In his classic memoir of the Soviet state terror of the 1930s, hope against hopeNadezhda Mandelstam recalled the last years of her marriage to the poet Osip Mandelstam as they fled from town to village, relying on help from a few brave friends and strangers, exiled from their Moscow home as enemies of the state. Osip’s main crime was reading a poem at a dinner party, which he never wrote, let alone published, that mocked Stalin and exposed his brutal regime.
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The final couplet: “And every murder is a feast / For the broad-chested Ossette.” (Stalin was rumored to have been of Northern Georgian, or Ossetian, descent, not ethnic Russian.) Osip was eventually arrested and deported in 1937, the year of the “Great Purge”, which took his life along with approximately one million other Soviet citizens who were deemed disloyal or simply “not needed”.
Writing from the perspective of relative security in the 1960s, Mandelstam looks back at the early years of widespread belief in the “dictatorship of the proletariat”, to which she and her husband initially subscribed, and traces the gradual erosion and then rapid abandonment in Soviet society under Stalin of “humanistic” values – respect for “the destiny of each individual”. “There is a moment of truth,” she writes, “when you are overwhelmed with overwhelming wonder: ‘So that’s where I’m living, and the kind of people I’m living with! That’s what they’re capable of! So that’s the world I live in!'”
This surprise, or “stupefaction”, and the resulting loss of all norms, standards, and values, she writes, were the frequent – and certainly intended – consequences of the imprisonment and torture of her husband and many others. Mental numbness spread among the families, friends and neighbors of those arrested, as well as among the survivors of the millions who died by hanging or starvation in Soviet prisons and labor camps during the 1930s and 40s: “(I did not) feel as if time had stopped, the world was over and everything was lost forever. The collapse of all familiar notions is, after all, the end of the world.”
The collapse of all familiar notions is the end of the world. I have pondered that sentence over the past year, as under the Trump administration’s unrelenting siege on nearly every supposed government protection or protected institution, I have felt my familiar world crumble. The signs are clear in my neighborhood, not far from Harvard Square, where posh hotel restaurants are often empty, many of the languages spoken by visiting scholars are subdued, and I see mostly white faces on the street. A neighbor who used to enjoy renting out an apartment in her two-family home to foreign students and teachers is selling the space as a condo.
Over the past year, under the Trump administration’s unrelenting siege of nearly every supposed government security or safe institution, I have felt the world I knew fall apart.
But still on trips to bustling, decidedly diverse New York City, or simply waking up in my own apartment with the same bedroom furniture, framed photos on the wall, and paper-strewn desk that I knew before January 20, 2025, I get nervous.
Neurologist Priya Anand writes The Mind Electric That feeling of familiarity originates in the limbic system, an area of the brain where “memory and emotion are closely linked.” Very little sensory input – a scent, a glance – is required to awaken the “ink of recognition” that reaches us as familiarity “in the moment before the explicit memory comes.” Reaching a street in your old hometown, you will feel Before you look at your childhood home and realize you’re there, get familiar. In fact, “familiarity can exist without recognition,” writes Anand. deja vu.
I don’t know if there’s a word for the feeling Stranger In a familiar place, a French phrase that describes what it is like to recognize the sights of one’s daily life, one’s home country, and feel uncomfortable. Whatever you call it, this is what Donald Trump has done to us.
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The Trump administration is not Stalin’s openly murderous regime, but Trump’s policies have cost and will cost many lives: hundreds of thousands, ultimately millions, around the world are no longer served by USAID; ICE raid-induced deaths in Minneapolis; In the Middle East, the war ends in abandoned Ukraine; The growing harms from measles, COVID, and influenza due to federally sanctioned anti-vaccine propaganda. More lives will be lost by gutting state-sponsored health insurance programs and Medicaid, closing clinics offering prenatal care, ending medical research, unchecked climate change. This is just the beginning of a long list.
Losing one’s job – one’s livelihood and professional identity – is another kind of death. During his years in exile, Osip Mandelstam was denied the right to work for any publication or publishing house; Translation works were cancelled, his writings went unpublished. He suffered harsh prison conditions, including isolation, malnutrition, and untreated illness after his arrest, leading to his death at the age of 47.
Donald Trump, as Terminator in Chief, has brought job loss grief to hundreds of thousands of civil servants whose employment was supposed to be secure, whose jobs held deep meaning to them and whose daily efforts, often for modest pay, supported the well-being of the country. These are also deaths; They shatter our basic expectation that government works for the public good. They tell us that we can’t trust our government to protect its workers or citizens.
During his years in exile, Osip Mandelstam was denied the right to work for any publication or publishing house; Translation works were cancelled, his writings went unpublished.
When Nathaniel Hawthorne lost his federal appointment as Surveyor of Salem’s Custom House, following the election of Zachary Taylor as Whig president in 1849, he referred to his firing as a beheading. Although many readers today skip the “custom-house” preface the Scarlet LetterIt was Hawthorne’s bitterly satirical account of his removal from office that sold the book when it was first published in 1850. The author considered himself “an ineffective literary figure”; Hawthorne did the surveyor’s work so diligently that he never found free time to write, as his friends in the Democratic Party had promised him when he accepted the position. Hawthorne biographer James Mellow writes that, after Taylor’s election, he was told that “qualified persons would not be removed from office for purely partisan reasons.” The promise was not honored.
Hawthorne’s firing became one cause celebre. Boston and New York newspapers issued editorials in his support; Harvard’s president, former Massachusetts Governor Edward Everett, rose to his defense. Nothing helped. Hawthorne’s wife, artist Sophia Peabody, began selling hand-painted lampshades and fire screens to support their family of four, while her husband took to his desk to see what income his pen could generate. the Scarlet LetterAn otherwise narrow story of sexual crime in colonial Boston, its first printing sold out in ten days thanks to readers across the country who were excited to hear Hawthorne’s account of the predatory system in place in hopes of cashing in on the controversy. Critics today agree that the novel – Hawthorne’s scathing portrayal of the Puritans’ newly founded “city on the hill” – was inspired by the author’s outrage at his own unfair treatment two centuries later, at the beginning of the American experiment in democracy.
The fight over protections for federal employees continued for the next three decades until Congress passed the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883, which required most federal jobs to be filled on the basis of merit and made it illegal to fire such employees for partisan reasons. Nearly a century later in 1978, in the wake of the Watergate scandal, a second Civil Service Reform Act was passed, providing further protections, including for whistleblowers.
The CSRA has been in Donald Trump’s crosshairs since his first term in office; From the beginning of his second term he behaved as if the law had already been repealed. Supreme Court’s decision of June 2026 trump vs slaughter, Giving the President the power to fire independent agency heads suggests that future cases filed on behalf of fired federal employees will not fare well in the Supreme Court. Already, with the emergency order of July 2025 McMahon vs. New YorkSCOTUS overturned a lower court ruling that had blocked Education Department Secretary McMahon’s mass firing of DOE employees following Trump’s order dismantling the department. (As of July 6, the Trump administration has also gutted the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, along with dismantling the DOE, established in 1979 to combat bias in public schools. new York Times Report by issuing an executive order to “de-prioritize” cases defending minority applicants.)
With a population of over three hundred million—fifteen times that of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s time—can the United States function without the skilled civil servants that Trump has long denigrated as operators of the “deep state”? 1st February 2026 boston globe The study found that, during Donald Trump’s first year in office, the federal workforce decreased by ten percent; The firing expanded to 489 federal agencies. Employees who had served the government for twenty years or more were targeted for termination or pressured to resign. Texas A&M law professor Nicholas Handler commented on the catastrophic effects of the “rapid brain drain”: the government’s “ability to do sophisticated things is badly diminished because you can’t convince good people to come. And even if you convince good people to come, if they can be fired every four or eight years, you don’t build the institutional capacity and the institutional knowledge to do the things that we expect twenty-first century government to do. Are.” “You’re looking at four million years of experience that went out the door,” said Rob Shriver, former acting director of the Office of Personnel Management.
Four years after Hawthorne’s novel was published, Henry David Thoreau gave a lecture on the meaning of the work, later published as “Life Without Principle”, one of his most famous works. Walden and “civil disobedience.” Thoreau was thinking at the rural level, but his insights speak to our moment:
It would be economical for a city to pay its laborers so well that they do not feel that they are working for lesser purposes, such as mere livelihood, but also for scientific, or even ethical purposes. Don’t hire the man who does your work for the money, but hire the man who does it for the love.
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I get nervous. Frightened. I open the morning newspaper, look at the serious headlines and find the crossword puzzle. For the past two decades, ever since I endured a painful divorce new York Times The daily puzzle has been my source of comfort. Not anymore. The official acronyms are the meat and potatoes of crossword creators:
54A: Fair-hiring innits. Since 1964 (EEO) April 10, 2025
30A: Vaccine-approving organizations. (FDA) June 16, 2025
28A: The “Individual Mandate” Act, in Brief (ACA) March 20, 2026
82A: Organization. To finance overseas projects (USAID) established on April 12, 2026
15A: Defense Grp. Since 1949 (NATO) April 14, 2026,
8D:Fuel Economy Organization. (EPA) May 13, 2026
30A: Flu-fighting organizations. (CDC) June 11, 2026
Every time I fill in the correct answer, I think about lost jobs, lost confidence, lost lives. The collapse of the familiar fixed feels like the beginning of the end of our world:
40A: Part of the government that includes the presidency (executive branch) March 23, 2026
17A: The classic flower spot adjacent to the White House (Rose Garden) January 26, 2026
