The End of America
February 21, 2025
For years I’ve written that America as a humane, enlightened democracy could not endure without a citizenry understanding and internalizing its foundational principles and ideals. Something falling away. I’ve also invoked the power imbalance between good and evil: good people’s actions are constrained by scruples, bad ones are unrestrained.
More recently I said Trump is joining America to an axis of evil. Further developments confirm it. Now he’s like a Kremlin-operated ventriloquist’s dummy, spouting their absurd lies (unconstrained by scruples). Smearing Ukraine as culpable for the war and its elected president as a “dictator,” while flattering the actual dictator who actually invaded the country. Starting “negotiations” with him by preemptively surrendering. Shredding relationships with our erstwhile allies in Europe and elsewhere, even next-door. Bullying them. Blowing up every principle America once stood for.
Even Neville Chamberlain stopped short of embracing Hitler.
Trump is also ending our foreign humanitarian aid, that sowed so much goodwill (and saved millions of lives). While he green-lights Israeli extremists to wreak horror on inhabitants of not just Gaza but the West Bank as well.
Meantime here at home, Lord knows our government could use reform, but Trump has handed to a self-infatuated, self-interested jerk a sledgehammer to witlessly smash it all. Our century-plus tradition of a professional non-political civil service blown up too. With even the Justice Department and FBI blatantly politicized — by the very guy who’d so falsely denounced them as such.
The list goes on and on.
I can’t say I’m shocked because I’ve long warned of such travesties. But what does feel shocking is how supinely America accepts them. Sleepwalking over a cliff.
Oh, there have been protests and marches. Editorial pages (notably our Albany paper’s) have thundered, along with broadcasters and online voices. Some of Democratic officialdom too. But none of it seems to matter much. Not moving the needle. The nation unable to summon up the moral energy called for.
What was I expecting? A violent, armed uprising? Well — in fact we had one on January 6, 2021. Which also, ultimately, failed to inspire broad public outrage commensurate with its gravity. Indeed, voters actually handed the government over to those responsible! And Trump’s indiscriminate mass January 6 pardons — while provoking some tut-tutting — yet again failed to shake America from its stupor. This and all the other disgraceful things mentioned have hardly dented his approval rating.
Those January 6 insurrectionists were riled to violence by a feeling that they were losing their country — a feeling Trump shamelessly manipulated. Its essence was loss of white supremacy. Now it’s the rest of us losing our country. Not just to those pathetic patsies of January 6, but to bigger, darker forces. And we’re pathetically surrendering.