"I Don't Understand What's Happening To This Country"
America was angry in the 1960s. Today it's angry and mean.
The good one.
“I don’t understand what’s happening to this country.”
My mother, who was not especially political, said that to me one night, unprompted, tucking my 10 year-old self into bed. This was after Robert F. Kennedy (whom we may soon have to start calling Robert F. Kennedy, Sr.) was assassinated. Martin Luther King had been assassinated two months earlier, and John F. Kennedy four and a half years before that. Since then I’ve compared notes with other people my age and found that just about all of them heard their parents speak these words in 1968.
I don’t understand what’s happening to this country.
I get paid to understand, but really, I don’t, and I have yet to encounter anybody who does. Yes, it has something to do with a half-century decline of the middle class (Harvard sociologist Barrington Moore: “No bourgeois, no democracy”), and when I published a book about that a dozen years ago I noted that America was an angrier place in the 1960s but that it was a meaner place now, meaning in 2012. Today it’s plenty mean and plenty angry, with no obvious proximate cause except an imaginary failing economy, an imaginary immigration surge, and imaginary depredations by the Deep State, all of which the proletariat expects to be solved by a felonious kleptocrat who’s busily manufacturing crises in these and other areas. I have to believe it will end badly for Donald Trump and the Republican party, but democratic self-correction is taking much longer than I expected, and many people are being hurt very badly in the meantime, including the Kennedy family, which as I write is waging a painful but very necessary civil war to protect the country against a sociopath named Robert Kennedy, Jr.
As I’ve written before (“Democracy Is No Bulwark Against Oligarchy”), our problem is not, pace Moore and most contemporary liberal commentators, that democracy is in peril. Democracy is in rude health, and it elected Donald Trump fair and square. The problem is that democracy chose badly in 2016 and even worse in 2024, and that the result is a full-on assault against republican governance and rule of law. What Moore should have said (except it’s too much of a mouthful) was “No bourgeois, no stability nor rationality nor respect for human dignity in government.” Democratic governance may suffer at some future date, but at the moment it’s what gave us this terrible mess that neither I nor anybody else really understands.
My latest New Republic piece documents the latest result, in the form of Trump shutting down his own government in the manner of a child throwing his Teddy bear out of his crib, just to see what it would be like. It is also, of course, how authoritarians consolidate power. You can read the piece here.
WE HAVE NEVER SEEN A COUP LIKE THIS. WE'RE DOOMED IF AMENDMENT 14, SECTION 3, CAN'T BE MADE TO APPLY
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What Donald Trump and Elon Musk are orchestrating represents uncharted territory in American governance and technology. Their actions push the boundaries of executive power and corporate influence in ways the legal system was never designed to anticipate.
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This bloodless digital coup, a coordinated effort to reshape government oversight, control information, and dismantle institutional checks, exploits gaps in laws written for a bygone era. These laws were crafted to address power grabs through physical force, not digital manipulation or bureaucratic subversion.
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Traditional legal frameworks are equipped to handle violent insurrections, armed uprisings, or overt acts of rebellion. However, they fail to capture the subtle and systemic ways modern technology and executive overreach can erode democratic institutions from within. By wielding the machinery of government, through executive orders, personnel purges, and regulatory interference, Trump and Musk are not storming the gates; they are rewriting the rules of power in real time, without firing a single shot.
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Musk’s influence over sensitive government data and his potential manipulation of financial regulators blur the line between corporate power and state authority. Meanwhile, Trump’s executive actions, such as limiting birthright citizenship and removing oversight officials, systematically dismantle the foundations of constitutional democracy. Neither fits neatly into conventional definitions of insurrection or rebellion, leaving the legal system ill-equipped to respond.
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This new form of power consolidation operates in the legal shadows, exploiting ambiguous or outdated statutes as a shield while reshaping the relationship between technology, governance, and democracy. Without clear and enforceable laws to address these emerging threats, the institutions meant to check power face a profound vulnerability, one where democracy can be dismantled without a single act of traditional violence.
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In essence, we are witnessing a slow-motion, bloodless digital coup, one that exposes the fragility of democratic norms when faced with actors willing to exploit legal gray areas and wield technological dominance. This coup ill-equipped not just the letter of the law but the very spirit of American democracy, and the legal system is struggling to keep pace.
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This is not a military coup. There are no tanks rolling into Washington or fighter jets strafing the capital.
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Instead, this coup advances with Trump’s full support. Its primary goal is to dismantle key parts of the federal government while ensuring that the remaining structures are loyal to Trump.
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Constitutional protections cannot effectively counteract the speed of this digital coup. By the time courts intervene to slow or stop Musk’s actions, the damage, amplified by digital infrastructure, will already be done.
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Grassroots protests and mass mobilizations in state capitals cannot keep pace with the rapid, technological acceleration of this power grab.
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The consequences of this coup will reverberate across the United States, undermining the entire federal system and reshaping U.S. relations with the world. The dismantling of agencies like USAID will have life-and-death consequences for vulnerable populations globally.
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In less than four weeks, Trump and Musk have thrown U.S. government agencies into disarray. Their actions are capable of causing permanent, structural change. Given Trump’s stated desire to become a dictator, and his recent claim that Americans "won’t have to vote anymore," the collapse of the entire U.S. federal government is no longer an abstract threat; it is an imminent possibility.
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Noah writes: “I get paid to understand, but really, I don’t, and I have yet to encounter anybody who does.“
What is going on (in part) is a Creedal Passion Period (CPP). This one began around 2013 and is projected to end around 2027:
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/cycles-of-radicalization
The peak year for this one was in 2020, the peak of the last one (1963-1978*) was 1968 (when your mom said she didn't know what was happening to the country) and the peak for the one before (1913-27) that was in 1919, year of Red Summer, the Red Scare and the Palmer Raids.
This one feels different than the last one because the divisions seem more likely to spin into civil war today. This reflects a different dynamic have to do with economic inequality and elite proliferation.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/the-american-secular-cycles
Our current situation is in a crisis period related to this dynamic.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/the-current-crisis-era
It is most like the period of a century ago, when we were in a capitalist crisis like now
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/the-capitalist-crisis
And a creedal passion period like now. And the parallels are eerie. We had a pandemic then and now. Inflation and immigration were big issues and a new corrupt administration came to power following an unpopular Democrat who wanted to run for another term but was too feeble to do so. The new administration proceeded to shut down immigration from nonwhite countries by a series if increasingly draconian measures over 1921-24. Today we even have a large-scale European war compared to the first world war than raged during the CPP back then.