#limiting democracy

[uwmspeccoll]

Milestone Monday: Democracy Interrupted

On this day in 411 BCE, during the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, a political crisis shook the foundations of Athenian democracy. The Athenian Coup, which resulted in the overthrow of Athens' democratic government and led to the establishment of a brief oligarchy known as the Four Hundred. This regime ultimately failed due to widespread discontent among the populace, and by the end of 410 BC, democracy was restored in Athens.

To commemorate this pivotal event in classical history, we are featuring our Limited Editions Club copy of The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides. This 1974 edition includes Richard Crawley’s (1840-1893) English translation, revised by R.C. Feetham, with an introduction by Peter Pouncey. It is richly illustrated with eight double-spread, two-color woodcuts and twenty-five black-and-white woodcuts by the Greek artist A. Tassos, including chapter headings, facing page pairs, and a frontispiece. Six maps, specially drawn for this edition by John Morris, provide historical context, while Eugene Ettenberg designed the format. The woodcut inserts were printed in Athens under the artist’s supervision at the Aspioti Elka printing plant, and the text was composed by John Stone in Concord, NH, then printed by Case, Lockwood & Brainard in Bloomfield, CT. This rare volume is a stunning tribute to both the artistry and the enduring legacy of Thucydides' historical account.

-View more Milestone Monday posts

-View more from The Limited Editions Club

--Melissa, Distinctive Collections Library Assistant

[pratchettquotes]

"One has to move with the times, of course," said the Patrician, shaking his head.

"We tend not to, over the road," said Ridcully. "It only encourages them."

"People do not understand the limits of tyranny," said Vetinari, as if talking to himself. "They think that because I can do what I like I can do what I like. A moment's thought reveals, of course, that this cannot be so."

"Oh, it is the same with magic," said the Archchancellor. "If you flash spells around like there's no tomorrow, there's a good chance that there won't be."

Terry Pratchett, Unseen Academicals

[ablogofcourage]

[memenewsdotcom]

Trump 'not joking' about possibly seeking third term

[the-everqueen]

so hard to keep the voicemails to my state reps civil when all i really want to say is I HOPE YOU BURN IN HELL YOU SICK MOTHERFUCKERS.

[roguekhajiit]

This is just a friendly reminder that the Civil Rights Act wasn't signed until July 2, 1964.

Just for some perspective.

5 of the 9 supreme court justices are older than the Civil Rights Act.

4 of those 5 are old enough to remember when Whites Only establishments existed.

1 of those 4 wouldn't even have been able to enter such establishments.

These are the same people taking power away from federal agencies, telling us that the president is above the law and allowing for unhoused individuals to be jailed.

[aroaceinneedofspace]

How Project 2025 and the re-election of Donald Trump in the USA could negatively affect LGBTQIA+ rights

The above article explains my point a lot better than I ever could, but I am begging all of you on this site, particularly those of you who are living in the USA or have the right to vote there, to please consider the above. I don't normally share my political beliefs, but Trump has already stated that he wants to reverse a lot of the rights that the LGBTQIA+ community currently has in the US, which are largely delineated in Project 25. Within this law and some of his policies, Trump has made it clear that he would ban gender-affirming care for minors and he also intends to limit queer discrimination protections in the workplace. Moreover, the project would reinstate a transgender military ban and it would rescind health care protection for trans people, thus urging the Congress to define gender as male and female, which would solely be fixed at birth. Overall, his policies would stop any and all acknowledgement and acceptance of gender identity and of members of the LGBTQIA+ community in general. Please feel free to not take this at face value and to instead do your own research; the best way to combat Trump and the lack of democracy that he is encouraging is to conduct research and to fight misinformation. Sorry to reiterate this, but I beg all of you to please bear Project 25 in mind when voting in the 2024 presidential election, for those of you that live in the United States.

[slaviclore]

i guess the question is if a nation votes in a fair and democratic election to abolish its own democracy, should it be permitted to do so?

[daydreamerdrew]

All-Star Comics (1940) #8, published in October 1941

[lil-oreo-crumbles]

You know back when the AU was a comic, I was able to gloss over so much of the politics of Mewni Creek I was not well equipped to handle and focus instead on the relationships and bonds that were important to the story going forward and explain the new governmental system of this combined world after it had been established and the masses calmed long down.

But now? Now that it’s a fic? Now that I have to essentially re-start the Ovelia establishment and better flesh out her blossoming friendships and connections to the main cast?

I’ve really gotta buckle down and write the politics and post-Cleaved chaos don’t I.

Man…

[grongleboy]

given that the supreme court is a governing body that isn’t publicly voted in, doesn’t have term limits, has the power to make decisions that drastically change laws nationwide, and just recently declared that the president can do whatever they want as long as they do it openly and officially…… maybe the supreme court shouldn’t exist??? or at least should be taken out behind the shed??? (haha jk :) )

[commonsensecommentary]

“Elections may come and go—each ushering in a bright new crop of office holders—but promised reforms will often be frustrated by those occupying the countless little government cubicles where innovations go to die.”

(From my blog archive)

[nicklloydnow]

“McCarthy, Tocqueville and democracy in America

Rather than speak in terms of Hobbes or Rousseau, it is more useful to suggest that there is a Tocquevillian political ethos present in McCarthy's body of work. This is because Alexis de Tocqueville encapsulates some of the political and philosophical contradictions which I argue are present in McCarthy's work. Moreover, Tocqueville's own work embodies precisely the resistance to ideological classification that we find in McCarthy. Tocqueville has received scant, if any, critical attention in terms of understanding McCarthy. However, his sprawling text Democracy in America offers political observations and critical insights about democratic practices and American identity which are of enormous value for understanding the political components of McCarthy's fiction. While I do nọt aim to suggest that McCarthy aligns necessarily with Tocqueville's political preferences, it is relevant to elaborate on how some of Tocqueville's observations about American political life help us to understand the political reflections implicit to McCarthy's prose.

The most obvious reason why Tocqueville is relevant to understanding McCarthy's work is that Tocqueville wrote in a later period in the chronology of political philosophy, so his ideas therefore are more historically proximate to McCarthy's own political milieu. Tocqueville made the observations on which he based Democracy in America in 1831, when the American democratic experiment was relatively young, if decisively maturing. While indebted to writers in the history of political thought - Hobbes, Rousseau and Montesquieu - Tocqueville was unencumbered by the philosophical expressions of the state of nature found in political theory. Tocqueville based his understanding of democratic political philosophy on concrete and factual observations of one of history's first grand-scale democratic experiments. Democracy in America is a remarkable work in ambition: because of its depth and range it functions at the intersection of journalism, anthropology, history, sociology, travelogue, political pathologies and political philosophy.

On the surface, McCarthy would not seem a natural ally for Tocqueville. Tocqueville suggested that the dominant trait of the United States is its ahistoricality. Given that the United States was in its relative infancy when Tocqueville was observing and writing about it, this positing of ahistoricality is based on his observation that American democracy arises from an ancestral amnesia where: each man forgets his ancestors, but it hides his descendants from him and separates him from his contemporaries'. This is certainly one place where we can say that McCarthy is not Tocquevillian. McCarthy is fascinated with how the long history of humanity illuminates the present and foreshadows the future - as I have evidenced in my appraisal of McCarthy's philosophical arguments for the continuing relevance of our evolutionary antecedents - where the ancient and the primeval coexist with humans' ongoing linguistic and technological development. Moreover, McCarthy is continually at pains to show how a forgetting, individually and collectively, of an enigmatic covenant of the past, present and future removes the possibility of any form of purposive meaning.

While Tocqueville noted the ahistoricality of American democracy, this view was tempered by his belief in the necessity of the continual refashioning of American democracy. The vitality of America stems from affirming process over identity; it is a country constantly engaged in the making of itself and its history. For Tocqueville, the dearth of historical meaning in American democracy is not necessarily a bad thing, since it bequeaths the populace with some necessary contradictions. While fraught on an individual level, that democracy is the constant process of being made and unmade is utterly essential for the proper functioning of the political sphere. As such, the American democratic spirit, the pursuit of a more perfect constitutional union, does imply a repudiation of the historical, since dogged individual self-determination, under a guiding ethos of 'equality of opportunity', requires one's historical origins to remain secondary to the capacity for self-reinvention. If self-invention is necessary, one ought not to be, and is not, strictly bound to one's own history. It follows that the overall body politic must be essentially weak and fallible rather than fixed or over-determined by past political mechanisms. Meaning is there to be achieved by an effort of will. For Tocqueville, in the political world: 'political principles, laws, and human institutions seem malleable, things that can be turned and combined at will [. . .] everything is agitated, contested, uncertain'. Thus, the fundamental weakness of democratic institutions is essential to American political identity. The absence of a centre delimits sovereign centralisation and hierarchy. According to Tocqueville, by partitioning federal authority through a constitutional separation of powers, the effect is that power remains weak and indirect. This should not be mistaken for anarchy or disorder, but on the contrary should be viewed as a 'love of order and of legality'.

Tocqueville's necessary contingency at the heart of government and democratic institutions evokes McCarthy's metaphysical proposition seen in the Woodward interview. If violence and contest are the central tenets of reality for McCarthy, it follows that McCarthy is a democratic writer in a Tocquevillian vein, as the political constitution of the American body politic reflects the contingent nature of reality itself. The political register of McCarthy's writing thus corresponds to what I described, when analysing The Sunset Limited, as a type of 'mitigated Platonism'. Democracy is not indexed to an external idea or reality which is impervious to historical power relations. McCarthy, while not necessarily endorsing this or that class or party of participatory or representative democracy, or even the desirability of democracy itself, can still be argued to be a type of democratic realist. He is a writer who aims to represent the unblemished consequences of the contested demos as it transpires. The reality which American democracy generates is not ideal and neither is it to be idolised or fetishised. For Tocqueville, as much as for McCarthy, democratic reality, whether oppressive or emancipatory, is always considered fabricated: there to be made, manufactured and produced, and consequently unfinished. In literary terms, this has a cacophonous effect, giving voice to benign and malign voices, recognising the inevitability of power, rhetoric and political seduction as much as a tolerance of the multiple traditions constituting the demos.

Elsewhere, Tocqueville determined that American democracy was defined by a fundamental contradiction: it was both optimistic and pessimistic simultaneously. Fatalism was, as it is usually understood, dismal, inert and pessimistic. For example, inherent to democracy is the possibility of a situation where:

The vices of those who govern and the imbecility of the governed would not be slow to bring it to ruin; and the people, tired of its representatives and of themselves, would create freer institutions or soon return to stretching out at the feet of a single master.

However, this fatalism is paired with a faith in progress, since Americans:

All have a lively faith in human perfectibility; they judge that the diffusion of enlightenment will necessarily produce useful results, that ignorance will bring fatal effects; all consider society as a body in progress; humanity as a changing picture, in which nothing is or ought to be fixed forever, and they admit that what seems good to them today can be replaced tomorrow by the better that is still hidden.

What is interesting about Tocqueville's descriptions is that the contradiction is functional. American optimism works because of American fatalism. Tocqueville's America is an optimistic democratic society; however, paradoxically, this optimism is entwined with a fraught pessimism. Because the foundation of the American body politic is built on equality of opportunity as well as the individual's pursuit of happiness, Americans in Tocqueville's account come to believe that prosperity, material acquisition and wellbeing are always within their grasp. But, because material wellbeing is directly correlated to the pleasures of their mortal bodies, they are condemned to agonise continually over any prospective loss of the pleasures they hold, or over not achieving the pleasures they perceive they merit. Pursuing individual material prosperity leads to honour and respectability, but beneath the veneer of respectable prosperity there exists a deeper malaise. For Tocqueville, such are the costs of existing in a meritocracy in which prosperity is enchained to personal abilities in direct competition with all others:

When the man who lives in democratic countries compares himself individually to all those who surround him, he feels with pride that he is the equal of each of them; but when he comes to view the sum of those like him and places himself at the side of this great body, he is immediately overwhelmed by his own insignificance and his weakness.

With respect to McCarthy, Tocqueville offers a unique precursor to the chaotic democratic spirit present in McCarthy's literature.

McCarthy also, throughout his work, depicts the two sides of democratic fatalism. McCarthy's writing is obviously a by-product of a democratic state and one is constantly struck by the passive, pessimistic fatalism of the literary world and characters he creates. Even so, the upside of his characters' pursuit of either essential material wellbeing or riches continually affirms a survival of hope and possibility - most acutely in Blood Meridian, The Road and No Country for Old Men - even if such hope remains fretful, fidgety and wholly brittle. As with the unfolding of American democracy itself, the perpetual pursuit of psychological or social harmony offers no guarantees or resolution in the end. McCarthy's characters are invariably trapped in an anxious wait for the good news that never arrives due to the essential incompletion of the American project he portrays. The framing of democratic politics in McCarthy is necessarily bleak because American democracy, either as a nascent or a mature entity, is chaotic, imperfect, contentious, tumultuous and ultimately without hope. Thus, as so often with McCarthy, we can see a collapsing of oppositional thinking, in this case optimism and pessimism.

What makes McCarthy's writing interesting is that he is both optimistic and pessimistic. McCarthy, like Tocqueville, spotted the tension in democracies, where individuals hold a faith that things will stubbornly work themselves out in the end, and this faith coexists with the ever-present sense of impending threat that prosperity will be taken away. McCarthy does not so much refuse the idea of progress as refuse the idea that American democracy is necessarily self-correcting. In colloquial terms, you cannot have the good without the bad. McCarthy's democratic world entails that the general political mood of his fiction situates itself firmly within American political identity, providing a remarkable mix of failed idealism and stubborn pragmatism. Ultimately, what unites the characters of his oeuvre is the inevitability of failed idealism co-existing with a pragmatic hope for survival.

The political pathology in Tocqueville's version of democracy is present throughout McCarthy's work. McCarthy's novels, with the notable exception of democratic collapse represented in The Road, are uniformly situated within the era of American democracy. If for Tocqueville, democracy invariably disturbs and unsettles the psychological self-description of individuals, then similarly, most of McCarthy's characters experience unsettled ways of feeling, cognising and behaving. As I have argued previously, this is particularly the case with Sheriff Bell's developing uncertainty and wisdom in No Country for Old Men; in Suttree's active rejection of prevailing customs and mores in Suttree; in the boy who transcends his father's pragmatism in The Road; in Lester Ballard and the perverse underbelly of the Tennessee social order, and with the kid grappling with the domineering influence of the Judge in Blood Meridian - all present the obverse underside of American optimism and exceptionalism. Such as it is, McCarthy's characters are the creations of both democratic malaise and democratic accomplishment. This is necessarily the case, since American democracy exists to cultivate the optimistic self-determination of its citizenship. As Tocqueville proposes, 'From Maine to Florida, from Missouri to the Atlantic Ocean, they believe that the origin of all legitimate powers is in the people.’ McCarthy's characters stand or fall on the extent to which they can or cannot transcend themselves. They, too, are perpetually unfinished, in the process of making themselves, and are a consequence of the way democratic decisions subject them both to a life of uncertainty, but also to a life of possibility and renewal.

If there is a political imaginary in McCarthy's work it resides in coping with a contagion of breakdown, crisis and the mutability of power relations. McCarthy's democratic realism, in its simplest form, tries to understand democratic humans as they live and as they are produced. Given the radical contingency of character psychology that occupies his literature, we can add another trait that McCarthy shares with Tocqueville's account of American democracy: anti-authoritarianism. Put in the simplest terms, McCarthy's literature retains a rebellious, anarchic, even populist scorn for figures of institutional authority: police, social workers, lawyers, clergy and corporate functionaries. As I have argued in Chapter 6, Sheriff Bell offers a particularly sharp example of this: the tragedy of his character emerges from the gradual shedding of his conservative shibboleths. In his more Tocquevillian moments, the political ethos of McCarthy's writing vigorously pinpoints that authority and hierarchy is not natural, with McCarthy revelling in portraying misfits and anachronistic characters which embarrass and shame the pretensions of pompous and unfeeling authority. Thus, the tragedy and renewal of McCarthy's characters are shaped by an irresolution that amounts to a perverse egalitarianism, where all humans hold the possibility and denial of their salvation concurrently.

This weird egalitarianism shows why one cannot easily suggest that McCarthy's written work sits well with conventional conservative pieties. McCarthy continually represents the importance and equality of the forgotten, the lost, misfits and delinquents: those who lose out to historical shifts. That he keeps these voices alive serves to openly embarrass any pretensions that democracy is settled or residing in long traditions. McCarthy is perhaps therefore one of the most democratic of writers, as his work continually serves to stimulate enthusiasm for the possibility of social and political equality, even if that equality is bounded with the inevitable chaos and contingency of life. While it would be inaccurate to argue that McCarthy is a socialist or motivated specifically by, say, a Marxist critique of consumer capitalism, it is clearly the case that his characters engage in a perpetual material struggle for equal recognition. This is nowhere more evident than in The Sunset Limited, with the symmetrical struggle for mutual recognition we find in White and Black. However, because of the ineradicable contingency purveying all McCarthy's writing, and by extension his representation of American democracy itself, any struggle for equality is tragically inaccessible. And therefore, McCarthy exhibits the Tocquevillian paradox: American democracy is radically contingent and ordered; however, it is this very contingency that makes democracy possible. Also, if contingency implies that innumerable possibilities can come to pass, the end of democracy itself must be one of them, which is of course the thought-experiment that The Road entertains.

The fugue of impending threat that adorns practically all of McCarthy's writing thus must be read as undermining any inherent declinism, since ending, in the Tocquevillian sense, is entwined with a possibility of renewal. The rhetoric of declinism is usually distinguished by corruption, decay, nihilism and the weakness of political institutions, and this is certainly evident with McCarthy. Quite often, declinism accompanies a fascistic critique of intellectuals, ideas economic instrumentalism over culture, spirit and vitality, where political institutions are in a state of irreversible decay? While these themes are obvious in McCarthy, they are not paramount. Given that' McCarthy's texts tend to gravitate inexorably towards the apocalypticism of The Road, clearly McCarthy thinks that the American democratic experiment, at best, is not robust enough to withstand whatever catastrophic event precipitates The Road, or at worst is in a de facto state of erosion to the point of self-annihilation. However, as I hope should be clear by now, The Road as ending, as decline, is not the end. The story actually shows that humans can muddle on in the face of enormous hardship. Thus, McCarthy unites the fatalism and optimism that Tocqueville sees at the core of American democracy. What is so interesting about McCarthy and why his literature resists political classification is that his representation of the relations between ruler and ruled show him at his most philosophical. The political inflection of his literature is fundamentally Socratic and McCarthy's political representation is a fly in the ointment of democratic self-assurance and smugness.

The political philosophy present in McCarthy's work is less libertarian conservatism and more democratic anarchism. As we saw in the way the TVA figures in McCarthy's work, we find a scepticism of authority and large-scale transformative projects as well as any faith in individuals and groups to self-govern successfully. McCarthy's democratic realism itself mirrors this logic in his representation of democratic life, with characters swaying between chaos and complacency, resentment, relief, hope and despair. The pursuit of enough material prosperity, as we saw with Llewelyn Moss, only offers an illusion of comfort as well as a complacent assumption that the political order is fundamentally sound. However, what McCarthy portrays throughout his literature is the underside of material progress, showing that American democracy 'works' through ever-present crises. It is not specific ideologies that fracture democracy; democracy must itself be fractured, weak and dispersed. Beneath the underlying stability of the democratic order lies a mélange of competing ideas, values and alternative 'truths'. In sum, the trauma that is always present in McCarthy's literature - Rinthy and Culla's base origin in Outer Dark, the apocalyptic disaster occasioning The Road, the original murder of The Orchard Keeper, the violence of Blood Meridian - is never just a singular traumatic event tied to individual character psychology, but instead reflects the broader manifestation of crises ever present in America's democratic experiment. However, as with the precarious structures in The Orchard Keeper, we should not take McCarthy's writing of crises as a validation of wild, chaotic anarchy or authoritarian rule. Instead, the political philosophy that is detectable in McCarthy's writing endeavours to think the complications of structure and chaos, rule and misrule, law and anarchy.

While Tocqueville thought the never-ending impending threat and crises might not lead to anarchy, this cannot be said for McCarthy. Most probably, for Tocqueville, the eventual outcome of democratic fatalism would be inertia, lethargy and stagnation. For McCarthy, the outcome foreshadowed in The Orchard Keeper is fulfilled in the anarchic savagery of The Road and American democracy's inability to cope with the novel's inaugural disaster. As with the other themes I have tackled throughout this work, the political function of McCarthy's literary imaginary blends the new and novel with the ancient and archaic. The chronology of McCarthy's narratives is preceded by an even longer story, one with deep roots in human evolution and the evolution of human societies. As we saw with Blood Meridian, humans' drive to civility, order and hierarchical rule is inseparable from popular demands for autonomy, self-organisation, mutual aid, voluntary association and even direct democracy. Hence, the conservative Sheriff Bell in No Country for Old Men vacillates between certainty and uncertainty, a representative of the state's power and frailty simultaneously. Bell's essential weakness and fallibility announces a broader desire for self-directed community and belonging. Bell is weak in the same sense that power is decentralised in America: power is elusive and ubiquitous, distant, yet somehow always to hand.” (p. 181 - 189)

[blueheartbookclub]

"A Foundation of Modern Political Thought: A Review of John Locke's Second Treatise of Government"

John Locke's "Second Treatise of Government" stands as a cornerstone of modern political philosophy, presenting a compelling argument for the principles of natural rights, social contract theory, and limited government. Written against the backdrop of political upheaval in 17th-century England, Locke's treatise remains as relevant and influential today as it was upon its publication.

At the heart of Locke's work lies the concept of natural rights, wherein he asserts that all individuals are born with inherent rights to life, liberty, and property. Locke argues that these rights are not granted by governments but are instead derived from the natural state of humanity. Through logical reasoning and appeals to natural law, Locke lays the groundwork for the assertion of individual rights as fundamental to the legitimacy of government.

Central to Locke's political theory is the notion of the social contract, wherein individuals voluntarily enter into a political community to secure their rights and promote their common interests. According to Locke, legitimate government arises from the consent of the governed, and its authority is derived from its ability to protect the rights of its citizens. This contract between rulers and the ruled establishes the basis for legitimate political authority and provides a framework for assessing the legitimacy of governmental actions.

Locke's treatise also advocates for the principle of limited government, arguing that the powers of government should be strictly defined and circumscribed to prevent tyranny and abuse of authority. He contends that governments exist to serve the interests of the people and should be subject to checks and balances to prevent the concentration of power in the hands of a few. Locke's advocacy for a separation of powers and the rule of law laid the groundwork for modern democratic governance and constitutionalism.

Moreover, Locke's emphasis on the right to revolution remains a contentious and influential aspect of his political philosophy. He argues that when governments fail to fulfill their obligations to protect the rights of citizens, individuals have the right to resist and overthrow oppressive regimes. This revolutionary doctrine has inspired movements for political reform and self-determination throughout history, serving as a rallying cry for those seeking to challenge unjust authority.

In conclusion, John Locke's "Second Treatise of Government" is a seminal work that continues to shape the discourse on political theory and governance. Through his eloquent prose and rigorous argumentation, Locke presents a compelling vision of a just and legitimate political order grounded in the principles of natural rights, social contract, and limited government. His ideas have left an indelible mark on the development of liberal democracy and remain essential reading for anyone interested in understanding the foundations of modern political thought.

John Locke's "Second Treatise of Government" is available in Amazon in paperback 12.99$ and hardcover 19.99$ editions.

Number of pages: 181

Language: English

Rating: 9/10                                           

Link of the book!

Review By: King's Cat

[wreckingball4good]

It’s now invaded my timeline again for the current election cycle so here’s fair warning that I’m severing ties with any and all accounts that push that Vote Blue No Matter Who shit, no questions asked.

[yesornopolls]

The article is under the cut because paywalls suck

This is an edited transcript of an audio essay on “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.

If you want to understand the first few weeks of the second Trump administration, you should listen to what Steve Bannon told PBS’s “Frontline” in 2019:

Steve Bannon: The opposition party is the media. And the media can only, because they’re dumb and they’re lazy, they can only focus on one thing at a time. … All we have to do is flood the zone. Every day we hit them with three things. They’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff done. Bang, bang, bang. These guys will never — will never be able to recover. But we’ve got to start with muzzle velocity. So it’s got to start, and it’s got to hammer, and it’s got to — Michael Kirk: What was the word? Bannon: Muzzle velocity.

Muzzle velocity. Bannon’s insight here is real. Focus is the fundamental substance of democracy. It is particularly the substance of opposition. People largely learn of what the government is doing through the media — be it mainstream media or social media. If you overwhelm the media — if you give it too many places it needs to look, all at once, if you keep it moving from one thing to the next — no coherent opposition can emerge. It is hard to even think coherently.

Donald Trump’s first two weeks in the White House have followed Bannon’s strategy like a script. The flood is the point. The overwhelm is the point. The message wasn’t in any one executive order or announcement. It was in the cumulative effect of all of them. The sense that this is Trump’s country now. This is his government now. It follows his will. It does what he wants. If Trump tells the state to stop spending money, the money stops. If he says that birthright citizenship is over, it’s over.

Or so he wants you to think. In Trump’s first term, we were told: Don’t normalize him. In his second, the task is different: Don’t believe him.

Trump knows the power of marketing. If you make people believe something is true, you make it likelier that it becomes true. Trump clawed his way back to great wealth by playing a fearsome billionaire on TV; he remade himself as a winner by refusing to admit he had ever lost. The American presidency is a limited office. But Trump has never wanted to be president, at least not as defined in Article II of the U.S. Constitution. He has always wanted to be king. His plan this time is to first play king on TV. If we believe he is already king, we will be likelier to let him govern as a king.

Don’t believe him. Trump has real powers — but they are the powers of the presidency. The pardon power is vast and unrestricted, and so he could pardon the Jan. 6 rioters. Federal security protection is under the discretion of the executive branch, and so he could remove it from Anthony Fauci and Mike Pompeo and John Bolton and Mark Milley and even Brian Hook, a largely unknown former State Department official under threat from Iran who donated time to Trump’s transition team. It was an act of astonishing cruelty and callousness from a man who nearly died by an assassin’s bullet — as much as anything ever has been, this, to me, was an X-ray of the smallness of Trump’s soul — but it was an act that was within his power.

But the president cannot rewrite the Constitution. Within days, the birthright citizenship order was frozen by a judge — a Reagan appointee — who told Trump’s lawyers, “I have difficulty understanding how a member of the bar would state unequivocally that this is a constitutional order. It just boggles my mind.” A judge froze the spending freeze before it was even scheduled to go into effect, and shortly thereafter, the Trump administration rescinded the order, in part to avoid the court case.

What Bannon wanted — what the Trump administration wants — is to keep everything moving fast. Muzzle velocity, remember. If you’re always consumed by the next outrage, you can’t look closely at the last one. The impression of Trump’s power remains; the fact that he keeps stepping on rakes is missed. The projection of strength obscures the reality of weakness. Don’t believe him.

You could see this a few ways: Is Trump playing a part, making a bet or triggering a crisis? Those are the options. I am not certain he knows the answer. Trump has always been an improviser. But if you take it as calculated, here is the calculation: Perhaps this Supreme Court, stocked with his appointees, gives him powers no peacetime president has ever possessed. Perhaps all of this becomes legal now that he has asserted its legality. It is not impossible to imagine that bet paying off.

But Trump’s odds are bad. So what if the bet fails and his arrogations of power are soundly rejected by the courts? Then comes the question of constitutional crisis: Does he ignore the court’s ruling? To do that would be to attempt a coup. I wonder if they have the stomach for it. The withdrawal of the Office of Management and Budget’s order to freeze spending suggests they don’t. Bravado aside, Trump’s political capital is thin. Both in his first and second terms, he has entered office with approval ratings below that of any president in the modern era. Gallup has Trump’s approval rating at 47 percent — about 10 points beneath Joe Biden’s in January 2021.

There is a reason Trump is doing all of this through executive orders rather than submitting these same directives as legislation to pass through Congress. A more powerful executive could persuade Congress to eliminate the spending he opposes or reform the civil service to give himself the powers of hiring and firing that he seeks. To write these changes into legislation would make them more durable and allow him to argue their merits in a more strategic way. Even if Trump’s aim is to bring the civil service to heel — to rid it of his opponents and turn it to his own ends — he would be better off arguing that he is simply trying to bring the high-performance management culture of Silicon Valley to the federal government. You never want a power grab to look like a power grab.

But Republicans have a three-seat edge in the House and a 53-seat majority in the Senate. Trump has done nothing to reach out to Democrats. If Trump tried to pass this agenda as legislation, it would most likely fail in the House, and it would certainly die before the filibuster in the Senate. And that would make Trump look weak. Trump does not want to look weak. He remembers John McCain humiliating him in his first term by casting the deciding vote against Obamacare repeal.

That is the tension at the heart of Trump’s whole strategy: Trump is acting like a king because he is too weak to govern like a president. He is trying to substitute perception for reality. He is hoping that perception then becomes reality. That can only happen if we believe him.

The flurry of activity is meant to suggest the existence of a plan. The Trump team wants it known that they’re ready this time. They will control events rather than be controlled by them. The closer you look, the less true that seems. They are scrambling and flailing already. They are leaking against one another already. We’ve learned, already, that the O.M.B. directive was drafted, reportedly, without the input or oversight of key Trump officials — “it didn’t go through the proper approval process,” an administration official told The Washington Post. For this to be the process and product of a signature initiative in the second week of a president’s second term is embarrassing.

But it’s not just the O.M.B. directive. The Trump administration is waging an immediate war on the bureaucracy, trying to replace the “deep state” it believes hampered it in the first term. A big part of this project seems to have been outsourced to Elon Musk, who is bringing the tactics he used at Twitter to the federal government. He has longtime aides at the Office of Personnel Management, and the email sent to nearly all federal employees even reused the subject line of the email he sent to Twitter employees: “Fork in the Road.” Musk wants you to know it was him.

The email offers millions of civil servants a backdoor buyout: Agree to resign and in theory, at least, you can collect your paycheck and benefits until the end of September without doing any work. The Department of Government Efficiency account on X described it this way: “Take the vacation you always wanted, or just watch movies and chill, while receiving your full government pay and benefits.” The Washington Post reported that the email “blindsided” many in the Trump administration who would normally have consulted on a notice like that.

I suspect Musk thinks of the federal work force as a huge mass of woke ideologues. But most federal workers have very little to do with politics. About 16 percent of the federal work force is in health care. These are, for instance, nurses and doctors who work for the Veterans Affairs department. How many of them does Musk want to lose? What plans does the V.A. have for attracting and training their replacements? How quickly can he do it?

The Social Security Administration has more than 59,000 employees. Does Musk know which ones are essential to operations and unusually difficult to replace? One likely outcome of this scheme is that a lot of talented people who work in nonpolitical jobs and could make more elsewhere take the lengthy vacation and leave government services in tatters. Twitter worked poorly after Musk’s takeover, with more frequent outages and bugs, but its outages are not a national scandal. When V.A. health care degrades, it is. To have sprung this attack on the civil service so loudly and publicly and brazenly is to be assured of the blame if anything goes wrong.

What Trump wants you to see in all this activity is command. What is really in all this activity is chaos. They do not have some secret reservoir of focus and attention the rest of us do not. They have convinced themselves that speed and force is a strategy unto itself — that it is, in a sense, a replacement for a real strategy. Don’t believe them.

I had a conversation a couple months ago with someone who knows how the federal government works about as well as anyone alive. I asked him what would worry him most if he saw Trump doing it. What he told me is that he would worry most if Trump went slowly. If he began his term by doing things that made him more popular and made his opposition weaker and more confused. If he tried to build strength for the midterms while slowly expanding his powers and chipping away at the deep state where it was weakest.

But he didn’t. And so the opposition to Trump, which seemed so listless after the election, is beginning to rouse itself.

There is a subreddit for federal employees where one of the top posts reads: “This non ‘buyout’ really seems to have backfired. I’ll be honest, before that email went out, I was looking for any way to get out of this fresh hell. But now I am fired up to make these goons as frustrated as possible.” As I write this, it’s been upvoted more than 39,000 times and civil servant after civil servant is echoing the initial sentiment.

In Iowa this week, Democrats flipped a State Senate seat in a district that Trump won easily in 2024. The attempted spending freeze gave Democrats their voice back, as they zeroed in on the popular programs Trump had imperiled. Trump isn’t building support; he’s losing it. Trump isn’t fracturing his opposition; he’s uniting it.

This is the weakness of the strategy that Bannon proposed and Trump is following. It is a strategy that forces you into overreach. To keep the zone flooded, you have to keep acting, keep moving, keep creating new cycles of outrage or fear. You overwhelm yourself. And there’s only so much you can do through executive orders. Soon enough, you have to go beyond what you can actually do. And when you do that, you either trigger a constitutional crisis or you reveal your own weakness.

Trump may not see his own fork in the road coming. He may believe he has the power he is claiming. That would be a mistake on his part — a self-deception that could doom his presidency. But the real threat is if he persuades the rest of us to believe he has power he does not have.

The first two weeks of Trump’s presidency have not shown his strength. He is trying to overwhelm you. He is trying to keep you off-balance. He is trying to persuade you of something that isn’t true. Don’t believe him.

You can listen to this conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.