Lloyd Kramer

I just returned from a seventeen-day trip to France, where I participated in a Symposium on Lafayette’s role in the early history of French-American relations and gained new insights into how President Trump is destroying America’s reputation among Europeans who have long respected and supported democratic institutions in the United States.

All great empires and dominant national states have eventually confronted the limits of their power and struggled to manage their declining influence in global affairs. This familiar pattern of world history is now shaping political transitions and fears in the United States, but our MAGA president and his political allies are demolishing the structures of America’s global power with an ahistorical efficiency that few declining “great powers” have ever matched.

America’s illegal war against Iran has become the most recent example of how Trumpism resembles Napoleonic authoritarianism by launching foreign military assaults during a time in which the government continues to arrest and imprison people who live within the nation’s political borders.

It’s a long journey from the mountains of North Carolina to the ICE-covered, winter streets of Minneapolis. One of our state’s native sons, however, has made this personal and professional trip to secure his place in contemporary American history as the recent “commander-at-large” of the United States Border Patrol.

Often attributed to Mark Twain — perhaps mistakenly, since no historical source shows he actually...

While most Americans are preparing for the winter holidays and happy family reunions, millions of our immigrant neighbors are fearing authoritarian knocks on their doors or hiding from possible detainments and deportations. 

Americans have begun celebrating the 250th anniversary of the revolutionary war that freed our nation from Britain’s monarchy and eighteenth-century empire.

Dismissing carefully developed expertise as a threat to national values, the authoritarian assaults on long-serving experts in military affairs, government agencies, environmental management, judicial systems, immigrant rights, historical museums, public education, and medical research profoundly endanger the expanding knowledge and transnational exchanges that have shaped America’s global influence over the last 80 years.

The recent actions of authoritarian regimes and the dehumanizing violence of current global conflicts evoke haunting historical memories of anti-democratic violence and warfare in the 1930s and 1940s.

The most important civic descriptions of American identity affirm the beliefs in human equality and democratic self-government that shaped the Declaration of Independence and Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.