Share Your Voice
The Horror of Trump’s Ascendance to a Dictator’s Throne
So many friends and colleagues are responding with power and grace to the current political order and its awful consequences. Not that what preceded it was great—including slavery, ethnic cleansing, the caste system—but what is happening now certainly gives a pause to Martin Luther King’s reminder that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”
How is it possible for MAGA followers, fearful, sycophantic Republican legislators, and people who voted for Donald Trump to buy into his political project, shared by Elon Musk and like-minded oligarchs, to establish a form of American dictatorship?
How are those of us who are horrified by the above responding or planning to respond to this reality?
First of all, I think we need to understand how so many people can allow Trump’s ascendance. Many people are asking and answering this question and have offered many complex responses. The following is one more small response.
I think the first task is to see ourselves clearly. I know I need to become more aware of the ways I have bought into the parts of my culture that have hurt and continue to hurt others. If we are not aware of how we are contributing to the problem, not seeing through the ways our own culture and individual actions encourage bigotry and discrimination, nothing will change. We may even be able to vote for an aspiring dictator.
My ideas are building on a long lifetime in which I have tried to make a small contribution to equity, kindness, and social justice, working in collaboration with and within the leadership of some extraordinary educators and friends. But I know I have not always recognized the consequences of my “good deeds”; I have not been aware that my actions have too often been contrary to my intentions.
The thing is when I take stock of my actions within my cultures (yes, plural!) and those taken collectively by people within their cultures, I am left with this frightening picture: every time society has made significant changes, every time we have taken two equitable steps forward, powerful, malevolent forces have managed to push us backward. In other words, small groups and individuals, including sometimes ourselves, have found ways of redirecting our progress. We are in the throes of one such redirection right now as a result of the election of Trump and his chosen co-president, Elon Musk.
Of course, this is not new. It is a process built into the human cultural condition, and I think it is one of the processes that make it possible for MAGA followers, fearful, sycophantic Republican legislators, and people who voted for Donald Trump to buy into his political project, shared by Elon Musk and like-minded oligarchs, to establish a form of American dictatorship? It is a familiar process that is not given enough credence for its ability to shape hearts and minds and win people over, even to a hateful cause. Oligarchies in modern states, like the United States, work to win over social groups/social classes so they agree with their cultural positions by disseminating stories, myths, and misinformation. As Noam Chomsky has said, “In the United States, there is this massive effort to try to control and manipulate behavior and understanding, and it works to some extent. That’s where you have people believing state propaganda. (It is a) highly manipulative approach that works in all societies” (Masterclass, 2025).
Certainly, it worked very well in Nazi Germany, which got many of its ideas on racism from the United States. Although Hitler, himself advocated the big lie about Jewish people in Mein Kampf, the following quote is attributed to Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels:
If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic, and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus, by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State. (Jewish Virtual Library, 2025)
Then, reading Yuval Noah Harari’s book, Sapiens, I became clearer as to how human society has, for thousands of years, been governed by the narratives of people in power or hegemonic narratives. Again, many people buy into narratives that are carefully disseminated throughout society, narratives that divide and rule. We do not necessarily see what is actually happening in the world. Many of us live a life according to the storied version of those in power as if it is real. We live a lie. Chomsky described this beautifully. (Please click on this link to read the rest of this essay)
According to Chomsky (1993), in 1960, Hans Jurgen Morgenthau, a so-called “realist,” tried to convince his readers to distinguish between America’s transcendent purpose to bring about liberty, equality, and peace in the world and America’s real, historical record, which has included slavery, the ethnic cleansing of native peoples, and a caste system. Although the discord between these two historical narratives might encourage some of us to question America’s transcendent purpose, Morgenthau goes on to state that such questioning would be a logical error since one should make a distinction between “reality” and “the abuse of reality.” Morgenthau’s “reality” denotes history as interpreted through the dominant American perceptual set—the dominant discourses of whiteness and white supremacy. “It is only necessary to consult the evidence of history as our minds reflect it” (Chomsky, 1993, p.8). This “reality” is what Americans, and oligarchs positioned alongside Morgenthau, would prefer to see, prefer to believe as having happened. It is a mythical ‘reality’ that is logically acceptable to Morgenthau.
On the other hand, what Morgenthau called the “the abuse of reality” represents what really happened throughout history, but it is, to him, unacceptable as American truth, as the American story, which must be rewritten, he says, in the so-called national interest—that of oligarchs—and couched in hegemonic rhetoric. It appears to be Tump’s truth, Musk’s truth, Many of today’s right-wing political, media, and educational pronouncements are couched in the same logic. It is a macro application of “W.I. Thomas’ famous dictum that ‘if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences” (Wineburg, 1994, p.165).
Returning to Morgenthau’s reality, this hegemonic process of colonizing the truth is widespread and is more than a small clue to an understanding of what is termed, “white supremacy.” White supremacy is informed by a strong ideological sense of entitlement (Glaude, 2020; diAngelo, 2018). It includes the practice of avoiding ‘truths’ that promise to disrupt this entitlement and it employs “novel combinations of old and new” discourse categories to legitimize this avoidance. Whiteness entitles people to impose certain cultural shades of ‘reality’ on reality – shades which reflect best on the norms, values, and accomplishments of men of European origin. Although other cultural perspectives are not completely excluded in today’s multicultural environment,
(i)t can be persuasively argued that all or nearly all initiatives and contributions, even when they take on manifestly alternative or oppositional forms, are in practice tied to the hegemonic: that the dominant culture, so to say, at once produces and limits its own forms of counter-culture. (Williams, 1994, p.599)
Hegemonic culture, then, is deeply embedded in society’s dominant institutions—family, economy, law, politics, and media/communication— and especially the school. We may believe the lies that MAGA tells; We may even think that the imperialist, colonialist narrative advocated by Trump during a Press Conference with his buddy, Netanyahu, at the 2025 Superbowl interview, and no doubt in other venues, that he is entitled to colonize, occupy, ethnically cleanse, and own Gaza, as, of course, many Europeans and Americans have believed before him.
Currently, there are growing numbers of great organizations that are working to challenge Trump’s and other hegemonic actions. We have a non-profit called the Educultural Foundation (educulturalfoundation.com) that has been inactive. However, we are working to bring it back to life to contribute to this cause. I have joined Indivisible; I plan to post to Bluesky. I am talking, writing, and sharing. I am also working on other ways in which I can help in charting a way forward—a way to better contribute to our realizing a society committed to human equity and the value of all living things; a society committed to the dissolution of caste, racism, sexism, gender bigotry, cruelty, and hatred; a society governed by a real democratic system.
Do please visit the Educultural Foundation website (educulturalfoundation.com) and our Facebook page. They are still in the development phase but your will find this an d other essays on the please, share your ideas and any actions you would like us to help make more public. The issues we are facing are too serious not to accept former First Lady, Michelle Obama’s challenge for us all to “do something.”
Please, also, check out my latest book, co-written with Sapna Thapa and Emily Hines titled, Vocalizing Silenced Voices: White supremacy, social caste, cultural hegemony and narratives to overcome trauma and social injustice. The publisher is Peter Lang. Perhaps some part of it will inspire you to share your ideas, or your thoughts on the ideas we share on the Educultural Foundation website or Facebook page; or perhaps the ideas in this essay may encourage you to share your story. Then, finally, if you have any ideas you wish to share relative to our mission, please do so.
Thanks for reading.
References
Chomsky, N. (1993). Year 501: The conquest continues. South End Press.
DiAngelo R. J. (2018). white fragility: Why it’s so hard for white people to talk about racism. Beacon Press.
Educultural Foundation (2021). Retrieved from: https://educulturalfoundation.com/
Glaude Jr., E. S. (2020). Begin again: James Baldwin’s America and its urgent lesson for our own. Random House.
Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the prison notebooks. International.
Harari, Y. A. (2015) Sapiens: A brief history of humankind. New York, NY: HarperCollins.
Jewish Virtual Library (2025). Joseph Goebbels: On the “Big Lie.” Retrieved from: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/joseph-goebbels-on-the-quot-big-lie-quot
Masterclass (2025). Manufacturing Consent: The Control We Can’t See. Noam Chomsky.Retrieved from: https://www.masterclass.com/classes/noam-chomsky-teaches-independent-thinking-and-the-media-s-invisible-powers/chapters/manufacturing-consent-the-control-we-can-t-see?&campaignid=20647728921&adgroupid=161385380344&adid=676956386847&utm_term=&utm_campaign=%5BMC%5D+%7C+Search+%7C+NonBrand+%7C+Category_DSA+Consolidated+%7C+ALL+%7C+EN+%7C+tCPA+%7C+EG&utm_source=google&utm_medium=search&utm_content=676956386847&hsa_acc=9801000675&hsa_cam=17057064710&hsa_grp=161385380344&hsa_ad=676956386847&hsa_src=g&hsa_tgt=dsa-1456167871416&hsa_kw=&hsa_mt=&hsa_net=adwords&hsa_ver=3&gad_source=1&gclid=CjwKCAiAneK8BhAVEiwAoy2HYaFsmejiAF-176XOxMc-lS3NhaB4yVmxrvzLCqgyLuWx4wbdKuUbRRoCdksQAvD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds
Williams, R. (1994). Selections from Marxism and Literature. In N. B. Dirks, G. Eley, & S. B. Ortner (Eds.), Culture/Power/History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory. Princeton University Press., p.599.
Wikipedia (2025). Classical liberalism. Retrieved from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_liberalism
Wineburg, S. S. (1994). The self-fulfillment of the self-fulfilling prophecy. In J. Kretovics & E. Nussel (Eds.), Transforming Urban Education. Allyn and Bacon.
