Disillusioned With America? Good. - Resistance History with Tad Stoermer

[ihaveaquestion]

May 21, 2026
The word I keep hearing about the country is disillusioned, and the people whose job is to reassure you are treating it like a wound. The most useful thing that ever happened to the antislavery movement was a few thousand comfortable men feeling exactly that way.

In the spring of 1854, the federal government deployed soldiers to march one man, Anthony Burns, out of Boston and back to slavery in Virginia, through streets packed with silent crowds and storefronts hung in black. Burns was the occasion. The point was to prove that the Fugitive Slave Act could be enforced in the most abolitionist city in the country, and it was enforced. It also broke something. Amos A. Lawrence, a textile magnate whose fortune ran on Southern cotton and who had spent years defending the Compromise of 1850, watched it happen and later said that men like him "went to bed one night old-fashioned, conservative, Compromise Union Whigs and waked up stark mad Abolitionists." Lawrence went on to pour his money into the antislavery fight in Kansas.

Nobody argued him into it; he was converted by watching the government he trusted do, in daylight, exactly what it had been built to do. That is what disillusionment actually is. It is not a collapse to be managed or a mood to be talked out of before the next election, but a comfortable person losing the ability to un-see what the people without his protections always knew.

The pundits and party leaders telling people to stay calm and trust the process are selling the product Daniel Webster sold in 1850, and they are selling it hardest now, while a president demonstrates there is nothing under it. They understand the danger in that disillusionment better than the people feeling it do, which is why they work so hard to sell a new illusion the moment the old one fails.