Tribune. Almost a year after Joe Biden’s narrow electoral victory over Donald Trump, the United States is still on a razor’s edge.
It is not easy to diagnose what causes America so deeply, at its very heart. Should we see in it the work of the incessant cultural wars which divide it on both sides of racial, religious and ideological lines of separation? Is it the increase in inequalities, both in wealth and in power, which have reached unprecedented levels? Is it the decline of its world power in the face of the rise of China and the repeated disasters of the wars in which it has chosen to engage?
All of these factors play their part in the tumultuous American political life. But, from my point of view, the deepest crisis is political: it results from the inability of institutions to “develop general well-being”, as the United States Constitution promises in its preamble.
Over the past four decades, American political life has become a closed game, favoring the super-rich and corporate influence groups at the expense of the vast majority of citizens. Warren Buffett perfectly analyzed the essence of this crisis in 2006 in The New York Times : “It’s class war, but it is my class, the rich class, that is fighting the war, and we are the winners. “
The main battleground is in Washington. Shock troops are the lobbyists for the big groups that swarm the United States Congress, federal government departments and government agencies. Ammunition is the billions of dollars spent annually on federal lobbying ($ 3.5 billion in 2020) and in contributions to electoral campaigns ($ 14.4 billion for federal elections in 2020). The propagandists who stir up the class war are the media concentrated in a few hands, notably those of the multibillionaire Rupert Murdoch.
Assault on general welfare
Class war against the poor is not new in America, but it was not really launched until the early 1970s and has been waged with terrible effectiveness over the past forty years. For roughly three decades, from the inauguration of President Franklin Roosevelt in 1933, in the midst of the Great Depression, to the Kennedy-Johnson period, from 1961 to 1968, America followed the same development paths as Western Europe, becoming a social democracy. Income inequalities were closing, and new social groups, notably African Americans and women, joined the main stream of economic and social life.
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