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AUTOCRACY vs DEMOCRACY?

Published February 18th, 2025

President Donald Trump, in his first two weeks in office, dismissed thousands of government employees involved in past prosecutions of himself or his supporters; cut off funding for foreign aid programs all over the world by shuttering USAID; threatened to “take back” the Panama Canal, and take over Greenland from Denmark, a NATO ally; begun rounding up undocumented immigrants for forcible expulsion of millions of them from the country; and allowed agents of his mega-billionaire pal Elon Musk, few of them government employees, to access  the U.S. Treasury Department system controlling trillions of dollars of payments for all kinds of government programs.  Musk wasn’t elected to anything last November, but he’s wielding almost dictatorial powers with Trump’s blessing, and is now eyeing the Department of Education for possible closure.

Some of Trump’s most important cabinet appointments are people with no evident qualifications for their jobs.  In his eyes, the only qualification they need is willingness to do whatever he wants them to do.  He reassures skeptics that he’ll keep them under control – small comfort that is.

Trump acts as if he had the power to do whatever he wants -- absolute power.  The Constitution of the United States, with its checks and balances, does not give the President that kind of power.  Did the voters who elected him want him to have it?  Many hoped he would bring down the higher costs of food and consumer goods which they blamed the Biden Administration for.  So what did Trump do?

In a single day, he announced plans for 25% tariffs on almost everything Americans get from out two biggest trading partners,  Canada and Mexico, to force them to control refugees from other countries who try to slip into the United States.  But Trump’s real goal seemed to be to get our two neighbors to stop smugglers of the deadly drug fentanyl.  China, where many of the makings of the drug come from, got slapped as well with a 10% increase in tariffs on many goods.  All three countries at first said they’d retaliate with tariffs on what America sells to them.  But after talking with Trump,  Canada’s prime minister Justin Trudeau said he would speed up a $1-billion border reinforcement plan and appoint a “fentanyl czar,” and Mexico’s president Claudia Sheinbaum agreed to rush 10,000 troops to her side of the border.  With that, they and Trump agreed to call off all the tariffs for 30 days. And China?  Trump’s tariffs went into effect, and the Chinese retaliated on key products imported from the U.S.  

Many Canadians and Mexicans who thought we were friendly neighbors may feel alienated.  But Trump is also not above treating many fellow Americans as if we were aliens.  He and Musk and their minions have abolished all diversity, equity and inclusion policies within the government, and threatened to cut off government payments to companies, schools, and other institutions that have their own policies against racial or sexual discrimination.  Trump even stated that that DEI was responsible for the fatal collision between a civilian airliner and an Army helicopter in Washington, D.C., implying without a shred of evidence that incompetent personnel hired because of the policy could have caused the crash – a blatantly racist insinuation.   

But what in our Constitution gives the President the right to singlehandedly reverse antidiscrimination policies that the other two branches of government, legislative and judicial, have approved and supported for years?   

Trump seems to think the Presidency itself is his by right.  He has never acknowledged that he lost his first bid for a second term in 2020, insisting on the lie that that election was “stolen.”  Since his second inauguration, he has been ruling like an autocrat.  Will he try to run for a third term in 2028, despite the 22d Amendment to the Constitution, which plainly says: “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice”?  Don’t count on it.

Anything is possible, it’s easy to think -- when you don’t understand anything.  Trump told the world that the United States will take over the Gaza strip, get the two million Palestinians who live there to move to places like Egypt and Jordan, and rebuild it as the Riviera of the Middle East.  Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, standing next to him at a press conference in the Oval Office, smiled.  What else could Netanyahu do? Israel took over Gaza at the end of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, and had to withdraw after years of violent resistance in 2005. Now, Israelis hope for an end to their latest and most deadly war there yet. Let Trump take over the Palestinian problem!  That would put the United States itself squarely in the bull’s eye center of any future Middle East conflict.

Trump’s ignorance of history and of international diplomatic and strategic principles makes him almost as much of a threat to the security of the United States and Western Europe as Russia or China are.  After a 90-minute telephone chat with Vladimir Putin about the war Russia has inflicted on Ukraine since 2023, he sent Vice President J.D. Vance to Europe to tell the NATO allies at a security conference meeting in Munich that they need to take up more of the burden of supporting the Ukrainians, given the billions of dollars’ worth of weapons the United States has provided to them.  There Vance shocked the Germans, a week before a national election that will determine the next government in Berlin, that the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party should not be automatically excluded from being a part of it.  The AfD, long considered a neo-Nazi group, was already expected to make major gains in the vote, and Vance’s remarks could boost them.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Friedrich Merz, the Christian Democrat who could replace him if the Social Democrats and their allies lose next weekend,  both denounced this as unacceptable interference in Germany’s domestic affairs.  

Trump, meanwhile, without any consultation with Ukraine’s embattled President Volodymyr Zelensky or with the allies, had a 90-minute telephone conversation about the war with Vladimir Putin, after which he said the two soon planned to meet to discuss how to end the war.  And, oh yes, he added after the Europeans asked whether Ukraine would have any voice in the talks, Zelensky would be there, too.  

Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other Administration officials may go soon to Saudi Arabia for preparatory meetings with the Russians.  But our European NATO allies, and Zelensky, were shocked into realizing that Trump seems to think he can tell them what to do, and expects that if Putin does agree to stop fighting, European troops, not American ones, will have to monitor the ceasefire.  The dumfounded allies are meeting in Paris to ponder what might be next.

The United States created NATO to ensure the security of Europe in the face of threats from the Soviet Union.  Now, after the deadliest and costliest war in Europe since World War II, the allies and all Europeans are frightened that with this President, they could soon be on their own. 
 

Living With Guns
Living With Guns: A Liberal’s Case for the Second Amendment

Published November 13th, 2012

Americans own as many as 300 million guns, and about 30,000 of us die from gunshots every year. Even though about two-thirds of such deaths are suicides, the number of murders is shocking. Furthermore, the disturbing phenomenon of mass shootings by psychopaths who are able to obtain guns legally continues. On Memorial Day weekend, Elliot O. Rodger, a disturbed 22-year-old former college student in Isla Vista, California, stabbed three people to death and then, with three semi-automatic pistols and hundreds of rounds of ammunition, went on a shooting spree that killed three more and wounded 13 before he killed himself.

Can we really “live with guns?” Yes we can, but only if we can find a way to talk reasonably with each other about them rather than shouting slogans, which is what we have been doing in the culture wars we have been waging with each other over the Second Amendment to the Constitution.
“Living With Guns” argues that the Second Amendment recognizes and protects an individual’s right to own and use guns. Americans have had that right since colonial days, but we tend to forget that it has always been connected with a civic duty. Back then it was to come to the common defense when called by the local or state militia. After the Revolution, the founders recognized the right to keep and bear arms as an important guarantee that the powerful federal government they established with the Constitution could not use a standing federal army to impose tyranny over the states and their militias, or on individual Americans. Like all other rights, the right to own guns was not unqualified and was subject to reasonable regulation, as it had been since Jamestown and Plymouth Rock.

But times changed. Social and racial turbulence in the 1960s was followed by a wave of drug use and violent crime. Under the banner of being “tough on crime,” Conservatives urged and passed “stand your ground” laws in many states, giving people greater license to look to their own guns for self-defense. Meanwhile more liberal areas like Washington, D.C. and Chicago, afflicted with high murder rates in those troubled times, in effect banned gun ownership in an effort to bring them down. But the bans did not work. And gun bans are not constitutional, according to the conservative majority in the Supreme Court, in opinions in 2008 on Washington’s law and in 2010 on Chicago’s (and for that matter, others nationwide). In Living With Guns I make the case that history shows that the justices were right on that point, though wrong in their more sweeping assertion that the primary purpose of the right was self-defense.

 

 

 

Living With Guns

They also ruled that reasonable gun control laws were constitutional. But strict gun control by itself cannot solve our gun violence problem. Keeping guns out of the hands of as many law-abiding Americans as possible does not keep them out of the hands of criminals who do not bother to register guns at all. Draconian gun laws and regulations do not work as well as social and economic policies that work with, rather than against, violence-prone young people in troubled neighborhoods -- for example, those programs that endeavor to convince them that using guns is not a solution to frustration.

Reasonable gun regulations are on the books, but they are full of loopholes. Everybody agrees that people convicted of crimes, the mentally unstable, those addicted to drugs, people subject to restraining orders against a spouse, and the like should not have guns, and Federal law forbids licensed dealers from selling to them. But the Federal background check database of names is full of holes. Other loopholes in the law allow private individuals to sell guns with no background checks at all on buyers.
Conservatives and the NRA fight all efforts to tighten the regulations, as if the crime wave of 20 and 30 years ago had not significantly ebbed, along with the crack-cocaine epidemic that caused much of it. “Stand your ground” laws that make it easier for people who have guns to use them when they feel threatened, like the one invoked by the neighborhood watch volunteer in Florida who shot Trayvon Martin to death in 2012, do nothing to reduce gun violence by criminals.

All Americans should be encouraged to recognize that gun ownership is a right, but that gun owners still have a civic duty, to exercise the right carefully and responsibly, not recklessly. The current impasse makes the next gun massacre simply a matter of time. “Living With Guns” explores ways to make it possible for Americans to live in greater safety, even with so many guns around.

The Author’s Proposals To Increase Public Safety

All of the recommendations in “Living With Guns” on how to make it safer for all of us to live with guns turned up in one form or another in the package of legislative and executive measures proposed by President Obama on Jan. 16, after the Newtown massacre.

See the proposals as they appear in Chapter Eight of the book, where the reasons for them are fully explained. READ MORE HERE.