On March 23, 1775, Patrick Henry, a political hothead from Virginia, declared: “Give me liberty or give me death!” and history gave America its liberty and death. One could not be given without the other.

Henry’s America, which enjoyed its liberty for 250 years, died on Donald Trump’s Inauguration Day, Jan, 20, 2025, and with it the famed “American Experiment” faded into history’s dustbin.

Trump came to America on liberal democracy’s last days and announced its funeral plans. Henry’s (and America’s) liberty was a reaction to feudalism, and liberal America’s death under Trump was a reaction to its liberty. This is the simplest way of describing “historical fatalism” — or just “history” — the idea that what we sow today we inevitably and logically reap tomorrow.

If your ancestors distributed the new capitalist wealth in the same way they had distributed the open farmlands in the New World, you wouldn’t be a sorrowful minimum-wager today: Jefferson’s America gave our land freely and equally to everyone, but modern capitalism gave our wealth only to the rich. When the first African slave landed on American soil, black and in chains, the tragic seed was sown, and its true reaping is still to come.

There are no mysteries in human affairs: Every event has its historical causes and explanations. Even dictators cannot invent or change their directions. Even revolutions follow the cause-and-effect patterns of history. Just now, Trump is the cause of all liberal miseries, but Trumpism itself is the harvest of the seed liberals sowed with their uncontrolled liberties, famously with Republican deregulation and Democratic neoliberalism.

Unsurprisingly, the social genealogy of Trumpism is directly traced to Patrick Henry’s (and his cohort’s) liberalism.

Likewise, all significant social facts exist always as a step (or a brick) in the logical sequences of history. The American Revolution (demanding liberty) was followed logically by liberal democracy (that gave maximum freedom to Americans) that came thereafter, which was followed by capitalism that came thereafter (maximum freedom to make money), followed by consumer society (maximum freedom to pursue individual pleasure), followed by Trumpism (saying America had too much freedom and not enough order) into a liberty-saturated and freedom-promiscuous (“woke”) nation.

In short, America was created for freedom, the only time a nationhood was ordained to be free, first from life’s drudgery and toil, and then from each other and, finally, from the nationhood itself. Eventually, such a society created too much uncertainty in individuals and too much chaos in society as a result. Trump, the ever astute master of national moods, promised salvation from such a “hellhole.”

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From liberty to a hellhole, American history followed its own logical premises: Patrick Henry and his nation asked for liberty and got it, and his liberal heirs reaped Trumpism from the seed of freedom. For the first time since feudalism, too much freedom killed freedom itself.

Our infantilization (treating adults as children), logically following America’s freedom, was predetermined: thousands of TV channels, millions of internet websites, pleasure-serving drugs on demand, mind-numbing advertisement to sell everything from junk food to presidents, and a nation that never wakes up from its always-on fantasies and hallucinations. Such a society is for children, not adults, and this “liberalism” resulted in the 77 million-strong “Children’s Crusade” that welcomed Trump’s America.

Long before the wave of deregulation, cable TV, the internet, or Trump, I had concluded, in my first book, “The Dead End: The Psychology and Survival of the American Creed” (1977), that America’s liberal democracy — in spite of its outward prosperity and strength — was not going to survive its historic trial. While the nation yawned, Time magazine agreed with me in a 1980 editorial that it was “an important and brilliant book (about) America’s national death wish.” This death wish came true only 50 years later, with Trump’s second inauguration (2025). We are merely witnessing the historical death throes of Henry’s liberal democracy, which had fallen on its sword on Nov. 5, 2024.

In the book, I predicted that America’s liberal society would fall to Russia in its historic contest for world dominance. I argued that, ever in pursuit of pleasure and comfort as their national creed, Americans just didn’t have enough inner discipline to stand up to Russia’s national unity. As a lifelong admirer of Jeffersonian America, I mourn such an inglorious end to my beloved ideal in the face of history’s cruelty. Yet, fascinating unto itself, we never before witnessed the coming-true of a liberal-democratic nation’s death wish.

It is yet unclear what will replace America’s liberalism: Anything from authoritarianism to Orwellianism is possible. Whatever comes after liberal democracy in America will be inelegant, even brutal, certainly nothing like the smiling faces under consumer capitalism. Whatever is America’s future direction, Trumpsters would make sure that history’s first and only, and surely flawed, experiment in freedom is no more.

All that remains to be done — between our daily fantasies and hallucinations — is the grubby burial of our own historical carcass once known, perhaps hypocritically, as “American idealism.”

As Abraham Lincoln once said, “We cannot escape history.”

Jon Huer, columnist for the Recorder and retired professor, lives in Greenfield and writes for posterity.