“Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.”-Soren Kierkegaard
Though it will likely take another two years, the Trump era will assuredly end. When it does, America’s willingness to remediate accumulated political harms will be “Job 1.” Moreover, whether or not the nation displays such essential willingness will impact not only the United States, but the world as a whole.
How did we get to such a bitterly corrosive place? The correct answer is unhidden. To live “forwards,” Americans will first have to understand life “backwards.”
It’s time to validate this correct answer. Driven by policies of presidential gain and self-promotion, the Trump-shaped system of American governance has forged a toxic amalgam. From this paradoxical fusion of plutocracy and mob rule, no national or international benefits should ever have been expected.
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There is more. Looking “forwards,” resolute candor and dispassionate analyses will be a required. In the end, America’s recovery from Trump presidencies 1 and 2 demands a comprehensive look beyond personalities, parties and ideologies. Among other things, this indispensable look should be about something that operates beneath the surface of visible politics. In essence, this “something” is a latent unwillingness to make policy decisions based on history, science and law. While bound to such refractory unwillingness, Donald Trump’s authoritarian culture of manipulative simplification and visceral obedience has dragged the United States “backwards.”
But we must live “forwards.” More precisely, we need to inquire: What should be done to blunt already-suffered Trump harms and simultaneously prevent Trump-caused afflictions after his term? As Thomas Jefferson and other Founding Fathers understood, the Republic requires authentic education and historical literacy. Prima facie, while the vast majority of Americans know how to read, this same majority routinely chooses not to read anything of learned importance. In the White House (at least those structures not yet demolished), President Donald Trump remains stubbornly indifferent to America’s intellectual foundations.
There is more. As evidenced by Trump’s contrived justifications for violating other states’ sovereignty with belligerent armed force, this president has conspicuously ignored Article 6 of the US Constitution (the “Supremacy Clause”) and related US Supreme Court decisions. Following William Blackstone’s 18th century Commentaries on the Laws of England o (i.e., the origins of US law), international law has always been a part of America’s domestic law.[1]
For law-observant US citizens, the Trump era should be considered a “symptom” of pathology, but not an actual “disease.” Accordingly, we should inquire: How did this country ever manage to reach such a law-defiling and self-destructive nadir? To reply meaningfully, answers that would point toward American intellectual illiteracy should not be dismissed out of hand. For sound analytic reasons, these answers would not necessarily be hyperbolic or false.
To clarify the core problem, we Americans now inhabit a feverishly-breathless nation, a dissembling country wherein one major political party flatly refuses to pause the grinding machines of national and international injustice. Powered by a president who consciously avoids any phrasings that are truthful, dignified or informed, this refusal is intentionally inconsistent with a still-functioning democracy. Ipso facto, the only viable remedy for the sorely-injured United States is a citizenry that would energetically seek national leadership beyond barren political clichés and embarrassingly empty witticisms.
In principle, at least, Trump’s palpable loathings should not be hard to decipher. Functioning amid the wreckage of a continuously anti-intellectual American culture, this president’s evident lack of educational, legal and scientific interests evolved as a political asset.
“Could any single datum of human governance be more humiliating or more perilous?”
“Is this a president we could ever rely upon during nuclear crisis dealings with Russia, North Korea, Iran or China”?
Regarding this president’s patently lawless claims concerning Greenland, Donald Trump has several-times asserted an executive right to choose military options. In a worst-case but increasingly-plausible scenario, the United States would come to blows with Denmark or other NATO countries, an irrational conflict in which the American nation would de facto ally itself with Vladimir Putin’s Russia. To be sure, such a grim alliance is already detectable in Putin’s war of aggression against Ukraine. Trump also champions a world politics of crudely belligerent nationalism, a chaotic “state of nature” that systematically degrades all law-based mechanisms of nuclear arms control.
Now at the 11th hour, a great deal needs to be done. Inter alia, Americans should become more determinedly analytic. If the US should fail in this primary responsibility, Trump’s successor could be forced to make extraordinarily consequential decisions on war and peace. Living “forwards,” the next president might have to authorize the world’s first nuclear war.
Where are we and where are we heading? Trump’s excursions into irrationality and anti-reason have displayed starkly dissembling contradictions. While many Americans may remain confident in their hopes of overcoming “affordability” problems, even the richest among us may still feel “deprived.” Resigned to an ostentatiously dreary and violent future, including the intolerable prospect of fighting perpetually gratuitous wars, even the most “successful” among us already need to deal with variously lethal uncertainties.
To repair a fractured country, candor, intellect and grace will be necessary. For the moment, “We the people” are not generally motivated by high-minded calculations of human virtue. For the most part, we Americans no longer seek any navigable paths to courage, equanimity or “equilibrium.” Instead, all-too-many misguided individuals continue to accept this president’s frenetic commands to follow orders (including unlawful military orders) and to passively accept perilous lives of ritualistic obeisance and visceral submission.
Whatever is currently decided in politics, we Americans are not being carried forth by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “high thinking and plain living,” but instead by sorrowful eruptions of worry and agitation. At times, at least, “We the people” may wish to slow down and “smell the roses,” but the Trump-battered system of governance has imposed on us the merciless rhythms of blind conformance.Left unchecked, the predictable end of all such mind-deadening delirium will be acrimonious bouts of criminalized governance and uncontrollable spasms of international war.
There is still more. We Americans inhabit the one society that could have been different. Once, “We the people” possessed the potential to nurture individuals to become more than a servile “crowd” (Soren Kierkegaard), a shapeless “mass” (Carl Jung) or a docile “herd” (Friedrich Nietzsche). At that stage, Emerson had described Americans as a people guided by Platonic “virtue” and Jeffersonian “self-reliance.”
Living “forwards,” credulity will remain America’s recalcitrant foe. Our always-willing inclination to believe that personal and societal redemption must lie in politics represents a potentially fatal disorder. Many critical social and economic issues do need to be addressed by government and elections, but so too must the nation’s deeper problems be solved at the individual human level.
This point is not complicated: Always, macrocosm must follow microcosm. This sequence can never change.
Looking backwards and living forwards, Americans will finally need to understand that Donald Trump has “merely” been the visible symptom of the nation’s much deeper illness. To meaningfully rescue the imperiled Republic, it will not be enough to rid the United States of its flagrantly lawless and frequently irrational president. It will also be necessary to overcome a long-term national mind-set that favors the demeaning entertainments of “mass” society over an ennobling “life of the mind.” If we are genuinely worried about “doomsday” in any form (nuclear war or otherwise), Americans ought not to seek survival via cartoonish “superheroes.”
In summation, America cannot be saved from itself by cinematic fantasy figures or presidential elections. Like Roman god Janus, this nation will need to understand life “backwards” while living “forwards.” In approaching a post-Trump world order, only this dual-level view could point the United States toward authentically durable survival options.
[1] On this incorporation, see especially art. 6 of the US Constitution (“The Supremacy Clause”) and the Pacquete Habana (1900). In the words used by the U.S. Supreme Court in The Paquete Habana, “International law is part of our law, and must be ascertained by the courts of justice of appropriate jurisdiction….” See The Paquete Habana, 175 U.S. 677, 678-79 (1900). See also: The Lola, 175 U.S. 677 (1900); Tel-Oren v. Libyan Arab Republic, 726 F. 2d 774, 781, 788 (D.C. Cir. 1984) (per curiam) (Edwards, J. concurring).
