Tim Kipp, retired history teacher of 39 years, has been a political activist since the 1960s, including draft and tax resistance, civil rights, and anti-war organizing. He is one of the founders of the Vermont Progressive Party, has been a longtime field organizer for U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, and is currently active with the Vermont Indivisible movement.
BRATTLEBORO-After nearly five years of the Trump reign, the siege on democracy intensifies. Citizens have learned much about the intentions and the trajectory of the rebellion. This is not an unconstitutional assault, it is an anticonstitutional assault.
The perpetrators of the coup have also learned a great deal about organizing and escalating their crusade against democracy.
Who would have thought we would be facing the democratic struggle of our lifetime? Well, actually, large sectors of our society are all too familiar with this battle - the historically marginalized have always fought to win the fruits of democracy. The Constitution never explicitly mandated economic or political rights for all. Throughout history people achieved their basic rights by relentless and at times conflict.
The doctrinal system choreographed by political and economic elites hoodwinked about 30% of adults into believing a willfully ignorant, narcissistic buffoon would protect their interests.
Now combine these manufactured perceptions with the barbaric reality that this rich country has never afforded all people access to the power needed for real advancement.
A toxic storm brews. Into the cauldron mix a large, economically vulnerable population, an unresponsive and corrupt political system, and a carnival-barking demagogue, and the consequences are obvious.
Malevolent leaders and a malignancy in the system produces an authoritarianism that could metastasize into an American-style fascism. In 1919, Irish poet William Butler Yeats wrote about his country's struggle for democracy against British imperialism.
"Things fall apart: the centre cannot hold," he wrote. "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity."
Madison's nightmare
The founders constructed a new form of government, one with appreciable democratic attributes, albeit with limited public participation. Just ask the enslaved and Indigenous people, women, and members of other assailed classes.
These men of "property and standing" curiously were interested in the vagaries of human nature in particular virtue as it related to a new republican form of government. As such, a dialectic was formulated about the role of morality in the public sphere (the government) and the private sphere (citizens).
To account for human nature, the founders felt that virtuous leaders would be needed to influence and guide citizens, thereby ensuring a virtuous society, which James Madison said as much, doubting there would be "sufficient virtue among men for self government," and that "nothing less than the chains of despotism can restrain them from destroying and devouring one another." He continued that a constitution requires rulers who possess "most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society."
This brings us to what I call "Madison's Nightmare": Is it possible to create a republican government that could withstand the depredations of genuinely despotic leaders?
The founders were a nervous but optimistic bunch. They supported Benjamin Franklin's plea at the end of the Constitutional Convention the hope that every member would "doubt a little of his own Infallibility" as such they ratified a constitution they believed would promote public and private virtue.
The constitution bends to the coup
The Constitution was a pioneering and bold experiment, especially in those dark days of monarchy, but it was also plagued by undemocratic characteristics. Any fair appraisal recognizes its reliance on imperialism, slavery, the primacy of private property, sexism, racism, and classism.
Essential features lauded as Enlightenment constructs - the social contract, popular sovereignty, separation of powers, and checks and balances - have always been stronger in concept than reality. History has eroded these foundational principles and now with this coup is destroying them:
• The social contract is in default. The founders' theorist, John Locke, devised a deal: that the government would provide order and security in exchange for citizen loyalty and compliance. This contract is in default, as the government cannot or will not provide the security of opportunity for citizen development.
• Sovereignty isn't so popular: Consent of the governed is no longer required. There is a crucial disconnect between what citizens need and what the government is willing to provide. Basic needs - health, housing, employment, environmental protection, and civil rights - go unsatisfied.
• Powers are no longer separated. The corporate and political state are joined at the wallet by mutual interests. Do the wealthy elites not have a louder political voice to determine policies in each branch of government? And don't these interlocking interests blunt the independence of each branch?
• Checks don't balance. The rule of law is flouted with galling impunity. Congressional oversight, funding control, advice and consent, and oversight are seriously compromised or outright ignored.
The coup reveals systemic vulnerabilities. Retired Federal Appellate Judge J. Michael Luttig, has decried the "end of the rule of law" and has explained how the Constitution "never contemplated and therefore didn't ever provide for process and mechanisms to withstand an attack from within."
So Madison's nightmare haunts us.
The long train of abuses
In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson enumerated a "long train of abuses": 27 specific grievances against King George. Today the people's grievances are with a political economy that serves elite interests first and foremost, and with an oligarch masquerading as a champion of the people and democracy.
As Noam Chomsky reminds us, Adam Smith in his 1776 study, The Wealth of Nations, warned about the "masters of the universe," the elite corporate class who naturally align with the political elite to run a country. They hold to a "vile maxim": "All for ourselves and nothing for other people."
Today in our country the vile maxim manifests itself in warped budget priorities that give record tax breaks to the rich while ignoring basic human needs. Since the 1980s, according to the Rand Corporation, there has been a $50 trillion transfer of wealth from the bottom 90% to the top 1%.
How is this remotely a democratic arrangement?
The Trump/Republican coup is ravaging the abilities of our leaders of virtue to defend the constitutional principles that protect us from antidemocratic impulses.
The coup overseers are deliberately sabotaging traditional legislative functions in two distinct, treacherous ways: by the short-circuiting or bypassing of traditional lawmaking, and by destroying the congressional hearing oversight process.
Short-circuiting lawmaking
The Constitution gives the president vague and expansive power to declare an emergency. By doing so, some 125 statutory powers are unlocked for the president's use or misuse.
This empowers an autocrat to declare an emergency, then sign an executive order that bypasses the will of Congress. Trump has signed a stunning 446 executive orders (as of Jan. 2), far outdoing his immediate predecessors.
These orders, among others, have abolished historic agencies, imposed executive tariffs, and authorized the sacking of thousands of civil servants without due process, all the while 'saving' Americans from subversive "DEI and woke" policies.
Another procedure for circumventing Congress is using impoundments, the illegal refusal to spend congressionally authorized funds. Coup kingpins also detour Congress by using "pre-fab" - canned legislation written by corporate shills like the American Legislative Exchange Council and The Heritage Foundation.
Heritage's Project 2025 comprises a substantial portion of the Trump agenda. These right-wing entrepreneurs design bills to get government interference like national health care, public schools, civil and voting rights, and unions off our backs.
Another innovation in autocracy is the establishing of a shadow government within the government, then hiring a corporate mogul, Elon Musk, to drive it. DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, is a gleefully cruel scheme to eliminate human service programs, fire thousands of civil servants, and "shrink government to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in a bathtub," as croaked Grover Norquist, a Republican strategist who first surfaced during the Reagan era.
The despots also circumvent normal legislating by concocting omnibus bills, each a massive stew of taxing-and- spending initiatives too comprehensive and complex for human digestion. Then they fast-track a vote with little opportunity for debate. The "Big Ugly" budget bill of 2025 was 1,118 pages and given to U.S. representatives less than 24 hours before the vote.
The dismantling of congressional oversight
A vital element in the lawmaking process is Congress's power to conduct oversight, hearings, and investigations. This is where the "loyal opposition" should be able to exert influence on policy. Today, the Republican strategy is obvious: Throw a monkey wrench at these duties of accountability.
Trump handmaidens - Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr., et al. - arrogantly engage in a circus of noncompliance when they are called to testify before Congress. These toadies offer non-answers, ad hominem attacks, and audacious lies.
Congressional oversight powers are so mutilated that even diligent and effective Democratic watchdogs - Rep. Elizabeth Warren, Rep. Jamie Raskin, Sen. Bernie Sanders, Rep. Elissa Slotkin, Sen. Adam Schiff, to name some - are now reduced to mere eloquent barking. Thus, the opposition's oversight powers are fatally neutralized.
Coercion, decrees, mandates, and shakedowns replace analysis, debate, and compromise - the usual ingredients for legislating. As Maureen Dowd of The New York Times observed, Trump "wants to rule, not govern."
By undermining core constitutional legislative processes, authoritarianism supplants democracy, thereby clearing a path to fascism.
Is the recent past to be prologue?
Historic and contemporary flaws in our political economy, combined with tyrannical leaders, have culminated in the crisis of our lifetime. The structural guardrails are corroded, and leaders of good will struggle to restore what is lost.
This, the wealthiest country in the world, has never adequately addressed the basic security needs of large sectors of our population. Predictably, then, our most vulnerable citizens searching for better opportunities become susceptible to the conjurings of a demagogue and to the manipulations of an increasingly unregulated economic and media ecosystem.
While never a vigorous representative democracy, this system has intermittently and begrudgingly responded to citizen initiatives to force the county to live up to its founding ideals. The real genius here is the people's irrepressible desire for justice, not the ability of a government to withstand leaders who lack virtue.
The struggles of our people to win an equal place in society represents the most dynamic and honorable expressions of democracy we have. This country is its most democratic when we fight for it.
Today, an impressive percentage of the population is heeding the familiar warning: "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing."
Across the nation, good people are committed to defending and extending democracy. In these perilous times, the rapid and broadening resistance to the Trump/Republican coup can accelerate the reclaiming and reimagining of democracy in the United States - or, as Yeats wrote, where a "terrible beauty is born."
This Voices Viewpoint was submitted to The Commons.
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