Eulogy for a Republic
A former government official prepares to leave the United States.
There’s a quiet kind of grief that settles in when you begin researching how to leave your country—not out of hatred, not because of some performative declaration, but because you still love a place that no longer feels like home.
It’s not rebellion. It’s not spectacle. It’s something harder to admit: survival.
For years, I worked for the U.S. government. I knew where every American embassy was in every city I visited. I would feel a quiet steadiness walking by the Great Seal, the flag waving above. That seal didn’t just represent power. It represented a promise.
And for a long time, I believed in that promise.
What I’m experiencing now—what thousands of others are feeling—is the ache that comes when that promise begins to feel broken. It’s not theoretical. It’s visceral. Like watching a parent decline. They’re still them, but not really. And even if they’ve started to hurt you, you still feel guilty for stepping away. For choosing safety over sentiment.
And yet people are choosing. Not loudly. Not rashly. But methodically. They’re applying for dual citizenship. Scouting schools abroad. Exploring exit routes—not in panic, but with a heavy heart.
It doesn’t feel like liberation.
It feels like loss.
This grief is hard to explain because it isn’t born of disillusionment—it’s born of belief. Of loving something so deeply you can’t bear to watch it rot from the inside.
We’re taught—from classrooms to parades—to think of America not just as a country, but as a mission. Leaving feels like desertion.
But what if staying means surrendering more?
I took an oath to defend the Constitution of the United States. Not a president. Not a party. Not even a flag. An idea.
After 9/11, like so many others, I felt called to serve. I was living in D.C., listening to the chaos unfold on public radio, trapped on the GW Parkway while the Pentagon burned. That moment—our generation’s call to arms—was clear. I wanted to be part of the defense of our ideals.
That journey took me everywhere: the White House, Congress, British Parliament, NATO, Brussels, the United Nations. I defended American policies in public and in private. Some I believed in. Others I questioned. But I always believed the people in the room were trying to do what was right.
What I learned during those years is this: our global leadership was never guaranteed. It was conditional—on our commitment to our ideals. Our friends, allies, even our critics believed in the story we told. They wanted us to be the country we claimed to be.
That belief held the world together. It stabilized alliances. It gave hope.
But belief, untethered from evidence, becomes faith.
And faith without accountability becomes delusion.
Maybe the truth is this: America hasn’t been battle-tested so much as it’s been lucky.
Lucky in geography. Lucky in timing. Lucky in leadership at just the right moments. We’ve long told ourselves we’re exceptional because we survived our trials. But what if we didn’t survive them because of our strength—what if chance just gives us that illusion?
John Adams graciously accepted defeat, making Thomas Jefferson the third president. Abraham Lincoln was assassinated but left a powerful legacy. A wobbly chair saved FDR from being assassinated. Joseph McCarthy backed down after being shamed in a hearing, and the Red Scare effectively ended. Richard Nixon walked away rather than becoming the first president to be impeached. Al Gore graciously accepted defeat after the Supreme Court ruled against him. We’ve always stumbled through and told ourselves “Annuit cœptis.” Even if I accept that “he hath favored our undertaking,” stumbling through and hoping for good outcomes is not a strategy.
I don’t think we’re going to be lucky this time.
And so we grieve—not just for what we’re leaving behind, but for the version of America we once believed in.
The myth of American exceptionalism wasn’t just taught. It was baked in.
We were the shining city on a hill. The last best hope. Ronald Reagan told us, “Why shouldn’t we believe that? We’re Americans.”
Perhaps in an evil twist of irony, even our unraveling was patriotic: “We were great once. We could be again.”
And for a time, maybe the story of American Exceptionalism served us. It pushed us to do better. It inspired our allies. It terrified our enemies. It helped us rebuild a broken world after WWII, win the Cold War, and create a rules-based international order.
But now, the myth has become armor. Anesthesia. A story we whisper so we can sleep while the house burns.
People will ask: But what about voting? What about marching? What about fixing it?
I’ve asked myself the same questions for years. I’ve voted. I’ve marched. I’ve testified before Congress. I’ve helped write legislation. I’ve stood in rooms where change could’ve happened—and watched as it was delayed, diluted, or deleted altogether.
I don’t say this lightly: the system is no longer designed to be corrected by the very tools we’re told to use. Partisanship is largely a performative art, not a real debate of policy or ideas. Reform is still discussed but never allowed to mature. We are not living in the America that taught us how democracy works.
We are living in the one that quietly replaced it while we clung to rituals that now feel performative.
If you still believe change is possible from within, I envy you. I truly do.
But belief is not a plan. And hope is not a strategy.
Behind closed doors, in meetings with our allies, I saw two reactions again and again. Some thanked us—quietly—for doing the hard things they wouldn’t say publicly. Others scolded us for failing to live up to our ideals.
But both reactions came from a place of belief. They believed in the story we told.
That belief is dying.
France is emerging as the new leader of the free world. Our former allies no longer trust us. I don’t blame them. If I were writing intelligence memos today—as I once used to—I’d be issuing warnings about multipolar instability, system shocks, and the risk of great power conflict.
We’re teetering toward war—astonishingly, not just with our enemies but even with our friends. The president, whether he means it or not, threatens to annex Canada. He levies trade tariffs against them. He mocks their leaders on television.
NATO, for all intents and purposes, is broken.
And what makes this even more painful is how fast it all happened.
A few months ago, my mother died. We had a complicated relationship. I didn’t cry. I didn’t feel much of anything. Until the funeral. Until I stood at the lectern, reading from the Book of Wisdom—a passage I’d memorized.
That moment hit me like a wave.
I’ve written speeches for presidents, cabinet secretaries, generals. But that one—standing in front of my family, honoring a complicated life—was the most important one I’ve ever delivered.
I had to pull it together. Because I promised my father I would. Because I owed it to her.
That’s what this moment feels like now.
I owe it to my wife. To my children. To the oath I took. I can’t just hope this works itself out. I can’t wait for someone else to be brave.
I must prepare. Quietly. Carefully. With the same sense of duty I brought to public service.
Leaving, when it happens, won’t be because I stopped loving America.
It will be because I loved it too much to pretend this is normal. I’d have to deny everything I know and have been trained to do to see it any other way. But that doesn’t mean I like what is necessary. It doesn’t mean I don’t grieve the loss.
The grief is real. But so is the clarity.
We don’t always get to live the story we were told.
But we do get to write the next chapter ourselves.
William A. Finnegan is a pseudonym used by a former senior official in the George W. Bush administration. He is the author of two Substack publications: The Long Memo, on U.S. and global politics; and Borderless Living, a practical guide to building a life beyond borders.
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This is beautifully written and I strongly empathize with the author's grief and sense of loss. That said, a lot of people were feeling much the same way well before November 2024 between the censorship regime, weaponization of Covid mandates, essentially open borders, student loan lawlessness, etc. It's been decades at least since the U.S. could quite be described as a republic, and I'd argue that dates back to well before the author entered public service. Wishing him the best in his next chapter.
To say I feel the same pain would be a gross understatement. Like you, I have spent my life--a long life--in service to the ideals of our country, and it is alternately heart-breaking and maddening to see Trump (and those who made and make him possible) shatter those ideals. I also agree wholeheartedly when you say: "belief is not a plan. And hope is not a strategy." What's more, the strategies and tactics we are now deploying--traditional fund raising campaigns, tit-for-tat ad hominem attacks on MAGA, demonstrations, etc--will not get us past this moment, at least not by by themselves.
Still, I think it is premature to give up, especially on hope and belief. Scores of citizens before us have clung to hope and belief to see them through in the face of grueling odds during the Revolutionary War, efforts to abolish slavery, the Civil War, during Jim Crow and the gilded age, the Great Depression, two world wars, Viet Nam, and the Civil Rights movement.
You are right, though, that hope and belief are insufficient. We need to wed them to hard-headed, clear-eyed, creative strategies for mobilizing enough people--3.5% of the population according to Erica Chenoweth's research--to overcome the forces dismantling the ideals that founded this nation. But it's early innings yet and way too soon to declare defeat.
I empathize with the decision to give up or even leave, and I have been sorely tempted to do so myself. But I implore those reading this post not to join in despair and defeat but to stay and fight until the fat lady sings and the fat man is defeated.