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.
Poll
Loading ...Taking further action
If you want to write a letter to your MP on the issues raised in this blog post, there is a ChatGPT prompt to assist you in doing so, with full instructions, here.
One word of warning, though: please ensure you have the correct MP. ChatGPT can get it wrong.
Comments
When commenting, please take note of this blog's comment policy, which is available here. Contravening this policy will result in comments being deleted before or after initial publication at the editor's sole discretion and without explanation being required or offered.
Thanks for reading this post.
You can share this post on social media of your choice by clicking these icons:
There are links to this blog's glossary in the above post that explain technical terms used in it. Follow them for more explanations.
You can subscribe to this blog's daily email here.
And if you would like to support this blog you can, here:
Buy me a coffee!
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
Time on my hands this morning, so here’s a bit more from me.
Democracy is in crisis, and, thanks to you, we know all about one of the key reasons: voters have been stripped of the power to change their material circumstances. Fiscal and monetary rules, accepted and pursued by all governing parties, have been used to lock redistribution out of democratic reach. Governments then tell us they “can’t afford” to improve people’s lives, so democracy becomes a hollow performance rather than a vehicle for justice.
People vote because they hope for a better future for themselves and those they care about. But when the economic system is rigged to prevent redistribution, that hope is repeatedly betrayed. At that point, democracy stops being real. It becomes an empty ritual wrapped in austerity.
Into this vacuum steps the authoritarian right. They don’t merely dislike redistribution, they reject it as illegitimate. And because redistribution is central to any truly democratic project, rejecting redistribution means rejecting democracy itself. Markets and hierarchy replace social rights and collective power.
So democracy is dying, caught in a pincer movement of fiscal strangulation from above and anti-democratic politics from the right.
So we can’t simply “defend” what is left. We must try to rebuild democracy from top to bottom around economic justice and public purpose. Or accept that what remains is democracy in name only, and soon watch even that disappear.
I watched a brilliant piece of video last night featuring Zohran Mamdani, the insurgent candidate and favourite for the New York mayoral election. In response to the assertion that wealthy New Yorkers would relocate to Florida if he raises taxes on the wealthy as he promises, Mamdani said that many of those wealthy New Yorkers were spending way more money on trying to ensure he doesn’t get elected than it would ever cost them in increased taxes. This was such a potent point, that wealthy New Yorkers are far more interested in hanging onto their wealth than having a bit more of it taxed to help those in greater need or to improve public services.
I have seen it
It was very astute
The danger signs are very definitely on red, and the light is growing brighter all the time. But many people just don’t seem to be looking, or perhaps they just don’t want to look. It is the attitude of the media that to me is unforgivable. They can’t plead ignorance later – its their job to know and report.
The parallels to the US, that I see, are just scary. Perhaps others will say I’m paranoid, its all in my imagination. Maybe, but why risk it?
I used to wonder if the damage being wrought by Trump and his circle would bring about a collapse of the US economy, the extent of which would demonstrate the futility of the policies they adopt. In particular the rather virtual almost infinite wealth of the super-rich would evaporate overnight as the various Ponzi schemes fell apart. The collapse would be an unintended consequence of extreme, wrong-headed, but mostly sincerely held views (I know, I know). The optimistic conclusion would be a restoration of rational governance based on the rule of law.
Now I think the collapse is intentional, no matter how profound, nor how widespread the consequences. The intended result being a civil war fought between desperate groups but with the ultimate outcome of a fascist dictatorship. A fourth Reich.
Looking at what has been happening in both America and the UK since the mid to late 1970’s I think democracy began to be unwound then. I think western style democracy has been continuously unwound from that period – I really do think Nixon started that in the U.S. and also Thatcher in the UK (but those in the Labour Right too like Crosland – whom I find to be tremendously naive when I read what he says today).
So, I’m asking you to think along the lines of seeing the end of democracy not as a recent phenomenon, but a very long, drawn out and I think underhand process that is finally coming to an end in our epoch.
That is what you are losing. Not democracy but the planned end of democracy. The process of dismantling it has meant that we have lost such a lot of democracy already.
I’m almost grateful that there is now no pretence about democracy anymore. Because this allows us to think differently. So if we mourn democracy, we can mourn it as it is NOW not as it was. As it was reduced to. And that ‘s not much to mourn in my opinion anyway.
The rich who rule don’t want democracy. So you’re not going to get it are you? Savvy? Penny dropped yet?
So, OK, PSR (God is he still here!?) says democracy does not exist and you think that that might be rubbish – fine! All I’m asking you to do is unpick how this happened. We have to look the Gorgon of un-democracy, unfreedom full in the face so that when we get the politics of care and better management of the fiscal means one day through better democracy we do more to protect that new democracy with better checks and balances.
We must stop treating the end of democracy as a sudden onset of illness or a sudden death. Democracy has been ill for a long time and was never expected to recover. It was always going to die like this in our lifetime. So, this means we can plan ahead – we know what is coming.
BTW a clue: Whatever democracy we have in the future has to be as much about what we can’t do as what we can.
The impending death of the Capitalist model will of course mean the end of Democracy. The Capitalist model has a built in self destruct element in that in its efforts to extract the infinite profit means that eventually the consumers of its products will no longer be able to acquire them.
What the majority of people should now be doing is planning for the ousting of Capitalist principles and for replacing them with a model that is based on equality and fairness and a mechanism to ensure that Capitalist ideas cannot be allowed to develop in the new society.
What do you mean by capitalism?
Where does the indovidual who wants to create a business using their own skills fit into this worldview?
If it doesn’t, it is utterly abhorrent to me.
The Trump administration is demonstrating that the effectiveness of the democratic process is more vulnerable than people had thought. When the transition to authoritarianism is happening approximately 10x as fast as Germany saw before World War 2, it’s scary to watch.
I would call for the ICC to do this – lay out the clear evidence of war crimes that Trump is ultimately responsible for (such as the extrajudicial murders of non-combatants in international or foreign territory), BUT to also lay out the evidence of cognitive decline showing how Trump is confabulating, showing ever less inhibition, slurring words, showing physical ailments, etc.
It should then outline a conclusion that Trump is not mentally fit to stand trial for war crimes. It should then ask that the necessary persons (JD Vance, etc) do what is necessary by invoking the 25th Amendment.
3 days ago Robert Reich published a article called ‘Trump has finally awakened the sleeping giant — and now he’s roaring’, he is slightly more optimistic than most.
When I compare what is going on in the US now with what happened in Germany in 1933 I begin to feel a bit more hopeful again. Within a few months of taking office Hitler had banned Trade Unions, arrested trades unionists, banned all other political parties. Democracy was gone within a few months and Dachau was opened in March 1933 for political prisoners. So far Trump’s political opponents do not have to fear the knock in the night from the political police. Although they may rightly fear having their lives disrupted by being hauled before the courts on a trumped (!) up charge or even fear political assassination incited by social media they do not (yet) have to fear the knock in the night. And then i think, maybe this is part of the plan- to leave a facade of freedom of speech, but hollow out the institutions and instigate a slow slide away from democratic norms so that people do not see what is happening until it is far too late, and they are living in a state in which the rule of law no longer operates reliably AND THEY ARE USED TO IT.
But ICE is knocking on doors. I am not sure things are as good as you are suggesting.
No. I suppose I am suggesting that Trump is being a bit cannier than Hitler which is not exactly a hopeful thought, I agree.