Might Makes Right
Trump’s admin is very much attached to the Might makes Right style of doing politics
Which is understandable. MAGA is a culturally revolutionary movement, and - to a revolutionary movement - old customs & old conventions look like useless, meaningless shackles, that would be best removed. Removing them feels liberating
There is, however, a problem. Just few iterations later, a revolutionary movement is pretty much guaranteed to learn why these conventions had been introduced in the first place
Iteration 1. I can’t see why [our predecessors] would be doing this or that!
Iteration 5. Ah… Now I can
A new regime is guaranteed to have many and many revelations like that
One of particularly burdensome customs that Trump’s administration had been particularly eager to shake off, is the pretence of a due process
Previous administrations - which at this point can be best designated as the optimates - made a great stress on the due process. Sincerely or not, they tried to present their actions as results of some legitimate procedure. They wanted to avoid any appearance of the arbitrary execution of power; or of a personal whim.
Nope, whatever we are doing is solidrock legit, legitimacy being outsourced to some kind of “law”, international or not, written or not, secular or sacred.
Trump’s admin finds it all extremely burdensome, super irritating and pretty much performatively avoids this kind of legitimisation. It wants to make the execution of power as personal as possible and - let’s be honest about that - as whimsical as it can
I think this is a long term mistake that is going to blowback
You see, this kind of hypocrisy “no we’re not exercising power, we are just executing the will of some court, whatever” - it had not been introduced randomly or for no good reason at all. In fact, if we look scroll through the records of history, we will notice that pretty much any solid regime, or political system we know of, had been quite hypocritical, and tended to avoid a feeling of arbitrariness.
Why? As it often happens with the empirical facts - describing them is easier than explaining. You can usually see what is happening much better than why.
(Everyone agrees about what was happening during the French Revolution. Why it all happened though, is a completely different matter & is very much open to debate)
But I will give you one reason
People hate feeling personal power of other humans
No, they HATE it. They hate it, hate it, hate it, and hate it absolutely
Nothing triggers their wrath, nothing triggers their envy, and nothing makes them more depressed then being subject to the personal, arbitrary whim of someone else
That makes power something you have to hide, something you have to disguise, something you have to absolutely deny existing
Rulers of the past, kings of the past, and - last but not least - dictators of the past knew that, and worked hard to avoid any appearance of arbitrariness in their actions. No, it’s not my personal whim. It is not even my personal decision. I am merely an instrument, a tool executing the will of someone else, absolutely constrained in my actions - by this external authority.
Denying that you have any personal power at all is lindy
Loudly proclaiming that you do, is not
For every revolution, there is a reaction. Just like in science, for every action, there is a reaction.
Napoleon's coup was a reaction to the perceived failures of the revolution. By that point, people belatedly realized why revolution went too far.
The French Revolution shook up things, all right. But their goal was not quite achieved, nor was it permanently achieved. After Napoleon's transformation into an emperor in 1804, it would not be until 1848 that France became a republic again - a 44 years later. Though, it was still formally a republic until October 1808.
Almost no one saw that coming. They were too concerned with the present to take a stock of the potential long-term consequences that their actions might produce.
Just like the MAGA were too concerned with what's going on right now to even appreciate the long-term implications of their actions, or why many of the things like due process even existed at all. Nor did they appreciate that many things have reasons for existing in the first place.
They are sort of like, I want things NOW. NOW. Damn anything else. Damn whatever consequences. Make things happen NOW. No need to think them through.
No one in the MAGA is interested in analysis and all of that boring stuff. They are not interested in asking why and what did things like due process existed in the first place.
They want actions now and ask (or don't ask) questions later.
Revolutionaries likes to break things and doing so without thinking them through.
And one of the things about modern political revolutions is that their changes tend to happened in a very compressed time-frame. Like, it is a lot to process all at once. Revolution rarely lasted over a decade or more.
Unlike, say, industrial revolution or scientific revolution. Modern political revolutions generally only happens in highly centralized states. Industrial revolution and scientific revolution are decentralized, consisting of separate innovations across a larger span of time and wider number of locations. Political revolution, on the other hand, entailed a great deal of changes at once from a central authority.
Is a centralized political revolution sustainable? Well, depends.
Also, when I say modern political revolution, I mean French Revolution and later. English revolution (English Civil Wars and Glorious Revolution) and American Revolution don't count.
And, finally, there is a lag here. Like Mr. Galeev said, we can say what happened there. No one can say exactly why they happened until much later. The why basically lagged behind what. And even the explanation of why a century or more later will never be fully accurate, because of the time that had passed and because not every thinking are documented (much less with the French Revolution, when documents get lost or destroyed over time because of riots or war).
Cmon, 20 years ago the US bombed cities and hapless soldiers to grab oil. Now they just bomb air defenses and kidnap the chief. If you don't call that progress, I don't know what is.