In just over a month since Trump took office, America has begun a clear descent into strongman rule, with few signs it will be stopped. He’s gotten rid of qualified people in high positions, replacing them with loyal followers. He has enacted heavy taxes without Congressional action. He has tried to amend the Constitution’s birthright citizenship clause by decree. He’s loosed the ICE on cities; “border czar” Tom Homan has threatened, “I’m coming to Boston and I’m bringing hell with me.” Trump’s and Musk’s DOGE is a phantom entity, not an administrative unit authorized by any law, and it has scooped up sensitive information from government agencies with no accountability.
There’s outrage, to be sure, and more meaningless talk of “resistance” like what we heard during Trump’s first term, but not nearly enough solid opposition to Trump’s moves toward autocracy. The Republican Party has totally abandoned any limited-government positions it once held. The Democrats offer only a timid voice. The far left is worse than the Trumpist right. The Libertarian Party has ceased to be libertarian. I can only expect things to keep getting worse.
How did we get to this state? It’s not Trump. He’s just the symptom. He’s a pathetic, arrogant idiot who got where he is by saying what others wouldn’t quite abase themselves to say. What happened to America comes from two things: the imperial presidency and the collapse of the liberal ideal.
On the first point, Congress has steadily defaulted on its role as the driving force of the federal government, handing more and more power to the president. It’s been commonplace for years to call him the “commander-in-chief” of the nation (not of the armed forces, which is a position the Constitution gives him), as if we were already under a dictator. He’s been given more and more emergency powers, just waiting for someone with no scruples to use them to amass power. It’s a system with a single point of failure.
This is nothing new, but it’s gotten steadily worse over the years. Congress is now little but a rubber stamp for the president. The Democrats can’t say much against it; they’ve been as bad as the Republicans in handing power to the White House, at least when their guy occupied it.
The bigger point is the collapse of liberalism. I have to define this term; I don’t mean “liberalism” in the perverted sense of advocating a bigger, more centralized government, more taxes, more subsidies, and more control over everything. The term in its original sense is related to “liberty.” It means advocacy of the principles of personal freedom, private property, and equality before the law. It’s what the United States was built on, however imperfectly it implemented those principles.
Different segments of the population have departed from liberalism in different ways. We’ve seen a resurgence of religious authoritarianism. People are trying to make Christianity a state religion. They want to enforce their religious laws on everyone, especially in the areas of sexuality and childbearing. Another group, the socialists, wants the government to assume full control over the economy and directly nationalize large parts of it. Both the left and the right want to curtail free speech. Outright violence has become more acceptable. There’s widespread support on the right for the January 6 riots and on the left for the far worse, though more distant, October 7 massacre.
Much of the left thinks the best way to support their cause is to heap insults and smears on anyone who disagrees with them. This not only doesn’t work, it makes people more firmly opposed. When you treat people as enemies, they’ll generally regard you as an enemy, and they may join with whoever opposes you. When you use insulting labels all the better to mock them, they might start thinking that the people those labels name aren’t so bad.
Identity politics has further promoted mutual hostility by equating people’s “identity” with their ancestry, sex, or physical characteristics. Your identity is allegedly not who you are as an individual, but what group you belong to, as if you’re interchangeable with every other member. It’s collectivist thinking and leads to hostility between groups.
The battle in America is now between authoritarian gangs. How did we get to this state? The biggest factor is the failure of the American educational system. More than half of the adults in the US have a literacy level below the 6th grade level. The number of books Americans read per year has seriously declined. People who have trouble reading will have the most trouble with long, complicated text. They’ll rely more on videos, podcasts, and short bits of text, and they’ll have problems even with analyzing them for errors of fact and reasoning. They’ll be easy to manipulate.
These are conditions which people like Trump can take advantage of. They play on inter-group hostility, offer fallacious explanations, and lie outright. Principled liberalism is scattered to the winds. From pig to man and man to pig, you can’t tell which is which — and neither one would recognize the allusion I just made to George Orwell. Trump’s utter smallness and stupidity just illustrates how far America has fallen. He’s no Evil Genius. He’s an Evil Idiot.
I keep thinking of a quotation from Atlas Shrugged: “Take a look at them now, when you face your last choice — and if you choose to perish, do so with full knowledge of how cheaply so small an enemy has claimed your life.”