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Few spectacles in democratic life are quite so revealing as a leader who, sensing the ground shift beneath him, resolves not to look down. President Trump’s State of the Union address on Tuesday evening—one hour and forty-eight minutes of it, the longest in modern American history—was such a performance: a marathon of assertion delivered into the teeth of accumulating evidence that very little of what was being asserted bore much resemblance to the country people are actually living in.

There is, in the choreography of diplomacy, a gesture so fundamental that even the most negligent student of foreign affairs would recognize it as inviolable: when a host government summons an ambassador, the ambassador appears. It is not a suggestion.

There are moments in the life of a nation when the architecture of power, so long mistaken for permanence, reveals itself as provisional—a scaffolding of assumptions that the wind of consequence can loosen and scatter.

There is a particular kind of institution that exists not to accomplish its stated purpose but to announce that the purpose has already been accomplished. You recognise it by its ceremony—the signing, the podium, the charter held aloft like a diploma for a course no one has taken.

There is a particular quality to the diplomacy of our age that would have troubled the old seekers of wisdom—not its brutality, for power has always been brutal, but its peculiar emptiness, its capacity to perform the gestures of statesmanship while hollowing out every principle that once gave those gestures meaning.

There are seasons in the life of a republic when the soul of governance turns inward upon itself, not in contemplation but in a kind of willful forgetting, a deliberate unlearning of truths that have grown inconvenient to those who hold power.

There exists, in the mythology of democratic nations, a sacred covenant so deeply embedded in self-governance that it requires no enforcement beyond the conscience of those who hold power. It is the agreement to lose. Not gracefully—history is replete with bitter concessions and clenched-jaw congratulations—but to lose, nonetheless.

There is a particular kind of silence that descends upon a nation when its instruments of justice are turned against it—not the silence of peace, but the silence of a people watching the locks being changed on their own doors.