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POLITICAL CRITIQUE · DEMOCRACY
Trump Filled the Vacuum of Personal Agency
The new Republicans break things and make no sense but the Dems lost the plot by rejecting personal agency and replacing merit with grievance politics
Trump’s America is oddly entrenched despite its absurd policies. His administration recognized early on that the victim-centered framing of ailing democracy removed responsibility from the people by positioning them solely as subjects of systemic oppression that led to incredibly ineffective governance. So yes, I blame Democratic leadership for losing sight of individual moral agency and responsibility where Trump’s rise is a backlash to this failure and would like to warn of broad international consequences.
It implied that any action they took was merely the result of conditioning or an unfortunate product of their environment. Stripped of moral agency, they were reduced to passive vessels rather than fully conscious actors. Yet to be human means to be capable of discernment, foresight, and accountability. If democrats couldn’t reinforce that quality, someone more radical had to come in with undesirable evangelical qualities to rebel against complacency and break things in the process.
