Sliding Into Despotism

By Keith Parsons | 19 November 2025
Letters to a Free Country

(Credit: YouTube / screengrab)

SURE IT IS HARD TO DISAGREE RATIONALLY—BUT DOES THAT EVEN MATTER ANY MORE?

Here is one of Murphy’s Laws: If you speak so clearly that no one could possibly misunderstand you, then someone will misunderstand you. You learn this quickly when you present a syllabus to a class. “Dr. Parsons, what kind of essay do you want us to write?” “Well, as explained clearly in the second paragraph of the third page of the syllabus, what I want to see from you is…” Then, of course, when the paper is turned in, it appears that the author did not have a clue what I wanted.

Incomprehension increases exponentially when there is disagreement. “Debate” these days, particularly online, usually has the following format.

“P”
“Not-P”
“P!”
“Not-P!”
“P, you #%^&*!!!”
“Not-P, you #%^&!!!”

Needless to say, no one is edified by such an exchange. There are hot button issues like abortion or transgender rights that are pretty much guaranteed to escalate into mutual recrimination. Unlike physical entities where hotter is brighter, in human exchanges heat and light are inversely proportional; the more of the former, the less of the latter. You will probably not bother to acquire a nuanced understanding of an interlocutor if you basically are just telling him to go to hell.

So one reason that communication, especially disagreement, is so hard these days is that we Americans really don’t like each other. It has happened before. By 1861, North and South had long since ceased communicating. All they could do was to swap insults and exchange verbal broadsides. In such a situation, it is not long before the verbal cannons are exchanged for real ones, as happened at Ft. Sumter. If you cannot disagree civilly, you will disagree uncivilly, and if you disagree uncivilly, the next stage might be for the disagreements to be settled by a precipitation of lead.

Let me stop right here and say that this will not be a mealy-mouthed appeal for a “return to civility,” with sanctimonious lamentations bewailing incivility by “both sides.” Bullshit. Some years ago, I and my dear old friend Paris Donehoo coauthored a book Polarized (2019) that we had planned in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s election in November 2016. One of the things that shocked us was the egregious incivility of Trump’s campaign which stooped even to mocking the disability of a reporter who had criticized him. At the time we made an urgent plea for a return to civility, to expressing our disagreements passionately but without vituperation. We thought that the best way to deal with Trump’s ugliness was to follow Michelle Obama’s advice: “When they go low, we go high.” I will not speak for the Rev. Donehoo, but I no longer believe this. A call for civil discourse in the present context would be like reciting The Beatitudes in a barroom brawl.

It’s not just eloquent Lincoln (who delivered the Gettysburg Address 162 years ago today) versus crass Trump (who recently told a female reporter whose question he disliked, “Quiet, piggy!”).

Things have changed radically for the worst since we wrote our book. Trump is no longer a bumptious buffoon, but a hard core autocrat. The cabinet and staff that restrained his worst impulses in his first term have been replaced by enablers. The danger he poses is not to discourse but to our very freedom. We have all witnessed, day by day, Trump’s assaults on our democracy, but they come so fast and so hard, we may have trouble keeping up with all of them. It is good for someone to remind us of what we have seen and what we have to fear. This is from The Atlantic, December 2025 issue, by J. Michael Luttig, conservative jurist and former federal judge, appointed by George H.W. Bush:

Since his second inauguration, Donald Trump has seized authoritarian control over the federal government and demanded the obedience of the other powerful institutions of American society—universities, law firms, media companies. The question weighing heavily on the minds of many Americans is whether Trump will subvert next year’s midterm elections or the 2028 presidential election to extend his reign.

With his every word and deed, Trump has given Americans every reason to believe he will seek a third term in defiance of the Constitution. It seems abundantly clear that he will hold on to the office at any cost, including America’s ruin.

For anyone who doubts Trump’s autocratic intent, Luttig shows how far down that road he has already gone: He summarily fired dozens of officials who had done their sworn duty by seeking to hold him responsible for the 01/06/21 attack on the Capitol and other criminal actions, and he replaced those officials with sycophants. He attacked the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee of birthright citizenship. He seized from Congress the power to levy tariffs, invoking a bogus emergency to justify his illegal unilateral action. When Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell predicted inflationary effects of his tariffs, Trump called for his “termination,” and attempted to fire Fed Governor Lisa Cook. If the Trump-friendly Supreme Court rules that Trump can fire members of the supposedly independent Federal Reserve, Trump will have absolute control over monetary policy—a terrifying thought.

Trump has attempted to impound billions of dollars appropriated by Congress for Voice of America and for USAID, which provided vitally needed medical and food aid for desperate people worldwide. Further:

He has likewise usurped Congress’s power to establish executive-branch departments and agencies, fund their operations, and provide civil-service protections to federal-government employees, unilaterally overhauling the U.S. government. He has hollowed out the Department of Education, effectively abolishing it. He has dismantled the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and asserted executive control over the independent Federal Election Commission, and fired thousands of federal employees without reasonable cause or explanation—all while Congress has stood by silently.

Luttig concludes:

Trump has always told us exactly who he is. We have just not wanted to believe him. But we must believe him now.

We are far past the situation where discourse could help us. We need action, not dialogue, and the most urgent action needed is to resurrect that dead donkey, the Democratic Party. Actually, the seemingly moribund Dems did show some signs of life in the recent special elections, but their glaring errors and crying needs are spelled out by Fintan O’Toole in the latest issue of The New York Review of Books (11/20/25).

Aptly titled “The Lingering Delusion,” O’Toole’s essay reviews Kamala Harris’s 107 Days (2025), her memoir of the truncated campaign leading to her disastrous defeat. What the Democrats need is “a sharp and urgent understanding of why they failed and how they can fight back.” Harris’s book does not offer this. The proximate cause of the failure was the refusal to acknowledge Joe Biden’s increasing debility and his extreme unpopularity with the voters. Harris admitted that her failure to confront Biden and admonish him not to run was “perhaps” reckless. O’Toole’s comment is searing:

An admission of recklessness in the face of an imminent and explicit threat to turn democracy into dictatorship surely demands more than that shoulder-shrugging “Perhaps.”

Democrats’ vacillation and cowardice made them appear both incompetent and dishonest and blunted the effectiveness of their attacks on Trump. Harris wasted much of her meager campaign time effusively praising Biden, a lost cause. Instead of taking on Trump in a bare-knuckle fight she appealed to congeniality and the supposed good old days of bipartisanship. This, says O’Toole, is Democrats’ “lingering delusion,” that Trump’s savagery can be opposed by niceness and nostalgia.

O’Toole says that Democrats completely missed one of Trump’s strongest points—his opposition to the adventurism, nation-building, and forever wars of the neocons of the George W. Bush administration. They simply ceded this point to him. Further, you cannot be credited with fighting for the rule of law and human rights at home when you so weakly oppose their flouting abroad:

The US stands, in theory, for a global order based on the universality of human rights and the imperatives of international law. Apart from all moral considerations, its inability to stand up for those principles makes it look merely ineffectual. Against Trump’s rampaging amorality, the Democrats offered only bleeding-heart sympathy… Being the party that feels the world’s pain is not a good answer to a president who invites his supporters to share the unalloyed joy of being able to inflict it.

O’Toole reminds Democrats that it was Eleanor Roosevelt who shaped the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and defending those rights must be Democrats’ unyielding commitment, in Gaza as well as at home. A sincere dedication to the defense of universal rights can give Democrats a basis for attacking Trump’s foreign policy and for transcending narrow identity politics. As O’Toole notes, “…nothing proclaims impotence more than claiming to have principles you are too frightened to defend consistently.”

O’Toole says that Democrats are under the delusion that since Trump is so abysmally awful, he will inevitably fail. Americans will then return to their senses and flock back to the decency of the Democrats. But the pendulum will not just swing back. Trump is destroying the pendulum. Underestimating Trump, or assuming that he will collapse under the weight of his own incompetence, could be an assumption lethal for our democracy.

Trump’s energy is anger, and Democrats must also channel anger:

This does not mean aping Trump’s hate-filled anger or opposing the violence of masked ICE agents or armed national guardsmen with violence. It means giving constructive expression to a legitimate indignation at the system that allowed the top 0.1 percent of Americans to hold 14 percent of the country’s wealth while families in the entire bottom half hold 2.5 percent. It means being furious about the clogging up of the intergenerational social mobility that had been the driver of American dynamism: whereas 90 percent of Americans born during World War II ended up better off than their parents, those born in 1985 are as likely to be poorer than their parents as richer.

Democrats must militantly stand for those disadvantaged by the economic upheavals of the twenty-first century and against the coterie of oligarchs who have hijacked the American economy and turned it into an all-day billionaire’s buffet. I agree and would only add that Democrats should draw on the lessons of David Leonhardt’s Ours Was the Shining Future (2023). The goal is not to destroy capitalism but to make it work for everyone and not just the 0.1%. We have done it before. For nearly forty years after the end of World War II, the surging American economy benefitted everyone across the economic spectrum.

The oligarchs stole that prosperity from us, and now the Democrats can lead us in snatching it back.

Keith Parsons is a Professor of Philosophy and Humanities, emeritus at the University of Houston at Clear Lake and the former editor of the philosophy journal Philo. He has debated William Lane Craig on the topics “Is Christianity True?” and “Does God Exist?”. Dr. Parsons holds a Ph.D. in the History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Pittsburgh and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Queens University.

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