Is the US a failing democracy?

The US constitution tried to avoid dictatorship, but despite that, it is headed that way.

The US can be better described as a oligarchy in search of a dictator, which is why there is much admiration of Putin. The era of robber-barons in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were the heyday of oligarchy, interrupted by F D Roosevelt managing to set the US on a slightly more egalitarian footing before it was all dismantled by Reagan. Even the founders of modern tech giants have moved towards oligarchy to protect their fortunes from plundering by elements of the government.

Unlike the oligarchy in Russia, where Putin controls them, oligarchs in the US control the political parties, and so set a lot of the political agenda so that their fortunes remain, and they get many more opportunities to exploit people in the US and elsewhere. However, they still have a lot of citizens who don't trust them, so they have been funding right-wing think-tanks and lobbyists, as well as many ultra-right groups, to persuade voters that their policies are the most beneficial.

This is because they still want full control of the country, and so are actively undermining all arms of government in order to enable their eventual dictator to remain in power indefinitely. Unfortunately, Trump is too self-absorbed to be such a dictator, but getting them voted in while continuing efforts to take control elsewhere will allow them to prime the population for a real dictator. This has parallels to the former USSR, where Yeltsin was too weak to be in charge, but what they had done set the stage for an ex-KGB political operative called Putin to take over.

The US oligarchs don't want a dictator they can't control, but a real dictator is by definition someone they won't be able to control. So we have Trump who serves well enough as a figurehead for them until they can bump him off and install their own. Perhaps Pence was that person, but he has the charisma of a dead fish, so he doesn't really whip people up like Trump does. Trump succeeds because they are all the empty promises and delusions that the US has fed itself with for centuries.

The problem undermining such centralisation of power is that most peoples in the US have histories of resistance to authoritarianism, whereas in Russia, despite a revolution, the peoples have been used to being dominated over politically for centuries. That is why they essentially made a pact with Putin to be in control politically as long as they kept the population safe. For the US, it doesn't help that all their propaganda and advertising has been about being selfish individuals, which by implication means not being beholden to a dictator.

Despite being founded on supposedly democratic principals, the US has taken a long time to bring that to all their citizens. Having a civil war that supposedly brought freedom to the slaves, a hundred years later they were still trying to get some of the promises fulfilled, and while there are no explicit Jim Crow-like laws now, most states are passing laws that live up to their spirit, being in denying African-Americans and many other minorities the opportunity to vote and thus have a choice in who speaks for them.

The US is largely a fraud to the world, but also to themselves. Until enough disconnect from their national delusions, and that does not look like happening anytime soon, they are on a path to dictatorship, but because of their conflicting psyche, are likely to never really get there. If that is the case, they will constantly fail to project their power to the world, and so will become less relevant.

The US describes itself as the land of opportunity, but that has only ever worked for those who were willing to be ruthless in their exploitation of those they had persuaded could succeed like they did. Migrants sucked in by the illusion were fodder for their exploitation. The US came out better from WWII because they let other countries run down their economies fighting Germany while selling goods to all sides, and afterwards telling themselves that they won the war, despite the likes of Russia doing most of the heavy lifting. The US boomed after the war only because they profited off it.

For the oligarchs, that does not matter so much politically because many are operating transnationally and will find more havens where their fortunes will remain intact. However, a weak US means a domestically deflated market which they have been relying upon for the last century to provide them with sales and thus ever-expanding profits. For those who crave the numbers of their fortune, that means those numbers decline. It is one thing to find where to lower costs, but such rich purchasers are hard to find elsewhere, especially after decades of exploiting the peoples of every other country.

The US is so obsessed with its self-congratulatory propaganda that it is failing to look after itself or its people.

While the US has been promoting itself as some sort of superman, it has been poisoning itself with its own kryptonite to the point where it is teetering on political collapse, which would be followed by an economic collapse soon after. Nothing illustrates this delusion more than thinking of itself as a white Christian country when its Latine-heritage population is almost most of it people. It's hard to maintain a delusion when half of those we meet disprove it.

While the economic figures still look good, which only favour the very rich, the US is eating itself up from within, especially with so many promoting disharmony. The schisms are occurring everywhere in the country, so that not even states seceding will work, as each of those would be just a smaller version of what is happening now in the whole country. The immanent failure of its democratic experiment is intimately tied to its survival as a nation, despite what right-wingers delude themselves about.

The US is falling behind many other developed nations when it comes to supporting its own citizens. For example, its extremely poor health system, its lack of protection for children, and its obsession with money over all else. These are all reasons why its own people are losing hope. The only thing preventing complete loss of trust is the huge amount of propaganda that promotes the US as the best country in the world feeding them false hope. Corporations have been allowed to define almost all aspects of US society, and they are killing everybody by poisoning the food and the land.

Even its military-industrial complex has been weakened to the point that it couldn't invade another country, or even supply enough bullets to Ukraine. How the mighty have fallen! All it can do is float offshore and throw bombs at people. In all the countries where its troops have been fighting over the last decades, the results have been ongoing instability, or the groups they were fighting winning and taking full control. No democracies resulted anywhere. Its military operations have reflected the same lack of coherency the country itself exhibits.

The US spent over $2 trillion on the Afghan war to end up leaving the country in the hands of the Taliban, again, while killing 176,00 people, including 46,000 civilians, and likely another 360,000 due to indirect consequences of the war. Just $260 billion of that would have eradicated world hunger within years, and thus given the US a huge legitimate boost to its soft influence power. A minority of the remaining budget would have given the US free health care and education, yet those are perennially denied due to military spending always being given preference. What perverted priorities!

Since Trump took office in 2025, they have imposed a lot of trade restrictions to supposedly improve the US trading position, but instead have signalled that the US cannot be trusted. While China had already begun diversifying from reliance on the US after the last Trump presidency, many other nations are now doing so, to the extent of cutting out any reliance upon the US. This means that the US is rapidly losing its dominance of world trade, particularly because it will increasingly not be using US dollars, long the lever the US has been able to exert control over its trading partners.

So, instead of strengthening the US economy, Trump is further weakening it. The advantage the US had for other countries is the wealthier base of consumers it has, but widening wealth inequality in the US, together with tariff barriers to that base, and the lack of any sort of reliable US trade policies in future, make the US far less desirable. As other economies and their trading blocks become more dominant, their peoples' lives and earnings will be improved, providing their own consumer base to sell into, much like as has happened in China. The US has already lost the trade wars.

The US has been reducing infrastructure spending since the 1980s as par of its neoliberal drive to supposedly reduce government spending. Health, education and social services have been sacrificed to provide tax cuts, leaving the US with a reduced capacity for its population to adapt to changing world conditions, and not only climate, but realigning world trade alliances that seek to reduce dependencies upon having to toe the US line and use its dollar. This, all while China has been building its infrastructure and independence for decades. The US has lost the game it thought it owned.

The US is losing its ability to know what is real.

Unless there is a mass movement to heal itself, the US is losing to itself. A dictatorship will not save it. Their support of the Israeli genocide in Gaza is showing the world, and many of its own citizens, who the US really is, and that is as a self-righteous bully who is willing to throw everybody, including itself, under the bus. A country only exists by the belief of its citizens and the recognition of other nations, but the US standing in the eyes of both these groups has become substantially diminished. That precedes its collapse and demise.

The US political system was obsessed with communism for so many years that it failed to see that its political system has been infiltrated by Israeli agents pouring money into politicians pockets, so much so that a overwhelming majority of its house politicians voted to make criticism of Israel illegal, but not the US. How can a government allow another to have such a stranglehold? It has lost its ability to look after itself.

Those who espouse making the US great again are abandoning the consensus that enables it to exist, so hastening its demise. It is like a truck driver thinking they have the best truck but only succeeding in running themselves over. The driver is the problem. The US is surrendering to its own delusion, and worse, thinking that that delusion is what will save them. Delusion is not a belief that can sustain itself, just because it is reality that lasting things must be built from. Without that reality, the US is failing itself.

With Trump winning the 2024 election, and if many of their acolytes are elected as well, the only way to prevent a full-on dictatorship is a civil war with the goal of wiping them out. Those pseudo-militia that follow them may serve to create fear in the populace by being thugs who beat up their latest scapegoats, but they are too deluded to understand that they would likely be wiped out like Hitler had done with the Brown Shirts on the Night of the Long Knives to make way for their much more disciplined SS exterminators. It's time for all US citizens to wake up to their humanity, or lose it.

With Trump, the oligarchs have finally moved the political landscape significantly to the right. The Democrats, in their attempt to combat Trump by enlisting the help of anti-Trump Republicans, and with locking out the voices of those with any semblance of humanity, have walked right into becoming the new Republican party. The right shift is complete. Those so-called moderate and principled Republicans supposedly defending the Constitution are still all quite willing to throw people under the bus, and the Democrats lost because they were all the things that Trump was complaining about.

Unless there is a serious attempt to deal with the fundamental problems in US society, the inevitable is only delayed. The focus is still on Trump, and not their backers, so everyone is still distracted. Those behind Project 2025 are now recruiting others that will help them overtake the US. If it were not for a public slaying of a dark triad CEO galvanising the public against oligarchs and their minions, the path might have been clear for a complete takeover.

Now their every action will be under public scrutiny, making it difficult to assume that their plans will not be thwarted by more slayings. The institutionalised violence the oligarchs have relied upon is now seen as a license to kill for those being exploited by the wealthy and privileged. They cannot hide forever from the fury that they have created. Only a measure of capitulation at an FDR sort of level will enable them and their exploitative industries to remain sort of intact. However, the US has become too weak, so a few vigilantes may not be enough to stop the slide downwards.

As a playbook, Project 2025 is a pending nightmare for the US peoples, but who they are getting to do it is insane!

Project 2025 is an attempt by the conservatives to turn the US into a haven for the rich and powerful by dismantling all the sort of institutions and government processes and policies that have been put in place to prevent such a wholesale takeover of government. It was clear that in 2017, the Trump administration was ill-prepared for government, leaving many departments without executive appointees for a while. Project 2025 is about that not happening again. In the hands of competent and determined people, the US would be turned into a fascist state with little protection for the US people.

Under such a regime, the rich and powerful would be completely free to turn the whole of the US into whatever they want. Of course, they have always done that to a certain extent, but FDR put a holt to much of that until they put in Reagan to let them have control again. But there is a US population that has been fed by their constitution and raised to distrust government overreach, so some semblance of democracy has had to be there to placate them. This time round, many institutions have been corrupted, and the population half on board with having major changes. So what is the problem?

If the goal is to make the US government be a full puppet of conservatives, then the people being chosen to lead government departments are the least likely to be able to make such a plan a reality. They are more likely to ruin any plan altogether, because the way they would run government would not only put the general population and the country at risk, but also make life difficult for those who are supposed to be the real beneficiaries from what Project 2025 was supposed to create for them.

Just four days into Trump's presidency, all communications from the CDC have been stopped, including any warnings about the currently emerging H5N1 bird flu outbreak, so that hospitals are not receiving advice about how to handle it. It is this type of interference in public health that will likely be how many gullible people, and others, will die, but US citizens will not get told by the CDC about them either. This is the reality of mass delusion, and nothing has been learned from COVID-19.

There are hundreds of nominees with dubious expertise and distorted ideas about what their intended department should be run like. While they may not create as many problems as these two likely will, but all together, the pantheon of chaos that will ensue from all the appointees will create long-lasting disruption to the US, if not total societal collapse. We shall see how far this experiment will go, as some might want to pull the US back from the brink of catastrophe in time. What is strange is how any of the conservative wealthy backers are going to actually benefit from such chaos.

The US election and its aftermath has shown just what a wholesale grift the US is.

We have known that neoliberalism was always a grift, but we are now seeing just how tawdry it all is. It used to be hidden behind a lot of seemingly respectable policies and polished but flawed propaganda called white papers. Now it is just a bunch of incompetents flaunting their lack of intelligence as if they are the masters of the universe. What a fiasco, but which half the voting population chose to allow to govern under the delusion that those they elected were going to look after them, oblivious to Trump's complete lack of concern about anyone but themselves and their own grift.

We saw a lot of machinations to rig the supreme court and the various levels of government, but the circus of dunderheads being allowed to run government departments seems to indicate that no one is really serious about running the US at all. It is like none of the wealthy who were behind all the maneuverings care about having a US at all. So what were they all about, other than to seemingly drag the US down, and the world with it? It is like they are all no more sophisticated than carnival hustlers selling snake oil.

They seem just like a stupid bunch of grifters, pleased with having made just a few dollars off some gullible punters, as if there is nothing really more important than that. It all seems so short-sighted now that we are seeing the petty end goals they are half-striving for. That is not to say that there are not severe consequences for everyone else in the world, but the grandiose schemes we imagined they were all striving for just do not seem to be what they were really after, at least judging by who they seem to expect to make it all happen.

The right seemed to be so much more coordinated and scheming in the past. It now just seems like a big joke. Project 2025 looks like 900 pages of a government cosplay script that no one who wrote it seems to really care about it succeeding. There was a lot of chaos around Hitler, yet the Third Reich seemed such a well-ordered machine, but only because many strived to implement what they thought was wanted from Hitler's vague requests. Trump seems no more organised, but their incompetence at selecting quality personnel almost guarantees failure will be the outcome for most endeavours.

Between a lot of government activity falling in a heap, more oligarchs revealing their grifts, a H5N1 bird flu epidemic, and more shooters making 3D-printed guns to kill those oligarchs, it does not look like the US will make it too far into 2025, let alone much further. Well, that is if far more sensible people do not work out how to take the reins from the fools and steer the country in a more stable direction. If so, given that the grift of the oligarchs is now obvious, they not likely to be as indulged as they now think they should be, leading to them being put under a much tighter lease.

It is all really a toss up as to how far the US will go in any direction. It really is a circus with the world left to find out how they live when the circus leaves. Even if some sane US government remains, the world is not going to trust it any more, and is already looking to not relying upon the US for anything. Of course, while the circus is still around, they are trying to appease it as much as possible, while protecting their own interests from being damaged or plundered. It is a delicate balance dealing with what now seems like a ship of fools.

Now even the negotiations around the Ukraine war are turning into a grift, with Trump wanting vast resources concessions from Ukraine in return for really no guarantees of security. It was bad enough that the negotiations are only taking place between the US and Russia, without Ukraine or Europe involvement, though Europe is expected to do the legwork to implement whatever is decided. Russia still wants to neutralise Ukraine, and the US is being the enabler for that. It demonstrates a contempt for smaller nations, and thus is a message to the world that the US is not your friend at all.

Almost every US news commentator talks about how the US is such a boon to the world, but their focus is always on making sure that every act of so-called cooperation with other nations is geared to serving the US's own interests. They have provided stability for much of the world, but that has often involved installing or supporting dictators who terrorised their own citizens. The US has not been the friend of other nations, but more like a paedophile grooming other nations for exploitation. Instead of granting agency to nations, they have sabotaged and exploited them.

Now the US is being run by many who do not even understand the game that enabled the US to dominate the world. All they see is the short-term gains for themselves, while they abandon and even foolishly destroy all the structures that enabled them to dominate. In this, the US is sowing the seeds of its own destruction. Unwittingly, the rest of the world is finally realising how the US has never looked after anyone's interests other than its own, and so are finally understanding that they must stand apart from the US and cooperate with each other.

People are more than just fodder for the machinations of the few who want to own it all.

The nation that has been seen as so important to the world order has just revealed itself to be no more than just one big carnival act, and that any nation that wants to avoid being taken down with the US in its self-imposed death spiral must stand and take responsibility for itself and its citizens. A nation that neglects its people and treats them as just more suckers born to be lied to and exploited is doomed to succumbed to its own delusions, becoming just a parody of itself as we now see the US doing.

For too long, people have been seen as just another resource to be exploited and discarded when their usefulness is exhausted. People are why we have this planet to experiment upon, where we have the opportunity to see ourselves as far more than just another animal in a Darwinian quest for dominance. We have the opportunity to transcend such limited views of ourselves, and learn to find our true place in the world. The US has shown us the delusion of grandeur that thinking of ourselves as somehow better than those who seem to be less powerful or less focused on dominating others.

With the US, we see the fundamental weakness that comes from striving for domination by creating division among peoples. Its delusions are very powerful, but its citizens seem oblivious to the self-sabotage that their grifting creates. All they seem to see is that their strength comes from indulging those delusions, while remaining oblivious to the loss of actual power following them brings. The world will hopefully become stronger because of what the US has shown us about having false ambitions that have no real basis in reality.