What Emerges From the Wreckage

Mar 27, 2025

I’m trying to come to grips with the collapse of the American experiment.

The experiment, as I came to understand it by my early teens, was the audacious attempt to build a nation state founded on ideas. The seed was those lines indelibly expressed in the Declaration of Independence, a seed that would bloom into a vision of a nation where people of all backgrounds, religious beliefs, habits, cultures, ways of living could live and work together in an atmosphere of tolerance and mutual support. Its governance would be a system of laws that would balance individual freedom with a shared responsibility to lift up the less fortunate and favored, so that all its people had a fair shot at life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Call me thoroughly indoctrinated.

That vision was never shared by everybody and even among those who professed it, the specifics of how to implement it varied tremendously. But however tenuously, that elusive image was shared by enough of the people running the country – politicians, business people, educators – that I could believe that the vision, in all its power and beauty, might still one day be realized.

But the internal stresses have proven to be too much. The open hand has succumbed to the fist.

We wait, holding our breath as the movie careens towards its next climax, as the tussle between the Ghouls and the Judges advances, step by lumbering legal step. Strike and counter-strike. Judicial order and obfuscation. We watch and wonder – what limits will the Supremes lay down? And will the Trump machine abide by any limits? And if not, what happens then?

So much already seems to be clearly illegal and unconstitutional. But stepping back from my outrage, I can’t deny that much of it’s been within the President's power. And much of what does get blocked they'll find other ways to achieve. Case in point: on March 18, a federal judge ruled that the evisceration of USAID was likely unconstitutional in “multiple ways”. Yay! A big win for our side, right? Um, no. The judge ruled that it was the fact that it was being done at the behest of DOGEboy that was the problem. If the cuts were ratified by the official leadership of USAID it’d be okay. D’you see any likelihood that the current official leadership1 is going to walk back those cuts and try rebuilding the agency? We see this same pattern playing out time and again. The administration is using verbal jiu-jitsu to avoid a head-on confrontation with the courts while the cases work their way through the system. But they are also laying the groundwork in case they end up with a Supreme Court judgment that they’re not willing to abide.

There are more demonstrations scattered across the country every day. Indivisible is planning a day of nationwide protests and demonstrations on April 5. I’m hoping for huge turnouts, but I’m realistic about the results. Nothing will make Trump back down. There are still many millions of Americans firmly on his side2 and he’s got plenty of lawyers digging up every little loophole and bent interpretation of legalese to find ways to do what he wants. And if you’re thinking impeachment or removal3, remember that the line of succession goes to Vance and then Mike Johnson. MAGA is in charge for at least the next four years. And this time they've got the playbook. USAID is not coming back. The Department of Education will not be restored. Services to the poor will be greatly reduced. The DoJ will no longer be protective of civil liberties. The federal government will be much smaller and much less effective.

Devastating as those impacts will be for so many4, I’m more worried about how those who espouse hatred and intolerance of “the other” have now been empowered.

For decades the far right has been fighting a culture war while the Democrats have been playing politics. The Dems won enough legislative battles to believe they were slightly ahead. All those civil rights protections. But the far right knew how to play the long game. McConnell has spent decades successfully reshaping the judiciary. They knew how to patiently gerrymander their way into control of the statehouses, they understood the importance of local school boards and library boards. The Moms 4 Liberty were able to quickly metastasize nationwide from the organization’s founding in 2021 because the ground had been well-tilled.

When Trump burst on the scene, with his showman’s flair for hyperbole, the Democrats continued to act as if this were just one more political battle, so they were stunned when Trump managed to eke out a win. But he was stymied in his attempts to reshape the government. Too many people in that first administration who adhered to the old rules. (What a disappointment Jeff Sessions was!) And they didn’t have a clear roadmap.

After he was booted out, the Biden administration continued to play by the old rules, imagining bipartisan governing. They passed significant legislation, brought inflation down faster than any other country, and believed these concrete, mundane achievements would be welcomed and celebrated. But they made no impact on the culture wars. They were miserable at messaging, even as the right relentlessly hammered them with the invasion of Venezuelan rapists and murderers crossing the Canadian border to turn your little boys into little girls while snacking on their pets. For an electorate that gorged on true crime podcasts, and had been groomed by TV news for decades to fear the killers who lurked in every shadow, it was thrilling, and fabulously successful. The left too often took the bait and so aided and abetted the MAGA mob in making the case that the gender wars were all about bathrooms and locker rooms and that the complexities of immigration policy boiled down to Democrats wanting wide open borders in order to get more voters. Trump and his hard core of advisors and whisperers never faltered, never paused, never stopped planning, never stopped getting their message out. They’d gotten a taste of Presidential power and they also knew exactly what had stood in their way. The planning this time was meticulous. Trump's messaging was clear and it was entirely about the culture. The Democrats still tried to make it political, arguing that Trump was a threat to democracy. But that was vague and abstract and easy to refute.5 For all that the left tried to belittle Trump’s “weave”, it was very effective at carrying his message. And he was fun! His rallies were fabulously entertaining. Was anybody in the Democratic leadership fun? Not since Obama.

It's not at all clear to me that the left can figure out how to start fighting the culture wars. So far, they’re still playing politics, thinking that the courts are going to rein Trump in. But even if the courts establish boundaries that refute the extreme version of the unitary executive, and even if he abides (in the narrowest possible manner) by those boundaries6, he already wields enough power, abetted by a feckless Republican Congress, to do most everything he wants.

Too many shell-shocked people are assuming/hoping that Trump’s chaotic actions will cause such dramatic pain across the country that there will be a mass uprising, the MAGA faithful will finally wake up and... and... and what? Somehow the government will return to what it was in October?

Sorry. That ship has sailed.

The far right has won the culture wars. Even if, as seems likely, they make a mess of governing, they’re still going to be in charge.

So while thwarting their efforts as much as possible (or at least slowing some of them down) remains terribly important, I’m trying to adjust to the reality of all that has been broken beyond repair. No more shining city on a hill. The families of those who are dying around the world because life-saving programs have been fed into the wood chipper will never forgive the US. At the geopolitical level, no future US government, no matter how much it might repudiate Trump, will be trusted, at least for a generation. I saw an article referring to the President as “the leader of the free world”. For seventy-five years that was true. No longer.

Life has suddenly gotten scarier and more uncertain for pretty much everybody who is not a heterosexual white man. Most outrageous is the eradication of the very existence of transgender people, the elimination of any possibility of discussing gender at all. M.Gessen has an achingly eloquent piece in the NYT that expresses the fear, the sense of dislocation, the ground being pulled from underneath. The Trump administration has not only given permission to all those who would vilify transgender people, he's made it the explicit policy of the government. All across the country, but particularly in the small towns and medium sized cities, people who've hesitantly, but with increasing confidence, come out about their identity, had come to believe that most people would be okay with it, are now having to regroup and retrench. Now, even some allies are saying, "Well, maybe we went too far with our support..."

That hatred is one of the foundational MAGA building blocks. It's not going to be troubled by any judge or any court.

The DEI assault similarly is designed to undercut civil rights protections for anyone other than white men. Removing websites, tearing down murals, pulling down portraits celebrating the achievements of women, Blacks, other minorities7 under the guise of creating a "color-blind" society is shocking, but all of a piece. Schools are already taking down displays celebrating diverse populations, disbanding LGBTQ+ support groups and clubs; public library directors are being fired and collections raided looking for books that include the words which must not be said – it’ll be those in the smaller towns & cities that are least able to resist.

There is no going back. For those whose American dream is a vibrant multi-cultural, multi-racial, mutually supportive, egalitarian society, it's bitter to swallow the fact that the experiment has failed. But those ideas haven't died. Millions of Americans still hold those values. By all means, try to elect more Democrats – achieving divided government in two years may help. But that won’t win the culture wars. What would reassure me more would be to see people also putting energy into their local school boards and library boards8. Do most of the protesters even know who they are? The M4L sure do.

The left has to learn patience. Now it's got to be the long haul, the long game. By all means, demonstrate at the Tesla outlet. Keep phoning your senators and reps. Give money to candidates who might flip the house or senate in ‘26. Get out on the streets on April 5. But all of those actions will only slow the administration down. They won’t be able to fix very much of what’s been broken.

As a kid, I was beguiled by romantic stories of the French resistance during those awful days of Vichy. Maybe what will emerge is a new Underground. Instead of sabotaging bridges and communication lines, it’ll be local news sites keeping track of the impacts on daily life, it’ll be people who haven’t been political taking control of school boards and library boards, it’ll be community groups supporting LGBTQ+ kids, pro bono lawyers working to protect immigrant families, it’ll be local Islamic Centers and Synagogues and Christian churches reaching out with messages of tolerance, celebrating their cultural differences right along with all of the values that they share.

I hope events prove me wrong, that the American experiment is not irretrievably broken. But Trump (probably) and MAGA (for sure) will be in control of the White House for at least another 20 months. What happens in Washington will continue to be important. But the culture wars will continue to rage and they need to be fought at home, in every small town, on every street, in every moment where there is an opportunity to protect and support those that MAGA would abandon and eradicate. It’ll only be through those millions of daily human interactions that the American experiment, in all its idealistic glory, will be redeemed.

T Scott

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