Thoughts for the Day, June 4, 2025: A reflection after turning 74

Reflection

Monday June 2 was my 74^th birthday so I took the evening off from my blog. Other than being without water for 48 hours, I had a fabulous birthday. I also had a chance to reflect on the state of a whole bunch of things including the following

· My biggest concern is with our democracy. It is in danger. With the direction we are going we will no longer be a democracy for all the people. We are becoming a democracy for the few who look, act, and believe like the Trump and his followers. This is happening is such a short time it is mindboggling. It started with the Supreme Court saying the president is exempt from prosecution if he his carrying out the duties of the president. The Republican members of Congress played their part, by abdicating their constitutional powers to the president. Congress is on the cusp of further strengthening the president by passing a bill that exempts the president and his administration from contempt of court charges. The Courts are complicit because of the Supreme Court being in Trump’s pocket. Furthermore, the lower courts have no way of enforcing their rulings when Trump and his administration choose to ignore the rulings.

· We have become an “I win you lose society”. Win-win solutions don’t work. Winning isn’t enough. The other guys must be defeated and annihilated. Being the best in the world has taken precedent over being the best for the world.

· Empathy appears to be dying. Taking care of the unfortunate is not a priority. The Great Society and the Civil Rights movement is dead.

· Human life doesn’t matter. Look at Gaza. Look at the mass shootings in our schools and around the country. Look at the reductions in US health aid to other countries.

· Scientific research only matters if it is done at institutions who conform to the president’s views. Having the best scientists is not a criterion for federal funding.

· Money matters. As we have seen in the last few primary elections, money matters. The rich and powerful use their power and funding to influence elections, especially the primaries to control who represents the party. It has trickled down to local and state elections being funded by the same rich and powerful who fund national elections.

· Conflicts of interest no longer matter. President Trump is flaunting the power of the presidency to increase his personal wealth in ways I never thought possible. We have supreme court justices who think nothing of accepting gifts from people who have business in front of the court.

Our democracy is dying right before our eyes. Each day the passes it gets closer to death. We can stop it, but we need to speak up and speak out. We need to ask our members of congress to honor their oath of office by upholding their constitutional powers over the executive branch.

We need to get out and vote in all elections for people who will honor their oath of office. The 2026 midterm elections are critical.

Please call your members of Congress today. The U.S. Capitol switchboard is 202-224-3121. Tell the operator where you’re from and the operator will connect you to your representatives and senators. I tested this out today. It is very simple. They will ask for the congress member you want to contact. They will then switch you to that office.

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An Observation from Afar

An editorial by Jonathan Sumption, a former supreme court justice from Great Britain. As an observer of democracies and a constitutional lawyer in Britain, I have watched with rising alarm as many Western nations threaten to become failed democracies.

They may not yet be like Venezuela, Peru, Hungary, Turkey or Russia. But these countries show what can happen when a democracy dies with a whimper, not with a bang. There may not be tanks on the lawns or mobs in the streets, but slowly, they are drained of everything that once made them democratic, often with substantial public support.

These countries have elections, legislatures, courts and so on. The institutional framework is still there. But they are no longer democracies because the political culture on which democracy depends has failed.

Now the United States is in danger of being added to this list. There are tensions among its institutions, though they are still largely functioning. But the deterioration of its political culture is striking — and alarming. The country resembles other Western democracies buckling under the weight of increasingly unrealistic expectations of the state from its electorate.

Democracy is a constitutional mechanism for collective self-government and a way of entrusting decision-making to people acceptable to the majority, whose power is defined and limited, and whose mandate is revocable. That is the institutional framework.

A democratic culture depends on something more than institutions. It depends on the instincts of politicians and citizens. It calls for a willingness to choose solutions that the greatest number of people can live with. It requires conventions about how even lawful powers will be exercised so as to avoid capricious, vindictive or oppressive decisions. Above all, it requires people to treat political opponents as fellow citizens with whom they disagree — and not as enemies to be smashed.

Hence the significance of President Trump, who exhibits the three classic symptoms of totalitarianism: a charismatic leader surrounded by a personal cult, the identification of the state with himself and a refusal to accept the legitimacy of opposition or dissent. The result is a regime of discretionary government in place of the government of laws that the founders saw as the chief defense against tyranny.

Mr. Trump has used public powers to pursue private grudges: for example, against law firms that represented his political opponents; public figures for whom he has removed security protection; or cultural institutions, from Harvard to the Kennedy Center, that do not share his personal agenda.

Article 2 of the Constitution requires the president to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” Yet this, too, has become dependent on the president’s personal discretion. Mr. Trump has directed the Justice Department not to enforce laws passed by Congress such as the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, has reduced or wound up programs for which Congress has appropriated funds and has threatened governors and other authorities with cutting off federal funds unless they submit to his wishes.

…Continental Europe has seen high levels of electoral support for openly authoritarian figures, such as Marine Le Pen in France, Jörg Haider in Austria, Viktor Orban in Hungary and the leading lights of Alternative for Germany.

The reasons are complex…We crave state protection from many risks that are inherent in life: job insecurity, economic misfortune, drought, fire and flood, sickness and accidental injury. …When these expectations are disappointed, as they so often are, people blame the system or the “deep state.” They turn against the whole political class, which has proved unable to satisfy their demands for a progressive improvement of their lives. In the absence of a democratic culture, they spontaneously turn to strongmen and kid themselves that strongmen get things done.

The United States is a particularly interesting example. It has enjoyed a century and a half of almost unbroken good fortune. This may now be coming to an end in the face of competition from countries like India and China. Old skills have become redundant in high-wage economies as national prosperity has shifted to high-tech industries, hitting incomes traditionally derived from manufacturing, agriculture and the extraction industry. Even in the high-tech sectors where the United States is strongest, its lead has shortened and in some cases vanished.

These are not exclusively American problems. Europe suffers from them even more, and European expectations of the state are higher. The shattering of optimism is a dangerous moment in the life of any democracy. Disillusionment with the promise of progress was a major factor in the crisis of Europe that began in 1914 and ended in 1945.

The tragedy is that historical experience warns us that strongmen do not get things done. At best they may indulge the fantasies of some of the population. But at what cost? Strongmen tend to be fixated on a few simple ideas that they offer as solutions to complex problems. The concentration of power in a small number of hands and the absence of wider deliberation and scrutiny enable them to make major decisions on the hoof, without proper forethought, planning, research or consultation. Within the government’s ranks, a strongman promotes loyalty at the expense of wisdom, flattery at the expense of objective advice, and self-interest at the expense of the public interest. All of this usually makes for chaos, political breakdown, economic impoverishment and social divisions.

If enough Americans persistently vote authoritarian figures into government and their cheerleaders into Congress, then democracy will not survive. But that is not yet an inevitability.

The founding fathers of the United States were profoundly conscious of the cultural underpinnings of democracy and well aware of its fragility. The second U.S. president, John Adams, summed up their fears in a letter written in old age. Democracy, he wrote, was just as vulnerable to vanity, pride, avarice and ambition as any other form of government, and a good deal less stable. “There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide,” he wrote.

The founders’ answer to the self-destructive tendencies of democracy was to design “a government of laws and not of men.” A government of laws was based on rational principles, consistently applied. A government of men was something different: an invitation to rule by discretion, subject to the whims of a handful of men at the heart of the state, guided by the very vices of vanity, pride, avarice and ambition which Adams knew would sooner or later destroy any democracy.

There have been demagogues before in American history. Until now, they have failed. Political parties had enough respect for the workings of the democratic state to freeze them out.

The many friends of the United States must hope that the experience of autocratic government will persuade voters to restore the country’s democratic tradition and truly make America great again. This is my Quote of the Day

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Orchid of the Day: Parker Meadows of the Detroit Tigers, In his first game back on Monday after being on the DL since the beginning of the season, Meadows had a single, a double, a stolen base and while patrolling centerfield with two outstanding catches that took away hits from the White Sox hitters.

Onion of the Day: The water pump at Crooked Tree. Nearly three days without water was not fun, especially following the five days without water during the ice storm in early April

Lyrics of the Day: Now Muscle Shoals has got the Swampers
And they've been known to pick a song or two (yes they do)
Lord, they get me off so much. They pick me up when I'm feelin' blue
Now how about you?

If you think you know the answer, send me your response in the comments section of the blog.

Answer to Lyrics of the Day for May 28, 2025: The First Cut is the Deepest, originally by Cat Stevens, but made famous by Rod Stewart.

Question of the Day: Pacers or Thunder for the NBA Championship which starts Thursday.

Video of the Day: you make the call.