Shamocracy
MAY 30, 2026
When it comes to war (and more war), the USA is a dictatorship.
Consider Trump’s words that he will make “the final determination” whether the Iran War will persist. Roughly 342 million Americans and 93 million Iranians await Trump’s decision. The decision of an egotistical narcissist who’s convinced he must always be seen to be “winning”—that all that really matters is his own self-image.
Trump, America’s de facto dictator, if not yet de jure, recently told the American people he didn’t care if the war was hurting their finances or making life more difficult for them. As Dick Cheney once said about American opposition to the Iraq War: “So?” So what? Who cares what the people think. What matters is what the dictators think.
What’s especially shameful here is mainstream media coverage, which presents Trump’s absolute power over war as completely normal—even legal.
Remember when wars were supposed to be declared only by Congress in the name of the people?
Saying when to fight, when to go to war, when to send U.S. troops into harm’s way, is the ultimate power, literally the power over life and death, and we the people, as much as I hate to say this, have accepted with little protest that Trump has total power here.
Meanwhile, the Democrats mutter something about affordability. And there’s always a Democrat or two (“the rotating villain”) in Congress who prevents any curb to Trump’s war-making authority.
Welcome to America’s shamocracy. We might be able to remove Trump’s name from the JFK Center for the Performing Arts, but we can’t remove Trump from sending U.S. troops to their deaths in an illegal war. Where’s Congress? Where’s SCOTUS? Why do they leave war-making to the whims of one greedy and power-driven man?
Bracing Views 
Recently came across reference to Levitsky and Ziblatt’s “How Democracies Die” which through “incisive analysis and historical examples, examines the gradual decay of political institutions through the actions of authoritarian leaders, highlighting how established democracies are vulnerable to collapse not by external forces, but from within, via the erosion of unwritten rules of political conduct.”
Call it what you will, “slippery slope” or “greased skids,” the trajectory is steepening downward for this country: the 1% already has the most toys (though that won’t stop them from grabbing more), so they’ve won; the pinnacle of the judiciary, the Supreme Court, concocts legal interpretations and decisions green-lighting further aggrandizement, thus thievery is legalized; the press is complacent, merely echoing, not telling truth to power; more is spent on “guns” – now on the order of over $1 trillion per year – than on “butter” – $900 billion cut in Medicaid over ten years only partly to pay for all that, the rest being put on the credit card, the interest on which consumes more and more of the Federal budget, leaving less and less for things like infrastructure, itself graded D+ by the Society of Civil Engineers, and so on, and so on, and so on… until it no longer can possibly go on.
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The Nuremberg Principles were formulated in 1950 by the United Nations International Law Commission to define what constitutes a war crime. The impetus was a response to the actions of a militaristic fascist government; Nazi Germany. I would argue that the US, by violation of most, and ignoring the rest of those principals, is now in effect modeled after fascist Nazi Germany. Different flag, different uniforms, same evil intent.
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One need only think of Rome.
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And not fondly! When I was an angry, hopeful, determined idealistic youth I had full confidence that one day in the future, my future, we, the Human race, would come to see each other as the brothers and sisters we authentically are. We would view the treacheries and sufferings of the past as acts of blindness, and having opened our hearts and minds, would never ever repeat them. Money would be replaced be by the currency of Love, and always in surplus. I now find myself wondering… was I just dreaming? Fantasizing? Unitarian minister Theodore Parker wrote: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Something inside me holds that this is true. Now, at 70, I need to recalibrate my sense of time and know that that arc is still arcing.
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I have just a few years on you, my thoughts largely, but not entirely, run parallel to yours. Essentially, over the past year or so, I’ve been saying, asking, this is now the 21st century, it has a certain “zing” or energy to it, thus an optimism, at least to my mind. Further, from all the accumulated centuries before, there has been vast understanding of the natural, physical world, allowing (most of us) some stability in food, clothing, shelter, a reasonable chance at a longer, even happier if not just less miserable life span, while also in our social organization, to increase the odds of survival through mutual dependence.
While many of these advances, broadly speaking in scientific discovery, and in roughly more democratic political developments, took place in the previous century, that may also have been the most lethal in all human history, barring plagues of the Middle Ages. The 20th century started off with World War I, a staggering event shaking Western civilization to the core, with reverberations, still lethal, to the present day. It was supposed to be “the war to end all wars.” That notion lasted a scant twenty years.
So I have asked myself, with all the promise of beneficial discoveries since the last century, in hand with the bitter lessons presumedly learned from the battlefields of the Somme and Verdun, and the ultimate horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, weren’t we as people, as a species, supposed to be further along in our ability to live cooperatively, in peace, “with liberty and justice for all”? Kennedy put it this way in June 1963, ten months after the near civilization-ending Cuban Missile Crisis:
“So, let us not be blind to our differences–but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved… For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”
That sentiment would seem to argue in support of Theodore Parker’s contention, hope. I’m afraid the evidence does not support such an aspiration, progression, ultimate end. Two examples of that evidence: One, the absurdity, the cynicism, the primeval grip of war has not relaxed, not with now more than one trillion dollars worth of the nation’s output going to armaments in one form or another, per year(!), paid for, but only in part, by cutbacks in nutrition assistance programs and in Medicaid coverage. More guns, less butter. This is the characterization of 21st-century life in America, metastasizing to the rest of the world?
Two. Yawah Sinwar had a terrible decision to make, whether to allow the Palestinian experience since the late-19th century at the hands of the West – principally Britain and France at the time, later assumed by the United States in the mid-20th century, in conjunction with Israel – to be conveniently erased from the human record; or to revolt, at horrific cost, against it, asserting that his people do exist, with the hope that response from the rest of the world, that justice, understanding, compassion, fundamental humanity, would prevail.
He has been partially correct in his action launched October 7th. He has revealed the wantonness of the West, but at incalculable cost. A wantonness not only in the West’s treatment of non-Western peoples; not only in the less than tepid response from Western and other nations; not only in the vile complicity of these nations with genocide now just a few months shy of three years duration; but in permitting Israel, perhaps as the West’s – certainly the U.S.’s – proxy in letting utter unbounded ruthlessness, savagery, depraved indifference, degraded exploitation, beyond all human context, loose in the world. That is the legacy of Israel, of Zionism, of the West, of the United States as revealed by October 7th and days, months, years after. In other words, nihilism is the dictate, that nothing matters in life, there is to be no human imprint on the phenomenon. Thus there is nothing but a literal and figurative dead end to this, any arc of history is at best imagined, ephemeral.
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The arc bends both ways, toward and away from justice, based on human effort. There is nothing inevitable about progress, peace, and prosperity. We’re being reminded yet again the arc can bend toward regress, war, and penury.
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Hmmm, Dante’-esque…?
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C’mon Bill… don’t counteract my daily dose of hopium! But yes, in the short term sense, I agree completely. I’ve been a wager of peace (a word whose meaning has evolved over time) for most of my life. I started with the firm belief that justice would prevail and I would see a peaceful humanity in my lifetime… the glorious naivete of youth. Now I’m facing the VERY high probability that I was ridiculously wrong! I never could have guessed that a future administration of the US would make George Bush Jr look like an episode from Happy Days.
But there is another way to view the arc. Everything comes from a God of love, and everything returns, in time, to that source of creation. This does not preclude our freedom to travel far in stupid or lethal directions. So man’s journey on the “arc of the moral universe” is not smooth or direct and often appears to be plummeting strait to hell. The view of the infinitely long arc becomes obscured.
From Bob Dylan’s “Idiot Wind”:
There’s a lone soldier on the cross
Smoke pouring out of a boxcar door
You didn’t know it, you didn’t think it could be done
But in the final end he won the war
After losing every battle
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“C’mon Bill… don’t counteract my daily dose of hopium!”
Can’t recall where I came across it, but it goes “Since I gave up hope I sleep much better now.” It works! 😉
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My sleep is truly horrible so maybe I’ll give it a try. Actually the quote sparked my curiosity and I searched “faith vs hope”. In summary: Faith is primarily defined as present-tense trust in a truth. Hope is future-tense anticipation and expectation of a desired outcome that has not yet occurred.
Hope and dread seem like 2 sides of the same coin. Neither conducive to sound sleep. Good catch XK. Thanks doc!
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PRN (Pro re nata) Take as needed.
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“And all the cities the whole world ’round wil just be another American town. Oh how happy they will be. We’ll set everybody free!!”. –Randy Newman, from the song Political Science.
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