I pictured myself pulled by the undertow into deep water, jagged with needles and knives and razors and broken glass—like that of the window through which Ashli Babbitt, a subject of this book’s title essay, attempted to climb when she invaded the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Babbitt, shot for her trouble, was a fool who pursued her own death. And yet, many of us might say the same of ourselves. The peril in which the country finds itself now is not natural; it is in the broadest sense of our own American making.
