America the Failure, unless we act now

 You know how it sucks when a product you really like is still in production, but the great company that made it was bought out by some greedy corporation, so the product is a cheap copy of what once made it so desirable?

That conveys the feeling, but hardly the true threat we face since gullible voters reinstalled the worst president in our country's history at the controls of what had the makings of eventually becoming a great country.

The "sphere of influence" concept championed by greedhead Putin works by threatening neighboring countries and absorbing them into a totalitarian framework. You might decide to run your sphere differently, being generous and kind, but eventually you will have to face a militarized foe when the cruel empire decides to push its boundaries. 

Republican Saint Ronald called the USSR the evil empire. Now Republicans embrace Russia under the leadership of the current occupant of the Oval Office, who has been a Russian asset since the 1980s. Vain, greedy, and stupid, yet exalted by American media culture as a beacon for idiots, Trump was the most useful idiot the Russians had ever had. He's paying off big time now.

Proponents of the unitary executive -- an all-powerful presidency served by a subordinate Congress -- really pushed us off a cliff here. Several Supreme Court justices should be dragged off the bench and put to work cleaning latrines for that one. Dictatorship is tempting when you feel confident that your ideological position will always be on top. SCOTUS and the Heritage Foundation laid a lot of groundwork to build a system that will assure their control. Their opposition may be tempted to leave the machinery in place and use it to force a different set of reforms. That will fail because the natural human inclination is conservative: fear based and self protective.

Various fables use the device of shabby travelers seeking shelter, turned away by most, but taken in by a generous host at last. After the host provides food, shelter, and comfort, the shabby travelers reveal that they are gods and reward the hospitable mortals handsomely. This may be supposed to teach hospitality and generosity, because you never know who might be a god, but it starts from the basic human fear of strangers. Vampires can only come in if you invite them. Drifters and hobos might be serial killers. That hitchhiker might murder you. Or you might murder them.

On a very basic level, we don't trust each other. Of course we do trust each other constantly, but paranoia is never far away. It's easy to excite. It drives conservative thought. So if a self-styled progressive administration tried to strong-arm benevolence on people, it would set off the kind of quiet resistance that leads to stunning election losses and a return to institutionalized distrust. You want some assistance when you're down and out? How down and out are you really?

Trump rallies were not the norm, although the Tea Party rallies did foretell them. The norm was Republican victories just quietly grinding forward with their bold assurance that the party of killjoy fuddy-duddies knew better than those dippy kids thinking that we could have luxuries like universal health care, excellent public schools, and well-maintained infrastructure. Next they'll be saying that we should go back to taxing the wealthy! Ha ha ha, how cute. Now run along and bury yourselves in popular culture while the grownups run things.

Conservatives have been constantly pulling toward authoritarianism in the name of freedom while the other side was trying to find something for each side. The net result is that we kept getting dragged toward the situation we're in today. Freedom was always code for a very specific, vocal, violence-prone subset of the entire population. The rhetoric of the conservatives was as elastic as the founding documents themselves. It's as vague, contradictory, and modularly applicable as the Bible.

The changes in tax laws and election financing since 1980 have almost turned our elections into shareholder meetings where the wealthy actually get to outvote us. The upcoming midterms may be our last chance to assert the true power of the people by voting against the party most thoroughly responsible for empowering rich punks and gangsters.

Should the Democrats gain control of both houses of Congress, don't expect an instant miraculous recovery and get all snitty in 2028 when it hasn't happened. A depressing percentage of potential voters are persnickety and apathetic. They don't vote or vote third party, thus perpetuating the conditions that make them persnickety and apathetic.

Social media showcases cynicism and sinister conspiracy theories designed to convince you that you shouldn't waste your time trying to make anything better. These posts can appear right next to one about environmental protection, social justice, universal health care, or political action, posted by the exact same person who just told you that the medical establishment is just a money machine designed to keep you sick and paying, and that "both parties are the same." You can't exhort people to vote and then tell them that anyone who runs for office is guaranteed to be a con artist or worse. And don't get me started on the childish belief that term limits for elected officials will solve anything. Term limits is not the same thing as limited terms, as would be a good idea for supreme court justices. But in that instance, the length of a fixed term would give parties a set target to anticipate exactly when they get to appoint a successor. It would become another precise political calculation. Not a magic bullet.

What is a magic bullet is your vote. You get one shot per candidate or ballot measure. You will be part of a massed volley in one exchange of fire. At the end, we will have a winner. The bullets, fortunately, are metaphorical, but the result will affect lives for years to come. We're choosing once again what our brand and quality will be. What do we offer to each other and  the world? We failed in 2016. We barely came back in 2020. Lost our chance in 2022 and set up the epic faceplant of 2024. One more time: are we stupid and violent or are we thoughtful, brave, and faithful to the ideals of human rights?

The Trump administration is a teenage fantasy of a presidency

 The mental age of the Trump administration is about 14.

All that they know about government appears to come from shallow observations based on movies and television. They don't have the attention span to read a comic book, let alone a real one with no pictures.

When confronted with a crime or a mistake, they lie, make excuses, and pout. They clearly don't understand the complexity of governing an enormous world power. They screw things up because they're going through the motions of how they think it works. 

They're using the US military like characters in a game. They're using apps to circumvent parental authority. They're experimenting with juvenile delinquency, as if deciding whether they will grow up to be criminal masterminds. Only they're all adults, clearly criminal and demonstrably not masterminds.

They're in charge.

The Supreme Court gave the president unlimited power to commit crimes as long as it could be tied in some flimsy way to "official acts." The president can't be accused of anything worse than poor judgment, no matter how many people get killed and what gets destroyed.

Legal scholars debate whether the protection extends in any way to the functionaries carrying out the orders. The Nuremberg trials did not accept the "only following orders" defense from Nazis facing the consequences of their heinous acts, but that was a simpler time. Who knew that in the United States we would raise a generation that actually longed to look out over fields of corpses such as the liberators of the death camps found?

Fascination with the Nazis is another teenage phase. The sharp uniforms, the cool-looking ships, planes, tanks. The unflinching cruelty. What does it mean to be a man? Not every boy goes through it. I thought that most grew out of it, but clearly I was wrong.

Everything they do is a caricature. 

Look around your area to see who still has flags and signs out, supporting the idiot in the Oval Office. We have representative government. These are the voters that this government represents. The House of Representatives is supposed to represent the common people most directly. The GOP House members support the regime. We'll find out in 2026 whether they still represent the voters who put them in office, but in 2024 they did. Disillusioned Republican voters have confronted their elected representatives so forcefully that the representatives won't face them in public anymore. But where it counts, in Congress, where they could impeach the President and send him to trial in the Senate, they do nothing. No one wants a government-paid trip to El Salvador, I guess. They're afraid they'll lose. It's a national version of the rape victim who won't testify, or the organized crime witness who knows that they will die even if the mob boss goes to prison.

This is the difference between actual teenage fantasy and the nightmare we're in now. Voters who can't tell the difference put this regime in office. Now they're finding out. They voted for corrupt, greedy, cruel, lying, emotionally immature people to be in charge of every single department of the federal government.

Elon Musk has brought in actual sociopathic teenagers to help with the destruction. Why not? They fit right in.

The US is no longer a great power

 Isolationists have succeeded in taking the United States from being a global power and a force for good and converting us into a global threat and an untrustworthy ally, possibly forever.

The politicians who cultivated a base of voters who live in anger and fear thought that those voters were stupid and apathetic enough to remain controllable. But somewhere along the line they started believing their own shit. We have a whole regime devoted to destroying our strengths both domestically and internationally.

We could have been great. Sure, we made mistakes, usually propelled by the same greedy impulses that have now led to this complete undoing of all progress. Countries don't have friends, they have interests. The same is true of corporations. But in the case of nations those interests can align with what's kind, moral, and just, as well. Everything does come down to philosophy eventually.

Kindness, morality, and justice, have gone in the shitter with this regime. It's all about the money and power.

It is much easier to impose a regime of cruelty than one of kindness. A free society always contains the seeds of its own destruction. The people who hate the freedom of anyone who is not like them will take advantage of the freedom to speak and assemble, to spread their anger and fear to anyone susceptible, and organize their militias and pressure groups. 

The fact that the regime's budget proposal rips away large sections of the social safety net for chronically underpaid "essential workers," the elderly poor, and children proves that they hate spending money on much more than foreign aid. They're demonstrating if not admitting that they consider anyone below a certain financial threshold to be a useful idiot at best and vermin at worst. And you could be in both categories.

The oligarchs believe that they do represent American values. They represent you, because you would certainly do what they are doing if you had the chance. This is depressingly true in a lot of cases. Now it's our nation's global posture. Turning inward has never worked out well for us in the past. We always get blown out of our complacency by world events and have to play catch up because we had let our global awareness and capability deteriorate.  This time around, our rivals will fill in behind us, and then sweep over us. The current regime is the most ignorant, inept, and corrupt in the history of the United States. Their lust for power will end up leaving them with none, and the rest of us with the ruins of what had been a promising young nation.

We could dust off the Constitution and start applying it in the more inclusive way that those soft-headed liberals had been suggesting before we decided to go ahead with the right wing's experiment in unbridled greed and cruelty. It will be too late for US standing as a global leader. We might even be a vassal state of China by then, in which case our Constitution is just a historical curiosity for underground scholars to remember wistfully. Same goes if the victor is Russia, but I don't think that Russian leadership is capable of global dominance the way the Chinese are.