The age of unreason in American politics

Once the world’s model of civic restraint, the United States now teeters on the edge of authoritarianism, warns Mike Bedenbaugh. Our U.S political analyst traces how the corrosion of republican virtue, fuelled by vengeance and spectacle, has in his view hollowed out the moral foundations of American democracy, and argues that only a revival of citizenship itself can restore the Republic

It was a spectacle both theatrical and tragic: the United States Attorney General, Pam Bondi, sitting before the Senate Oversight Committee, defending what she called a “patriotic defense of America’s future.” Yet what unfolded that day was less a defense of the nation than an indictment of what it has become. Senators were berated as “anti-American” for asking questions, and journalists were labelled “propagandists.” In that room, the world saw an America that no longer knows how to deliberate and only how to destroy.

For Europeans who once admired our open debates and peaceful transfers of power, the sight must have seemed unfathomable. But for those of us living here, this has been a decade-long descent, not a sudden collapse. Our proverbial house of cards is not falling because of one man—it is falling because a third of our country no longer believes that the rules matter at all.

In Reviving Our Republic, I wrote that August 6, 2015—the night of the first Republican presidential debate—marked the beginning of the end of political restraint in America. On that stage were ten candidates, most of whom would have drawn from the same conservative advisers and institutions that had shaped Republican policy for decades. But the base rejected them all and chose instead the most brash, bullying, and vulgar among them. From that night forward, politics ceased to be a forum of competing ideas and became, instead, a blood sport of vengeance and spectacle.

Having just finished Ron Chernow’s biography of George Washington, I knew that the great experiment Washington had fathered was entering its time of trial. Washington warned that “the alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, is a frightful despotism.” Those words, written over two centuries ago, read now as prophecy fulfilled.

The spirit of revenge has replaced the spirit of reason. Factions no longer debate; they annihilate. It is not ideology that drives them, but a shared contempt—for institutions, for expertise, and often, for their own fellow citizens.

Many insist that America’s decline began with Donald Trump. I disagree. The sickness predates him; he was merely the symptom. Studies show that authoritarianism—an ingrained preference for order, obedience, and submission to a strong leader—is the single best predictor of Trump’s support, cutting across race, income, and education. Authoritarians rally to strongmen not because they understand policy, but because they crave certainty in an uncertain world.

That craving has metastasized across our institutions. It is now visible in the rhetoric of cabinet officials, in the intimidation of judges, in the ritual humiliation of generals who dare to question presidential authority. When our Secretary of War delivers speeches demanding “warrior loyalty” from the nation’s top brass, the line between civilian control and militarized fealty begins to blur—a dangerous echo of the very systems our grandparents once crossed oceans to defeat.

I have often reflected on the post-World War II generation—the men and women who returned from the carnage of Europe and the Pacific and became builders, not conquerors. As I said once at our Statehouse, “America’s strength does not come from a permanent war footing. It comes from a free people willing to rise when duty calls—and then return to peace.”

Contrast that ethic of reconstruction with the prevailing mood today. Ours is now a politics of demolition. Many citizens—some sincere, others cynical—speak of “overturning the tables,” as one Trump supporter told Oprah Winfrey during a 60 Minutes interview before the 2016 election. The sentiment was clear: tear everything down and worry about what comes next later.

But as I learned from years in historic preservation, those who talk most loudly about destruction rarely know how to build. In every small town where I fought to save a historic structure, the developer who bulldozed first and planned later always left behind an empty lot. They were vandals masquerading as visionaries. That is the metaphor for modern America: a nation of vandals mistaking destruction for renewal.

Pam Bondi’s testimony before Congress exemplified how far this nihilism has seeped. Here was the chief law officer of the United States, treating oversight not as a constitutional duty but as an act of betrayal. The Founders envisioned checks and balances as the lifeblood of republican government; now they are treated as heresy.

In The Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton warned that “a torrent of angry and malignant passions will be let loose” whenever demagogues appeal to prejudice rather than reason. We are now fully submerged in that torrent. And it is not confined to the halls of power. In my own community, friendships have been fractured beyond repair. To criticize Trump, even from a conservative standpoint, is to invite ostracism. I call myself a constitutional conservative, yet those words no longer hold meaning to many Americans. To them, conservatism is not about conserving institutions—it is about crushing enemies.

Our loss of moral clarity is reflected in our foreign policy. We condemn tyranny abroad even as we flirt with it at home. The rubble of Gaza, the collapse of democratic norms in Israel, the slow-burning tragedy of Ukraine, the rise of illiberal strongmen in Hungary, India, and Russia—all unfold while America looks inward, paralyzed by faction and fatigue. Our silence is not neutrality; it is complicity.

As nations across the Global South realign—India courting Moscow and Beijing, the Gulf States hedging their alliances—America’s word means less with each passing year. The moral authority once earned by rebuilding a war-torn Europe has been squandered by cynicism and division. We no longer export hope; we export confusion.

Into this vacuum of confidence has stepped something even more troubling: the bureaucratized vision of power embodied in Project 2025. Conceived by former Trump officials and the Heritage Foundation, this 900-page “Mandate for Leadership” is not merely a set of policy goals; it is a manual for dismantling constitutional guardrails and consolidating control of the federal bureaucracy.

It seeks to “institutionalize Trumpism” by filling every agency with loyalists and redefining the executive branch as the singular instrument of a president’s will. It is precisely the kind of centralization Washington warned against in his Farewell Address—and the antithesis of what Madison envisioned when he wrote that government must be “obliged to control itself.”

What makes this so dangerous is that millions of Americans welcome it. They mistake domination for leadership. They do not realize that the same machinery that can be used to crush their enemies today can be used to crush them tomorrow.

Our crisis is not only political but moral. A republic cannot function when its citizens no longer practice the virtues that sustain self-government: patience, humility, curiosity, and restraint. When Washington cautioned against “the impostures of pretended patriotism,” he foresaw a time when the language of liberty would be used to justify tyranny. That time has arrived.

What we now call “free speech” is often the freedom to defame; what we call “truth” is often tribal loyalty. The old civic habits—town meetings, school boards, community newspapers—are vanishing, replaced by algorithmic rage.

In Reviving Our Republic, I wrote that we must rediscover intentional citizenship—the daily discipline of governing ourselves. Self-government is not a spectator sport; it requires engagement, not entertainment. The Constitution is not self-executing; it depends on citizens who still believe in its promise.

As America approaches the 250th anniversary of its Declaration of Independence, we stand at an inflection point reminiscent of the late Roman Republic: exhausted by excess, seduced by spectacle, and yearning for the strong hand of Caesar. But there is still time to turn back.

The antidote to authoritarianism is not counter-authoritarianism; it is citizenship. We must rebuild our civic institutions from the ground up—city councils, state legislatures, independent journalism, and civic education—so that power once again flows upward from the people rather than downward from the executive.

That is why I advocate for what I call Project 2026—a citizen-driven renewal of American federalism and constitutional balance. Its goal is not to wage ideological war but to restore equilibrium: dispersing power between states and Washington, between citizens and corporations, between individuals and their government.

When Pete Hegseth delivered his swaggering lecture to hundreds of generals and admirals at Quantico, he wasn’t really addressing them—just as Pam Bondi’s testimony before the Senate wasn’t meant for the senators in the room. Both were performances for an audience of one: the president, watching from stage right or through the digital screen, judge and jury of their loyalty. It was a chilling tableau of what happens when the warrior class and the rule of law become props in a leader’s vanity play.

Our future now depends on whether good people; teachers and doctors, those who serve in quiet service or on the celebrity stage, are willing to stop jobbing out our political leadership to sycophantic salesmen, pause their own careers, and take up the responsibility to serve their communities as our founders intended.

That is the only remedy for our broken republic.

I can only hope that some of those generals, leaving that auditorium in silence, understood the weight of the challenge before them. Perhaps one of them will follow the example of Washington after the Revolution, Grant after the Civil War, or Eisenhower after World War II—men who removed their uniforms and led their country with strength and character, not vanity and grievance.

If they, and we, can rise again in that spirit, then we may yet clean up the debris left by the vandals and launch a new age of American renewal—one our grandchildren can prosper under. If we fail, the republic will not fall to invasion but to indifference. But if we succeed, it will be because ordinary citizens once again became extraordinary when liberty called.


Author and political thinker Michael Bedenbaugh is a respected voice in constitutional principles and American governance. Based in South Carolina, he is deeply involved in his home state’s development while contributing to national discussions on governance and civic engagement, most recently as standing as an independent candidate for Congress. He is the author of Reviving Our Republic: 95 Theses for the Future of America and the host of YouTube channel Reviving Our Republic with Mike Bedenbaugh.

READ MORE: ‘Project 2025: America’s gravest constitutional stress test since the Civil War’. As America approaches its 250th birthday, a new political blueprint—Project 2025—sets out a radical plan to centralise presidential power, dismantle constitutional checks, and redefine the nation’s civic life. it marks the most serious challenge to the republic’s foundations since the Civil War, warns the U.S political analyst, Mike Bedenbaugh.

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