At Age 249, Are We Too Old to Govern Ourselves?

The combination of a demagogue as Presisdent, revanchist ideologues making policy , and incompetent sycophants crewing the ship of state ,brings into question the viability of American democracy

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America is an idea, not a place

As the longest enduring democratic republic in history, the United States has a record of great accomplishment, growing in less than two centuries from a breakaway group of British colonies into the world’s supreme economic and military power. However, the record of the “land of the free and the home of the brave” also contains major failures to live up to those ideals in both deed and spirit. The persistence of slavery for 90 years after the Declaration of Independence (“all Men are created equal“), for example, and allowing 130 years to pass after the ratification of the Constitution before women gained the right to vote, are egregious examples. In the 20th Century, efforts were made to rein in powerful economic interests, and struggles were waged to ensure civil rights for all. Whether or not Winston Churchill said it, the statement attributed to him that- “Americans are a wonderful people. They will always do the right thing- after exhausting every other possible alternative”- is a valid description of America’s wobbly path to a more just society.

It seems we may no longer be able to get to the right thing, and to be the nation that the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg said "welcomes people to its shores, all kinds of people.". We have chosen to elect a government that is pursuing policies that run counter to our national self-image as a people who can boast of our rights and freedoms, rights and freedoms we may have taken for granted. We are a nation created by immigrants, a country whose development over its existence was fostered by other generations of immigrants and their descendants.¹ There was a time when an American President described the United States as “a nation of many nationalities, many races, many religions-bound together by a single unity, the unity of freedom and equality."² The question of such an idea having purchase these days, when unidentified government agents are seizing people off the streets, is moot.

What we are witnessing is a heavy-handed effort to remake our society, led by an erratically incapable wannabe autocrat and a band of venal bumblers. While underpinned by an ideology that seeks to weaken democracy and promote a plutocracy, their actions have been marked not only by disregard for laws and an active disdain for political norms but also by Keystone Cops-like miscalculations and blunders. The current Administration and the supine Congress have managed the astonishing achievement of being both evil and stupid at the same time. That should not lull us into assuming it will all end well for America because it always has. But it also means we cannot surrender to fear and abandon the can-do optimism that is a traditional trait of our national character.

What We Face: Stupidity, Evil, and The Faltering of Self-Correcting Mechanisms

Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed- in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack. For that reason, greater caution is called for than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous. - Dieter Bonhoeffer, (1906-1945) “Letters and Papers From Prison”³

Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran pastor and theologian imprisoned by the Nazis and executed in 1945. He bore witness to the descent of German society into a totalitarian state. His observations dovetail into the later work of Hannah Arendt, who coined the phrase “the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil” in her coverage of the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1963.⁴ Arendt described Eichmann not as an evil monster, but as a dull bureaucratic clerk “just following orders”.

These observations explain how a democratic society can be steered into autocracy by cynical persons pursuing power in their self-interest. Evil is masked agents snatching people in public, it’s the government building concentration camp-style “detention centers”, and it is the unceasing efforts to undermine the rule of law. Stupidity is obvious in the unforced errors made by incompetents in government. The most recent examples are FEMA’s delayed response to the Texas floods and the passage of the large, ugly bill that cuts taxes for the rich and reduces social safety net programs for millions of Americans. The danger is that the corruption and chaos are so plain to see, people’s minds become indifferent to it. Instead of being outraged, too many of us are numb.

Are we therefore resigning ourselves to this state of affairs as the new normal? Consider three countries that slid from democracy into autocracy in this century: Hungary. Turkey and Venezuela. The dictators (Orban in Hungary, Erdoğan in Turkey, and Chávez and Maduro in Venezuela ) came to power by election, thus employing the signature tool of democracy to subvert it. There is a pattern in their actions: they solidified their hold on power by attacking the institutions that might hold them accountable- the courts, the media, the universities. They weakened the political opposition. Their governments are corrupt and operate much like organized criminal enterprises. If this seems disturbingly familiar, it is because the current Administration is following a similar blueprint.

Yuval Noah Harari, the Israeli historian and philosopher, has developed a theory based on his studies of how information networks function. In his recent work, he discusses the differences in how various institutions utilize information. For instance, religion (an information network) adheres to dogma (e.g., the Bible, the Koran, the Torah, etc.), which is assumed to be “an infallible source of knowledge” and beyond question. On the other hand, science, as it emerged in the Enlightenment period, accepted human fallibility and created “an information network that takes error to be inescapable.“ Think of the scientific method, or peer review of published papers by other experts, as a self-correcting mechanism. Such institutions “reward skepticism and innovation rather than conformity.”

Harari applies this concept to his treatise on democracy and dictatorships, which he sees as “contrasting types of information networks.’ ⁵ In his model, dictatorships are “centralized information networks[s], lacking strong self-correcting mechanisms A democracy, in contrast, is a distributed information network, possessing strong self-correcting mechanisms.” Information- and power- is distributed through “independent nodes”: Legislative bodies, political parties, courts, the press, corporations, local communities, NGOs, and individual citizens [who] communicate freely with one another…” Under our Constitution, political power is distributed among three co-equal branches of government, another means of self-correction

Some of these mechanisms are failing. in our country today. The Congress has relinquished many of its designated powers to the President. The large media outlets are corporate entities more interested in profits than public service . One of the two major parties has exchanged public service for the pursuit of power; the other, out of power, is searching for answers. They are not alone.

I was asked recently by a dinner guest what I thought the future would bring in light of the Trump Administration’s actions to date: taking a wrecking-ball to the Federal bureaucracy, passing the deficit-busting budget bill, inciting trade war brought on by the President’s tariff fetish, and, most conspicuously, engaging in mass deportations reminiscent of fascist Germany and Italy of the 20th Century. I answered that I had no way of knowing, and there was no clear path to see what would happen in a society as divided as ours is politically.

All crises are not only tests, but opportunities. The weaknesses of many of our institutions, especially those relied upon as self-correcting mechanisms, need to be repaired and updated. This is the opportunity that can be had. It is probably a process that could take decades. There is no magic bullet to cure a creaky political structure or to make capitalism a more equitable economic model.

What is to be done? That’s the hard part.

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1. Immigration proved disastrous for the Native American populations the immigrants encountered as the United States followed its manifest destiny and expanded from coast to coast.

2. These words, taken from a 1940 campaign speech by Franklin D. Roosevelt, are still pertinent today.

3. You can read the full text of Bonhoeffer’s essay on stupidity here.

4. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Penguin Classics)

5. Harari is best known for the best-selling Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011). His latest work is Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI (2024). The quotes I used here are taken from Chapters 4 and 5 of the latter title.