How America Dies

“Honey, I forgot to duck!”—Ronald Reagan, to his wife Nancy, on awakening from surgery after an assassin’s attempt on his life.

“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall!”—Ronald Reagan to Mikhail Gorbachev, Soviet Russia’s reform leader, in front of the Berlin Wall that the USSR had erected between East and West Germany after the end of WWII.

Don’t look now. It’s probably too late, anyway. But the America we were taught to love in school is on life support. It’s already in the ICU.

Want evidence? You don’t need to read heavy tomes like How Democracies Die. You just have to watch a recent thirty-minute clip of John Oliver. In it, the transplanted British humorist makes the ghastly and surreal seem funny. Our “holy” First Amendment is being battered to a pulp by the very force it was meant to contain and civilize, the full force of government.

Orwellian? Kafkaesque? You bet. But it’s happening, for real, right now. And the methods that Trump and his team use—relentlessly bashing, and even prosecuting, what remains of the free press—is right out of Orwell’s 1984: “Freedom is slavery.”

Ironies abound. But as my old teacher of the Russian language used to say, politics “is not logical. It’s psychological.” (He actually said this about language, but its truth applies far more broadly.)

Understanding that basic truth helps you see. Donald Trump’s relentlessly repulsive, selfish, corrupt, crude, insulting and domineering personality is not a bug. It’s a feature. It’s designed to channel the crudest, rudest, most selfish and primal feelings of the least thinking voters into one of the most destructive forces in our nation’s political history. And it’s working, big time.

It’s working because, unbeknownst to most voters and even most pundits, it’s part of a plan that started 44 years ago, with Ronald Reagan. It was he who became famous for the central tenet of right-wing propaganda over the last two-plus generations, even putting it in his inaugural address: “Government is not the solution to the problem. Government is the problem.”

Think about that. Our own government was the first in human history to put the rights to “life, liberty and pursuit of happiness” and “due process” in writing. It was carefully designed to let white men—and, much later, later Black men and even women—control their own and collective destiny by voting for representatives who would run their government. It was, our Founders seemed to believe, a direct product of the Western Enlightenment, and a successor to and improvement of the Senate of Ancient Rome. It was a reflection of Jefferson’s immortal words (then hypocritical but later made real) that “all . . . are created equal.”

So who could object to that? The great modern philosopher John Rawls gave us a sort of quasi-scientific “proof” that it’s the best form of government.

Suppose, he wrote, you were a disembodied soul about to be born into a human infant. Suppose you had some form of consciousness and were able to choose which society, but not which family, to be born into.

What society would you choose? One like what the US used to be, in which most anyone could, through education, training, hard work, and a bit of luck, rise to the pinnacle of wealth, comfort and power? Or one like the British aristocracy of our Founders’ day, or like our ante-bellum or Jim Crow South, in which a small part of the population had an iron grip on wealth, comfort, prestige and practical power?

If you had no control over which particular body your soul would inhabit, Rawls mused, your choice would be easy. You would prefer the society in which your chances were greatest: a truly egalitarian democracy. You would opt for what our country used to strive for.

So simple. So true. If your goal is to maximize the happiness, comfort and prosperity of everyone, the politics we Americans were pursuing from the “Progressive Period” of Teddy Roosevelt through the muscular post-Depression reforms of FDR and the post-war visions of JFK, MLK, and RFK seemed right for the job. But the last three were all gunned down by assassins, giving the apostles of greed a wide opening to work their way.

The greedy will always be with us. Greed and selfishness are part of human nature. They are part of our biological evolution. Without a healthy self-regard and self-protection, our individual organisms could not have survived. Yet only in rare instances have our species’ chief evolutionary advantage—our Reason, intellect and ability to cooperate for mutual benefit—overcome that greed.

That happened, most notably, in the ancient Greek city-states, Ancient Rome, Britain, and (up to now) the USA. But it’s hardly the norm for our species. In a recent population weighted estimate, I calculated the incidence of democracy in human history as 3.2%.

But I digress. The subject is how and why the US’ egalitarian democracy is dying right now. The reason is as simple as sin. The greedy are single-minded in purpose and drive. They want more: enough is never enough. They believe themselves superior, in some metaphysical sense, to certain minorities. And their insatiable egos convince them they deserve more, and that their getting and having more is good for everyone, if only because it creates better jobs for the serfs. Today Trump is their avatar.

Our country has even developed special institutions to teach and propagate that lust for more. They are called “business schools.” There are about 1,700 of them in our nation. What they teach, in essence, is how to make money. Not a single one existed before the last century.

It gets worse. The “morality” that business schools teach is absurdly simple and profoundly corrupting. It’s profit, period. Business schools teach how to profit and increase “shareholder value.” In the process, they teach, perhaps inadvertently, that profit is all that matters. And the accountants, managers, calculators and corruptors that business schools turn out in droves every year propagate this numerical gospel of self.

Don’t take my word for it. Look at some recent history. What they have done is take a society that built immense wealth on science, engineering and industry and turned it into a bunch of greed-heads who spin software, automation and paper-pushing into cash, and sometimes into obscene wealth.

The Boeing Company was once perhaps the greatest privately owned engineering-scientific firm in human history. Yet under the classic “B-school” leadership of David Calhoun—an accountant by training, not an engineer—Boeing had planes and their parts literally fall out of the sky. It’s now under what can best (if loosely) be described as probation by the DOJ and the FAA for its two total-fatality crashes, and the FAA is under massive assault by the Trump government.

I could cite dozens more examples. But let’s just take a few big ones. Has anyone noticed how promotion and advertising have taken over the Internet and corrupted its practical value, let alone its morality?

In its early days, the Internet offered immense practical value. Every person on Earth with an Internet connection could, in theory, have access to the sum total of human knowledge and learning, including history, science, engineering and medicine. Once the Internet commandeered logistics like Amazon’s, every buyer could, in theory, get whatever he or she wanted, with a precise online search, and have it delivered to his or her home at a reasonable price in days.

You don’t have to use the Internet much to see how far it has fallen from those ideals today. While it has islands of relative sanity, such as Wikipedia and the websites of major medical centers, the Internet has become a cesspool of lies, propaganda, commercial promotion and self-promotion. It has given us the phenomenon of teenage “influencers.” These are not-fully-formed adolescents without special knowledge, training or any other kind of distinction but a modicum of physical attraction and a glib line. They rise like meteors in popularity, fall just as fast, and get depressed and sometimes suicidal when they do. Thus the Internet has elevated town-square soap-box fools to internationally influential roles and has increased their numbers to vast multitudes.

At the same time, online promotion has exploded to such an extent that the utility of online searches for specific products and services has dropped precipitously. In the Internet’s (and Amazon’s!) early days, it was possible to pinpoint a particular product—by specific features, price and availability—using a precise Boolean search in a search engine like Google’s or Amazon’s. Today, such a search produces a long list of “sponsored” products, organized by general product category, such as “chairs,” “women’s shoes” or “kitchenware.” So the theoretical logic and precision of computers in consumer product selection has degenerated into letting you loose, without guidance, in a whole section of a virtual department store, with products organized in order of their garishness, the promotion paid the platform, and the misleading character of their ads.

In the realm of ideas, especially the political and social, the Internet’s “evolution” has been much worse. Social media and often news media use carefully designed algorithms to feed you incessantly material that reinforces your own prejudices, preconceptions and misconceptions. They thus raise “confirmation bias” from a common and scientifically established personal failing to a high art of propaganda.

Many social media also play on our strongest emotions, rather than Reason. Their algorithms seek to turn Web users into monkeys in Skinner boxes, driven to press buttons, as fast as they can, to get sugar cubes or doses of dopamine. They convert curious and thoughtful human beings into cogs in a grand machine of profit, persuasion, deception and delusion. “Hidden” persuaders, indeed!

The bosses and programming peons who work daily to jerk your chains in all these ways are much like the B-school grads. All are imbued with the notion of profit, derived from clicks and “hits,” as the greatest social good. Your attention, gained by fair means or foul, is now the most valuable coin of the realm.

The adherents to this dark gospel also include Vladimir Putin and his swarm of spooks and trolls, each telling you that his rape of Ukraine and atrocities on its people are proper, or at least none of your business. And of course they include many purveyors of substandard, poorly conceived, worthless, dangerous, toxic, unhealthy, inoperative, useless or simply poorly-performing products that, along with Trump’s TariffsTM, are likely to consume an increasing part of your meager income.

Who’s really behind all this? That’s the beauty and the terror of it all. It would be easy to blame the “oligarchs,” as I and others have done repeatedly. But that would be shortsighted. People like Jeff Bezos, David Koch, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg are but the tip of the iceberg. (And Jeff Bezos, to his credit, once upon a time actually introduced useful product searches and honest product-user reviews.) These billionaires have a huge phalanx of witting and unwitting accomplices, include all those millions of B-school grads, all the millions of smaller business owners, lawyers and executives who aspire to become oligarchs (or oligarchs’ henchmen), foreign tyrants like Putin and MBS who would like other leaders to be pliable, self-interested despots and so easier to deal with, plus most of the Republican Party. Which brings us back to Ronald Reagan. Although hardly a gift to the Western Enlightenment, he was personally as different from Donald Trump as he could be. He was a man of immense charm and emotional sensitivity, as the headquotes to this piece above attest. Even more anomalously, he got his start in politics as a labor leader of sorts, President of the Screen Actors Guild. How he became the most prominent propagandist for what was then truly the Party of Business is a story yet to be told.

Even before he started falling asleep in Cabinet meetings and later developed clear signs of Alzheimer’s (from which he died), Reagan was hardly an intellectually curious man. It wasn’t until his second term that he asked his generals how many people would die in any big nuclear exchange between the US and then USSR. Only when they told him that about 600 million people would perish did he get serious about disarmament. But to his credit, he negotiated, with Soviet reformer Mikhail Gorbachev, the vital nuclear disarmament treaties that are increasingly lapsing and/or being ignored today.

But that was then. This is now. Today’s Republican capo is as different from Reagan as night from day. Yet he has shifted into Warp Speed the very same transition that Reagan began: one from a secular democracy based on human equality and lawful limits on business into one which, as Calvin Coolidge so well put it, “The business of America is business.”

In the process, our new capo has not only permitted, but encouraged, massive corruption and grifting, in much of which he himself is involved. He has also permitted huge and unlawful concentrations of business power that would have given Senator John Sherman (he of the Sherman Antitrust Act) apoplexy. And in the process, he has shown an historically unique combination of arrogance, stupidity, ignorance, and incompetence in his work and gross disrespect, disdain, and vulgarity for his colleagues, underlings, political rivals, our allies and American voters.

It would be tempting to believe that this time will be no different from his first term, and so, at the end of it, our nation will be as amenable to correction and resuscitation as it was under Joe Biden (before senile dementia hit him, too). But this time is different.

This time, the capo has a plan, Project 2025. This time he has a phalanx of sycophants to execute it. This time, only four months in, he has (except for Marco Rubio and a few others) “stacked the deck” with obvious incompetents whose only characteristic of note is that they owe their jobs, their notoriety, and their fortunes to him alone. And this time, the Republican Congress has displayed its sycophancy by permitting his rape and plunder of the federal bureaucracy. The House has just approved, and perhaps the Senate soon will approve, a massive budget bill whose chief accomplishment is to explode an already large budget deficit for the primary purpose of cutting taxes on large corporations and the already wealthy.

Yes, we’ve lived through incompetent, corrupt, business-oriented presidencies before. Warren Harding and his Teapot Dome scandal come to mind. But this time is different. Not only did the hapless Harding—who some historians insist was a dupe of his underlings—never try to steal an election, let alone continue to insist that a legitimate one had been rigged against him. Most important, Harding never tried to use the nation’s apparatus of justice to prosecute his political rivals, let alone to cow and dominate our free press and great universities and contest their very expertise regarding facts.

Yet our current Demagogue has done all those things and more. And never before in our history have so many supposedly independent politicians and business leaders knuckled under to so clearly unlawful, anti-democratic and anti-civilized demands, not to mention crude, scatterbrained and disrespectful ones.

If the truth be told, our entire nation appears to be collapsing into an authoritarian mindset. While hardly as guilty as the Republicans, the Democrats are complicit, too. How else can you explain the lockstep resistance of powerful Democrats to acknowledging and handling President Biden’s increasingly apparent senile deterioration until it was too late?

Not only did their abject fealty to a president obviously not up to the campaign ahead practically determine the outcome. That fealty, in effect, forced VP Harris to wage an absurd “politics of joy” campaign at a time when the country, far from joyful, was and is literally falling apart.

For those my age, Harris’ alleged “supporters” tying her hands behind her back recalled the doomed campaign of Hubert Humphrey in 1968. Humphrey ran as a “happy warrior” after LBJ had stepped down in March due to opposition to his misguided and explosive escalation of our War in Vietnam. But there was nothing happy about those times. Whether through loyalty to LBJ or from political pressure from Democrats, Humphrey was unable to distance himself from LBJ on the War, which was the principal issue tearing the country apart. He lost, bringing us Richard Nixon and Watergate.

So it’s not just the Republicans whose “follow the leader, right or wrong” ethos is destroying our democracy. Like most of our species, we Americans are still caught in the death grip of the alpha male.

What’s going to happen now? As the famed baseball catcher Yogi Berra once remarked, “The future is one thing that is hard to predict.” But some writing is indeed on the wall.

A fundamental principle of democracy—accuracy and truth in facts—is under sustained assault, not just among the White House Press Corps, but in the attacks on free media that John Oliver describes, including public media (NPR and PBS) and abroad in the disbanding of Voice of America, and Radio Free Europe. Law firms, colleges, universities and private businesses are under relentless pressure for allowing dissent, handling public-interest legal cases for free, and promoting equality in DEI programs, of their own volition and at their own expense. Some are caving ignominiously, while some fight on, sometimes alone.

As in our Revolutionary War, “These are the times that try men’s souls.” Unfortunately, far too many men (and women! [set the John Oliver timer at 9:23]) are failing that trial. I fear deeply for our democracy, if the Dems can’t take over at least one House of Congress in the midterms, which are less than nineteen months away.

If this is not a time for every right-thinking man and woman to take a stand, that time will never come. The very least we can do is protest, all in unison, on June 14, which will be our would-be dictator’s birthday and—not coincidentally—our very first Soviet-style, mindless and hideously expensive national parade of military hardware. If you prefer right to might, that would be a good day to protest, peacefully but visibly.

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