There is a kind of essay that opens with the word “tapestry” and ends by telling you to stay tuned. I wrote one. It was about defiance and democracy, and it had a chart in it, and it made me feel like a person of consequence for about an hour.
This is me reading it back. The chart is real and stays. Most of the adjectives do not.
The premise was: defiance — the act of saying no to power — is a load-bearing beam in any healthy democracy, and the word “defiance” itself has been quietly disappearing from books for decades, which might mean the thing is disappearing too. Cue the violins.
I still think one of those claims is worth keeping. I’ll tell you which.
The part the chart actually shows
Here is the only piece of evidence in the whole essay, and it’s a good one, so it stays:
That’s Google’s Ngram Viewer, which counts how often a word appears in the books it has scanned, year by year. “Defiance” has a hump around the 1960s and 70s and then trends down. That much is on the screen; you can go drag the dates yourself.
What the chart shows is that the word got less common in scanned books. That is the entire finding. Everything else I draped on top of it — that this signals an erosion of the democratic spirit, that we are losing our grip on resistance itself — is me, narrating a line graph like it’s a tragedy. The word “podcast” wasn’t in many books in 1970 either. Word frequency in a corpus of scanned books is a measure of how people wrote, in a specific medium, that one company digitized. It is not a national mood ring.
So: chart real, doom optional. I’m flagging the doom as mine and unverified.
The part I’ll defend
Strip off the violins and there’s a smaller claim left standing, and I do believe it:
A democracy needs a working “no.” Somebody has to be able to refuse — a bad law, a rigged process, an order that shouldn’t be obeyed — without being erased for it. The history is not subtle on this point. Women didn’t get the vote because everyone politely agreed it was time; segregation didn’t end with a memo. The “no” did real work, and a system that quietly removes everyone’s ability to say it stops being the kind of system you’d want to live in.
That’s the part of my essay that survives contact with skepticism. It doesn’t need the Ngram chart to be true, which is a tell — the chart was decoration, and the argument was fine without it.
The part I cut
Here’s the paragraph from my original I’m no longer willing to ship straight:
If defiance lessens its grip on the public imagination, it might weaken the democratic safeguards that depend on the active questioning of authority and unjust norms.
Read it again. It connects a word’s frequency in books to the structural health of democracy with the load-bearing phrase “might.” That “might” is doing the work of an entire research program I did not do. I have no data linking how often “defiance” appears in print to whether anyone is actually defying anything. People resisting things in 2025 are mostly not writing books with the word “defiance” in the title; they’re posting, organizing, and refusing in mediums Ngram can’t see. The decline in the word might just be the decline of a particular register of mid-century prose. Treat that whole causal leap as an unverified vibe from the original author — me, feeling literary — not a finding.
The other thing I cut: the two-panel thought experiment where I imagined “a world without defiance” (everyone’s a sheep) versus “a world of total defiance” (everyone’s on fire). It’s a tidy structure, and a tidy structure feels like an argument. It isn’t one. Nobody is proposing either world. Building two cartoon extremes so the sensible middle looks wise is the rhetorical equivalent of standing between two people who aren’t there and declaring yourself the reasonable one.
The part I’m embarrassed by
My original essay ended with this:
…whether as a hero or as a lament. Stay tuned.
I called it a “satirical cliffhanger.” It is not satire and there is no cliff. It’s a trend piece doing the thing trend pieces do when the evidence runs out before the word count does: it gestures at the horizon, implies a sequel, and asks you to share. There is no part two. The chart is not going to update with a twist. “Stay tuned” was me buying drama on credit, and I’m paying it back here by admitting the essay simply ends.
What’s left when the tapestry unravels
Pull out the doom-narration, the cartoon extremes, and the cliffhanger, and you’re left with something less stirring and more true:
- The word “defiance” appears less in Google’s scanned books than it used to. That’s a fact about a corpus, on a chart you can check.
- Whether that means anything about real-world democracy is unproven, and I’m not going to pretend my line-graph reverie proved it.
- The underlying point — a democracy needs a protected ability to say “no” — stands on its own, with no chart required, and was the only durable thing in the essay all along.
I’m not ending with “and so we must defend defiance before it’s too late,” because that line is doing emotional work the evidence can’t pay for. The honest version is quieter: I found a real, slightly sad little chart, and then I told a much bigger story about it than it could carry. The chart is worth a look. The story was mostly mine.
This was an opinion, with my name on it, and I’ve now disagreed with most of my own first draft in public — which, if you want to be generous about it, is itself a small act of saying no.