15-Jul-2025

Just before turning in last night (or really this morning), reading the news of the day and the various analyses thereof, esp. news of the Supreme Court, a depressing realization came over me… the struggle is lost.

That is hard to say, but I believe it to be true. It won’t stop me speaking out a taking action, but 50 years of malfeasance by a determined retrograde minority and neglect by the major parties let rot set in from with the once great 250 year-old tree of Democracy. The scheme to overthrow the heritage of the New Deal worked …the tree was ripe for felling because the inside of the tree had been eaten away by insects and disease.

Trump has seized government. The popular will to resist Trump and his minions is insufficient. Former Trump consigliere and fixer, Michael Cohen, has called it a ‘complacency’ the New American Crisis. I would add ‘fear’ to that. Trump is triumphing over his would-be resisters by instilling fear of retribution …by grey men with masks, by his Rudolf Hess-like attorney general, by any arm of government or a shadowy S.A.-style MAGA militia.

I drove through nearby Dartmouth College on a fine summer afternoon yesterday and thought to myself, if this had been the 1960’s when I grew up, the place would have been alive with protest. No one protests anymore. Complacency and fear. Students worry about the personal consequences of protest. They are looking after their careers and track to the good life.

A weakened, complacent body politic and debased society is unable to meet the challenge to our constitution and democracy. People are not resisting in large numbers. As much as half the population is still enthralled with a ‘charismatic’ (sic.) leader –I don’t see the appeal, but like any cult leader, one has to be ‘in’ the cult to see it. For the rest, fear of the bully and has apparatus is too great.

Democracy is an abstraction. A growing detachment from ‘democracy’ has been documented for decades, esp. among the younger generations. Rights are not worth fighting for. Better to live quietly and make some compromises, look the other way, rationalize, pretend or tell ourselves fibs, rather than risk losing all one’s comfort. ‘How bad can it be, right?’ ‘It’ll be okay’ ‘These things go in cycles.’

Trump said last week, “I control the levers.” He was right, he does, because he knew the American electorate better than the democrats/Democrats. He knew even before the Iowa caucuses in 2016 that Americans were inert when he said, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?”

And so, here we are, the last vestiges of old New Deal order collapsing day by day, week by week in the face of token opposition. For the most part, we segue into our every day lives and live as we always have. Stock market is good. Crypto is booming. The bad stuff is happening to ‘them‘, not us.

I am reminded of the William Butler Yeats poem from 1919 about the shell-shocked transition from the old order to an unfolding post-WW I world. Trump is a sort of ‘second coming’ …a ‘rough beast’ of dissolution and destruction stepping into a divided and broken nation.

The Second Coming

BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS 

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.   

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out   

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert   

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it   

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.   

The darkness drops again; but now I know   

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?