Dooming New Year
The American right has fetishized Viktor Orban’s Hungary for years now. But it is still remarkable how quickly America has succumbed to Orbanization in less than a year into Trump’s second term. The major media outlets are now controlled by oligarchic entities either beholden to the administration or ideological aligned with it. Education and expertise at all levels are under attack as anti-intellectualism grips the ruling party. The legislature has ceased to be an independent check on the executive, instead ceding its power to the president and effectively disbanding until he needs them again. The ruling party refuses to seat duly elected members of the opposition from taking their place in Congress and delays special elections to assure its continued power. The highest court in the land continually usurps power from the legislature and the lower courts and either hands powers to the executive or rescinds them depending on the party of the President. The administration targets its perceived enemies with political prosecutions and the deployment of an apparently lawless militarized state power that is literally disappearing people, legal aliens and citizens included. It is paying bounties to a vigilante-like force that racially profiles its potential victims.
While the lower courts have been surprisingly resistant to the expanding lawlessness, many of them are deeply infected with judges who are simply puppets of the president and his party, which includes the majority on the highest court in the land. Even so, the administration continues to both lie to and defy the courts at an alarming rate. The President has made clear he intends to defy the Constitution and run for a third term. The final step in fascist consolidation is to further warp the existing electoral processes, which already significantly structurally favor the current ruling party, to ensure their permanent power. The success of that effort will be determined in the coming years.
Corruption is endemic and open. Governmental functions are now personalist. The President is increasingly obsessed with monuments to himself. Billionaires and power-hungry sycophants compete to see how much they can flatter or pay an increasingly demented narcissist to advance their careers or business interests. Cabinet meetings now resemble the “Dear Leader” levels of sycophancy of North Korea or Soviet Russia. Accountability is non-existent. Instead, the willingness to break the law, or having already done so, has become a criterion for advancement.
The institutional collapse has been swift and widespread. The destruction of the administrative state is far more comprehensive than comprehended at the moment. The DOJ acts as the personal law firm of the president. Our premiere institutions of health and science have been decimated. There is no federal agency that has not been gutted or politicized. Elite law firms and universities have folded in the face of what is essentially governmental blackmail. Business leaders now accept nationalization of a percentage of their company as the cost of doing business.
We have become a rogue state, threatening our allies, attacking others at will, committing war crimes on the high seas, and now engaging in an unprovoked and unauthorized war in Venezuela. Our foreign policy is driven by the whims of an increasingly addled man who is apparently easily manipulated by foreign leaders and his own handlers. Our interests increasingly align with other dictators, many of whom the President clearly admires, and our support of genocide and general international lawlessness empowers the worst impulses of many nations. The abrupt termination of international aid will probably result in the deaths of millions. As we abdicate our global leadership in areas like health, science, and research, debilitate our competitiveness in green energy, and abandon our allies, other countries, especially China, will fill the void.
We haven’t fully succumbed to fascist autocracy, but we are much further along than most of us realize. Yes, there is still plenty to fight for and the resistance is both stronger than we imagine and the administration believes. The opposition to this administration created the largest protests in American. Citizens are organizing to protect their neighbors from the government’s paramilitary forces. Democrats consistently overperform in special elections. Yet, so far, many of our victories have been largely Pyrrhic. The boycotts of Target, Disney, Tesla, and others have been damaging but those companies still survive. Democrats may overperform by substantial margins, but gerrymandering works and the citizens of Nashville still are denied real representation. Rather than contrition, the administration’s response to last November’s election losses was to double down and accelerate its fascist tendencies. The Supreme Court may restrict the administration’s domestic use of the military, but it is already building a bigger, more ruthless force which will have greater legal authority and a wider permit in ICE. And, seriously, does anyone think that the current congressional Democratic leadership is capable of providing a significant check on this rogue administration if the House and, less likely, the Senate flips next November? And does anyone seriously believe that this administration will abide any demands for hearings or respect congressional subpoenas?
Most of us will survive this. Millions of Russians survived Stalinist Soviet Union; millions of East Germans survived Stasi-infected East Germany. But the most important part of dealing with reality is acceptance of what is. And we must accept that the country that every one of us beyond their teens has known is gone, gone forever. The administrative state has been destroyed. Agencies like the NIH, CDC, and NSF have taken decades to build; they are not going to be rebuilt in any time soon, especially when the most respected people in those fields have no confidence in the stability of the US government. The unwritten guardrails that kept our democracy stable since the New Deal are gone – gone is the independence of the DOJ; gone is any pretense that that there is equality under the law; gone is presumption that bribery is not the primary driver of government policy; gone is assumption that our democracy is more important than power itself.
Regardless of what happens next November, and despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of Americans disapprove of the administration’s policies, we are and will still be facing three more years of an autocratic assault on what’s left of our democracy. Sane Republicans may be retiring from Congress in droves, but they will mostly likely be replaced by even more true believers. The fever will not break for Republicans. Even if Democrats gain total control of the federal government in 2028, does anyone have the confidence that they will have the power and the courage to initiate the democratic reforms needed to restore our republic – reining in rogue courts, reconstructing democracy by eliminating the structural legacies of slavery in the Senate and Electoral College, reducing the monetary and political power of the billionaire class, and providing accountability to all the criminals in and out of the current government who we can assume will be protected by blanket pardons from Trump or his successor?
None of us have any idea of how much worse things might look by the end of these next three years. In the interim, the focus should be on using the powers of federalism to resist the administration’s autocratic efforts. That means blue states using their sovereign powers to defend the rule of law and resist federal incursions in the courts and in the streets. In addition, it means using their combined strength to fill the void that the federal government is leaving, as exemplified by the Governors Public Health Alliance. That Alliance covers nearly 130 million Americans. Imagine the buying power it might have if it tried to negotiate drug prices.
A successful democracy relies on an engaged, educated, and informed citizenry. We have lost that. One third of the country doesn’t even vote in the most hotly contested federal election and that cohort expands enormously, often becoming a large majority, when talking about state and local elections. Americans have lost faith in our institutions and at least a substantial minority of them have also lost faith in their fellow Americans. As a country, we have lost the trust, or whatever was left of that trust, of the rest of the world. There is no coming back from all this at any point in the near future. Happy New Year.