Someday, Donald Trump will be a mere memory.
Just last week we were reminded, during the 9/11 memorials, that one-third of the nation’s population was not yet born when the planes hit the twin towers. That’s how soon firsthand memory recedes in the population.
So by the year 2053, less than one-third of the U.S. population will have a living memory of Donald J. Trump as president.
After he takes leave of office, we will have an awful lot of cleaning up to do. First on the agenda will be, as Vaslav Havel put it, recommitting to “the value of moral rules in all areas of public life, including the economic.”
Richard Conville
Havel was speaking of the cleanup necessary after nearly 40 years of totalitarian rule in Czechoslovakia. He continued (in his 1991 essay in Summer Meditations, published two years after his election as president of Czechoslovakia): “Unless we … rediscover and cultivate, what I will call a superior responsibility, it will go ill with our country.”
His task was what ours will be.
Havel was a poet and a playwright, a politician and above all a courageous leader in the 1977 human rights movement, Charter 77, in Czechoslovakia. His role earned him a four-year prison term, but 12 years later found him a principal leader in the Velvet Revolution, the movement that transformed Czechoslovakia into the Czech Republic, a multi-party democracy.
We can look to heroes like Havel for guidance through the maze of rank amateurs and groveling collaborators in the Donald Trump’s cabinet (Patel at Justice; Hegseth at Defense; and Kennedy at HHS). Cleaning up after them will be a challenge.
What, then, is this priority task of restoring “moral rules in all areas of public life” that Havel speaks of?
The first step is cultivating superior responsibility in political leaders. Superior responsibility, Havel asserts, is made manifest in “the politics of service to one’s neighbor, … to the community …, to those who will succeed us. Its origin is moral because it is … responsibility realized toward all and by all.”
Political leaders, then, must have a heart for service, focused not on enriching themselves or their friends or the friends of the president, but focused on the quality of life of ordinary citizens whose lives are touched by their office.
Political leaders, then, must have a heart for service.
Consider for example the National Park Service and the Bureau of Land Management. Rather than relaxing environmental protections, encouraging accelerated logging and building additional roads through those vast territories, political leaders motivated by service would preserve and protect those lands.
Extensive research shows contact with nature is beneficial to mental health. Eighty percent of the U.S. population live in urban or suburban areas where access to the natural world is limited. The National Alliance for Mental Illness reports nearly 20% of U.S. adults suffer from anxiety disorders each year, and nearly a quarter of all U.S. adults report their average stress level to be an overwhelming 8 on a 10-point scale.
People seem to know that a walk in the woods has real medicinal value. In 2025, the National Park Service recorded nearly 325 million visits, despite a 43-day government shutdown, and 26 sites set new attendance records. Those visitors want more, not less, access to our national parks and wilderness areas.
So how do we cultivate that “politics of service … to the community?”
Like many, I believe it starts with education, but education of a particular kind. Ernest Boyer laid out a picture of what that could look like nearly 40 years ago. Meanwhile, much of education policy and practice has tilted more toward career preparation than toward civic responsibility. Consequently, Boyer’s stance may sound somewhat quaint in today’s climate of AI and Ipads, “accountability” and job skills.
“The aim of education is not only to prepare students for productive careers, but also to enable them to live lives of dignity and purpose; not only to generate new knowledge, but to channel that knowledge to humane ends; not merely to study government, but to help shape a citizenry that can promote the public good,” Boyer wrote in 1990.
Havel was right. Havel is right still. Unless we learn to cultivate a politics of service in our political leaders, “it will go ill with our country.”
Richard Conville is professor emeritus of communication studies at the University of Southern Mississippi and a long-time resident of Hattiesburg where he is a member of University Baptist Church.