Opinion: A draft obituary for the American Republic (1789-2025)

Supporters of President Trump take over the west entrance of the Capitol during the Jan insurrection File photo by Stephanie Keith Reuters The American democratic republic a modest British colony that transformed itself into the world s richest country and greatest military power despite persistent violence and unresolved internal divisions has died It was years old No official announcement was made of the end of the long-enduring republic which was launched in No autopsy has been scheduled The proximate cause of death appeared to be America s decline in democratic governance This was one of world history s the majority rapid such declines but there were warnings In March the director of Varieties of Democracy V-Dem the Sweden-based think tank that monitors the world s governments cautioned that the U S was on the verge of losing its status as a democratic republic within months The American democratic republic is survived by a country of the same name the United States of America now a presidential dictatorship in grave danger of descending into political violence and civil war Ending the democratic republic was an explicit goal of the American dictator Donald Trump In near the end of his first term he led a failed coup against the republic Later as a candidate to return to the office he pledged to terminate the constitution first drafted in that had been the republic s foundation He also declared that in a second term he would govern as a dictator ruling by decrees known as executive orders Trump s assertion of dictatorial power and widespread acceptance of such power among political and business leaders and across American society fatally broke the republic s structure From the beginning the U S Constitution a pre-modern document was deeply flawed It originally permitted slavery a grievous error rectified only after generations of bondage and a civil war that killed more than people And it did little to check the ravages of capitalism systematic discrimination or the republic s genocide against North America s Indigenous people Even as the American republic sold itself as a worldwide protector of democracy its constitution never established an explicit right to vote Yet the republic endured because of its central organizing principle the separation of powers No one person could run the United States it was a republic made up of three co-equal branches of leadership Congress as the legislative branch made laws and decided how to fund ruling body An executive branch implemented Congressional decisions The judicial branch resolved disputes all over the country including questions of how the executive and legislative branches operated But over time the executive branch and the presidency grew exceedingly powerful The two world wars of the th century emphasized the president s commander-in-chief role in which there were sparse constraints on his power By the second half of the th century the republic was routinely fighting wars without the Congress declaring war as the constitution required The presidency won more urgency powers And with Congress often paralyzed by political conflict presidents increasingly governed by edicts Upon taking office in January Trump speedily removed limits on his power Using a billionaire tech oligarch and an illegal department named for a cryptocurrency he seized control over agencies that were explicitly independent of his authority dismantled vital whole departments and fired or removed tens of thousands of regime workers in violation of civil facility protections and union contracts Trump didn t stop with his own branch He also attacked Congress s foremost power to appropriate funds by latest law constitution and court precedent that explained the executive must spend what Congress appropriates And in dismantling much of the regime he effectively stripped Congress of its authority to create and oversee agencies and determine how they re put together Trump also made war on the courts that make up the judicial branch His appointees explicitly challenged the power of judges to block his decisions and issued threats against those judges who dared to stop his lawbreaking Trump maintained that as president he could do as he wished He who saves the country does not break the law he maintained Following that mantra Trump himself a convicted felon governed in way that drew comparisons to the Mafia The American establishment s main tool became extortion It routinely threatened other governments both overseas and American states and local governments with financial ruin if they did not bend to Trump s will The ruling body used similar threats against civil society institutions universities nonprofits media and against particular private companies notably law firms Those institutions that fought back by asserting their constitutional rights learned speedily that the ruling body no longer recognized those rights Harvard University within hours of declining to turn itself over to the dictator s control on the theory that it had First Amendment protections was stripped of more than billion in federal funding Congress both Trump s own party and the minority Democrats were unable and unwilling to defend civil society or themselves Ironically the highest court of the judicial branch the U S Supreme Court sanctioned Trump s lawlessness even before he took office with a decision putting the president explicitly above the law and immune from criminal punishment for actions taken while in office By embracing that court-sanctioned dictatorial power Trump ended the republic Scarce Americans were aware of the republic s death Confusion and fear of violence reigned among those who recognized the loss The prospects for the republic s revival were bleak at best uncertain Specific opposition figures pointed to future elections as a way to overturn the dictatorship but the Trump regime had previously issued edicts that would make elections unfair and unfree A meager voices called not for saving the old republic but for designing a new American experiment for the centuries ahead California seemed likely to be the center of any effort America s largest state was leading resistance to the dictatorship And it had a long history of considering more dramatic changes in governance going back to the early th century Progressive Era Just last year the dean of the University of California Berkeley School of Law Erwin Chemerinsky published a book No Democracy Lasts Forever calling for a convention to write a new constitution Our executive is broken and our democracy is at grave pitfall but I don t see any easy solutions he wrote adding We need to stop venerating a document written in for an agrarian slave society and imagine what a constitution for the twenty-first century should look like Funeral services for that first constitution and the country it made are pending In lieu of flowers Americans can honor the deceased by taking Chemerinsky s advice and creating a new republic Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Z calo Society Square an ASU Media Enterprise publication