Setting aside culture war animosities for the moment to consider the direction of politics in the US— to the extent that doing so is psychologically and / or economically possible for dedicated culture warriors, recent revelations that the FBI and CIA were active participants in the 2016 and 2020 national elections run headlong into longer history. While ‘American democracy’ has always been tenuous and abstract (‘representative’), the US has now returned to a pre- and inter-War melding of state with commercial interests. The American political ‘system’ now fits the Marxist-Leninist conception of the capitalist state.
How is this working for ‘the people?’ Well, which people? The US has the largest military budget in the world by a factor of ten. But it is nevertheless apparently incapable of producing usable weapons and bullets. The US spends multiples of what the rest of the rich world does per person on healthcare while it has active genocide levels of people dying (graph below) who wouldn’t be in a functioning society. The end of the agreement between capital and the state to forego predatory pricing (‘greedflation’) on food and other necessities is increasing food insecurity for vast swaths of the West. And nuclear war with Russia is once again an implied possibility.
The recent shift from the soft power of trade agreements (NAFTA, TPP) to the hard power of military imperialism ties to the economic backdrop of a (US) corporate-state that
— source counterpunch.org | Rob Urie | Aug 4, 2023