When power went out in our Kansas home, I pondered political disaster. Our only hope is self-rescue.

On a recent Friday afternoon, heavy winds knocked out the power at our home and a few hundred others in Emporia. Our old house on Constitution Street was plunged into silence as the din of daily life ceased. No hum from the refrigerator, no ticking of coils on the cooktop, no sloshing and slurping from the dishwasher. There were also no lights, and as the afternoon wore on the natural light from the windows became progressively weak and eventually left me sitting in darkness at the dining room table.

My wife, Kim, had found other things to occupy her. She read an Anna Pigeon mystery on her iPad and kept her phone charged with a portable battery. But I couldn’t bring myself to open my tablet or scroll for the latest news on my phone. It felt good to be free of screens, at least for a little while, so I sat in the gloom and felt the weight of the current moment.

It was March 14, 2025.

With no device to distract me, I was left to deal with my emotions. The last few months had left me disoriented, disillusioned and distressed. Echoes of the conversations Kim and I have at the dinner table came to me. Over meals and an occasional whiskey we would talk about the books we were reading, the particularly insightful news articles we had found, and whether American democracy could survive a second Trump presidency. We talked about how Democrats and progressives were failing us by not fighting harder against the enactment of Project 2025. We talked about what should be in our go bags until we realized there was really no place to run to, that you couldn’t outrun the current political storm as you would a natural disaster.

This essay is an attempt to convey the current mood, at least at our table. There may be others who feel as I do. Think of this as a dispatch from the dining room table.

I recalled other times, in more desperate situations, in which I was sitting in houses without power following a disaster. As a reporter embedded with an Army National Guard police company in 2005, in the aftermath of Katrina, I spent days in buildings without utilities. My soon-to-be wife Kim and I went several nights in her somewhat damaged home following the Joplin, Missouri, tornado of 2011. But those times were different, with the constant sirens and the thump of helicopters overhead, and a sense that normalcy waited just on the other side of the crisis.

But waiting for the power to come back at our house on Constitution Street felt different, a glimpse not of a disaster to be endured for a few days or weeks, but a prelude to an age of shadows. The tumult of recent years had been replaced with civil twilight.

Sitting in the growing dark, I felt the weight of time. Five years before, Kansas public schools were among the first in the nation to close because of the pandemic. We were told to wear masks and to wipe down our packages and groceries with disinfectant. I did all this and began compulsively washing my hands, a habit that persists. Donald Trump was in his first term as president and made the health emergency worse with his absurd statements about injecting disinfectant to cure the disease.

I marked the one-year anniversary of the start of the pandemic with a column about the sense of isolation caused by the lockdown and my dismay about how badly state lawmakers had handled the response. “If we deserve the government we get,” I said, “in Kansas we must have been very bad indeed to get the collection of clowns, miscreants and cult of personality sycophants holding the majority at the Statehouse.”

More than 10,000 Kansans would die of COVID-19, by March 2023, according to Johns Hopkins; nationally, deaths would exceed 1 million. But COVID did more than kill 1 in approximately 300 Americans.

It fractured society in a way that the 1918 influenza outbreak did not. A century ago, we were bound together by the blood and grief of World War I, an event that so shocked us as a nation we redefined, from Fitzgerald to flappers, what it meant be American. In 2020, we had the summer of George Floyd, nationwide protests against the killing of an unarmed 46-year-old Black man in Minneapolis. A police officer had knelt on Floyd’s neck for 9 minutes and 29 seconds. In attempting to confront our long history of racial violence, we were trying to understand ourselves, but the effort polarized Americans.

The pandemic also deepened a schism between medical expertise and populist politics, one that would lead to the reelection of Trump and the confirmation of vaccine denier Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the secretary of Health and Human Services. We had an interregnum with Joe Biden, but now Trump is back. If Trump was a populist in 2016, he became a sadopopulist in 2024, promising not governance but revenge.

In addition to the disempowerment of public health authorities, both nationwide and in red states like Kansas, the return of Trump has turned American foreign policy on its head, disabled the machinery of government, and plunged us into a constitutional crisis that brings us nearer authoritarianism. In the 62 days since Trump’s inauguration, we have already faced a multitude of crises, the most serious of which may be the refusal of his administration to comply with a federal judge’s order to recall aircraft carrying Venezuelan immigrants, without due process, to a hellhole of a prison in El Salvador.

One of the books I’ve been discussing with Kim at the dining room table is Milton Mayer’s “They Thought They Were Free.” Published in 1955, it was the first serious examination of how ordinary Germans viewed the Nazi years. It tells the story of 10 individuals and their culpability or complicity in the burning of a synagogue in their town Nov. 9, 1938.

“As an American, I was repelled by the rise of National Socialism in Germany,” Mayer writes in the foreword. “As an American of German descent, I was ashamed. As a Jew, I was stricken. As a newspaperman, I was fascinated.”

Instead of finding monsters, Mayer found otherwise decent individuals who had allowed themselves to be seduced by lies — and clung to those lies even long after Hitler’s Reich lay in ruins. Hitler was a great man undone by unfortunate events, most believed.

“Nobody has proved to my friends (the 10 interview subjects) that the Nazis were wrong about the Jews,” Mayer observes elsewhere in the book. “Nobody can. The truth or falsity of what the Nazis said, and of what my extremist friends believed, was immaterial, marvelously so.”

Mayer’s book seems dated now, especially by his assertion that “the mortal choice which every German had to make — whether or not he knew he was making it — is a choice which we Americans have never had to confront.” The book’s strength is in explaining how the desire to belong, to identify with a group, and to act only in craven self-interest, can blind human beings to the evil done in their name.

Another book that I’ve been discussing at the dining room table is more recent, Timothy Snyder’s “On Freedom.” Released in 2024, this new book is unlike anything Snyder has done before, in that it is his most personal book to date — and contains perhaps his most profound ideas.

Snyder contrasts the concept of negative freedom with positive freedom. Most Americans think of freedom as the former, a condition in which some outside force, be it government or something else, is removed. But true freedom, Snyder argues, is positive and “about knowing what we value and bringing it to life.”

Written after a long illness during which he nearly died because of a misdiagnosis, Snyder writes about the importance of health to liberty: “With respect to health, the idea of negative freedom is a dangerous relic of the past, of a time when the most that could be hoped for was property, slaves, and women to surround an ill man.”

The commercialization of health care and the refusal to recognize wellbeing as necessary to the pursuit of happiness handicaps Americans, Snyder says, resulting in a system that values death more than life. To be truly free, we must recognize that freedom is risky, unpredictable, and often exhilarating.

Anybody who has been to the emergency room and feared receiving the bill afterward will understand what Snyder is talking about. Even if you’re lucky enough to have health insurance, you may not be able to afford the co-pay.

Snyder also worries about the unreality created when our minds are tethered to screens and advocates for a return to physical books and, when writing friends, to actual pen and paper. He recognizes the importance of factuality and of local news, the importance of access to education, and the danger poverty poses to democracy.

I was thinking about these concerns the other day when it was announced the Trump administration had shut down the Voice of America, the radio program known for broadcasting news and entertainment to repressed audiences around the world. Originally meant to counter Nazi propaganda, it became a global news source.

The first VOA broadcast was in February 1942, beamed into Germany. “Today, America has been at war for 79 days,” the announcer said. “Daily at this time we shall speak to you about America and the war. The news may be good or bad. We shall tell you the truth.”

The VOA, which reached an audience of 361 million in 49 languages, discontinued regular broadcasting March 15. The Ides of March indeed.

The shuttering of VOA hit me hard because it signals the end of an American era, when we encouraged democracy by giving politically repressed audiences worldwide access to reliable journalism. Little “efficiency” can be accomplished with silencing the VOA, unless you define such efficiency as encouraging dictators abroad and hastening the slide toward authoritarianism domestically.

Six months ago, with Americans separated by a knife edge on the presidential race, I pondered what the end of our political equinox would mean. Now we know. Americans chose not the light, but the shadows. We are not the Nazis, but America is no longer the leader of the free world. We have turned our backs on our allies, given comfort to our enemies, and demonized the traditional American values of diversity and equality.

The killing of George Floyd was about the power of authority brought to bear on the body of a human being, resulting in the extinguishing of that individual. Floyd is one of many, both before and after 2020, but because his death was recorded on video by a 17-year-old bystander, we knew his name. His murder was impossible to ignore.

Mayer, whose book is based on his postwar interviews, described the ability of ordinary people to know something and also disavow it. Some of his German interview subjects told him the Jews taken to death camps were traitors; most of them did not notice, or pretended not to, when they disappeared from their town; only one expressed regret. “Everybody Knew, Nobody Knew” Mayer titled the chapter. It is easy to ignore the suffering of others when you don’t know their names, have no interest in their affairs, do not miss their absence in your town.

Snyder — who coined the word “sadopopulism” and explored the concept in his 2018 book “The Road to Unfreedom” — has written that the rights of those unnamed deportees bound for El Salvador were violated, but so were ours.

“If you do not know the details about operations that forcibly remove human beings from the territory of the United States,” Snyder observed on his Substack account, “you do not have a responsive government. And you are therefore at risk.”

Everybody knows, but nobody knows takes a new meaning.

Trump’s assault on his perceived enemies is not confined to deporting their bodies, but extends to trying to expunge references to race and equality from the policies that govern us. His purge of references to diversity, equity and inclusion from the language of government is an unconscionable attempt to remove the color of our skin — and all other markers of difference — from our collective memory.

It’s not too late to fight, but the hour is growing late.

After six hours, the power returned to Constitution Street. The lights came on, the appliances began to hum, the screens began to glow. But I didn’t look at the devices in the same way I had before.

To reach others, to persuade them of the necessity of preserving traditional American values, will take more than clicks and likes. We have the power to determine whether darkness or dawn awaits beyond this civil twilight. Our hope is self-rescue. We must leave the virtual unreality of our screens and put our bodies in the world. It will take real conversations, over coffee or perhaps beer, describing how easy it is to be beguiled by authoritarians. It will take heartfelt letters written to friends, family and acquaintances. It will take notes written to strangers and left in public spaces.

It might even take a new Voice of America, a sort of pirate radio of democracy, beaming out to dining tables across the heartland.

Max McCoy is an award-winning author and journalist. Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.