A year on from Joe Biden’s narrow election victory over Donald Trump, the US remains on a knife-edge. Many political outcomes are possible. These range from the gradual economic and political reform that Biden is seeking to the subversion of elections and constitutional rule that Trump attempted in January — and that he and the Republican Party are still intent on pursuing.
It is not easy to diagnose exactly what ails America so deeply that it incited the Trump movement. Is it the ceaseless culture wars that divide America by race, religion and ideology? Is it the increase in inequality of wealth and power to unprecedented levels? Is it America’s diminishing global power, with the rise of China and the repeated disasters of US-led wars of choice leading to national agony, frustration and confusion?
All these factors are at play in America’s tumultuous politics. Yet, in my view, the deepest crisis is political — the failure of America’s political institutions to “promote the general welfare,” as the US Constitution promises. Over the past four decades, American politics has become an insider’s game to favor the super-rich and corporate lobbies at the expense of the overwhelming majority of citizens.
Warren Buffett homed in on the essence of the crisis in 2006. “There’s class warfare, all right,” he said. “But it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”
The main battlefield is in Washington. The shock troops are the corporate lobbyists who swarm the US Congress, federal departments and administrative agencies. The ammunition is the billions of dollars spent annually on federal lobbying (an estimated $3.5 billion in 2020) and campaign contributions (an estimated $14.4 billion in the 2020 federal elections). The pro-class war propagandists are the corporate media, led by mega-billionaire Rupert Murdoch.
Nearly 2,500 years ago, Aristotle famously observed that good government can turn into bad government through a flawed constitutional order. Republics, governed by the rule of law, can descend into populist mob rule or oligarchic rule by a small and corrupt class or a tyranny of personal, one-man rule. America faces such possible disasters unless the political system can detach itself from the massive corruption of corporate lobbying and campaign financing by the rich.