SNA (Tokyo) — We live in extreme times…

Time out for a second, for I have a confession to make. Things are so extreme that columnists like me don’t know where to begin. Do I comment on a small thing within a deluge of events, and risk ignoring the big picture? Or do I go big and realize I’m completely out of my depth, especially measured up to the big-picture columnists successfully rising to the occasion, such as Anne Applebaum, Rebecca Solnit, Robert Reich, or Timothy Snyder?

But writing things out is how columnists make sense of it all, so bear with me as I try. Let me start again.

Extreme Times

We have an American president who has declared himself king (not only rhetorically, but pictorially), while the legislative branch abdicates its oversight powers, and the judiciary grants immunity. Essential services are arbitrarily slashed by an unelected, unapproved, and unmonitored “Department of Government Efficiency.” Civil Servants are fired for something as mundane as taking a DEIA course required under the previous Trump administration. Even reliable information is under assault, as top-level domains with the formerly trustworthy .gov label (see for example whitehouse.gov and doge.gov) are being degraded into blogs and social media feeds.

Meanwhile, NATO is dying, with the likely victory of Russia as it absorbs Ukraine then reconstitutes its military. We are regressing to a century where the world was carved into blocs run by regional powers (this time probably China, Russia and the United States). This will mean the end of equal sovereignty within a community of nations, as might makes right, and great powers invade at will (China taking Taiwan; the United States taking Greenland, Panama, Gaza, even Canada; and Russia snaffling sovereign countries of the former Soviet empire).

The postwar order of interlocking trade that made the world generally rich and peaceful looks mortally wounded. All thanks to one man, believing his place is secure in the “Great Man Theory” of world history, who doesn’t understand the concept of consequences for his actions because he has never faced any in his life. He invokes a turn-of-the-century president (William McKinley) as his template while ignoring that era’s unstable world order, where a few people’s emotions led to stupid public policies, culminating in global conflicts ultimately costing close to 100 million lives.

Why is this happening?

Natural-Born Extremism

If I could offer one generality that seems to cut through some of the noise, it would be that the Americans were always temperamentally ill-suited to be leaders on the world stage. Pax Americana was fine while it was governed by the educated specialists, trained in useful skills such as international trade, diplomacy, military strategy, and the sobering science behind life and death decisions.

But among governing systems, democracy uniquely gives the public a say in foreign policy. That’s why the policy experts had better make sure the general public knows the basics of what’s going on, or is convinced by the aims of the mission. Or bad things will happen when they go out and vote.

The governing class really dropped the ball on that. The overall culture of secrecy and unaccountability behind America’s military action, both in mandate and budget, was shrouded in “official secrets” and “executive privilege.” That not only made things ripe for unknown unknowns to be filled by internet conspiracy theories, but also ideal for the opportunistic “America First” advocates. Why is America spending so much of our money on weird things overseas when people at home are hurting?

Yes, this political dynamic favoring isolationism could happen anywhere. But here’s where America is particularly susceptible: It not only has the largest economic and military footprint in history (meaning uninformed Americans falling for irresponsible slogans affect the whole world order), but also a long history of taking things to logical extremes.

America was founded in extremism. From the first settlers’ cult-like devotions to superstitions leading to the Salem witch trials, to a system of slavery that overwhelmed entire economies (to the point where, in some places, slaves outnumbered the free population). From a system of coexisting with your indigenous neighbors to a philosophy of terra nullius that denied their very existence. Or worse, a system that justified the extremes of war and genocide in order to occupy an entire continent through “Manifest Destiny.”

Yes, these ideologies could be dismissed as excesses of an adolescent nation. But even as the United States turns 250, plenty of extreme ideologies can be found in modern policy debates. Consider these.

American Exceptionalism

The belief that the United States is unique in its values, democracy, and development, therefore destined to play a special role on the world stage, has underpinned policies ranging from an economy open to trade deficits (even to the detriment of American workers) to the United States assuming the mantle of de facto world policeman (even if that means Americans dying in military adventurism abroad).

Having been born and raised in America and trained as an Eagle Scout, I too was once imbued with the mindset of how America is special. But after decades living abroad and becoming fluent in another language (America’s brazen monolingualism is a related blind spot), I’ve also developed the skill set of seeing that other viable worldviews and systems are possible, and that America isn’t number one at everything. Revisiting America, I find mine a pretty lonely view.

But here’s the logical extreme: American exceptionalism doesn’t just mean it’s special or unique. It means America is also somehow an exception to international rules. Given its unique role as keeper of the world order and promoter of democratic peace, the United States should get special treatment, immunizing it from the consequences of its actions. How else does one justify the United States not joining the International Criminal Court or arrogantly issuing “Country Reports on Human Rights Practices” without including itself? If American leaders or soldiers make decisions that result in war crimes, who gets prosecuted at The Hague? Nobody. And what are you going to do about it? It makes international relations even more lawless.

But the biggest blind spot in American exceptionalism could be American democracy’s undoing: the unfounded belief that authoritarianism couldn’t happen here.

The logic is that America’s amazing democracy wouldn’t allow it, except that historically America has had many “near misses” with popular political extremists, including John Adams, Aaron Burr, Andrew Jackson, Andrew Johnson, Leland Stanford, Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, Huey Long, Charles Coughlin, Joe McCarthy, and George Wallace.

Americans can’t accept that one authoritarian finally got through in 2016 and 2024 and watch agape as Trump and his cronies act in waves of extremes, dismantling democratic institutions one by one. So policymakers, media, and voters disbelieve their lying eyes and treat it as politics as usual. This is extreme hubris.

The Cowboy in the White Hat

Another American extreme is cultural: the conviction that Americans are always the winners and the heroes in the world.

Thanks in part to the dominance of American entertainment in media, coupled with Americans’ incessant need to feel entertained rather than informed, they aren’t used to seeing themselves as the bad guys (in contrast to, say, the Germans). American-sponsored torture and coups overseas? Forget about it. Show us Rambo blowing up Afghanistan and pass the popcorn.

If Americans ever make it outside the United States (most don’t; it wasn’t until 2024 that 51% of Americans even got a passport!), they’re astounded to find themselves loathed and targeted abroad. After all, US news media rarely report on overseas events, and many Americans can’t find a country on a map unless it involves US military conflict. Then that, of course, goes through a filter embedding the reporters and supporting the troops, so lessons aren’t learned again.

The problem is that Americans have little sense of what’s being done in their name. A public ignorant of that elects extremely ignorant people in their own image, who in turn make irresponsible decisions affecting the lives and governments of people thousands of miles away. And if there is any blowback, we American heroes have been attacked, so America must retaliate. Pass the popcorn.

Structural Extremism

Finally, we get to the fact that America’s archaic democracy has mechanisms that embed extremism.

Start with the fact that the United States has an extreme number of elections and elected jobs—the most in the world, in fact. That means even fundamentally nonpartisan roles (such as sheriffs and judges) become popularity contests. While many dismiss this as true people power in action, American democracy goes to extremes in more significant ways.

For example, the “primary system” not only favors extremists choosing candidates, but also makes the most important election campaigns perpetual. American elections are the most expensive in human history, thus easily susceptible to corruption. Yet a Supreme Court stacked with free-speech extremists has consistently short-circuited attempts to rein in campaign finance reform by interpreting free speech in terms of money, which plainly gives the rich and corporations the loudest voices in an election. National politicians are now forced to waste at least half their work time not on policymaking, but on fundraising.

Likewise, extremist candidates, picked under extreme conditions, end up passing extreme laws (such as banning abortion under all circumstances) and asking politicized judges to take things to their logical extremes.

Follow this logic: New York City Mayor Eric Adams was indicted last September for bribery, fraud, and soliciting foreign campaign money. However, as of last week, the Department of Justice (DOJ) under Trump wants to drop those charges. Why? The Supreme Court granted Trump immunity while in office last year. The reasoning? Being sued or arrested for a crime interferes with an elected official’s duties.

Thus, Trump is trying to apply his immunity beyond the presidency to the mayoral level—and beyond. The DOJ is also arguing here that all politicians, or even political candidates, should be granted immunity because being accused of a crime counts as election interference! Run for office and immunize yourself from criminal prosecution? Calling all crooks!

When extremism becomes this normalized, weird theories go from fringe to mainstream. What other country would fall so hard for Milton Friedman’s capitalistic zealotry—i.e., that unfettered market forces magically fix everything, so we don’t really need governments? That hokum has evolved from Ronald Reagan’s snake-oil “trickle-down economics” to the current extremist Project 2025.

What Goes Around Comes Around

So what happens next?

Extreme moves result in extreme blowback, and that sometimes means violence has to occur before people realize they’ve gone too far.

For example, it took extreme laws (the Alien and Sedition Acts, etc.) that nearly destroyed freedom of speech under the fledgling US Constitution before people voted out a shortsighted President John Adams. However, the United States then swung to another extreme, becoming a one-party state for the next thirty years and entrenching slavery as an economic and political institution.

It took a horrific Civil War before the United States finally outlawed that slavery. But the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, followed by extreme interpretations of “states’ rights,” ensured that freed slaves remained disenfranchised for nearly another century.

After sixty years of a “spoils system” embedding political cronyism, it took the assassination of President James Garfield by an enraged job seeker before people realized a politicized civil service was a bad idea.

It took the deaths of 146 workers in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and 172 children in the Collinwood school disaster before people realized that buildings needed safety protocols and fire escapes.

It took the death of President Franklin Roosevelt before people realized that perpetual presidencies were a bad idea and constitutionally enshrined term limits—a lesson Trumpophiles, recently creating a “Third Term Project and Beyond,” seem to have unlearned.

It took the death of President John F. Kennedy before Civil Rights and Voting Rights were finally passed, thanks to a guilt-ridden election that gave rare supermajorities to one party. (After all, thanks to the filibuster, it takes extreme support for anything to pass the Senate.)

Likewise, I bet somebody gets hurt before things snap back from the extremes in the present Musk-Trump co-presidency.

It Can Only End in Violence

It’s ironic that Trump cites McKinley as his template president, as he too went to extremes. Presiding over a mercantilist tariff regime and stoking wars to annex territories overseas, McKinley saw society polarize into an oligarchic ruling class versus an exploited factory-worker class, along with the rise of the Communists and the domestic “bomb-throwing anarchists.”

One of those anarchists assassinated McKinley.

The politics of assassination is not sustainable, and it’s completely avoidable. One of the reasons we have the rule of law is not only to temper extremism but also because a functional society requires justice.

When justice is not served and people with power act as if they are above the law, people resort to extrajudicial means. If you go to the police after a crime but they do nothing about it, what else can you do? You call the mafia, and they break legs.

We have the rule of law so the black market for justice does not thrive. Consequences must happen one way or another. And if lawlessness prevails, that probably means violence. A lawless Trump administration means that, sooner or later, somebody is going to get hurt.

That’s why I don’t think things will end well. Extremes result in counter-extremes. That’s what history teaches us over and over again. Learn it, or else.

But America’s exceptional case means that, due to its extremes, it was never designed to sustain a worldwide empire. And now that its expertise is being politicized and removed, this is where the empire collapses. That, or democracy will snap back, and real reforms will happen.

Either outcome might happen extremely fast. I’ll be here to muddle through with another column then.

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