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 Regan. 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 he are all the empty promises and delusions 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. 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!

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.

If Trump wins the 2024 election, especially 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.

While Kamala Harris running for president has revitalised the Democrats, and if they happen to win as a result, 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 they are still distracted, which will likely lead to a short-lived euphoria that does nothing to alleviate the lives of the country's citizens. Self-congratulatory platitudes do not make an egalitarian society. Those behind Project 2025 are still going to recruit others that will help them overtake the US.