In Our Time

I’m assuming that if you’re reading these posts you’re aware of the facts, which are now obvious to anyone not actively complicit or in denial.

A few weeks ago, Elon Musk and a group of teenagers gained access to the Treasury Department’s payment systems and infiltrated the General Services Administration. They rewrote code. They gathered information on us all. They identified choke points and proceeded accordingly.

When our actual elected representatives showed up, they were stopped by security.

This is the real January 6^th.

Just a few days ago, Trump issued an executive order assigning a DOGE representative with sole hiring and firing power to every agency that runs our country.

The dismantling of the administrative state, also known as the US government, is underway, and whether the current court injunction denying Musk access succeeds in slowing things down remains to be seen.

Personally, I’d love to know who’s running oversight on compliance.

---

All this is being documented as it unfolds by journalists and historians with more knowledge, more insider access and vastly greater research capabilities than my own. Read them for the facts. Read Heather Cox Richardson. Read The Bulwark. Or The Contrarian. Look up Katherine Stuart’s February 7^th guest essay in The New York Times, “Now Will We Believe What is Happening Right in Front of Us?” Better still, if you’re reading the Times, find M. Gessen’s February 9^th op-ed, “The Chilling Consequences of Going Along With Trump.” I read everything Gessen writes. It takes a refugee from Putin’s Russia to identify the various forms of “anticipatory obedience” we’re seeing emerge, as well as the self-justifying arguments behind them.

Though my background is in American history and culture, I can’t hope to match these folks, and I’m not going to try: They – and dozens like them – are doing an extraordinary job.

What I can do is try to shed some light on the human side of this disaster; that is, on what many of us may be thinking and feeling at this moment.

---

I’ve never lived through something like this, but my parents did. Born and raised in Czechoslovakia, a thriving constitutional democracy, they saw their country taken over, reshaped, renamed. They did what they could. My father and grandfather were both in the resistance, mostly as couriers of information and arms. For some weeks, they hid a Jewish man in a crawl space in the rabbit hutch. In the winter of 1943, along with thousands of others, they sabotaged the cross-country skis the Germans had requisitioned for the retreat from Russia.

Less than three years after the end of the war, having survived the threat from outside, they were buried from within, by propagandists, ideologues, and opportunists who took over government institutions, filled them with loyalists and demolished the rule of law with heartbreaking speed.

What my mom and dad remembered most was their initial sense of helplessness at the time: This couldn’t be happening – and yet it was. Decades later my mother would get frustrated with American friends who’d say, ‘You should’ve done this,’ or, ‘I would’ve done that.’

It was easy to say, she’d tell them. At the time, people desperately wanted to believe everything would be fine - the desire for normalcy is a powerful thing – and those who saw what was coming had no idea what to do, how to stop it.

Then fear kicked in and did the rest: most people pulled back, lowered their voices, looked out for their own.

I mention this because it’s important for us to realize that the helplessness we’re experiencing now has been felt before. That the disbelief, the outrage – even the nostalgia for ordinarily dysfunctional times – is normal. That we’re not the first to wonder what kind of world our kids will have to navigate.

It’s important because it helps us feel less alone in history.

And because then, as now, something came after.

---

As I write this, the President of the United States and a Bond villain (he’s the richest man on Earth, he controls space, he’s mentally unbalanced . . . ) are taking over. They’re shutting down programs. They’re purging at will. It’s happening. It’s a fact.

Republicans in Congress, seemingly hypnotized, are ensuring their own irrelevance by installing traitors and thugs in positions of extraordinary power.

There’s a White House Faith Office now, run by Pastor Paula White, a televangelist who speaks in tongues and believes that her mere presence in the White House makes it holy ground. She believes that anyone who opposes Trump opposes God, a view shared, not surprisingly, by Trump himself.

The Democrats, with one or two exceptions, are so many deer in the headlights. They’re hinting they might do something . . . though they’re not sure what. They’re swaying and chanting. They’re making eloquent speeches to “the loyal opposition,” hoping for their “Have you, at long last, no shame, sir?” moment, apparently not realizing there’s no loyalty to be found and shame has been purged.

Some, incredibly, have taken to bleating about working with “the new administration.”

As if this were an administration and not a hostile takeover.

Heather Cox Richardson quotes political scientist Stathis Kalyvas, who recently posted: “There is now total clarity, no matter how unimaginable things might seem. And they amount to this: The U.S. government has been taken over by a clique of extremists who have embarked on a process of regime change in the world’s oldest democracy…. The arrogance on display is staggering. They think their actions will increase U.S. power, but they are in fact wrecking their own country and, in the process everyone else.”

I don’t know where this goes, and anyone telling you they do is either a liar or a fool. But this much I can pretty much guarantee: There were people - smart people, competent people – who saw this coming. Contingency plans were made. Something will follow. And that something will reveal paths, opportunities - ways and means of resistance – we may not be able to see at the moment.

There will be other players – names we don’t know yet.

There will be headlines we can’t anticipate.

By all means, burn down the phone lines to Congress - it matters. March if you can. Speak out and keep speaking out. But above all, don’t give in to helplessness.

Watch. Wait. The days to come will show the way.

---

What do I think may come to pass?

Well, I can tell you what I hope: I hope the insurrectionists’ greed and incompetence causes them to overstep. That infighting destroys them from within. That the two principals have one cheeseburger too many.

I hope that the whole mad mess slides into a survivable incoherence and just burps along until the midterm elections when the American people straighten things out. Or that the hardship unleashed by Trump’s 4^th grade understanding of economic principles creates mass unrest, which in turn disenthralls the US Congress, which then wrestles back the power given to it by the American Constitution and shuts this thing down.

That this blitzkrieg, which currently seems as irresistible as its military antecedent did in 1940, is stopped dead in its tracks.

Do I believe this will happen? No. Maybe. Not really. Not any more.

I think we’ve given away too much. Trump has immunity now. The Republicans would unanimously approve his left shoe for office. Loyalists are lining up at the trough, and if Patel is confirmed as head of the FBI – as he most likely will be – Trump will own the law. Our enforcement power will be gone.

I think they’re playing for keeps.

---

I’d rather be writing about something else – anything else. I ask myself if I’ve missed something. If I’m being alarmist. If it’s not possible that this will all just pass like a bad dream on waking. I desperately want to be wrong.

I don’t think I am. If anything, I think the mainstream media is underplaying the danger.

This is what I see happening. (I’m not even addressing the international scene, which is frankly unbelievable, for lack of space.)

Trump will continue to do what he always does, sending up trial balloon after trial balloon – weaving, attacking, denying, attacking again – essentially rope-a-doping us all into exhaustion. Or trying. Whenever the firehose slackens to merely crazy, people will understandably want to believe that he’s reached the limits of his power, that this debacle won’t be as bad as they’d feared.

And then it will begin again.

Do I see mass deportations? Transit and detention camps? Yes.

Will Guantanamo and other prison sites be vastly expanded to house ‘illegals’ and, later, other undesirables? Yes.

Will they try to bury the free press and the 1^st Amendment? Yes.

Will court rulings against Trump be disregarded? Yes, and soon. He’s been drawing us a map for ten years. More to the point, once he’s got the DOJ and the FBI, who’s going to stop him? It’s not a subtle point: If someone is robbing your house, moral suasion won’t cut it – either you or the cops have to force the issue.

Will the apparatus of the state be used to intimidate individuals and corporations into censoring themselves? Of course. It’s already happening.

Will Trump fund the militias, as fascist regimes invariably do? Yes. Given his pardon of the January 6^th rioters and his admiration for groups like The Proud Boys – essentially America’s brownshirts – why would anyone think he wouldn’t?

In short, this is likely to get ugly. The hate is high. There are 400 million guns in our fair land. Already there are open calls for assassinations on X.

Which brings us to the big question: Will there be elections in two years? I don’t know. What I do know is that Trump isn’t acting like a man who’s worried about the ballot box.

We gave him the keys to the house. It’ll be hell getting him out.

---

But if predicting Trump’s behavior is relatively easy – just plot the current madness and project forward - guessing how the American people will respond is harder.

Here – maybe because I can’t bear the alternative – I’m going to go with my heart.

I believe that this won’t go easy – for Trump. That just as many civil servants are currently refusing Musk’s offer to resign, so patriots in the DOJ, the FBI, the Dept. of Defense and the military may hold their ground – creating a crisis of loyalty.

If Trump calls out the military against the American people – as he has indicated he would - will the army obey its draft-dodging Commander in Chief?

I believe that the American people – ornery, difficult, unaccustomed to bowing – will have some say. That they’ll reach their limit. That they’ll fight back, and that their natural generosity – something you don’t notice until you live abroad – will play a role.

I can see families, friends, neighbors pulling together, forming networks of resistance.

I can see sanctuary towns and cities – whether publicly declared or not. And not just for immigrants, but for dissidents. For oppositional figures of all stripes. For people targeted for retribution.

Ultimately, unless this whole thing implodes (which it very well may), I can see the blue states asserting themselves, establishing alliances that allow them to withstand whatever punishment might be visited on them by a rogue federal government.

Of course, pushed to its logical conclusion – and this is where the mind struggles to comprehend what may lie ahead – state solidarity raises the spectre of partition. Of sectional division. Of some kind of Pacific confederacy, say, comprising the states of Washington, Oregon and California. Or a New York / New England equivalent. Or a mid-western Illinois/Wisconsin//Minnesota allegiance.

At certain moments, the unimaginable becomes less so.

Like everything else, empires break.

Ours is being tested for the second time in its history.

Bizarrely, should partition come to pass, it would be a reversion to where we were before the Constitution was ratified: in 1787, the alternative to the single union advocated by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay in The Federalist was “several partial confederacies.”

It’s the very last thing we should want.

So this is my entirely secular prayer:

Let us all hope that this is not our time.

That history takes a different turn.

And then let us do what we can to make it so.

---