Connections

August 15, 2025

As the world turns toward more autocratic styles of government in this 21st century, two of the strangest and most concerning examples of the trend involve the United States and Israel. Is this just mere coincidence, or might there be connections behind this juxtaposition?

Many historians have pointed out that literally from America’s inception, groups from time to time have been drawn to the lure of authoritarian leadership, only to lose out to a majority of the people whose rededication to democracy prevails. Israel’s relentless assault on Gaza has been cast as an act of self defense against the Hamas leaders that leaves the government with no alternative to the path it has pursued.

Post-Traumatic Stress in Individuals and Whole Societies

The MAGA movement, like many historic transitions from democracy to authoritarian rule, has drawn its energy from one charismatic personality in particular. Perhaps the biggest of many uncertainties surrounding MAGA is what happens when Trump no longer is leading. Even if a way is found to extend his role beyond the current term, its hard to imagine the window remaining open more than a decade at tops given his age, weight and type A personality.

Israel didn’t start the latest confrontation. With Hamas deeply imbedded in Gaza’s population, a great deal of collateral damage was going to be inevitable in any Israeli military response to the killings, rapes and kidnappings committed on October 7, 2023. It is also true that the approach that Israel continues to take with no planned endgame is not close to an optimal one if the goal is to secure sustained peace and sense of security for its citizens. Moreover, a military campaign that sacrifices so many innocent civilian lives is inevitably destined to lose the war of public opinion.

Domestic public approval for Donald Trump in the United States and Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel are each weakening, and their actions have greatly dismayed an awful lot of governments and people around the world. One commonality of the two situations is the immense responsibility of a single individual in each case. Without knowing how each trauma will evolve going forward, one reason not to take comfort from the lesson of history that past assaults on democracy were impermanent is that this century is like none before. Technological advances like social media and artificial intelligence give autocratic leaders powerful tools that their forebears could only dream about. To understand the current situations and how to properly manage them, it’s therefore useful to find common causes in seemingly isolated political dramas.

Post traumatic stress disorder appears to be an element in what is now driving both U.S. and Israeli policy. Compared to other presidents including even ones from the nineteenth century, there is surprisingly little information available on the internet about Donald Trump’s upbringing. He had a strict father, who overshadowed the influence of his mother especially in the earliest formative years From as early as age 13, President Trump attended the NY Military Academy, where both physical and verbal punishments instilled a survival of the fittest mindset. To his credit but to the detriment of friends and foes in his orbit, the future president emerged from that test a winner. Just as the child of an abusive parent so often passes on the curse to which he or she was exposed, it is not unreasonable to presume that a similar dynamic could play out on a tribal or even national scale. History knows few if any greater mass abuses than the Holocaust committed by fascist Germany against the Jews. It is sad to think that that nightmare might be influencing the means, if not the objective, of the Netanyahu government.

Religious Encroachment in Political Matters

Religious extremism is playing a role, too, in the seemingly coincidental metamorphoses of American and Israeli rule. Netanyahu’s cabinet has become critically dependent on the support of its right-wing orthodox Jews, whose position does not represent the majority. The bedrock of Trump’s MAGA movement consists of Evangelical Christians. In the evolution of religious groups around the world, that affiliation played an important role in creating a safer environment to secure survivability and enable people to adapt to changing technology. The need for religion has ebbed in recent decades. Membership losses have been pronounced in many denominations, and extremist wings have gained political power whether across the major sects of Christianity, Judaism and Islam.

This in turn has literally transformed the nature of perceived truth. One side defines truth by what is written in sacred texts written thousands of years ago and in the interpretations of such by designated religious leaders. People of a less fundamentalist persuasion believe that mankind is endowed with an ability to learn from experience and observation that finds new truths and modifies old beliefs. Truth, according to one side, boils down to something being forever so because a serious person says that is so. Others trust a truth when it has passed the test of scientific discovery and considerable debate. To a considerable degree, the rising influence and appeal of authoritarian secular rule represents a backlash of fundamentalist thinking against modernists and the disappointment of people of lesser means with the frustrations of their lives to have improved as previous political leaders had promised.

Packing the Courts and Deciding What Can be Taught

An irony in the religious split between fundamentalists and centrists is that in the realm of politics, truth and the facts supporting whether something is true can be more easily manipulated now. Aided by technological tools unavailable to past generations of autocrats, folks put in power by fundamentalists with rigid views on what is right or wrong are greatly weakening the ability of people to decide independently what is in their own best interests. All sorts of paradoxes emerge from this bait and switch. For instance, President Trump has put prestigious institutions of higher learning on alert, and he claims that liberalism has damaged the quality of what is taught as well as the selection process of student admissions to those institutions. Oddly so, therefore, isn’t it strange that among the nine Supreme Court justices, four attended Harvard law, and four got their law degree from Yale. Behind those two schools, which are ranked numbers one and two as the alma mater of Supreme Court Justices all-time, the third highest number came from Columbia, another institutional target on Trump’s hit list.

Vice President Vance in particular has defended the administration’s actions against Ivy League schools as an identified need to restore a system of student admissions and faculty hiring based on merit. That sounds great, but shouldn’t merit also apply to political leaders? Shouldn’t voters have a right to know the standardized admission test scores of political leaders, what sorts of courses they took, and their GPAs? Without objective facts such as these, candidates can claim to be smarter than their opponents without any proof.

At this early frontier stage of artificial intelligence, voters will need more precise objective markers for sizing up their political leaders. Regrettably, things are trending the other way.

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on Friday, August 15th, 2025 at 2:37 pm and is filed under Larry’s Blog.
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