Americans aren’t facing a democratic collapse. We’re living in its aftermath
Eric Reinhart
The US was an oligarchy well before Trump’s first term. Recognizing this reality is essential to building a true democracy
Since Donald Trump returned to the White House, American political life has taken on a familiar rhythm. Each week brings another court ruling framed as a breaking point, another election cast as the last real one, another executive order described as the moment it all finally tips over the edge, another person murdered by a government that’s finally gone too far. Democratic party fundraising emails promise to “save the Republic”. Commentators warn that the guardrails are giving way. Anxious citizens refresh their screens, waiting for the collapse of American democracy.
This state of permanent panic rests on what Sigmund Freud called an illusion: a belief embraced not because it reflects reality, but because it satisfies a psychological need. The illusion in this case is that the United States still has a democracy to lose. The more unsettling truth is that Americans are not living under threat of future democratic breakdown; we are living inside the aftermath of one that has already occurred.
For tens of millions of people, democratic life has been absent for decades as they endure precarious housing, inaccessible healthcare, unchecked policing powers, debt servitude, vanishing public goods, and near-total exclusion from meaningful formal political power. For others – the wealthy, the politically connected, the donors and oligarchs – the same system produces not insecurity, but insulation, along with a constant need to rationalize the deprivation of others upon which their power is predicated and to disavow any responsibility for it.
These are not signs of a democracy under threat. They are symptoms of one that eroded – if it ever existed – long ago. Why, then, does American political discourse remain fixated on a catastrophe that always seems imminent but never quite arrives?
In his essay on the “fear of breakdown”, the psychoanalyst DW Winnicott described patients who become consumed by the dread of an impending disaster, only for analysis to reveal that what they fear lies not in the future at all. It is instead the displaced anxiety of a breakdown already suffered but never experienced – an early failure of the environment to hold the person together in the face of abandonment so overwhelming it was defensively short-circuited, repressed rather than lived. What returns later is the echo of that unlived event in the guise of a future threat.
Winnicott developed this concept through the treatment of individual patients, but his insights are also pertinent to group dynamics and political collectives. Nations too generate defenses against reality: denial, idealization, displacement, projection, regression, collective forgetting. America’s fixation on democracy’s perpetual near-death is one such defense; it’s also a political strategy. It allows liberal politicians, institutions, media and elite universities and professional groups who have benefited from longstanding inequalities to avoid confronting a more uncomfortable truth: the decline of democracy did not begin with Donald Trump but unfolded gradually across decades, including under the stewardship of the Democratic party leaders who now brand themselves as democracy’s last line of defense.
To acknowledge this is not to downplay the authoritarian project advancing under Trump. It is instead to try to understand it clearly enough to oppose it effectively, rather than remain caught in the loops that immobilize the country’s elite political class that is refusing to confront its own complicity.
Their story is mired in nostalgia, insisting that the US had a functional democratic order that is now suddenly slipping away under the threat posed by a singular, unprecedented figure – an aberration in American history rather than its reflection or culmination. The solution, in this telling, is preservation: defend institutions, restore norms, shore up checks and balances.
But to what democracy, exactly, are we trying to return? One built on settler colonialism, slavery, and the genocidal dispossession of Indigenous nations that continued – as explicit policy – well into the 20th century? One that excluded women until 1920, Black citizens until the 1960s, and trans people – with many liberal politicians and pundits’ backing – still today? The government that expanded formal rights only to hollow them out through mass incarceration, voter suppression, racialized wealth extraction, and – enabled by the supreme court – corporate capture of public institutions and elections? The democracy that bailed out bank and auto executives while millions of working-class people lost their homes, jobs and retirements due to corporate crime, sending suicide, addiction and despair to historic levels? The political system that has – under Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Trump alike – presided over the fastest growth in economic inequality and anti-democratic concentration of power in history while doubling down on a domestic police state and imperial violence?
Well before Trump’s first term, evidence clearly indicated that the United States was already an oligarchy. Decades of bipartisan deregulation, privatization, union-busting, and welfare retrenchment dismantled the public infrastructures that enable people to experience themselves as participants in collective life and progressively transferred the democratic power of the people over to corporations, unelected judges, and billionaires.
If democracy is not simply a constitutional arrangement but a lived experience of shared fate, ethical commitments, and civic presence, then millions of Americans have very clearly not lived in one for decades. And if your neighbors are not living in democracy, then neither are you.
As long as we imagine democratic collapse as something still to be prevented, we will remain politically paralyzed, clinging to norms, leaders and procedures whose authority has evaporated. We will fight to restore a pre-Trump order that provided the fertile ground out of which far-right politics continues to grow.
ear of breakdown binds us to a past we cannot restore – because it never existed – and prevents us from building the future we need. Winnicott observed that this fear diminishes only when the truth it conceals is finally truly experienced rather than repressed. When a patient confronts reality, a new direction becomes possible.
Genuine democracy is built and sustained by the everyday public infrastructures that allow people to rely on one another: thriving public housing, childcare, schools and libraries, universal healthcare, unions, public media, real community safety, and public health as direct social care. Where these institutions wither, democratic imagination withers – and fascist fantasies thrive. Where they are valued and invested, democracy becomes a lived practice rather than an anxious memory.
Ambitious policies such as universal childcare, Medicare for All, guaranteed housing, debt relief, green investment, and a national corps of community care workers, then, are not merely policy proposals. They are engines of democratic subjectivity – ways for people to feel part of something larger and to encounter one another outside the cutthroat marketplace and the politics of fear.
These projects cannot magically heal a nation that has never been whole. But they can create the conditions in which we might stop mourning an illusion and instead devote ourselves to the work of finally making democratic life a tangible reality.
What’s giving me hope now
Even as Democratic party leaders retreat into caution, empty rhetoric and procedural theater amid the rise of fascism in the United States, many ordinary Americans have stopped waiting for them. Across the country, including in my Chicago neighborhood, people have begun organizing among themselves to protect our immigrant neighbors and friends from state violence enacted by ICE, with measures including rapid-response phone trees, volunteers monitoring ICE and vulnerable neighborhood areas, mutual aid funds for detained neighbors, and community groups sharing legal resources and safe shelter.
These efforts are emerging not because the Democratic party has suddenly discovered courage and principle, but precisely because it has not. People are stepping in where their political representatives have cowered, choosing to defend their neighbors directly rather than waiting for permission from institutions that have proven unwilling to act. These acts are small, improvised and often invisible outside the communities within which they occur, but they reveal something essential: democracy does not begin with politicians and institutions that promise to save us. It begins when people decide they will not abandon one another. Following that instinct – to build the care and protection we need ourselves rather than defer to a thoroughly corrupted two-party system – is essential for broader democratic renewal. If that spreads, if Americans insist that good government grows from the bottom up rather than the top down and refuse to let grassroots movements be co-opted for politicians’ careers that put party loyalties over care for people in need, then the possibility of a real democracy may yet live.
