{Concerns about the powers of the American presidency have been expressed since the Constitution was ratified in 1788. That these concerns, for the most part, have been laid to rest, does not change the fact that our constitutional structure remains vulnerable to any President possessing sufficient ambition and lacking scruples, respect for law, or any sense of decency—in other words, someone like the current occupant of the White House.)
“The President has come to regard constitutional opposition to any scheme of his own as a rebellion or a crime which the executive must punish. This is at present, in my opinion, our most serious national danger." (Charles Sumner)
Henry Lockwood, from The Abolition of the Presidency (1884):
The presidential system, when first proposed, encountered the most strenuous opposition, not only in the Convention which framed the Constitution and in the different State Conventions which ratified it, but also at the hands of the press of the country. Not solely did the plan, as a whole, meet with objections, but each particular part of it was severely criticized. Prominent patriots resisted the establishment of any government which even savored of a limited monarchy. There seemed to be no division of opinion as to the absolute perniciousness of the elective form of monarchy.
Leading thinkers and writers have resisted the presidential form of government from the very formation of our system. Objections were made to conferring on the President the power to command the army and navy; to grant reprieves and pardons; (particularly in relation to the pardon of those guilty of treason, for the President may be engaged in the treason himself) to establish himself in regal authority; to nominate officers, civil and military. The President, as constituted, was a King in everything but in name; that though he was to be chosen for a limited time, yet, at the expiration of the period, if he is not re-elected, it will depend upon his own moderation whether he will resign that authority with which he has been invested.
The President, from having the appointment of all the various officers, in every part of the civil departments—who will be very numerous in themselves, and their connections, relations and friends and dependents, still more numerous —will have a formidable host devoted to his interests, and ready to support his ambitious views. The army and navy may be increased without restraint and commanded by the President in person, the officers of which, from the highest to the lowest, are to be appointed by him, will be dependent on his will and pleasure, and of course subservient to his wishes, and ready to execute his commands; in addition to which, the militia will also be entirely subjected to his orders; that all these circumstances, in fine, combined together, will enable him, when he pleases, to become a King, in name, as well as in substance.
At the Convention, Patrick Henry spoke thus:
"Your President may easily become a king. If he be a man of ambition and abilities, how easy it is for him to render himself absolute. The army is in his hands, and if he be a man of address, it will be attached to him, and it will be the subject of long meditation with him to seize the first auspicious moment to accomplish his design; and will the American spirit survive when this happens? I would rather have a king, lords, and Commons, than a Government so replete with insupportable evils. If we make a king, we may prescribe the rules by which he shall rule his people, and interpose such checks as shall prevent him from infringing them, but the President in the field, at the head of his army, can prescribe the terms on which he shall reign master, so far that it will puzzle any American ever to get his neck from under the galling yoke. I cannot, with patience, think of this idea. If ever he violates the laws, one of two things will happen; he will come at the head of his army, to carry everything before him; or he will do what the Chief Justice will order him. If he be guilty, will not the recollection of his crimes teach him to make one bold push for the American throne? Will not the immense difference between being master of everything and being ignominiously tried and punished, powerfully excite him to make this bold push? But, sir, where is the existing force to punish him? What will then become of you and your rights? Will not absolute despotism ensue?”
The dangers and evils of personal government still exist. The law fosters and protects a disguised monarchy. The question is, whether the common sense of the people will give timely recognition to these facts.
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{Who among us is not familiar with the classic ‘Pascal’s Wager’ which suggests that living ‘as if’ God exists is a prudent choice for those who cannot actually believe but aren’t willing to bet their lives on that disbelief. However, the ‘Wager’ in today’s post has absolutely nothing to do with God, with belief, or with eternal life. Pascal the existential Russian blue cat thanks you for your attention to this matter!}
“These are the times that try men’s souls, and they’re no picnic for women, either.” (Thomas Paine, more or less)
What are the odds that American democracy can survive Donald Trump? What would you be willing to bet that America’s tripartite federal government will withstand the current assault by advocates of a ‘unitary executive’? An associated wager could be made on whether MAGA will succeed in shrinking the federal government to where it’s small enough for Grover Norquist to drown it in a bathtub.
I am not ordinarily a betting man, but I am putting what little money I have on America's ability to outlast the barbarians currently within its gates. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and it seems unlikely that the modern administrative state can be destroyed in one presidential term, especially when those attacking it have no idea how it works or what it does. For months now, MAGA has been tilting at windmills of its own devise—DEI, the “woke military,” “trans ideology,” and the all-purpose chestnut, “waste, fraud, and abuse”—and repeatedly hoisting itself on its own petard. Trump 2.0 isn’t “the gang that couldn’t shoot straight,” it’s “the gang that keeps shooting itself in the foot,” or “the gang that amputates its own feet with a chainsaw.
The DOGE Chainsaw Massacre
For all its cruelty, callousness, and mean-spiritedness, Trump 2.0 is less a ship of state than a ship of fools: the USS Dunning-Kruger. It’s not just a clown car, it’s an entire cavalcade of clowns in a seemingly endless clown motorcade, led by the Bozo-in-Chief. Are we really supposed to believe that the American government, crafted by statesmen of genius, with its mettle tested and proven by history, will be undone by the likes of Pete Hegseth, Pam Bondi, Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel, the brainworm-addled Robert Kennedy Jr., the canine-intolerant Kristi Noem, and the ketamine-enhanced Elon Musk, a basket of cognitively compromised deplorables not one of whom is capable of more than what Lionel Trilling once called “irritable mental gestures” in place of coherent thought? I refuse to believe that. You might as well tell me that George Washington is being replaced on Mount Rushmore by Pee-wee Herman.
I do not mean to minimize the damage being done, much less the damage yet to come; we will be digging ourselves out of various wreckages for years to come. Nor am I unaware that, while institutions may survive, individuals are being harmed, some of them beyond repair. 1 Lives are in the balance, and we are witnessing unprecedented disregard for legal processes, not to mention compassion. We may never put all Trump’s toxins back in the tube where they belong; they may linger in the public square for years, perhaps even decades, the political equivalent of Love Canal. But neither the American government—you know, the one MAGA calls “the Swamp” and the “Deep State”—nor the American people are “snowflakes,” “pussies,” or whatever other term of art makes the Trump legions feel better about themselves. We will get through this nightmare; to paraphrase my friend Alison Pipitone, “We are not going down fighting, because we are not going down.” 2
Since almost everything Trump and his minions are attempting to do—from tariffs to deportations to revoking tax-exempt status for “woke” universities—is illegal, and because courts have appropriately blocked, reversed, or put on hold various diktats and executive decrees, the best word to describe our current situation is “uncertainty”. We are plagued by economic, legal, and political uncertainty, the only thing worse than which would be allowing the President to become a king, a rank to which he obviously believes he is entitled. So far, the courts are holding the line.
Beyond today’s uncertainties, however, is this reassuring certainty: the Trump administration will not last forever. In November 2028, the American electorate will have a chance to repent. That prospect seems like an eternity away, but it will come. Will we at that time reverse the course that Trump and MAGA have set, and begin to undo the damage they have done? Will civic sanity at last prevail?
As I said, I am not ordinarily a betting man, but my money is on “Yes”.
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1 Of course, “We all are going to die,” so for heaven’s sake, don’t get all worked up about it.
2 Alison Pipitone (2016): https://youtu.be/lzhZx4ZIxdQ?si=wR79hnKp1UvfkStq
{In 1985, President Ronald Reagan having smiled and charmed and lied his way into a second term in office, John Mellencamp released his album Scarecrow, which was essentially an indictment of the Reagan era. Forty years ago, we didn’t think things could get much worse in American politics, but, not for the first time or the last, we were wrong.}
The Face of the Nation
As I run through this life
Sometimes it breaks my heart
Seein' old people goin' downtown
Stumblin' their way through the dark
And the little babies cry
For their mothers' warmth
Sometimes I feel so helpless
I don't know where to start
And the face of the nation
Keeps changin' and changin'
The face of the nation
I don't recognize it no more
The face of the nation
The face of the nation
So many lonely people
Damn those broken dreams
Oh yes it could be better
You can say that about anything
Some got it worse than me
Some got it worse than you
You see the people starvin' underneath the tree
And you wonder what happened to the golden rule
And the face of the nation
Keeps changin' and changin'
The face of the nation
I don't recognize it no more
The face of the nation
The face of the nation
You know babe I'm gonna keep on tryin'
To put things right
If only for me and you
'Cause the devil sleeps tonight
And the face of the nation
Keeps changin' and changin'
The face of the nation
I don't recognize it no more
The face of the nation
The face of the nation
And the face of the nation
Keeps changin' and changin'
The face of the nation
I don't recognize it no more
The face of the nation
The face of the nation
---------------------------
Source: LyricFind
Songwriters: John Mellencamp
The Face of the Nation lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC / 1985
https://youtu.be/kGetCrGz9kM?si=V3sWpWIuuF0ryAlr
Badges? They don't need to show you no stinkin' badges...
{In case the sociopathic cabal currently controlling our federal government decides to further tighten the screws--to declare martial law, to suspend habeas corpus, or to defy court orders--we might learn from the experience of those who endured oppression before us. Do not think it can’t happen here; it’s happening. Thank you for your attention to this matter.}
“Each individual, standing against the oppressors, made the effort to be himself irremediably.” (Jean-Paul Sartre)
1. Jean-Paul Sartre, from “The Republic of Silence”:
We were never more free than during the German occupation. We had lost all our rights, beginning with the right to talk. Every day we were insulted to our faces and had to take it in silence. Under one pretext or another, as workers, Jews, or political prisoners, we were deported en masse. Everywhere, on billboards, in the newspapers, on the screen, we encountered the revolting and insipid picture of ourselves that our oppressors wanted us to accept. And because of all this we were free. Because the Nazi venom seeped even into our thoughts, every accurate thought was a conquest. Because an all-powerful police tried to force us to hold our tongues, every word took on the value of a declaration of principles. Because we were hunted down, every one of our gestures had the weight of a solemn commitment. The often atrocious circumstances of our struggle made it possible, in a word, for us to live out that unbearable, heart-rending situation known as the human condition in a candid, unvarnished way. Exile, captivity, and, especially, death, which in happier times we artfully conceal, became the perpetual objects of our concern; we learned that they were not inevitable accidents or even constant, external dangers, but must be regarded as our lot, our destiny, the profound source of our human reality. Every moment, we lived to the full the meaning of that banal little phrase, ‘Man is mortal!’
And the choice that each of us made of his life and of his being was an authentic choice because it was made face to face with death, because it could always have been expressed in these terms: “Rather death than . . .” And here I am not speaking of the elite among us who were real Resistance fighters, but of all Frenchmen who, at every hour of the night and day throughout four years, answered NO. The very cruelty of the enemy forced us to ask ourselves questions we sidestep in peacetime: ‘If they torture me, will I be able to hold out?’
Thus, the basic question of freedom itself was posed, and we were brought to the verge of the deepest knowledge that man can have of himself. For the secret of a man is not his Oedipus complex or his inferiority complex: it is the limit of his own freedom, his capacity for resisting torture and death.
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{Fritz Pappenheim’s 1959 meditation on ‘alienation’ notes our very human tendency to mind our own business, if we can, even as terrible things happen all around us. Those of us of a certain age recall being shocked by the 1964 Kitty Genovese incident (however misreported it may have been); her death became a symbol of ‘indifferent bystanders,’ an infamy we may all attain if we fail to resist America’s descent into authoritarian cruelty and contempt for the rule of law.}
2. Fritz Pappenheim (from The Alienation of Modern Man):
There seems to be a tendency in all of us to become indifferent bystanders. In the way we associate with other people or respond to important events we tend toward a fragmentary encounter. We do not relate to the other person as a whole or to the event as a whole, but we isolate the one part which is important to us and remain more or less remote observers of the rest.
The person who thus splits the real into two parts becomes divided in his own self. There is something uncanny in the condition of man when he has become a stranger to himself; but it is a fate which shapes the lives of many of us. We seem to be caught in a frightening contradiction. In order to assert ourselves as individuals, we relate only to those phases of reality which seem to promote the attainment of our objectives, and we remain divorced from the rest of it. But the further we drive this separation, the deeper the rift within ourselves.
The individuals who, for reasons of social prestige or in consideration of professional or business interests, join the church which gives a relatively high degree of respectability rather than the one which represents their religious backgrounds and beliefs; the political leader who, realizing that his struggle for an unpopular cause might doom his chances for re-election, abandons his convictions to secure his political future; such persons show how those who are estranged from the truth can no longer be themselves.
The individual’s alienation from everything which has no bearing on the pursuit of his interests does not necessarily enter into his consciousness; nor does he always become aware of the estrangement from his own self or feel it as a disquieting experience. In fact, as a result of his detachment, the alienated man is often able to achieve great successes. These engender a certain numbness, which makes it hard for him to realize his own estrangement. Only in times of crisis does he start to sense it.
Today, concern about man’s alienation is expressed by many: by theologians and philosophers who warn that advances in scientific knowledge do not enable us to penetrate the mystery of Being; by psychiatrists who try to help their patients return from the world of illusion to reality; by critics of the increasing mechanization of life who challenge the optimistic expectation that technological progress will automatically lead to the enrichment of human lives; by political scientists who note that even democratic institutions have failed to bring about genuine participation by the masses in the great issues of our period.
The forces of alienation have gained intensity and significance in the modern world. A society dominated by these forces stifles the fulfilment of human potentialities; respect for the individual and for the dignity of man cannot be implemented. Western civilization has been suffering for a long time from an inner crisis. The current nihilism is nothing but a new expression of the mood of doubt that followed the collapse of belief – belief in the greatness of man, the inevitability of progress, and the sovereignty of reason – in the twentieth century.
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Murder of Kitty Genovese - Wikipedia
{As I post this, a pop-up ad for Microsoft's "Copilot" AI has commandeered my Outlook email page, rendering the page inaccessible. Thanks, AI! I didn't want to check my emails anyway.}
“The fear of existential threats like AI plays directly into the cold hands of deracinated elites who are working to establish a global managerial state.” (Jacob Howland, channeling Peter Thiel)
As the saying goes, great minds think alike, the minds in this case being mine and that of multi-billionaire and deep thinker Peter Thiel. I base this upon Jacob Howland’s “Peter Thiel’s Visions of Apocalypse,” 1 in which Howland praises Thiel’s “ambitious, thought-provoking attempt to weave, from seemingly unrelated strands of meaning, a theological/anthropological/historical narrative that aims to make sense of the whole of human experience.” Am I not, here at The Little Red Blog and with the assistance of Pascal the existential Russian blue cat, attempting the same thing?
Will Artificial Intelligence be our undoing? Peter Thiel, being a preposterously wealthy tech magnate/guru, is well aware, says Howland, that “Technology underlies virtually every apocalyptic anxiety of our time. But Thiel,” Howland continues, “is unsure of the role of advanced technology, and in particular AI, in the big picture of history he’s trying to work out. Is AI the Antichrist? Does it prepare the way for the Antichrist? Or is it a katechon, the mysterious force that forestalls the Antichrist? The katechon plays a major part in Thiel’s analysis, because things capable of opposing the Antichrist can also advance its aims, and vice-versa.”
He had me at katechon, one of my favorite New Testament enigmas. The katechon of the moment might be Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Ukraine, or Pope Leo XIV; or, apparently, it might be AI. Who can know for sure? Howland worriedly observes that “Western countries, aided by advanced digital technology, have turned psychological operations and disinformation tactics developed to fight foreign adversaries against their own citizens. This suggests deep cultural sickness, a crisis of confidence in the values that defeated totalitarianism in the 20th century.” And if the cultural sickness doesn’t destroy us, the cure might, or so Howland speculates: “If bioweapons, climate change, nuclear bombs, or AI don’t drive the human species to extinction, drastic measures deemed necessary to forestall such dangers, such as the establishment of a single world government, might themselves bring an end to politics, morality, spiritual life, and culture.” 2
Is there a katechon in the house who will save us, or at least an Übermensch? Howland thinks it may be Peter Thiel, who “is driven to find a way between the binary alternative of No World or One World, the whirlpool of planetary destruction or the many-headed monster of global totalitarianism. Thiel’s insight is that the Bible’s prophecies do more than pluck our inner strings of existential dread. They help us to understand our chaotic times.”
Matthew 24:24 predicts that “[T]here shall arise false Christs and false prophets … [and] they shall deceive the very elect.” In other words, the Antichrist will attempt to appear more Christian than Christ himself, even as it works to accomplish the wholesale destruction of the Christian underpinnings of Western civilization. 3 A successful Antichrist would, like the French revolutionaries and the Marxists, promote values that seem consistent with the Judeo-Christian foundations of civilization, such as universal liberty, equality, and justice.”
Must we then oppose anyone who advocates liberty, equality, and justice? Howland is not ready to go quite that far (though Thiel may be), but he has no doubt that “There is something satanic about AI, a ghostly entity that is increasingly capable of hacking human minds on a very large scale. What Thiel said of Francis Bacon seems to apply to the developers of Large Language Models (LLMs): they’ve “summoned a demon they don’t believe exists”. Once again, though, Howland waxes ambivalent, wondering if “perhaps AI is really a katechon.”
These are the issues that keep Peter Thiel awake at night (along with counting his money), while Pascal and I enjoy untroubled sleep. For my part, I have decided that Pascal the existential Russian blue cat is, for me at least, the katechon; Peter Thiel and Jacob Howland will have to find one of their own.
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Peter Thiel’s visions of Apocalypse - UnHerd
1 Not to be confused with Dylan’s “Visions of Johanna”
2 The likelihood that “a single world government” will be established is approximately the same as the likelihood that Donald Trump will replace Josh Allen as quarterback of the Buffalo Bills.
3 What Jordan Peterson would call “the metaphysical substrate of our culture.”
A witty slogan on a t-shirt that Peter Thiel gave to Rod Dreher
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