Is the American Political System Broken Beyond Repair?
By Steven Yates
April 29, 2025
[Author’s disclaimer: the opinions and conclusions expressed in this article are solely mine, and should not be attributed to NewsWithViews.com, its editorial staff, or any other NewsWithViews.com contributing writer.]
It’s all gone sideways….
Remember Signal-gate? It looks as though Pete Hegseth created a second chat, sending sensitive information to a group including his wife, his brother, and his attorney.
The man is incompetent. He’ll soon be unloaded.
That said, there will be more to why he’ll be unloaded than meets the public eye. It won’t be over Signal-gate. Let Chuck Baldwin explain (scroll to the final section).
Baldwin also notes how Trump is on board with the unconstitutional REAL ID program. When I lived in South Carolina, I was part of a group that fought REAL ID tooth and nail. I was standing three feet away from then-governor Mark Sanford when he signed a bill declining to participate in REAL ID. (Here, here.)
South Carolina, like every other state, was eventually strongarmed. REAL ID is a perfect police state instrument. To the best of my knowledge, Trump has said nothing against it.
Trump has a nightmare on his hands with deportations. This isn’t his fault. We’re seeing fallout from 40 years of “free trade” ideology / open borders globalism … having outsourced American’s manufacturing base, de industrialized the country, and destroyed a middle class that took decades to build.
Sleepy Joe let 15 million illegals into the country. Trump inherits this mess. How does he get them out? It’s not like they’re wearing illegal on their sleeves! What’s to be done, then? Trump has pointed out — not unreasonably — that giving every suspect due process would take 200 years!
So how does ICE differentiate illegals from U.S. citizens without using police state tactics?
Even making the tall assumption that federal agents can Constitutionally demand, “Your papers please!” how many Americans could produce proof of U.S. citizenship on cue? A birth certificate, Social Security card, or passport would do it, but I’d wager that because few people need such documents very often, they can’t lay their hands on them on cue. What happens then? Send them to the detainment / deportation facility in Louisiana?
Department of Homeland Security sloppiness has already spilled over onto U.S. citizens. Over the past few weeks, a few immigration lawyers — and some who aren’t involved in immigration at all — have received letters from DHS ordering them to leave the country! Apparently no one checked to see which email address was the lawyer’s and which was the client’s. I don’t know what would explain sending such letters willy nilly to U.S citizens.
This is happening under Kristi Noem’s watch. Trump put her in charge of DHS. Another disastrous appointment! Illustrating her lack of judgment: she shoots an “untrainable” dog, then puts an account of the episode in a book, apparently not giving a thought that many voters are dog lovers!
On Easter she had a $4,000 Gucci bag snatched from under her nose in an Asylum on the Potomac restaurant. She lost her passport, apartment keys, driver’s license, DHS access badge, some medication (!), and $3,000 in cash.
Who in their right mind carries $3,000 in cash around with them in a high-end purse in this day and age? Or leaves them unattended in public?
If I had to guess, I’d surmise that DHS is in chaos courtesy of this airhead. That might not be a bad thing, actually, since the Constitution never authorized its creation in the first place. But we’re stuck with it for now, and its activities include carelessly sending terrifying letters to law-abiding U.S. citizens ordering them to leave the country!
Trump himself has more-than-toyed with the idea of sending U.S. citizens to foreign prisons: only the worst of the worst of our “homegrown,” we are assured.
First, even prisoners have rights under the Constitution, and this would blatantly violate those rights (Eight Amendment provision against “cruel and unusual punishment”).
Second, such policies would easily expand. Always keep in mind: Trump won’t be in office forever (all the talk about his seeking an unconstitutional third term notwithstanding)!
A left wing Democrat could conceivably get in, in 2028!
Whatever Trump institutes will still be around!
Do you, a U.S. citizen, want to be threatened with detainment and deportation for criticizing affirmative action “diversity, equity, inclusion” (DEI) ideology? Or, in our present environment, because you were accused of “antisemitism.”
You could ask me (maybe someone out there was thinking this), Well then, who should Trump have appointed to DHS?
Honest answer: I have no idea!
How does anyone fix this, Trump or anyone else? Isn’t it just conceivable that cultural Marxists, so-called free-traders / open borders globalists, Zionists, and many Republicans have collectively ruined the country, which is now FUBAR (stands for effed up beyond all repair)?
What Trump is trying to do right….
Trump wants to purge higher education and other affected institutions, including corporations, of cultural Marxist, affirmative action ideology, for the past several years known as DEI.
This should have been done three decades ago!
My first book was Civil Wrongs: What Went Wrong With Affirmative Action (1994). I drew connections between affirmative action, increasing criticism of it and successful lawsuits against it, and the rise of political correctness: speech codes, critical race theory, the rise of cancel culture.
That book nearly got me canceled. Perhaps that was to be expected. What I didn’t expect was that well-positioned conservatives in think tanks would ignore it!
They were ignoring the work of others, though, who had far more visibility than I did!
These people were effing scared of their effing shadows, and most of them still are!!
Pardon my language, but my patience has run out!
I predicted in ‘94 that affirmative action ideology would spread from academia and law schools until it dominated every profession in the country: law, news media, corporate America, entertainment, even the military (“women in combat” in the mid-1990s; homosexuals and “trans” people in our century).
Was I right, or was I right?
Again, though, what do we do about it now?
“DEI” is so deeply baked into institutions and into the consciousness of a public that grew up with it that getting rid of it without a federal takeover is going to be massively difficult!
Naturally I’m not advocating that!
It worked for Viktor Orbán in Hungary, someone might reply.
Hungary is a small country. Few could name a single university there. Harvard and other Ivy League institutions are known worldwide and have deep pockets. Trump should have anticipated pushback in the form of lawsuits.
The public “likes DEI,” says far-left USA Today columnist Rex Huppke!
Corporations phasing it out are losing business!
That’s the Brave New Generation(s) that grew up with it, about which I also warned two and a half decades ago!
That’s what we’re up against!
Back then, I had ideas about what would fix this mess! Now I don’t!
What Trump is getting (sometimes disastrously) wrong….
Foreign policy: Initially, back in 2015, I wasn’t going to support Trump. He struck me as a celebrity blowhard whose candidacy would quickly flame out.
But when he described U.S. foreign policy as a “complete and total disaster,” I paid attention. He gained traction in an environment of Establishment narrative collapse. His voice resonated with a growing base of support. This support won him the GOP nomination and then the presidency.
Widely circulated essays like this one helped as well.
Now, the “complete and total disaster” has returned … thanks to Trump’s fealty to a sociopath (Netanyahu) and commitment to Israel, no questions asked.
Latest example: the Houthis in Yemen, who had not threatened us. They had begun retaliating against Israel’s violation of the ceasefire agreement in Gaza.
If Trump were putting America First! he’d be telling Israel, Not Our Problem! You did this to yourself! At least he’d be demanding to know what America gains from being dragged into another war in the Middle East.
Powerful people seem to want to fight Iran. Trump is on board with this if he doesn’t get the nuclear deal he’s working on, although Israel and the West have pushed Iran to want nukes. Should war between Iran and the U.S.-Israel alliance break out, the potential for catastrophe dwarfs what was done to Iraq in 2003. If Iran should mine the Strait of Hormuz, what do you think will happen to every Western economy that depends on the oil that flows through that passage every day?
But everyone in the Asylum on the Potomac is terrified of getting on the Israeli lobby’s s**t list including Trump. In fairness, it is the Asylum’s most powerful lobby.
Isn’t it interesting how many neocons have dual U.S.-Israeli citizenships???
My question: America First? Or Israel First?
Tariffs: what Trump wants to do is clear. He wants to bring back manufacturing. But his institution of tariffs to make this happen has been erratic and unpredictable, driving markets nuts (although market oscillations — investors buying, selling, day-trading, what-have-you, based on the hope of cleverly-gotten freebies — has been entertaining to watch).
The objection I keep seeing in a range of credible sources is that not only will tariffs drive up prices for ordinary Americans and drive more small businesses under when they can’t absorb the costs like the big boys, but that because of changed technology, if manufacturing does return to the U.S. it will all be automated.
In that case, it won’t create a single job of the sort that built the economic powerhouse of the 1950s and 1960s.
No Trumpian golden age, in that case….
I only see further consolidation of wealth and power in the hands of the few, which is what Elon Musk and other Silicon Valley technocrats are counting on, I’m sure, while His Muskiness and Gen Z techies dismantle agencies like the Social Security Administration that provide a lifeline to over 70 million Americans.
The Courts and deportations: Trump is right to stand up to the far-left Obama appointees. But first, not all of those criticizing the legality of his moves are Obama appointees.
Second, even left-wingers get some things right. It appears that the Trump administration violated a 2019 court order not to deport Kilmer Abrego Garcia to El Salvador.
Trump certainly seems to be defying the U.S. Supreme Court (including two of his own appointees) which has ordered the administration to “expedite” returning Abrego Garcia to the U.S.
The Trump administration has admitted that deporting the man was a mistake.
I keep hearing: but Abrego Garcia is a gang member, a member of MS-13, and that he’s abused his wife.
If that’s true, let’s find out by bringing him back and charging him in a court of law. That’s how our system is supposed to work. The claim — made not just by Trump but by Nayib Bukele — that there’s nothing they can do seems disingenuous to me.
The latter is El Salvador’s president, and he’s saying he can’t arrange for one man to be put on a plane in his country and sent to the U.S.?
Are you effing kidding me?! If he can’t, then who can?!
Forgive me again, but this is ridiculous!!
Small wonder a lot of pundits on all sides of the aisle are talking about a Constitutional crisis. The Trump administration (as I argued previously) has already violated the First Amendment rights of every student scooped off the street and thrown in detention because they criticized Israeli mass murder of over 50,000 Gazans, most of them women and children.
I completely reject the retort that such stances are “pro-Hamas.” More weaponized language! Conservatives, can’t you see it?!
Diagnosis: Trump’s anger.
Trump 1.0 said think like (in addition to the above): “Americanism, not globalism!” His instincts were of an economic nationalist and a cultural conservative — despite the less savory elements of his past.
Trump 2.0 probably still has those two instincts, but he’s much angrier. And if anyone has a right to be angry, it’s him.
The 2020 election was stolen.
Yes, it was.
I ran some numbers. Consider: in 2004, 123,069,054 official votes were cast. Bush the Younger won.
In 2008, 129,446,839 official votes were cast. Obama won that one.
In 2012, 126,849,299 official votes were cast. Obama won again.
In 2016, 128.838,342 official votes were cast. Trump won in the Electoral College.
See the range? Between 123 and 130 million votes seems normal for the post-2000 popular vote.
Know how many official votes were tallied in 2020?
Answer: 155,507,476!
Until someone can tell me where over 25 million new voters came from, especially during a year when there was massive mail-in voting because of Captain Covid, I’ll assume a “deep rig” even if I don’t have specifics, and no matter what the judiciary and William Barr said.
Trump’s supporters protested the steal, to the point of taking the ill-advised step of invading the Capitol. The Biden regime and leftist courts (and neocons like Liz Cheney) deemed them “insurrectionists” and imprisoned them.
Trump’s enemies spent the next four years trying to destroy him, using every legal/judicial tool they could command. They tried to keep him off the 2024 ballot as an “insurrectionist.” They accused him of concealing payments to a porn star, cheating by overvaluing his properties, making off with classified documents, and of being a sex abuser and rapist. Did I miss anything?
When none of this worked and it was clear, his supporters weren’t buying it, his enemies tried to assassinate him! Twice!
Not only that, the attempts dropped from the radar within two weeks. Can you imagine what would have happened had someone taken a shot at Obama? We’d still be hearing about it!
Might it not have been for the better, had Trump been allowed to win in 2020?
I don’t think we’d be in this mess!
Water under the bridge. We have Trump 2.0, and he’s operating off an anger-driven desire for revenge.
Anger may be a right, but it’s almost never a good idea.
If we were to do something most people including Trump don’t much do these days, like read a book — we’d learn from Seneca, the Roman Stoic philosopher and author of On Anger, how destructive and ruinous uncontrolled anger is.
And when the president of the United States, arguably still the world’s most powerful country with its strongest military, is an angry, vengeful person, it threatens not just his country but the world. (It may have already made him an eager pawn of the sociopaths who want war with Iran!)
Trump is not a systematic thinker….
Whatever Trump’s instincts are, systematic thought is not one of them. Neither him nor anyone in his orbit sees its importance. I’ve posted missives on the White House website more than once. I’ve yet to get a reply, not even from an underling.
A little reflective, systematic thought about our situation would be a good idea right now!
We had an opportunity, back in 2008 and again in 2012, to elect a systematic thinker. His name was Dr. Ron Paul.
No one was interested.
Dr. Paul, author of numerous books and countless articles outlining his worldview based on Christianity and the Constitution, lacked the charisma of a Donald Trump.
He retired in 2013. (Listen to his retirement address to Congress.)
Dr. Paul was arguably the last statesman the U.S. had, and I see no one else on the horizon. (J.D. Vance was schooled by Peter Thiel, another technocrat.)
The predicament we’re now in:
THERE IS NO ONE ELSE!
I can picture someone asking me sarcastically, would you have preferred a Kamala Harris win after all?
Of course not!
Nothing I’ve said changes the basic lying and deceitful nature of Establishment Democrats. They spent four years trying to hide Joe Biden’s cognitive decline and gaslighting us as “conspiracy theorists” when we stated the obvious. They lied about Russiagate. They lied about Charlottesville. They lied about Jeffrey Epstein’s being murdered in prison. They lied about Hunter Biden’s laptop calling it “Russian disinformation.” They lied about the origins of covid. This is all in addition to their lies about Trump.
The alternatives Democrats offer: people like AOC who’s dumber than Kristi Noem!
Republicans? No one who isn’t either a technocrat, like Ramaswami, or a neocon warmonger or another globalist. (DeSantis seems to have dropped from the national radar.)
That’s where we are, people!
There is no one else!
I’ve the impression Rome had the same problem in its final days.
His Muskiness and other technocrats would privatize the whole mess and institute full technocracy based on the technofeudalism I wrote about last week.
I’m not looking to anyone, since those with the money necessary to exact change are all on the side of decadence and destruction. And because even if there were someone, that person couldn’t fix the problems we face overnight, and we’re running out of time!
I’m done.
This will be my last political commentary. I’ve been doing this for around 35 years, and my work includes three other nonfiction books. There’s little more I can say that hasn’t been said, and if what I’ve said hasn’t accomplished anything at this point, it’s not likely to.
So I’m hanging up my word processor and preparing to do other things: family things. I won’t rule out posting occasional notes on Biblical studies, or possible self-improvement if I’ve happened upon something I’ve found useful. But I’m not prioritizing this.
The U.S. is toast, is it not? It is following the Roman, Arab, Napoleonic, Ottoman, and British empires into the history books. Its cities will doubtless still be around, as are the cities that once dominated those empires. But the country’s influence is already diminishing.
Most people, moreover, don’t want the truth. They say they do and tell themselves they do, but they don’t.
Somehow, though, truth/reality always wins out! The deepest and awfulest truth: all civilizations rise, peak, lose direction, turn into empires, become corrupt and decadent, then decline and are either conquered or fall from within.
The U.K.’s Sir John Bagot Glubb, in his 1978 essay “The Fate of Empires,” identified signs of the Age of Decadence we’re in. I’ve adapted and lengthened his list for our specific situation.
Materialism: the haves worship money like a god; intellectuals tell themselves God does not exist, promote the idea that when all is said and done we’re no more than big-brained animals, then wonder why so many act the part.
Triviality and evasion: intellectuals are primarily academics lost in clouds of micro-specialization who have nothing to say that common people find useful.
Frivolity: many of these last adopt an “eat, drink, and be merry” attitude. Don’t worry; be happy! This is the best time to be alive! (The rest count money, have sex, watch porn, take drugs, or all four.)
Superficiality: national heroes are celebrities, athletes, and entertainers, not statesmen or authors.
Abandonment of founding principles: the Constitution is literally now “just a piece of paper” no matter which party controls the White House or Congress.
Currency debauchment: the dollar has lost around 98 percent of its purchasing power since Nixon killed the gold standard in 1971. The belief that we can print our way to prosperity still holds.
Marginalizing of religion: see under materialism. Realize, too, that Evangelical Christianity is deeply corrupted by Scofieldism (dispensationalism) and Zionism.
Corruption of every dominant institution. I’ve written volumes on the decline of higher education, which I saw first-hand because I was there.
Influxes of foreigners, many illegal, who do not learn English, do not assimilate, were encouraged to enter the country by Democrats who wanted votes, Republicans who wanted cheap labor, and cultural Marxists who wanted to destroy traditional white Christian America.
Irrational, aggressive foreign policy often in the service of foreign powers (e.g., Israel).
Welfare-statism: more and more people seeking to live at the expense of a bloated state bureaucracy, including corporations seeking lucrative federal contracts (corporate welfare by any other name is still corporate welfare).
Women moving into occupations previously dominated by men, who are emasculated until they struggle to reassert a semblance of their masculinity in a “manosphere.”
An obsession with sex / gender fluidity.
Peter Turchin, in End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration (2023), wrote of:
Massive and worsening economic inequality, in an environment in which the have-nots can justifiably suspect the haves of cheating. This, he argues compellingly from history, is fundamentally destabilizing.
Public immiseration, arrangements that harm ordinary Americans and make their lives miserable: unaffordable housing and healthcare are examples; so is a “gig economy.”
Overproduction of elite aspirants, more educated people trying to rise in a system than there are jobs or other positions for them to occupy, resulting in:
Rising counter-elites who appeal to frustrated elite aspirants and lead the adoption, increasingly, of a burn-it-all-down mindset.
I made my first predictions starting 35 years ago; they were ignored. Most came true. This is ignored.
So be it.
I see no hope that any of the above will be turned around in my lifetime, if ever, because the “influencers” capable of making a difference tend to be superficial, poorly educated, and without motivation to do more than make entertaining videos on TikTok. Most are complete ditzes at anything except getting seen online.
I’m not an “influencer.” Since you have to be one to expect, realistically, to make a difference, I’m going into retirement.
© 2025 Steven Yates – All Rights Reserved
E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com
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Steven Yates is a (recovering) ex-academic with a PhD in Philosophy. He taught for more than 15 years total at several universities in the Southeastern U.S. He authored three books, more than 20 articles, numerous book reviews, and review essays in academic journals and anthologies. Refused tenure and unable to obtain full-time academic employment (and with an increasing number of very fundamental philosophical essays refused publication in journals), he turned to alternative platforms and hereticl notions, including about academia itself.
In 2012 he moved to Chile. He married a Chilean national in 2014. Among his discoveries in South America: the problems of the U.S. are problems everywhere, because human nature is the same everywhere. The problems are problems of Western civilization as a whole.
As to whether he’ll stay in Chile … stay tuned!
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Read the book (Annie Jacobsen’s)!
Kamala, on the other hand, will do as she’s told, just like Joe did. Since she owes every position she’s ever held to Diversity-Inclusion-Equity (DIE) policies, she’s arguably not bright enough to do otherwise.
Many of us, back in the day — for me it was the early 1990s — underestimated the cultural power the hard left had even then. This power is based on emotion, not reason. It is also based on the Platonist idea that some are most fit to rule others. This is a powerful psychological motivator in some personality types who identify with power-elitism and believe they should be allowed to dictate terms to the unwashed peasants. And to enlist as many of the latter as possible to further their own enslavement to agendas, via “virtue signaling” or worse.
Another result is the diminished quality of everything, as well as ease of use. When I was a child (1960s), my parents bought some top-of-the-line Ethan Allen furniture. I still have some of it. It’s over 60 years old, and in very good condition (a coffee stain here or there).
What we’re seeing amounts to a mass revolt against planned budget cuts aimed directly at farmers announced near the end of December by the (pro-globalist) Olaf Scholz government that took the reins in Germany last year. The cuts were to include subsidies for diesel fuel and tax exemptions for tractors and other farm equipment.
A friend drew my attention to it: 
I’m surprised Dystopian fiction and films are not more popular than they are. But then again, the 2020s have seemed to make Dystopia redundant!
The memes are there: we’ve probably all seen the one of Bill Gates with an evil grin on his face holding up a needle.
Dystopian protagonists offer hope. In The Matrix, Neo promised freedom from the control grid. The character V, in V for Vendetta, fomented a mass uprising against the tyranny, with the Guy Fawkes mask as his symbol.
