On November 11, 1947, just two years after the end of the Second World War, Winston Churchill said these famous words about democracy in a speech before the House of Commons:
Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed. it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…
Churchill was under no illusions about the stability of democracy. It is fragile and often messy. But in a sinful world, it is the least imperfect form of government we’ve got. As the evangelical theologian, Carl F. H. Henry puts it: “The biblical emphasis on human depravity and the consequent temptation to divert political power to inordinate ends argues for limited government as the least oppressive . . . A democratically chosen and constitutionally limited government seems to be the political structure most compatible with the Christian insistence on human worth and liberty and the most likely to accommodate the promotion and protection of human freedom, justice, and peace.”[1]
Yet today, Americans are deeply divided over the future of our democracy. According to a NPR/Ipsos poll conducted nearly a year after the January 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol, seven in ten (70 percent) Americans said the country is in crisis and at risk of failing. Sixty-four percent say that democracy itself is under threat.[2] This sentiment that America is in crisis is shared across party lines—which has led some pollsters to joke, mordantly, that at least we know Americans are able to agree on something![3] Similar polling data indicate a dissatisfaction with the very idea of democracy. That is, increasingly Americans are saying something like “I’m just not sure I believe in democracy.” Of course, the explanations people have given for this declining faith in democracy vary widely. President Trump’s supporters believe that the 2020 election was rigged while other Americans believe, in the wake of the post-election storming of the US Capitol by some of those very same Trump supporters, that extremism in the electorate undermines a democracy based on the rule of law.[4]
In her memoir Oath and Honor former Republican representative and co-chair of the January 6 Commission Liz Cheney argued that Donald Trump poses an existential threat to democracy. In an effort to transcend partisan politics, she warned:
If Trump is on the ballot, the 2024 election will not just be about inflation, or budget deficits, or national security, or any of the many critical issues we Americans normally face. We will be voting on whether to preserve our republic. As a nation, we can endure damaging policies for a four-year term. But we cannot survive a president willing to terminate our Constitution. . . .This is more important than partisan politics. Every one of us—Republican, Democrat. Independent—must work and vote together to ensure that Donald Trump and those who have appeased, enabled, and collaborated with him are defeated.[5]
Cheney was not alone. Many other former Republican leaders, including members of his previous administration argued that Trump was unfit to hold the highest office in the land. But in an historic comeback, he soundly defeated Kamala Harris to become the 47th president. During his first three weeks in office, he wasted no time in filling key cabinet positions with loyalists and signing a barrage of executive orders—a tactic which Steve Bannon once called “flooding the zone”—designed to drastically reshape the federal government. Many critics believe that these actions are part of an “authoritarian playbook” Trump is using to consolidate power and sabotage our democratic institutions. As AP’s congressional correspondent Lisa Mascaro states:
Three weeks in, the change the Trump administration has brought is a disruption of the federal government on an unprecedented scale, dismantling longstanding programs, sparking widespread public outcry and challenging the very role of Congress to create the nation’s laws and pay its bills. Government workers are being pushed to resign. Entire agencies are being shuttered. Federal funding to states and nonprofits was temporarily frozen. And the most sensitive Treasury Department information of countless Americans was opened to Musk’s DOGE team in an unprecedented breach of privacy and protocol.[6]
Most Americans who voted for Trump thought they were voting for lower grocery prices and increased border security. But argues David French in a recent New Yark Times opinion piece, “Trump isn’t merely issuing orders and enacting policies; he’s launching a constitutional revolution. The object is nothing less than the transformation of the American presidency.”[7] In other words, “he’s not breaking the constitutional structure to achieve concrete policy goals; breaking the constitutional structure is the policy goal.”[8] In a chilling essay, two constitutional and legal experts, Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith similarly suggest that Trump may not be using his executive orders to test the limits of his power; he may instead be “seeking to effectuate radical constitutional change.”[9]
Those of us who did not vote for Trump can hope and pray that our democratic institutions will hold up against his authoritarian impulses. So far, the federal courts have blocked many of Trump’s executive orders from being implemented, at least temporarily. And there is the law of judicial review—namely, the ultimate authority of the Supreme Court to determine the legitimacy of the acts of the executive and the legislative branches of government. In theory at least, says French, that last guardrail is still in effect. But, as Goldsmith and Bauer argue, Trump may be “attempting to instill fear in the Supreme Court that the presidency is prepared to resort to outright defiance of its decisions.”[10] That is, “the administration might be planning to dare the Court to say ‘no’ with threats of noncompliance.”[11] If that were to occur, we would indeed be faced with a full-fledged constitutional crisis.
Many of President Trump’s MAGA loyalists are drawn to what the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Anne Applebaum describes as “the seductive lure of authoritarianism.”[12] They are not only willing but happy to blow through moral and legal guardrails in the process doing his bidding. Thus, Cheney’s warning needs to be taken seriously. As Applebaum states: “given the right conditions, any society can turn against democracy. Indeed, if history is anything to go by, all of our societies eventually will.”[13] That's a scary prospect, to be sure—but accurate. We are silent at our own peril. So how can we both explain and resist this lurch towards authoritarianism?
In this essay, I want to make three main points. First, the viability of any democracy depends on the rule of law, which must have an anchor deeper and higher than mere majority opinion. Simply put, somehow the laws of any society that values democracy must reflect transcendent moral principles which the vast majority of the citizenry accept as reasonable and just. Otherwise, law is merely the expression of raw power.[14] This is the argument that C.S. Lewis made in his classic, The Abolition of Man which was written over eight decades ago. This is where we as Christians need to begin, for it is precisely the cultural loss of moral transcendence which threatens our democracy and democracies around the world.
Secondly, Donald Trump’s MAGA movement cannot be viewed in isolation. It is part of an international movement on the far right which has little in common with most of the conservative political parties (including American Republicanism) that existed in the post-World War II era. Previous political conservatives were dedicated to representative democracy, religious tolerance, independent judiciaries, free speech, the free press, limited government, political checks and balances, and transatlantic alliances. Members of today’s far right, however, “want to overthrow, bypass, or undermine existing institutions, or destroy what exists. . . . All of them seek to redefine their nations, to rewrite social contracts, and sometimes, to alter the rules of democracy so that they never lose power.”[15]
Finally, we need to gain a deeper and, yes, empathetic understanding of why otherwise good, decent, and respectful people can become so unwaveringly loyal to Donald Trump who violates so many norms which we have regarded as indispensable to the common good and a healthy democracy. Many of them are fellow churchgoers, friends, and family members. Two authors Travis Ruddle and Brad Agle have coined the term the “totality of allegiance” to explain this phenomenon. They argue: “What we are witnessing in Trumpism is more than political alignment; it is the crystallization of a profound allegiance that transcends policy and enters the realm of identity and belief. Hannah Arendt’s profound insights on authoritarianism in her classic work, The Origins of Totalitarianism and other writings are extremely helpful in this regard.
The Abolition of Man
Lewis’s Abolition of Man is based on three lectures he gave at the University of Durham on the evenings of February 24, 25, and 26, 1943. Just a few weeks earlier, the German troops had surrendered to the Red Army in Stalingrad. This would prove to be a major turning point in World War II. In the months following Lewis’s lectures, the Axis powers suffered a series of major defeats. The Axis would never again have the upper hand in the war.[16]
This historical context is important for understanding Lewis’s argument. As Susan McWilliams Barndt points out, at first glance Lewis does not seem to be talking much about politics. But he quite clearly announces the political dimensions of his thinking near the end of The Abolition of Man when he suggests that the most profound threats to democracies are internal, not external. “A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery,” he writes.[17] In other words, a belief in objective value is necessary for self-government and the rule of law—principles which ideally define liberal democracies. Then Lewis says: “I am not here thinking solely, perhaps not even chiefly, of those who are our public enemies at the moment. The process which, if not checked, will abolish Man, goes on apace among Communists and Democrats no less than among Fascists.”[18]
Given the time and place in which Lewis uttered these words, they must have been shocking to his listeners. For just when the Brits were beginning to taste victory over their fascist foes, he was telling them that ultimately, they could very well be no different than the Nazis. “The methods may (at first) differ in brutality,” says Lewis, but those scientists and philosophers who reject objective values will in the long run be just the same as the Nazi rulers of Germany.[19] It is the “magician’s bargain” to give our souls and get power in return. “But once our souls, that is ourselves, have been given up, the power thus conferred will not belong to us. We shall in fact be the slaves and puppets to that which we have given our souls.”[20] Lewis describes those bureaucrats who succumb to moral relativism and the lure of power “men without chests.”
Lewis defines “objective value” as “the belief that certain attitudes are really true and others are really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are.”[21] He connects “objective value” to what he calls the Tao—or what others call Natural Law, Traditional Morality, or First Principles of Practical Reason. “It is the sole source of all value judgments. If it is rejected, all value is rejected,” he argues.[22] “Only the Tao provides a common human law or action which can overarch rulers and ruled alike.”[23] In the appendix, Lewis provides the follow illustrations of the Tao: 1) beneficence; 2) duties to parents; 3) duties to children; 4) justice; 5) good faith and veracity; 6) mercy; and 7) magnanimity.[24] He emphasizes, however, that the list makes no pretense of completeness.
This connection between objective value and the Tao is particularly important for democracies and democratic republics since they depend on the concept of the rule of law—the idea that such laws exist, that they should serve the public interest, and that they should apply to everyone equally.[25] The rule of law is the basis for the principle that “no one is above the law.” In fact, Lewis argues, the very effort within a democracy to ferret out corruption becomes impossible without the existence of some standard of objective value which informs the rule of law. The word “corrupt” itself implies a doctrine of value.[26] The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts it this way:
The most important demand of the Rule of Law is that people in positions of authority should exercise their power within a constraining framework of well-established public norms rather than an arbitrary, ad hoc, or a purely discretionary manner on the basis of their own preferences or ideology. It insists that the government should operate within a framework of law in everything it does, and that it should be accountable through law when there is a suggestion of unauthorized action by those in power.[27]
Disparaging or routinely violating the rule of law as defined by our Constitution erodes the norms of self-government. When this happens, a democracy can die.[28]
Recently, Trump posted on Truth Social and X, “He who saves his Country does not violate any law.” The post drew immediate criticism from Democrats who argued that Trump was likening his executive authority to that of a king or autocrat. The phrase which is attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte who declared himself the Emperor of France in the early 1800’s, emphasizes the idea of a leader acting above the law in the name of national self-preservation. But when leaders stand outside of all judgments of value and in effect become the source of law, argues Lewis, we are faced with the rule of some people over others based on mere impulse and power. A dogmatic belief in a “law above the law” to which all are subject “is necessary for the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery.”[29]
The New Authoritarianism
Anne Applebaum’s illuminating analysis, The Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism (2020) helps us understand the rise of authoritarianism in Europe and the U.S. Applebaum begins her book with a step back in time—to a New Years Eve party in December 31,1999 which she and her husband hosted at their house in northwest Poland. Most of her friends and colleagues at the party were in the general category of what Poles called the right—conservatives, anti-communists, but also believers in democracy, checks and balances, the rule of law, and supporters of NATO. “In the 1990s, that was what being ‘on the right’ meant.”[30] But in the years that followed there was a splintering of the right, such that nearly two decades later Poland became one of the most polarized societies in Europe. (Similar divisions have occurred in the old Hungarian right, the Spanish right, the French right, the Italian right, the German right—and with some differences, the British right and American right, too.)
Applebaum provides an alarming sketch of how a xenophobic, nativist, and openly authoritarian party called Law and Justice (which is manly supported by Catholic conservatives) won a slim majority in the 2015 election. Immediately, after gaining power, it began undermining the constitution and independence of the judiciary and media. State institutions were another target:
Once in power, Law and Justice sacked thousands of civil servants, replacing them with party hacks, or else cousins and other relatives of party hacks. They fired army generals who had years of expensive training in Western academies. They fired diplomats with experience and linguistic skills. . . . There was very little pretense about any of this. The point of all these changes was not to make the government run better. The point was to make the government more partisan, the courts more pliable, more beholden to the party. Or maybe we should call it, as we once did, the Party.[31] (Emphasis added)
Applebaum could not have known in 2020 when she published her book that the Law and Justice Party would lose power in the 2023 election, after eight years of authoritarian rule. Nonetheless, there is still much that can be learned from Poland’s recent backsliding from democratic norms. Moreover, Poland is not the only European country facing the threat of authoritarian reactionary Christianity. As David Gushee points out, “Hungary arguably offers the most disturbing example of democratic backsliding in Europe. What makes it even more disturbing is the influence that nation’s authoritarian reactionary Christian paradigm is having well beyond its borders.” Far more than Putin’s Russia, “Hungary is providing both the ideas and example for reactionary Christian politics all over the world, perhaps especially in the United States.”[32] This influence on American politics is evident from the close relationship between Donald Trump and Viktor Orban.
According to Applebaum, what happened in Poland and Hungary, as well as what is transpiring in the U.S., are manifestations of an illiberal one-party state that have adopted a way of organizing society begun by Lenin in 1917. It is not so much a philosophy, she contends, as a “mechanism for holding power” that “functions happily alongside many ideologies.”[33] In other words, present-day authoritarianism is about power, loyalty, control, order, and compliance. Individuals advance in such a system not because of talent or industry, but because of their willingness to conform to the rules of the party, or party leader. Hannah Arendt, the recognized authority on totalitarianism in Germany, wrote that the worst kind of one-party totalitarianism in power “invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.”[34] Sound familiar?
While there is no single explanation for the rise of authoritarianism, there are some preconditions for the erosion of democracy in modern society. Arendt identified the existence of an “authoritarian personality,” a radically lonely individual who has no other social ties and derives his or her sense of identity from membership in the party. However, more recently, Karen Stenner, a behavioral economist who has researched personality traits for over two decades, has argued that about a third of the population in any country has what she calls an “authoritarian predisposition.” People with this predisposition favor homogeneity and order. “Authoritarianism appeals, simply to people who cannot tolerate complexity; there is nothing inherently ‘left wing’ or ‘right wing’ about this instinct at all. It is anti-pluralist. It is suspicious of people with different ideas. It is allergic to fierce debates. . . . It is a frame of mind, not a set of ideas.”[35]
However, argues Applebaum, there is another crucial element in the decline of democracy and the rise of an autocracy that is often missed by theorists. The would-be autocrat needs people who accept his efforts to gain unbridled power and who can sell his image to the public. These are people who launch a coup or use sophisticated legal language to defend authoritarians in the courts. They are also people who give voice to grievances and launch war on the intellectual elite.[36] This cadre of supporters “understand their role, which is to defend the leaders, however dishonest their statements, however great their corruption, however disastrous their impact on ordinary people and institutions. In exchange, they know they will be rewarded and advanced.”[37]
The Totality of Allegiance
Travis Ruddle, co-author along with Brad Agle of the study, The Totality of Allegiance: Inside the Hearts and Minds of Trump Supporters describes the following experience he had as a student traveling in Germany: “Ettersberg Hill, outside the small city of Weimar, holds a grim paradox—the birthplace of profound cultural and intellectual achievements and the site of unimaginable human suffering.” He continues:
Here, at one of the largest concentration camps within Germany’s pre-World War II borders, Buchenwald, a dark shadow of history looms large. In the very area where Johann Wolfgang Goethe once lived and contributed to the Enlightenment—a movement that sought to elevate reason, clarity, and moral progress of humanity—this camp stood as a grotesque negation of those ideals. . . . Upon arrival, I confronted a deeply unsettling reality. How could the residents of Weimar not have known the atrocities were occurring so close to their homes? How did they reconcile the camp’s existence with the Enlightenment values that once flourished in their midst? . . . I pondered whether those who lived nearby—those who baked bread for the camp, delivered food orders to the gate, or wandered near the encampment’s border—were truly ignorant of the horrors within. Did they really believe that those interned were receiving what they “deserved,” as the gate’s inscription suggested? Or was the truth so obscured, so entangled in the web of propaganda and fear, that even the obvious became uncertain?[38]
Arendt, a philosopher and political theorist, has helped us gain a greater understanding of human motivations and conduct under authoritarian and autocratic regimes. After attending the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi operative who was responsible for organizing the transport of millions of Jews and others to various concentration camps, she published a book entitled Eichmann in Jerusalem in which she introduced the concept of the “banality of evil.” This phrase is usually associated with the idea that ordinary people can be convinced to overlook and even do terrible things. But argues Mike Cosper, “It is not enough to simply say that ordinary men and women can do terrible things. Rather, it’s that these terrible things are actually transformed in the moral universe of the Nazis into a positive good.”[39]
Arendt came to see Eichmann not as a moral monster but as someone who was “terrifyingly normal.” As a bureaucrat, his evil was shallow and bland. During his trial, “He was genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché.”[40] This reflected his inability to think outside himself. “The longer I listened to him,” Arendt wrote, “the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think . . . from the standpoint of somebody else.”[41] Eichmann was found guilty and sentenced to death. But in Arendt’s view, he showed no evidence of a guilty conscience. As someone who was thoroughly committed to the Nazi movement, he was utterly convinced of the righteousness of his cause and viewed the Jews as an obstacle in the march of progress. Some have criticized Arendt for minimizing Eichmann’s guilt. But this critique misses the nature and allure of totalitarian ideology—which is that it flattens the complexity of the real world and inoculates a person from the need to think.[42]
What is further disturbing is the fact that so many Germans who were or claimed to be Christians heartily endorsed and supported Adolf Hitler’s rise to power. Hitler’s promise to restore the economy and national pride—to make Germany great again—resonated with many Germans. A large segment of the Protestant church known as the “German Christians,” viewed the German people as God’s chosen instrument at a crucial time in history and Hitler as the man who would lead them out of the wilderness. Even Protestant leaders of the Confessing Church who rejected the more liberal theology of the German Christians for the most part welcomed the restoration of Germany’s greatness and honor that Nazism seemed to offer.[43]
Nazi Germany thus provides horrific proof of how quickly a civilized society can degenerate into bestiality. Ruddle and Agle suggest that Arendt’s “meticulous analysis of the rise of strongmen and autocratic regimes –rooted in the erosion of truth, the manipulation of facts, and the obliteration of the individual’s capacity for independent thought—serves as a powerful lens through which we can examine the disturbing trends of our own time.”[44] Just as Arendt explored the consequences of a society willing to sacrifice reason and morality for fealty to a Fuhrer so we must grapple with the forces that drive people away from critical thinking and moral principles and toward the seductive allure of an autocratic savior.[45]
To be clear, these authors are not suggesting that Trump is another Hitler or that the MAGA movement in the U.S. is comparable to the Nazi movement in Germany. Nor am I. Few events in human history can compare to the horrors of Buchenwald and other concentration camps designed to carry out Hitler’s Final Solution—the extermination of six million Jews. Cosper rightly warns us against making one-to-one comparisons between our current crisis and Nazis Germany. He states: “Rather than arguing against something on its own merits, we shortcut it by likening our opposition to the most brutal regime in human history. It’s a reactive response, a way of swinging the largest and heaviest weapon imaginable in an effort to attack or defend.”[46] Nonetheless, Cosper continues, Arendt’s work “mapped the architecture that undergirded [the Nazi] ideology—the structure of belief that motivated and justified their actions.”[47] That structure has appeared again and again in various authoritarian and totalitarian regimes throughout human history. What is critical to understand, and what Arendt recognized better than most theorists, is that totalitarianism is profoundly seductive to the modern mind.
Ruddle and Agle argue that popular support for Trump goes beyond mere agreement with his position on issues of policy. There is a powerful psychological force: a fervent and unwavering devotion that blurs the boundary between perception and reality. This deep loyalty, which can be termed the totality of allegiance, undermines the capacity for critical thinking and consistently prioritizes allegiance above truth itself. In an effort to better understand this allegiance, they conducted in-depth focus groups in four states: South Carolina, Utah, Oklahoma, and Arizona. One of their key findings is the deep distrust that Trump supporters have toward major institutions—government, media, academia, and beyond. In many cases, this translates into an anti-intellectualism and disdain for any authority figure who speaks out against Trump and his MAGA movement. “Trump’s rhetoric did not create this distrust alone, but it did amplify and weaponize it, turning it into a powerful tool of political mobilization.” This anti-establishment attitude toward major institutions coupled with a profound sense of nostalgia for a bygone era aligns with Trump’s populist attacks on the media and elites and violation of traditional democratic and ethical norms in the name of dismantling the “deep state.”[48]
The strong emotional attachment of many of his followers to Trump often translates into moral rationalization—various forms of self-deception or mental gymnastics which allow individuals to justify or rationalize behaviors they would typically consider to be unethical, deeply immoral, and even illegal.[49] One reason often given by white evangelicals for why they voted for Trump is that they were choosing the “lesser of two evils.” After the release of the notorious Access Hollywood tape in which Trump bragged about sexually assaulting women, the typical response among his supporters was that this was “locker room talk,” and that the stakes were too high to worry about such things. After all, we were electing a president not a pastor or Sunday School teacher. One focus group participant put it this way:
When Trump got elected the first time . . . people were complaining about his morality, complaining about his past actions . . . And the thing was, if you come home from a vacation and your house is full of rats, I mean, your house is totally overrun with rats when you call the exterminator, do you care if he goes to church? Do you care if he is religious? Do you care if he is righteous? No. You want someone to get rid of the rats. And that’s kind of the way people looked at Trump. He was going to drain the swamp, get rid of the rats . . . And they really didn’t care about his personal life.[50]
Certainly, no political candidate or politician is perfect. But, as Russell Moore points out, “surely there is some line in which a person’s character is too flawed to be fit to lead, whatever the consequences might be.”[51]
Moreover, the “lesser of two evils” argument rarely stays that way. Arendt famously warned that “those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil.”[52] She notes that within totalitarian regimes, “Acceptance of lesser evils is consciously used in conditioning the government officials as well as the population at large to the acceptance of evil as such. To give but one among many examples: the extermination of Jews [in Nazi Germany] was preceded by a very gradual sequence of anti-Jewish measures, each of which was accepted with the argument that refusal to cooperate would make things worse—until a stage was reached where nothing worse could possibly have happened.”[53] Arendt further contends that the “killing operations” were “not committed by outlaws, monsters, or raving sadists, but by the most respected members of respectable society.”[54] It was as though morality, as a set of mores, of customs and manners, could be exchanged for another set “with no more trouble than it would take to change the table manners of a whole people.”[55]
How does such a wholesale exchange of one system of values for another take place? Joseph Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany once said, “It you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”[56] Hitler was able to capitalize on social turmoil and gain favor with the people through a combination of lies, deceit, and partisan propaganda. Arendt writes: “Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of the man who can fabricate it.”[57] Authoritarian strongmen, in other words, are able to manipulate the population through an avalanche of falsehoods and partisan propaganda “to the point where they would at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing is true.”[58] The inability to distinguish fact from fiction coupled with a mixture of cynicism and gullibility increases the likelihood that followers will accept false narratives over truth, justifying even the most heinous actions.
Today, the existence of social media and a multiplicity of media outlets or “information bubbles” through which individuals get their news make it doubly difficult to identify and resist disinformation and false narratives. Authoritarian leaders depend, if not on the Big Lie, then on what the historian Timothy Snyder calls the Medium-sized Lie. That is, they encourage their followers to adopt an “alternative reality” which is usually formulated with the help of modern marketing techniques, audience segmentation, and social media.[59]
A consummate conman, Trump has been particularly adept at tapping into people’s feelings of victimization, fear, anxiety, distrust of institutions, etc., and presenting himself as the solution to perceived threats—whether immigrants, the media, political opponents, or federal workers of the “deep state.” Without him, America would be overrun by crime, corruption, and chaos. Trump’s constant repetition of falsehoods regarding these perceived threats thus intensifies the allegiance of his followers to him. Ruddle and Agle state: “For Trump supporters, the more they hear these claims—whether about election fraud, media bias, or threats to their freedom—the more these ideas become ingrained as truth. This is not simply a matter of believing individual lies but rather adopting a worldview where anything that contradicts Trump’s narrative is dismissed as part of a larger conspiracy.”[60]
For example, the Marshall Project used a combination of computer-aided text analysis and human reporting to process over 350,000 of Trump’s public statements from Factba.se. Reporters found 13 major claims about immigration, some of which the former president has repeated 500 times or more. All of them are false or deeply misleading. Here are some: Unauthorized immigrants are criminals [said at least 575 times], snakes that bite [at least 35 times], eating pets, coming from jails and mental institutions [at least 560 times], causing crime in sanctuary cities [at least 185 times], and a group of isolated, tragic cases prove they are killing Americans en masse [at least 235 times].[61] Repetition has been a fundamental feature of Trump’s speech throughout his political career. Research has shown that the more times someone hears a statement, the more it feels true. Why is that? Cognitive scientists call this the illusory truth effect. “Repetition makes information easier to process, making it seem more truthful. A 2021 study found that repeating a piece of information up to nine times continued to make it more believable to subjects, and further repetition did not decrease the effect.”[62]
Trump’s firehose of falsehoods takes the form of both misinformation (spreading falsehoods he believes to be true) and disinformation (knowingly manipulating facts or repeating outright lies.) Both forms of falsehood distort our sense of reality, thereby undermining our democratic institutions. This can be seen in the creation of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Is the purpose of DOGE really to eliminate government waste, fraud, and inefficiencies? Or is the whole enterprise a campaign of disinformation with an agenda to dismantle federal services? The patterns of deception and lack of transparency suggest that it is the latter.[63] Either way, in the name of “draining the swamp,” Musk and his lackies have taken actions which were unthinkable even during Trump’s first administration, including:
Cutting off funding to USAID which gives critical life-saving food, water, and medical aid to millions of people in poverty-stricken nations around the world.
Shutting down and eliminating government agencies whose task is to protect the public safety and welfare.
Terminating or threatening to terminate the jobs of tens of thousands of government employees without due process.
Seeking access to troves of sensitive taxpayer data at the IRS.
The cruelty and utter recklessness of the slash and burn tactics of the current administration is blatantly obvious. Yet they are occurring with no congressional oversight and little or no opposition from the Republican Party. Deep cuts in the federal workforce will lead to a significant “brain drain” and a decrease in the ability of the federal government to provide essential social services. Meanwhile, Trump is pushing for huge tax cuts which if passed by the Republican controlled congress will increase the federal deficit by an estimated four trillion dollars and result in a massive transfer of wealth from the general population to the ultra-rich.
Applebaum argues that DOGE is not primarily interested in government efficiency. Rather, DOGE and its boss Elon Musk “have focused their activity on the eradication of the federal civil service, along with its culture and values, and its replacement with something different. In other words: regime change.”[64] During the 2024 campaign Trump described Election Day as “Liberation Day.” J. D. Vance has said that Trump should “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.” Applebaum reminds us that “elected leaders such as Hugo Chavez and Viktor Orban have also used their democratic mandates for the same purpose.” The actions of Musk and DOGE, she continues, “have created moral dilemmas of a kind no American government employee has faced in recent history. Protest or collaborate? Speak up against lawbreaking or remain silent?” Eventually, though, if the assault on the civil service is not blocked by the courts, civil servants will be either fired, denied access to the tools they need to work, or frightened by smear campaigns. Most of them will be replaced by people who can pass the “purity tests” now required of candidates seeking government jobs. She concludes: “There is still time to block this regime change, to preserve the old values. But first we need to be clear about what is happening and why.”[65]
Conclusion
When “extreme situations” confront the individual with “political impotence or complete powerlessness” Arendt contends, “It is obviously not everybody’s business to be a saint or a hero.” However, personal moral responsibility and noncooperation with evil are everybody’s business. People like Eichmann were not criminals and psychopaths, Arendt argues, but rule-followers protected by social privilege. “It was precisely the members of respectable society,” she writes, “who had not been touched by the intellectual and moral upheaval in the early stages of the Nazi period, who were the first to yield.”[66] On the other hand, those who refused to participate, did not have “highly developed intelligence or sophistication in moral matters.” Rather, they were critical thinkers practicing what Socrates called a “silent dialogue between me and myself,” and they refused to face a future where they would have to live with themselves after committing or enabling atrocities.[67] We must remember, Arendt writes, that “whatever else happens, as long as we live we shall have to live together with ourselves.”[68] As someone once said: “Like the purpose of a curtain tieback, we each choose how much light to let in.”
Granted, it is too early in the Trump administration to draw any final conclusions about his full intentions or the long-term consequences of his political agenda. Intellectual humility requires that we constantly evaluate and re-evaluate our initial reactions. Our understanding is constantly evolving. Furthermore, as various historians of the Third Reich have argued, many who supported Hitler were motivated by real fears and concerns—economic instability, political disenfranchisement, weak political leadership, etc.[69] The same is true of many of those who voted for Trump. However much we might disagree with their decision to support Trump, their voices need to be heard. Above all, in this time of uncertainty we must place our trust in God’s sovereignty. At the same time, our reliance on God’s faithfulness and purposes in history does not absolve us of moral responsibility and our duty to speak truth to power regardless of who is in power at any given moment. The theologian Donald Bloesch reminds us:
[God’s] hand is in all events—always working to bring good out of evil. . . . History is not the random interplay of forces beyond human or divine control but the field in which the drama of redemption is played out amid conflict between forces of righteousness and of iniquity. The outcome of this struggle is already assured, but the way in which we arrive at this outcome is partly dependent on how God chooses to interact with and respond to human initiatives. We are not masters of our fates and captains of our souls. . . But we are nevertheless by the grace of God covenant partners with him in building a future that fulfills the hopes and dreams of a lost and fallen humanity through the ages.[70]
[1] Henry, Has Democracy Had Its Day?, 6.
[2] Newell, “Seven in Ten Americans Say the Country is in Crisis, At Risk of Failing.”
[3] McWilliams Barndt, “The Abolition of Democracy,” 2.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Cheney, Oath and Honor, 267-68.
[6] Mascaro “Trump and Musk’s Dismantling of Government is Shaking the Foundations of US Democracy.”
[7] French, “The. Trump Crisis Deepens,” 1.
[8] Ibid, 6.
[9] Bauer and Goldsmith, “The Trump Executive Orders as ‘Radical Constitutionalism,”2.
[10] Ibid., 7.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy.
[13] Ibid., 14.
[14] See Gushee, Defending Democracy from Its Christian Enemies, 9-10.
[15] Ibid., 20-21.
[16] McWilliams Barndt, “The Abolition of Democracy,” 5.
[17] Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 84-85.
[18] Ibid., 85,
[19] Ibid.
[20] Ibid., 83-84.
[21] Ibid., 29
[22] Ibid., 56.
[23] Ibid., 84.
[24] Ibid., 95-121.
[25] McWilliams Brandt, “The Abolition of Democracy,” 9-10.
[26] Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 78.
[27] Waldron, “Rule of Law.”
[28] See Levitsky and Ziblatt, How Democracies Die, 7-9.
[29] Ibid., 84-85.
[30] Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy, 2.
[31] Ibid., 5-6.
[32] Gushee, Defending Democracy from Its Christian Enemies, 114;
[33] Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy, 22.
[34] Ibid., 24. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 339.
[35] Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy, 16.
[36] Ibid., 17.
[37] Ibid., 25-26.
[38] Ruddle and Agle, The Totality of Allegiance, 13-14.
[39] Cosper, The Church in Dark Times, 115.
[40] Ibid., 117.
[41] Ibid.
[42] Ibid., 114, 118.
[43] See Barnett, For the Soul of the People; and Erickson and Heshel, eds., Betrayal: German Churches and the Holocaust.
[44] Ruddle and Agle, The Totality of Allegiance, 15,
[45] Ibid.
[46] Cosper, The Church in Dark Times, 15-16.
[47] Ibid., 17.
[48] Ruddle and Agle, The Totality of Allegiance, 26-27; 51-52.
[49] Ibid., 61.
[50] Ibid.,67-68.
[51] Moore, Losing Our Religion, 161.
[52] Arendt, “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship,” 36.
[53] Ibid., 36-37.
[54] Ibid., 42-43.
[55] Ibid., 43.
[56] Ruddle and Agle, The Totality of Allegiance, 132.
[57] Ibid., 114-15,
[58] McQuade, Attack From Within, 24.
[59] Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy, 38.
[60] Ruddle and Agle, The Totality of Allegiance, 133.
[61] Flagg. Calderon, and Hing, “Trump Often Repeats These False, Misleading Immigration Claims.”
[62] Ibid.
[63] See Nichols, “The Death of Government Expertise;” and Uprise RI Staff, “Exposed: Musk’s DOGE Caught in Web Of Lies About Government Waste.”
[64] Applebaum, “There’s a Term for What Trump and Musk Are Doing.”
[65] Ibid.
[66] Arendt, “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship,” 44.
[67] Ibid., 44-45.
[68] Ibid., 45.
[69] See Hamilton, Who Voted for Hitler? And Brustein, The Logic of Evil.
[70] Bloesch, God the Almighty, 115, 119.
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