Saturday, February 22, 2025

Musings on the Demise of American Democracy: We Should Have Seen it Coming

By Rudy Barnes, Jr., February 22, 2025

There have been several recent commentaries on the demise of American democracy. In 2020 I wrote a commentary on the Demise of American Democracy: Is It Deja Vu All Over Again? At the beginning of Trump’s second term in 2024, Trump invited Elon Musk to lead a wrecking crew to reduce American democracy to an oligarchy that reflected Project 2025.

The free-spending Bidenomics of Joe Biden and America’s massive national debt set the stage for Trump’s radical right Republicans to take over America’s democracy. After Trump’s victory in 2024, it should have been no surprise that Trump invited Musk as a fellow predatory capitalist to fill the political vacuum--and here we are. We should have seen it coming.

Trump and Musk have precedents as predatory capitalists. Musk is a 21st century version of Cecil Rhodes, a 19th century British predatory capitalist admired by Trump. It should be no surprise that Trump is already emulating the political strategies of Victor Orban of Hungary to orchestrate the demise of American democracy and replace it with an autocracy.

Democracy is not a durable institution. It’s only as strong as a majority of its voters make it, and it appears that a majority of American voters either support the Trump Republican regime (NBC news reported on February 15 that 53% of voters support the Trump/Musk regime), or they are indifferent to participating in politics needed to save American democracy.

Polarized partisan politics have corrupted American democracy since the 1850’s, when Abraham Lincoln led the fledgling Republican Party to assume power after the Civil War. That terrible war merely reversed the parties in power. Until the 1960’s South Carolina was a one- party Democratic (blue) state; today it has become a one-party Republican (red) state.

American politics are a two-party duopoly governed by unyielding partisan institutions. Third party candidates cannot compete with institutional partisan political structures, and candidates won’t run for office unless they have a reasonable chance of winning. That limits candidates to the two major parties; and both parties attract demagogues like Trump and Musk.

After Trump’s first term and his campaign promises in the 2024 election, we should have seen this debacle coming. It’s more about the degradation of political legitimacy in America than it is about Trump and Musk. The church has failed to be a steward of the altruistic values taught by Jesus that shaped our democracy. American democracy needs to be born again.

Without a moral reformation to restore honesty and integrity in American politics, and an affirmation of the primacy of the Constitution over Project 2025, the political devastation orchestrated by Trump and Musk will be a requiem for American democracy. It will be lasting evidence that human depravity trumps reason and altruistic morality.

Notes:

“President Biden and a Democratic Congress took power in 2021 with a bold plan (Bidenomics) to propel the nation out of the pandemic, revitalize American industry and bolster the working class. It was a complete flop with the voters.” Longtime Democratic economic advisor Jason Furman has said that “the Biden administration’s willingness to toss aside traditional economic orthodoxy around fiscal policy and run the economy hot risked higher inflation for a turbo-charged rebound from the pandemic turned out to be a bad bet.” And it opened the door to Trump’s demagoguery. https://www.axios.com/2025/02/11/biden-inflation-economic-policies.

Musk is America’s Cecil Rhodes, a 19th-century diamond-mining magnate in South Africa who used his fortune to help the British expand their empire. In a phase of accelerated, furious imperialism at the end of the 19th century, Rhodes planned to build a rail and telegraph line from Cape Town to Cairo, connecting all British African colonies like beads on a string. It’s not just Trump and his fellow billionaires who do this. It is also Israel, waging all-out war against Gaza and bombing Lebanese villages without any restraint and in total disregard of international law. It is Russia invading its neighbors because President Vladimir Putin wants the old empire back, using former Wagner Group militias to get to Africa’s minerals. It is China, too, trying to establish semi-colonial “stations” in strategic ports and get ownership of arable land, plantations, and mines on other continents. This is a zero-sum game, with the function of Musk’s empire for Trump being similar to that of Huawei or Cosco, the shipbuilding giant, for Chinese President Xi Jinping. It also resembles the Dutch Republic in the 17th and 18th centuries in the first phase of the “capitalism of finitude” that allowed the Dutch government to build and conquer forts in many parts of the world, to negotiate and sign trade agreements, to mint coins—even to wage war.” https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/02/07/elon-musk-predatory-capitalism-colonialism-cecil-rhodes/.

Bill Kristol has said: “Flipping the narrative on January 6, and becoming a pro-January 6 administration, then weaponizing the justice department talking with mass firings at the FBI is very dangerous for obvious reasons. In a real sense US democracy has died and Trump is emulating Hungary’s Orban. Borrowing from Orbán’s playbook, Trump has mobilised the culture wars, issuing a series of executive orders and policy changes that target diversity, equity and inclusion programmes and education curricula. He is also seeking to marginalise the mainstream media and supplant it with a rightwing ecosystem that includes armies of influencers and podcasters. Jim Acosta, a former White House correspondent who often sparred with Trump, quit CNN while Lara Trump, the president’s daughter-in-law, was hired to host a new weekend show on Fox News. But the most dramatic change has been the way in which Trump has brought disruption to the federal government on an unprecedented scale, firing at least 17 inspectors general, dismantling longstanding programmes, sparking widespread public outcry and challenging the very role of Congress to create the nation’s laws and pay its bills. Government workers are being pushed to resign, entire agencies are being shuttered and federal funding to states and non-profits was temporarily frozen. Musk orchestrated a physical takeover of the United States Agency for International Development (USAid), locking out employees and vowing to shut it down. “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” Musk posted on X. The complete indifference of the Republican Congress to the ways that it is being stripped of its core constitutional functions is demoralising. Charlie Sykes has said: “What Elon Musk represents is basically a hostile takeover of the government, and the complete indifference of the Republican Congress to the ways that it is being stripped of its core constitutional functions is demoralising. It is this mood that nothing can be done or will be done to stop them in the political community that reflects a fundamental loss of faith in the rule of law and in our system of checks and balances.” https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/07/trump-viktor-orban-electoral-autocracy.

Trump targets a growing list of those he sees as disloyal, “fulfilling his promises that he would retaliate against those who did him wrong.” https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/17/us/politics/trump-retribution-list.html.

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Demagoguery is not limited to Republicans. South Carolina’s Pitchfork Ben Tillman and Louisiana's Huey Long (aka Kingfish) are notorious Democrats who are members of America’s political hall of dishonor. See Religion, Democracy, Diversity and Demagoguery at

https://www.religionlegitimacyandpolitics.com/2016/03/religion-democracy-diversity-and.html.

On tribalism, partisan polarization and civil religion in politics, see https://www.religionlegitimacyandpolitics.com/2017/09/tribalism-and-american-civil-religion.html.

On Lamentations of an Old White Male Maverick Methodist in a Tribal Culture, see https://www.religionlegitimacyandpolitics.com/2018/10/lamentations-of-old-white-male-maverick.html.

On A 2020 commentary predicting the Demise of American Democracy, see https://www.religionlegitimacyandpolitics.com/2020/09/musings-on-demise-of-american-democracy.html.

https://www.religionlegitimacyandpolitics.com/2016/03/religion-democracy-diversity-and.html.

On tribalism, partisan polarization and civil religion in politics, see https://www.religionlegitimacyandpolitics.com/2017/09/tribalism-and-american-civil-religion.html.

On Lamentations of an Old White Male Maverick Methodist in a Tribal Culture, see https://www.religionlegitimacyandpolitics.com/2018/10/lamentations-of-old-white-male-maverick.html.

On A 2020 commentary predicting the Demise of American Democracy, see https://www.religionlegitimacyandpolitics.com/2020/09/musings-on-demise-of-american-democracy.html.

On Musings of a Maverick Methodist on the Need for a Politics of Reconciliation, see https://www.religionlegitimacyandpolitics.com/2020/10/musings-of-maverick-methodist-on-need.html.

Saturday, February 15, 2025

Musings on How American Democracy Could Be Undermined by Project 2025

By Rudy Barnes, Jr., February 15, 2025

The oath of office of the President of the U.S. is, “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." By expanding the executive powers Project 2025 can violate the Constitutional separation of powers.

Article I of the Constitution grants all legislative powers to Congress, while Article II grants all executive power to the President, and Article III vests the power of judicial review to the courts. With a Congress polarized by partisan politics, the executive branch has been left by default to make laws by executive order, subject to judicial review.

In 2026, voters will have the opportunity to end the partisan polarization of Congress. All members of the House of Representatives and many in the Senate will be running for office. While America will have to wait until 2028 for the next presidential election, independent voters can end partisan polarization and restore the Constitutional separation of powers in 2026.

That is, unless before then, the courts allow Trump and Musk to continue to expand the power of the President with Project 2025 by making laws by executive order that increase the powers of the executive branch in the Constitution at the expense of the legislative branch. Executive orders of the President should not encroach on the legislative function of Congress.

Trump and Musk promote a form of oligarchy that favors the rich and powerful over a democracy that favors people of modest means. They favor a powerful executive branch that attracts demagogues like Trump and Musk that can reduce the powers of Congress over the executive branch and reduce the effectiveness of government by attrition and automation.

If you wonder how that would work, think about how large megacorporations have automated their services and minimized their workers, making it difficult to get personal services. Can you imagine depending on a government that has automated all of its services? That’s the vision of oligarchs like Trump and Musk of the federal workforce in the future.

In the public sector the governing moral principle is to promote the common good, not selfish interests to make a profit, as favored in capitalism by the rich and powerful. Unlike the private sector, the objective of government is to serve public needs, not to make a profit. Too often politicians confuse those contrasting objectives.

The objective to promote the common good is based on the altruistic moral imperative of the greatest commandment taught by Jesus to love God and our neighbors as we love ourselves. That’s why altruistic norms of faith should be prevalent in government, while the profit motive remains dominant in the capitalist businesses of the private sector. Meanwhile, the courts must prevent Project 2025 from undermining the separation of powers in the Constitution.

Notes:

Project 2025 is a political initiative to reshape the federal government of the United States and remove checks on executive power in favor of right-wing policies. See Project 2025 at Wikipedia. It was published in April 2023 by the American conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation in anticipation of Donald Trump winning the 2024 presidential election.[4][5 The ninth iteration of the Heritage Foundation's Mandate for Leadership series, Project 2025 asserts a controversial interpretation of the unitary executive theory according to which the entire executive branch is under the complete control of the president.[6][7] To achieve its goals, the project calls for merit-based federal civil service workers to be replaced with people loyal to the president [8] to take partisan control of key government agencies, like the Department of Justice (DOJ), Department of Commerce (DOC), and Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Other agencies, like the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), would be dismantled, and the Department of Education (ED) abolished.[9 Once these measures are in place, the president would be free to implement the agenda, including reducing taxes on corporations and capital gains, instituting a flat income tax on individuals,[10] cutting Medicare and Medicaid,[11][12] and reversing Biden's policies.[13][14] Other goals of the project include infusing government and society with conservative Christian values [15][16] and rejecting abortion as health care.[17][18] It calls for making the National Institutes of Health (NIH) less independent, stopping it from funding stem cell research, and reducing environmental regulations to favor fossil fuels.[19] It proposes eliminating coverage of emergency contraception [11] and prosecuting people who send and receive contraceptives and abortion pills.[18][20] It proposes criminalizing pornography,[21] removing legal protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity,[22][23] and terminating diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs[5][23] while having the DOJ prosecute anti-white racism instead.[24] The project recommends the arrest, detention, and mass deportation of illegal immigrants living in the U.S.[25][26] and deploying the military for domestic law enforcement.[27] Proponents of the project argue it would dismantle what they view as a vast, unaccountable, and mostly liberal governmental bureaucracy.[28] Critics have characterized Project 2025 as an authoritarian, Christian nationalist plan[15][29][30] that would steer the U.S. toward autocracy.[31] Legal experts have said it would undermine the rule of law,[32] separation of powers,[5] separation of church and state,[31] and civil liberties.[5][32][33 Project 2025 is closely connected to Donald Trump, with many contributors and Heritage Foundation employees associated with him, his 2024 campaign, his first administration, and his allies.[34][35][36][37][38] Trump campaign officials had regular contact with Project 2025, seeing its goals as aligned with their Agenda 47 program.[28][39][40][41] But amid media scrutiny during the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump distanced himself from it, calling some of its proposals "ridiculous and abysmal".[37][42][43][44] Critics dismissed Trump's denials, pointing to the many people close to him directly involved, the many contributors expected to be appointed to leadership roles during Trump's second presidency, his endorsement of the Heritage Foundation's plans in 2022, and the 300 times Trump is mentioned in the plans.[45][46][47][48]

On Trump Brazingly Defies Laws in Escalating Executive Power Grab. see https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/05/us/trump-federal-law-power.html.