At the end of the Vietnam War era, a political theorist, whose name I cannot remember, made the prediction that the US global empire would last another 200 years or so. Many took a deep breath following that pronouncement because of the palpable exhaustion masses of those on the left felt after a decade of pushback and protest. A valid observation from that historical epoch is: How many times can a person or movement go to the symbolic and real barricades and go on? That’s where the late Yippie and left theorist Abbie Hoffman’s observation comes into play: “The young must be there.”

It’s been only 50 years since the end of the Vietnam War, and the signs of the empire imploding are everywhere. This morning when I opened the New York Times, “Epstein Alleged in Emails That Trump Knew of His Conduct,” (November 12, 2025), those headlines and signs of the decay of the empire jumped out from the page. As the day progressed, more filth from the detritus of empire was exposed.

House Democrats on Wednesday (November 12, 2025) released emails in which Jeffrey Epstein wrote that President Trump had “spent hours at my house” with one of Mr. Epstein’s victims, among other messages that suggested that the convicted sex offender believed Mr. Trump knew more about Epstein’s abuse than he has acknowledged (New York Times).

Donald Trump’s behavior and attitudes toward women are well known. We have E. Jean Carroll, the “grab them by the pussy” statement, and the New York State conviction over the payoff to a sex worker.

Mr. Trump’s Supreme Court couldn’t do away with Roe vs. Wade fast enough. The fundamentalist right can’t put women in their “place” fast enough. The Nazis wanted lots of blond babies, too.

The point in all of this is how much information does a nation need to conclude, “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark”? There’s the attacks on people of color over the years. Recall Trump’s call for the death penalty in the case of the Central Park Five, who were all innocent of the vicious attack on the jogger? Remember his separation of kids from parents in early immigration actions during his first term and the robocops from ICE terrorizing immigrant communities today?

In foreign policy, Trump easily matches his predecessors with his plans for war, actual attacks, those on the high seas now come to mind, his support for genocide in Gaza and his lack of interest in bringing the Ukraine war to an end. He’s ready to attack Venezuela, Nigeria, and perhaps Cuba, and who knows where else. In these actions he follows a long history of US military hegemony backed by some allies in Western Europe. William Blum catalogued these official, both open and secret, attacks against all manner of so-called enemies in Killing Hope (1995).

There’s the obscenity of the race of fossil fuel extraction, nuclear proliferation, tariffs that change with the day of the week or which way the wind blows on a particular day, cuts to Obamacare, not a great plan in any case, and attacks against the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). The list is pretty much endless. Quite a sales pitch for a republican democracy in the wealthiest nation in the world.

And what actions has Trump taken to revitalize the loss of industry in the US? Not a damn thing, as the bleeding of jobs overseas has long since become irreversible.

The Refuse Fascism demonstrations are absolutely necessary and so far superior to the calls by some on the so-called left to continue to work to right the system through supporting Democratic Party candidates, such as is the work of Indivisible. While these calls may be well-intentioned, they’re like ordering dinner on the Titanic after midnight on the night of its sinking. I think that the federal government may retaliate if Refuse Fascism becomes a prominent force for pushback against the Trump administration, but waiting for the November 2026 Congressional election will be far too late. As a society, it may already be far too late.

The power elite will concede nothing without a struggle. The abolitionist Frederick Douglass’s words on resistance were prescient: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”

This fragile, marginal democracy has been on life support since the 2000 presidential election that installed the intellectually challenged George W. Bush in the presidency with the help of politicians in Florida, including his brother Jeb Bush, with the imprimatur of the Supreme Court. It would be just 16 years later, helped by Bush’s War on Terrorism and the Patriot Act, that Donald Trump would assume the throne and throw the switch provided to him to end any notion of republican democracy in the US. Now, when the fascist ducks are all lined up in a row, the shutting down of anything resembling a democracy is perhaps what’s in store for people of goodwill.

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