In President Trump’s second term, breaking things — or at least trying to — is a feature, not a bug. Sometimes that includes big things, too. So how can we understand this political moment? This week, Times Opinion published two guest essays that explore what is being done and undone to American democracy and to the federal government, and what it all might mean for the future of the country. Jonathan Sumption, a former justice of the Supreme Court of Britain and the author of a new book on democracy, writes that he has “watched with rising alarm as many Western nations threaten to become failed democracies,” and notes that America could soon join this list. He explains in his guest essay that while these countries maintain an “institutional framework,” they are “no longer democracies because the political culture on which democracy depends has failed.” He focuses on the deterioration of America’s political culture under Trump, a figure “who exhibits the three classic symptoms of totalitarianism: a charismatic leader surrounded by a personal cult, the identification of the state with himself and a refusal to accept the legitimacy of opposition or dissent.” “The result,” he continues, “is a regime of discretionary government in place of the government of laws that the founders saw as the chief defense against tyranny.” In another guest essay, Nathan Levine, who writes the newsletter The Upheaval under the pen name N.S. Lyons, explores a key idea behind the administration’s cuts to the federal bureaucracy: anti-managerialism. The “war against the bureaucracy,” he notes, “is the culmination of a once marginalized, now transformative strand of political thought about who really holds power.” He adds that “our democracy has been usurped by a permanent ruling class of wholly unaccountable managers and bureaucrats,” and “much of what is commonly called ‘populist’ politics can be more accurately described as part of an anti-managerial revolution attempting to roll back the expansion of overbearing bureaucratic control into more and more areas of life.” In these two essays, we can see two wildly divergent views of where American politics is going. Read the essays here: Here’s what we’re focusing on today:
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