I once thought the Constitution, the rule of law, and basic common sense would protect this country from political chaos, the way the French believed the Maginot Line would shield them from invasion in 1940. The French were wrong—and so was I. What I did not anticipate was the near-total surrender of many corporate leaders to the political pressures of the Trump administration.
The word “hero” has been so cheapened in the past eight years that the bar hasn’t just been lowered—it’s been buried underground.
Before his death, I knew little about Charlie Kirk beyond a handful of YouTube clips where he “debated” college students. His philosophy struck me as shallow, reactionary, and hostile to nearly every step of progress made since the 1960s—civil rights, women’s rights, gay marriage. To me, he seemed like this generation’s David Duke.
As much as I would love to be a historian looking back at this moment from 20 or 30 years in the future, that’s exactly how much I despise living through the chaos in real time.
Strangely enough, comedians have become the most responsible and courageous voices in these perilous times, while many of our politicians and representatives play the role of clowns.
Now, with Jimmy Kimmel’s indefinite suspension, we’ll see whether the promised economic and cultural backlash against Disney, ABC, and their affiliates materializes. As for Kimmel himself, I would not be surprised if he decides not to return at all to his show.
I’d say this analysis from outside the United States and about the United States is dead on and reflects my thinking about the end of the American dream. I don’t think things will change, certainly not for the better. My sense is that there will be a “Civil War” in this country and it probably has already started.
The United States is a dangerously volatile country. There has always been a palpable element of derangement in its social order. It has a record of assassinations and attempted assassinations, and a perennial problem with violent crime which is matched by almost no other first world country. But what is happening now feels different: apocalyptic and inexorable. And the reason it cannot be stopped is that the people, both the population at large and those who are supposed to be in charge, do not want it to stop whatever they may claim.
If they sincerely wanted to put an end to it, they could do so in a moment of reasonable consensus. But they have consistently resisted any attempt to enforce standards or controls on the virulent social media activity which is undermining the real freedoms they revere. So the tide of what would once have been called “extremism” – the incitement of violence and the perpetration of blind hatred – are now the accepted currency of political discourse.
Janet Dailey The American Dream is ending in a Psychotic Breakdown The Telegraph
When stupid people get together, they tend to elect stupid candidates. Those candidates, once in office, appoint other stupid people to help them mismanage the government. Naturally, stupid politicians make stupid decisions. And stupid decisions, like a biblical plague rain chaos and destruction on everything they touch.
That, in a nutshell, is a brisk and brutal diagnosis of our current political condition.
But what about the so-called smart people? Are they truly intelligent if they keep letting the proudly ignorant run the country—and ruin their lives in the process? A genius who surrenders the steering wheel to a blindfolded clown isn’t a genius at all; he’s just a polite passenger on the road to nowhere.
There was once a time when a stupid person had the humility to recognize he needed the expertise of smarter minds. That time has passed. Today, asking for advice is seen as weakness, and expertise is treated with the same suspicion once reserved for door-to-door preachers. Guardrails? Who needs ’em when you’ve got overconfidence and a social media following?
The rise of stupidity in America isn’t a fluke—it’s a feature. For at least a quarter century, our culture has glorified the simple-minded and vilified the competent. Stupidity has become endearing, even charming. Meanwhile, intellect and nuance are treated as elitist sins. Smart people are mocked, threatened, canceled (by both the woke and the anti-woke), and exiled from conversations (and decisions) they might actually improve.
So what happens? Smart people stop running for office. They quit their jobs. They retreat from the public square. Why volunteer for a high-stakes pie-throwing contest where the prize is harassment and the consolation is a subpoena? When idiocy becomes fashionable, intelligence becomes a liability.
If democracy dies in darkness, it may also perish in stupidity—with a laugh track.
H.L. Mencken’s Notes on Democracy was written about 100 years ago, yet the reader will be struck by how sharply his observations on 1920s politics and culture mirror the political landscape of today.
Mencken’s caustic style and biting sarcasm run throughout the book. He held little confidence in the judgment and wisdom of his fellow citizens, particularly regarding politics and voting, as evidenced by this remark:
“Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.”
Mencken’s disdain was not reserved solely for the electorate. He was equally unforgiving when it came to the judgment and competence of elected leaders, describing their primary motivation with brutal clarity:
“It is his business to get and hold his job at all costs. If he can hold it by lying, he will hold it by lying; if lying peters out, he will try to hold it by embracing new truths.
One quote in particular struck me—written a century ago, yet hauntingly apt in describing the Trump administration’s approach to governance:
“No man would want to be President of the United States in strict accordance with the Constitution. There is no sense of power in merely executing laws; it comes from evading or augmenting them.”
The relevance of Mencken’s skepticism and critique of American democracy is both startling and disheartening. His writing is a reminder that the flaws he saw in the democratic process and its leaders are not new—they are simply dressed in the colors of each era. We could certainly use more writers and journalists like Mencken today: fearless in their observations, unyielding in their criticism, and unafraid to expose the flaws in both our political culture and the electorate that sustains it.
It’s gutting—and deeply humiliating—to hear Canadians booing our national anthem at recent sporting events. But I don’t blame them. Not one bit.
Given the economic, political, and moral wreckage left behind by our twice-elected president, their disgust is understandable. The confusion and contempt from our allies aren’t aimed solely at the man in the Oval Office—they’re aimed at the people who put him there. Twice.
Let’s call it what it is: the United States has betrayed its friends, waged economic war on its own citizens, and devolved into a carnival of cowardice. The respect of our allies? That ship has sailed—and may not return in our lifetimes.
The Republican Party is a gelatinous mass of fear and sycophancy, devoid of courage or principle. The Democratic Party? A staggering monument to incompetence, still fumbling through the aftermath of letting a failed businessman and convicted felon stroll back into power.
And democracy? Please. We are no longer a beacon of anything. The Constitution has become a quaint relic, a yellowing parchment trotted out for ceremonial purposes while those in power treat it like a suggestion menu at a diner they never plan to pay for.
Maybe—just maybe—a sliver of Trump voters feel some remorse. But let’s be clear: 77 million people helped break this country. They owe their children, their neighbors, and the world an apology.
The red MAGA cap is no longer a slogan. It’s a symbol—loud, defiant, and chilling. Our allies don’t see us as brave. They see us as brainwashed. And in the eyes of much of the world, that crimson hat might as well be a swastika.
We have not simply lost our way. We’ve torched the map and handed the match to a mob.
I wish I could have our friends outside the United States read this book so they can understand what is going on inside it. The book is useful for citizens inside the United States but daily events related to DOGE, budget cuts, Elon Musk, court orders being ignored and chaos from Washington DC are front and center in our minds 24 hours daily.
Cooper does a very good of explaining the national crisis affecting the United States and its consequences to the rest of the world. He describes how the government and our political system were intended to work. And he accurately analyzes why they aren’t working. Cooper also tries to be even handed on his criticism of both political parties and their leaders.
This book will be an excellent resource for historians 20 or more years out trying to explain the craziness of our contemporary times and politics. I appreciate that this book was updated to reflect the start of the second Trump Administration.
If I have any reservations about this book, it’s that I feel that Cooper is being a bit more optimistic than I am about this country’s immediate future. Cooper writes “None of these definitions applies to Trump. He doesn’t have absolute power over the whole of government. He’s not even close to that. He remains constitutionally responsible to the people in significant and fundamental ways…The most serious domestic risk America faces with Trump as president isn’t dictatorship. It’s that the military follows his orders to break the law—to go after American citizens, for example. This scenario, however, is unlikely.”
I have the advantage of seeing how things have unfolded with in the Trump administration since the book has been published and the author may want to temper his faith in the power of our Constitution and the rationality of the Trump presidency.
Below are some notes and highlights that will provide the prospective reader of an introduction to the book and topics…
Obama’s presidency deeply unsettled and angered millions of Americans not ready for a Black president. And Trump’s hostility to minorities (sometimes subtle, sometimes overt, always cunning) drives his popularity among many Republicans, particularly in southern states.
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If the President of the United States were ever to punish disfavored speakers like the Harvard faculty, Google’s CEO, or the New York Times’ publisher, the nation would be in peril.
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The root cause of America’s twenty-first-century decline is the combination of (1) tribalism, (2) social media, and (3) a malformed political structure.
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Journalists are now disproportionately focused on writing stories that will go viral on Facebook and Twitter, a very different goal from writing stories that will educate and inform
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Americans focus little on human history, let alone absorb its lessons. And an embarrassing percentage of them don’t understand basic civics.
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Just look at the presidency. Donald Trump is grossly unfit to hold America’s highest office…The House of Representatives, moreover, is throbbing with underqualified mediocrities.
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The remedies are easy to prescribe. Americans must improve civic education in schools; raise awareness about cognitive biases throughout society; spend more time with people from other political tribes; reduce and regulate the use of social media; rework the political structure to foster more political parties and equal representation; double down on free speech; shun politically motivated prosecutions; feverishly guard election integrity; and support a new Republican champion other than Donald Trump.
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While Cooper’s remedies are easier to prescribe, they are impossible to fulfill. God bless the United States…
…” too many assume soft despotism can’t happen here. That we are better than that. Well, American exceptionalists, it turns out, we’re just like everybody else: susceptible to conmen and tyrants and kleptocrats. It is happening here, right before your eyes, even if yours are shut tight.
“And yet, even with all this tumult, comes the news that Trump, while still the most unpopular president ever, or at least since 1953 when such measures started being taken, has attained his highest favorability rating. Leaving me with some existential questions like: Who am I? Who are half these people I call countrymen? What alternative universe do they reside in, and is there any chance we could make them stay there, then build a wall and make the aliens pay for it? They often remind me of those stories we’d read during the worst of COVID, when patients who had been propagandized to within an inch of their lives after being told by their conspiracy-slingers of choice that it was all some giant hoax, would be in the ICU on respirators, their lungs failing, arguing with their doctors on their deathbeds that surely they don’t have COVID, since it doesn’t even exist.”
One of the things that I have experienced and come to grips with in my late stage of life is death. I have buried parents, a sister, relatives and friends so why should democracy be any different?
My expectation is that democracy would have at least survived me. Democracy did not die suddenly. I watched helplessy as a cancer of greed, corruption and stupidity weakened the patient. Many urged remediative care to ensure the patient survived and prospered. Instead the patient succumbed to a prescription based on misinformation, racism, sexism and superstition.
I am not indifferent to those who mourn or are suffering from democracy’s demise. Many are in shock; many are in denial. Power is now seized or bought. Caucuses, conventions and elections are not the bromides to resurrect or replace what we have experienced for so long. The guardrails of a Constitution, free press, independent judiciary and vigilant Congress no longer exist. I seriously question how accurate election results will be in the future. So much data and information is so easily manipulated, so can numbers.
The divide in this country is deeper than the hatred between North and South for so many years. I had hopes that a younger generation would change the tenor of our politics and culture as Baby Boomers need to step aside and allow our children and grandchildren to determine their future. Instead I sadly question whether they will be able to enjoy the opportunities and freedoms that once existed. Our school systems cannot educate students to read and write, how can we expect people to make right decisions and judgements?
I watch all of this numb and in sorrow. One expects to lose his family and friends. No one expects to lose his country.
For decades, America’s democratic process has shown signs of decline. On November 5, 2024, that decline may have reached a fatal turning point. Donald Trump was re-elected as President, marking—some would say—the final blow to a weakened democracy, neglected by its stewards and estranged from its founding principles.
Three pillars are essential for democracy: (1) a transparent, fair election process, (2) qualified candidates, and (3) an informed electorate, capable of choosing wisely. Yet, in today’s climate, who genuinely trusts the judgment of the American voter?
Consider this: The stock market is booming, unemployment is at a historic low, and gas prices are stable. The Biden administration was handling critical issues from Middle Eastern conflicts to Russian aggression against Ukraine. But in this era, good governance and stability didn’t win the day.
Trump’s victory stunned many, especially with his support among white women—53% of whom preferred Trump over Harris, despite his controversial record. These female voters chose a candidate from a party poised to limit their rights, including access to abortion. How did we arrive here?
Leading up to election night, the media portrayed Trump’s campaign as a dwindling force, with sparse rally turnouts and low energy, contrasted by the enthusiastic crowds at Kamala Harris’s events. Yet, in the end, reality defied expectations. Were these rallies misreported, or did the media miss the sentiment driving Trump’s base?
For those disappointed by the outcome, here’s a light-hearted note: maybe it’s time to book a one-way ticket before January 20, 2025. Think Liz Cheney, Robert De Niro, Jimmy Kimmel, Hillary Clinton, and others at odds with the new direction of our country.
Hitler’s rise in 1933-34 has long fascinated historians. He exploited public discontent, channeling German frustrations into loyalty to his cause, much as Trump does today. As we brace for the next four years—or more—it’s clear that we are living in historic, if challenging, times.
Ah the NBA and Stanley Cup playoffs are ending. Baseball is in full swing. Caitlyn Clark is the new American heroine and Taylor Swift continues to captivate audiences on her worldwide tour. Millions of Americans are on or about to enjoy their well deserved vacations. Summer is here, full of festivals, concerts, community activities, fireworks, and music fairs. Americans are enjoying the extended sunlight by playing golf, pickleball or heading to the shore to swim and lie comfortably on blankets in the sand serenaded by the timeless tunes of War’s classic song:
Cause it’s summer
Summer time is here
Yes it’s summer
My time of year
The stock market continue to reach for new highs. Unemployment is low. The economy and job market have largely recovered from one of the great health and financial challenges in the history of the world. There are no American soldiers involved in active combat. Indeed there was a recent commemoration of the 80th anniversary of D-Day, where American soldiers braved heavy artillery and gunfire from German forces to start the last days of tyranny.
Amidst this idyllic picture, what could disrupt our enjoyment of the sun, warm nights, and the sounds of children playing in the park?
Discordant and rabid voices are baying hatefully at political rallies clad in red hats and clothing like SS troopers at a 1930’s Nuremberg rally. Clutching their flags, Bibles and sometimes guns, they pledge allegiance to an ideology of hate, revenge and promised retribution. Like their leader, they know little of history or truth. There is no discussion of compromise. They wish to destroy democracy by employing their ruse of democracy—-the people want a dictatorship!?
As we revel in the joys of summer, it is crucial to remain vigilant. The threats to our democracy are real, and they come from within. Hopefully people will not be complacent by the warmth of the season. The future of our nation depends on awareness, actions, and unwavering commitment to the principles of democracy and justice.
Esot-eric 