Part 1: The New Replacements – Issues and Freedom Replaced by Cultural Leadership

 

Part 1: The New Replacements – Issues and Freedom Replaced by Cultural Leadership

MAGA votes for leaders and culture over everything else. Constitution? Meh! Woke!

As the Chinese curse reminds us: “May you live in interesting times.” The whole world is watching as the United States, once the bastion of democracy and personal freedom, makes a rapid descent into a cruel and judgmental autocracy. We are at an inflection point, where efficiency and cultural warriors under strict, mostly white, Christian nationalist values trump the rule of law, particularly the Constitution. It is a battle royal, replete with its own potential descendible monarchy-in-waiting. And those Christians who believe in a tolerant, charitable and non-judgmental New Testament, are simply being passed by an evangelical movement that flexes power and views the Bible as a “pick and choose” menu.

Thomas Jefferson would be aghast at the federal government’s official take on freedom of speech. He found even those who opposed the new democratic principles were not called “terrorists” or subject to censorship. This is quite the opposite of Trump sycophant State Department Secretary, Marco Rubio, who has revoked foreign student visas from totally peaceful students for protest activities deemed to pose “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.” Simply applied, since the US foreign policy embraces the Israeli point of view on Gaza, the support of a peaceful resolution in support of Palestinian statehood local rights was sufficient to generate a visa revocation order.

There is absolutely no question that freedom of speech is not limited to US citizens. The 1945 Supreme Court case of Bridges vs Wixton held “Freedom of speech and of the press is accorded aliens residing in this country.” A deportation based on an alien’s expression of an unpopular belief was reversed. As the Trump administration turned to clamp down on foreign students writing for Stanford University's student newspaper, The Stanford Daily, threatening immediate visa cancellation and deportation, on August 6th, Stanford sued the Trump administration in California federal court claiming that the threat of immigration law enforcement against lawfully present noncitizen students expressing pro-Palestinian views is unconstitutional and has students self-censoring out of fears of being deported. Was Jefferson rolling in his grave?

As President Trump has unilaterally declared a maze of massive tariffs, now in effect, based on some concocted and factually unsupportable theory of “emergency” (the only basis for the President to usurp Congressional control over setting taxes and tariffs), he imposed one of the greatest tax increases on the American public (a de facto regressive sales tax) in American history. But as his executive orders invade every facet of American life, his loyal base reminds us that he was not elected to lead a democracy; instead MAGA followers elected him to impose their cultural beliefs to defeat a “deep state” hiding under an archaic and irrelevant US Constitution. Many MAGA believers fabricated their own interpretations of the Constitution as an alternative approach. His Big Beautiful Bill crushes the life out of his core MAGA constituency, but they still support him… with one huge cultural exception: the immutable MAGA concern with “deep state” pedophilia, that Trump seems to be betraying with the Epstein debacle.

As Confederate statues are being resurrected, we know we are in a culture war. Just looking at the ICE recruitment strategy, now that it is overfunded, offers large recruitment bonuses and caters to those who are ready to “protect our American culture.” ICE is being constructed as Trump personal police force, able to operate without warrants or due process… or even personal identification. Trump voters are relatively unmoved by traditional values, economic or otherwise.

There are also many subcultures in this mix, but race, ethnicity and sexual orientation remain the bastions of the movement, and white pride is an essential bulwark. Strict evangelical religious underpinnings are rising in importance, including the new “bro culture” embraced by DOD head, Pete Hegseth. Women should not vote except as their husbands dictate, they should not be in the military and should return to their traditional roles as mothers and homemakers. This Christian concept is called Postmillennialism, which “holds that Jesus Christ establishes his kingdom on Earth through his preaching and redemptive work in the first century and that he equips his church with the gospel, empowers the church by the Spirit, and charges the church with the Great Commission (Matt 28:19) to disciple all nations. Postmillennialism expects that eventually the vast majority of people living will be saved. Increasing gospel success will gradually produce a time in history prior to Christ's return in which faith, righteousness, peace, and prosperity will prevail in the affairs of men and of nations. After an extensive era of such conditions Jesus Christ will return visibly, bodily, and gloriously, to end history with the general resurrection and the final judgment after which the eternal order follows.” Wikipedia. That Christian soldiers may have to eliminate non-believers, by whatever means, is simply reality.

Muscles, physical power, AR-15s, defiant poses and a clannish self-righteousness define a new class of Gen Z men who arrogantly support Donald Trump, a phenomenon not paralleled by Gen Z women. Indeed, Gen Z women now outnumber men in colleges and universities, remarkably in professional schools (especially law). Even in the tech and cryptocurrency world, images of male power seem more important than scientific achievement. In a surprising Darwinian parallel, RFK, Jr’s slashing of MNRA and overall medical research funding, suggests that those whose medical issues are tossed aside do not merit tax dollars to keep them alive. Men can control the environment, as Trump slashes any NASA funding to track atmospheric carbon dioxide build-up, continuing to pronounce climate change, using his favorite word, as a “hoax.”

In upcoming blogs, I will explore more of this “my culture above all else” movement that threatens to derail our democracy, the pattern of education and innovation that made us the most powerful economy on earth, our quality of life and our influence (rapidly declining) in the world, as our allies are now scrambling to construct workarounds to our efforts at bullying hegemony. It is apparent that “strength” has been redefined to benefit this explosion of American pro-autocracy. If “they” don’t like it, they label it “woke” (still undefined) … but to “them” “woke” stands for “weak.” If Trump were so confident in his popularity, why is he pressuring his sheeplike governors to rig the next elections to guarantee the purge of Democrats from political power?

I’m Peter Dekom, and I hope I can help explain the damage to replacing issue-oriented democracy with autocratic leaders who prioritize their vision of “American culture” above the rule of law.