The democratic moment is over.
We haven’t had a Rubicon crossing and we’re not about to. The country is not in the hands of Cesar but Caligula. If I were to game-theorize this nuclear winter of an administration wishful media still refer to as “presidential,” I’d say there’s a 70 percent chance that Emperor Selfie will, before the legal end of his lawless reign, suspend the Constitution across the dominion for the first time in its 237 years. With an exception for the Second Amendment of course. Wouldn’t want to disarm the goons he’ll need to enforce his terror. It can happen here, Mr Lewis.
Noemic definitions aside, the habeas corpus clause of the Constitution has been suspended in limited areas of the country or the empire four times before, including once in Hawaii before it was a state and once in the Philippines, for those of you who think the Constitution only covers Sherwin Williams-certified white, Christian Americans who can trace 100 percent of their hemoglobin to that vessel of illegal immigrants known as the Mayflower. Not that constitutional scruples prevented Teddy Roosevelt’s occupiers from waterboarding brown skins it didn’t exterminate during our gilded genocide in the Philippines.
A fifth, universal and possibly final suspension of the Constitution would be the inevitable next step for a junta that has declared eight national emergencies in its first eight weeks, 16 counting the ones still in effect from the emperor’s first four seasons before the Biden senescence, and over 140 executive orders in the first 100 days, most in history.
The junta’s Theodore Bilbo impersonator is openly calling for suspension. The pretexts are the huddled masses and wretched refuse of decades of American support for mass-murdering dictators in Central America. That brown trash is now yearning to breathe free on this side of disillusion and discovering that what freedom it imagined lit this formerly perfectible shore has been obscured by that nuclear winter.
The chance of a suspension grows to 110 percent if we have an actual emergency, like a 9/11-style attack or something less grave but more frothy for the foxy TV mob, like mass protests that should be shaking this country to its absent core in response to the emperor’s demolition derby. We have no such protests. Regular but limited demonstrations are too partisan and nowhere near critical mass.
For the most part, the American public is as comatose as Congress, and nearly half approve of Caligula with that gleeful drunkenness you feel coming out of a colonoscopy, while the other half act the way Faulkner described it in “Uncle Willy”: “It was like one of those sheep they would sacrifice back in the Bible. It was like it had climbed up onto the altar itself and flopped onto its back with its throat held up and said: ‘All right. Come on and get it over with. Cut my damn throat and go away and let me lay quiet in the fire.’”
The democratic moment died well before January 20. That’s why it was easy to predict the emperor’s return from his luxury Elba in Palm Beach. There is no democratic world where a bigoted, twice-impeached convicted felon and sexual predator who cannot tell a truth, whose Doge-like response to Covid contributed to the unnecessary deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans and who cheered an insurrection after leading the most corrupt and reckless administration in history could still be elected by a nation interested in democracy. We simply no longer are. The traditional democratic norms of governance and dignity and accountability are history.
How else to you explain the country’s surrender to the degradation of the country’s institutions since Jan. 20–the assaults on universities, on media, on law firms, on judges, the contempt for judicial orders and constitutional protections, the war on immigrants, the dehumanization of trans people, the blanching of history, the indifference to governance, the monetized corruption of the presidency on a scale that makes Teapot Dome look like doll-house tea party, and this growing sense that, to borrow a line from Garcia-Marquez’s Autumn of the Patriarch, “there was no other sound in the world, he alone [is] the nation” as he discharges “the delirium of his rancor” on anything in his way?
We want a strongman. We want what Turkey has, what Israel, Hungary, Italy Russia and Venezuela have–authoritarians still lip-servicing democracy but acting as despots. This is the so-called “unitary executive theory” in action. It’s a fancy name for dictatorial power grabs. It means whatever the president says goes. It means the president is not only above the law. He is the law.
You’ll find the unitary theory in action during the Roman Empire, when emperors “were exempted from the obligation and penalty of many inconvenient laws,” as Edward Gibbon reminds us. Or in papal bulls. You won’t find it in the Constitution. But like intelligent design, like Reaganomics, like the idea that “business buccaneers should have a say in formulating federal policy” (as historian Sean Wilentz put it), a once-ludicrous concept with the validity of a middle school fantasy birthed by Steven Calabresi in a 1992 law review article has gone mainstream thanks to middle school clubs posing as right-wing think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the Claremont Institute.
Americans love it, just as they’ve come to embrace those other absurd concepts. It’s only natural since most Americans since the 1980s have regressed to a middle school mindset.
None of that is democratic. None of that is remotely pluralist. But here we are. We can still pretend, as in New York Times editorials, in pleas by Jon Stewart or in those desperate demonstrations, that there’s a way back, that democracy only needs a fresh new message, that Democrats have to “offer new ideas,” as the Times implored. All that misses the point. It suggests that democracy’s dialectic is still functioning, that the competition of ideas and the rule of law still matter. But a majority of Americans aren’t interested in democracy anymore. They want their strongman. He’s delivering.
Pierre Tristam is the editor of FlaglerLive. A version of this piece airs on WNZF.
JC says
Please provide evidence that the Constitution will be suspended before 2028? After reading your article, I just nothing but fear mongering without actual evidence.
Nina says
How would you resolve the issues? As americans on both sides, we should just try to work together to find solutions.. two heads are better than one but only to agree. We get nowhere by slinging insults however creativily phrased! Its as if someone, or something is hellbent on keeping this country divided! Theres truth to the statement ‘United we stand… divided we fall’
Deborah Coffey says
Spot on, Pierre. I actually think there’s a very good chance that Congress will be suspended even before the courts, before the 2026 election.