Sliding into Disrespect

Is the United States of America losing the world’s respect? Are we losing respect not just among our rivals and enemies, but among our friends and non-aligned nations? And is there good reason for this dismal trend?

The answers to all three questions, I submit, is “yes.” And the reasons are the same as ones that would cause anyone to lose respect. We don’t or can’t keep our word. In increasingly important matters, we don’t fulfill our moral, legal and historical obligations. And, for a nation founded on Reason and the Enlightenment, what we do increasingly doesn’t make sense.

Let’s take Ukraine first. But let’s start with history. The last century saw the two bloodiest wars ever. Both started in Europe. Both involved disputes that, at least initially, seemed none of our business.

But, despite strong isolationist trends in both cases, we got involved. We lent our allies money. We supplied goods and munitions. Eventually we jumped in directly, sending our own people across the great ocean that protected us to serve, fight and die in foreign fields. Still today, row upon row of graves of Americans—in Flanders Field and in the much bigger fields of Normandy—attest to the determination and sacrifice of Americans in great causes.

What were those great causes? It’s easier to see them now, with the benefit of hindsight. There were at least three. First and foremost, we helped our allies: the nations with whom we shared history, values and democratic ideals, the nations of the Enlightenment. Second, we fought to advance those ideals for themselves, in a perhaps quixotic attempt to improve the human condition.

In World War I, our slogan was “Make the World Safe for Democracy.” We failed at that task, in part because we couldn’t persuade our victorious allies to refrain from punishing the German people collectively for the sins of their Kaiser. But at least we tried. Later, in and especially after World War II, we succeeded spectacularly.

And that brings us to the third and most important great cause of all: bringing some sense of reason, humanity and order into international relations, what today we call “geopolitics.”

The widest and bloodiest single war in history had ended with the first use of nuclear weapons, which we invented. Any idiot could see where continuing geopolitics based on tribalism, tribal wars and imperialism would lead. And where we couldn’t rise above the foresight of idiots, scientists credibly told us that continuing such politics in the nuclear age could lead to our species’ self-extinction.

For a brief moment after the war’s end, we Americans were the sole superpower. We were also the sole surviving combatant nation to have incurred minimal attacks on and damage to our homeland. Did we use our nuclear weapons, our military power, our industrial might and our intact homeland to intimidate and dominate the rest of the world? No. We used them to lead the world, peacefully, toward a better and less bellicose future, based on mutual respect, negotiation, agreement and peaceful rebuilding. While still paying off our own war debt, we stretched to rebuild Europe, including our former enemies Germany and Italy, under the Marshall Plan. We did much the same with Japan. We organized and helped found the United Nations.

Recognizing the economic causes of World War II, we organized the world economy to promote progress and reduce causes for war. Beginning with the Bretton-Woods agreement on monetary exchange, we continued with the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which eventually morphed into the World Trade Organization. We helped found the World Bank and International Monetary Fund and became their principal contributor.

Taken together, these acts of ours were unique—and uniquely successful—in world history. You could summarize the thrust of our global leadership in four words. As Jesus once had advised, we loved our enemies.

For decades, we lived Enlightenment values. We not only loved our former enemies. We helped rebuild them and paid for their renewal. As a result, our bitter former foes Germany and Japan now stand not as an axis of aggression, as they had been in World War II. Instead, they serve as global anchors of democracy, peace, scientific and technological progress, and the values of the Enlightenment. Today’s Germany, with its full confession and repentance for its wartime aggression and the Holocaust, has become a model nation, a global exemplar, and the industrial and defense anchor of a united Europe.

Now we Americans face an embarrassing paradox. We didn’t win the last century’s big war in Europe. Soviet Russia did. While Soviet Russia was fighting two hundred Nazi divisions in the East, we and our other allies were fighting a mere ten in the West. But we gave Soviet Russia critical help in supplies, arms, munitions and food. Without that help, the Eurasian continent might look far different today.

Not only were we the “Arsenal of Democracy,” as the wartime slogan went. We were also the Soviet Union’s arsenal. Our arms and aid allowed it to survive and continue, and the Russian people to escape domination by a relentlessly violent, self-proclaimed “Master Race.”

Now Russia itself has gone rogue under a twenty-first-century tyrant like Ivan the Terrible. It has attacked and invaded a democratic-leaning neighbor, without provocation, in the baldest act of imperialist aggression in almost ninety years. And what do we Americans do?

After a good start in supporting a stalwart and democratic-leaning victim of imperialism, we are now failing to provide absolutely crucial support. A bill to fund the “Arsenal of Democracy” is stuck in Congress because the Speaker of the House—the second in mere months—won’t bring it up for a vote, although it would almost certainly pass if he did. A novice politician from one of our least advanced and least significant states, Louisiana, is holding up the world’s most powerful democracy and making us look weak, cowardly and indecisive.

Unlike the two world wars, this war won’t require a single American to fight or die for the cause. All we have to do is make and provide arms and ammunition. Not only will doing so build up our own defense industry and make us profit; it will give good jobs to many of the skilled workers left high and dry by globalization, who’ve turn to Trump as a savior in their desperation. We have everything to gain, nothing to lose, and an innocent would-be democracy to save. So why don’t we act?

Imagine how all this looks to Europeans. Not only have valiant Ukrainians been forced to retreat from Avdiivka for lack of ammo. Our President also won’t authorize giving them the advanced fighter jets and long-range missiles they need to at least control the skies over their cities and troops. Why? Because he’s afraid that Ukrainians might use them to attack Russia proper, as Ukrainians have already done with their own drones and missiles. Add this to the President’s continued refusal to confiscate some $300 billion in Russian monetary reserves sequestered in American-controlled banks—money that could be used to buy Ukraine all the arms it needs—and it begins to look as if President Biden, while giving Ukraine a small set of brass knuckles, is holding Russia’s coat while it beats up its neighbor with long metal bats.

I know, I know. Russia has nuclear weapons. But so do we. So do France and Britain. It would only take one to wipe out Moscow and the Kremlin and kill the man who is the single greatest threat to global peace and security—and to our species’ survival—since Hitler and Stalin. We also have stealth technology to deliver those weapons, while it’s unclear whether Russia has anything of the kind.

Of course I’m not suggesting that we “go nuclear.” I’m merely suggesting that we understand that Putin has as much to fear as we do, even more. We should know by now that he’s the great deceiver, so we should not let him bluff us. He wants us to think he is crazy and will do anything. That may well be part of the reason for Aleksei Navalny’s untimely death, coming as it did during the Munich Security Conference. That infelicitous timing surely didn’t help Putin divide and weaken NATO, as he had hoped!

Vladimir Putin is the epitome of evil rationality. Whatever the ravages of age upon him, he undoubtedly has the dark intelligence to have foreseen the effect of Navalny’s death on NATO. So he must have intended Navalny’s untimely death as a warning against rising discomfort inside Russia with the cost and sacrifice of his bloody, gratuitous war in Ukraine. Putin has, above all, a fully functioning evil intelligence: he will not start something that could lead to disaster for his empire and himself.

On our side, the problem goes much deeper than an elderly, perhaps overly cautious president. The Gulliver of our nation is tied down by new Lilliputians: half-crazed pols from our least significant states and least important districts. A rump-group of “burn-it-all-down” crazies in the Republican Party is holding back what news reports suggest is a clear majority of the House in favor of giving Ukraine its aid package now. Every day that passes without a discharge petition, which would clear the aid bill in the House for passage, our allies’ trust in our ability to keep our president’s word and deliver on our clear moral obligations (not to mention military necessity!) declines.

But this issue, dear reader, is just the tip of the iceberg. Because we are still the global colossus, Europeans, Japanese and South Koreans (among others) diligently read the news about us. What do you think they think about the Alabama Supreme Court’s decision that frozen fetuses used for in-vitro-fertilization (IVF) procedures are “children” with full legal rights? Do you think they fail to understand how that decision threatens not only IVF medical services, which miraculously promise children to women having difficulty conceiving, but all of modern reproductive medicine? What do you think they think on reading this peroration of Alabama’s Chief Justice in the case:

“[T]he theologically based view of the sanctity of life adopted by the People of Alabama encompasses the following: (1) God made every person in His image; (2) each person therefore has a value that far exceeds the ability of human beings to calculate; and (3) human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God, who views the destruction of His image as an affront to Himself."

What I think they think is that at least one state in our great nation has been captured by people who have abandoned science, rationality and the Enlightenment for law and politics based on Scripture, i.e., for theocracy.

But our allies’ (and our rivals’) analysis has to go much deeper than that. They see how our supposed popular majoritarian democracy has degenerated into something quite different. They see how pols, seeking ever-greater power for themselves individually, have multiplied many fold the deviations from simple majority rule inherent in our Electoral College and our malapportioned Senate.

In particular, they see how the filibuster and Senate “holds” allow a 41% minority of the Senate, and even individual senators, to block legislation and presidential appointments to key administrative and judicial posts. They see how the GOP’s so-called “Hastert Rule,” in a nearly equally divided House, allows a 26% minority of the whole House (a majority of the GOP majority) to block legislation like the Ukraine aid and border-protection bill.

Both allies and rivals see how a single, solitary senator—Mitch McConnell—cynically and hypocritically manipulated the Senate’s role in the Supreme-Court appointment process to conjure up a so-called “conservative” majority on the Court. They watch as that illegitimate judicial majority decides fundamental issues bearing on everything from human rights and home life to corporate domination of our society.

Allies and rivals don’t even have to read much to understand these things. They can just watch TV. They can, for example, watch a recent “Frontline” episode to see how McConnell, who apparently values personal power above all else, managed to throw the Supreme Court, in an increasingly diverse and modern nation, backward toward an Old-Testament theocracy.

Not only is our government under increasing theocratic pressure from small states and outback districts with inordinate political power. Because of the political gridlock in Congress, real power is passing inexorably to the judiciary, which a small cabal of unelected judges on our Supreme Court rules for life, like potentates of old. That so-called “conservative” majority is in the process of remaking this nation in ways that will have great impact on private life, rights, voting, technology, health, and ultimately war and peace.

In Citizens United (2010), the Court legalized “soft” corruption by making corporations “people,” with consequent free-speech rights. It thus legitimatized the use of unlimited corporate money to propagandize the people, “lobby” their political leaders, and influence political decisions, often in secret meetings.

I have written at least twice (see this post and this one) about a modern megatrend. Real, secular power power over laws, public money and national events is passing inexorably from government and political entities to private corporations, if only because corporations have a wider scope of operation, fewer legal restraints, and far more money. In the long run, this trend may help corporate power displace government power as thoroughly in our new millennium as the power of monarchies and eventually democracies displaced the all-consuming of power the Church during the second millennium after Christ.

Citizens United helped shift that ongoing transition into hyperdrive. The evidence is manifold. Antitrust law is suffering a laxity and lassitude unmatched since the Sherman Act was passed into law in 1890. Without any effective legal restraint, Fox enjoys huge financial and political success as a private propaganda organ, far surpassing the state-sponsored propaganda organs of Hitler, Stalin and Mao. And Big Tech has, without significant legislative or judicial pushback, flooded the Internet zone with propaganda, “alternative facts,” conspiracy theories, and now AI-simulated “reality.” With all this going on at home, who needs foreign spooks? But we have them nevertheless: Russian, Chinese and Iranian intelligence agencies are operating round the clock to divide and delude our people and influence our elections, all assisted by corporate algorithms that magnify their impact out of lust for profit or sheer indifference.

In Shelby County v. Holder, the Court, in its infinite wisdom, decided that the South (and the rest of the nation) had “come to Jesus,” so that the section of the Voting Rights Act that required the Justice Department to “pre-clear” changes in certain states’ voting laws was no longer needed. Within the single decade after that decision, twenty state laws restricting voting rights were enacted. The overall result of Shelby County was thus to invite the mostly Southern states that had sought to restrict minority voting rights since the Civil War to do so again and more freely.

In Dobbs (2023), the Court obliterated the productive rights of women that its more thoughtful earlier counterpart had established in Roe v. Wade a half-century earlier. The sequelae of this decision, including the Alabama IVF decision, bid fair to throw the legal status of women back to the days of male-dominated patriarchy under the Old Testament. So what were the good “conservative” justices “conserving”—a fifty-year-old precedent, or a bit of scripture over two millennia old?

In Heller (2008) and McDonald (2010), the Court read the “well-regulated Militia” clause out of the Second Amendment, decided that the “right to bear Arms” is a personal right of self defense, and made that right active as against the states. In so doing, it arrogated to itself the ultimate authority to decide what weapons can be carried on our streets, and how, when and for what purposes they can be carried. It thus arrogated to itself—nine unelected judges, or today the mere six that constitute the so-called “conservative” majority—the power to restrain (or not) the carnage of rampant gun massacres now overwhelming our civil society. The results today are both dismal and self-evidently the consequences of judicial action.

As if all that were not quite enough, two of the most consequential ways in which the Court might usurp the functions of elected officials are coming up this Term, with decisions expected before June. The first is an appeal from a decision of the Colorado Supreme Court that let election officials disqualify Donald Trump from running for president in Colorado under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment (the “Disqualification Clause”). As I have analyzed in another essay, the justices’ questions in oral argument hint at a burning desire to outlaw disqualification without deciding the central legal issues of the Disqualification Clause: whether an “insurrection” happened on January 6, 2021, and whether Trump “engaged in” or “gave aid and comfort to” it. Some of the reasons cited by observers for so ducking a substantive decision include non-legal and blatantly political ones, such as letting the people “decide” in the election, or “giving each side one win,” by denying the Democrats disqualification while refusing absolute immunity to Trump as a defense against 91 felony charges.

In the long run, the second pending case may be even more important, at least if our democracy survives the first. In Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the court appeared ready to overrule or cut back a 39-year-old precedent that is the foundation of our administrative state, which demagogues refer to pejoratively as our “bureaucracy.” That precedent, nicknamed Chevron for its corporate party, held that when Ph.D.s and our other administrative experts lawfully make rules that are “permissible” interpretations of congressionally delegated authority, they are valid. It thus allows administrative experts to operate freely within general authority, and for general purposes, that Congress has specified, much as executives in corporations are expected to follow the general purposes and limits established by their boards of directors.

If the Supreme Court overrules or cuts back this Chevron precedent, what will be the consequences? Experts who know the science and the facts will be unable to act within their expertise and best judgment. Instead, the “law” will expect Congress to micromanage them, rather than just setting general goals and limits, such as reducing pollution or toxic hazards in our food and considering the costs and benefits of regulation.

That would be bad enough in the best of times. But these are not the best of times. Today our gridlocked Congress is barely able to pass a budget and avoid a temporary government shutdown, let alone provide vital aid to a courageous ally fighting the worst case of imperialistic aggression in Europe since World War II. So, if Chevron falls or is wounded, who will ultimately have to decide precisely how to curb pollution, fight global warming, keep toxins out of our food and medicines, and keep cars safe and airplanes from having their doors fall off while flying? With Congress gridlocked and unable to act, the Supreme Court itself will have to decide.

The sheer insanity of this proposition boggles the mind. But that is precisely what overruling or cutting back Chevron would portend. It would allow, if not force, lawyers and judges, in cumbersome years-long lawsuits, to hobble, if not gut, our administrative agencies as they seek to protect us with expert knowledge of modern science, technology, biology, chemistry and engineering. Can you imagine, for example, what a botch people trained only in verbal jousting under the law would make of microbiology?

Perhaps it wouldn’t be quite as bad as asking priests to decide. But it’s in that direction. And as the Alabama Chief Justice’s peroration in the IVF case reminds us, having priests decide might well be next.

Writ large, the crux of the matter is that the USA is no longer a democracy, at least if “democracy” means anything like majority rule. It’s some kind of hellish mix of oligarchy and anarchy, with a touch of despotism, as revealed by how quickly Trump got House Republicans to change their minds on the border and Ukraine.

Minorities in either House, not to mention single senators, can thwart any action by Congress, including senatorial “consent” to presidential appointments. The cabal of six unelected, so-called “conservative” justices on our Supreme Court has undertaken to make the Court the ultimate arbitrator of: (1) corporate “soft” corruption of politics, (2) legal restrictions on voting rights in the states; (3) women’s reproductive rights, and now (4) whether the post-Civil war constitutional amendment to keep insurrectionists out of public office will actually work today; and (5) whether our expert administrative agencies will by stymied by a broken Congress and judges like the theocratic Alabama one in the IVF case.

Neither our allies nor our rivals are stupid. Xi Jinping and (in his own bent, criminal way) Vladimir Putin can match any global leader, including our president, for sheer analytical intelligence, if not emotional intelligence. (Dictators don’t need much emotional intelligence; they don’t have to worry as much as leaders of even flawed democracies about persuading “the masses.”) No doubt Xi and Putin can see what’s happening to us: a once-thriving democracy is being undermined by: (1) minority rule in both Houses of Congress: (2) rules that give individual senators and minorities in the House veto power over legislation; and (3) a Supreme Court that increasingly arrogates to itself, and to lawyers and lawsuits, decisions on basic moral, operational and important substantive issues of government that ought properly be characterized as executive.

None of these things our Founders would have approved. None did they anticipate. Their major focus was their eagerness to create a self-governing nation from a barely viable chimera of slave and free states. We have long since passed the point where we should revere their foresight as impressive, let alone good for a millennium.

But none of this matters now. As today’s cliché goes, “It is what it is.” At risk today is not just some theoretical respect for American ingenuity, inventiveness and goodness, based on our checkered but sometimes glorious past. Today’s question is whether our allies and adversaries can respect a nation with a Congress riven by a deep ideological divide, hog-tied by minorities and (in the Senate) even by whacko individuals, which is ultimately ruled in key respects by a small cabal of Supreme-Court Justices (backed by a larger cabal called the “Federalist Society”) intent on arrogating some of the most fundamental decisions to itself and, in the process, hog-tying those decisions with all the complexity, delay and uncertainty of modern high-stakes litigation.

This is the reality in which we live. For better or for worse, this is how we now govern ourselves. To say it’s a “dysfunctional” and “non-democratic” system would be understatements. And bear in mind that none of this depends on whether the Demagogue becomes president again, although a lot of this will affect his chances, and his winning would make all this much worse.

If you were a leader of a foreign country under these circumstances, would you respect our government and trust the president’s word? Would you bet your national budget, let alone your national survival, on our promises? If the Enlightenment is to survive this perilous passage, it’s going to have to have Britain, the EU, Japan, South Korea, and a re-invigorated India carry it along.

Our nation may well help. It may even carry a substantial burden. But as of this moment in time, there can be no assurance that it will do so. We have our heads too deeply buried in all the following to focus on what matters in the real world today: the enduring consequences of slavery, tribal politics, the presumed rights of Americans to do exactly as they please at all times, and the alleged abstract constitutional rights of corporations, as “people,” to spread lies electronically and to magnify disinformation, misinformation and foreign propaganda algorithmically without effective legal restraint.


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