“The American Scheme of Things”, Harper’s Magazine

by Henry Freedland, November 2025 Edition

From “Motet for the Record,” a collage essay composed of 121 sentences selected from 121 distinct works by Lewis H. Lapham, which was published in July by Lapham’s Quarterly.

The word “liberty” in America’s currently reactionary scheme of things slows the pulse and chills the blood. The story of Western civilization is for the most part a collection of tales told by, for, and about the ruling families whose smile was fortune and whose frown was death. Alas, nothing seems to do much good.

“It’s awful,” the historian said.

“All true,” I said.

The will toward self-annihilation is a familiar human characteristic. I don’t know what the less enlightened periods of history were like, but at present I can think of nothing easier than to outrage large sectors of public opinion by merely stating the obvious.

No leaves on the trees, few birds in the sky; the spacious vistas interdicted in all directions by armed men in black uniforms—police at the perimeter barricades, police on motorcycles, police drifting overhead in helicopters. Temporary cessations of hostility, but no permanent closing of the moral and social divide between debtor and creditor, and no giving up on the thought that some lives matter more than others. The depreciation of any and all values unable to pay a loan shark’s rate of interest transforms the company of gentleman adventurers into a colony of anxious squirrels. I don’t count myself a believer in the dystopian futures imagined in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World or George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, but I think it would be a mistake to regard the trend of events as somehow favorable to the cause of liberty. Which is why in times of trouble I reach for the saving grace of the nearby Twain.

How does it happen that American society at the moment stands on constant terror alert? Instead of one community, which might be described as democratic, there appear separate and distinct communities that must be described as totalitarian. That’s the trouble with dreams of power. It stimulates anxiety about a catastrophe that has yet to happen. Who better than the Americans to lead the fascist renaissance, set the paradigm, order the preemptive strikes? Trump apparently has as little use for the rule of law as Oliver North or General Manuel Noriega.

So also am I frightened by people who look down, from some sort of imaginary superior height, into the mirrors of race and class and see a face that is not their own. Attempting the hopeless task of conquering a peace, the Israeli army makes itself an accomplice to the murder of children. Their truths are absolute, their verbs invariably violent—“destroy,” “smash,” “purge,” “deny,” “punish,” “cut off,” “stomp.” Yes, they say, the world can be made to come to heel, to obey the commands of the enraged or frightened self. Jews who ask questions find themselves modified by the adjective “self-hating.” And yet nobody, least of all a committee of experts, can come up with the answers.

I find this incomprehensible. I begin to see what the desk clerk meant about the local tendency toward melancholy.

In the American scheme of things, why is the usurer (i.e., the financial magnates on the covers of Business Week) thought to possess the rank of a duke and the loveliness of a child? Why no mumblings of atonement for the predatory nature of capitalism itself, its core values and standard operating procedures no different from those of the beasts in the field? Despite the never-ending wars on crime waged by the producers of Law & Order and CSI,why does the murder rate in the United States dwarf the comparative statistics in all of Western Europe and most of Asia? Why would any politician in his or her right mind wish to confront an informed citizenry capable of breaking down the campaign speeches into their subsets of supporting lies?

Surely at some point the answers cease to be of interest. Narrative becomes montage, and as commodities acquire the property of information, the amassment of wealth follows from the naming of things rather than the making of things. The frontier dissolves into the lightness of air, and the world is full of holes. Children unfamiliar with the world in time become easy marks for the dealers in fascist politics and quack religions.

A practical man presumably finds this kind of accounting wasteful and deranged. The more beautiful questions demand the more beautiful answers, and if we can learn to ask them, we stand a chance of steering clear of shipwreck on our jury-rigged and not so distant star.

I look forward to the exploration.