Frank's Musings

In Trump’s criticism of the “woke”  interpretation of U.S. history at the Smithsonian Institution, he calls for modifying its presentation of some of the shortcomings of our government and cultural practices to “correct” mischaracterizations of our culture.  Reactionary policy is a  form of paternalism and it can lead to tyrannical rule.   But what the MAGA crowd resents, and what Trump has successfully appealed to, is its resentment of being told what to do by the country’s educated elite—by their paternalism.  Thus, paternalism can vitiate democracy from two directions. 

Trump’s  supporters in the 2016, 2020,  and 2024 elections  were convinced that he represented their resentment of the disregard of their immediate interests by the dominant groups in the U.S. government.  The bureaucracy under  previous administrations, both Democratic and Republican, consisted of an elite stratus of society who were typically college educated and socially segregated from the backgrounds and immediate concerns of the majority of the public.  Because the U.S. republic is built on the assumption that majority rule guarantees the most equitable outcome of government policy, most of them believed that, somehow, they had been victims of corrupted democratic ideals and voted to restore their idealized concept of self-rule.

However, particularly during Trump’s second administration, they are learning that attempts to restore this simplified version of democratic principles can easily lead to autocracy and the loss of popular control of government policy.  The restored Trump presidency has witnessed even more egregious faults that include the following:

1. Zealous tightening of immigration regulations has created a secondary police force with the power to limit human rights without due process, effectively suspending habeas corpus protection
2. Seizure and unsubstantiated deportation of legal resident, visaed immigrants, and U.S. citizens
3. Noncompliance with court orders
4. Off-census-year, arbitrary congressional redistricting
5. Second term appointment of unqualified cabinet secretaries
6. Excessive budget spending
7. Pardoning of Jan. 6 rioters
8. Federalizing National Guard troops for domestic law enforcement in California in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act.

These failures of the restored Trump presidency are largely owing to the weakening of the power of the checks and balances built into the Constitutional structure of the republic created 250 years ago.  It did not anticipate how thoroughly our society would be released from the bounds that the sense of individual responsibility imposes by the substitution of third-party information for personal thought.  Not only has the public been trained to rely on showmanship for the validation of factual truth; the public’s representatives in its democratic government have also subsumed their commitment to principled behavior to personal life goals—their professional  careers. 

A demagogue like Donald Trump can take advantage of how American society has been transformed by its subservience to skilled use of  communications technology.   The legacy structure of the U.S. government does not allow change in its rules of “checks and balances” to occur swiftly.  Therefore, it will take a long time to correct the features of the Constitution that allow it to be used to facilitate authoritarian distortion.  Determination and patience will be necessary to protect the ideals of our Founding Fathers from the paternalistic tyranny of 21st Century autocrats.