Democracy really is under threat in the USA. Almost unmentioned by the media in the UK, it is grinding to a halt.
This comes from the ever-useful Letters from an American newsletter by Heather Cox Richardson:
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has canceled House business again next week, meaning that over the last 17 weeks, the House of Representatives will have worked on Capitol Hill for just 20 days.
As she then explains:
Trump is trying to make the impasse between the parties about the shutdown [about the Federal budget], but that obscures the actual fight at hand.
What is at stake is the theory behind the Republicans' One Big Beautiful Bill Act [and] the destruction of the modern American government that was put in place in the 1930s by Democrats under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and expanded from then until 1981 under both Democratic and Republican presidents.
Today's fight is about the cuts made by billionaire Elon Musk as head of the “Department of Government Efficiency,” and cuts made after Musk left the administration by Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought.
Republicans have embraced the destruction of the modern government, slashing SNAP [food stamp] benefits, Medicaid, cancer research, the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA), and so on. The Democrats are defending the government that has been in place since the 1930s, focused on leveling the playing field between the very wealthy and ordinary Americans.
Note that last line, because in half a sentence, Heather Cox Richardson summarises what the fight is all about in the USA. It is:
[F]ocused on leveling the playing field between the very wealthy and ordinary Americans.
And that summarises the whole of modern politics. The far-right parties are only interested in promoting the cause of the wealthy. At the end of the day, that is all their agenda about. Everything else - from furore about migration onwards - is about deflecting attention from this fact. And it is working. It seems that almost a third of voters in England - the vast majority of them not well off - are being persuaded to destroy the very system of government that was created to protect their interests, and they are falling for it.
In the States, it is still around 30 per cent who support Trump.
The questions are threefold. First, will voters change their minds in the US when it becomes apparent just how destructive Trump is, whether it be for the future of Mid-West farming, which now has no Chinese market for its soya beans, or for household budgets, where medical premiums are set to soar in price if the full impact of his cuts comes into effect in November?
Second, will the disenchantment that I expect in the US spread to the UK?
Third, can parties like the Greens, Plaid Cymru, the SNP and maybe Your Party, inject sufficient life into politics in the UK to suggest that Reform is not the place to go to fund an alternative to the failed politics of both Labour and the Tories?
Time will tell, but what is certain is that we are in a fight for democracy itself, as is being seen in the US right now.
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America was held up as the model for civilisation when I was growing up in the late 1950s and 1960s.
It took me years to realise that was all propaganda.
Unfortunately we have become more American and less like some of our European neighbours.
I hope it’s not too late to change direction. I feel that the next General Election will be very important.
The lesson of Caerphilly is that you don’t win against anti-democratic forces like Reform by trimming and hedging and copying their rhetoric, you win by standing up firmly and clearly for your principles. I am a Labour party member and voter but I am glad that Plaid won. They deserved to. Plaid and the voters of Caerphilly have done the country an enormous favour and set a direction for the way ahead. The voters will reward courage and standing up for progressive values if they are communicated clearly and with convinction. There are people within the Labour party who can do this. If Keir Starmer cannot he should stand aside for someone who can.
Please see my earlier comment on your White House ballroom piece.
“The Democrats are defending the government that has been in place since the 1930s, focused on leveling the playing field between the very wealthy and ordinary Americans” – but we also have to recognise that the Democrats have been spectacularly unsuccessful in doing just that – as indeed have the UK Labour Party and most other centre-left parties since the 1980s across ‘western democracy’. The Democrats last year found themselves trapped in the corner of defending the very status-quo most people knew was not working at all well for them – a trap UK Labour are going to find it increasingly hard to avoid unless they actually make fast, radical changes to that status-quo.
The big difference in Europe is I guess that we have more viable options outside the old duopoly – Plaid, SNP and the rising Greens – maybe there is, with the LibDems and a Labour rump under different leadership, the possibility of a coalition big enough to keep out Reform and the Tories (which are to me increasingly indistinguishable).
I had never heard of this person a few days ago… All I can say is, after reading this article, I was left very disturbed…
https://www.democracynow.org/2025/10/21/russell_vought_propublica_shadow_president