There was a time when America liked to see itself – and be seen – as a flawed but striving democracy. Loud, imperfect, often hypocritical, but anchored to the idea that power should be constrained, the vulnerable protected, and truth at least contested in good faith.
Something has changed.
Today – under the Trump Administration – the United States increasingly resembles a country that rewards wealth, punishes poverty, and treats cruelty as policy rather than failure. Economic decisions are framed as strength even when their costs fall overwhelmingly on ordinary people. Tariffs are imposed in the name of national pride, yet paid for by consumers at the checkout. Corporate profits are insulated; household budgets are not.
Healthcare, once described as a moral obligation in any wealthy society, is steadily hollowed out. Access narrows, costs rise, and survival itself becomes conditional – not on need, but on income, employment status, or luck. In a nation that can fund wars, subsidies, and surveillance without hesitation, illness is still treated as a personal failing.
At the same time, America’s relationship with power has grown disturbingly unrestrained. Threats that would once have been dismissed as fringe bravado now emerge from the centre: talk of bombing Mexico, invading Greenland, or withdrawing from international institutions designed to prevent global catastrophe. These statements may be waved away as bluster, but words from powerful nations are never just words. They signal intent, they shape norms, and they erode the idea that international law matters – as evidenced by the recent kidnapping of a world leader.
The treatment of immigrants is perhaps the most telling measure of this shift. Harassment, detention, family separation, and public demonisation have become normalised. People fleeing violence or poverty are recast as threats, while the systems that benefit from their labour remain untouched. The cruelty is not incidental – it is performative. It reassures some voters that someone, somewhere, is being punished.
Most disturbing of all is the corrosion of accountability. When a citizen dies at the hands of the state – as in the case of Renee Nicole Good – the question should never be how quickly the story can be buried, but how rigorously the truth can be established. When investigations are perceived as opaque or pliant, trust collapses. A democracy cannot survive long if the public believes that justice depends on who you are, not what happened.
Nor can it survive when loyalty is valued above truth. Institutions once designed to act as safeguards – law enforcement, the courts, even the press – are increasingly treated as enemies unless they conform. Expertise is dismissed as elitism. Dissent is reframed as disloyalty. Reality itself becomes negotiable.
America has not suddenly become evil. What has happened is more banal, and therefore more dangerous. Power has been unmoored from restraint. Wealth has been mistaken for virtue. Strength has been confused with domination.
Many Americans see this. They feel it in their bills, their hospitals, their schools, their fear of saying the wrong thing or being the wrong person. They know something is wrong, even if they are told – repeatedly – that this is what winning looks like.
The tragedy is not only what America is doing to others, but what it is doing to itself. A nation that once aspired, however imperfectly, to moral leadership now appears exhausted by the very idea of responsibility.
History will not ask whether America was rich, armed, or feared. It will ask whether it was just, whether it told the truth about itself, and whether it remembered that power without compassion is not greatness – it is decay.
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America is still there, north and south of it. You refer, undoubtedly, to the Unwiped Shitty Arseholes of Washington and Dryington, the criminal corrupt corporation of Trumpery. A large Longbayload of human extractive filth exists by this, to oppress the others. A shame about civilisation, law, decency, honesty.., maybe some other time. The defectives among pioneers have much to do with this, scrapings and droppings of runaway deluded disobedient wilful ultrasuperstitious types, rather like Drumpft’s ancestors. This USA is leprously castoffable.
It’s revealed itself to be what it always was, always will be.
Mid Terms will not change things. If they are allowed to happen. Unless a massive swing away from Trump and his Henchmen.
Excellent article Michael. But sad and frightening to read as so many nails were hit on heads there.
Agree with 4th H totally.
America ? – – the dark ages revisited.
My view is perhaps even more pessimistic. I see the US spiraling downward onto itself and drawing the rest of the world into the chaotic disintegration that we’re witnessing there each day. As you point out, this is (was) a country that saw itself as imperfect, yet able to at least attempt to maintain a reasonable degree of fairness and equality for its people, even if the rise of oligarchy seemed unstoppable. Trump is simply the manifestation of surrender to oligarchs, driven by the destruction of a whole class of middle America over the past 30 years or so and the rise of anger and hatred throughout society.
Problem is, who will fix it? And, just how will that occur?
It is an oligarchy and there are reasons over time that have created this evolution. But even when I was young, it seemed a facade obscuring the truth.
I used to be enthralled by “Jet Jackson- the Flying Commando”, less so the grindingly boring “I Led Three lives”, starring Richard Carlson, at the height of the McCarthyism/ “Communist Plot” rubbish of the ‘fifties.
A decade later Dorian Grey USA unmasked itself with the horrors of Vietnam and Cambodia, so reminiscint of today and Palestine.
…………
They Won’t solve “the revenue problem”, more perverse even than our “monkey see/monkey do” politics.
just more austerty for the masses and the masses overseas.
Another perspective from John Menadue….
https://johnmenadue.com/post/2026/01/the-usa-today-a-derangement-threatening-the-world/?
In the hands of gangsters and mobsters by none other than the useful tool of Trump, his oligarchs and madmen.
Time is and will be called, and complete humiliation waits for Trump and his family.
National karma has come to collect it’s dues after 250 years of sin.Murder, disposession,greed,and failure to learn from history.Nor will the filthy rich be shielded by their wealth.
And to think I considered the previous your best Mr Taylor.
It’s not just reporting, opinion, journalism – it’s your writing that gives it power.
Thank you again.
“…The tragedy is not only what America is doing to others, but what it is doing to itself…”
USA has no credible political alternative to turn to. Democrat or Republican – the population is divided and embedded in trivia – nothing changes.
The same problem exists in UK, Australia and New Zealand: the two party uni-party governance system is controlled by lobbyists and a concentrated media ownership. Parliamentary “Opposition” is simply megaphone theatrics used to mask constant collusion and obfuscation on matters of communal importance such as health, education and social welfare. At least Australia has a burgeoning group of independent representative at Federal level to call out the hypocrisies of the establishment.
Ahhhh Michael, you’ve done it again!! Raw objective analysis of the USA (United States of Apartheid) moving inexorably from the Hollywood ”American Dream” to the ”Nightmare on Main Street”.
I am reminded of Garry Allen (1971) ”None Dare Call it Conspiracy” (5 million sales in 6 months) who was among the ”first modern” writers to report on post WWII planned corporate domination. Roll on through 50 years of the disbelief, discouragement and abuse from ill-informed unthinkers and the present TACO Trumpery America has blossomed into a modern all-consuming triffid, exceeding anything that Allen predicted.
It appears that the preferred future is neo-feudalism, where the rich stay rich and the workers get screwed ….. hardly a pleasant idea.