The gyre widens. History turns at a remarkable pace, assassin’s bullets and late stage dropouts. In one political party, a frantic campaign of whispers and leaks topples a President too clearly past his prime to serve four more years. In the other, an all-consuming figure reaches for a messianic halo and toys with it for about twenty minutes before he gets distracted by a stray thought on Hannibal Lecter and goes back to being the chaotic ego he was born to be. Apocalyptic rhetoric is everywhere. A nation hurtles toward the brink of…something or other.

I can rationalize and lower the temperature, if that is helpful to you. The Democrats have absolutely done the right thing, cautiously navigating all of the institutional inertia arrayed against them in ways that were aggravating but probably necessary. I am skeptical of the darkest claims about what a second Trump term entails; the infrastructure necessary to make a civil war possible does not exist. Instead of a decisive turn to authoritarianism I see instead another lurch toward less accountability, further obfuscation of facts, further insistence on one’s own truths. The United States will muddle through, more and more hurt but far from the fall. If people could settle down and have families and carry on living as they did in the 1930s or in 1968, so can I. Put the phone down and look around: life ain’t too bad for most of us.

We are instead convulsed by imperfect systems and ugly spasms and lone wolf lost boys, each passing event making it clear there is no grand scheme or great conspiracy, just a lot of flawed humans trying and failing to take control of a beast that no one can tame. Energy erupts, some people get hurt, it erupts back in another direction, rising and falling in no clear rhythm. They are the classic, navel-gazing lurches of an empire waking up to the fact that the world around it has changed, that certain myths that sustained it are not quite up to the current task. It is decadent, feels chaotic to those in deep, and has no easy endgame. But human history goes on, as it always has.

If that rationalization is thin consolation, I get that. I have the freedom to retreat into a comfortable life in some out of the way northern woods that many people do not. Politics grows ever more exhausting, and the odds of existential risk do grow the more we go down this cycle. No one knows exactly when it might break, but the risk is there, a looming dread. Even when Congress quietly has some fairly collegial and productive terms—which it has in the Biden years—nothing seems to lower the temperature.

Above all a deep crudeness pervades everything now, ends justifying means and any shared moral language lost at sea. That moralism of past eras was often hypocritical, often not quite reality, but it at least set a standard for conduct and all such measurement. We live beyond virtue, a troubled state diagnosed by Alasdair MacIntyre and struck upon more recently by Robert Putnam, the sage of modern loneliness, who gave a long-ranging and rather bleak interview about his life’s project:

“What stands upstream of all these other trends is morality, a sense that we’re all in this together and that we have obligations to other people. Now, suddenly, I’m no longer the social scientist, I’m a preacher. I’m trying to say, we’re not going to fix polarization, inequality, social isolation until, first of all, we start feeling we have an obligation to care for other people.”

I am starting to think that what we need now are indeed preachers of some sort. The rational mind is good for an argument but thin gruel for humans in search of moral uplift. On some weird level I get the Trumpian evangelists, even as I recoil at their easy peace with Caesar: at least they speak to an underlying yearning. Unlike most other Democrats (save, perhaps, fringe figures like Marianne Williamson), Joe Biden tried to revive that language, may even have those gestures to healing the soul of a nation to thank for his 2020 victory. But as he fades into his geriatric fog it feels like the last gasp of a man speaking to a society that has passed him by, the liberal church in full retreat and a void left in its place.

David Brooks thinks a new progressive social gospel is the antidote to what ails us, but I look around at my mostly liberal millennial circles and see little fertile ground. People who need help don’t seek answers in faith; they go to therapy. Struggles tend to be personal instead of communal, and when they do take on a shared aspect, I am not sure they are better. The godless progressive moralism that has surged in recent years seems to swing between righteous anger and end-of-times despair with all the dogma of religion but none of the hard work of inner moral struggle, to say nothing of the desire to bring forth new life. For many others, including a lot of people who keep up on news and say all the right things, the greater temptation is just to retreat to higher ground when push comes to shove. Drown it out, make enough money to get by, and get on with life. That notion is tempting sometimes.

In 1968, Robert F. Kennedy (Senior) consoled a restive Indianapolis crowd on the night Martin Luther King was killed; it was one of the few major American cities that did not burn that night. Kennedy did something that would seem absurd today, even among supposed defenders of tradition and the classics: he quoted Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, the first of the three plays in the Oresteia. The Oresteia is a tale of murder and retribution, a curse placed on the House of Atreus by the gods in which Orestes, the son of King Agamemnon of Iliad fame, is forced to avenge his father’s murder and pursued by wrathful Furies for his trouble. In the trilogy’s final episode, Athena orchestrates a trial that absolves Orestes and turns the Furies into defenders of justice. The cycle breaks. Democratic Athens is born.

Whether it falls to Donald Trump or Kamala Harris or some other turn yet unseen, a victory this November will only feel very temporary so long as American politics remains a war of all on all. I do not know what the solution looks like, if some modern-day Athena can descend from the skies and make us mortals believe in some solution again. But I do think it is worth great effort to ponder what that solution might be. Whatever it is, I expect it will speak the language of souls, of faith and hope, of the pursuit of wisdom, in Kennedy’s words, through the awful grace of God.