Where are we going?

 Events in the last couple of months have laid out a road map for the Trump Administration.  

 During the last 90 years or so, the federal government has acquired enormous power and influence within our society.  Regulation and direct financial support have given it a critical role in all our economic institutions, from Wall Street to agriculture to higher education, medical care, transportation, communications media, energy production and distribution, and any industry facing foreign competition. And during those 90 years various administrations have used that power both to preserve and to change the way Americans live in important respects.  They drew upon the 18th-century principles of the Enlightenment, which held that governments could use reason and intelligence to improve the lives of all.  Meanwhile, the US government has deployed unprecedented power all over the world.  That power, too, originally claimed to serve higher principles: the destruction or containment of totalitarian regimes, and the creation of a world ruled by law.  For the time being, those experiments appear to be over.

The Republican Party has sought the undoing of the regulatory state and the complete liberation of free markets at least since Ronald Reagan, but only the rise of Donald Trump, a political outsider with no commitment whatever to any of the achievements of the last 90 years, to make their dream come true.  Trump commands a degree of loyalty among a majority of the Republican Party that no president since Franklin Roosevelt has ever matched, precisely because of his outsider status and his willingness to disregard taboos that have constrained political behavior for the entire history of the republic.  No president has ever publicly described political opponents the way he does.  Seeking power largely for personal reasons, Trump has achieved it through an alliance with our most powerful economic sectors, including the fossil fuel industry, the tech industry and the growing crypto industry.   His administration is reconfiguring the federal government to give them all anything they want.  Nowhere is this more apparent than with respect to fossil fuels.  Government policy has done a 180, shifting from trying to limit climate change to encouraging it.  How exactly the fossil fuel industry plans to cope with its consequences--of which they must be well aware--is not clear, and I haven't seen any media analysis of this rather critical question.  They may be counting on technological breakthroughs to block some of the sun's rays.

And meanwhile, to consolidate his power, Trump is using the power of the federal government to cripple any opposition to him and what he wants to do.  Our traditional media outlets--newspapers and television networks--are feeling heavy economic pressure, which has forced CBS/Paramount, for instance, to seek a merger.  That is why 60 Minutes had to break all precedent and settle Trump's lawsuit against it in order to make sure the merger might go forward, and, quite possibly, why John Oliver is leaving late night TV.  That is why Columbia, Brown, and the University of Pennsylvania have reached settlements with the Department of Education, and while Harvard is almost certain to do so as well. They cannot maintain the size and scope of their universities without federal money, and they do not have the courage to regain their independence by drastically restructuring themselves to allow themselves to live within their non-government income.  (I suspect they could do that by firing most of their administrators, but since those administrators completely control them, they won't.)  Trump convinced several major law firms to donate time to whatever he wants them to do, and probably deterred them from taking on clients working against his interests.  Trump has secured the allegiance of the right-wing American pro-Israel lobby by endorsing everything that the Netanyahu government wants to do, including the ethnic cleansing of the Gaza strip.  And that isn't all.

Trump has learned the hard way how federal investigations can create unfavorable media attention, distract the public, and drain the target's economic resources.  His Justice Department, working with the new leadership of the intelligence agencies, are working full time as I write to turn the tables on Democratic former presidents, including Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and very possibly Joe Biden.  We can't yet be certain but it looks like negotiations are underway to trade clemency or a pardon to Ghislaine Maxwell in return for testimony implicating prominent Democrats, led by Clinton, in Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein's sex crimes.  (The Biden Justice Department, to its credit, did not apparently give her the chance to trade such testimony for leniency when it convicted her of sex trafficking.)  The Justice Department is preparing to charge leading figures from the Obama administration with a criminal conspiracy to propagate the story that Russia in 2016 was trying to elect Donald Trump.  Their targets may include Obama--in spite of last  year's Supreme Court decision granting presidents immunity from criminal prosecution for any actions related to their presidential duties.  I will not be at all surprised if they start bringing cases against Democratic state and local officials as well, perhaps for attempting to obstruct federal immigration policies.

And last but hardly least, Trump has started using the federal bureaucracy to control information.  He has now fired the chief of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which has been keeping unemployment statistics for most of 100 years, because the bureau released a disappointing jobs report.  Like so much of what Trump is doing, this disregard for real facts is not  unprecedented.  I have repeatedly pointed out that administrations since Bush I have talked about the federal budget, throwing around five- and ten-year figures for expenditures and deficits, has made it impossible for average citizens to have a real sense of what is going on.  But Trump, by firing the head of the bureau based on false information about previous mistakes, has broken new ground.  Throughout his career he has depended on selling his own particular version of reality.  Meanwhile, the other Boomer at the the highest levels of this administration, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is abandoning some of the most important lessons of medical science, where the Enlightenment originally had some of its greatest impacts.

Trump is using parallel tactics in foreign policy.  His imposition of high tariffs has caused major US trading partners, including Japan, Great Britain,. and the EU, to make major tariff and trade concessions.  Whatever they may think of him, the Europeans apparently believe that they cannot afford a complete break with the United States.  Trump is also using threats to try to get Putin to halt the war against Ukraine, and he does seem to want Netanyahu to stop the war in Gaza.  Here his tactics so far have failed--and I'm not sure how serious he is about Netanyahu, anyway.  He has just escalated threats against Russia, responding to former President Medvedev's nuclear threat with one of his own, but where this diplomatic struggle will lead him is not clear. 

Earlier generations of Americans created a more just economic order and saved freedom in much of the world by sacrificing for goals bigger than themselves.  That ability, I think, allows institutions involving large numbers of people to succeed.  It was that kind of sacrifice that my generation rebelled against in the late 1960s because of the Vietnam War, in which the government tried to draw on it for mistaken goals.  Both sides of our political spectrum, as I have written here many times, have rejected that kind of sacrifice, in different ways, in subsequent decades.  That is why history and literature professors abandoned the idea of a body of knowledge that every educated person should have, why journalists stopped ignoring stories about politicians' personal lives that held them to impossible standards and simply undermined public confidence in leadership, and why so many educated people embarked on a long crusade against federal taxation.  That is why Donald Trump could become an heroic figure to tens of millions of Americans.  Such a shift has happened many times in history--it is part of the story of the fall of every great empire, and something very similar happened right here in the decades after the Civil War.  And I am not convinced that the Trump administration is the biggest threat to life as we have known it, or to freedom, that we face.  The whole digital revolution that has transformed our lives so much, and which is entering a new phase with AI, has given us a new generation of leaders who appear to have equally little concern for what their innovations will do for the common good and for the economic and emotional health of the citizenry.  They are more transformative figures than Trump and will last a lot longer.

 We can all keep the need to sacrifice for the common good and to respect actual facts alive in our own lives.  Eventually a critical mass will get tired of selfishness and lying and things will start to swing back the other way.  It took 1000 years, until the Renaissance, to restore the Greco-Roman respect for science and facts, and I don't think it will take that long this time.  In any case, to paraphrase Ranke, no era completely defines human nature, and all our lives are part of a much larger story in which the good far outweighs the bad.  No era--like no life--last forever, and many give birth to something completely different.