The Widening Gyre

Applying Yeats’s ‘Second Coming’ to a nation losing its center.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

In 1919, William Butler Yeats watched the wreckage of the First World War and the convulsions of the Irish revolution and wrote The Second Coming - a poem about the moment when a civilization’s shared vocabulary collapses. The falcon, once obedient to the falconer’s call, has flown so far into the whirlwind that it can no longer hear the voice that trained it. The center - the agreement on basic facts, the acceptance of institutional authority, the belief in a common project - cannot hold.

Our falconer - the Constitution, the rule of law, the norms that held the line between executive power and autocracy - is screaming. But the falcon has flown beyond earshot. It is spiraling in a thermal of disinformation, rage, and profitable opportunism, no longer tethered to the voice that once commanded it to return.

The gyre is widening. And the Republicans who swore an oath to the Constitution are choosing - day after day, vote after vote - not to call the falcon home.

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

This is Yeats’s most cutting indictment, and it is playing out in real time across the American political landscape. The ‘worst’ - those animated by grievance, contempt for democratic norms, and a will to power unchecked by shame - move with absolute certainty. They do not hesitate. They do not flinch.

And ‘the best’? Too many have decided that restraint is wisdom, that silence is dignity, that the guardrails will hold without anyone manning them.

We see this paralysis in the Republican senators and representatives who know better - who understand the stakes, who privately admit that the current administration’s actions are indefensible - and who vote to enable them anyway. Lindsey Graham, who once called the president a ‘race-baiting, xenophobic bigot,’ now cheers his every move. John Thune, newly elevated to Senate Majority Leader, promises ‘aggressive’ support for an administration that treats oversight as obstruction. Susan Collins, perennial avatar of ‘concern,’ furrows her brow and falls in line.

These are not people who lack information. They lack conviction.

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

Yeats understood that when societies fracture, it is not merely that institutions fail - it is that the shared rituals that bound people together lose their meaning. The ‘ceremony of innocence’ - the belief that elections matter, that oaths are sacred, that truth is a meaningful category - is drowned in the rising tide of cynicism and expedience.

We are watching this drowning in slow motion. Executive orders bypass Congress. Regulatory agencies are gutted or weaponized. Military officers are fired for insufficient loyalty. The Senate confirms appointees whose sole qualification is personal fealty. And the Republicans who enable this are not passive bystanders - they are active participants, trading their institutional authority for the promise of political survival.

This is what collaboration looks like. Not jackboots and torchlight parades - just senators nodding along, cabinet members rationalizing the indefensible, and representatives calculating that their seats matter more than their oaths.

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Yeats ends with a question because he knows the answer is not yet fixed. The ‘rough beast’ is not Christ reborn but something older and more pitiless - a pagan shape rising from the desert to replace a Christian civilization that has exhausted its moral authority. The new order slouching toward power is still taking shape. Its features are not yet fully defined. But the men and women enabling its rise are making a choice every day about what it will become.

History does not remember the enablers kindly. Vidkun Quisling gave his name to every collaborator who followed. The senators who stand by while democracy crumbles are footnotes to catastrophe, not profiles in courage.

This publication is a record. We are working to document the choices being made right now - not in abstract terms, but in the specific votes, statements, and silences of named individuals. The votes to confirm unqualified loyalists. The silence when the rule of law is trampled. The Republicans who decided that their political futures mattered more than the republic they swore to defend.

The gyre is widening. The center is not holding. Someone should be keeping the roll.

If this work matters to you, you can help by sharing and forwarding emails - including past posts. Most political Substacks offer news commentary or analysis - ours is a record, and records only matter if they reach the people who need to see them.

The falcon cannot hear the falconer. But we can still hear the names of those who refused to call it home.

* * *

The Second Coming

By W.B. Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?