In the annals of human history, Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address in 1863 assumed a pivotal role in the spread of democracies across the world. A century ago, the defining slogan of the French Revolution—liberte, egalite and fraternite—as popularised by Maximilien Robespierre, was a clarion call that encapsulated the existential need to abolish monarchies.
However, Lincoln’s maxim, “a government for the people, by the people and of the people,” provided the structural edifice to a subjugated humanity and the raison d’etre to unshackle itself from the millennia-old yoke of the “divine right of kings.” The United States became the harbinger of this change, promising a volte-face for Dostoevsky’s “humiliated and insulted,” ushering the working class into an emancipated world characterised by participatory rule and governance.
Drawing on his inviolable Christian foundations of justice and righteousness, Abraham Lincoln asserted that ideal democratic governments “shall not perish from the earth,” unlike the ancient experiments of Athenian democracy, which was extinguished in less than two hundred years. Lincoln may have underestimated the inherent human weaknesses of greed, ambition, and the desire for class domination, which have led to zero-sum outcomes in America several hundred years later.
In the twenty-first century, America is grappling with a fatal disconnect between economic injustices and constitutional guarantees of a fair and just society. This has threatened the long-standing integrity of once-hallowed American democracy, placing it in an intensifying state of crisis.
Democratic backsliding in the US started with Republican president Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, with “Reaganomics,” distinguished by neo-liberal policies of market deregulation and laissez-faire economics. The destiny of Americans was consigned to the “invisible hand of markets,” a euphemism for unfettered capitalism and transferring unlimited power to hawkish corporations. He instituted corporate tax cuts, decreased government spending on social programs, and increased military spending.
Welfare spending was denounced as enabling black youth and creating ignominious “welfare queens.” Billionaire Elon Musk, advisor to President Trump, has the gumption to deride the American social security program as a “Ponzi scheme” and its recipients as “parasites.” In fact, millions on social security are a gnawing testament to income inequality and the concentration of astronomical wealth in the hands of the top 1 per cent of Americans.
Ronald Reagan was a strong proponent of the trickle-down-economic policy and supply-side economics, where tax cuts lead to robust economic activity and the resultant rising tide lifting all boats. While these policies helped avert a possible stagflation and generated employment when the economy recovered in the mid-80s, they also had an adversarial impact in increasing income inequality and wage stagnation and widening the chasms between the rich and the poor.
Fiscal deficit and national debt soared and have never abated since. The rising tide lifted only the corporate boats, with nominal gains for the American working middle-class population.
Contrary to the liberal views it espoused when the Republican party was founded in 1854, it has since then a chequered history of being anti-labour and anti-democratic. The party leadership and its patrons have been alleged to be ruthless, zealous and doctrinal, known for forming coalitions with the business community.
Traditionally, they pandered to serve the interests of the corporate class and wealthy Americans. In exchange for the megabuck bankrolling of party and election funding, Republican governments catered to the demands of corporate donors in white supremacist policies in anti-gun control legislations, anti-immigration, lower corporate taxes and anti-abortion laws.
It would be illusory to think that Democrats are antithetical to Republicans and are the singular custodians of the interests of the working class they historically claim to represent. If neo-liberalism exploded during the Reagan era, it was during the time of the Democratic President Bill Clinton that the devastating NAFTA trade deals were formulated and established, inflicting a death blow on American manufacturing and jeopardising the economic prospects of the working middle class.
Manufacturing industries that flourished in the “Rustbelt” were initially relocated to Mexican “Maquiladoras.” Subsequently, with the internationalisation of production, these production facilities were shifted to East Asian countries and ultimately to China, which earned the geographical epithet as the “factory of the world.”
For American businesses, labour was always a cost in the income statement. This contrasts with the Japanese management model, where they are considered valuable assets, and manufacturing facilities are tantamount to social security organisations.
In the American business model, the employer-employee relationship is transactional, unlike the more relational approach traditionally seen in Europe and Asia before globalisation, which exported the American management style. It is now estimated that US manufacturing has lost 3.5 million jobs to NAFTA.
Apart from the loss of livelihood and sustainable income, it had devastated the community living and torn asunder the social bonds that existed predominantly within white neighbourhoods. Before corporate raiders and private equity firms took over America, social cohesion and camaraderie found adequate expression in patriotic sentiments, free and fair elections, high voter turnouts, participation in the democratic process, pride in being part of the collective that constituted the source of dignity and self-worth, both for individuals and communities.
Emilie Durkheim, the French sociologist, referred to the rupturing of social bonds as “Anomie,” which inevitably leads to sadomasochism and violence among individuals and societies. The erstwhile factory locations in the mid-west are hoarded up wastelands now that serve as a grim reminder of the unbridled quest for profits ruining societies.
The financialisation of the US economy replaced industrial capitalism with financial capitalism. A real economy producing physical goods for money is supplanted with an ecosystem driven by making money from money through speculative trade in stocks and securities. It has bred social inequalities and thrust the working class down the road of uncertainty and mayhem.
The manifestations of this psychological distress are myriad: opioid addiction, obesity, gambling, sexual sadism, nihilistic mass shootings, escalating suicides, ethno-nationalist white movements and the proliferation of black ghettos.
Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, over a million individuals have died from drug overdoses. Additionally, more than 40 per cent of US adults are classified as obese, with 9.4 per cent considered severely obese. Nearly 50,000 suicides are recorded each year, and in 2022, 1.6 million Americans attempted suicide.
According to the Gun Violence Archive, there have been over 488 recorded mass shootings in the year 2024. Furthermore, data indicates an annual average of 600 mass shootings over the past four years. These are symptoms of a cause that has spread its tentacles of political dysfunction and socioeconomic inequality engulfing the nation.
The Democratic party have shifted to the right of the political spectrum. In contrast, the Republicans have spawned a malicious neo-Confederate white nativist Christian right rooted in a radical version of Christianity. Their dejection and despondency culminate in Islamophobia, hostility to immigrants, abhorring LGBTQ activism and pro-choice movements and repudiating DEI, oblivious of the fact that the real culprits are Citibank, Chase Manhattan, Goldman Sachs, Black Rock, State Street and kindred corporate behemoths.
Both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama are faux liberals who harboured beneath the façade of championing working class rights and aspirations, sedulously served the interests of oligarchs and elite corporations. Labour unions were clinically dismantled, and according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2024, only 11.1 per cent of the workforce is unionised.
Bill Clinton’s 1994 Crime Bill exploded US prison populations, incarcerating 1.8 million people. United States prisons house 25 per cent of the world’s inmates despite the country representing only 5 per cent of the global population.
It also militarised the police, introduced wholesale surveillance of the masses and unleashed a wave of racial violence targeting blacks. Eric Garner, Michael Brown and George Floyd succumbed to police brutality and racial hatred for nondescript and framed offences.
Juxtaposing it with President Obama’s administration, corporate elites who were guilty of one of the biggest stock market crashes since the Great Depression—known as the Great Recession of 2008–were exonerated and received billions of dollars in bailouts funded by taxpayers’ money. Furthermore, he was unable to prevent 9.3 million families from experiencing home foreclosures following the housing market collapse.
Sheldon Wolin, an American political theorist, introduced the phrase “Inverted Totalitarianism” to describe the democratic decline in the country. In classical authoritarianism, a ruthless dictator, demagogue or ultra-nationalist state targets and oppresses specific citizenry for real political ends. Genocides, bigotry, partisan legislations, sectarian violence and state connivance, are the sociopolitical tools employed with impunity in conventional totalitarian regimes.
In inverted totalitarianism, power of the corporations is paramount, and they essentially operate anonymously. In this type of regime, the external characteristics of a democracy seem to persist, including the constitution, civil liberties, an independent judiciary, and a free press, as well as the spirit of patriotism and the iconography of egalitarian values. However, the core of its democratic mechanisms is undermined by corporations that influence domestic and foreign policies through aggressive lobbying and egregious corruption, leaving citizens weak and ineffectual.
In the US, economics dominates politics, unlike dictatorial regimes, which are subordinate to politics. Nazis were antagonistic to the wealthy and the privileged class and sought to appease the majority working population for populist support of their slanted Aryan supremacy ideology. Hitler envisaged providing the masses with a sense of collective power and strength, Kraft Durch Freude (strength through joy). Over the past five decades, power has constantly shifted upwards in the US, and legislation has been enacted solely to patronise the rich and the powerful.
Corporate power is perpetuated by destabilising and weakening the masses through commuting welfare programs, implementing a for-profit health care system, threats to privatise social security, and divestiture of public assets, institutions, and entities. The working class perpetually lives in fear of mass layoffs, economic bubbles, outsourcing of jobs, skill obsolescence, and short technology cycles.
Corporate power feeds on the working class’s uncertainties to control them, while management gurus and economic analysts conclude that this is a perfectly rational outcome of any business. The median wage rate adjusted to inflation has stagnated in the last forty years, and when productivity has exponentially improved, the productivity pay gap has alarmingly widened.
Elections in the US have regressed into legalised bribery centred on manufactured personalities accompanied by massive PR machinery, advertising, marketing specialists and propaganda. Both parties’ manifestos are replete with non-substantive and unpopular issues of tax cuts, increases in defence spending or austerity programs.
The pageantry and extravaganza highlight a “politics that is not political.” Big money has categorically replaced the vote, and citizens are increasingly becoming irrelevant whose singular duty is to vote for pliant legislatures in a lobby-infested Congress.
The media is complicit in compartmentalising and breaking up the electorate into parochial hate camps to thwart the cohesiveness of the voters who are supposed to act neutral and rational. Media machinery—even the legacy ones like the New York Times, MSNBC, or CNN—participate in it to acquiesce their advertisers.
The media creates a fragmented, volatile, and antagonistic public through virtual focus groups and opinion polls that elicit public responses to predesigned questions. Manufacturing Consent is the norm.
Culture wars and identity politics dominate all political discourses, and abusive language is normalised. America has regressed into a deeply divided society, so corporate graft is left unnoticed and unchallenged.
The nexus between the military-industry complex and the government is invincible, and since the last few decades, the primary occupation of the United States has been war. Democrats have outclassed the Republicans in becoming a war machine.
The military fiascos in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq have not deterred the colossal defence expenditures at an annual average of around $800 billion. National security has become a clickbait to garner public support despite such military engagements abroad have devastated nations and societies. In hindsight, most US military interventions were economic interventions in disguise.
Donald Trump, the incumbent US president, is a product of the consequences of elite narcissism and the Democratic party’s disowning of the American workers, especially Whites and Hispanics. The far Christian right, though utilitarian, was historically relegated to the fringes by erstwhile Republican leadership, in George Bush and Dick Cheney.
This has now become mainstream. Its educated elite supporters and elect are not pro-conservative but anti-left. Trump’s imperial presidency, the ‘MAGA’ project and America First policies bereft of economic due diligence and social audit may further undermine American democracy to an unrecognisably grotesque form. The only place where the vestiges of once-hallowed US democracy remain is on the streets.
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