Look on my works, ye Mighty

Labors of Destruction and Creation

And on the pedestal these words appear:

"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

No thing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Labor Day. I thought of these lines, from Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias”, as I contemplated the poster of Donald Trump that now decorate the Department of Labor in Washington, DC. I thought of labors of creation, and of destruction.

To a historian of the twentieth century, such banners recall similar representations of Mussolini, although the Italian ones were less ugly. But I am struck more deeply by the contrast between the poster and the Labor Department. Trump can put his poster on the building. But he would never have built a Department of Labor. His kind of politics only destroys institutions. He can take a day off for Labor Day. But he would never have created a holiday for those who labor.

Ozymandias was the Greek name for the Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II. And in fairness to Ramses II, we should recall that he won battles, built temples, and ruled for decades. He led a state that lasted for millennia, of such fame that Percy Shelley and his friends could write poems about it millennia after its end.

Shelley reminds us that even the mightiest of rulers and of states come to an end, and that this final, unavoidable reality is what makes vanity of every boast.

That wisdom is the beginning of the understanding of our predicament. Americans are facing a more extreme situation. We are living through a regime in which there is no creativity between the boasting and the vanity. It is not that Trump is building great things and boasting about them, and that only time will reveal the inherent tragedy of human achievement. He is bragging about destroying what others have created.

Trump and Vance seem to believe that the United States will go on forever, regardless of what they do. But no political order is eternal. It is one thing to build things and imagine that all must bow before them indefinitely – the mistake of the poetical Oyzmandias. But it is a less forgivable mistake to believe the destruction can go on forever.

My worry is about the integrity of the United States as such. It is not arrived at lightly, or expressed hastily.

For the last couple of decades I have been thinking and writing about the alternatives to democracy, the failures of democracy, about where modern politics can take us and where it might yet take us. Bloodlands and Black Earth were about the worst of the European twentieth century. The Road to Unfreedom was about the postmodern authoritarian that was emerging in the 2010s. On Tyranny was an an attempt to leverage lessons from the tyrannical past against the aspirations of those who would build a tyrannical future. On Freedom was about other, better futures, ones that can be possible if we understand liberty in the right way and build the right kind of institutions around it. It is a philosophy book but also a book about America, and so it assumes the continued existence of the United States.

In the present circumstances, the future of the United States cannot be taken for granted. The negative scenario in On Tyranny, and I think the negative scenario most often imagined, is that the entirety of the United States will undergo a regime change towards an authoritarian order, without the rule of law, without checks and balances, with permanent repression of dissidents, with informational control via technology, with programmed ignorance through decimated and humbled schools and universities, with an economy controlled such that social advancement is impossible and wealth remains with the regime-friendly oligarchs. That is the goal of those in power, and we are right to fear it, and right to work against it – more right, I think, than we realize.

We use the phrase “regime change” too often. That idea imagines that the land, the people, the institutions do not matter much, and that all that matters is what happens at the top. One kind of regime goes, another comes, and the country remains. But that is not what history teaches. Attempts to change the form of government at the center can lead to dissent in the center, stress on the periphery, and change calculations about the sense of the entire endeavor. This is always true, regardless of what kind of alteration in the center we are talking about, or what country we have in mind. The integrity of a political system rests on certain foundations, and an attempt to change everything from the center, especially a heedless, ignorant attempt, can undermine those foundations.

Trump takes his example from Orbán in Hungary and Putin in Russia. But Hungary is a small country with an economy about a third the size of that of Boston, Massachusetts. Russia is a large country, but its power base rests in two cities and in control of the hydrocarbon industry. Both of these countries are very poor compared to the United States, and neither of them has a meaningful tradition of federalism, neither of them has any decentralization of wealth and power. The Putin regime survives on endless war, the Orbán regime on EU transfers of money. The memes used and the tricks played in Budapest and Moscow have a certain utility in the United States, and they are all the more tempting for an American president who wants to be able to do what Hungarian and Russian leaders have done: redirect flows of wealth to himself and his immediate environment. But those regimes will not last forever. And the attempt to imitate them in the United States is not only authoritarian but destructive.

What holds the United States together? Let me hold back for a moment on the loftier ideas of the Constitution and the history for a moment, and stay focused on those flows of wealth. It is the money, as transferred by institutions, as justified by political convictions.

The blue states pay taxes to the federal government, which redirects them to the red states. Voters in red states take advantage of this redistribution, while claiming (in their majority, not the whole population, of course) both that they are against such a redistribution and that they are being cheated because they do not get enough. Governors of red states (not all, but several) push the logic of the federal system to the limit, treating themselves (not the Constitution or the law and certainly not the taxpayers in blue states) as the final arbiter of what can be done with taxes. This is an arrangement, when looked at from the outside with a cold eye, can hardly be seen as natural and sustainable. It only works because of certain assumptions about the nature of the federal government as a whole, assumptions that are now being challenged. It depends on blue state politicians and voters acting in the name of something beyond narrow self-interest.

It is one thing, as a blue state voter, to know that your taxes are being spent elsewhere in the country. But it is quite another to worry that they will simply disappear into a sinkhole of corruption, such as that which is now being created in the White House. It is one thing to believe that federal taxes are worthwhile because they are being spent to redress inequalities in health care or education. It is another to watch the federal government spread disease and ignorance. It is one thing to pay taxes every year, in the knowledge that eventually the power in the White House will change every four or eight. It is another to be confronted with a president who talks about third terms. It is one thing to believe that the Constitution will ultimately preserve the country. It is another to recognize that those in power scorn it.

Trump and Vance can destroy what others have built. They can push the Constitutional regime of the United States past the breaking point. But they lack an alternative to replace it. They want fascism, and they don’t mind death of others, but they do not want to take responsibility for the death. To get what they want, on the fascist model, they will have to, at some point, fight a major foreign war in which they manage to send off young people who oppose them to die, or they will have to use government forces to kill Americans. I don’t think that either of these will actually work; Vietnam and the Kent State shootings had the opposite effect.

I also don’t think, though I could be wrong, that Trump and Vance would try this; since they themselves believe in nothing, it will be hard for them to take that next step of direct killing to generate political meaning. Historical fascists believed that their nations should be subjected to a bloody competition for world superiority. Trump and Vance just think that Americans are idiots. That is not the same thing. It is also not clear that the armed forces would go along with such a major undertaking: think of the military parade.

The death that Trump and Vance prefer, and cause, and need is indirect and passive-aggressive: by destroying government functionality, the generate unnecessary suffering, which they then blame on migrants and African Americans. They have funded ICE and deployed the National Guard to deter those of us who see the logic. That is their sadopopulism, their safe space.

This can work for a while, but can it work forever? One of the reasons for concern about the future of the country is that Trump and Vance seem to believe that it can.

If you are a successful grifter, you do not really see beyond the boundaries of the grift. Why would Trump think that he needs to anything besides grift on indefinitely? He has parlayed a set of entertainment skills into the presidency. Why would Vance think that he needs to go beyond grift? He rose to his easy life as angry-straight-rich-white-male-almost-in-chief thanks to a book which women of color helped him to write, and thanks to political donations from a gay billionaire. No wonder he thinks that we can be fooled endlessly.

But at the bottom of apparently bottomless cynicism always rests a certain naiveté. Grifts can only work by consuming resources that are created from outside the grift. The better the grift works, the fewer resources remain. The United States exists thanks to material exchanges grounded in institutional arrangements based in political faith. Trump and Vance create none of this; their grifts consume it all. But from inside the grift they cannot see this. And so they will push on, with ever greater boastfulness and vanity, until they get to the end.

Every country can come to an end. The 250 years of the American Republic, for which Trump takes credit on those banners, is an impressive figure, longer than most states, no doubt. But it is a far cry from forever, and believing in forever, acting is if forever belongs to you, is a certain way to summon doom. Trump and Vance will not learn from Ozymandias or from history.

But for the rest of us there are two important lessons.

One is that resistance is patriotic. Everything that we do to oppose American authoritarianism we do not just in the name of defending freedom, but in the name of preserving America as such. In the swirl of destruction that is underway, it is impossible to know what will crack first, and how the collapse will begin. But what we do know is that the thing that comes next, the better America, can rest only on the labor that we perform now, on the good that we do now.

The other lesson is that resistance is constructive. It can seem difficult to resist merchants of calamity such as Trump and Vance. No one action seems to stop them. But every act of resistance creates the possibility that the country itself can survive, and every moment of hope creates the foundation for a better republic. The actions we take have to be actions against, against what is being done to us now. But by their nature every strike, every protest, every act of organization, every act of kindness and solidarity are also actions for, for a future in which the United States continues to exist, and in which the learning from resistance becomes the politics of freedom.