Donald Trump's Approach Present a Danger to Our Social Fabric.
His internal and external strategies – ranging from the effort to overturn the election previously to recent incursions and warnings – undermine both domestic and international legal frameworks. However, the issue goes deeper.
They threaten the fundamental meaning of a civilized world.
The moral purpose of any advanced culture is to forestall the stronger from harming and taking advantage of the weaker. Otherwise, we would be permanently immersed in a conflict of all against all where survival of the strongest prevails.
This ideal is central of the Declaration and Constitution. This is also the core of the global system established after WWII supported by the America, which stresses collective action, popular sovereignty, human rights, and the legal authority.
But, it is a delicate principle, easily violated by those who choose to misuse their influence. Preserving it requires that the powerful have the moral fortitude to avoid seeking short-term wins, and that the rest of us hold them accountable if they don't.
Unfettered might does not make right. It leads to instability, disruption, and conflict.
Whenever people or corporations or countries that are wealthier and stronger prey upon those that are not, the fabric of our shared norms frays. If these actions are left unchecked, the structure collapses. Without intervention, the world can fall into instability and violence. We have seen this pattern previously.
Our current reality is a international landscape with deepening divides. Political and economic power are increasingly centralized than in modern history. This encourages the elite to exploit the disadvantaged because they act with a sense of above the law.
The wealth of a handful of tycoons is difficult to fathom. The reach of major corporations in technology, energy, and aerospace covers numerous countries. Artificial intelligence is poised to further concentrate economic and political clout further. The offensive capability of the leading countries is unprecedented in the annals of time.
Enabled by complicit legislators and a pliant high court, the executive office has been made into the most dominant and unchecked entity of government in the modern era.
Consider this confluence and you grasp the threat.
A direct line links earlier lawless actions to present-day menaces. These were founded upon the hubris of invincibility.
You see much the same in international affairs: in territorial invasions, in coercive diplomacy, and in the worldwide exploitation by industrial titans.
But, strength without restraint does not establish right. It produces fragility, upended order, and armed conflict.
Historical evidence demonstrates that frameworks designed to check the influential also protect them. If these guardrails are removed, their insatiable demands for increased control and resources ultimately cause their collapse – and with them their corporations, nations, or empires. And threaten world war.
This blatant contempt for legal order will haunt the nation and the world – and the very idea of a rules-based order – for a long time.
