Surrender in Slow Motion: The Soft Collapse of American Democracy

/ March 28, 2025

An edited version of this essay was later published at CounterPunch

What if the collapse of a democracy doesn’t come with sirens or boots in the street, but with slogans, executive orders, and billionaires in boardrooms? A drift toward something unrecognizable, a system where mythology replaces accountability, unelected tech moguls shape public policy, and fear becomes the new filter for free speech.

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.

This is how democratic values rot, not all at once, but through the slow normalization of idolatry disguised as patriotism.

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 it’s 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 facts start to feel negotiable, optional, or maybe just not worth the effort of sorting out.

Reporters who challenge the administration are smeared as traitors or “deep state” operatives. Trump still 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. Independent newsrooms face lawsuits, threats, and coordinated disinformation campaigns designed to corrode public trust. 

And it works. The more chaotic the noise is, the easier it is to tune out the signal until truth becomes something to argue about rather than act on. And once reality gets slippery, everything else is easier to break. Books are banned, curricula sanitized. Judges face harassment for actually upholding the law and ordinary folks start second-guessing what they post online say out loud. It doesn’t take long for people to forget what used to be obvious to us as Americans: 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. 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. It’s state-mandated morality dressed up as tradition.

There’s a 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. 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 I served with, some of whom never came home, weren’t there for oil or politics, but because they believed in service. Many had volunteered in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks, willing to risk their lives to protect something bigger than themselves. 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 man, or a party, or even a flag.It was to a Constitution, one that’s supposed to hold this nation together. And that’s a big part of why this matters to me so much.

When I see politicians twisting those principles into tools of repression, I don’t call it patriotism. I call it what it is: 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 political power now. Not metaphorically, not just influence-by-Twitter (or X, or whatever that ad-choked echo chamber is calling itself today). Trump brought him in early to lead the so called Department of Government Efficiency—DOGE. As a “special government employee,” Musk was handed sweeping authority to cancel contracts, slash programs, and restructure entire federal agencies. No election. No confirmation. No accountability. Except, of course, to Trump and his inner circle.

Musk has used that power like a wrecking ball. USAID and the CFPB, gutted. The VA, slashed. Now the Department of Education is on the chopping block. Trump 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 gut 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.

And like clockwork, Musk’s signature chaos-management style has followed him into government: mass firings with little to no discernment, followed by attempts to rehire the very people dismissed (nuclear safety experts, pandemic response staff, oversight personnel) when it turns out gutting institutions actually has real consequences.

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 kind of guy came with it. Movements like “Tesla Takedown,” built around public shaming and targeted boycotts of Musk’s brands, are picking up steam. Trump’s base still defends him, mostly, but it seems they’re beginning to sour on Musk. The golden boy of techno-libertarianism now looks a lot more like a self-dealing billionaire with too much control over their lives.

Musk’s role in the administration isn’t just a weird twist of the never ending Trump saga. It’s a symptom of something much deeper: the corrosion of democratic norms in real time. When unelected billionaires are given the authority to dismantle federal institutions and profit from the aftermath, we’re not looking at innovation, but rather privatized power in patriotic packaging.

Legal scholars are already 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. If the Constitution is a framework built on checks and balances, then we’re watching those supports be removed, one after another.

This isn’t a hypothetical. Tt’s already happening, and if it continues unchecked, we’re not flirting with autocracy so much as laying out a red carpet for it.

And none of this is happening in a vacuum. 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. And then 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. Hungary rewrote its constitution and wrapped its authoritarianism in flags and hymns. Family, faith, purity, tradition… the slogans may change, but the structure remains the same: consolidate power, erode checks, and rebrand repression as righteousness.

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.” It’s “maybe you shouldn’t.”

I’m not a paranoid person. I have no patience for conspiracy freaks or tinfoil logic, and I try 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 and . I’m writing this on a device connected to the internet, where nothing is ever truly private and nothing really disappears That’s not a problem with this essay as I plan to publish it, but what about private text messages? Notes? Conversations with AI chatbots?

Whether we like it or not, tools like ChatGPT are becoming fixtures of daily life. People use them to draft emails, sort out personal dilemmas, or ask questions they aren’t comfortable asking out loud to another person. But these tools aren’t confidants. They’re algorithms trained to predict the next likely word, with no mind, no morals, no memory. Are they logging dissent, mapping behavior, stockpiling keywords for some future review? Maybe not. Or maybe not yet. But let’s not underestimate the creativity of bad actors with power. The infrastructure exists, and if the political winds shift hard enough, all it takes is a flip of a switch.

When it comes to tech abuse, the current administration’s incompetence might actually be our last line of defense. These are, after all, the same people who planned a military strike in a Signal group chat, and accidentally invited a journalist.

Even so, the surveillance state doesn’t need to be competent, just connected. Metadata is already vacuumed up. GPS logs, browsing habits, biometric patterns, all cross referenced with identities.

If this all sounds like dystopian fiction, that’s only because we’ve been trained to think of it that way. But it’s not fiction. The systems are real and the only thing missing is the right justification: National security. Public order. “Family values.” “Protecting the children.” And then comes the familiar Orwellian reassurance: If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear. That’s how it always starts.

The threats aren’t just abstract anymore. 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 tries 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 risk.

We’ve been conditioned to treat comparisons to fascism as melodramatic, as alarmist. But sometimes “alarmist” just means paying attention. When journalists are attacked, courts are captured, books are pulled from shelves, and history is rewritten in real time, it isn’t hysterical to say the house is on fire.

Authoritarianism doesn’t need everyone to go silent, just enough people afraid of making noise. It thrives on hesitation. On people weighing the cost of resistance against the ease of going along. That’s the most dangerous part, not censorship itself so much as the internalized version, the self-editing, the second-guessing, the voice that says maybe just let it go, maybe don’t post that, maybe don’t write this.

But I’d rather name it now than whisper about it later. If this country is still salvageable, and I believe it is, it won’t be because we waited politely. It’ll be because enough people chose not to. Silence isn’t safety. It’s 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. Or maybe you just choose to look the other way. Either way, ask yourself this: what happens when the next president isn’t your guy? When someone you don’t trust and didn’t vote for inherits the same unchecked authority, the same gutted institutions, the same executive branch reshaped for loyalty over law?

To be fair, this didn’t start 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. He stepped on the gas. And once power expands, it rarely contracts. The people who come next don’t give it back. They 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. Guardrails. And we’re watching those 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. His interests include baseball, philosophy, and trying to make sense of the mess we call modern life. He’s not a journalist or a pundit—just 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 more important than he actually is.

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