◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

Morning I was born in Tampico, Illinois. Population eight hundred. My father was a shoe salesman who drank. My mother read us the Bible and believed it. I grew up believing in the New Deal. Franklin Roosevelt saved this country and I campaigned for Democrats and I meant it. Something changed. Not my values. My diagnosis. I came to believe that government, past a certain size, stops serving the people and starts serving itself. I still believe that. But I want to tell you what I meant by it and what I did not mean — because the difference matters now more than it has ever mattered. I called it the shining city on a hill. Let me tell you what I actually said. I said it was a tall proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, teeming with people of all kinds — and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors, and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get there. Walls with doors. Open to anyone with the will and the heart. That is the city I described. I did not describe a city that closes its doors and calls the closing strength. The closing is not strength. The closing is fear. And fear dressed up as patriotism is still fear. I spent eight years working to reduce the size of government. I believed — I still believe — that government that governs least governs best, that the people closest to a problem are better positioned to solve it than the people in Washington. I acted on this and some of what followed I am proud of and some of what followed I did not intend. When you tell a generation that government is the enemy — that the institution is always the problem, that the expert is always the obstacle — you do not always produce the lean and liberty-loving republic you intended. Sometimes you produce the man who has learned that the institution can be destroyed and calls the destruction freedom. That is not what I meant. I meant: limit the government. Reform it. Make it answer to the people. I did not mean: burn it down. There is a difference. I was an actor. People said that as an insult. I took it as a description. Leadership is partly performance — the story a president tells shapes what the country believes about itself. Morning in America was not propaganda. It was a choice. You can tell the people that the darkness is coming, that the enemy is within, that only one man can save them. Or you can tell them that the morning is real, that the work is worth doing, that the country has come back before and will come back again. Both are performances. The question is which calls out the best in the people and which calls out the worst. I am watching a performance now that calls out the worst — the fear, the resentment, the need for an enemy — and calls it strength. Strength does not require an enemy to justify its existence. I left the White House on a January morning and flew home to California. No regrets about leaving. That is how it is supposed to work. You serve. You go home. The republic continues. The man who cannot leave — who requires that the republic reorganize itself around his refusal to leave — that man does not love the republic. He loves himself and has confused the two. I made mistakes. Every president makes mistakes. But I left. And I want to say to everyone who learned politics from what I built — this is not what I built. The resentment is not what I built. The contempt for institutions is not what I built. The cruelty toward the stranger is not what I built. I built the morning. Not the endless, weaponized night. The morning. It is still there. Behind the noise, behind the fear, behind the performance that calls out the worst — the morning is still there. It belongs to you. Not to him. To you.