In the aftermath of the election, there’s a consensus in the commentariat – that is, the gaggle of people with big audiences paying attention to what they say about public affairs. And the commentariat says that we’re in a new era. The Trump Era doesn’t have a name yet, but there’s talk that the MAGA tide has swept away the last vestiges of Reaganism, which itself had replaced the government activism that FDR inspired.
So, you know, every four decades or so there’s a sweeping out of things in America. And here we are, God help us, as something new is taking hold.
In nature, the cycle of life depends upon decay of the old to nourish the new. In a 2007 bestseller, The World Without Us, the science journalist Alan Weisman projected what would happen if humans suddenly disappeared from earth. New York City’s decay, for example, would begin within a half hour, Weisman calculated, with subways flooding and then begin to erode their surroundings. Within two decades, major avenues would become rivers, toppling mighty skyscrapers. Within five centuries, dense forests would completely overtake residential neighborhoods across the country. Even rats and cockroaches would die off without the food and warmth that human presence provides them.
That ebb and flow of things has inspired philosophers throughout history, giving rise to what sociologists call the social cycle theory: the notion that events and currents of societies tend to repeat themselves.
In the 4th century BCE, Plato’s Republic laid out five forms of government, from aristocracy to tyranny, that Plato believed would tend to flow from one to another – and Plato believed that democracy would be the next-to-last stage, before tyranny. Machiavelli, writing during the Renaissance, thought governments would perennially rotate through three cycles, while Thomas Carlyle, an influential 19th-century Scottish essayist, saw history as a phoenix, with societies always growing and dying in stages much like the seasons of the year.
I guess there’s some comfort in such a long view for those of us horrified by the prospect of Donald Trump’s return to power – we who are fearful of the calamities that might attend his careless leadership of the world’s dominant society, and who worry that our democracy itself is at stake. Maybe, we’re tempted to think, we ought to just take it easy. That’s better for our mental health, anyway. You know, the earth has lasted a long time, and despite many terrible rulers, we have reached this stage of relative comfort — for our part of the human race, that is.
I mean, consider the antecedents: Adolf Hitler might have been the worst individual disaster ever to befall the world, but his rule lasted only 11 years. Humankind advanced despite the depredations of Atilla the Hun and Vlad the Impaler. Compared to them, Trump seems positively benign.
But it’s a delusion to think that everything will turn out okay because it always does. Actually, it doesn’t. Trump’s first term empowered violent radicals, widened economic inequality, dramatically increased the national debt, weakened the alliance that has stabilized international relations since World War II and, by minimizing the risk of the pandemic and the threat of climate change, surely cost the lives of tens of thousands of Americans and will lead to the premature deaths of hundreds of thousands more globally. As to our national character and its effect on our society in decades to come, we can only speculate about the damage that will have been done by the example of an amoral leader; our descendants will judge that, and feel its impact.
Abuses tend to yield reforms – which is why official negligence of America’s economic decay gave rise to the New Deal, and why the corruption of Watergate gave us some ethics and institutional reforms. But there’s a sense -- in fact, almost a promise in his own words – that Trump is going to reverse all that: to attack government itself, upend the global order, unleash forces that our social norms have held in check.
What’s at stake is nothing less than the reversion of the federal government to a level of corruption beyond what we’ve seen in recent times. It would mark a regression that could be every bit as damaging to our democratic system as the imagined absence of human intervention could be to the ecosystem of New York City.
When forests overtake land once cleared for pasture, we may be struck by the richness of nature and the diversity of the life that emerges. If a president trounces ethical norms aimed at ensuring the equity and justice that the Constitution aims to enforce, there will be nothing so beautiful to celebrate.
That would be more akin to the decay of abandoned buildings under the force of storms, heat and cold. And it can remind us that human hands are essential if we hope to avoid the reversion to what once was. Nature ebbs and flows, and the long view of history makes it clear that life goes on even as governments change. But governments are human systems, and their success hinges on human involvement. Which is why we cannot sit idly by, reassuring ourselves that everything will eventually play out just fine. We can’t quietly accept the decay that is now a real threat.
Rex Smith, the co-host of The Media Project on WAMC, is the former editor of the Times Union of Albany and The Record in Troy. His weekly digital report, The Upstate American, is published by Substack.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.