]The great problem with the United States today is twofold: First, the country is falling to pieces under President Trump, the most corrupt and incompetent president in American history. Second, as I have argued at length previously, the U.S. has been suffering severe problems for decades that Trump leveraged to squirm into power. Deindustrialization, the opioid epidemic, poverty, inequality, and so on — these are the soil in which racist demagoguery grows. Obama threw homeowners under the bus to save the banks, endorsed austerity instead of full employment, and Republicans reaped the political benefit in 2010, 2014, and 2016.
We see here a certain political trajectory that has ended in right-wing dictatorship on multiple occasions in other countries in the past. A country is being devoured from the inside by gangrenous capitalism. The status quo elites, who benefit from the rigged economy, are strong enough to throttle any reform effort from the democratic left. But they are not strong enough to fend off an anti-democratic attack from the right — or worse, they actively welcome it as the only way to avoid higher taxes and more regulation. As Dan O'Sullivan wrote after Trump was first elected, "This is all the result of kneecapping any attempt at reform of the system — the reform fails, the pain remains, only now it comes out sideways, through the only permissible path: the far right."