It is Practical to Be Good

B. D. McClay on American idealism in the age of Trump.

Today, we are happy to publish B. D. McClay for the first time on Wisdom of Crowds.

BDM

is an incisive and original critic and essayist, whose range covers everything from contemporary literature to the value of posterity, from Taylor Swift to the meaning of beauty. Her work has appeared in The Drift, the New Yorker and the New York Times. She is a former editor at the Hedgehog Review and writes regularly on her Substack,

Notebook

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— Santiago Ramos, executive editor

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This January, while Joe Biden was still president, the Washington Post published a story that revealed that a USAID official, Sonali Korde, had pressured a famine-tracking organization to downplay its findings that Gaza was in a state of famine, clearly stated in the report’s title. She suggested stating it was at “risk” of famine instead, “a less severe assessment that the authors of the report said was not supported by the available facts.” When the organization pushed forward anyway, the article continued, the Biden administration censored it:

When the report published in late December without changes to the title, the Biden administration ordered the famine warning be deleted from FEWS NET’s website — the first such retraction in the organization’s 40-year relationship with the U.S. government.

I’ve been turning this ugly story over and over in my mind lately, as the Trump administration has demolished USAID, even to the point of manually overriding payments approved by Marco Rubio’s State Department. In the end it reflects the realities of American soft power. USAID does a lot of good and saves a lot of lives and its destruction will kill a lot of people. However, as an organization which ultimately exists to further American interests, there will be times USAID deliberately refrains from doing its stated job. Neither of these statements negates the other. In that sense, what’s there to turn over? “Mix of good and bad found in government”?

Nevertheless, this story has become a sort of puzzle for me. I do think that Trump’s administration represents something worse than what it replaced. But why? I know and love people who think Trump is fine — or even great — and I find their point of view understandable, even if I can’t agree. And I know people with a passionate attachment to a certain ideal of the public servant who similarly are shocked and horrified by what’s happening, and I find that understandable too, even if stories like the above, about Sonali Korde (which, again, took place under Biden, not Trump), temper my own reaction.

It’s my own position that I don’t entirely understand: that Trump is very bad and that what he represents and does and enables are all very bad, even though he inherits a corrupt and self-serving world that has also done evil things (and often gotten away with it). What I find disappointing or bad about USAID is furthermore not the same thing that a member of the Trump administration does; I certainly can’t regard them as a tool of potential reform. (In the same way, even though I also think there’s a lot to criticize about the American food system, I’m not going to hitch my wagon to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and hope for the best.)

To frame my trouble in, perhaps, the most tedious way possible: what does civic virtue mean in 2025? I do in fact love America very much, and consider myself a patriotic American, and this sense of patriotism is part of why I find the actions of the administration so disgusting.

To state the obvious: America is a powerful and wealthy country with an intoxicating level of idealism about itself. To be American is probably to be idealistic — even in our most self-parodying and self-disgusted moments, our cynicism is only that of the disappointed true believer. So, as an American, my own thoughts can only be those of an idealist. And my idealistic understanding of America has been that it is a nation that has, over its centuries of existence, learned to try to keep its promises.

We promised life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and preached the equality of man while keeping men enslaved. This dishonesty exacted untold amounts of suffering, not only in the blood shed in the Civil War, but in the people kept under subjection for the first part of our history. We made treaties with native tribes and then we broke them. When the Supreme Court tried to make us keep at least one promise, it was simply ignored, killing thousands of Native Americans on the Trail of Tears. When, in World War II, we suffered an attack on American shores, we retaliated by imprisoning tens of thousands of innocent Japanese Americans in camps.

Nevertheless, the idealistic language of America’s self-conception meant that our cruelties had a language with which it could rebuke itself and change course. In the end it is very important to most Americans that our country not only be powerful but good. And while idealism can be a dangerous kind of innocence that runs cover for brute power, it is also a compass by which to steer.

So even if, at the very rosiest estimation, America keeps about a third of its promises now, we still want to keep them and we work to keep them. If USAID abuses its power to cover up famine in Gaza, we retain the ability to say that this is wrong within our own way of conceiving its role and our role — that even if USAID is functionally a tool of American state power, it should and can be more than that. Such an ability might not do anything to help Gazans in the moment, but it is, nonetheless, important.

Thus what I see when I look at the Trump administration is a government that has no interest in keeping promises or even aspiring to do so. I don’t mean promises made on the campaign trail but rather the ability to believe that the government’s yes is a yes and its no is a no. The rights of transgender Americans to live their lives in peace and dignity — those were somebody else’s assurances. Promises made to refugees seeking asylum? New administration, not interested. Our long and peaceful relationship with Canada? Maybe we should just make jokes about invading the country and taking it over, to see how it goes. Do you have a green card? Not if we decide otherwise.

Meanwhile, of course, deals are cut for allies: sorry if you were fleeing political or religious persecution, but you’ll have to wait in line behind the Tate brothers and South African farmers. But this part, frankly, does not bother me as much. Everybody cuts deals for their allies, after all. (Nor can I get that worked up about the pardoning of the January 6 crew — American prisons are a hell from which I’d cheerfully pardon most people if I could.) It is rather the brutal refusal to help those who are not allies — either because they are from a population that the current administration views with disgust, like trans people, or because they are simply too unimportant to care about, like the children who will die without USAID programs.

The Trump administration gambles, and probably gambles correctly, that it can terrorize and neglect these populations to make a show of its strength. If people feel bad about it later, they can write mea culpas about how they didn’t really know what they were doing, but their participation now won’t really harm them or their future careers. I am sorry to say that they’re probably right about this fact.

But I do not want this future for America. I want to live in an America that tries to keep its promises. There is so much about this country that I love and it is being led by people who despise what makes it lovable. They don’t love American moralism, American optimism, American voluntarism, American grit, the American right to stand up to the government and assert yourself. They don’t love our rich history, or even our ideals. They are profoundly unworthy of America and of the Americans who have voted for them. (In fact I’d like to be as clear as possible that the people I am criticizing here are not Trump voters, but rather the elected and unelected officials making up our government.)

I am an American and that means I am an idealistic person who wants a country to be as good as it is strong. Of course, Americans do not have a monopoly on patriotic idealism: my belief that idealism is basic to being an American is what I’d call a limited claim, rather than an exclusive one. What I consider distinctively American is that our idealism stems from a sense that it is practical to be good — that there is not, in the end, a real choice between what is morally good and what is expedient. If we, for instance, abuse our peaceful border with Canada and suggest that we should annex the country, as President Trump has done, this behavior is foolish because it is wrong, not foolish (and also wrong). To me, the characteristic American outlook is that there are no zero sum games and that there is a possible world in which everybody wins, an outlook that somehow co-exists with an embrace of competition and the marketplace. It is a country of optimistic comedians. Or, as Alexis de Tocqueville puts it in Democracy in America,

In the United States hardly anybody talks of the beauty of virtue; but they maintain that virtue is useful, and prove it every day. The American moralists do not profess that men ought to sacrifice themselves for their fellow-creatures because it is noble to make such sacrifices; but they boldly aver that such sacrifices are as necessary to him who imposes them upon himself as to him for whose sake they are made. … They therefore do not deny that every man may follow his own interest; but they endeavor to prove that it is the interest of every man to be virtuous.

Even if the truth about America is that we have always been, in some ways, unworthy of ourselves, I cannot and will not abide these people who seem unable to like or even love America and its promises. I do believe that virtue is useful; and I do believe that Americans can prove it every day.

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