America is a liberal democracy. Its greatest blessing is freedom, the right to live and act in accordance with one’s conscience.
This freedom unleashes boundless energy and creativity. Along with other Western nations, liberal democracies have advanced at an astonishing pace, far surpassing autocratic and theocratic nations in every measure, especially in quality of life.
Despite its advantages, democracy is not universally accepted. Monarchs, autocrats, theocrats and oligarchs, who have a stake in preserving the societal structures that protected their wealth and power, continue to repress freedom. They deceive their citizenry using misinformation and disinformation to disparage the liberty of the Western world. And they crush the opposition with iron-fisted police and kangaroo courts. Dissidents like Alexie Navalny and Vladimir Kara-Murza are imprisoned and often murdered.
Their propaganda has infected Western democracies. The United States, Germany, France and Italy have all shifted to the right. People are losing faith in the most successful form of government ever devised.
A study by The Economist concluded that, along with Greece, Israel, Poland and Brazil, America is now one of the “flawed democracies.” Worse yet, the stage is set for its ruin. Donald Trump, who has admired autocratic leaders and aspires to be one, has surrounded himself with oligarchs; he heads a political party that advocates the overthrow of democracy, and they are following the Project 2025 playbook.
The loss of liberal democracy would be tragic for humanity and the planet. After 4,000 years, there is no reason to think that religions will ever bring peace and tranquility. The only real hope for humanity is humankind’s reasoning ability, and liberal democracies are the only form of government truly grounded in reason.
Why is American democracy failing?
Politics & Money
Politics in America has become a rich man’s game. In 2011, the average net worth of a senator was $14 million, while a House member’s was $7 million. Today, those numbers would be 50% greater. And $15.9 billion was spent in the 2024 election. It is naïve to think that politics is not profitable or that politicians are not beholden to benefactors.
To win public office, one usually needs the support of corporations and wealthy donors. And, when elected, officials spend half of their time raising money, which should be spent working for their constituents. Money has corrupted the system. In the Sons of Wichita, Daniel Schulman reveals that one of Charles [Koch’s] advisers said, “Politicians are [paid] stage actors working off a script produced by the nation’s intellectual class.”
A significant reason for this disgraceful circumstance is the 2010 Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which ruled that free speech under the First Amendment bars the government from restricting campaign expenditures by corporations and nonprofits. Dark money contributions are unlimited, and Congress cannot write laws to stop them. Nonprofits are especially disturbing. In the last election, one shell corporation steered nearly $2.6 million to half a dozen Republican political committees, though the company existed only on paper and had been incorporated for only three months.
Since 2010, the income of the top 1% has risen by 250%, while the income of the bottom 20% has risen by only 24%. The wealthy get what they pay for. Elon Musk has shown that lodging at Mar-a-Lago and donating a quarter of a billion to a campaign can buy a controlling seat at the president’s table. No wonder Americans have lost faith in the system.
To be fair, many politicians recognize the problem and want to address it. Thirty-two senators have supported a constitutional amendment that would overturn Citizens United. But for now, the only safeguard preventing the complete corruption of our political system is our democracy. Not one Republican appears on that list of 32, implying that the party consents to this compromise of democracy.
Divisiveness
Senseless “culture wars” also threaten our democracy. To say “culture” is misleading. These are not culture wars; they are freedom wars, wars over America’s greatest blessing.
Abortion is a key issue. Roe v. Wade ruled that until viability, the Constitution granted women the right to abort a pregnancy. In essence, the court said that personhood begins with viability. But Christian fundamentalists insisted, without evidence, that personhood begins earlier, though they could not show when. Nonetheless, they fought to deny women their freedom. After 50 years, conservative Christian Justice Samuel Alito, writing the Dobb’s decision, concocted a ruling that turned the issue to the states, where subjective popular opinion could override established legal precedent and a constitutional right.
The LGBT controversies are also a matter of freedom. The freedom to choose how we live belongs to everyone, including members of the LGBT community. However, the Christian bible recognizes only two genders, and fundamentalists view any variation as a violation of God’s work. They believe their God wants this freedom to be denied to gay, lesbian and transgender people.
Because the majority of Americans do not agree with their delusional views, Christian fundamentalists see democracy as an obstacle they must overcome. And so, two influential groups—the affluent and the fundamentalists—think it is in their interest to abandon democracy.
Their home is the theocratic Republican party, which has worked diligently to subvert our election process. Theocratic parties are incompatible with American democracy. For religious extremists, serving God is more important than serving the common good. And their primary allegiance is to the bible, not the Constitution. For extremists, these conflicts are irreconcilable.
The First Amendment forbids establishing a national church. There has never been a theocratic party of any consequence, so the separation of church and state was never an issue. But it has become one. Sixty-two percent of the Republican party wants America to become a Christian nation, knowing it would violate the Constitution. And Republican theocrats prioritize Christian ideology. The divisiveness generated by this Republican mixing of religion and politics has torn our nation apart and may bring an end to democracy. That will be tragic for everyone; a theocracy is just one form of autocracy.
History proves that democracy is far superior to autocratic or theocratic government. Do we have the wherewithal to reject the religious extremism that has infected the Grand Old Party? Can we restore our democracy so that the government reflects the people’s will and is dedicated to the common good? That is up to we the people.
Bob Topper, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is a retired engineer.
The irony is that MAGA politics are incompatible with Jesus’ philosophy. That many Christians miss that is proof that they are intellectually short of redeeming their own religious ambitions.
Get out of your echo chamber Bob. If you are really for democracy then you would be speaking out for those who have stood to protect free speech from the deceptive accusations of “misinformation.”
The president has taken strong steps in the right direction, but the Woketopus’ response shows that the path ahead will not be easy.
The federal government is out of control and President Trump is working overtime to fix it, but the bureaucrats causing the problem have powerful allies striking back at the president from outside.
The basic problem isn’t just the woke spending at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), though that is a prime example of the central issue.
The problem is that unelected bureaucrats have real power to determine policy, and they consider themselves intellectually and morally superior to the people and their elected representatives. This mentality explains why 64% of Washington, D.C.,-based bureaucrats who voted for Kamala Harris in November say they won’t follow a lawful Trump order if they consider it bad policy.
This should also remind Americans of how aggressively certain actors within the executive branch opposed Trump during his first term. Agents within the government helped prop up the conspiracy theory that Trump was a Russian agent, and a news outlet partially funded by USAID helped launch the first Trump impeachment. At least one bureaucrat openly described himself as “part of the resistance inside the Trump administration.”
The rot runs deep, and rooting it out won’t be easy. To make matters worse, the deep state has allies outside the government who are working hard to prevent Trump from changing the system.
The Freak Out
Democrats have taken to the streets of Washington, D.C., to protest Trump’s restructuring of the federal government, acting as though cutting waste and abuse from the bureaucracy amounted to a national crisis.
“People need to know how serious this is,” Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA) whose congressional district is home to more than 70,000 federal workers, said at a recent protest. “You tear down the federal government, you also tear down our whole society. If you eliminate one of the three branches of government, you can’t run a country.”
Trump and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) aren’t tearing down the entire government, and they’re not even eliminating one of the three branches. Rather, they’re making the administrative state — effectively a fourth, extra-constitutional branch of government — accountable to the people’s elected president.
The Democrats and their allies don’t like it because it involves rooting the woke activism out of the entrenched bureaucracy.
For example, USAID had been funding Marxist “equity,” transgender activism, and climate alarmism, the woke ideologies voters rejected in November. USAID had partnered with the Open Society Foundations, the massive funding apparatus of Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros and his son Alex.
In one particularly egregious example, USAID and Open Society funded the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. This news outlet attacked conservatives for criticizing Soros and released the report that spurred the first Trump impeachment in 2019.
Conservatives should be familiar with George and Alex Soros. Soros and his son have bankrolled almost every leftist cause you’ve ever heard of, and the Open Society Foundations played a major role in propping up the leftist groups that called the shots in the Biden administration.
As my book, “The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government,” reveals, woke activist groups fed staff into the Biden administration and pressed the administration to implement woke policies. Scratch the surface of any Biden policy, and you’re likely to find activists with the Center for American Progress, the Human Rights Campaign, or the Natural Resources Defense Council. America’s largest unions, such as the AFL-CIO and the Service Employees Industrial Union, also had tremendous access and influence in the administration.
Now, those same groups are gearing up to defend the deep state, and they’re doing more than just picketing outside USAID.
Inside The Resistance: How Washington’s Deep State Counters Trump’s Policies
By Tyler O’Neil
Feb 14, 2025 DailyWire.com