The name Hans Vaihinger is virtually unknown today, but we Americans very much live in his world. Vaihinger, a German philosopher, created a minor sensation more than a century ago with the publication in 1911 of The Philosophy of ‘As If’ (the English translation, The Philosophy of ‘As if’: A System of the Theoretical, Practical and Religious Fictions of Mankind, was published in 1924). While Vaihinger spends hundreds of pages explicating this philosophy, the gist is easily conveyed. We live and act, he argues, “as if” certain things were true.

“Appearance,” Vaihinger writes, “the consciously-false, plays an enormous part in science, in world-philosophies and in life.” I wonder how many of us can honestly deny that this is how we operate as a country today. Vaihinger was no political scientist, but the way he outlines his “as if” philosophy strikes me as a damning commentary on American politics in 2025.

Recently, for example, there has been clamorous debate about whether we have an “imperial presidency,” or, perhaps, an “imperial judiciary.” By “imperial” is meant that whoever occupies a high office—chief executive, Supreme Court justice—acts beyond that office’s legitimate bounds, reaching for more power than the position confers.

“Imperial presidency”? Let’s see. Bombing foreign countries, of course, but also, arguably, imposing sanctions, providing targeting intelligence and weapons systems to belligerent powers, fomenting revolution in an adversary’s country, and assassinating foreign government officials—all these are acts of war. The Constitution vests the authority to declare war in the Congress. (The last time Congress declared war was in 1942.) The 1973 War Powers Resolution and subsequent congressional deliberations spell out even more clearly what presidents may and may not do when it comes to inflicting violence on other countries. But nearly every modern president has ignored these limits. We act “as if” we don’t have an imperial presidency, pretending to be shocked when the Constitution is ignored, when in fact this unconstitutional activity has been going on since before most of our parents were born.

As for the Supreme Court, it acted for decades “as if” the word “person,” in statutes, at the common law, and in the Constitution itself, did not include people of African descent, or, more recently (and to this very day), babies. It has done this while pretending not to notice, by and large, that the chief executive was acting “as if” there were no limits on his authority to instigate belligerency. For any justice on the Supreme Court to accuse any occupant of the Oval Office of unconstitutional conduct is to behave “as if” hypocrisy were not written in big pink letters across the entire scene.

And we, the people, continue to engage in the cheap theater of acting “as if” the laws of the heartland also apply to the people in Washington, D.C. We go about our business “as if” we have a constitutional republic when in fact what we have is a globe-bestriding empire, something the rest of the world can see but not most of us. The Fourth of July has just gone by again, and we have been in our backyards, barbecuing and shooting off fireworks, pretending “as if” 1776 (or 1789) has anything whatsoever to do with 2025. The republic the Founders gave us? We didn’t keep it. But it is much more convenient to act “as if” we lived in a land where everyone was equal, where babies in Black neighborhoods were treasured as much as donors knocking on doors along K Street.

This studied political blindness may be part of every national system. Corruption and folly are rife in our species, so people in all corners of the earth probably have to act, to some extent, “as if” there were rules, knowing full well that the people in power almost always act as though there were none. In any political arrangement, the weak will be prey to the strong. To preserve our sanity, at least, we must, I suppose, go along to get along, “as if” God is in His Heaven, and all is right with the world.

But there is something else going on in America, some other “as if” that is destroying the fabric of our nation. Many of us act “as if” there is no God. Perhaps we fret so theatrically about “imperial presidents” and “imperial justices” because we intuit, at some level, that we recognize no higher authority than federal officials. We don’t pretend to do what God’s law demands of us. We don’t honor the Commandments even in the breach. We just brazenly smile, “as if” we were bringing the best possible version of the universe into being by means of our political cleverness.

This past week, Congress passed a colossal stack of paper into law, clocking in at some nine hundred and forty pages. At pages 660 and 661, we see that federal funding for abortions was cut to zero dollars for one year.

Yes, this is welcome news. Although not named in the new legislation, the upshot of the language on pages 660 and 661 is that Planned Parenthood will have its trough of federal dollars emptied for twelve months. By this wonderful move, perhaps, God willing, Planned Parenthood will go out of business forever.

But if we really believed that the taking of innocent human life cries out to Heaven for justice, then would we also believe that we could fool God by swearing off paying for the killing of the innocents for just one year? A year is better than nothing, to be sure. One day, one hour, in which babies are not being hunted in utero is better than that the practice should go on unabated. But do we think that one year is enough? Do we think we can bargain with God, forego killing babies for a little while, then pick up where we left off once our season of right behavior has elapsed?

Do we not act, in our political hubris, our imperial pride, “as if” God were not watching, and will not be angry at us for the river of blood we have shed—all with the approval of, for the most part, the presidents, the Congress, and the Supreme Court?

We can leave Vaihinger’s world. We can see things as they really are and not go on make-believing that the “as if” we want is the “as is” we have. But I think the shock of truth will be more than most of us can bear. Violence suffuses our politics, overseas and domestically. We kill foreigners, and babies, with impunity. We don’t just have imperial presidents and high court justices, but imperial citizens, many of them willing to snuff out tiny life if they find that life to be inconvenient. Nearly seventy million babies have been killed these past five decades, and almost none of them was even given a name, much less a proper burial. We can go on acting “as if” they weren’t human beings, and “as if” their mothers weren’t mourning their loss. To do that, though, to take stock of the horrors that have transpired under the banner of freedom and democracy, may be to lose the illusion of America altogether.