here, a warning there, a patient explanation of gathering dangers abroad. He spoke to Americans with intimacy and confidence. There was little braggadocio, little exaggeration, and no obvious effort at self-glorification. Most importantly, the public generally believed he was telling the truth.

Events in Europe certainly helped his case. Britain was being blitzed nightly. France had fallen. Much of Eastern Europe already lay in ruins beneath the Nazi boot. The threat was becoming harder to ignore.

Yet Americans remained deeply reluctant. Barely twenty years earlier they had endured the slaughter of the First World War. The mud of the trenches, the bloodshed, and the Spanish influenza pandemic remained vivid memories. The prevailing sentiment was simple: no more foreign wars.

Roosevelt therefore moved step by step. Rearmament. Cash-and-carry. The first peacetime draft in American history. The destroyers-for-bases agreement. Lend-Lease, which he famously compared to lending a neighbor a garden hose to extinguish a fire without demanding payment in advance. Each measure would have been politically impossible had he attempted it all at once.

The present administration has done none of this with respect to Iran. It has not undertaken a sustained effort to explain the Iranian threat to the American people. It has not sought congressional support. It has not articulated a coherent strategic vision. As a result, many Americans believe the United States is merely being dragged into another Middle Eastern conflict on behalf of Israel rather than confronting a threat that affects Western interests more broadly.

Iran's rulers seek regional dominance. They aspire to exercise influence or control through proxies and client forces stretching from Lebanon and Syria to Yemen and beyond. They seek a nuclear umbrella beneath which that influence could expand further. They have repeatedly threatened Israel, challenged freedom of navigation in the Persian Gulf, and used disruption of maritime commerce as leverage against the world economy.

The economic implications are not abstract. A closure or serious disruption of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz has reverberated through global energy markets and affected consumers far removed from the Middle East. The resulting instability has not stopped at the region's borders.

Nor is the problem purely economic. The regime's ideology is fundamentally hostile to liberal democracy. As Douglas Murray has observed, it is animated by a revolutionary religious zeal that is difficult for secular Western societies to comprehend. When political leaders repeatedly proclaim their intentions, prudence suggests we should take them seriously.

Iran must not acquire a nuclear weapon. On that point there appears to be broad agreement across much of the American political spectrum. President Trump likely understands this. Yet understanding a danger and persuading a nation to confront it are two different things.

Roosevelt understood that the cost of confronting a threat early is often less than the cost of confronting it later. He recognized that free citizens had to be persuaded that a distant threat would eventually become their own. A Nazi-dominated Europe, he believed, would ultimately threaten American security and prosperity.

Iran is not Nazi Germany. Historical analogies always break down if pressed too far. Yet Roosevelt never had to contemplate a Nazi regime on the threshold of acquiring nuclear weapons. But the lesson Roosevelt taught was not about Germany. It was about leadership. Democracies do not automatically mobilize in response to distant dangers. Their leaders must explain, persuade, educate, and prepare.

Despite placing himself rhetorically alongside Lincoln, President Trump has yet to demonstrate Roosevelt's understanding of broad public sentiment. Leadership requires more than declarations, slogans, or social-media posts. It requires building a durable public consensus behind difficult decisions.

Whether this president possesses that capacity remains an open question. The stakes are high enough that Americans deserve a clear answer.

Az Me Darf a Gonef

My father was a hotelman. He often relied on unreliable employees who either did not show up for work, got drunk, or were dishonest. He would stand by the window watching employees sneak off the premises with towels or food from the kitchen hidden in laundry baskets. The aggravation never ended, yet he needed them to run the hotel.

One day, in youthful innocence, I asked him, “Dad, why don’t you just fire the ones that are dishonest or don’t show up?”

He looked back at me wistfully and said, “Duvid, Az me darf a ganef, nemt men im fun der tlie.”

“If one needs a thief, one takes him from the gallows.”

These marginal employees often lasted only until payday, when they inevitably got drunk or disappeared, leaving the kitchen and dining room short staffed. Dad would find himself back in the kitchen cooking, washing dishes, and mopping floors. The philosophy that sounded so practical in the moment simply kicked the proverbial can down the road. It solved nothing permanently, but it functioned long enough to get through the rush season.

America made a similar Faustian bargain with Donald Trump.

Many Americans believed he would cure the ills he railed against: inflation, unemployment, foreign wars, uncontrolled immigration, jobs lost to globalization, and institutions they believed had abandoned or humiliated them. Some were hanging on economically while working two jobs. Others watched manufacturing towns collapse after decades of trade deals that exported jobs to countries with cheap labor. Many believed cultural elites looked down on them as backward, disposable, or irrelevant.

Trump understood that anger better than his opponents did.

To his supporters, he was not merely a politician. He was a battering ram. A man willing to fight institutions they believed no longer represented them. They overlooked the vulgarity, the dishonesty, the chaos, because they believed only someone outside the accepted rules could break a system they thought was already corrupted against them.

In their minds, they were cutting the thief down from the gallows because they needed him.

And, in fairness, some of the administration’s policies did address real concerns. Illegal immigration was reduced. NATO allies were pressured to spend more on defense. Iranian proxies were weakened. The administration projected strength in ways many Americans found reassuring after years of drift and uncertainty.

But the bargain carried costs that grow more visible by the day.

We have watched a kaleidoscope of ethical evasions, loyalty tests, self dealing, and assaults on institutional norms. A President increasingly treating the machinery of government as personal property. An Attorney General viewed by critics less as guardian of the Constitution than as personal counsel to the man who appointed him. The line between public duty and private protection has become dangerously blurred.

Yet if one opposes this administration only with outrage and moral superiority, one learns nothing.

Economic dislocation is real. Cultural humiliation is real. The anger of people who believed themselves abandoned by political, financial, and media elites is real. A democracy that ignores those realities creates conditions in which citizens become willing to make dangerous bargains.

That may be the enduring lesson of Faust.

Faust thought the devil would bail him out of a universe of despair. Americans, too, sought a solution for profound dissatisfaction — revenge against scornful elites, relief from insecurity, humiliation, economic fear, and the feeling that the people running the country neither understood nor respected them anymore.

But Goethe’s Faust obtained redemption not because he was innocent, but because he kept striving to be better. The damnation of eternal hell was avoided because Faust never stopped reaching beyond his own failures and illusions toward something higher than himself.

So, too, must we strive to blow past this dark chapter of our times.

Not merely by condemning one man, however deserving of condemnation he may be, but by understanding how millions of Americans came to believe that cutting the thief down from the gallows was their only remaining choice.