By Billy Webster

Engraved on the National Archives building in Washington, DC, which houses the original founding documents of the United States (US)— the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights — is William Shakespeare’s admonition from The Tempest, “the past is prologue.”

Much of me wanted to ignore that phrase upon the re-election of Donald Trump as president. After all, measured against his showing in the 2020 election, his popularity improved in every state, every demographic, and every age group in the US. While it would be hard to call it a mandate, the election was indeed a clarifying event. His instincts about the economy and immigration were spot on. Pundits have worked themselves into a frenzy trying to explain what happened but why it happened really doesn’t matter. Explaining it doesn’t change it. If lessons are drawn from the 2024 election, the one thing we know for sure is that none of them will apply to 2028. 

Many of my friends, heck, maybe most of them, voted for Trump. These are people I care about and respect. So I wanted desperately to put aside my partisan emotions and embrace the constructive things that might happen in the next few years to: the federal bureaucracy is indeed too large and intrusive and has to be rationalized, culture politics have eclipsed dinner table politics to the detriment of our national fabric, the national debt and the annual deficit are eroding our economic stability, the international obligations to police and support democracy fall unevenly on our shoulders and our immigration policy has failed to keep our borders safe and secure. I wanted to look forward, not backwards. 

I wanted to hope.

Now I feel only despair. It is clear to me that Shakespeare’s wisdom is, as it has always been, deadly accurate. 

I have written in this space before that I lived in Germany — then West Germany — some 45 years ago. The shadows of World War II had shortened but they were still there. Naziism had been pulled up by the stalk, but the roots remained. I listened with my own ears to ‘old’ men discuss their Nazi past and how an entire nation had been commandeered by evil. Good people acquiesced as bad people gained power. By the time those good people realized what was happening, it was too late to stop it. 

I am now the age of those ‘old’ men. And I see in my country what they saw in theirs. I hear the echo of their words in what I see now. 

In less than a week, Trump and his storm troopers pulled up the guardrails of democracy. Trump has assaulted the Constitution by issuing an executive order contravening the 14th amendment; he has published his enemies’ list and begun to effectuate retribution against those on it; he has embraced the most noxious and dangerous like-minded dictators around the world like Viktor Orban in Hungary and Kim Jon-un in North Korea; he has demeaned the church when it seeks to admonish him; he has loosed the criminal class back onto the public by pardoning the worst of the January 6 rioters; he has brought the voices of opposition to heel by threats and intimidation. Elon Musk’s Nazi salute is simply the exclamation point on a horrifying week. As the prominent German weekly magazine Die Zeit wrote a few days ago, ‘a Hitler salute is a Hitler salute is a Hitler salute.” 

Past is indeed prologue. Where this onslaught against democracy and the rule of law might end is anyone’s guess but what happens along the way is clear enough to see. Hate crime, violence and incivility will increase. People will die because of it. The world has seen it before. 

Billy Webster is an educator, entrepreneur, and civic leader. He has been appointed to various positions by two presidents – George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, serving in the Agency for International Development, The Department of Education, and the White House, among other postings. A resident of Spartanburg, Webster has served on numerous boards for organizations serving the Upstate.