Americans recognize they are living through the destruction of our own freedoms

The scaffolding of what we called human rights, that postwar latticework of law and polite consensus, is not merely buckling under the strain of this era.

It is being actively dismantled, beam by beam, by the very government that once entrusted it as its chief architect.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” according to the Declaration of Independence.

The question is no longer whether the system can survive a superpower’s defection, but whether the American people recognize they are living through the un-building of their own freedoms.

In the twelve months since the last election, the administration has moved with a speed that suggests not impulsive chaos, but a chilling precision.

The tools are familiar to students of autocracy: the weaponization of bureaucracy against critics, the deliberate erosion of institutional independence, and the creation of a pervasive climate of fear intended to silence dissent before it is uttered.

What is uniquely American is the scale and the audacity, the use of existing legal machinery not to govern, but to punish and to purge.

Consider the assault on the rule of law itself. When a president openly defies court orders, pardons those convicted of violent intimidation at medical clinics, and directs the Justice Department to investigate law firms based on their clientele, he is not testing the system’s limits. He is demonstrating its fragility.

The message is not subtle: the mechanisms of accountability are negotiable, and loyalty to power trumps fidelity to law. This is not policy disagreement; it is the dismantling of a foundational premise of republics.

The cruelty, however, finds its sharpest edge in the treatment of the vulnerable. The mass deportation regime, invoking wartime statutes against civilians, the denial of lifesaving medical care to veterans, the stripping of food and health assistance from millions—these are not merely “strict policies.”

They are experiments in how much suffering a populace will tolerate when inflicted upon its neighbors. A government that can, with a bureaucrat’s pen, render a child parentless or a sick person destitute has moved beyond debate into the realm of raw force.

It calculates, correctly, that a society divided by fear and dehumanization is one that will not unite in defense of abstract principles.

Internationally, the retreat is not passive but aggressive. Abandoning multilateral bodies, gutting humanitarian aid, and cozening up to strongmen are not isolationism.

They are in alliance with a different world order—one where rights are privileges granted by the state, not inherent qualities of humanity. When the world’s most powerful democracy treats due process as a nuisance and asylum as a loophole, it grants permission to every petty dictator to do worse. The vacuum left is not filled by noble middle powers, but by cynicism and violence.

Yet, to attribute this erosion solely to one administration is to misunderstand the moment. The ground was softened by decades of growing inequality, corrosive disinformation, and a willingness to trade democratic norms for short-term political victories.

The current White House did not create these fissures; it is dynamiting them open. The danger lies in mistaking this accelerated collapse for a temporary deviation. Systems do not snap back. Norms, once broken, become precedents.

Can human rights survive? They must, but not as a relic of a bygone consensus. Survival now depends on a stubborn, unglamorous defense of the local and the immediate: the school board, the state legislature, the independent newsroom, the community pantry.

It depends on lawyers filing motions, bureaucrats leaking directives, businesses refusing to comply, and citizens showing up.

It requires recognizing that the defense of a migrant’s dignity is the defense of one’s own; that an attack on a transgender child’s healthcare is an attack on everyone’s bodily autonomy; that the silencing of a protester today enables the silencing of a voter tomorrow.

The grand architecture may be failing. But human rights were never really about the scaffolding. They were, and are, about the fundamental conviction that a person is not a subject of the state, but its sovereign.

That idea is harder to kill than any institution. It can be buried under fear, bureaucracy, and propaganda, but it persists in the simple, subversive act of saying “no” when ordered to be cruel, and “you matter” when told someone does not.

The era will test not just our laws, but our character. The record is being written now, in the choices of the watched and the watchers, the agents and the targets. History suggests that in such times, the most radical act is often mere, unwavering decency.