ALSO SEE: Need to Know by David Rothkopf (Substack)

In the February darkness, a glimpse into a terrifying moment unlike any other in our history...

I live not far from the edge of a city, along the fringes of a forest, surrounded by farms.

When the snow falls, as it is falling now, it becomes as silent as sleep.

The boughs of pines at the edge of my yard are beginning to bend ever so slightly in the snow. I know that beneath them, just on the other side of our fence, a dozen or so white-tailed deer are curled up, sleeping. I can see their silhouettes from atop our hill.

The only thing I can hear is my own breath. I’m ill at ease and I can hear it in hesitant, too deep intakes and pauses and what sounds less like exhaling and more like one muted sigh after another.

Time stands still. You can almost hold the moment in your hands and regard it, release it into the air and walk around it, examining it.

Never in my life did I think I would see a moment like this. Never in very nearly seventy years of living in America did I think we would live through what we are living through now.

What a thing to feel the age I have always felt and to have white hair and live on the edge of a wood that is as oblivious to the dangers of this moment as are all the people in the city that from here is just a faint glow on the horizon.

But these are not portents I sense in the February night. The peril is upon us and as far as I can tell, few are prepared for it, fewer still call it what it is, and even fewer seem willing to do anything to stop it.

A new government in Washington is dismantling our democracy. Piece by piece. With hammer blows and shivs and clubs and with memos and executive orders and the complicity of political leaders who do not lead. Greed and self-interest and hate and ignorance are at work everywhere you look.

An assault on the role of the Congress is relegating it to merely a role supporting an all-power executive and the majority in both houses is willingly going along with it. The treacherous and the ill-equipped and the repugnant are being put in charge of great government agencies without regard to the threat they pose. (Why? Ask the members of Congress who are making judgments based on their own political well-being and who have set their oaths alight, sending them off as charred embers into the wind.)

Corruption is being embraced, flaunted even. Departments that targeted it are being shut down or told to stand down. The corrupt are being rewarded, pardoned, and enabled despite their crimes. Anti-corruption watchdogs are being fired. Laws against corruption are being effectively erased. From the president down brazen kleptocracy is now one of the central organizing principles of this government with precious few other principles to speak of.

The international system America spent 80 years building is being knocked from its pedestal just like many of the fallen autocrats now being emulated by America’s leaders. We are promoting crimes against humanity, betraying our allies and our treaties, doing the work of our enemies.

While challenges to the actions of the administration are taking place in the courts, it is already apparent that the president and those around him are rejecting the power of the judiciary. Not just Article I of the Constitution but Article III too is being rendered meaningless, being struck off by a president told by the highest court that effectively courts no longer can contain him. The Supreme Court in its groveling before the donors that support its majority has written its own death warrant and that of the entire branch of government that it was to lead but has more recently debased.

The Chill in the Air

The chill in the air tonight comes from the fact that in the days ahead as more court decisions are ignored and the majority of the Washington establishment sits idly by while it happens (the Speaker of the House has already endorsed the impulse to subordinate the courts to the executive, to strike down Marbury vs. Madison), we will descend further into the gravest constitutional crisis we have faced since the Civil War.

But make no mistake, our government is far more dysfunctional now than it was at the time of the Civil War. There was far more consensus then about the separation of powers and the rule of law than there is now. The Confederacy sought to tear our country asunder. MAGA world is tearing our Constitution to pieces and reducing our institutions to rubble.

But because this has never happened before, what we have on a night like this one…as it is all happening around us…is this deafening silence. We don’t know what to do. We don’t know how to refer to what it is happening. We are completely unwilling to answer a question that the president is counting on us not daring to ask: What do we do when working within our system fails us? What do we do when working within law won’t work because the president and his supporters refuse to do so?

Indignation and opeds and columns like this one won’t help. Neither perhaps, will lawsuits any longer. Will aggressive journalism? It might if it existed. Will running for office? It could if we are allowed to do so in 2026. Should we donate to legal defense funds for those targeted by the administration? Donate to batteries of lawyers and political campaigns? Yes. Of course. Do it all. Do it as we have never done it before. Call national strikes. Refuse to comply. Demand the law be followed until it is not.

But what then? That is the question we can barely whisper. What do we do when all the means at our disposal fail because we are playing within the rules and the new administration has set them aflame, is reveling in having no law but the word of the president and his unelected deputy president and their minions. What do we do when innocents are prosecuted? When they are fired and lose their livelihoods? When we violate international law? When wholesale, reckless spending cuts cause death and suffering just to pay the way for more tax breaks for billionaires, for the richest among us?

How long do we play within the system? What are our alternatives then. How far can civil disobedience take us? What is next if that does not work?

And What If Working Within the System No Longer Works?

An old friend of mine today, repeated a thought that I have heard many many times in the past few days. He said that when he was young, he knew what to do. He protested the Vietnam War. Others told me of taking to the streets to support the rights of women, of people of color, of the LGBTQ+ community. They felt that there were ways to pressure those in power and have an effect.

But what if those ways don’t work? We’re not there yet. We haven’t tried them. In fact, we have been pretty placid and accepting of the appallingly unacceptable so far. So, by all means, lets exhaust every such means at our disposal.

But standing on the backsteps of my house, looking into the pine trees and the forest beyond, the silence occasionally broken by the shrill howl of the foxes that live on the next hillside, examining this moment and recognizing we have never seen one like it before, I cannot help but wonder about what we do when everything we were raised to believe would work no longer works, when our system is gone and has been replaced by the rule of one man or a few who do not have the interests or the history or the values of this country at heart.

When do we reach the breaking point? When do we enter the uncharted territory?

Until a few short months ago, we innocently had a debate about whether America’s next great challenge was a new Cold War with China. It was largely ignorant. Such a cold war is in the interest of neither country. But, it was also a distraction. Because the greatest threat we face, it is now absolutely clear, does not come from China. It comes from within our own nation, now from atop our own government. What do you call it when your government is waging war against the system and the people it was raised up to preserve and protect?

If it happened within us, we’d call it a cancer. And I suppose that is as good a term as I can think for what is growing in that city on the other side of the dark, frozen woods I’m staring into right now.

Whatever we call it though, coup or cancer or the will of some of the people at the expense of all the rest, we are rapidly coming to a point at which new thinking will be needed, new leadership, a willingness to recognize that those who threaten what we hold dear are utterly lawless and without values, ethics or morality of any sort.

Then what? The shriek of the fox (if you’ve heard that harrowing wail, you know what I mean) can’t articulate the answer but for me, right now, late at night, it certainly does capture the mood of the moment.