Will we even notice when democracy is gone?

We’d better start by stating that the metaphor involving boiling a frog by gradually increasing the temperature of the water is a myth. That the story is so widespread shows its appeal as a means of illustrating the inability or unwillingness of people to react to a threat if it is sufficiently concealed or slow-moving.

The metaphor is frequently invoked to explain the reluctance or unwillingness to notice or do anything about pollution or anthropogenic climate change. It can also explain the deceptive normality of life when a society plunges into dictatorship. I call this process catastrophic gradualism: the small, almost insensible accumulation of evils, fairly minor in their individual character, but which when considered whole, inspire a pervasive feeling of dread.

Unless you had the bad fortune to be a federal government employee, the texture of your lived experience probably hasn’t changed much in the last several months. Companies have mostly tried to “hold the line” with price increases related to Donald Trump’s tariff policies, but businesses are not philanthropic enterprises and will raise them sooner rather than later.

Still, unless you’re in the market for a new car, or perhaps have noticed that the cheese imported from France is no longer on the shelf at Costco, you likely have not been much impacted. In any case, the Trump regime will soon begin lying about retail inflation, so the Consumer Price Index will have no value as an objective measure.

To tidy up some financial business, we recently engaged in some online banking. Then the chilling thought came: How secure is anyone’s private information? How can it be used against Americans, not by Nigerian hackers but by their own government?

That same day, the story broke that a Federal Reserve Board member was under investigation by the regime for alleged mortgage fraud. How so? Bill Pulte, Trump’s director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, accessed her mortgage records (possibly illegally), referred the information to the Justice Department and pronounced her guilty on X (Pulte is a MAGA warrior and never lets his job interfere with his incessant flame-posting).

Rep. Adam Schiff and New York Attorney General Letitia James have also been harassed in this way. That all three have been obstacles to Trump’s bid for Stalin-like power is sheer coincidence, of course. But how many layers down will it eventually go? When will it reach the stage of China, where a social media post can land a private citizen in a laogai?

Somewhat chastened by that thought, one went for a walk; the nearby Mount Vernon Trail might be a good place for distraction from doomscrolling in the imagination. But no such luck — the adjacent grassy areas managed by the National Park Service obviously hadn’t been mowed in months, yet another reminder of what the regime’s priorities are. It should have been expected: the Park Service has lost 24 percent of its employees since January.

If you pay attention to the details, America is rapidly transforming from a service state — one that provides education, health care, infrastructure and parks to its citizens — into a carceral state that punishes and imprisons them.

James Fallows, the former editor of The Atlantic, wrote recently about walking through the Mall area in Washington on a beautiful, mercifully cool summer day when it should have been jammed with tourists. He said he had never seen the area so empty. His evidence is not flawed even if it’s anecdotal: Restaurants in D.C. report that their business is down.

That is the result of the carceral state, whereby ICE and the National Guard prowl the streets, creeping out normal people going about their business. A correspondent living in the District writes, “They set up a checkpoint the other night on MacArthur Boulevard checking if people have their seatbelts on. Then asking for IDs and doing background checks on anyone they think is questionable (brown).” If you don’t live in D.C., don’t worry: It’s coming soon to a city near you.

Glancing ahead at the calendar, one notices a checkup scheduled in a couple of months at the physician. That’s usually the occasion, before winter comes, to obtain a COVID vaccination based on an updated formula. Perhaps not this time: one reads that COVID vaccines may be banned “within months” by a ’roided-up ne’er-do-well who not only has no medical qualifications, but whose brain has been partially eaten by a parasitic worm.

Looking further ahead, what happens when not only vaccines and medicines are no longer available (biomedical research has been slashed across the board) but the supply of physicians begins to dwindle as prospective medical students from other countries are prevented from studying here and taking up practices? The same may happen with nurses and other hospital staff (a large proportion come from countries like the Philippines) or attendants in nursing facilities. That, apparently, is how we make America healthy again. Trump’s GOP underlings are also conspiring to destroy health care at the state level as well.

Eating fruits and vegetables is another way to stay healthy. What happens as we reach the point when they become scarce, with crops rotting in the fields because there is no one left undeported to pick them, and product from Mexico is kept out by tariffs? Good luck with the regime’s suggestion that American-born Medicaid recipients will toil in the fields.

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Already, in red states, public school teachers and librarians are harassed by self-appointed vigilantes. What will happen to their already modest salaries when draconian education cuts trickle down to every state and political loyalty tests are likely to be administered? They will probably vote with their feet and leave the profession, as they are already leaving red states. What will be taught to your children then? That the earth is 6,000 years old and evolution is a hoax, that the 2020 election was stolen and Ukraine attacked Russia?

What we are seeing may be unique in the last several hundred years of Western history. Dictatorships have been all too plentiful in that period, and most people think of Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s Russia as the archetypes. They of course enforced rigid ideological conformity and unleashed ruthless violence against dissenters. But their leaders did not adopt a conscious policy of regression to the past in terms of the technological makeup of society.

Hitler, as the cliché goes, built the autobahns, and Nazi Germany developed technologies like synthetic fuels, optical equipment and space flight that were ahead of the Western democracies. Once the Communists took over Russia, they vastly increased the literacy of the largely peasant population, industrialized the country, poured money into scientific research and fostered a respectable number of Nobel Prize winners. That all of this was more than nullified by the brutality of these regimes is obvious.

What the Trump regime and its supporters seem to be planning is different: a comprehensive attack on cognitive intelligence per se, and a concerted effort to undermine the very basis of modern advanced society: education, health care, natural disaster assistance, objective statistical research, public services of any kind (the National Guard is now picking up trash on the Mall, given the cuts to Park Service personnel) and even things like weather forecasting.

They literally want to move the country backward and cause destruction; why else would government agencies dismantle cyber defenses? (Hint: the latest reduction came within days after Trump’s meeting with Vladimir Putin in Anchorage.) And how can one understand his cancellation of a wind energy project, along with the 2,500 jobs involved, that was already 80 percent complete, if not to hamstring the country? Xi Jinping’s China, the rival superpower that haunts the fever dreams of MAGA, may be tyrannical, but its leaders are not that droolingly stupid.

But China 60 years ago may be the closest analogy of a large social undertaking along the lines of what Trump and his lackeys are doing: Mao Zedong’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution amounted to little more than vandalizing the infrastructure that sustained the country. In this context, MAGA vigilantes threatening teachers over forbidden books are the modern-day version of the Red Guards who ransacked Chinese universities and libraries. How soon before the National Guard is sent to harvest the unpicked crops in California’s Central Valley, as was the People’s Liberation Army during the era of Mao?

Despite this catalog of current and easily predictable future horrors, America resolutely keeps up a façade of normality. One still sees the manic cheerfulness and idiotically self-satisfied expressions of TV newscasters, the same moronic sitcoms, the same contrived crime dramas calculated to absorb the viewer’s interest while a crime of infinitely greater magnitude unfolds, seemingly unnoticed, in real life.

Michigan will again play Ohio State in an unbroken ritual that many adults actually take seriously. No matter how much federal funding is cut, universities will still stage football games (which are all that 90 percent of the population knows about academia), even as prestige institutions abolish studies and degrees across entire curricula.

The other day, I received a breaking-news email from the New York Times; the very phrase “breaking news” engenders apprehension these days, but the headlines were these urgent bulletins: “Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce announce their engagement,” “They’re rich, they travel, and they love to complain,” “Ask our fashion columnist: what can I wear on a plane besides leggings and sweats?”  All the news that’s fit to print.

Admittedly, much of social life consists of maintaining a thin pretense of normality. Should you ask an acquaintance, “How are you?”, you don’t actually want or expect him to recite his blood pressure and cholesterol readings and give you every detail of an upcoming knee surgery. You expect a terse “fine,” so you may proceed to some other triviality like sports or the weather. Yet in extraordinary times the constant juxtaposition of the banal and the monstrous becomes surreal.

George Orwell’s 1939 novel, “Coming Up for Air,” tells the story  of an unremarkable suburban London householder who is seized with a feeling of overwhelming dread by the looming terrors of war and totalitarianism. While walking the noisy, packed streets of the central city, with the engines of London Transport double-decker buses roaring, horns tooting and newspaper sellers shouting the headlines of the latest European crisis, he muses:

Enough noise to waken the dead, but not this lot, I thought. I felt as if I was the only person awake in a city of sleepwalkers. That’s an illusion, of course. When you walk through a crowd of strangers it’s next door to impossible not to imagine that they’re all waxworks, but probably they’re thinking just the same about you. And this kind of prophetic feeling that keeps coming over me nowadays. … We’re all on the burning deck and nobody knows it except me. I looked at the dumb-bell faces streaming past. Like turkeys in November, I thought. Not a notion of what’s coming to them. It was if I’d got X-rays in my eyes and could see the skeletons walking.

As Orwell’s George Bowling says, the feeling of being a lone prophet is an illusion. But how many Americans actually do see it coming? How many care?