The Former President's Approach Constitute a Risk to Civilization.
His internal and external strategies – from the challenge to the democratic process previously to recent incursions and warnings – undermine not only domestic and international law. However, the issue goes deeper.
These actions jeopardize the core idea of what we mean by.
A moral purpose of a functioning society is to stop the more powerful from attacking and exploiting the vulnerable. Failing that, we could find ourselves locked in a brutish war where only the fittest wins.
This ideal is embedded of the nation's founding texts. This is also the foundation of the postwar international order advocated by the United States, built on international cooperation, democratic governance, fundamental freedoms, and the supremacy of law.
But, it is a fragile construct, often broken by those who choose to misuse their influence. Preserving it requires that the those in charge have enough integrity to avoid seeking temporary advantages, and that the rest of us demand responsibility should they falter.
Absolute power does not make right. It results in uncertainty, disruption, and conflict.
Each instance people or corporations or countries that are richer and more powerful prey upon those that are weaker, the framework of civilization weakens. Should such behavior are not contained, the structure collapses. Without intervention, the world can plunge into disorder and conflict. We have seen this pattern previously.
Our current reality is a society and world grown vastly more unequal. Political and economic power are held by fewer hands than ever before. This encourages the elite to take advantage of the disadvantaged because they act with a sense of untouchable.
The fortunes of a handful of billionaires is difficult to fathom. The influence of big tech, big oil, and large defense contractors extends over numerous countries. Artificial intelligence is could centralize resources and influence even more. The military might of the world's largest nations is unmatched in the annals of time.
Enabled by political allies and a sympathetic high court, the executive office has been transformed into the supreme and answerable-to-none entity of government in history.
Combine these factors and you perceive the looming crisis.
An unbroken thread links past transgressions to current menaces. These were based on the hubris of invincibility.
You see much the same in other global contexts: in wars of aggression, in coercive diplomacy, and in the rampant monopolization by powerful corporate entities.
Yet, unfettered might does not create right. It makes for uncertainty, revolution, and armed conflict.
The lessons of the past reveal that frameworks designed to check the influential also protect them. Absent these limits, their insatiable demands for increased control and resources eventually bring them down – and with them their corporations, nations, or empires. And risk international catastrophe.
This kind of contempt for legal order will haunt the nation and the world – and the very idea of civilization – for years to come.
