The U.S. government was created by a bunch of comfortably-well-off dudes who never really thought it’d be controlled by people who seriously disagreed with them.
That’s why it has no real blocks to serious abuses of power.
Sure, they figured there’d be the usual squabbling over details; that’s just going to happen when you get a bunch of people into the same room and tell them to run a country.
So they made a system with no real guardrails in it; what safeguards there actually are are more like those painted lines you get at train stations to tell you something bad will happen if you go past it.
It’s more a warning than a preventative.
But sometimes you need an actual railing, or maybe even a wall.
Because the more people you have around, the greater the odds that one of them will be a complete headcase who’ll jump over the line just to see what happens.
Or, more likely, will shove someone else over it just to watch them go splat.
Which brings us back once again to the Trump coup.
Since the founders never really expected a party who’s opposed to the basic concept of a public State (or even a State governed by actual laws) to take Congress, the Presidency and the Supreme Court all at the same time, the system is woefully unprepared to deal with this.
The system can just about manage lunacy cropping up in one branch, but for that it depends on the others to keep things going until the next election.
And what we’re seeing now is … not that.
With the Supreme Court creating new immunities out of thin air and Congress alternating between abject surrender and active support, what we’re seeing now is the gaping holes where actual guardrails should have been.
And since no one knows how much institutional knowledge has already been lost or how much data has been irretrievably erased (and/or exfiltrated for private or foreign exploitation) it may very well already be too late to put the United States back together again.
But whether we’re rebuilding the U.S. or building something new, we need to learn much the same lessons from this.
I’d list the basic lessons as:
- no person can be above the law, ever
- preventing the problem is better than having to clean up afterwards
- norms are useless; effective preventatives can’t depend on them
- delay in responding to a problem is failure
We need a system built with those in mind to stop this foolishness and keep it from happening again (and again and again).
Because there are a lot more lunatics out there who’d be happy to keep watching things go splat.
