We Are Not Ourselves

The US is no longer a democracy. 

I know — you thought we were the shining example of this most fabled form of government, when in truth, we are more like a theocracy or oligarchy or kakocracy or, well, some kind of crazycracy.

It’s not just that the Supreme Court has decided that allowing black people to vote is a silly idea. Nor is it that a handful of billionaires have more power than the populations of entire states. 

Those are big-time indicators, but the latest proof comes courtesy of “one of the most credible global sources on the health of democratic nations,” The Varieties of Democracy Institute at Gothenburg University, which reached the “alarming conclusion that the US is hurtling toward autocracy at a faster rate than Hungary and Turkey.” The institute said America is “now back at the worst recorded level since 1965, when US civil rights laws first introduced de facto universal suffrage,” meaning that “all progress made since then has been erased,” and what “we’re seeing now is the most severe magnitude of democratic backsliding ever in the country.”

OK, that’s just one group of eggheads badmouthing the good old US of A. I’m certain that most people still love us. Well, there is the fact that residents of Europe are three times more likely to view the United States as a threat than an ally. 

And there’s the disturbing statistic that about half of Americans believe democracy is functioning poorly in the United States, “marking a sharp decline from several decades ago.” And there is also a growing movement among young people for an absolute monarch to take over America. And… damn, how did we get to this messed-up point?

There are numerous grim milestones, terrifying tipping points, and 20/20 hindsight realizations about when and why America has become a chaotic swirl of violence and hatred led by thugs and incompetents. 

One root cause goes all the way back to the 1970s, when Nixon was forced to resign, but received a pardon rather than doing the hard time that would have served as a warning to would-be despots and petty tyrants. Ford pardoning Nixon was not the supposed balm that allowed the nation to heal, but the moment when “powerful people in both political parties worked assiduously to ensure that their leaders would escape the consequences of their actions.”

When Mr. Watergate escaped any punishment whatsoever, it jumpstarted the “decades-long backlash among the American leadership class to the idea of accountability.” As a result, we ended up with Trump, a man whose corruption was well-known before he even ran for political office but whose many moral, ethical, and legal transgressions were viewed as ok because he was, you know, rich and stuff.

The only felon ever elected president “has evaded punishment for crimes both low (campaign-finance violations, for which he was convicted, though he will serve no time thanks to his 2024 victory) and high (his attempted overthrow of the federal government in the aftermath of his 2020 election loss, for which he was spared by the Supreme Court’s decision to grant him kingly immunity).”

The adjudicated rapist in the White House “is the product of a society that has worked hard to help the rich and powerful elude punishment for criminal behavior.”

And it’s worked great… for the rich and powerful.

For the rest of us, not so much.

All the Good Options Are Gone

People keep shooting at, or in the general vicinity, of the president. Yet everyone seems surprised that a random lunatic with access to a firearm might try to become famous by murdering a well-known individual, even though this is literally the dream of thousands of unstable, gun-wielding Americans.

No, there is no way out of our Second Amendment nightmare without even more death or a national catastrophe of some type.

There is also no way out of Iran without American troops getting killed or American credibility, what little of it remains, going up in flames like the Stars and Stripes at a Taliban rally.

Consider that the “costs of Trump’s folly include far more than the thousands of deaths and tens of billions of dollars the Pentagon has spent on the war.” All that is bad enough, but in the best-case scenario, we will get a shitty deal that will reopen a strait “that was open before the pointless war he started, with [Iran] demonstrating its control over the strait and potentially extracting fees plus sanctions relief.” That’s in addition to the hundreds of dead children, with U.S. embassies badly damaged, “U.S. standing in the world obliterated, and U.S. munitions badly depleted.” Also “prices are up everywhere, and more global economic fallout to come.” Furthermore, Putin has been “strengthened and enriched,” while we endure a “profoundly shameful episode in American history no matter what happens next.”

Again, that is the best-case scenario.

We arrived here because an oblivious megalomanic surrounded himself with cabinet members who exhibit “lickspittling, bootlicking, groveling, kowtowing adulation and unctuously servile toadyism.” And now all of them — every macho-postering moron and reality-denying jingoist — are shocked that the Iran war is breaking Trump and has “significantly damaged American credibility and influence in the region.”

Who could have foreseen this — other than every president before Trump, every Middle East expert, and most of the people who have more than nine brain cells in their heads?

In addition to the inevitable quagmire and/or defeat, what has made the “outcome of the war so embarrassing was Trump’s conduct during it—not only the constant lies and dissimulations about why he had launched the conflict and what he hoped to achieve from it but, even more, the spectacle he presented of unhinged, unaccountable American power.”

But on the plus side, we got some great footage of shit blowing up.

Totally worth it.

Secret Codes Are Cool!

When I was a kid, I had a brief fascination with ciphers and codes. I loved writing encrypted messages, even though I had nothing to say and no one to send a message to. Those were minor details.

In any case, I recently stumbled across an online Carrol cipher creator. This site translates your messages into a top-secret, spy-worthy, uncrackable code that will leave your trench-coated nemesis scratching their heads in frustration.

I thought about creating an entire post in code, but that seemed a bit much. So instead I will offer one line in Carrol cipher for you fledgling cryptologists out there. 

To decode this message, which I admit is highly political, you just need to know the code word. I’ll go ahead and tell you that, just to give you a decent chance at deciphering the message.

The code word is “resist.” Here is the message:

KVMUH BJ E HMVHGLATW TEH WDWKPFGLQ DESOA AM.

No, I don’t know why it’s all in caps. You’ll have to ask Lewis Carrol, the whimsical writer who invented the cipher.

If you figure out the message, let me know. You just might win a prize of dubious quality.

I’ll be back next with a proper post, full of fire and insight. And maybe an encoded message — who knows?

Lunatic Fringe

If you are a Christian conservative, you’ve been quite willing to overlook Trump’s many deviations from devout behavior. There’s the nonstop lying, cheating, adultery, “unrepentant mendacity,” arrogance, gleeful boasting that he hates his opponents, and threats of death on all who oppose him. Despite his “suspect professions of faith and his glaring unfamiliarity with scripture, conservative Christian leaders have praised him and described him as heaven sent.”

But now, our most holy of presidents has indulged in full-force, straight-up blasphemy, and he believes you are too stupid to see it. Yes, he has presented a defense, which is based on the man being so moronic that he doesn’t understand basic imagery that a nine-year-old would comprehend. And that is the best-case scenario for his behavior.

It’s bad enough that the president is a narcissistic liar who doesn’t even care if he insults his followers and who revels in ultimate cringe. The bigger problem is that he is a nutjob.

Yes, I’ve addressed the man’s frayed sanity before, and as far back as his first term, many political commentators and healthcare professionals were shouting, “This guy is cuckoo for Coco Puffs.”

It will forever be mystifying to me how millions of Americans saw this demented act in 2024, excused the word salad and meandering as “passionate” or “joking,” and thought this dementia-addled bigot was fit to make economic policy and negotiate with heads of state. This philandering oligarch was one step from babbling on the subway. Clearly, “they’re eating the cats and dogs” was a cry for help, but huge swaths of Americans thought it was a campaign slogan.

In any case, more people are openly debating the 25^th Amendment, which I advocated for in 2017.

This development is because “Trump’s erratic behavior and extreme comments in recent days and weeks have turbocharged the crazy-like-a-fox-or-just-plain-crazy debate that has followed him on the national political stage for a decade.” 

Instead of leadership, we get “a series of disjointed, hard-to-follow and sometimes-profane statements,” interspersed with threats to destroy entire civilizations. It leaves even the most partisan of observers with “the impression of a deranged autocrat mad with power.”

And Americans are catching on. Polling shows that 61% of Americans “think Mr. Trump has become more erratic with age” and half think he is too old to be president. Only one-third of Americans thought the near-octogenarian was too old just a year ago, so we have to wonder why such a large percentage of people suddenly realized how time works.

Regardless of this abrupt epiphany, we now have a government run by psychos, and a president who went from “making insane genocidal threats this morning to hyping the ‘golden age’ of Iran hours later,” even if the situation did not change in the interim. It is no exaggeration to say the chief executive is “an absolute basket case who needs to be removed from power before he follows through on one of his mass murder fantasies.”

Right now, this is how we live: “The American people spent the whole day wondering if their mad king would destroy the world, only to find out he was terrorizing them in order to protect his ego after starting a disastrous war.”

This is madness.

Please Excuse the Obvious

In my last post, I discussed how Finland was crowned the happiest country in the world for like the 19^th year in a row. In fact, all of Scandinavia is prosperous, peaceful, and delightful. 

This fact should put American conservatives in a quandary. After all, when multiple nations embrace the exact opposite of your values, and those countries go on to become the envy of the world, one would think it would constitute a strong rejection of your ideals.

But conservatives are a hardy lot. Even when total disaster befalls them, and everything they said would happen doesn’t occur, and their agenda implodes into chaos, they insist that they are right and everyone else is wrong.

One could call this perseverance. I prefer the term delusion, but perspectives vary.

In any case, conservatives have a quick answer for why the Nordic countries — all socially democratic with active governments and generous benefits for their citizens — are doing so well.

“It’s obvious,” says the conservative. “They are reaping the benefits of being small, culturally homogenous societies with little ethnic diversity.”

To the conservative, the Nordic governments prosper not because they provide universal healthcare and don’t allow their citizens to carry around assault rifles. No, they thrive because all of their citizens are white and blonde.

This is, to say the least, an interesting viewpoint. It’s also implied racism, but we will let that go for the moment.

Let’s take a look at each of these arguments in turn.

First, I agree with conservatives that smaller countries seem to be more hospitable. This is one reason why I advocate for splitting up the United States (or at least studying the idea more thoroughly). 

Huge countries like America, China, and Russia tend to devolve into unmanageable messes or international bullies. Maybe the Nordic countries have an advantage in that they don’t have to keep 300 million people happy under one system. 

However, there are large countries that seem to have their shit together, like Canada, and small countries that are hellholes, like North Korea. So this is a supporting factor at best.

What about being culturally homogenous? It makes sense that a shared culture and national character would bind a country together. However, many studies have shown that the most culturally diverse cities tend to be the safest and most productivewithin any given nation. So maybe we call this factor a draw.

That leaves us with the heart of the conservative argument, which is that the happiest countries don’t have a lot of foreigners running around, and most people there are the same skin hue and look like they could be related.

Again, this is an interesting position to advocate for.

To analyze this argument, let’s look at that list of nations again. According to the study, the five happiest countries, in order, are the following:

Finland 

Iceland 

Denmark 

Costa Rica 

Sweden 

Yes, those places are not exactly melting pots. But do me a favor and take a glance at the same study’s list of least-happiest nations. The five most miserable countries, in order, are the following:

Afghanistan 

Sierra Leone 

Malawi 

Zimbabwe 

Botswana

Um, those countries are even less racially diverse than the Nordic countries. 

Well, that’s a plot twist.

Now to be fair, if conservatives are talking about ethnic diversity, they may have a point, because Afghanistan, for example, is home to many different tribes, all of whom apparently hate each other. But if you’re talking about racial diversity — and let’s face it, that’s what conservatives really mean — then the conservative argument is backward. 

Places like Afghanistan and Sierra Leone have almost no racial diversity. The vast majority of the people in those nations enjoy the cultural and racial hegemony that conservatives dream of, and yet this has not led to paradise. Also, those countries have limited governments (to the point of almost nonexistent) and plenty of guns in the hands of residents, so they sound like conservative Edens.

And if we really want to get bossy, please note that the top five happiest nations, in addition to being more racially diverse than the five saddest countries, also have much higher immigration rates.

This makes sense, because if you were a refugee, would you rather escape to Denmark or Malawi? So once again, if an immigration rate of zero is your dream, you must really love Zimbabwe.

At this point, it’s fair to say that even this most fragile of conservative arguments for the success of Scandinavia is absurd. In truth, there is no logical way anyone can look at the most prosperous nations, line them up with American conservative ideals, and see a match.

So maybe conservatives are wrong about the ideal society, and perhaps we should not listen to people who want American to emulate Hungary (the 74^th happiest country in the world) rather than Norway ((the sixth happiest country in the world).

I know where I would rather live. How about you?