Surrender in Slow Motion: The Soft Collapse of American Democracy

/ March 28, 2025

An edited version of this essay was later published at CounterPunch

It still feels a little paranoid to say it out loud, that the United States might be drifting toward something that looks a lot like Russia. Or Hungary. Or some unholy blend of theocratic nostalgia and corporate feudalism. But that gut feeling the one that says that something’s not right, is getting harder to shake. The signs aren’t exactly subtle, either. To anyone paying attention, they’re plenty loud. But they’re also easy to tune out, dismiss as noise, as politics as usual. What’s harder to ignore are the rituals. The reverence and worship.

We don’t usually start naming highways after sitting presidents, especially ones under multiple indictments, most especially ones wildly obsessed with power and openly musing about a third term. But here we are. A bill in Texas proposes to rename a stretch of I-35 the “President Donald J. Trump Highway.” It might not even pass, but that almost doesn’t matter. It’s one of a growing list of gestures aimed at deifying a man who, by any rational standard, should be facing serious consequences for his role in the January 6th insurrection, an attack on the peaceful transfer of power that many legal scholars argue should disqualify him from office under the 14th Amendment, if not result in criminal charges for inciting sedition.

Instead, we get a slow-motion canonization. Lawmakers have floated putting Trump’s face on currency, making his birthday a federal holiday, and renaming airports in his honor. Some supporters even want to carve his face onto Mount Rushmore. Religious leaders compare him to biblical kings, chosen vessels sent by God. A strange, parallel reality has taken shape where Trump isn’t just a man, but a savior figure. Someone who can do no wrong, whose followers speak in reverent tones and whose power must be defended at all costs.

The slow normalization of idolatry disguised as patriotism is how democratic values rot.

Mythology only works if it can crowd out reality, and repression always needs scaffolding. Confusion does that work better than force ever could. The Trump administration hasn’t just clashed with the press so much as they’ve worked to hollow out the very idea of truth itself, turning “fake news” from a cheap insult into a governing strategy, a way to flood the information space until the facts start to feel optional… or maybe just not worth the effort of sorting out.

Reporters who challenge the administration are often smeared as traitors or “deep state” operatives. Trump calls mainstream journalists “the enemy of the people,” echoing the language of the dictators and strongmen he seems to admire so much. Investigations are dismissed as partisan attacks and whistleblowers are discredited before they speak while independent newsrooms face lawsuits, threats, and coordinated disinformation campaigns designed to damage public trust. 

And it works. The more chaotic the noise is, the easier it is to tune out the signal until truth becomes something we argue about rather than act on. And once reality gets slippery, everything else is easier to break. Books are banned, curricula is sanitized, judges face harassment for actually upholding the law and ordinary folks start second guessing what they post online or say out loud. It doesn’t take long for people to forget what used to be obvious to us as Americans, that opposition to authoritarianism is essential to a free society.

I live in Austin, Texas, a city that prides itself on being an outlier inside a state that loves to talk about freedom while legislating the opposite. This is a state where “small government” somehow includes sweeping preemption laws, micromanaging what books kids can read, and controlling uteruses. The message is clear: freedom is fine as long as it’s defined by those in power. Texas has one of the strictest abortion bans in the country where providers can face life in prison and even individuals assisting in abortion access are at risk of legal consequences, even in cases of rape or incest. In public schools, Bible-based curricula are slipping into classrooms under the pretense of “values” or “patriotism,” incentivized by lawmakers. We take state-mandated morality and dress it up as tradition.

There’s a kind of reflex in this country, maybe in every country, to label dissent as disloyalty. Criticize the government, and suddenly you’re “anti-American.” I don’t buy that. I love this country and the ideals it’s supposed to stand for. When I enlisted in the Army and volunteered for the infantry, I swore an oath and I’ve seen firsthand what it means to put your body on the line for a set of principles. 

Sure, my war was Iraq, and in hindsight, it’s clear we weren’t exactly defending American freedoms by invading a nation that had nothing to do with 9/11, but the men that I served with, some of whom never came home, weren’t there for oil or politics, but because they believed in service. Many of them had volunteered in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks, willing to risk their own lives to protect something bigger. They believed in the promise of liberty, accountability, and a fair and just system worth defending.

And some of them probably support President Trump. I don’t speak for them, and while I respect their right to that choice, I won’t pretend to understand it. But I do know what we all swore to uphold. Our oath wasn’t to a president or a party or even a flag. It was to the Constitution, the principles that hold this nation together. And that’s a big part of why this matters so much to me.

When I see politicians twisting those principles into tools of repression, I see it as a threat. And while there are many faces to that threat, perhaps none illustrates it more clearly right now than Elon Musk, a man elected by no one, yet handed more control over federal institutions than most cabinet secretaries. His financial influence didn’t just buy him a seat at the table, it pretty much bought him the table.

Elon Musk (billionaire, attention addict, CEO of everything) holds real power now. Not metaphorically speaking, not just influence-by-Twitter (or X, or whatever that ad-choked echo chamber is calling itself today), but real political power. Trump brought him in early to lead the Department of Government Efficiency. As a “special government employee,” Musk was handed sweeping authority to cancel contracts, slash programs, and restructure entire federal agencies. No election or confirmation or accountability, except of course to Trump and his inner circle.

Musk has used that power like a wrecking ball, gutting USAID and CFPB and slashing the VA, and now the Department of Education is on the chopping block. Trump has already signed the executive order to begin dismantling it, with the justification that schools should be governed “locally,” even though the fallout is anything but local. Teachers’ unions, the NAACP, and civil rights organizations are suing, warning that the move violates the Constitution and threatens to kill federal protections for vulnerable students. Meanwhile, DOGE’s attempts to access sensitive agency data have been blocked by federal courts, citing privacy concerns and executive overreach.

Musk’s signature chaos-management style has followed him into government. Mass firings with little or no discernment, followed by attempts to rehire the very people dismissed (nuclear safety experts, pandemic response staff, oversight personnel) when it turns out blindly gutting institutions actually has real life consequences for safety and security.

Even Musk’s own support is starting to wobble. His approval numbers have slipped, protests have spread, tesla cars have been vandalized, and a whole side hustle economy has popped up to cash in on selling bumper stickers to owners who bought the car before they realized what an asshole the guy who sold it to them was. Movements like “Tesla Takedown” have been built around public shaming and targeted boycotts of Musk’s brands, and are picking up steam. Of course Trump’s base still mostly defends him, but it seems they’re starting to tire of Musk, as the golden boy of techno-libertarianism is looking a lot more like a self-serving billionaire with way too much control over their lives.

Musk’s role in the administration isn’t just some weird twist of the never ending Trump saga, but a symptom of something much deeper, the corrosion of democratic norms. When unelected billionaires like him are given total authority to dismantle federal institutions and then profit from the aftermath, we’re not looking at innovation. He’s not fooling anyone who doesn’t want to be fooled anymore.

Legal scholars have already started sounding the alarm about a coming constitutional crisis. The rule of law is being selectively applied, courts are being ignored or sidelined, and the balance of power is being bent toward executive fiat. The Constitution is a framework built on checks and balances and we’re watching those supports get removed, one after another.

This isn’t hypothetical or alarmist, it’s already happening, and if it continues unchecked, we’re not flirting with autocracy so much as laying out the red carpet for it. The courts have been methodically reengineered, starting at the top, where three Supreme Court justices were installed during Trump’s first term (after he lost the popular vote) with help from a Senate that represents a minority of Americans. Below that, the lower courts are stacked with ideologues who don’t try to hide their contempt for civil rights. There are the laws that encourage citizens to snitch, sue, or surveil each other under the guise of morality or tradition. It’s a culture shift, a moral panic turned into legislation.

None of this is new. We’ve seen this playbook before. Germany in the 1930s didn’t collapse overnight. It slid through legal channels and institutional decay. Russia didn’t need a coup; it had bureaucracy, media control, and just enough plausible deniability to almost seem legit. Hungary rewrote its constitution and wrapped authoritarianism in flags and hymns. Family, faith, purity, tradition… the slogans may change over time, but the structure remains the same, consolidate power, erode checks, and rebrand repression as something righteous and patriotic.

Here in America, it isn’t boots in the street (at least not yet) but bans in the library, teachers rewriting syllabi out of fear, protesters labeled extremists, and voting rights treated like optional extras. The message isn’t “you can’t speak” but it’s quickly becoming “maybe you shouldn’t.”

I’m not a paranoid person and I really don’t have much patience for conspiracy freaks or tinfoil logic. I try hard to ground my thinking in science and history, in what can be known and verified, but even so, I’m not immune to the worries about privacy. I’m writing this essay on a device that’s connected to the internet, where nothing is ever truly private and nothing ever really disappears, and that’s not a problem with this piece as I plan to publish it somewhere, but what about private text messages or notes? What about conversations with AI chatbots?

Whether we like it or not, these tools are becoming fixtures of our daily life as we use them to draft emails, or sort out our personal dilemmas, or ask questions that we maybe aren’t comfortable asking out loud to another actual person. They are trained to predict the next likely word and rapidly gather data that would take us hours, but they aren’t confidants, they don’t have morals or know right from wrong… they don’t “know” anything. Are they being trained to log dissent or map behavior or stockpile keywords for some future review? Maybe not. Or maybe not yet, but I don’t think we should underestimate the creativity of bad actors with power. If the infrastructure exists and the political winds shift hard enough, all it will take is a flip of a switch.

When it comes to tech abuse, the current administration’s incompetence might actually be our best line of defense. These are, after all, the same people who planned a secret military strike in a Signal group chat, and accidentally invited a journalist to listen in. But even so, the surveillance state doesn’t need to be all that competent, just connected. Metadata already gets vacuumed up… GPS logs, browsing habits, biometric patterns, all cross referenced with our online identities.

If this all sounds a bit like dystopian fiction, it’s only because we’ve been trained to think of it that way. But the systems are real and the only thing missing is the right justification, something like national security or public order or family values or everyone’s favorite, “protecting the children.” Once we have that justification in place we can go ahead and roll out that familiar Orwellian reassurance: If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear.

The threats aren’t just abstract, they’re actually embedded in the systems we already live under, maybe not with jackboots and batons, but with procedural language and patriotic branding that does it’s best to make everything sound reasonable. It waits for fatigue to set in, for outrage to give way to apathy, for protest to feel futile and speaking up to feel like a real personal risk.

We’ve been conditioned to treat any comparison to fascism as melodramatic or alarmist, but sometimes “alarmist” just means you’re paying attention. Because when journalists are attacked, courts are captured, books are pulled off the shelves, and history gets rewritten in real time, it’s not hysterical to say the house is on fire. Authoritarianism doesn’t need everyone to go silent, it just needs enough people to be afraid of making too much noise. It thrives on hesitation, on people weighing the cost of resistance against the ease of just going along. I think maybe that’s the most dangerous part, not the censorship itself so much as the internalized version, the self-editing, second-guessing, that little voice that says maybe just let it go, maybe don’t post this or write that…

Personally I’d rather name it now than whisper about it later. If this country and our Constitution can still salvaged, and I truly believe it can, it won’t be because we waited politely with our hands folded in our laps. It’ll be because enough people chose not to, because they recogized that silence isn’t really safety. It’s just surrender in slow motion.

To Those Who Still Support President Trump

Maybe you still support Donald Trump and his approach to governing. A lot of people clearly do. He’s your guy. Cool. But what happens when the next president isn’t your guy, when someone you don’t trust and didn’t vote for inherits this same unchecked authority, the same gutted institutions, the same executive branch that’s been reshaped for loyalty over law?

To be fair, none of this shit started with Trump. The power of the presidency has been sliding in this direction for decades, but he sure as hell didn’t slow it down. Once power expands, it rarely contracts. The people who come next won’t just give it back. They’ll just find new ways to use it and abuse it.

The Founders weren’t perfect, but they knew what concentrated power could do, which is why they didn’t build a throne. They built limits and guardrails and we’re currently watching those guardrails get stripped for parts. You might like who’s driving now, but what happens when you don’t?

Notes and Clarifications

  1. United States Armed Forces oath of enlistment: The enlisted oath includes obeying the orders of the President and officers, but that clause is explicitly framed within the obligation to support and defend the Constitution. That hierarchy matters: obedience is conditional on legality. Under the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), service members are not only allowed but required to disobey unlawful orders. The officer’s oath, by contrast, does not include any pledge of obedience to the President—only to the Constitution. In both cases, the Constitution remains the ultimate authority—not the individual issuing commands.
  2. This piece ran at CounterPunch on April 14th, 2025.

Sources & Further Reading

Nick Allison is a former Army infantryman, a college dropout, and a writer based in Austin, Texas. He spends too much time reading about history, democracy, and systems in collapse, and not enough time being optimistic about any of it. He’s a political independent, unaffiliated with any party, who still believes the Constitution is worth defending.

Also, he enjoys writing his own bio in the third person, because it probably makes him feel a little smarter and more important than he actually is.

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