When they Ask, What Did I Do?
Summary
Donald Trump threatens the modern American democracy and individuals such as myself need to speak out and take action, expressly because individuals alone cannot hope to stop him. As many people need to voice their objection as possible.
I add my voice to those of many others: Trump must not be allowed to continue to tear apart the federal American institutions as he and his sycophants are presently doing.
What did I do?
From the future, the past and the decisions of its actors always seem easy to judge. From the present, the most moral or ethical—or even merely the most effective decisions—often appear non-obvious from the limited perspective of the present flash in time.
I have often wondered why the residents of the past made the, “wrong,” decisions they made and let retrospectively terrible things happen and—from my perspective—often those, “wrong,” decisions appear to be the decision to take no action at all. From the seemingly clear-visioned viewpoint where I stand in the future, it seems obvious that any action was better than passivity.
Of course, there are at least two problems with this line of thinking: first it is an invalid, reductionist perspective of most events. Generally speaking, when viewing various sudden shifts in power such as the fall of the Roman Republic or the rise of the fascist states of the 20th Century, there were a diverse array of resistance efforts leading up to the turning point.
Second, it places on unfair expectation on people merely living their lives. If any individual in any of the above states had—entirely independently without additional support—taken some action, no matter how dramatic, it likely would have had little long-lasting impact on its own.
Why should a rational individual in such a situation draw attention to themselves? If that attention is to bring nothing, is it not more rational to make the best of the new regime they can?
However, human society has developed into something emergently complex and beautiful because—sometimes—people make the irrational choice when considered at the level of the independent, discrete individual. Instead, for some irrational reason, they choose to believe in something larger.
Consider that every time a person chooses to vote in an election, they choose the irrational. My vote will (except in exceedingly rare scenarios) not make a statistical difference. The ballot that I cast will not be a deciding factor and whether I show up or not will not change the outcome.
Given that observation, something unintuitive happens when enough individuals in a society believe that there is a reason to vote besides the cynical calculation that their individual vote cannot matter. Whether because it was reasoned to via game theory, because of an appeal to some ethical framework such as Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative, or even just the a priori sanctity that they have imbued upon the process through some interplay between their religion and society, something happens that would have never been possible among individuals outside that complex society. A consensus emerges and a government can be empowered to work towards building a different society and power sharing agreement, based on the expressed consent of the people.
That meandering preamble is a partial explanation for why I feel it is necessary to say something. I believe Donald Trump is an existential threat to the American democratic experiment and if enough Americans implicitly consent to his current course of action, the result may no longer be the imagined democracy, “by the people”, many Americans believe we have inherited.
I do not know what the world will look like in 1 year, 5 years, 50 years or 100. However, incomplete information is not a good enough reason to stay out of the fray—after all, none of the power-wielding decision-makers in our world today have complete information either.
That said, Donald Trump and his entourage’s previously inconceivable recent actions are upending expectations about how power is balanced in the US republic—centralizing that power within the executive branch and most dangerously on the person of Donald Trump himself. Just some of the actions that I believe must be halted immediately: the rapid attempt to emplace loyalists in the most powerful institutions such as the FBI; or allowing Elon Musk direct control of the beurocratic apparatus of USAID and the systems necessary to disperse payments; instigating trade, “wars,” towards close allies without the consent of the people or even Congress.
I hope in the coming days and weeks I can realize more concrete actions to effect change beyond merely writing this text. However, the reason why democratic experiments have taken place over the last few centuries is because people of all types have come together to exchange ideas, and that is where such change starts.
I hope that I will see the American people rise to the need of the moment.