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Opinion
How the US Became the Most Dangerous Country in the World
The Trump administration's behavior leaves no room for the common trust on which diplomacy depends. There are only two choices: surrender or strengthen your military in anticipation of war.
Mar 26, 2026
The joint US-Israeli killing of Iranian leaders on February 28 marked the second time in a year that the United States had used negotiations as a decoy for a surprise attack. On the pattern of Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939, our own invasion of Iraq in 2003, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the US under President Trump has indeed launched a criminal war of aggression. The run-up to the war, however, followed a discernible pattern. Throughout the months preceding it, the Trump administration was testing the American public’s tolerance for just such an adventure.
First came the drone killings of alleged “narco-terrorists” on boats in the Caribbean Sea; then, the kidnapping of the president of Venezuela; and finally, the seizure of oil tankers said to originate from Venezuela (an act of piracy by any other name). Now, with the attack on Iran, the message to the world should be considered unmistakable. Nations concerned for their own survival, if they aren’t already US vassal states, are likely to avoid negotiations with the Trump administration. And what else could be expected? Its behavior leaves no room for the common trust on which diplomacy depends. There are only two choices: surrender or strengthen your military in anticipation of war.
The United States is now widely judged to be the most dangerous country in the world. Niccolo Machiavelli in The Prince advised all aspirants to the leadership of a state that it is good to be feared, but he added: Take care that you are not more hated than feared.
We may already have crossed that line.
Since the Biden and Trump administrations threw this country’s weight behind the Israeli destruction of Gaza, we now lack the standing to claim a role as the benefactor of any other nation in that region, including Iran.
What, in all our history, could have led us to fall so far? The disaster of the Vietnam War offered a decade-long glimpse into such possibilities, but the last stage of this country’s descent began with the invasion of Iraq. In early 2003, President George W. Bush told United Nations inspectors to leave that country because our bombing was about to begin. Had they been allowed to complete their search for supposed Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, they would have established that such weaponry, the pretext for our invasion, was nonexistent.
Such actions have consequences. When an international Gallup poll in 2013 asked which country was the greatest threat to world peace, the United States finished in first place. (Iran and Israel were tied for fourth.) The question has not been asked again, but in view of the wars that followed, including NATO’s regime-change bombing of Libya; a CIA-sponsored insurgency in Syria; US bombing campaigns in Somalia, Sudan, and Nigeria; Washington’s support for the destruction and mass killings in Gaza; and now the assault upon Iran, the answer to that poll today would probably be the same.
Lawless With New Laws
Imperial expansion generally comes with a loss of liberty at home. In the United States, the Patriot Act began that process in October 2001. Passed by Congress as an apparent response to the fears of a terrified populace just a month after the 9/11 attacks on New York City and Washington, DC, it was a remarkably comprehensive document to have been written so fast. The enhanced surveillance and security measures of the Patriot Act would, however, turn out to be just the opening chapter in a long series of abridgments of rights and anti-constitutional innovations for which the Global War on Terror served as an excuse. Nor were the tools of that war laid aside by later presidents, even when they struck a different posture.
Presidents of both parties extended the reach of our global war by reducing its visibility. Drone assassinations of presumed enemies, for instance, became a remarkably routine tactic of the Obama administration. And in Donald Trump’s second term, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in American cities have brought the War on Terror home. The arrests may still be largely limited to non-naturalized immigrants and their more vociferous supporters, but nothing in the history of empire would lead one to suppose that such repressive measures (demanded in the name of “national unity”) will cease to gather force. Contempt for legality is not just an international but a national tenet of Donald Trump’s presidency.
Latent in the presidency itself has always been a risk of dictatorship. The capabilities associated with the office by its most distinguished advocate, Alexander Hamilton, are instructive here: activity, energy, dispatch, and secrecy. There have in truth been just three presidents in 250 years, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt, for whom most Americans can still feel an honest admiration. Coincidentally, they led the country during three of the very few American wars that could be justified without embarrassment. But even in the War of Independence, the Civil War, and the Second World War, the cost to civil liberties always proved high. Those wars were invariably used to justify an expansion of state power that would open the way for wars of choice.
Our absorption in what we believe we are doing for others stops us from thinking about what we are doing to ourselves.
Of course, the sovereign branch of government under the Constitution was clearly meant to be Congress, not the presidency, but for the last 85 years, in one fashion or another, Congress has continually abdicated its responsibility to approve and oversee the wars that America conducts—wars that were meant to be launched only in self-defense. Defaulting to the president on the decision to go to war is by now a deeply ingrained habit of congressional cowardice.
President Trump’s wars, however, have been new in one obvious way. Unlike any of his predecessors, he gloats over his killed or kidnapped victims. But the outlandish quality of the man can be a distraction. In truth, imperial hubris had set in and diplomacy had already faded from view before the end of Joe Biden’s presidency. With Trump having already pulled out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action—or JCPOA, also known as “the Iran nuclear deal”—in his first term in office, President Biden was content to let it go unrevived. And no sooner had Russia attacked Ukraine in 2022 than Biden all but abandoned diplomacy and, in the three years that followed, never lifted the phone to speak to Russian President Vladimir Putin. To judge by the record of his presidential travels, Biden came to believe that his real job description was President of NATO.
As for Iran, it has long since acquired for Americans the status of a myth rather than an actual nation and continues to occupy a twisted place in the national psyche. All 52 of the hostages taken in that country’s 1979 revolution were, in fact, released on President Ronald Reagan’s inauguration day in 1981. For him, that was a valuable piece of theater, supplied by the very people we were still calling terrorists. By 1986, when the Iran-Contra scandal broke—the illegal trade of arms to Iran organized by senior officials in the Reagan administration in exchange for money to finance a US-backed insurgency in Nicaragua—it became hard to avoid the inference drawn by Gary Sick, the Persian Gulf adviser to President Jimmy Carter, that US and Iranian arms-for-money hustlers in both governments enjoyed mutual confidence because they had dealt with each other before. As thoroughly forgotten as the Iran-Contra affair were the CIA’s overthrow of the democratic government of Iran in 1953 and American support for Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein during the Iraq-Iran war of 1980-1988, in which Iraq used chemical weapons against Iranian civilians. (The recent poisonous smoke from the Israeli bombing of civilian oil depots in Tehran may be evidence of a comparable war crime.)
What Americans so easily forget, the world sometimes remembers, and the perception of the United States today in Africa, Asia, and Latin America differs markedly from our perception of ourselves. Worse yet, we are led to misjudge our stature by the encouragement we receive from subordinate members of NATO, especially Great Britain, France, and Germany, descendants of defunct empires whose servility to Washington is now almost total. As surely as their representatives trooped into the Oval Office by twos and threes to plead with President Trump for a gentler deal on tariffs, they have also offered military support—an aircraft carrier here or there—to assist with the challenges that confront Washington in its latest war. Feeble though such gestures may be, the North Atlantic commercial democracies are more than ever dependent on American protection and largesse. As a result, in line with Trump administration propaganda, they portray the new conflict with Iran as an episode in a clash of civilizations that was always bound to happen.
But how inevitable was any of this? Thanks to a story in The Washington Post by John Hudson and Warren Strobel, we now know that a week before the joint Israeli-US attack, President Trump received a report from the National Intelligence Council informing him that a full-scale war on Iran would likely fail to bring down the government.
Washington’s determination to annihilate Iran, however, is nothing new. It has, in fact, been more constant and obsessive than most people realize. Back in 2007, a shipload of British sailors was captured in the territorial waters of Iran. Negotiations between the two countries were already underway when then-Vice President Dick Cheney pushed to convert the incident into a cause for war. He had earlier registered his displeasure when that year’s National Intelligence Estimate on Iran gave no grounds for believing that country was close to having a nuclear weapon. In short, there was no pretext for the war that would have lived up to the neoconservative motto, “Boys go to Baghdad, real men go to Tehran!” Still, courageous resistance from the head of CENTCOM, Admiral William J. Fallon, at that moment actually stopped the Bush-Cheney administration from getting into their third Middle Eastern war in five years. There has been no one like Fallon within a country mile of the Trump administration.
The Cold War Legacy from Hell
During his first term in office, in the relaxed usage casually deployed on the American left, Trump was often called a fascist. But the immobilizing speed with which each of his transgressions has succeeded the last does prompt a comparison with German foreign policy in the 1930s. A violent lunge and jolt, followed by another and yet another, too fast for his opponents to catch their breath: that’s the drill. After massive DOGE cuts and further selective purges of government workers, as well as ICE raids in Democrat-run cities and those assaults on Venezuela and Iran, what might come next? One possibility certainly is Cuba. Trump has long been fascinated with Cuba, and he’s hardly alone. That annoying island, 90 miles off the Florida coast, has troubled violent minds in the United States even longer than Iran. And on March 7, Trump promised, “Cuba is going to fall soon.”
Anti-communism was a potent drug, and we are still getting high on its fumes. It outlasted the Cold War but gathered a deeper plausibility from an older model. The sentiment that we’re doing it for their own good goes back to that American favorite among world-conquering powers, the British empire of the 19th century. The British always claimed that they ruled their imperial subjects for their sake—that is, to advance them to the next stage of civilization.
Now, Washington has taken up, as Rudyard Kipling once put it, “the savage wars of peace” and, “cold edged” as we are “with dear-bought wisdom,” we will carry on until the final war is done. From the days of the Roman empire (so the imperialist story ran), the growth of civilization followed a path along which every society could theoretically progress. Nineteenth-century England stood at its happy terminus, but given the right training, any country could arrive there eventually. Rome was cruel by comparison since only Romans were full citizens of that empire and exempt from the most humiliating punishments. The British commonwealth had a more generous presentation and was less keen on wars. (In this regard, America’s rulers are the disciples of Rome.)
Giving up empire would mean detaching ourselves from the conceit that the world wants to have our way of life and that it is our moral duty, even at the point of a gun or a drone, to give the world’s people what we imagine they are asking for.
But the United States has added something new to the relationship between the imperial center and the outlands. We have long admitted refugees from the countries we opposed and supported their inveterate hatred of the regimes they fled. If a Cuban wants the US to bomb Cuba, that rates a cheer of solidarity from many Americans. The same goes for the Polish emigré clamoring for NATO to destroy Russia or the Iranian who cheers the death cloud lately oozing over Tehran from US and Israeli attacks on civilian oil depots in that city.
But there is something odd about this pattern of vicarious hatred: very few of those refugees intend to go back to their native lands. They prefer the United States. By their unquenched thirst for revenge—not just the destruction of the bad Islamist or communist government in their former home, but a legacy of further suffering for the people who remain—they are exhibiting a horrific side of human nature. But as empire builders, we are expected to empathize and never say a word against the miserable fate, including bombs and sanctions, that our leaders have been all too happy to impose on the actual inhabitants of Cuba or Iran.
In a speech delivered in 2017, former President George W. Bush expressed regret over a weakening American determination to spread our kind of democracy and markets globally. For 70 years, he said: “The presidents of both parties believed that American security and prosperity were directly tied to the success of freedom in the world. And they knew that the success depended, in large part, on US leadership.” The world thus owed its stability to the portability of “the DNA of American idealism.” This was the language of the Berlin Airlift at the very start of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. Three generations later, we still speak that language even as, in our recent actions, we repeat the collective self-hypnosis that drew us into Vietnam. We are “winning” in Iran, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has claimed, “decisively, devastatingly, and without mercy.”
Stop a moment at that last phrase—without mercy. It betrays a thought that American soldiers are not supposed to think, or at least not say aloud. Such strutting brutality lowers general morale by proudly displaying a failure of self-discipline. There is such a thing, in foreign policy, as lacking the standing to make certain claims. Since the Biden and Trump administrations threw this country’s weight behind the Israeli destruction of Gaza, we now lack the standing to claim a role as the benefactor of any other nation in that region, including Iran.
The worst of empire is this: that it requires conquest for its self-definition, which means it has no permanent self. Yet to the eye of the empire builder, war is an adequate substitute, an acceptable second best. Our absorption in what we believe we are doing for others stops us from thinking about what we are doing to ourselves. Giving up empire would mean detaching ourselves from the conceit that the world wants to have our way of life and that it is our moral duty, even at the point of a gun or a drone, to give the world’s people what we imagine they are asking for.
We will go on being the most dangerous country in the world, as well as an empire in free fall, until we stop supposing that we know other nations better than they know themselves. But the crisis we are now in also requires an inward look. Recalling the state of German society in the mid-1930s, in her extraordinary essay “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship,” Hannah Arendt offered a startling reflection: “It was as though morality, at the very moment of its total collapse within an old and highly civilized nation, stood revealed in the original meaning of the word, as a set of mores, of customs and manners, which could be exchanged for another set with no more trouble than it would take to change the table manners of a whole people.” At home and abroad, how close are we coming to just such a change?
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Nuking Iran Would Mean Stepping Beyond the Brink of Evil
There may be no recovery from such an action; indeed, “recovery” is only possible before such an action occurs: before the nuclear missile hits.
Mar 26, 2026
This is the first sentence of a column I cannot write... of a “war” I cannot win. There’s just no way to condense the psycho-spiritual devastation of an unleashed nuclear bomb into words. All I can do is ask a question that has no answer: What is the opposite of Armageddon?
Can a collective human embrace be larger, more intense and powerful than collective suicide? Is “peace” a force in its own right, or just a brief moment of quiet while humanity reloads?
OK, no answers, just a bit of context with which to ponder the ongoing US-Israeli war on Iran (and throughout the Middle East). Lawrence Wilkerson—retired US Army colonel and former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell—put it this way in a recent interview with Democracy Now: “This is a war with long legs and I think Trump has completely misinterpreted it. The only one who has interpreted it correctly is Bibi Netanyahu and I think he’s ready to use a nuclear weapon, should it become as bad as it looks right now.”
One alleged reason why we’re waging a war on Iran is because it has nuclear “capability,” which we need to obliterate for our own safety. Apparently, only the boss countries—the world leaders, the conquerors and colonizers—can be trusted to have nukes. USA! USA! This club also includes Israel, which in fact possesses a large number of nuclear warheads and may actually use one if the war it started comes back at it with too much ferocity. In other words, if Iran’s retaliation is too successful: “...winning against such insatiable enemies could provoke a cornered Israel to turn the war nuclear,” according to the publication Jacobin. “A Trump adviser recently warned that Israel might use a nuclear weapon against Iran.”
I don’t believe it’s possible to turn a nuclear assault into a verbal abstraction: “Gosh, Iran was just nuked.” If that happens, we’ve just inflicted hell on all of humanity. We’ve stepped—collectively—beyond the brink of evil.
Let’s take a moment to let this sink in. The Iran war could go nuclear. Here’s where things get incomprehensible: horrifically unimaginable. The human race has far more skill at murder than it has at understanding, conflict resolution... sanity.
The Jacobin piece continues:
Israel has a large nuclear arsenal, officially undeclared, of over 100 warheads that it built with the help of the French and hid for a decade from the Americans. It can be deployed by submarines as well as long range missiles and is considered by Israeli planners to be the "Samson option," named after the last biblical judge of Israel who tore down the columns of the temple of an ancient fertility God to destroy the Philistines. It may resort to using this weapon if it feels it is existentially threatened.
Samson brought the temple down on himself as well, as I imagine you know. Could an ancient story be more relevant to the present moment?
This is where I lose any sense of what to say. First of all, I don’t believe it’s possible to turn a nuclear assault into a verbal abstraction: “Gosh, Iran was just nuked.” If that happens, we’ve just inflicted hell on all of humanity. We’ve stepped—collectively—beyond the brink of evil. There may be no recovery from such an action.
Indeed, “recovery” is only possible, in all likelihood, before such an action occurs: before the nuclear missile hits. Recovery has to start happening right now—and it is, or so I hope. Something’s happening. More than 3,000 No Kings Day protest rallies are planned around the country on March 28. Protest is not enough, of course, but it’s yet another beginning. Let this be the match that lights the candle.
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Yes, It's Time to Tax the Rich
A recent poll found that 80% of American respondents viewed wealth inequality as a problem, 80% said the rich had too much political power, and 78% said taxes on billionaires were too low.Social Scheduling
Mar 26, 2026
With the deadline for paying federal income taxes fast approaching, the thoughts of American taxpayers turn naturally toward the age-old question: Why isn’t there a fairer tax system?
Currently, in fact, campaigns for state tax-the-rich legislation are flourishing in California, Colorado, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Texas, and Virginia, and have already succeeded in getting such legislation adopted in Massachusetts and Washington. Similarly, in Congress, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) have introduced the Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act, while Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Wash.) are sponsoring the Make Billionaires Pay Their Fair Share Act. The tax-the-rich proposals range from increasing the tax rate for the very highest annual income earners, to instituting an annual wealth tax on the very richest Americans, to a combination of both.
Although the most affluent Americans, like other Americans, have always paid taxes to fund public services, the dispute has been over how much they should pay. Sales taxes and property taxes place a heavy burden on people of modest means, but a much lighter burden on the wealthy. Therefore, the wealthy have tended to favor these generators of public revenue and to oppose a progressive income tax, under which the rich would pay at a higher rate than the poor. A lengthy political battle for a tax system based upon ability to pay led to passage of the 16th Amendment to the US Constitution, which empowered Congress to levy an income tax.
Initially, the new income tax, though progressive, was rather small-scale. But as the federal government took on new and costly tasks―particularly funding US participation in two world wars and the Cold War―the federal income tax grew accordingly. By 1944, the official tax rate for the highest income earners stood at 94%―although, thanks to deductions, loopholes, and the rate’s confinement to the top increment of their income, the richest Americans actually paid at a much lower rate.
Increasingly, in politics, big money talks―and on behalf of Republicans.
Like their well-heeled predecessors, many wealthy Americans were outraged at funding public services that benefited people whom they often regarded as their inferiors. Why, they wondered, was their money being “wasted” on things like public schools, public housing, and public healthcare, when “the best people” went to private schools, lived in private mansions or gated communities, and employed private “concierge doctors”? While chatting with their friends over lunch on their yachts or at their tennis clubs, they complained of “welfare queens” and the “ungrateful poor.”
Consequently, Congress―badgered by the wealthy, their corporations, and conservative ideologues―cut the progressivity of the federal income tax. In 1964, the top marginal tax rate was reduced from 91% to 70%, in 1981 to 50%, and in 2018 to 37%.
Given these dramatic cuts in the federal income tax rate, plus preferential tax treatment for dividends and appreciation in the value of stock, bonds, and other investments―the wealthiest Americans managed to secure a much lower tax rate than most Americans. According to a ProPublica investigation, the 25 richest Americans, who had $401 billion in income from 2014 to 2018, paid taxes on it at a rate of just 3.4%. Indeed, during some years, the world’s top billionaires―including Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg, and Carl Icahn―paid no federal income taxes at all.
When it came to corporate income, the federal government slashed the corporate tax rate from 53% to 21% between 1969 and 2025. And this, too, produced enormous benefits for very affluent Americans, who own most stock market wealth. According to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, 23 of the largest and most profitable US companies paid no federal corporate income taxes at all from 2018 to 2022. And 109 corporations paid no federal tax in at least one of those years.
The Trump administration’s tax policies lifted the fortunes of the wealthy to unprecedented heights. According to a September 2025 report by Americans for Tax Fairness, the wealth of the 15 richest US billionaires increased by over 300% after the passage of the first Trump-GOP tax cut in December 2017. The wealth of the very richest of them, Elon Musk, grew 20-fold. In the first year of Trump’s second term, marked by another huge tax cut for the rich, US billionaire wealth jumped from $6.7 trillion to $8.2 trillion.
Not surprisingly, government taxation policy―coming on top of low-wage rates, corporate outsourcing, assaults on unions, and government subsidies for big business―has resulted in rising economic inequality in the United States. By late 2025, the richest 1% of Americans possessed some $55 trillion in assets―roughly equal to the wealth held by the bottom 90%. “Household wealth is highly concentrated and becoming steadily more concentrated,” reported the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, a major financial research firm.
This rising economic inequality enhances the growing power of the wealthy in public affairs. Increasingly, in politics, big money talks―and on behalf of Republicans. Federal election contributions from the nation’s 100 richest Americans averaged $21 million between 2000 and 2010, but rose beyond $1 billion in 2024. In that year, contributions to Republicans surged from roughly $300 million to just under $1 billion, while donations to Democrats dropped from roughly $300 million to less than $200 million. A right-wing political party, led by a demagogic billionaire promising more tax cuts, proved irresistible.
By contrast, most Americans support proposals to raise taxes on the rich. According to a March 2025 Pew Research Center poll, large majorities of Americans surveyed favored increasing taxes on the wealthy and corporations. In January 2026, an Economist/YouGov poll reported that 80% of American respondents viewed wealth inequality as a problem, 80% said the rich had too much political power, and 78% said taxes on billionaires were too low.
It’s time to tax the rich. Or, as Pete Seeger used to sing, “Take it easy, but take it.”
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The Real Cause of US Polarization: Class War, Not Culture War
The real crisis is America is not the deep political cultural divisions among its citizens as much as the concerted efforts of both political parties to play on imagined differences, while orchestrating a massive shift in wealth from working people to the super-rich.
Mar 26, 2026
At this year’s National Football League Super Bowl, the Trump regime could not resist politicizing the event by attacking the halftime performance of Bad Bunny, a celebration of Puerto Rican musical culture conducted entirely in the Spanish language. President Donald Trump endorsed an alternative country western streamed halftime program of Kid Rock, which was dedicated to the conservative icon Charlie Kirk. It was the president and his party inciting the MAGA base to campaign for congressional Republicans.
The two shows represent two radically different cultural streams in America, roughly approximating the struggle over ethnic, gender, and racial representation in public life. On a more material level, however, the unfulfilled day to day needs of working people caught up in this ideological divide suggests that rhetorical claims about the culture wars are not grounded in the quotidian realities and material demands of most people.
The real crisis is America is not the deep political cultural divisions among its citizens as much as the concerted efforts of both political parties to play on imagined differences, while orchestrating a massive shift in wealth from working people to the super-rich class, which includes the congressional millionaire unrepresentatives. At least two-thirds of the Senate membership and more than half the House are millionaires, compared to 9% of Americans overall.
Diminishing access to basic human needs, a news topic that does not attract advertising revenue, except perhaps from Big Pharma, has a huge impact on the quality and very meaning of democracy. The real crisis of the working class is not on the MSM agenda.
True to its propaganda mission of creating legitimacy for the hegemonic state, the mainstream corporate media fails to help Americans understand that in their individual family struggles to survive or just about make ends meet, they are not alone.
In the midst of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln referred to an ideal America as a country of, by, and for the people. Looking at the political and civic participation and well-being of people, all the people, as a proxy for democracy, it is clear that the legitimacy of the democratic state is at a dangerously low level and in inverse correspondence with the degree of American military or police aggression at home and abroad. The largest injuries of wars fall on the working class.
The lower the trust the public invests in the state, the more the ruling apparatuses are compelled to distract public attention. Trump apparently believes he can override constitutional restraints on his power mandate, ignore public opinion, and function as a quasi-autocrat. He also hopes to deflect attention from his failed economic policies by redirecting the public gaze toward a constructed enemy threat.
In 2016, Hillary Clinton melded her identity politics strategy to neoconservative, pro-Israeli, and Russophobic rhetoric bereft of any vision or coherence, in the process losing the working class, 52% to 44%, to a faux pro-labor campaigner. Her “basket of deplorables” gaffe directed at the white working class didn’t help her chances. The Democrats under the neoliberal Clinton wing of the party turned away from the New Deal and toward neoliberal, anti-welfare, corporate-friendly, austerity, and tough-on-crime policies.
In 2024, a disunited working class voted overwhelmingly in favor of Donald Trump, who was anything but a pro-labor politician. According to the Pew Research Center, 67% of Trump voters were without a college degree, a proxy for working class, compared with 51% for Harris. Clinton protégé Kamala Harris captured just 42% of working-class voters, while Trump carried 56%.
Clinton-Obama acolyte Joe Biden, often identified as progressive, cut federal food stamp and childcare benefits during his presidency and allowed child poverty to nearly triple, while millions of Americans lost Medicaid and CHIP (Children's Health Insurance Program) support. On the international front, as Barack Obama’s vice president, Biden acted like an imperial proconsul in Ukraine, forsaking even token gestures of diplomacy in dealing with the Russian head of state, whom he publicly dismissed as “a thug.” His unconditional military assistance that enabled the Israeli genocide lost him and his stand-in much of the youth vote in 2024 prior to his decision to drop out of the presidential race.
The Democrats have followed the same militaristic, hegemonic foreign policy approach as Republicans. As secretary of state, Clinton, following John Foster Dulles’ style of “brinkmanship,” promised to confront Russia in Ukraine with a “no-fly zone” that she proposed would halt Russian aid to the rebellious Donbas region in eastern Ukraine. Overall, her identity-based politics campaign strategy in 2016 lost out to a faux labor-friendly campaigner, who took 52% of the working class vote to Clinton’s 44%.
Perhaps the only thing worse than a party of the billionaire class led by a real estate tycoon is another party of the billionaire class pretending to be an alternative. In reality, the well-being of Americans has continually declined for nearly 50 years under neoliberal governments of both parties. As a result, public trust of governing institutions by 2024 had reached a near all-time low in the post-war period. Today, Democrat voters are only marginally more trusting of the federal government, 35%, than Republicans, 11%.
The purported polarization of Democrat versus Republican voters has been constructed as an ideological trope to hide the more substantive economic and class basis of the great divide, which is the public’s recognition of the corruption of the state on the one hand and the concentration of wealth and power that has hollowed out the democratic status of citizens, especially workers and urban minorities, on the other.
In November 2025, the Kettering Foundation found a new low, 24%, in its tracking of American adults who believe that democracy is working in the country. The relatively weak organic character of American democracy measured in terms of social distribution corresponds to the perception of diminished state legitimacy that is documented in several studies of public trust in state institutions. Of all public institutions in America surveyed by Gallup in 2024, the very lowest regard is held for the one body that constitutes the essence of a representative democracy, the legislature. Gallup found that trust in Congress registered a “great deal” or “quite a lot” for a total of a meager 9% of respondents.
Trust in the presidency registered 26%, the Supreme Court 30%, newspapers 18%, television news 12%, and internet news 16%. Big business was trusted by 16% and, crucially, the medical system by a minority 36%. Indeed, 80% of Americans, including 91% of Democrats, 82% of Independents, and 67% of Republicans, see the rich as wielding too much power in American politics, according to a January 2026 YouGov poll. It identified a broad public perception that the economic system works primarily on behalf of powerful interests and that members of Congress, governors, and federal officials, moreover, are likely to accept bribes.
The public is indeed very skeptical about the conduct of electoral politics: 87% of Republicans and 85% of Democrats believe the parties "are more focused on fighting each other than on solving problems.” Per Max Weber, it was the charismatic and caudillo style of Trump that served as the last though shaky refuge of public confidence in government. That lasted about one year. In March 2026, enmeshed in a brutal war without real objectives in Iran, Trump’s approval rating reached an all-time low for presidents.
Neoliberalism and Social Polarization
A “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” to use Lincoln’s felicitous phrasing, captures the essence of democracy–over and above the right to vote, nominal free speech, or the existence of relatively independent news media, all of which in fact are under the threat or capture of partisan control. In this regard, the US has greatly declined as a democracy, even as measured by the conservative NGO Freedom House, and more closely resembles an oligarchy dominated by the billionaire class, with extremely wide income gaps and among the highest concentrations of wealth (Gini coefficient) among the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. Compared to the European welfare states (e.g., Nordic countries, France, Germany, and Netherlands), the US is more of a warfare state, drawing much of its wealth from military interventions, military aid (which is largely recycled back to the US), and alliances with repressive political leaders such as the Gulf autocrats.
Looking at the material and social status of working Americans as the true measure of democratic empowerment, one finds a depressed state of well-being and social economic freedom for most citizens.
A few of the indicators of social demise (a fuller list is found in my book cited, below) that has fed distrust and material polarization in America:
- Highest rate of homelessness among wealthy countries;
- One of the worst countries in the OECD in real retiree income;
- Share of adults living in middle-class households fell from 61% in 1971 to 50% in 2021;
- 44% of workers in 2024 were not earning a living wage;
- Some 50 million Americans are living with household incomes below 125% of poverty, including more than 15 million children;
- In 2023, Blacks in the US had more than double the poverty rate of whites, 17.9% to 7.7%;
- Infant mortality rate in 2017 was 5.8 per thousand live births, ranked 32nd (out of 36) among OECD countries, 55th worldwide;
- People with less than $15,000 in earnings died on average more than 10 years earlier than those with annual income above $50,000. US ranked 46th in life span. Comparing American pre-Covid-19 life expectancy between the richest 1% and poorest 1% of individuals, the gap was 14.6 years;
- 35% of millennials and 22% of all Americans fear becoming homeless;
- Covid-19 deaths are the highest in the world;
- Among the highest numbers and rates of incarceration in the West, with extremely high rates for people of color (in the US, three times the population share for Blacks);
- Blacks and Latinos make up 29% of the national population but nearly 60% of the prison population;
- More than 5 million Americans are under supervision by the criminal legal system, of whom about 2 million, disproportionately Black, are living in prisons and jails rather than in their communities;
- The weakest middle class and the largest low-income and high-income strata compared to Western Europe;
- Since the takeoff of neoliberalism, among the lowest rates of civic engagement and immigrant enfranchisement of any advanced economy;
- Ranked among the 10 loneliest national populations, measured by percentage of people living alone, 5th at 28%; and
- Press freedom: 57th in 2025 (45th in 2018), behind every country in Western Europe except Greece.
These are the actual data of polarization in the US, intensified in the era of neoliberalism. True to its propaganda mission of creating legitimacy for the hegemonic state, the mainstream corporate media fails to help Americans understand that in their individual family struggles to survive or just about make ends meet, they are not alone. The MSM instead misleads the public by portraying political conflict as cultural warfare rather than class warfare, thereby dividing the people and protecting the system’s class repression and small minority of billionaires controlling the most critical affairs of the state and its propaganda apparatuses.
Democracy here is defined by the equality of citizenship. In practice, this means universal access to healthcare; quality housing; higher education; clean environment; equitable income; union empowerment; racial, gender, and ethnic justice; cultural amenities for all; and other core objectives pushed by public advocacy groups. Indeed, in a more genuinely democratic society there would far less need for public advocacy, and electoral and political activities would no longer be controlled by corporate and other undemocratic institutions. The role of progressive intellectuals is to struggle for democracy along this understanding of a democratic and just society.
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