The “I” Word
“I may do it. I may not do it. Nobody knows what I’m going to do.”
Donald Trump, when asked about bombing Iran, June 18, 2025.
While Bobby Kennedy’s people at Health and Human Services were making a series of confusing and contradictory decisions about vaccine research, I got Covid. I didn’t take it personally; I’m sure the timing was coincidental. Covid ain’t what it used to be, but it’s not much fun. Apart from an endless cough, my main symptoms were fatigue and depression, both of which are still hanging around long after the virus itself has gone.
Depressed is not what I want to feel in these times as I watch Donald Trump dismantling the institutions of this country, not one by one, but all at once. As someone who came of age in the turbulent 1960s, I have not always been sympathetic to the role institutions play in the life and health of the nation. Not all institutions are good, and none is perfect. Slavery, for example, was America’s “peculiar institution,” one that threatened both the existence and the soul of the nation. And I spent three years in the army at a time when National Guard troops fired into student protesters at Kent State, killing four and wounding nine.
But institutions, I have learned, are the glue that holds the country together. The most basic are the three branches of government as set forth in the Constitution, three separate branches that are meant to check each other even as they work together as single whole. This secular trinity is a difficult concept to wrap your brain around, and yet, except for the Civil War, it has held us together through some very tough times.
Our constitutional form of government grew out of the Enlightenment, which had taken firm hold in Europe and America by the mid-18th century. The Enlightenment elevated reason over passion, which is the other great foundation stone of our republic. From those two pillars – the separation of powers and the primacy of reason – grew a state marked by representative government and based on the rule of law, in which both individual rights and religious liberty were protected.
These ideas stood in contrast to the absolute monarchies and religious intolerance that had previously dominated much of the world; and from them have flowed the institutions on which this country has relied for the last two-and-a-half centuries – including a free press, academic freedom, an independent judiciary, and a non-politicized military. Their purpose has been to serve as a check on demagoguery and to protect the rights of those in the minority and others who are out of favor.
The alternative, as our founding fathers warned, is a kind of mob rule in which tyrants recast the institutions that brought them to power into instruments of their own will. They seek to replace “we” with “I”. See, for example, January 6, 2021.
That is what is dismaying about this weekend’s bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities. I have no more idea than anyone else what the ultimate outcome will be; and it is fine to say, as some have, that this is Donald Trump’s war. But it isn’t. It’s being waged in the name of our country, which is why the Constitution unequivocally gives to Congress the power to declare war.
“L’etat c’est moi” (“I am the state”), Louis XIV, king of France, is alleged to have said in the 17th century. One hundred years later, the Constitution of the United States began with the words, “We the People.”
That epic change is simple to describe: There is no I in We the People.
Note: I plan to be on a reduced schedule this summer, as our house will be filled with the laughter and tears of children. They are the reason I still write these posts.