'Heir to party royalty' (Mario Tama/Getty Images)
Everyone knows the United States is in steep decline — except perhaps for its political leadership. The US Congress went without a speaker for the greater part of last month, seized for the umpteenth time by anti-statists. In the Senate, only death brings the opportunity for new leadership. Meanwhile, President Biden seems unfit to lead a pub shuffleboard team, much less the most powerful military in the world. As we stand on the threshold of potentially the most dangerous global conflict in generations, how should we understand the character of this former superpower? A doddering two-party cartel? A one-party monopoly with two bickering heads? Both labels offer descriptive merits. The one designate, though, that no longer applies is “functioning liberal democracy”.
In this regard, the US has far more in common with its southern neighbour than it would ever like to admit. For more than 70 years, Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party (the “PRI”) controlled the largest Spanish-speaking country in the world. Ostensibly, the country was a democracy except for one problem: the PRI won — literally — every national election from 1929 to 2000. During this time, serious challengers to its hold on power would be found not-so-mysteriously murdered. Even social and political reformers working within the PRI itself would end up dead.
Together, the Democrats and the GOP have ruled the US since the country’s Whig Party dissolved in 1854 — more than twice as long as the PRI’s reign in Mexico. Admittedly, the twin towers of the American party cartel do not murder their opponents as the PRI did in Mexico. However, US politicians and their fourth-estate minions have other means of preserving social control. In the most Anglo-Protestant of ways, US elites use shame and public humiliation as their central tool in maintaining power.
Like small-time criminals, deviants are placed in the stocks of the national media to have their reputations tarred and sullied. A message for all to see: stay off our corner. If you want power, play by our rules — or else. It’s no accident that the most commonly used words and phrases associated with Robert Kennedy, Jr. by the mainstream media this last year have been “conspiracy theorist” and “anti-vaxxer”. Any challenge to the two-party cartel will be met with immediate character assassination and sustained attempts to rally opprobrium.
Henry Wallace, George Wallace and Ralph Nader were all treated by the American establishment as nothing more than deviant lunatics after their third-party runs. The reputational destruction process has been so thorough that it took 70 years for even the country’s academic Left to reconsider the legacy of Henry Wallace after his 1948 Progressive Party bid against Harry Truman —who Democratic Party bluebloods replaced Wallace with as FDR’s heir apparent in a shadowy backroom deal. Wallace was expected to accept that betrayal and fade quietly into the night. When he refused, cartel leaders unleashed their dogs. As with the PRI’s iron rule of Mexico, challengers to the US two-party cartel are technically allowed. However, the twin towers of American politics have established barriers to third-party recognition so high as to make the effort almost pointless.
After Nader’s 2000 Green Party presidential run witnessed dozens of arena-sized rallies — including a packed Madison Square Garden — the two-party cartel sensed danger. In the years that followed, whether “red” or “blue”, nearly every state in the union began exponentially raising the threshold of voter signatures legally required to gain ballot access.
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SubscribeSo the GOP is a cartel…and it chose Trump? Absolutely nobody in that Party’s establishment wanted Trump, and many of the former neocon vanguard have joined the Democrats. He is the middle finger to the “uniparty,” as much as the author doesn’t want to admit it.
It’s certainly true that the Left polices it’s own side, banishing rebels from their academia-activist-media industry. But Ross Perot did not suffer the fate of Wallace or Nader because he primarily hurt Bush/Dole and not Clinton (or Gore immediately after, as Nader did). And he was self made, not depending on liberal largesse for his means.
As for the US-doomsaying…What? Nobody is seceding from our union. 1% owns half of everything, it’s not going anywhere despite all the talk of the public debt. Please.
The US is in such a strong position we don’t even really pay for all of the mistakes we make. Other people do, and it’s amazing how impervious we seem to be to our idiotic and self aggrandizing politicians.
I’m not saying it’s all roses and we don’t have issues, and the old man in charge doesn’t leave one feeling assured at all.
But the PRI? Really? What “woke Mexico up” wasn’t the assassination or Chiapas or whatever leftists say, all that was common. What woke them up was the sight of the Mexican government begging Bill Clinton for tens of billions to keep the lights on after the economy had cratered.
What is really hilarious is how Trump is not even that good at fighting the uniparty but they keep self-destructing trying to get rid of the guy. If they were smart they would have treated him as an aberration and quietly downplayed him while working behind the scenes to do their own thing. Instead they went bonkers and never got off that crazy train.
They tried that in 2016. It was comical how they ignore him and kept promoting Jen Bush and Marco Rubio while it was obvious to everyone that Trump was running away with the nomination. The primary system is the one safety valve democracy has against the establishment because it lets voters choose their own candidates.
And they’re still doing it, lining up behind DeSantis, Haley, Pence, and Scott the way they did Rubio, Bush, Cruz in 2016, and it’s even less effective now.
It also lets the most partisan voters choose candidates that are extremely unattractive to the majority of the electorate! “Democracy” as usual = systems, processes and results of which I approve!
It’s astonishing how few people realise what a loser Trump actually was /is: two mid terms and the 2020 Presidential against one extremely narrow victory (but lost the popular vote). You’d think if he was so great he could win much more convincingly.
Perfect!
This author gives himself away early on when he talks about ‘anti-statists’ in the House of Representatives. He seems to hold them in very low esteem, but these anti-statists are in fact mostly Trump supported or tea party era conservatives clashing with the establishment. I’m not sure what this author is hoping for exactly. He seems to like RFK Jr. and brings up Ralph Nader so I’m guessing he’s a Democrat who hates Trump, hates conservatives, and hates that the Democrats have become the establishment party. When his kind stays home in 2024 out of anger over RFK or Biden’s warmongering or whatever else, we may well see a second Trump administration. If Trump wins after everything they’ve done to destroy the man, I suspect it will collapse the establishment entirely and we’ll have a free for all similar to the end of the Roman Republic, when everyone suddenly realized the jig was up and started playing to the mob instead of trying to control it or suppress it.
Forgive me for asking, BUT who in the US made any effort to control the ‘Mob’ that set the US alight for most of a year?
Certainly NOT the same people who then went berserk over the US equivalent of the UK’s Monster Raving Looney Party’s fancy dress day out in the Capitol?
Once they got bored, the took off home with many photos and a few souvenir pieces.
A fair counterpoint. I attribute that to a couple things. First, those riots were almost exclusively in poorly run, one party cities. Second, the damage inflicted by the Floyd riots was largely inflicted on their own neighborhoods. A man who burns down his own house is an idiot, not a dangerous threat. It wasn’t like they marched uptown to destroy the gated communities of the elites. That would have gotten a response, a big one.
We see that in the contrast between the Floyd riots and Jan 6th. The former were much larger and much more destructive, but the latter received a far greater response, an inconsistency that, despite elite efforts, has not gone unnoticed. The message is pretty clear to me. Burn down your own neighborhoods all you want, but don’t enter the elite spaces or challenge them in their places of power, for the response will be swift and harsh.
Trump is loved by many, but loathed by more. It is astonishing to me how narrow much of the US Right are, amounting to some form of hero worship of this egregious and so-obviously self obsessed and interested human being. Trump cannot even manage to maintain good working relationships with people on his own side. No doubt they are all ‘traitors’.
Solid point about the fact that this only really applies to candidates running to the left of the Dems.
Not sure why but I can’t help thinking that its something to do with the fact that the Republicans are, very broadly, who they say they are and the Dems aren’t.
Republicans genuinely think that the state is a parasite on private enterprise, they back American militarism overseas, and they are socially conservative. I don’t agree but they are who they are and they have a right to their views. Ross Perot might have lost them the election by running to their right but he didn’t expose them as liars – indeed, he showed that there were neglected issues over there that they could draw upon next time. Same goes for Trump although he is a much more complicated figure.
The Dem’s problem is that they’re hypocrites. They claim to be the friend of the working man but they hobble unions, they claim to support healthcare reform but they won’t even bring a vote to the floor of the house, they claim to be pro-choice but they missed every opportunity to protect it over the decades between Roe vs Wade and the Supremes’ decision to overturn it. They draw support from the anti-War left but, oh look, they start just as many wars as the Republicans. they claim to support the middle class but they line their own pockets in Congress and spend half their time sucking up to their donors just the same as the republicans do.
When someone runs to the left of the Dems either from within or without, they expose the whole pantomime. They show that the Democrats just aren’t who they say they are- they expose the potential for things to be different. That is a much greater transgression than losing an election.
Just because leftwingers enthusiastically campaign for a party / candidate that unfailingly shafts them (e.g. Bernie Sanders) doesn’t mean the party itself is hypocritical. More serious U.S. leftists point out that Bernie Bros choose to ignore what the Democratic Party says and does.
The GOP is not socially conservative, just as the Dems aren’t a socialist party no matter how many ‘democratic socialists’ fritter their lives away for Bernie Sanders (and then Clinton and Biden LOL!) The White Evangelicals who did so much to make GWB president were repaid with unprecedented numbers of Muslim immigrants. Social conservatives, indeed!
The Dems have been the war party since the Obama people somehow got most U.S. leftwingers to become indifferent to America’s wars.
There are Democrat politicians who oppose abortion and Republicans who are all for it, it’s not automatically a one party issue. If your leftwing friends felt able to confide in you, you might discover some of them are horrified by abortion.
The question I was thinking about was, why do the Dems loathe left challengers while the Republicans seem pretty relaxed about right challengers.
My answer was that Republicans more often do what they say they are going to do than Dems do. They hammer welfare, they cut taxes on the rich, they fight like hell to get right wing judges appointed and celebrate when those judges shoot down Roe vs Wade. And they (until quite recently) treat every foreign policy crisis as an opportunity to wage war. Did they let a lot of immigrants in? Sure. But they at least try to keep more of their promises than dems do. And when someone runs to their right, they often shift right and absorb that position.
The Dems are no-one’s idea of social democrats but they believe that they are entitled to the votes of those who are even though they deliver almost nothing for those voters.
They claim that they are pro choice to get votes but they don’t do very much to protect the right to an abortion. They claim that they want to reform healthcare in order to secure the votes of people who want it but, when elected, they enact Romneycare and trash the public option that their supporters wanted. Joe Biden claims to be the most pro-union president ever, but he recently went out of his way to bust a railway strike that aimed to secure a crazy leftist dream – paid sick leave. As you rightly say, Obama ran against GWB’s militarism and said he’d close Guanatanamo within his first 100 days. But he started a bunch of new wars and Guantanamo is still open. They are hypocrites not because of what they believe but because of the gap between their perceived entitlement to left votes and their record in office.
Which is why, whenever anyone runs on a platform to the left of them, they destroy them.
As to my leftist friends being too cowed to tell me that they’re actually sickened by abortion, you’re over your skis. I have several friends who are uncomfortable about abortion. I respect their sincere position. Disagreement isn’t hypocrisy. But they didn’t run for public office on a platform of protecting the right to abortion only to sit by and watch that right overturned.
Do you see the difference?
The Democrats have given you a black Supreme Court judge who pretends to not understand biology and a transgender four star admiral. These are your triumphs. Did they really promise you more? When the Democrat activist on your porch launches into her spiel about Biden being the only way to achieve socialism in America she knows the Dems never promised her any such thing. Her perception be damned.
Right challengers have not been permitted in the GOP since the 1960s and were almost entirely purged in the ’50s. Trump wasn’t jockeying for position with the other GOP riders, he took over their racetrack. He and his guys are currently paying the price for humiliating the U.S. establishment, or if you prefer, challenging from the right*. A leftwing equivalent would be Corbyn / Momentum’s takeover of the UK Labour party, followed by them nearly winning the 2017 general election and for perpetrating that outrage getting squashed by every legal means possible. Thank goodness for the rule of law.
The Republicans make a lot of noise about x and then, like the Democrats, pursue policies that none of their base want**. The anti-abortion & ‘libertarian’ elements are disciplined and laser-focused on specific issues, but those things aren’t doing much to help their voters.
*He’s less rightwing than Biden was in 1996.
**A paleoconservative would do a good job of listing the Republican party’s decades-long tradition of horrendous, anti-conservative policies.
I’m trying to work out what it is we disagree about here.
Both Republicans and Democrats let down their voters on the regular. Agreed?
But, although Republicans would certainly have preferred not to have Trump as their candidate in 2016, because his platform contained a load of stuff they didn’t support, most of them worked with him in the end and they will again. Mostly they delivered the parts of his platform they wanted but not the bits they didn’t (the swamp remains undrained). That is cynical but it is not hypocritical.
By contrast, the Democrats were far more effective in sabotaging Bernie even though his platform consisted of precisely the things that Democrats claim to support. That is what makes them hypocrites.
As to Corbyn, once again, he represented a set of things that most Labour members (and a great many Labour supporters) all claimed to want. And yet the party machinery conspired to destroy him. That makes them hypocrites.
Parties of the right are less prone to this specific form of hypocrisy than parties of the centre left. Which is why Jill Stein is a bogeyman and Ross Perot is not (even though Perot did cost the Republicans and election and Stein probably didn’t)
You erroneously believe the Republicans are relaxed about challenges from the right, are social conservatives and less hypocritical than the Democratic party. That’s the disagreement.
The GOP didn’t tolerate Trump’s victory and grudgingly work with him; it wasn’t Nixon and Rockefeller thrashing it out above Fifth Avenue. It was a hostile takeover they couldn’t stop. They’ve never forgiven him and will work as hard as the DNC to prevent a second Trump presidency.
Does the Democratic party claim to support the Bernie Sanders platform? Or do some of them make the right noises so people assume they do?
Whether Sanders wanted to lead the party leftward is up for debate: some frustrated ex-Bernie people think he’s being used, with his consent, to keep progressives in the party. And serious U.S. leftists have written about how slippery these young new ‘socialist’ Dems can be.
Likewise some ‘conservative’, ‘far-right’ Republican politicians, to say nothing of journalists, genuinely despise conservatives. Not only the conservative activists pestering them but anyone vaguely conservative who supports them. It’s difficult to regard the GOP as any less hypocritical than the Dems.
Conservatives in the party knew the GOP regarded them as an irritant, but those who worked for Trump were shocked by how much the party loathed them and worked unrelentingly to sabotage anything vaguely conservative once he was in office, while as you say doing all the stuff any other Republican administration would have done. A Bernie Bro doing his best to get Hillary Clinton elected told me (between crowing about Clinton’s impending landslide victory and explaining what a terrible person she was) how he experienced something similar. The DNC knows they can count on not only the votes, but the activism of damn near every self-professed socialist in the U.S.A. no matter what they do. The Dems are entitled to the votes of such people. It’s no certainty the GOP can hold onto Trump supporters the way the Dems can count on Bernie Bros voting blue no matter who.
And what does the average college-educated, 35yo DSA activist really want? Actions speak louder than words and they’ve fought tooth and nail to ensure President Biden talks about the threat of fascism and the perils faced by trans children. Maybe they’d like healthcare reform, but they’ll settle for pissing off rednecks – those people who live somewhere out there, lurking in the shadows, plotting to overthrow democracy and put gays into concentration camps.
My guess is that, absent a heart attack, Trump wins the nomination (indictments be damned) and very probably the presidency. My suspicion is that the level of intervention required to deprive Trump of the nomination would so infuriate the base that they lose the election. And I think the RNC knows that and will therefore acquiece in putting him at the top of the ticket. Just as they did last time. We’ll see.
My guess is that, if Bernie had won the nomination in ’16, he’d have beaten Trump and I think that the DNC knew that too. But they stopped him anyway because they thought they could win even with Hillary.
But I agree that he’d never have got his agenda through the congress. Any more than Obama (or Trump) did.
I do think that he’d have had three advantages over those others though:
First, he wouldn’t have made the mistake Obama did when he took office – of disbanding his grass roots operationSecond, Bernie had been around Washington long enough to know how it actually worked – something that Trump manifestly didn’tThird, his distinctive policies, (such as M4A) were more popular than Trump’s (wall building)
It’s also notable that the two of them actually shared an important policy – making Washington accountable to the public. Drain the swamp was much the better slogan but that’s all it was. Bernie (I suspect) had at least some idea how he’d do it.
But I certainly agree that he’s been a huge disappointment since.
Well said (as usual) George, Are you an American might I ask?
Thank you.
But no, I’m not an American. I’m just interested in what’s upwind of British politics.
The author is delusional. Trump is the ultimate anti-establishment figure, with a million arrows in the back to prove it. Only RFK could challenge him and could arguably do a better job. The difference is that Trump defeated the Republican establishment, and RFK has failed (so far). If Trump somehow manages to win in 2024 expect a grand reckoning. His gloves will be off dismantling the uniparty system. Moderate, truly Liberal Democrats should join his movement and broker deals down the middle during the second Trump Administration. Trump’s Cabinet could be brokered 50/50. Once cleansed of the stranglehold on their party, they and the new GOP can return to proper, representative government focused on real issues for the People.
Agreed. More than anything, however, is my wish for the Federal government to simply shrink and get out of the way! I only want the Feds to do what they are supposed to do, outlined in the Constitution, not continue to grow and grow the bureaucracy until it consumes 1/4 or 1/3 of the entire GDP.
Government at every level has gotten their mitts into virtually every level of daily life, telling me how large the window in my bedroom has to be and at what height from the floor! Look at how many stickers are on a ladder, some telling me not to use the ladder as a scaffold! There’s serious talk about banning beef and gas stoves! I am waiting for new rules on how many sheets of TP I can use. It’s become ludicrous.
That is the real problem we have. Trump understands this and that is what frightens the establishment.
The author is correct that the two party system isn’t going anywhere. It’s basically a part of the system now. That said, the parties themselves are not invulnerable to change. They change drastically over time. The parties of today are basically unrecognizable from what they were in 1980, to say nothing of what they were in 1880. He also underestimates the Trump movement. It isn’t going anywhere either. The old Republican establishment cannot take back control because every time they try to rally behind someone else, it only increases Trump’s popularity. All the other candidates besides Ramaswamy have been courted by the establishment and put forth as ‘alternatives’ to Trump and Trumpism. They all immediately tanked in popularity afterwards, yet connecting A to B seems more than some elites can manage these days. The Republicans and the uniparty doesn’t want Trump, but they can’t get rid of him, nor will they ever. They used their media dogs to blitz the man for four years, barely beat him in a bizarre COVID election, and have continued to hammer him constantly, even to the point of having the man indicted, and none of it has worked, because they’ve lost the respect and trust of the people. Too many people have become disillusioned and wouldn’t trust the media to tell them the color of the sky, let alone anything about politics. Not even Trump’s own stupidity and manifest unfitness for leadership has managed to dent the man’s popularity because the sheer hatred and malice toward the elite class is that deep. They will have to contend with Trump and populism for the foreseeable future.
Whenever Trump retires, some other outsider will take up the mantle because it’s there, and politicians are first and foremost glory hounds and opportunists. Right now the leading possibility is Ramaswamy, who is basically playing Trump’s role in the debates. Would not be shocked to see Ramaswamy tapped as a running mate. Unlike Trump, Ramaswamy is young and energetic enough to be a headache for the establishment decades into the future. Further, Trump/populist candidates have so far failed to win many statewide Senate races, they have been very successful in the House of Representatives, which is the source of the conflict over House speaker. The establishment Republicans are fighting the populists, and they are losing. A lot of former establishment type guys, Rubio for example, are sounding awfully populist these days because they see which way the wind is blowing. Personal power is a hell of a drug, more than enough to shift the loyalties of ambitious men from the princes to the paupers. Moreover, the threat from the Sanders left is not gone either. Things are very much more dire for the uniparty than this author imagines. There will definitely be two parties for the foreseeable future, but what those parties look like and sound like ten years hence is anyone’s guess.
For any non-Americans trying to understand current US politics, start with this Comment. It is singularly insightful.
Thank you for the compliment. American politics is very much its own unique animal. It does respond to the public will, but not in the same ways as a parliamentary system. The actual election is quite a bit less important than the primaries. When the party backed candidates start going down in primaries, that’s a sign that change is coming, and the Republican elites have been losing a lot of primaries the past decade.
The other big thing I didn’t get around to mentioning in my post is that a lot of things play out at the state and local level under the radar of international news, and the variance in policy between local and national candidates can be very large. The election of Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, in Virginia, a state that has been leaning Democrat lately, was huge, and showed an issue of vulnerability for the Dems, woke doctrine in school systems. Ron DeSantis is wildly popular in Florida despite his lackluster presidential campaign. Texas, Florida, and Arizona are pretty much openly enforcing their own immigration/migrant policy in defiance of Biden. There’s a well documented trend recently of businesses and people leaving blue states (Democrat) for red states (Republican). That matters because eventually the losers of this interstate competition will have to moderate their policies to reverse these trends.
There’s also a local flavor to the parties and the party candidates. A Democrat from Kentucky with a Democratic agenda would, if suddenly transposed to California, would probably have to run as a Republican. The loyalty to state is particularly important for Senators. Joe Manchin of West Virginia is a Democrat, but you’re unlikely to see him supporting a lot of anti-climate change legislation because West Virginia is the biggest coal mining state in the USA. He recently caused a lot of controversy by basically single-handedly blocking the build back better plan over environmentalist overreach and his concerns about overspending in an inflationary period, basically Republican talking points. He’s basically trading his national reputation amongst the party elites for popularity with the people, who will remember this and probably keep electing the guy until they put him in the ground. Standing up for your state’s economic interests and getting things for the state is at least as important for Senators as whatever the party dogma happens to be at the moment, and that’s pretty much always been the case in America. One can go back and find examples of this since before the Civil War.
Between primaries, localized interests, and the ability of states to pursue their own policies, national elections are probably the least important feature of American democracy, but of course that’s what gets covered in the international press. I personally realized this years ago, and don’t vote for that reason. I can imagine how dysfunctional this must all look to European observers.
My brother lived in Greenwich Connecticut for 20 years. He now lives on Miami beech. It’s quite the exodus.
Tree-hugger, is he?
Joe Manchin has decided not to run for reelection in 2024. Perhaps he will run for another office and West Virginians will support him. The U.S. political system seems to attract some of the worst people among us. The few who appear to be decent people, like Manchin, usually call it quits after a period of time.
I saw that yesterday as well, and it’s a damn shame. I have gained enormous respect for Joe Manchin over the past two years. We need more people like him, not fewer. His retirement is a grievous loss that the establishment of both parties will no doubt be celebrating. The Republicans will think they can easily win his seat, and the Democrats will be rid of a maverick who refuses to bow to the will of his party bosses.
America has one of the most corrupt democracies in the world, but it has more to do with the lack of campaign spending limits. Like many Anglo countries, it has a first past the post system, which makes it exceedingly difficult – not impossible – for third party candidates. No different in Britain or Canada. I do share the author’s outrage at the decay of democratic institutions.
That great defender of democracy, Nancy Pelosi, really let her mask slip when she took to Twitter a couple of days ago, attacking the “No Labels” bid to put forward a 3rd Presidential candidate to challenge Biden & Trump,
“I think that No Labels is perilous to our democracy. I say that completely without any hesitation …. …. When they jeopardize the reelection of Joe Biden as president of the United States, I can no longer remain silent on them.”
Oh, so not actually “perilous to our democracy” then, just that “they jeopardize the reelection of Joe Biden”.
Got it.
(Is anyone else having posts disappear at an alarming rate at the moment?)
These people are so Frickin awful. She’s a grifter who has literally made millions on insider stock trading. And why are he Dems forever ranting about threats to democracy?
Deflection.
And see the video mash up of local news anchors repeating the line ‘this is a danger to our democracy’ as a swathe of them fills the screen.
Laugh. It’s true, unfortunately every other country is worse off. Will be pretty funny watching Europe pay for their protection.
The real enemy of the EU and Europeans more generally is the USofA!
Think Nordstream.
Unfortunately the heads of the EU are brain dead and think the USofA is their friend. They obviously never read Kissenger!
‘To be an enemy of the US can be dangerous but to be a friend is fatal.’ H Kissenger.
FFS! KISSINGER.
“Al Gore did not dare, even after the Supreme Court handed George W. Bush the election in 2000.”
No, his party just repeated that line for years. Many of them still do. “What’s the matter with Ohio?” was the next one. Questioning election outcomes is actually a time honored process in American politics at this point. Just remember these rules.
· Be a political insider
· Leave the serious accusations to your underlings
· Have most of the heavy lifting done by party affiliated media
· Help your other party members fundraise off your allegations
· You can get away with more if you are a Democrat
· Blaming your loss on one of the countries’ geopolitical rivals works wonders
If you ask most Republicans who were around at that time they will say the Democrats tried to steal the 2000 election. If you ask most Democrats who were around at that time they will say the Republicans stole the 2000 election. This is another one of those we pretend American political history before 2016 was a magical land of rainbows and gumdrops and honorable politicians garbage.
Election fraud is a thing in the US. There have been about 1,500 convictions since 1983. This is a staggering number and it’s non partisan.
In disseminating such malinformation you are serving to undermine democracy and consititute a clear and present threat to national security. Are you a Putin puppet?
This is a good laugh..!
1,500 convictions in 40 years is a staggering number? There have been literally hundreds of millions of votes cast in that time period.
Regardless of your opinion on the outcome of Bush v. Gore, the idea that somehow Al Gore was an outsider who got screwed by the insider Supreme Court for that reason is rather hilarious.
Yes indeed. The media have tried very hard to paint Trump as an existential, apocalyptic threat. To a certain segment of the political class, he might be, but if one looks at history, this is more like a return to historical normal for the US than an aberration. Look up the corrupt bargain election of 1876 or read about what local political machines did in the major cities a century ago. The entire administration of Teddy Roosevelt was an accident created by the corrupt political process. Teddy was a reformer in his home state of New York who was causing problems for the establishment. They wanted to get him out of their way so they made him VP when that position was regarded as a meaningless one and a political career killer. Didn’t work out so well for them. American politics was basically a cesspool until after WWII when, for a few decades, the threat of Communism encouraged everybody to play nice for a while. America is a conflict driven nation, a nation of contrarians and dissidents, conceived in revolution, born in rebellion, and baptized in the fires of war. Americans are fighters who revere our soldiers and our police. If there’s no enemy to fight, we fight each other, a fact the author finally gets around to when he notes that a secession crisis is the most likely way the US falls apart.
“Everyone knows the US is in sharp decline”.
Another article that kicks off with opnion presented as fact.
Not everyone does agree on this. Sure, the US has problems. But so does everyone else. And most worse than those in the US.
The author tells us that the US is not a “functioning liberal democracy”. Really ? It’s certainly as liberal as it’s ever been under Joe Biden. And aside from the problems of running political administration in Washington, government services appear to be running as well/badly as before.
We’re also told that the US is a “former superpower” !
The whole article reads like wishful thinking from someone with a set agenda regardless of the facts.
The list of ways that our allies have pulled ahead of us certainly suggests “decline”: healthcare, childcare, public education, living wage, housing affordability, food quality…
It’s simply not a “functional liberal democracy” anymore.
Of course it’s true that “Everyone knows…” was not the best choice of words.
Can’t tell if you’re joking. I’m not aware that American allies have ‘pulled ahead of’ the US in any of those categories…?
1) Better healthcare outcomes at a much lower cost. 2) Many countries have susidized child care for all. 3) Finland, among others, is far more effective at educating its children. 4) In most the wages are not much better but the public supports, like child care, are. 5) Vienna, I understand, has large middle-class, subsidized rental apartment buildings. (In the US they’re called “the projects”, they’re strictly for poor people and they look like prisons.) 6) And, in many countries, real fresh food. I would kill for a produce/fish market like the ones I saw in Palermo.
Hmm. I don’t agree. (1) As to healthcare, “There are no solutions, only tradeoffs” – and there are plenty of disgruntled people in various countries of the West complaining about their national health care systems. In the UK the NHS is barely functional and the subject of alternating national nostalgia campaigns and fury-barely-concealed tales of bureaucratic incompetence. In any event, there are many other factors influencing health care outcomes other than national health care system design.
(2) Some of us think the govt paying someone else to raise your children is a bad way to raise children, so more widespread subsidized child care is a negative not a positive.
(3) Agree completely that the US public education system is the pits. It’s pretty obviously the result of two factors: teachers unions and broken families. The evidence is strong in this regard.
(4) Again, some of us think robust public support systems are bad for people’s economic, emotional, mental and physical health. People find life satisfaction in work, not in being supported by Big Brother. I can vouch for this myself, as someone looking for satisfying work even though I’m not going hungry in the meantime.
(5) Not sure about Vienna in particular, but the US has much more affordable housing than almost any other comparable country. The social conditions in public housing are bad everywhere.
(6) Real fresh food is available everywhere, including all over the US. It’s just more expensive, but that’s the case in Europe, too. In my opinion it’s good to have the option to spend more or less on food, depending on how highly you prioritize food quality and what your other wants, needs and resources are.
The thing is about the PRI is that even though they did occasionally kill people, the primary method of staying in power was to co-opt people, that being they would ingratiate themselves with powerful interest that had the ability to threaten its power by giving the benefits of cooperating with them to gain their loyalty as well as do the same thing with those who actually threatened them. That’s how the two party system works when it comes to dealing with threats to itself, they give them the benefits of wealth, power, and status. This works most of the time because the type of people who are attracted to power are power hungry pathological types with deep insecurities. A good example of this would be AOC of the squad in the Democratic party, they may hate the party leadership and may resent how the government is run, but they themselves will never challenge the established power structure because they benefit from it. Look of examples at AOC was invented to the Met gala, wearing an expensive dress that said eat the Rich. How dose someone like that square such a contradiction, it’s simple they they have pet peeves with the system but they like what it gives to them. What ever their actual beliefs, those are just rationalizations, it was always about power.
“Henry Wallace, George Wallace and Ralph Nader were all treated by the American establishment as nothing more than deviant lunatics after their third-party runs“. Well, they were. And the proportion of the US federal debt attributable to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is tiny. Subsidising renewable energy generators to achieve Net Zero is going to be a lot more expensive. Rampling, unconvincing article. If you want the hard left, and to cut Israel adrift, there are plenty of Democrats to vote for.
“Deviant lunatics” is a little strong, but I think people who make third-party runs in the United States are not really serious candidates. Take Ross Perot, for example, who ran against George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton in 1992. He had some odd thing about his daughter’s wedding that was just plain weird.
Bobby Kennedy Jr. fits in that mold. He’s earnest and intelligent, but he’s got some screws loose. His first wife died a suicide and his treatment of her had something to do with it, but not everything. That alone should not be disqualifying, but his crusades against vaccines and even WiFi (he claims it causes a variety of diseases) should. His book about Tony Fauci was full of lies (though some truths as well) and is just more evidence of a mind that should not be president, especially topped off with his belief that the CIA killed his uncle John Kennedy.
And a Kennedy as president is hardly breaking the cartel.
And the name is the only reason he has the 20% support which the writer finds so impressive.
And Biden’s mind is a presidential one? Who is the de-facto president of the US today is something I’d love to know, because it surely ain’t Biden. I wonder if Israel knows?
No mention of the $5 trillion printed for Covid.
Trump cannot be beaten by any democrat. If he escapes a lucky shot, then he wins. Says I.
Trump and Trump’s preferred candidates have been beaten by many Democrats…
This author has gone to the Oliver Stone school of history.
The warnings about the danger of America’s debt ring true, but not much else does. Most of the examples of the wily, manipulative insiders are from the Democrats, by the way. That’s why they are the Evil party. And the Republicans are the Stupid party since they can’t take advantage of the Democrats mistakes.
Oh, and the media are the real power brokers. Just look at how they trashed Trump, supported demented Joe Biden, and are now casting about for a new lame horse to ride as they see how badly Biden has done and how corrupt he is.
That great defender of democracy, Nancy Pelosi, really let her mask slip when she took to Twitter a couple of days ago, attacking the “No Labels” bid to put forward a 3rd Presidential candidate to challenge Biden & Trump,
“I think that No Labels is perilous to our democracy. I say that completely without any hesitation …. …. When they jeopardize the reelection of Joe Biden as president of the United States, I can no longer remain silent on them.”
Oh, so not actually “perilous to our democracy” then, just that “they jeopardize the reelection of Joe Biden”.
Got it.
What do you expect a Democrat to say, the more the merrier? I really can’t agree with people who blame politicians for acting like politicians.
Ha ha, wait until he finds out about the UK.
At least in the US, you can challenge any candidate through the primary process. Here, mandatory re-selection for MPs is considered so unthinkably tyrannical that neither Corbyn nor Johnson even considered it. And as for the Lords…
If we don’t get electoral reform soon we’re sunk
But you have Ms Braverman. What could go wrong?
I recall the leadership of the decaying Soviet Union in the 1980s consisting of dodery old men only to note that Andropov was in fact only 69 when he died and Chernenko only 73. US medical science seems to preserve Trump and Biden into demented old age more effectively. Of course had Gorbachev maintained the iron grip on power that Stalin and Brezhnev managed we might have had a 91 year old Soviet leader.
The author does not understand Trump at all. He is an insurgent who temporarily beat the cartel, which reacted by simultaneously undermining (Russiagate, false accusations of racism), attacking (baseless impeachment, constant character assassination), and co-opting (placing its agents in his administration and entrapping him in a Congressional agenda that was theirs, not his). His nonparticipation in the current debates is not antidemocratic, it is anti-cartel.
As evidenced by 4 indictments, 91 counts, not a single one of which has any merit whatsoever. Clearly the cartel views him as an outsider and threat.
I amnot a big fan of Trump because of his personality issues, but to to say he broke the cartel in 2016 but in 2023 is part of it is nonsense.
This is a grossly simple analysis which makes unjustifiable and unjustified sweeping statements that are simply wrong. All open free democracies (not Mexico) with a first past the post system tend, most of the time, to feature two powerful parties operating as broad coalitions, maybe with a small protest party on the side.
Those coalitions tend to have a winning dominant philosophy espoused by one of the parties during which the other party grouping “me-toos”, and then, when paradise has not arrived, there is a switch to a new idea. Political history in democracies is made of these long sweeping waves of political fashions.
Incidentally, judgement of the Wallaces and Nader as “mad” is pretty much correct, as spotted by the electorate. So, I fear, is RFK.
OK, there’s some truth here, but the main reason “Henry Wallace, George Wallace and Ralph Nader were all treated by the American establishment as nothing more than deviant lunatics” was that they were all deviant lunatics. More mainstream third-party candidates like Teddy Roosevelt, John Anderson, and Ross Perot didn’t get the same treatment.
I wish I could disagree with anything said here. As Moench writes, RFK, Jr.’s attempt to present a viable alternative to Democrats (most of whom want one) was shut out by that party’s machinery, beholden to Biden and no one else. As noted, getting on each state’s ballot as an Independent — the option left Kennedy — has become laborious and expensive, also not accidentally. I’ll write him in if he doesn’t make Colorado’s ballot, and then be done with the farce of voting unless some miracle manages to dismember the corrupt two-party/mainstream media minions cartel.
I might dissent only from the author’s confidence that murder is off the table. At least, I’ll note that Kennedy has been denied Secret Service protection. Obama was given that protection even earlier during his campaign because, as a black man, he was perceived at higher risk of assassination. Providing Secret Service protected both him and the American people, as his murder would have been profoundly destabilizing. Anyone who doesn’t perceive RFK, Jr. as also at exceptional risk is abysmally ignorant of our nation’s history. Certainly, the assassination of another Kennedy would be not only destabilizing, but deeply if not fatally demoralizing, especially for older Americans.
I forgot to mention, Excellent article!. Didn’t agree completely but I enjoyed reading it.
“Admittedly, the twin towers of the American party cartel do not murder their opponents as the PRI did in Mexico.” JFK? RFK? Martin Luther King?
$100,000 per citizen actually is not much money. Especially since there are about 420 million people living in the United States, including undocumented immigrants, so that number is lower. The unofficial economy is huge. If you wanna buy a house in Brooklyn, for instance, you would pay $600,000 up to $5,000,000. A new car costs $25,000.
Wow, heck of an article! Thanks for this sobering analysis. Two party CARTEL indeed! Funny how neither party seems to push for term limits!
I think the world would agree that the US is too big to fail. Also, this notion that “mass-based interest groups have almost no impact on legislation” is ridiculous. What about public employee unions? They are nothing more than mass-based interest groups and they drive almost all legislation in California, for example, because they elect the legislators.
I completely agree that “people without wealth and connections no longer have any representation in American politics”
I disagree here that “Polls show a majority of Americans have no desire for either Biden or Trump to represent their respective parties again”. I think there is a strong desire to have Trump finish his second term, give us back a booming economy, get us out and keep us out of wars, and control immigration.
The story ends the way the deep state and lawless Leftist Democrats dictate, “everyone knows how the story ends. Trump vs. Biden — the rematch” The Democrats steal power, the end justifies the means, and the Neo-Cons keep us at war. Both continue to increase the debt. “Deja Vu all over again”.
It’s a fact polls show that.
Trump drastically increased the debt as well…
“I think there is a strong desire to have Trump finish his second term, give us back a booming economy, get us out and keep us out of wars, and control immigration.”
MAGA morons living in an utter fantasyland.
I’m an American and agree with basically everything stated about the government, here. Except for the statement that no one is getting murdered, I think there is plenty to be concerned over in that regard (even without the long lists of deaths surrounding the Clinton’s thug rulership). One thing that I don’t hear folks mention is that the Trumps and the Clintons have been tight since forever, Chelsea and Ivanka even having bff status for their years growing up… the whole thing is a play for the plebs while the elites gather wealth. The founders had a great idea, but criminals are gonna criminal, and even that very solid foundation has been cracked for a very long time. We’d all do better with benevolent kings or queens, but the greedy for power and wealth will always claw their way to the tops of the important hierarchies. Welcome to humanity.
I cannot agree with the infantile demagoguery, nor with the adolescent antinomianism that dismisses anything simply for being established, simply for its being so, and wants novelty for novelty’s sake (or for being “on the outside”, for “being a challenger”, for “speaking truth to power” or “fighting the power”, and other soixant-huitardiste nonsense), especially when politics and society is concerned.
It is an attitude that became strangely common among the mid-century generation, living in an era of both prosperity and stability, having been preceded by death, destruction, and poverty almost without historical precedent, and has ever since exercised its baleful influence on every institution (corrupting it and eventually utterly destroying it), and also corrupting this generation’s children, grandchildren (my generation), and great-grandchildren. The work that needs to be done of reconstruction and restoration, material, intellectual, and moral will take decades, if it can be undertaken at all.
So no, I do not care that Mr. Kennedy, who is almost as bad as his ancestors biological and politcal. Inded, they were much worse than this ineffectual, drunken ne’er-do-well: thank God that neither Bobby nor Ted nor John Jr. and Joseph Jr. evern became Presidents of the United States. The world would have been an incredibly worse place to live had they ever gotten into the White House.
Kennedy is even dumber than both Biden and Trump, and that’s saying something.
Genuinely curious what you have against Joe Kennedy Jr. He was a war hero who died fighting the Nazis.
My problem with him? He was a Kennedy. And not just any Kennedy, which is enough of an indictment in and of itself, but he was Joe Sr.’s favorite and chosen successor. He was the worst of the Borgia
Kennedybrothers.Well that’s weird, but thanks for answering my question.
I would urge the author to read Richard Hofstadter’s “The Idea of a Party System” to learn why a system of two established parties is actually a bulwark of democratic politics and not a stumbling block.
Absolutely correct in every sense. American democracy is a circus. Look at Nikki Haley debating what’s-his-name. “You scum” she spat out, with that perpetual look of an angry, slightly inebriated college girl on Spring Break who’s just suffered some nasty-male insult.
To my mind, the fact that presidential candidates must be wealthy and have an unlimited amount of time to campaign for two years – first to get elected by their party and then to make a mark as the chosen candidate.
This article makes some good points but rather than a neutral analysis of the US’s problems, it is a very particular partisan view of it. As usual “democracy” just means “a government I approve of”. Primary systems are unknown in many democratic systems and there is no such thing as a pure democracy anyway.
The idea that states will split away is far fetched – that issue was settled in 1865. And many states are actually much more mixed politically when you look at the county level.
Yes, the “never” wars are expensive but Iraq and Afghanistan are becoming old news now. Trump has many faults and I don’t reckon his ability to set a new stable right wing settlement, even accounting for the extreme opposition he got. But he did have foreign policy successes and did not get the US embroiled in new conflicts, so it is possible.
Lots of delusional Trumpbots here spouting the usual MAGA inanities.
Truth is, Trump’s administration was fairly standard Republican schtick, if executed with hilarious incompetence. His cabinet was all the usual ex-military and Goldman Sachs hacks who got out as soon as they realized that they working for a clueless bully who knew nothing about the business of running a country and cared for nothing except his clownlike boasts.
Likewise, the American people soon realized that they had played a terrible joke on themselves and got rid of him at the first opportunity in a landslide.
No doubt someone will mention that there are a couple of polls that seem to show support for the fat bozo. Go back and check how Obama was doing in the polls at this stage in his first term and then go have a look at how the 2012 election worked out.
Kennedy is called a conspiracy theorist because he spreads conspiracy theories. No more complicate than that.
This whole theory may have significant basis in fact but using Kennedy as an example weakens the argument as he is what he is being called by the mainstream.
And George Wallace was openly racist. Another bad example.
You have been quiet in the Israel-Gaza threads…. I wonder why
Why don’t you tell us why you think that might be
Are you suggesting if he theorizes about a conspiracy-in-fact, he is still to be dismissed as a conspiracy theorist?
I’m suggesting that he is mental and so are you.
Not suggesting it really, its a matter of public record.