From Omnipotence to Democracy
Ceremonies during the annexation of the Republic of Hawaii, 1898. Raising American Flag at United States Annexation Ceremony at ʻIolani Palace, Honolulu, Hawaii. The American marines performing the ceremony are from the USS Philadelphia. Collection: Ray Jerome Baker Collection. Public Domain.
I have been in the United States for most of my life. I witnessed the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. I could never understand why that young, handsome, intelligent and nearly great statesman was cut down. Kennedy was the son of petroleum wealth. However, he and the Soviet leader Nikita Chruschev saved the world from nuclear war annihilation. That experience convinced Kennedy that nuclear weapons and states don’t mix. He intended to abolish nuclear weapons before those genocidal bombs abolished humanity. His murder was fact number one that America was already in deep decline – in 1963. Gangsterism is the antithesis and enemy of democracy and civilization.
In 1963, I was a student at the University of Illinois. With rudimentary knowledge of English, I went through course in zoology. I really did not have a clear idea of what my “major” should be. I loved learning about the Greeks and other people, so I moved to historical studies: ancient, medieval, modern Greek and European diplomatic history, Roman, British, Russian, Soviet and Southeastern European history. Then, as a postdoctoral fellow, I turned to the insights and wisdom of the history of science at Harvard.
The next step in understanding my new home, the United States, was my work on Capitol Hill and the US Environmental Protection Agency. That 27 year experience was fact number two, that the United States was in deep decline. A “democratic republic” allowed a few corporations, domestic and foreign, to legally lace most of the food Americans eat with neurotoxic and carcinogenic chemicals – for the convenience of large farmers. No civilized society would have tolerated such a crime.
The state of America in 2026
America in 2026 is a pilotless supertanker floating in the oceans of planet Earth. In February 2026, Trump and Netanyahu of Israel attacked Iran. This unprovoked war unsettled and angered Pope Leo XIV. He said, a “delusion of omnipotence” is fueling the [US-Israel] war that has left thousands dead.” Indeed, the delusion of omnipotence powers became the hubris that led Trump to start the illegal war against Iran. Trump did not like Leo’s criticism. He accused the Pope of being weak on crime.
President Trump is ruling by edict, thus bypassing and almost shutting down the Constitutional responsibilities of US Congress.
One of the worst decisions of Trump was his undermining of the US Environmental Protection Agency, the country’s sole institutional “protector” of public and environmental health. But Trump undid EPA. An EPA scientist was just fired because he requested the monitoring of microplastics in a fish farm. In my lengthy experience at the US EPA, only the administration of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s nearly matched the corruption and anti-human and anti-environmental health policies of the Trump EPA.
Billionaires funded the election of Trump. And billionaires are behind Trump and his decisions. When they convinced him to eliminate most regulations that assured some health protection to Americans and the natural world, what has been going on in their mind? They are forcing America to the swamp and toxic pollution of the 19th century. They must know, for example, that eating carcinogens and neurotoxins in food mean big trouble for this and future generations. Does this fit their nightmare obsession with AI-human hybrid robots? The billionaire class is hostile to Americans, fact number three that America is in dramatic decline. No democratic society can coexist for long with a minority of plutocrats turning democracy and everything else upside down.
In addition, climate chaos is in the room. Both Trump and his billionaire friends deny the very existence of climate emergency. They pretend they can ignore massive fires, deadly heat waves, the thawing of the permafrost in Alaska, tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, diminishing drinking water and emerging difficulties in raising food. This denial of science and climate change / chaos if fact number four that America is in dangerous decline.
Warring theologies
Nature, however, is almighty. Like the Sun, it makes life possible. The ancient Greeks spoke about the Sun god Helios. They knew something we ignore at our peril. The Sun, the stars, the wind, the rivers and all of the natural world were divine. But the word “divine” in America means something different — in 2026.
In 2026, most people in the Americas, Europe and the Middle East have monotheistic religions (Christianity, Islam and Judaism) that reject the divine nature of the world around us. This is one of the basic reasons why climate chaos and petroleum and other poisons that power agriculture have become existential dangers.
Rod Drehel, conservative Republican, writer and defender of Christianity, had a long discussion with a podcaster of the New York Times. He explained the decline of America in terms of Christianity. He abhorred the wokeness of the “liberals” and the Democratic Party. He also rejected Catholicism because of the massive sexual crimes of Catholic priests against boys. He joined the Orthodox faith and church. He said that Nazism and Soviet communism were products of the murder of god, meaning the Christian god. All these metaphysical illusions, especially his insistence on “transcendence,” drove him to extreme political and theological assumptions on what constitutes decline of a country like the United States.
On July 9, 2026, he tried to make sense of his religious and political realities of America. He said that “we’re living through, at the bottom, a crisis of meaning. People don’t know why they should go on. We have been raised by consumerist culture — both the left and the right have a role to play in this — to believe that more freedom, more wealth is going to make us happy, and it hasn’t. It’s made us more miserable…. I think it all ultimately goes back to a loss of a sense of transcendence. Losing the transcendent sense of life has been deadly for us spiritually, morally and aesthetically.”
I agree with Dreher that consumerism, more “freedom” and more “wealth” failed to improve the lives of most Americans. But he is wrong about wealth. Wealth is still a dream for the overwhelming number of Americans. Moreover, the idea of “transcendence” is strictly an invention of theologians who make a living on organized deception. We should know that neither polytheism nor monotheism are founded on logic, much less facts or science. The gods of polytheists like the ancient Greeks and Romans and the god of monotheists like Christians, Moslems and Jews were human inventions.
Homer and Hesiod explained the “birth” and function of the gods in Greek society. And it made no difference if those deities were real or imagined. The Greeks modeled their behavior to accommodate their culture to the expectations of those divine and mighty beings. After all, the Athenians, probably the best of the Greeks, built their beautiful and exquisite Parthenon to honor Athena, virgin daughter of Zeus and goddess of intelligence, war and freedom.
In America, Christianity was part of the culture of the British and other Europeans who established their hegemony over the country. Christianity justified the genocide of indigenous Americans. And with the coming to power of Trump, “Christian nationalism” spread the alarm of potential crusades and new theocracy. Nationalism baptized by the contaminated waters of religion means trouble. This is threatening the present and future of the country. Conventional Christians face specialized theological groups of Christians who like to believe they are living in the early days of Christian formation and conflict. Some of them pretend to have prophetic powers, others like to assume they are healers. And still others like the charismatic Christians are preparing themselves for crusades. They now proclaim that “God calls Christians into spiritual warfare against demonic forces.”
Molly Worthen, history professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, has been studying these unorthodox rebel Christians. “The irony of our secular age,” she says, “is that theology is more powerful than ever.” And that’s where the danger of new crusades becomes factor number five of a declining America.
Congressman Jared Huffman (D-California), is very concerned about the emerging Christian zealots. He is proud he has no religion to confuse him. He says he is a “humanist,” which he defines this way: “To me, it means good without God. It means you don’t need the inducement or fear of an afterlife to have a moral framework and to know your place in the universe. You’re sort of at peace with the reality that, as far as we know, this is it. You get one time around. There are people of faith who sometimes think, well, that must be sad, that must be incomplete. I find it’s just the opposite. It makes this world and our opportunity to be part of it more sacred.”
Epilogue
It’s difficult to make predictions. But as a historian I noticed certain events highlighting changes inimical to democracy. Greek history is full of those seminal events or ideas that sparked warning signals. For example, in the sixth century BCE, a few plutocrats lent money to Athenian farmers. However, several of those farmers could not pay back their debt. The Athenian large farmers / lenders enslaved and sold the indebted farmers. This cruel and unpatriotic decision of Athenians enslaving Athenians rung the bells of civil war. The rulers of Athens invited a former Athenian archon / ruler, Solon, to rewrite the constitution of Athens. Solon did. He abolished slavery and set the foundations of Athenian direct democracy.
Why is this great paradigm of the creation of the first democracy in Western civilization ignored in America? I think Solon becomes paradigmatic in reforming the American constitution: making it a fence around democracy, thus preventing any president from becoming a tyrant or protector of plutocrats. The money in elections in America must stop or the American Republic is doomed, fact number six of the decline of the United States.
In fact, like the Athenian constitution, the revised American constitution should allow citizens to become rich but, when national needs arise, rich people would be responsible to fund defensive weapons or other national priorities.
In addition, the new American constitution would mandate the immediate phasing out of fossil fuels and the transition from fossil fuels to solar and other green energies; the immediate transformation of industrialized farming to small-scale family agriculture producing entirely certified organic food; the phasing out of animal farms; and the separation of church and state.
Of course, these measures require informed and responsible citizens who love their country more than money. But these modest reforms, if done, promise to reduce and eventually eliminate the emerging decline. The US, now 250 years old, has the opportunity to reinvigorate democracy, abandon its destructive war path and save itself and the planet from nuclear war and climate chaos.
