Trump's Actions Present a Threat to Our Social Fabric.
The internal and external strategies – ranging from the effort to overturn the election in the past to latest moves and statements – erode not only national and global legal frameworks. The implications are broader.
They endanger the very concept of civilization itself.
A ethical foundation of any advanced culture is to forestall the more powerful from harming and taking advantage of the vulnerable. Failing that, we risk being trapped in a brutish war where only the fittest could survive.
This principle lies at the center of the nation's founding texts. This is also the core of the postwar international order supported by the US, emphasizing multilateralism, popular sovereignty, human rights, and the supremacy of law.
But, it is a vulnerable principle, often broken by those who seek to abuse their power. Maintaining it demands that the influential have the moral fortitude to refrain from seeking immediate gains, and that the public ensure they answer for their actions if they don't.
Unchecked strength does not make right. It makes for instability, disruption, and conflict.
Whenever people or corporations or countries that are wealthier and stronger target and use those that are less so, the structure of society unravels. Should such behavior are allowed to continue, the fabric unravels. Allowing it to persist, the world can plunge into instability and violence. History provides ample precedent.
We now inhabit a global community with deepening divides. Influence and wealth are more concentrated than in modern history. This invites the privileged to leverage their position against the less fortunate because they act with a sense of omnipotent.
The resources of a handful of billionaires is difficult to fathom. The power of big tech, big oil, and large defense contractors covers numerous countries. Artificial intelligence is could centralize economic and political clout to a greater degree. The military might of the major powers is without parallel in recorded history.
Enabled by complicit legislators and an accommodating high court, the highest office has been made into the supreme and answerable-to-none instrument of government in history.
Put it all together and you grasp the looming crisis.
A clear connection links previous transgressions to present-day threats. Both were based on the arrogance of omnipotence.
One observes much the same in the actions of other powers: in territorial invasions, in strategic threats, and in the worldwide exploitation by massive conglomerates.
But, strength without restraint does not establish right. It fosters fragility, upended order, and armed conflict.
History shows that rules and conventions to check the influential also safeguard them. Without such constraints, their endless appetite for more power and wealth in time lead to their downfall – along with their enterprises, countries, or domains. And risk global conflict.
This blatant contempt for legal order will cast a long shadow over the nation and the world – and indeed civilization – for a long time.
