SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
social democracy
Crime and Punishment US Style: an Interview with David Garland
The author and NYU professor explains why America’s modern regime of policing and punishment is altogether extraordinary when measured against the practices of other developed nations.
Aug 28, 2025
The United States is a global outlier in several significant areas, not least of which is its extraordinary penal state with its penchant for extreme punitiveness.
Indeed, as Professor David Garland, one of the world’s most influential criminologists, argues in the interview that follows, for historical parallels with the penal state in the US one must look to the case of the Gulag system during Joseph Stalin’s reign as dictator of the Soviet Union. Moreover, Professor Garland contents that behind the harshness and cruelty of the US criminal legal system lies the nation’s racialized political economy, and that transforming the latter is a prerequisite for restructuring the former.
David Garland is the Arthur T. Vanderbilt professor of law and professor of sociology at New York University and an honorary professor at Edinburgh University. He is author of the newly published book Law and Order Leviathan: America’s Extraordinary Regime of Policing and Punishment.
C. J. Polychroniou: The United States has long portrayed itself as the greatest and freest country in the world, a model democracy for other countries across the globe. The reality, however, is that the US is the most economically unequal society in the developed world and one of the worst countries for racial equality. In addition, its weak and fragile liberal-democratic institutions have been exposed in recent times for all to see, while its penal system is what may easily be described as a national disgrace and an international embarrassment. Indeed, as you argue in your recently published book Law and Order Leviathan, the US is also an outlier among modern democracies in its policing and punishment practices, and this is indeed by no means a new phenomenon. How should we understand the country’s long-standing obsession with law and order?
David Garland: Yes, people think of America as Alexis de Tocqueville’s civil society when in fact it’s often closer to Thomas Hobbes’ authoritarian state. We see these repressive characteristics today in the conduct of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, but for the last 40 years the leading example has been the massive deployment of penal power by America’s criminal legal system—a deployment that has occurred at every level of government with broad bipartisan support.
The fundamental cause that has shaped America’s penal state is the nation’s racialized political economy and the material conditions created by its economic and political structures.
America’s modern regime of policing and punishment is altogether extraordinary when measured against the practices of other developed nations. American police kill civilians at a much higher rate; American courts impose longer and more frequent prison sentences; American prisons house massively more individuals, particularly Blacks and Latinos; and Americans with felony convictions are subject to many more controls and constraints after they serve their sentence. No other democracy exercises penal power to this extent. To find historical parallels, we have to look to the Soviet gulags or Mao’s political prison system.
There are many causes that converged to bring about America’s penal Leviathan—fear of crime, racism, neoliberalism, the appeal of law and order politics, a culture of cruelty and indifference—but the fundamental cause that has shaped America’s penal state is the nation’s racialized political economy and the material conditions created by its economic and political structures.
C. J. Polychroniou: The US has a weak welfare system and a distinct political economy in general compared to many European countries. Is there a direct link between weak welfare structures and the employment of aggressive policing and harsh punishment?
David Garland: Yes, and the book shows in detail what these linkages are and how they operate. Like its penal state, America’s political economy is an international outlier, with characteristics that set it apart from the economic arrangements of other high-income nations. This is especially true of its labor market—which provides fewer protections for working people, and more low-paid, precarious employment, making for a level of insecurity and instability that is unknown elsewhere in the developed world. On top of this, America’s welfare state provides less support for poor people and for those in need.
Material conditions for working people grew worse after the 1960s when the economic dislocations of deindustrialization were exacerbated by the collapse of the New Deal order, the decline of trade unions, and federal government’s abandonment of the inner cities. In the 1980s and 1990s, America exhibited social-problem levels markedly higher than other developed nations, the most striking of which was a rate of lethal violence—mostly gun homicides—that was off-the-charts high compared to other affluent countries.
The outlier status of America’s penal state will persist unless and until the nation’s political economy is transformed.
Drawing on urban studies and the sociology of violence, I show how pressures produced by America’s political economy—unemployment, disinvestment, deteriorating housing, limited social services, and so on—destabilize poor neighborhoods, undermining community life and family functioning, especially in racially segregated areas with concentrated poverty and population turnover. The result is that the vital processes of socialization, social integration, and informal social control normally carried out by families, schools, neighbors, and employers grow weak and fail, leading to social problems, social disorder, and criminal violence. These problems are deepened by the widespread availability of guns—another exceptional feature of the American landscape.
When homicides and armed robbery rates rose, and cities became disorderly and unsafe, voters demanded that something be done to improve public safety and protect their businesses and property values. But the same political economy that disorganized communities and triggered criminogenic processes also limited the governmental responses to these problems. In America’s racialized ultra-liberal political economy, redistributive policies are generally unpopular. And because responsibility for public safety is, in the US, a local function, few municipalities had the resources needed to respond to crime using the social policies and economic investments that are common in social democratic nations. Instead, they defaulted to the cheap policy instruments that were within their toolkit, namely police and punishment.
Moreover, American-style policing and punishment turns out to be remarkably aggressive. Why? Because of public indifference to the fate of those caught up in the carceral net; because the courts refuse to hold police and prisons to account; but mainly because penal state agents operate against a social background that is more disorganized, more dangerous, and more gun-laden than that of any other developed nation.
C. J. Polychroniou: As you point out in your book, public sentiments about police brutality, mass incarceration, and the penal state experienced a major shift away from punitive measures following the police murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020. Indeed, as street protests ensued, the tenets of police and prison abolition gained currency, although alternatives still needed to be worked out. Be that as it may, the politics of law and order have since returned with a vengeance, as evidenced by the reelection of US President Donald Trump, who ran a campaign based on fear and anxiety. How do we explain this reversal?
David Garland: The plague year of 2020 was an extraordinary time, during which public anxiety and hopes for radical change often coexisted. (During the pandemic, the US created a pop-up European-style welfare state, with stimulus checks for every household; enhanced unemployment, housing, and child-allowance benefits; and massively extended healthcare coverage—only to dismantle it once the crisis had passed.) In retrospect, we can see that the massive street demonstrations that followed the police killing of George Floyd were possible because so many people were no longer at work or in school, making them available to join in the protests. Of course, many Americans were genuinely shocked by the brazen violence and racist disregard for human life that Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin displayed. But it is worth remembering, that by 2020, homicide levels and crime rates in general had been falling for more than a decade, relaxing public demands for tough-on-crime policies and enabling activists, such as the Black Lives Matter movement and local groups of abolitionists, to draw public attention to the pathologies of police violence, mass incarceration, and racialized criminal justice.
Democrats need to take the crime problem seriously and offer their own strategies and solutions—not just watered down versions of right-wing bromides.
In general, though, the American public is very conservative on matters of crime control and public safety, and demands for the “abolition” or “defunding” of police and prisons were never liable to have much traction beyond the world of activists, advocates, and academics—even when the liberal media briefly introduced these ideas into the mainstream. And while the life chances of middle-class white people are not normally affected by police violence or harsh prison sentences—in sharp contrast to poor communities of color—they are affected by crime and violence. So when, in the fall of 2020, there were reports of an uptick in shootings and homicides, public support drained away from Black Lives Matter and voters reverted to their long-standing preference for law-and-order candidates—as we saw in the election of Eric Adams to NYC Mayor, in the deselection of several progressive prosecutors, and eventually in the victory of Donald Trump. So the reversal was a political regression to the mean following an extraordinary historic moment.
However, I believe the protests of 2020, and the radical critique of the penal state that accompanied them, have changed the public discourse in important ways, introducing new ideas and radicalizing many young people who form part of the Democratic Party base. My hope is that this new level of concern about penal state repression will be joined with realistic, progressive proposals for dealing with crime and disorder. Democrats need to take the crime problem seriously and offer their own strategies and solutions—not just watered down versions of right-wing bromides. The emphasis should be on non-penal crime-control measures such as situational crime prevention; designing public spaces to make them safer; improving police training and effectiveness; relieving police of tasks for which they are not suited; enabling communities and not-for-profits to launch crime-reduction initiatives; supporting victims to reduce the likelihood of revictimization; and so on. Crime and disorder are real problems for working people; and the victims of homicide and assaults are most often poor and Black. Sustainable reform of the penal state must go hand in hand with effective crime control.
C. J. Polychroniou: What realistic possibilities are available to us for bringing about penal change if we do not first succeed in restructuring the political economy of the United States?
David Garland: To be clear, the outlier status of America’s penal state will persist unless and until the nation’s political economy is transformed. It is that peculiar political economy that makes American violence, policing, and punishment so extreme compared to other affluent nations. However, there is a range—I call it a “bandwidth”—of possible variation within which American crime, policing, and punishment can be changed: a structurally determined floor and ceiling between which lies the possibility of significant reform. That bandwidth of variation is a key part of the theoretical analysis set out in the book, and an empirical fact confirmed by recent developments.
Criminogenic processes and crime control policies are loosely coupled with political economy, not mechanically and directly determined by it. Crime-control policies can be altered, criminogenic processes interrupted, community work activated without any alternation in larger socioeconomic arrangements. For those hoping to bring about penal change, the existence of this relative autonomy is vitally important. It means that even if Nordic or Western European levels remain out of reach, there is nevertheless the real possibility of life-altering improvements in policing, punishment, and public safety.
There is a bandwidth of possibility within which variations in violence levels and penal state policies can occur even in the absence of larger structural change.
We know this because the last few decades have witnessed many instances of significant change. Over the last 20 years, the nation’s imprisonment rates declined from a high point of 765 per 100,000 to a new level closer to 600 per 100,000. Between 1995 and 2020 the nation’s annual homicide rate declined from around 10 murders for every 100,000 people to 5 per 100,000. Shootings of civilians by the New York Police Department (NYPD) dropped dramatically—from an average of 62 people shot and killed each year in the early 1970s to an average of nine per year between 2015 and 2021—after new forms of training, guidelines, and accountability were introduced. The NYPD also reduced its deployment of stop and frisk from over 680,000 per year in 2011 to 11,000 in 2018—the result of a court ruling not a social transformation. Between 1997 and 2023, 2 million formerly incarcerated people regained the right to vote, thanks to campaigns against felon disfranchisement. And since 2000, the imprisonment rate for Black men has fallen by almost half, thanks in large part to the scaling back the war on drugs.
Each of these changes was significant, even radical, affecting the lives of hundreds of thousands and sometimes millions of people. Together, they amount to an empirical demonstration of the book’s theoretical claim that there is a bandwidth of possibility within which variations in violence levels and penal state policies can occur even in the absence of larger structural change.
Nevertheless, the gravitational force exerted by structural arrangements—and the powerful interests that support them—is, in the final analysis, ineluctable. America’s political economy sets definite limits to what can be achieved and imposes upper bounds on what is possible. Until its structures are transformed, America’s penal state will continue to impose a level of punishment and control that has no equivalent in the developed world.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Why Is It Happening Here? And Why Now?
In the early 1970s the corporate elite, conservatives, and neoliberals launched what became a 50-year-long class war from above against the hard-won rights of working people in all their American diversity.
Apr 18, 2025
In early April, historian Harvey J. Kaye made these remarks at a conference in Barcelona, Spain. Common Dreams has published the transcript with his permission.
In the aftermath of the 2016 U.S. elections, I wrote an article titled “Who Says it Can’t Happen Here?” I opened with these words:
Donald Trump’s candidacy and now, presidency, have resurrected a public discourse not heard in this country since the Great Depression—an anxious discourse about the possible triumph in America of a fascistic authoritarian regime over liberal democracy. It’s a fear that the popular writer Sinclair Lewis turned into a 1935 bestselling novel titled It Can’t Happen Here—although, as Lewis actually told it, it sure as hell could happen here in the United States.
However, it did not happen. At least, it did not happen then. Nor did it happen in 2017. But it is happening now.
Why? Arguments vary. Journalists, editorial writers, and all too many academics—so many of whom are actually liberal and progressive Democrats—say it was due to either the Democratic Party’s failure to effectively communicate the truth about the economy or working-class racism, sexism, and generally low cultural standards. What they ignore is that the making of the “crisis of democracy” began five decades ago in the 1970s.
What Americans never heard in the mainstream media was any reference to the 50-year-long class war and culture war campaigns waged by the corporate elite, conservatives, and neoliberals against the democratic achievements of what we might call the Long Age of Roosevelt from the 1930s through the 1960s. They never heard talk of how those forces subordinated the public good to private greed; laid siege to the hard-won rights of workers, women, and people of color; enriched the rich at the expense of everyone else; hollowed out the nation’s industries and infrastructures; produced a devastating recession and lethargic recovery; and pushed the environment to the brink.
So, I offer two questions. Why did it not happen in the 1930s? And why is it happening now in 2025? The short answers are:
First: It did not happen in the 1930s because in 1932 American voters elected the Democrat, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, to the presidency and effectively launched the most progressive decades in American history. Call it the Long Age of Roosevelt—an age that extended from the 1930s through the 1960s.
Second: It is happening now because in the early 1970s the corporate elite, conservatives, and neoliberals launched what became a 50-year-long class war from above against the democratic achievements of that Long Age—that is, a class war versus the hard-won rights of working people in all their American diversity.
All of which poses a critical third question. What should the answer to the first question teach Democrats and other anti-fascist Americans about responding to the answer to the second question?
The only way to confront a mortal national crisis and save American democratic life is to do what Americans, with all of their faults and failings, did in the 1770s, 1860s, and 1930s and 60s.
Popularly known as “FDR,” Roosevelt was essentially an American aristocrat—but despite that, he rejected the “Gilded Age” order with its ever-intensifying concentration of wealth and power and its widening extremes of rich and poor. He did so because that order was denying the nation’s revolutionary promise of “a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” and a democratic government of “We the People” to the vast majority of Americans.
He had entered politics in 1910 as a progressive reformer. And yet, during the next 20 years, he became not just a liberal in the American sense, but actually a social-democrat and even something of a radical. (Though he never used either word to describe himself.)
He had long worried about what conservative political rule might do to America. And in the shadow of the worst economic and social catastrophe in the nation’s history, he truly feared it would lead to some kind of authoritarianism.
However, he knew U.S. history and he recognized how earlier generations had confronted and prevailed over mortal national crises in the American Revolution of the 1770s and the Civil War of the 1860s, that is, by radically transforming the country. Knowing that, he wrote in 1930, “There is no question in my mind that it is time for the country to become fairly radical for at least one generation.”
In his 1932 campaign against the incumbent president, conservative Republican Herbert Hoover, he projected a “New Deal” involving an impressive array of policies and initiatives to not only combat the depression, but also empower working people with economic security and freedom. As Roosevelt would say, “Needy men are not free men.” In fact, he audaciously suggested an Economic Declaration of Rights to redeem and renew the promise of the Declaration of Independence.
As FDR saw it, the only way to truly secure and sustain American democratic life was to progressively enhance it.
Which is exactly what he and a generation of Americans would do. They didn’t simply reject authoritarianism. They phenomenally improved the economic and physical state of the nation and—at the very same time—radically enhanced American freedom, equality, and democracy.
Moreover, encouraged by FDR himself, working people did more than take up the labors of the New Deal. They actually pushed him to go even further than he may ever have planned to go—and together they initiated revolutionary changes in American government and public life.
Consider this. They subjected capital to public regulation and raised the taxes of the rich. They legislatively empowered government to address the needs of working people and the poor (which included advancing industrial democracy). They organized and, in their millions, joined labor unions, consumer campaigns, and civil rights organizations to both fight for their rights and advance the “We” in “We the People.” They established the Social Security system. They built schools, libraries, post offices, parks, and playgrounds all over the country. They vastly expanded the nation’s public infrastructure with new roads, bridges, tunnels, and dams (and provided electric power to almost a million farms.) They repaired and improved the national landscape and environment. And they energetically cultivated the arts and refashioned popular culture.
All of which seriously antagonized capitalists, and led the richest men in America to organize the Liberty League and spend great sums of money trying to portray FDR as a communist and thereby prevent his reelection in 1936. But they utterly failed to secure popular support.
Roosevelt did not ignore their efforts. He famously said, “I welcome their hatred.” Indeed, when accepting his party’s nomination for a second term, he delivered the most radical speech in American presidential history. Speaking to a stadium crowd of 100,000 and millions more national radio, he said:
These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power. Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power.
I absolutely love that speech, and American working people loved FDR. One Southern textile worker spoke for the majority of his class when he wrote to Roosevelt, saying, “[You are] the first man in the White House to understand that my boss is a son of a bitch.”
Still, for all of the humor, FDR took the anti-democratic threat seriously. In 1938—just before the midterm congressional elections— he went on radio and warned:
As of today, fascism and communism—and old-line Tory Republicanism—are not threats to the continuation of our form of government. But I venture the challenging statement that if American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, then fascism and communism, aided, unconsciously perhaps, by old-line Tory Republicanism, will grow in strength in our land.
Yes, FDR and those whom Americans would come to call the “Greatest Generation” left much to be done—especially regarding race and gender. But they had equipped themselves to defeat fascism overseas in the 1940s and learned how to democratically rebuild the nation.
Furthermore, the democratic upsurge of the 1930s did not cease during the war years. Americans continued to organize and enlist in labor unions, consumer campaigns, and civil rights organizations.
Encouraged by all that they had accomplished, Roosevelt called on Americans to envision an America and a world characterized by four fundamental freedoms, the Four Freedoms: Freedom of Speech and Worship and Freedom from Want and Fear—which became a theme of the war effort.
And in his 1944 State of the Union Address, he articulated his fellow citizens’ postwar aspirations by proposing an Economic Bill of Rights to include a right to a job at a living wage; a comfortable home; medical care; a good education; recreation; and economic protection during sickness, old age, and unemployment. A proposal that was enthusiastically embraced by the American Federation of Labor, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, the National Farmers Union, and all the leading civil rights groups.
But Roosevelt did not assume they could easily secure it. Thinking of the corporate bosses, he predicted the likelihood of fierce “right-wing reaction.” But he also warned—in words that should speak loudly to Americans today—“If such reaction should develop—if history were to repeat itself and we were to return to the so-called ‘normalcy’ of the 1920’s—then it is certain that even though we shall have conquered our enemies on the battlefields abroad, we shall have yielded to the spirit of fascism here at home.”
FDR won a fourth presidential term in 1944, but passed away in April 1945. Still, the Age of Roosevelt did not come to end. As much as capitalists, Republicans, and Southern Democrats made the most of the Cold War to obstruct the further advance of democracy and social democracy, a generation of Americans, and their children, would not forget what they had accomplished. And in the 1960s, Americans witnessed a new democratic upsurge challenging every aspect of national life.
Pushed by the resurgent activism, and inspired by FDR’s New Deal and vision of the Four Freedoms and Economic Bill of Rights, President Lyndon Johnson called for the making of a Great Society and a War on Poverty. A liberal Congress led by Greatest Generation veterans moved to enhance American democratic life.
Congress passed historic civil rights, voting rights, and fair housing acts, and a major reform of the nation’s immigration law. It also made healthcare a right for the elderly and the poor, significantly expanded educational opportunities for children and young people, and enacted laws and created agencies to clean up and make the environment, marketplace, and workplace safer (EPA, OSHA, CPSC). At the same time, the Supreme Court guaranteed and strengthened the constitutional separation of church and state and moved to liberate women to control their own bodies. Plus, many state governments built new schools and universities and, in the Northern and Western states, expanded industrial democracy by granting collective bargaining rights to public workers.
That’s why it didn’t happen. Now to why it’s happening now.
All of this terrified Southern white supremacists, political and religious conservatives, and corporate bosses—and in the early 1970s they were mobilizing to not just counter the democratic surge but also reverse the democratic achievements of the Age of Roosevelt.
Though a series of crises, most notably, defeat in Vietnam, an Arab oil embargo, and an economic recession, shook up Americans, polls showed they remained committed to social-democratic ideals. In fact, workers were staging strikes on a scale not seen since the late 1940s. Yet not only did the Democratic Party fail to mobilize them, younger, prominent Democratic politicians such as Coloradan Gary Hart—soon to be known as neoliberals—were turning against the FDR tradition and the New Deal coalition in favor of engaging professionals, women, and minorities.
Meanwhile, corporate executives, already feeling under siege by federal agencies and labor unions, were experiencing a “profits squeeze” due to the emergence of foreign competition (especially from Germany and Japan). Which led key figures to call on their class comrades to wake up, join together, and launch what the British Marxist political scientist Ralph Miliband would call a “class war from above” against government regulation, taxes, labor unions, and what they referred to as the “adversary culture” of environmental and consumer-rights groups, college students, the media, and university intellectuals.
Soon enough, old and new business organizations from the National Association of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to the Business Roundtable and the Trilateral Commission (whose members included the future Presidents Republican George H.W. Bush and Democrat Jimmy Carter), undertook major advertising, public relations, and lobbying campaigns calling for deregulation, lower taxes, and reducing the size of government—all in favor of “free enterprise.”
We have endured 50 years of creeping authoritarianism and may well now suffer a fascist-like regime because the Democrats, the once-upon-a-time party of FDR, has forgotten what he said.
At the same time, they not only set out to destroy the labor movement by means both legal and illegal (via union-busting consultants and lawyers), but also to invest in pro-business think tanks, public intellectuals, and both Republican and Democratic politicians. And prominent “super-rich” reactionaries funded efforts to mobilize Christian evangelicals around “culture war” questions like school prayer and abortion and white working people around calls for “law and order.”
If all that was not enough, corporate bosses were moving their operations South and overseas to avoid state regulations, taxes, and union wages. Communities suffered; unions were broken; and wages and benefits were frozen, reduced, or lost. To try to survive, workers, who could not vote to raise their wages, began to vote all the more for conservative politicians who promised to cut taxes.
Unions and environmental and consumer rights groups sought to defend and advance democratic achievements, but the Democratic President Jimmy Carter called for “austerity” and liberating business and turned his back on labor and the environmental and consumer movements in favor of cutting government programs, lowering taxes, and deregulating capital—which effectively paved the way for the so-called “New Right” Republican presidency of Ronald Reagan and the age of neoliberalism.
The story of the ensuing decades is that of continuing class war from above and neoliberalism. Of course, we expected it from capital and conservative Republicans. But what Carter the Democrat started, the next Democratic President, Bill Clinton, pursued aggressively. He too betrayed labor by pushing Congress to enact the North American Free Trade Agreement that further devastated American manufacturing in the Northern states. That was just the start. He deregulated the communications industry, enacted a mass incarceration crime bill, ended “welfare as we know it,” (a.k.a Aid to Families with Dependent Children—which began with FDR), and further deregulated banking. When the next Democrat President, Barack Obama, won the White House in 2008 he not only did not fight for the EFCA (Employee Free Choice Act) which would have made it far easier to create a union.
He also failed to prosecute Wall Street bankers for possible crimes that led to the Great Recession of 2008-2009. Obama pushed through a healthcare bill, the Affordable Care Act, that gave huge concessions and profits to the pharmaceutical and health insurance industries, and attempted to push through a bill creating a Trans-Pacific Free Trade Partnership.
At the same time, in state after state, conservatives have acted to override or circumvent a woman’s right to choose by enacting laws intended to make abortions almost impossible to secure. In state after state, Republicans have sought to suppress the votes of people of color, the poor, and students by enacting voter ID laws. And after years of trying, they finally succeeded in getting a conservative Supreme Court to disembowel the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Plus, in state after state, the corporate and conservative rich have smashed labor unions and effectively suppressed the voices of workers by enacting so-called right to work laws—even, as in Wisconsin in 2011, rescinding the collective bargaining rights of public employees.
There have been movements from the bottom up: Wisconsin Rising, Occupy, The Fight for $15, the Moral Monday Movement, the anti-fracking and block-the-pipelines campaigns, and Black Lives Matter. They raised hopes, but they failed to garner the active support of the Democratic Party.
Notably in 2015 one major poll showed that the majority of Americans wanted radical change. Yes, RADICAL change. But the Democratic Party both in 2016 and 2020 found ways to deny the most radical candidate, Bernie Sanders, the nomination. I truly believe Bernie could have beaten Donald Trump both times. But working people, the working class, was, to put it mildly, really fed up with the party that had once been the party of the American working class, that had worked to empower labor and the working class.
Polling continually shows that the working class wants what FDR proposed in 1944. And yet neither party is speaking to working class aspirations. The Republican Party has been speaking to and rallying working-class anxiety and anger. The Democrats have been speaking to professional and upper-middle-class concerns.
We have endured 50 years of creeping authoritarianism and may well now suffer a fascist-like regime because the Democrats, the once-upon-a-time party of FDR, has forgotten what he said: “As of today, fascism and communism—and old-line Tory Republicanism—are not threats to the continuation of our form of government. But I venture the challenging statement that if American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, then fascism and communism, aided, unconsciously perhaps, by old-line Tory Republicanism, will grow in strength in our land.”
What should the answer to the first question teach Democrats and other anti-fascist Americans about responding to the answer to the second question? That the only way to confront a mortal national crisis and save American democratic life is to do what Americans, with all of their faults and failings, did in the 1770s, 1860s, and 1930s and 60s. Act to radically enhance American freedom, equality, and democracy.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Social Democracies Keep Top Spots on World Happiness Report as US Falls to Record Low
In the U.S., "the downward trend in life satisfaction is particularly steep among young people under 30, especially women."
Mar 21, 2025
For the eighth consecutive year, the World Happiness Report on Thursday found that the countries with the happiest people are those that use their resources to invest in social welfare—and documented a precipitous drop in satisfaction among people in the United States, where President Donald Trump is pushing to destroy public services in the interest of further enriching the country's wealthiest people and corporations.
The top four happiest countries in the world were the same this year as in 2024, with Finland taking the top spot followed by Denmark, Iceland, and Sweden.
The report, compiled by the Wellbeing Research Center at University of Oxford along with Gallup and the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network, found that the U.S. is continuing to fall down the list—ranking at 24, one spot lower than in 2024. In 2012, when the World Happiness Report was first published, the U.S. held the 11th spot.
The researchers measured several variables that contribute to people's happiness, including social supports, freedom to make life choices, and perceptions of corruption within their country.
Across the world, researchers recorded a drop in "deaths of despair"—preventable deaths from substance use disorders, alcohol abuse, and suicide. But the U.S. was one of two countries—the other being South Korea—where these deaths "rapidly rose," with an average yearly increase of 1.3 deaths per 100,000.
This year's World Happiness Report focuses largely on "the impact of caring and sharing" on people's happiness, noting that the prevalence of volunteering and helping strangers was high in some of the happiest countries, while social isolation in the U.S. was tied to high levels of unhappiness.
"In the United States, using data from the American Time Use Survey, the authors find clear evidence that Americans are spending more and more time dining alone," reads the report's executive summary. "In 2023, roughly 1 in 4 Americans reported eating all of their meals alone the previous day—an increase of 53% since 2003."
But the Costa Rican ambassador to the U.S., Catalina Crespo Sancho, noted at an event hosted by Semafor presenting the annual report, that the way the Costa Rican government invests public funds has helped push it into the top 10 happiest countries for the first time, with Costa Rica ranking sixth in the world.
"We're one of the few countries in the world that does not have an army," said Crespo Sancho. "All that money, they invested in things that our Nordic countries here have been doing for many, many years... Education, social services, health access."
Residents of the happiest countries named in the report benefit from significant public investment in healthcare, education, childcare, and other public services, and live in societies where the divide between the richest households and working people is far smaller than in the United States.
Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Iceland, and the Netherlands all score below 30 on the World Bank's Gini Index, which measures income inequality, while the U.S. has a score of 41.3, indicating a wider gap between the rich and poor.
The report was released two months into Trump's second term in the White House, which has already been characterized by efforts by Trump and his billionaire ally, tech mogul Elon Musk, to gut public spending on healthcare, education, and the environment in order to fund tax cuts for the richest households. The Republican Party is also aggressively pushing attacks on bodily autonomy in the U.S., passing abortion bans and so-called "fetal personhood" measures as well as laws barring transgender and gender nonconforming people from accessing affirming healthcare.
According to the report, in the U.S., "the downward trend in life satisfaction is particularly steep among young people under 30, especially women."
The report also contextualized the victory of Trump and rise of far-right movements like the president's nationalist, anti-immigration MAGA movement, noting that far-right supporters of "anti-system" political leaders like Trump "have a very low level of social trust."
For the populist right, this low trust is not limited to strangers, but also extends to others in general, from homosexuals to their own neighbors. The xenophobic inclination of the populist right, well-documented worldwide, seems to be a particular case of a broader distrust towards the rest of society. Right-wing populists throughout the world share xenophobic and anti-immigration inclinations. The Sweden Democrats, the Danish People's Party, the Finns Party, the Freedom Party of Austria, Greece's Golden Dawn, the Northern League and Fratelli in Italy, the National Rally in France, and a fraction of the Republican Party in the U.S. are all built on strong anti-immigration foundations.
Meanwhile, "far-left voters have a higher level of social trust," leading them to support "pro-redistribution, pro-immigrant" political groups that offer an alternative to the political establishment with "more universalist values."
In the United States' two-party system, citizens "with low life satisfaction and low social trust" tend to "abstain" from political engagement, according to the report.
"The fall in life satisfaction cannot be explained by economic growth," reads the report. "Rather, it could be blamed on the feelings of financial insecurity and loneliness experienced by Americans and Europeans—two symptoms of a damaged social fabric. It is driven by almost all social categories, but in particular, by the rural, the less-educated, and, quite strikingly, by the younger generation. This low level of life satisfaction is a breeding ground for populism and the lack of social trust is behind the political success of the far right."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular