Alan Zendell, August 10, 2026

I’ve been reluctant to admit it to myself, but during the entire eleven year nightmare since Donald Trump came down that escalator, it has become more apparent every day that events are spinning out of control, and there’s little reason to believe that there’s a Franklin Roosevelt or Winston Churchill waiting in the wings to save us from self-destruction.

Trump’s entire political career has been a slow motion coup to undermine the basic principles our nation was founded on. The Tea Party never went away. It simply morphed into the Heritage Foundation’s horror known as Project 2025. Future historians will scratch their heads asking how a nation as wealthy and powerful as the United States could have descended into decadence, greed, intellectual indifference, and divisiveness so quickly. For most Americans, the euphoria generated by Barack Obama’s acceptance speech in Grant Park after winning the 2008 election turned out to be a self-imposed delusion.

We who had grown up during the era of enlightenment that saw the Civil Rights, Social Security, and Voting Rights Acts pass really believed that Obama’s election was a metaphor for the maturation of America. We had finally grown past our heritage of slavery, the genocide of the native American nations, and the unbridled greed of Capitalism to create a society with a fairer, more level playing field. It wasn’t about Obama himself, but what the election of a black man with the middle name Mohammed symbolized.

Suddenly, the fact that throughout history there has never been a civilization that survived very long after reaching it peak didn’t just seem like history anymore. It was happening here, to us. At some level we all felt it, but instead of recognizing where we were headed and coming together to find a middle ground that worked for most Americans, we withdrew into the social media of our choice, everyone finding an influencer voice that fit their comfort zone. But what was really happening was that we were succumbing to the toxic mindset that drives people like Trump.

I’ve been asking myself why for several years. I had been naively assuming that in the end Americans would get their act together and fix things, just like we always had, just as I was raised to believe we always would. Wasn’t America where the good guys lived? Weren’t we better than everyone else like we’d been taught?

Apparently not, and I’ve come to wonder if the problem is simply that human nature is so flawed that most of us are easily seduced by the kind of self-serving rhetoric that Trump and his followers spout. They are about exploiting all of our flaws and weaknesses and using them to divide and conquer. They are about wealth, power and privilege, and now that Trump has removed his masks and made it painfully clear that he couldn’t care less about average Americans, about health care, science, unbiased education, or economic opportunity, I wonder if it’s too late.

Our only real hope to rein Trump in is that Democrats gain a majority in at least one house of Congress. But that hope is rather thin, because I have very little faith that the Democrats can unite themselves much less the entire country. They are as politically corrupt as the MAGA crew, their only real virtue being that they are not united by greed and lust for power. Since Ronald Reagan was elected, we’ve been fighting domestically over the massive redistribution of wealth that progressive policies require, and that has brought out the worst in all of us.

That’s bad enough, but Trump has turned this into a true existential crisis. Even if his power is neutralized in November, he has left us dangerously weak on the world stage, entangled in an ever-expanding war that appears to have no good outcome, and may, in fact, wind up destroying us, which brings me to the real point of this piece. Human nature is badly flawed, and if we expect to avert the catastrophe that has destroyed every empire that preceded us, it’s those basic flaws that need to be addressed. I realized this when I found myself re-reading a book that has influenced my thinking more than any other.

Walter M. Miller’s classic 1959 novel, A Canticle for Liebowitz, tells the story of a post-nuclear apocalypse in which America and the world gradually pull themselves back from almost total destruction. The story is masterfully told with seductive dark humor mixed with the hope that we’d finally learned our lesson. Civilization recovers and thrives, but we no sooner reach the levels we had previously attained, when those same basic flaws in our nature take over again.

Miller’s frightening message was that whenever human brings achieve to ability to destroy their world, they will use it. Of course, that was obvious all along if only we’d paid attention. No wonder I re-read that book whenever we appear to be approaching the brink as we are today. And no wonder, that after spending most of my life optimistic about our future, I now struggle to imagine any path forward that will save us.