Our American Chernobyl: Politicians Must Cease Promising Bold Visions Built atop a Radioactive Wasteland
Occasionally on social media, I will come across a post in which someone binge-watched six-part HBO Series Chernobyl. The person is invariably staggered by the miniseries and the sickening and engrossing recitation of the calamity that took place at the nuclear power site outside of Pripyat, Ukraine on April 26, 1986. Even while the drama takes artistic license with the events, the core presentation of the catastrophe touches on the themes of how the meltdown at Reactor 4 was all but fated by the corrupt and hollow-out collapsing autocracy that the Soviet Union had become by the 1980s. It has many lessons to teach America about this perilous time in our history.
It is a story of bravery of ordinary people who sacrificed their lives or lost them innocently, the cowardice of corrupt party officials, the stubborn resistance to scientific reality, arrogance about the capabilities of the nuclear authorities, and ultimately about one thing. Lies. Little ones roll into bigger ones, and everyone seems to lie to everyone else, even while they look at one another and know that lies are being told. Chernobyl demonstrates with a cold nauseating dread that once a society builds itself around lies, the logic of maintaining the artifice eventually leads to complete catastrophe.
November 5, 2024, should largely be viewed as the day America suffered a political meltdown on par with the nuclear catastrophe. We are living in the chaotic, bewildering aftermath of our very own American Chernobyl. Chernobyl is an extraordinarily helpful framework to analyze our predicament. To use it for political purposes is not to minimize the devastating human and ecological toll of the accident. Instead, it's to heighten the alarm over the situation the United States finds itself in after one-year of President Trump's second term.
The damage at the power plant site and the surrounding Ukrainian countryside will be measured over a long, even inconceivable, time horizon. We are talking forty-thousand years of contamination, essentially the entire length of modern human life on Earth. It might as well be forever. As if to emphasize that point, a consoritium of international companies and governments came together to build a massive "sarcophagus" to encase the stricken and poisonous Reactor 4. The impossibly massive arc of steel was built and slid over the site to encase the most radioactively poisoned area. It will provide relief for a few decades after which it will have to replaced again and again for centuries.
Such a somewhat geologic perspective of time allows for the proper humility in approaching remediation for Chernobyl. There was no boisterous 1987 call to "Rebuild Pripyat!" It sits today abandoned of all humans except for military visitors, scientists and strange wildlife (more on that later). Amazingly enough, the full plant was not shutdown until December 2000. Many find it amazing that it continued to limp along for years and years. But things endure, as we are finding out. The true cost of the human toll is memorialized (unintentionally) in the formerly tidy middle-class town on Pripyat. Pictures taken by intrepid explorers and curious tourist (prior to the Ukranian War of Independence) showed an eerie frozen-in-amber spring day in the USSR.
Faded posters of Mikhael Gorbachev. Posters extolling the virtues of the U.S.S.R. Faded and dilapidated playgrounds. Broken windows, everywhere. There are even notebooks of students perched on desks. Empty swimming pools. Weed-strewn lots abound where people once jockeyed for parking sports. Abadoned vehicles. Empty bus stops. Hollowed out performance halls. Vacant shopping plazas. Pripyat was a thriving town. A job at Chernobyl was solidly upper middle class in the 1980s. The workers were well educated and had many treats and luxuries other Soviets lacked: telephones, cars, and good working appliances. All of that sits in ruins to this day. Similarly, for America, we cannot go back to November 4, 2024.
We are right now in a kind of rolling evacuation trying to make our way through the still-unfolding drama. Our first chance to clean it up starts with a desperate containment operation beginning this coming November in the pivotal 2026 midterms. Americans have a somewhat hopeful naïveté about their politics. This is often encouraged by Democrats, who believe in good government, policy-making, and proposing feasible ideas. The party is full of hope and possibilities. This is a strength of Democrats. Built on the spine of Black women, Democrats are mostly patriotic, practical and community-focused.
However, there is a left/liberal weakness where we tend to be susceptible to the advice from the familiar cast of consultants and powerful online media brands. These pundits and campaign-adjacent advisers are quick to demand Democrats present a vision of "not just what they are against but what they stand for." One will hear the constant refrain of "kitchen-table issues" which has morphed into the understandable and laudable focus on "affordability." As campaign season takes shape we are hearing more warnings that "Democrats haven't given voters a reason to choose them."
I bristle. This is the sort of familiar campaign arc in which Republicans are allowed to campaign on their rage, fear, and doubt. Republicans are permitted to be racist, bigoted, out-of-control and often violent. Democrats are required to balance on a wire offering fully detailed plans, but not be too boring about it, and don't also be negative, but also draw distinction, but also be bipartisan, but also appeal to leftists, but then not alienate establishment Republicans. As a result, we get campaign advice that is tired, old and based on the idea that the Democrats must always offer detailed hopeful plans.
This is where the Chernobyl analogy allows us to break free from this contextual headlock. Democrats should be honest. The Republicans and Donald Trump have done severe damage to the country, the economy, the federal government, the stability of our democracy, and our reputation. Put simply, Donald Trump's second election was a Chernobyl-level meltdown of our society. Then, the truth: there is no easy fix. There is no magic that is going to take us back to the good-old-days. We can only promise, as Democrats, that if we have control of Congress, we can at least slow down or halt the rampage in certain areas. If we win in 2028, we might be able to start making some repairs.
Donald Trump constantly complains that Presidents Obama and Biden handed him Chernobyl-level messes to clean up. Of course, it's lies. He was left by both presidents with healthy or recovering economies. Had he literally done almost nothing but continue his predecessors' policies and golf all day every day, he probably would have been regarded as a Top 15 president. But instead he was able to foment rage in his base by claiming that he inherited a nation in complete distress. This explains why in his first term his inaugural speech was famously dubbed American Carnage.
Moreover, the radiation is silently seeping out everywhere, poisoning all that it touches. It his federal courts full of unqualified hacks, his agencies brimming with incompetent people unworthy of their jobs, and his network of shady contacts who are using crypto, money laundering and bribery to hack away at our rule of law. Thirty years ago, Trump would not have been able to wield his careless and violent tariff policy the way he does today. This was built on a foundation of recklessness and self-soothing lies about norms, traditions, and bipartisanship. In the same way, the technologists who built Chernobyl made inherently dangerous design decisions contrary to sound nuclear physics, the underpinnings of Trump were built into the system by Reagan and economists like Arthur Laffer. Arrogant men who ignored reality and mathematics to begin spreading a gospel of conservative low-tax, high-spending lies that have cratered our economy and left us with soaring out of control deficits.
But does that mean Democrats can't be bold? Does that mean we offer no ideas and no vision to our young people? This is such a dour and despondent worldview! This is where I can offer an idea. Look to the L'Affaire Epstein. We can be bold. About cleaning up messes, about accountability, about tribunals, about impeachments, about criminal charges against hundreds, maybe even thousands of powerful people. We can be resolute and angry and uncompromising about justice and the restoration of the rule of law. President Obama was an excellent executive. But during his administration his economic policymakers, particularly Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, was hasty and insistent that "we move forward" and not look back. As a result, outside of Credit Suisse executive Kareem Serageldin, and the failed prosecution of two Bear Stearns traders, virtually no one responsible for the Great Financial Crisis of 2008 was punished. The mantra was look forward, move on. This was the same for the imprudent and criminal Iraq War. This has turned out to be a grave mistake. The lack of accountability continued to put stress on our society, like a slithering radioactive poison. We need to don the hazmat suits, scour the entire landscape and isolate all the radioactive waste Trump has created. In other words, our boldness must be for justice.
Chernobyl is still a mess to this day. It will be a mess tomorrow. It will be a mess a thousand years from now. The lesson of the catastrophe is that sometimes humans do damage so severe there is no fairy tale pixie-dust magical speech that is going to make it better. Democrats should actually take a matter-of-fact approach and lay out the full scale of the damage this regime has done to the country. Then they should say the first reason to give us power is to stop the assault. Then we may have a chance to save the country. But promising a bold future in a matter of months is setting the party up for a spectacular reversal of fortune if they should have a blockbuster midterms. The electorate needs to be addressed as adults. You made a huge mess. We all need to pitch in and clean it up. We can only start to do that by breaking unified GOP rule, which must never happen again in the nation's history. Then we must mercilessly punish everyone involved with this regime.
Wildlife has come back to this heavily radioactive region in Ukraine. Ecologists have been surprised to see the region "heal". Deer, wild animals and flora have grown. All of it would be heavily poisionous to humans. Geiger counters still sickeningly crackle next to verdant green fields, indicating spiking levels of radiation that would kill any long term inhabitant. Nevertheless, the message is clear. Life somehow adapts and carries on. People can do the same here in this post-American Chernobyl.
Time is an arrow and the arc of history is long (which way it bends is never a given). But the one thing we're never doing, whether here or in Chernobyl is going back to the day before the calamity. We will be a nation, but we will never be the same country we were on November 4, 2024. Trump I was a sort of "Three Mile Island", a warning that we were playing with something very dangerous. But Trump II was a the full nuclear accident. On this point, our Democratic politicians need to be clear and forthright. The American electorate deserves the truth and the blame.
