At the heart of bourgeois liberal democracy there lay a contradiction. In the political sphere, bourgeois democracy promised equality via the familiar slogan One Man/Woman One Vote. In the economic context, however, the capitalist system, under which all bourgeois democracies so far have existed, presages inequality. The societal tensions inherent in this contradiction, historically, have been manageable as long as the gap created by economic inequality remained within socially acceptable limits. Under global neoliberal capitalism, economic inequality has soared to such heights that its social impact now threatens the demise of democratic functioning itself.
This is being experienced and acknowledged on an almost daily basis in the country that regards itself as the world’s oldest democracy, the United States of America. On its 250th anniversary this year, any celebrations of this milestone are muted while apprehensions of its future survival are rife in the media and in society more generally. Too much should not be made, of course, of the US self-image as a land of pristine democracy and a bastion of freedom. Despite the soaring rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence, the US at its inception was, as a leading liberal writer, Adam Serwer of The Atlantic, recently put it: “a liberal democracy founded on slave labor.” To which one may add, founded also on a genocide of the native American population. Thus, tyranny over various sections of the population, like the slaves and former slaves after the Civil War along with native Americans, continued to co-exist with liberal democracy for a large part of US history; after all, it was not until the mid-1960s when laws like the Voting Rights Act were passed that the black minority achieved equality at the voting booth.
The survival of such laws, much less their widespread implementation, is uncertain in the current dispensation as the Executive with its MAGA followers reverts to white supremacy, the federal legislature under a Republican majority remains not only dysfunctional but a doormat of the Executive and the conservative Supreme Court harks back to the worst features of the era of the Dred Scott ruling.
The election of a person with distinct fascist impulses like Donald Trump to the Presidency and the actions he has taken both at home and abroad in his close to two years in office certainly contribute to the sense of uneasiness about continued democratic survival but Trump’s ascent is as much, if not more, a symptom of the problem rather than its sole cause.
Certainly, the rush of events in the past few years that feature an overturning of the usual practices and guardrails of bourgeois democratic functioning has become too obvious to be passed over despite the attempts of the mainstream media to ignore the elephant in the room. The familiar institutional set up of the executive, legislature and judiciary that was supposed to provide the checks and balances characteristic of bourgeois democracy has been eroded to such a degree that it has been almost rendered dysfunctional.
Consider, for example, the fact that Donald Trump was found guilty by a jury in a New York State court on May 30, 2024 on 34 counts of falsifying business records. A month later, the US Supreme Court, three of whose justices were appointed by Trump in his first term, rendered its decision on presidential immunity that gave Trump immunity from prosecution for acts within his “conclusive and preclusive” constitutional authority. In her dissenting opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor charged that as a result of the court’s decision “[i]n every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.” After Trump won the 2024 election, he has been emboldened to behave as one.
Trump’s stupid and buffoonish remarks that he posts almost daily on social media should not blind us to the plans being prepared under his administration that could eventually pave the way for fascism to emerge in the US. Veteran reporter Chris Hedges, former Middle East bureau chief of the New York Times, is one of the very few current or former mainstream media personalities who provide critical, informed and honest commentary on political and social issues. The Chris Hedges Report of August 31 deals with the Trump administration’s plans to subvert the November 2026 elections, where the Republican party is widely expected to lose at least one chamber of Congress, most likely the House of Representatives. In an excerpt from his report worth quoting at length, Hedges states:
“The Trump White House has put into place a series of mechanisms to fix or invalidate the midterm elections…If the measures advocated by the Trump administration are implemented, emergency powers will be invoked to assert unprecedented federal control over voting. Federal agents will seize election materials. They have already seized ballots from previous elections. The U.S. Postal Service will only send ballots to those included on federally approved eligibility lists drawn from state voter rolls. These rolls, subject to citizenship checks, will deny election-mail services entirely in states that refuse the administration’s demands for voter data. Trump-backed mid-decade gerrymandering has already dismantled Democratic-held districts and created new ones for the Republican. Federal ID and citizenship-document requirements will disenfranchise millions of eligible voters, including lower-income Americans who lack access to the required documents and married women whose current names do not match those on their citizenship records. Federal troops and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — with $113.5 billion in additional funding allocated by Congress through September 2029 — will be deployed to or near polling stations which have a traditional Democratic Party majority. Those branded as “anti-capitalist” and “anti-Christian” or charged with belonging to antifa will be intimidated or blocked from voting. The Republican majority in the House — regardless of the vote — will use its authority to certify election results to retain power, gaming the Electoral College and refusing to seat newly elected members of the opposition. Overseeing the massive election fraud will be loyalists seeded by the Trump administration across state and federal election offices. Trump — who attempted to overturn the 2020 election results and said he would refuse to accept the outcome of the 2024 election if he lost — ruminates about defying the Constitution in order to serve a third term. He has also floated the idea of canceling the upcoming election, telling Reuters ‘when you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.’”
According to Hedges: “Congress will not save us. The courts will not save us. Our only hope — should the election be rigged or stolen — is nationwide strikes. Our only hope is to cripple the machinery of commerce and government, although this militancy will be met with savage state repression. Otherwise, we are doomed. There will be no exit.”
Whether the doomsday scenario sketched by Hedges comes to pass or not, a number of leading, not necessarily radical, economists have pointed to extreme economic inequality where a handful of billionaires have not only accumulated extreme wealth but excessive political power as a prime cause of the problem. Prof. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University in a recent YouTube video said bluntly that “10 US billionaires own the US government, the news media and the social media. They have already destroyed democracy,..”
Nobel prize winning economist Paul Krugman’s substack post of August 30 describes “the rise of American oligarchy, which I define as the extreme concentration of wealth and political power in the hands of a small number of people — not the 1 percent, but the .01 percent or even the .0001 percent, the 300 billionaires who made 19 percent of all reported federal political donations in the 2024 election.” Some of this inequality has been driven by technological and capitalist market forces that have resulted in a small number of extremely profitable “Silicon Valley” companies whose owners command incredible amounts of wealth. But much of it, according to Krugman, “has been driven by deliberate policy rather than technological or market forces. And that deliberate policy has been the decades-long dismantling of the system of progressive taxation — a system that had ended the Gilded Age, the last period of great inequality.”
Trump’s Big Beautiful Tax Cut enacted last year added considerably to the pockets of the “malefactors of great wealth,” to quote former President Teddy Roosevelt, while eviscerating Medicaid and other social programs further to the great detriment of the poorer sections of the population.
One may add that politicians belonging to both major political parties, Republicans and Democrats, have been complicit in this policy facilitated by the US Supreme Court judgment that removed limits on financial contributions to politicians and equated monetary ‘gifts’ to the exercise of free speech under the First Amendment. It is only relatively recently that political figures on the democratic left like Bernie Sanders have begun to campaign against oligarchy and call for higher taxes but their numbers are still too few to make a noticeable difference.
Another notable statistic on the staggering extent of wealth inequality comes from a YouTube video on August 30 of Prof. Richard Wolff who quoted Oxfam data that showed 62 wealthy individuals worldwide, most of whom, though not all, are American, control more wealth than 3.6 billion people, approximately the bottom 50% of the entire world population. Prof. Wolff indicates that he can’t think of a word strong enough to describe this shocking and obscene figure; a fraction of that wealth could transform the lives of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable who suffer from lack of food, clean water, shelter and health care. But that is clearly not going to happen in our liberal capitalist democratic system that only serves to funnel wealth and resources upward not downward, in what economists call K-shaped growth.
One major aspect of the autocracy that we are hurtling towards is the criminal neglect by the administration of global warming and climate change, an issue that poses an existential long-term threat to humanity’s survival. The US is widely acknowledged to be the world’s largest historical contributor to fossil fuel emissions, global warming and climate change while Trump and his cohort is not only in deep denial of the basic science it is actually encouraging fossil fuel production that will accelerate the problem. Meanwhile, the deleterious impacts are already being felt in the high Himalaya mountains as witnessed by the ongoing disaster on the Nepal-Tibet border. Are the uber-elite bothered by any of this? Elon Musk boasts (or jokes) about settling Mars or making other extra-planetary excursions if the Earth becomes uninhabitable while his fellow elites embark on building immense numbers of data centers powered by natural gas that will surely increase carbon emissions.
The reaction of the uber-wealthy who now increasingly control our political system and certainly constitute the bulwark of the Trump presidency is typified by the Silicon Valley capitalist Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal and the surveillance technology company, Palantir, and one time mentor of Elon Musk, reputed to be the world’s richest individual. In a manifesto published by the libertarian Cato Institute, Thiel wrote “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible…Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women…have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”
So, there we have it, from the horse’s mouth itself as it were, of the de-linking of the economic system, capitalism, from liberal democracy. Freedom will only exist for the uber-rich while one-person one-vote electoral democracy will either become a remnant of the past or continue in some restricted version.
A century ago, the great radical Rosa Luxembourg, contemplating the destruction and misery of the First World War, memorably remarked that humanity had a choice: either Socialism or Barbarism.
That choice confronts us even more urgently today as the end-point of the capitalist economic system threatens to extinguish not only the freedom but the very existence of over 99% of the world’s people.
Photo Caption: Hands Off! protest, Minnesota State Capitol, April 5, 2025
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