Until recently, i.e., until the arrival of Donald Trump and his MAGA clones and the Woke speech police, the United States was a democracy legally balanced (more precariously than most Americans realized) between law and long-standing custom.

Over time some of those customs were changed by law or codified into law, but far from all of them. Although the separation of church and state is mandated by the Constitution, that separation was maintained as much by custom as by law.

What we’ve seen over the last few years is a war between the extremists of the right and the extremists of the left, a war exploited for his personal benefit by Donald Trump, which is bad enough, but what is even worse is the tactic he’s used to great effect.

That tactic is simply seeking out customs and practices that used to have a certain force, almost of law, and overriding them because they’re not enshrined in law. This is nothing new. It’s happened before, but never on the scale pursued by Trump.

Trump tears down the east wing of the White House because there’s no law specifically forbidding it. He orders the militarization of national guard units and attacks on foreign boats and ships as part of a “war” against supposed drug cartels, because there’s not a clear legal definition of “war.”

The U.S. legal system was never designed to have to respond to such acts on a short-term and timely fashion, which is one of the principal reasons why he’s getting away with so much.

The other reason is because extremists control too much of each major party, and the two parties are deadlocked because the party leaders are effectively controlled by their extremists, even though most Americans don’t want the extremes of either party.

As a result of Trump’s tactics, even without Trump, the U.S. will still face the problem he’s exploiting, and that’s the fact that, at present, it appears as if corporations, presidents, and bureaucrats can damn well do anything that’s not definitively prohibited by law – and that to stop that will effectively require an authoritarian state controlling everything because the majority of Americans either don’t care, don’t understand the problem, or support one or the other extreme.

I suspect we all have TV commercials that rub us the wrong way. I know I do, one in particular. It not only irks me, but I find it offensive and dangerously subversive at the same time. For those who can’t guess from the blog title, it’s a commercial for an insurance company that tries to ridicule the behavior of “parents” and ends with a statement along the lines of “we can’t save you from becoming your parents,” but we can give you good insurance.

Admittedly, some “parental” behaviors are easy to caricature and ridicule. After all, who doesn’t have or know of a parent who has gone to excesses? The other aspect of the commercials is that all of those I’ve seen feature men becoming their parents.

But just as there are parents whose behavior is either abominable and/or laughable, there are those who have done well by their offspring. I also don’t know any parents who are perfect, who never made a mistake.

What bothers me most about this series of commercials is that it presents grown men (unless I’ve missed those that feature women) who adopt mannerisms and behaviors (supposedly from their parents) as foolish, out of touch, and laughable. The first time I saw and heard one of these commercials, I found it slightly amusing. After months, if not years, of repetition, I find the series both disturbing and dangerous.

That’s not to say that parents haven’t done foolish things – and in too many instances dangerous and criminal acts – but ridiculing an entire generation in order to sell insurance irritates me. More important, this approach also contributes to the ongoing practice of polarizing society, in the sense that it implies that older people are inept and foolish and that younger people should know better.

While insurance companies have the right to advertise their product in any fashion that doesn’t defame specific individuals, this kind of sales pitch strikes me as a “softer” version of Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans.

But then, I’m an “outdated” parent and grandparent.

Let’s see. For the moment, Trump’s latest dictator-like act is to rip the east wing off the White House, supposedly the “people’s house,” without any authorization from Congress in order to add a palatial ballroom that may well dwarf the rest of the White House complex.

At roughly the same time, Secretary of Defense/War Pete Hegseth attempted to require news reporters to sign an agreement not to print anything he hadn’t approved or to lose their Pentagon access. Virtually, all the reporters refused, turned in their press badges, and left the Pentagon. In return, Hegseth then issued an order to all military that no military personnel could speak to or provide any information to the press, Congress, or apparently anyone else that the Pentagon Office of Legislative Affairs had not approved.

The Trump Administration is citing a 1956 law as the basis by which the Secretary of State can unilaterally deport virtually anyone who the Secretary finds poses any danger to the U.S., without any recourse for an individual so cited, even if they’re a citizen or a legal immigrant.

Hegseth is ordering the Navy to attack and sink “suspicious” boats in the Caribbean before ascertaining what they really might be transporting.

Trump is still pressing for the Supreme Court to allow him to federalize state national guard units and to approve his “declaring war” on cities he doesn’t like, without the vote of the Congress.

ICE continues to round up large bodies of people, including U.S. citizens, on the slightest provocation.

Trump continues to fire federal employees that he doesn’t like, with little or no legal basis, to selectively defund federal activities he dislikes, while shifting funds, again illegally, to programs of which he approves.

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson is choosing which recently-elected members of the House he’ll swear in immediately and which he won’t – and all the Republicans were sworn in expeditiously, and the sole Democrat is still waiting – possibly because she represents the vote that would require Johnson to call a vote on a measure to immediately release all the Epstein files.

That’s just what I know, but even that sounds an awful lot like what goes on in a dictatorship, and what I want to know is why so many Americans don’t even seem to care.

The last time there was a possibility of a government shutdown, the Democrats gave in and attempted to work out something. The result?

The Republicans pushed through Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill,” with the result that less affluent families will get stuck with less (and in some cases no) healthcare, or much higher health insurance premiums, while the wealthiest of Americans got massive tax cuts, and the poorest essentially got none.

Now the Republicans are saying, “Stop the shutdown, and only then will we negotiate.”

The last time the Democrats agreed to that, they got rolled – badly. The Republicans have no real desire to negotiate, and the odds are that, even if they do, they’ll screw the Democrats.

In a special election in late September, Arizona elected Adelita Grijalva, a Democrat, as a replacement representative from Arizona. That was almost a month ago. Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, refuses to swear her in until he reconvenes the full House, but he’s already sworn in three Republican replacement representatives this year, immediately after their election without bringing the House into session. Yet Johnson has vowed not to seat Grijalva until the shutdown is over.

So why on earth would the Democrats want to give up the only power they have right now and trust Johnson and the Republicans?

Often, history is written by the victor. More often it’s written by the survivors, who may or may not be the victors. More often than that, it’s written decades or generations later by someone with an agenda.

As a result, it’s wise to be skeptical of the “lessons of history” and to pay more attention to verifiable facts and a wider range of views. “History” also changes, depending on who’s presenting it, as one can easily see by looking at the versions of U.S. history presented today by those with different views and agendas.

This has been the case throughout history. The battle at Kadesh in 1274 BCE, between the Egyptians and the Hittites, was a bloody and brutal draw, but Ramses II had celebratory inscriptions of victory chiseled into stone all over Egypt. It wasn’t until the last 50 years or so, with the discovery of the massive clay tablet library in the ruins of the Hittite capital of Hattusas, that historians were able to sort out what really happened.

For generations, there was a widely held view that Europe suffered the “dark ages” from the time of the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century CE until roughly the Renaissance. Except… it didn’t. What it did suffer was a massive fragmentation of governance. Later, the term “Middle Ages” was adopted, but there was still a perception of darkness and plagues, even though the Roman Empire also suffered darkness, anarchy, and plagues.

Recent archeological studies have shown, for example, that after the Romans withdrew from England, very little changed in people’s everyday lives over the next few centuries. The same was true in France under the Merovingian kings. Fewer massive buildings and roads were constructed, most likely because smaller kingdoms couldn’t muster the resources, especially when there was more local warfare.

In the United States, as everywhere, history has often been distorted or “revised.” Historical revisionists have persistently claimed that the Civil War was not about slavery. This persistent myth claimed the war was fought over states’ rights or economic differences, but in reality, the protection and expansion of slavery was the central cause of the Confederacy because the entire economy of the south was based on slavery. After reconstruction, a set of lies permeated the south portraying the Confederacy as a noble and heroic cause and whitewashing the history of slavery and elevating Confederate leaders like Robert E. Lee to undeserved heroic status.

In the mid-1930s Hitler and other right-wing German nationalists propagated the false claim that the army had not been defeated on the battlefield, but that it was betrayed by enemies on the home front – specifically Jews, Marxists, and other leftists, who undermined the war effort and forced the military to surrender, an agenda designed to shift blame away from the military and the politicians.

History is messy and multifaceted, and to come close to understanding any period takes a great deal of study, which is why most people go with generalizations that often bear more resemblance to what they want to believe than to what actually occurred.