A New Dark Age

In the grey dawn of the second month of the second term, the grim chain of cause and effect gleams dully. We are entering a new Dark Age.

The man who is now president is a tyrant by nature. His first term was his apprenticeship. (Savor the irony of the title of his “reality show” that lifted him from repeated business failure to political success.)

Never mind that a traditional apprenticeship was seven years, and the first term only four. Never mind that his analytical intelligence is self-evidently at the very bottom of our presidential roster, and likely below rank average for our entire population. Never mind that he has taken extraordinary measures to keep his college grades and test scores secret.

He doesn’t need analytical intelligence to rule, because his emotional intelligence is off the scale. He needn’t discern actual cause and effect because he’s so damn good at exploiting emotional cause and effect. He gets millions of people to believe things that are not so, to see false effects of false causes, and to knuckle under despite grave moral, political and social qualms. Boosted by quisling right-wing and “social” media, he’s become a master of mass deception who would make Orwell frown.

According to the Washington Post’s careful tally, he told 30,573 lies and near-lies in his first term. From all appearances, that firehose of falsehoods continued during the interregnum, although the WaPo’s tally didn’t. The result: our voters re-elected him by a narrow margin.

He won by playing on voters’ emotions and tribalism. He accused the people who pick our crops, tend our homes and kids, and install our drywall of being murderers and rapists. He painted innocent and hapless refugees from gang violence as demonic pet eaters. He managed to get white, Black, Hispanic, Christian, Jewish, and Muslim—citizens and migrants alike—all to suspect and fear each other, without enough of us asking, “Is there any scapegoat he’s left out?”

It would be worthy of hilarious laughter if it all weren’t so horrific. As an obscure Nazi-era German media oligarch once reportedly said of himself and Hitler, our free voters have just anointed as their leader the greatest demagogue in human history. And he’s far more insidious than Hitler, whose screaming tirades were emotionally repellent, or Julius Caesar, who had no TV or social media to egg him on and spread his lies.

But let’s not look back. It’s too late for that. The deed is done.

We must look forward. And how do we do that? We must reason from what he is, what he has been and what he has done.

After eight years of the most intense media scrutiny ever bestowed on a single individual, his character is an open book. His lodestars are grievance, tribalism, retribution, vengeance, dominance, and loyalty. He sums it all up for us, every so often, in his favorite words, “win,” “winning” and “winner.” He reportedly called the soldiers who died saving the Enlightenment from Hitler “losers.”

He’s converted politics—our species’ means of governing itself—into a bizarre and increasingly deadly blood sport, something like the fictional “Hunger Games.” Already he’s referred to himself (he says jokingly) as “king.” And he did promise to be a “dictator,” albeit only on his first day.

But that’s not just how he sees himself. That’s how he acts. His attitude toward law and order is the same as it’s always been throughout his decades-long mostly-failing business career: dispute, deny, delay, distract, defend against, and generally ignore the rules. As heiress Leona Helmsley once said about taxes, rules are for “little people.” They are just obstacles to crush under his heels as he strives for dominance. And our supine Supreme Court has acquiesced, making him immune from criminal responsibility for “official” acts. Our Senate has become his doormat.

“Dominance” means that anyone he doesn’t like, for whatever reason, must suffer. If you didn’t see that before, just look at the way he turned on Ukraine and its doughty leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who had riled him by refusing to find dirt on Hunter Biden in Ukraine (the subject of his first impeachment.) This week he threw Zelenskyy to Vladimir Putin like a hawk throwing a dead mouse to its chick. And the Republican “hawks,” who once resisted the Russian bear at the risk of nuclear Armageddon, stood by.

But this same week, he did something even more consequential for us. He fired once-four-star-General Charles Q. Brown, Jr. as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of our armed forces. That’s the second key step in his personal takeover of the world’s most powerful, professional, restrained, and law-abiding military. The first (in case you didn’t notice it) was insuring that once-four-star General Lloyd J. Austin III got replaced by once-Major Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense. Now the “top brass” of our once world-beating military are in our rogue president’s pocket.

But that’s only the beginning of the frightful chain of cause and effect that’s now shaping up. Even as our military is falling under the thumb of a demagogue, it’s also getting weaker.

Our aircraft carriers, destroyers, big bombers and other Cold-War means of projecting military power abroad are becoming obsolete. They are all sitting ducks for much cheaper and more nimble drones, which can be made autonomous, deployed in swarms, and imbued with artificial intelligence. Yet our military-industrial complex continues to churn out “big hardware” because it’s immensely expensive and immensely profitable.

Ike famously warned us about our military-industrial complex. But it’s not just a political liability. It’s a military one, too. It continues producing the last century’s huge, lumbering and mindlessly expensive war machines while missing the drone revolution that will win the next war. And in a final irony, Trump’s abandonment of Ukraine sidelines that nation’s revolutionary home-made-drone industry, leaving it for Europe’s scientists, engineers and military industries to adopt, assist and exploit.

Yet another military-related domestic trend is threatening us at home. A lot of people who never heard of it before now know about the Insurrection Act. It’s an obscure 1807 statute, enacted sixteen years after our Constitution was ratified. It allows the President to deploy our federal armed forces, and to federalize and deploy states’ National Guards, to put down a “rebellion” or “insurrection.” It’s considered an exception to the later Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which prohibits deployment of federal troops for purposes of domestic law enforcement.

The legal space between the two statutes is big enough to move an aircraft carrier through, let alone a tank. By the time the supine Supreme Court gets a chance to fill it, a lot of protestors could be dead, and we could be in a second civil war.

So now the dismal logic of Trump’s fevered mind is taking shape. We no longer need a world-beating military—or the cutting edge science and engineering that supports it—if only we accept a new world order. All we have to do is admire, befriend and emulate the world’s existing tyrants, as he apparently does Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un. (Trump seems more reluctant to cede a sphere of influence to Xi Jinping because his main threat is economic, not military, at least to us as distinguished from Taiwan.) Then we can share the world most amicably with them by dividing it into spheres of influence.

All we need our own grand military for is keeping “order” within our own sphere of influence. It can do that by intimidating, if not annexing, Canada, Greenland, Mexico, the Panama Canal, the EU, Australia and New Zealand, and by suppressing domestic dissent. Then we can appease China and Russia by throwing them the bones of Taiwan and Ukraine, respectively. An obsolete military based on sitting-duck carriers, destroyers, bombers, tanks and Blackhawks is plenty strong enough for that, even if the Blackhawks occasionally do bring down passenger aircraft.

Think my pessimism is getting out over its skis? Then take twenty-five minutes to watch this episode of Washington Week. In it, four top reporters on the national scene examine how Trump’s recent acts and utterances portend a return to nineteenth-century imperialism, with a global regime of “spheres of influence.” It’s the only way to make sense of them besides senile dementia. And, seen in that light, they do have their usual puerile, facile logic.

I never read Machiavelli’s The Prince until late in my middle age. When I did, I was appalled. I had thought that the book would teach some positive moral or practical lesson. But its lessons were all grossly negative. What I learned was the plight of medieval Italian city-states, each run by a duke much like Trump, bent on dominance and “winning” at any internal cost. The only details I remember now were two incidents in which such worthies invited delegations from rival city-states for peace talks, and then slaughtered the entire delegations by surprise, in cold blood.

Imagine that mindset controlling nukes! Back to the Dark Age! It was perfect for Trump’s personality and mindset. And that is precisely where we’re headed under his “leadership.”

If you’re uncomfortable with that, you have two choices. You can find refuge in one of the world’s few remaining democracies and hope that: (a) it will admit you as a citizen or resident despite your own country’s (and Europe’s) increasing antipathy toward migrants; and (b) it will remain, at least for your miserable lifetime, independent of Trump’s sphere of influence, which now threatens to include all but China’s and Russia’s. Or you can protest, resist and fight to save our own democracy, with all the strength and intelligence of which you are capable.

There’s no middle ground but complicity. If you choose to resist, I’ll join you in the February 28 universal boycott for equality. I won’t be spending a penny for twenty-hours, online or otherwise. It’s just a small gesture of protest, and it’s just a start; but it’s the least an old man can do.

Endnote. In March 2022, less than a month after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, I wondered when the US would be sending such cheap drones to Ukraine. Apparently we didn’t yet have them, because Ukraine has had to develop its own, domestic cheap-drone industry, using civilian and “hobby” drones.


For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

Permalink to this post