Political stability made American prosperity and global dominance possible; political instability will bring about the opposite consequences.
“Some folks are born made to wave the flag
Hoo, they’re red, white and blue
And when the band plays ‘Hail to the chief’
Ooh, they point the cannon at you, Lord”
Creedence Clearwater Revival, “Fortunate Son”
Unless you were raised beneath the guilt cloud of the Catholic church, you may have trouble admitting you were wrong. No matter how dire things become, I have no expectation that MAGA faithful will suddenly realize the folly they’ve supported for so long. Even after the devastation Hitler inflicted on Germany, many Germans still supported the Third Reich. Former Nazis hardly rushed forward to confess. No, they pursued a different course, one that MAGA supporters and politicians will adopt when the Regime collapses: weather the storm, wait for time to pass, and deny having ever supported Trump or shilled for his brutal and idiotic policies. Once the spotlight dims, it’s easier to pretend innocence. Of course the most committed MAGAs will carry on, the True Believers will keep the torch burning and look toward the coming of the next fascist leader.
In the meantime, how is Trump’s Golden Age working for you? Are you the beneficiary of a fantastic manufacturing job in a spanking new state-of-the art facility? Have you cashed your DOGE and tariff refund checks? Are you paying less for eggs, gas, food, electricity? Are you being paid by Big Pharma for your prescription medications? If not, soon, glory and prosperity lie just around the next bend.
Every material benefit promised by the Trump Regime is a coming attraction, arriving in two weeks, next month, later this year, next year. But the reckoning our country faces isn’t a coming attraction, it’s in progress. When the rule of law gives way to the law of the jungle, when a Regime declares that citizens have no civil or legal rights that the Regime is obligated or bound to recognize, when an entire political party and the highest court in the land is subservient to an addled and malignant man, a reckoning is inevitable, and few of us will be able to sidestep the consequences.
The penalty for not showing the proper deference to an untrained ICE thug might be death.
We must understand what’s happening, recognize it, acknowledge it for what it is and what it means. For decades the United States has acted as if it could bomb its way to peace and prosperity; we organized our economy around the fanciful idea that widespread prosperity was best achieved by allowing several hundred individuals to become stupendously wealthy; we recast Jesus as a ruthless capitalist who disdained the poor and hated strangers; we lost our minds after 9/11, resulting in the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and ICE; we falsely believed that surrendering civil liberties was the path to “security”; we demonstrated an appalling lack of social responsibility during Covid, when millions equated mask mandates with the worst excesses of government tyranny. A million Americans died, many of them needlessly.
Which brings us back to Donald Trump, our ADHD-afflicted dictator. The pattern of play should be obvious now. Call the tactic One and Done. When Trump declares that inflation is over, it becomes in his megalomaniacal mind a fact, because he said so. When India and Pakistan revive their ongoing territorial dispute, Trump thinks a single phone call telling them to cease and desist represents a binding “peace” agreement. When Trump says Venezuela will gladly surrender its oil reserves for the benefit of US multinational oil companies, he thinks the riches are already flowing. (Sorry, no, we snatched Nicolas Maduro but left his government in charge.) Trump is the ultimate Big Picture guy — details are for underlings to sort out. Any day now Greenland will bow to Trump’s demands, while Canada will happily and gratefully become the 51st state. It’s all so easy for a man of Trump’s greatness, requiring only strength and an unshakeable belief in make-believe.
For a brief time make-believe might work for Trump and his cronies. But do you think your family and friends, your neighbors and city or town, can withstand three more years of this insanity? For that’s what it is, what millions of our fellow citizens voted for, insanity at scale, every single day. Trust me, the last thing we want is a state of breakdown and chaos. Please don’t make the mistake of thinking it can’t happen. Ask instead, what’s going to prevent it from happening? Although American democracy has always been limited, unequal, slow, and subject to racist passions, it has, with the exception of the Civil War, forestalled breakdown and chaos. Political stability made American prosperity and global dominance possible; political instability will bring about the opposite consequences.
For about one day after 9/11, I clung to the hope that our country would use the terrorist attacks to pause and reflect, to engage in some long overdue self-reflection about our bellicose behavior around the world. I was woefully naive. The opposite happened. George W. Bush declared the entire world our battlefield. Even as they collapse, empires are not known for being self-reflective or for admitting error. Now the violence we have inflicted on people abroad is being inflicted on us, not by crazed Islamic terrorists or Chinese communists, but by our own Department of Homeland Security.
The worm has turned.
