How to Destroy a Democracy: Inequality, Distrust, and the Myth of the “Far Left”

It took 44 years to make Americans unfit for democracy, but nobody expected the Spanish Inquisition

Screen grab: Monte Python’s Flying Circus, series 2, episode 2. Available on YouTube.

It’s possible we’ve been focusing on the wrong problem. We ask “How can we return democracy to the American people?” Perhaps we should be asking “how can we return the American people to democracy?” Because the challenge we face today is this: a large segment of the American public is no longer fit to serve as citizens of a democratic republic. Thanks to decades of relentless conditioning, these people have been taught to believe that democracy is a farce, that half of this country is their mortal enemy, and that tolerance, compromise, or evidence-based reasoning are unnecessary burdens for governing America.

When the Republican Party launched its project to save America from diversity under Ronald Reagan in 1980, they probably weren’t trying to create a fascist state. They simply wanted to maintain the level of white-male supremacy that had dominated American politics since its founding. That supremacy had been under threat since the 1960s, due to rising demands by women and minorities for the equal rights and privileges promised by the US Constitution, but never delivered. Those demands were a threat to the existing order for sure, but defeating them was not seen by Republicans as corrosive of the American democratic experiment. Rather, opposing diversity was seen as necessary to maintain the natural order of things, a fundamentally conservative and very American thing to do.

So how did we get to where we are today? How did we get to the literal dismantling of the American government, the deliberate destruction of the American economy, and the abdication of America’s leadership in the world? How did we get to a situation in which our government indulges in infantile name-calling, unfettered racism, abandonment of longstanding friends and allies, and an agenda of hate and repression not seen since the rise of the Confederacy? Maybe Republicans really did, at one time, believe they were making America “fiscally responsible” and safe for “family values”. But apparently … nobody expected the Spanish Inquisition.

How did we get here?

In a nutshell …

A screen shot from “All the President’s Men”, 1974. Reprinted under fair use.

In a bit more detail …

I suspect there are three basic sources of America’s descent into fascist authoritarianism under the current regime. These are deeply embedded causes that will not be easily corrected. In the language of causality, they are ultimate causes, not proximate causes. While a proximate cause of someone’s 2024 Presidential vote might be “they voted against their interests”, an ultimate cause would address reasons why they voted against their interests. Here are three ultimate causes that help explain how a desire to maintain an existing hierarchy can morph into a nihilistic nightmare of vengeance and incompetence that threatens the very survival of humanity on this planet:

1. The reality of inequality in America (which right-wing elites have successfully hidden from their followers as well as most Americans).
2. The wave of distrust at all levels in American politics and society (which the far right originally promoted and amplified to hide its real aims, but which now has spread across the political spectrum to infect Americans of all political beliefs).
3. The myth of the “Far Left” (which the far right media machine uses to inoculate its followers against ever learning how poor their living standards are when compared to citizens of more progressively governed states or, indeed, of most other modern democratic nations).

For speed readers, here is a preview.

1. Inequality in America is today at its highest level since the Roaring Twenties. It has been nothing short of highway robbery, shifting 80 trillion dollars from the bottom 90% of the American public to the top 1% over the last four decades (details below). This transfer of wealth from the American middle and working classes to the country’s richest citizens has been the biggest single accomplishment of the Republican Party since the election of Reagan.
2. To make sure its followers never notice how or how much they are being robbed, the GOP and its rightwing media allies have actively promoted distrust, suspicion, and demonization of various “enemies”. For decades, the purpose of these efforts was to distract, anger, and mobilize its followers. Today, the man in the White House appears to have taken over this project, marrying it to his own long list of enemies, whom he is now pursuing with maximum gusto and illegality. But distrust is like a poison in the veins of a democratic system. Republicans know this, but have always considered it an acceptable tradeoff to maintain their electoral viability. Greater inequality has always been in their interest (that is, in the interest of the wealthy elites they serve), even as this priority has starved the great majority of Americans across the country (but especially in Republican controlled states), denying them the infrastructure, services, and rights enjoyed by citizens in most other modern democracies.
3. Finally, to make sure their followers never even consider the benefits they are missing under the yoke of right-wing priorities, far right propagandists have invented an enemy called “the Far Left”, a mythical and terrifying bogeyman that wants every American to live under something horrible called “socialism” which is somehow going to take away all of America’s “freedoms” and turn us into Venezuela … or something. If the truth were ever revealed that “the Far Left” is actually just responsible modern democratic government (not without its flaws, but far superior to the far-right alternative), that could be problematic for the right-wing messaging machine.

These are the three fundamental obstacles that Americans must overcome if they are ever to revive democracy in America. Let’s consider each in more detail.

Inequality in America

Most Americans have no idea how unequal their society really is. Republicans like it that way.

What Americans think they know about inequality

In a study conducted in 2011, researchers asked a representative sample of Americans to guess how much of America’s total wealth was held by the 20% richest Americans (called the top quintile in statistics-speak). The average guess was 59%. The actual figure at that time was far greater, 84%. Given that billionaires’ wealth increased by 62% during the pandemic, while workers’ wages grew by only 10% over the same period, this disparity has only continued to grow.

The researchers then asked what people thought would be a fair and equitable distribution of wealth across the five quintiles. On this question, the average preferred percentage of wealth for the top 20% of Americans was 32%, a figure that was fairly consistent across political, demographic, and income groups.

Finally, the researchers asked people to compare the attractiveness of two unlabelled wealth distribution “pies”, shown here:

Data from Norton and Ariely, 2011. Image reconstructed by author.

When presented in this way, 92% of Americans across all political, income, and gender groups said they would prefer to live in Country B versus Country A. This was an interesting result because Country A showed the most recent distribution of wealth in the USA, while Country B showed the most recent distribution of wealth in Sweden.

This leaves us with three important findings about the models in peoples’ heads that filter how they think about wealth distribution in America:

• Americans vastly underestimate the amount of wealth concentration in the United States.
• Even their underestimates are far higher than their preferred levels of wealth distribution.
• When not distracted by labels and stereotypes, Americans of all stripes show an overwhelming preference to live in a society where wealth is distributed more like it is in Sweden than in the US.

In addition to not knowing how unequal American society is, most Americans have no idea how much it costs them to live in a society where the rich continue to siphon off greater and greater proportions of the wealth produced by the country as a whole.

What inequality has cost us: Would you believe $80 trillion since 1975?

In 2020, two researchers from the RAND Corporation asked another interesting question: If the distribution of taxable income that existed in American society in 1975 had remained the same until 2018, how much more income would have remained for the bottom 90% of earners, as opposed to being transferred to the top 10%?

Here’s how this calculation works. In 1975, the top 10% of American income earners received about 34% of all income earned in that year. The bottom 90% earned the rest, 67%. By 2018, the top 10% were earning 50% of total income, leaving the other 50% for everyone else.

Suppose that in 2018 those proportions were the same as in 1975. How much more income — in current dollars — would the bottom 90% have if they were still sharing 67% of total income in 2018, as opposed to the actual figure of 50%? The answer for 2018 alone is $2.5 trillion. Making a similar calculation for each year between 1975 and 2018 and adding them all up, the authors reach a truly mind-blowing conclusion:

If the distribution of taxable income in the United States had remained constant at its 1975 level, by 2018 the bottom 90% of American income earners would have earned an additional $47–48 trillion between 1975 and 2018.

In March 2025, RAND researchers extended this analysis to include wealth data through 2023. They found that while it took 43 years for the inequality gap to rise to $50 trillion, it took only five more years for it to increase by an additional $30 trillion. In other words, if the distribution of wealth existing in the United States in 1975 had remained constant through 2023, a total of $80 trillion would have found its way into the pockets of 90% of Americans, instead of ending up where it did, in the pockets of 10% of Americans, the richest 10%. (see also source)

Imagine what kind of country we would be living in today if $80 trillion had been distributed across all working Americans over the last four decades, as opposed to being siphoned off and essentially quarantined by the very rich.

Imagine what the current MAGA crowd would think of their precious Republican Party if they knew exactly how much their party’s dedication to increasing income inequality was costing them — not millions, not billions, but trillions of dollars over the course of their working lifetimes. I’m guessing it probably wouldn’t sit well.

For Republicans, the key phrase in the last paragraph is “if they knew”. The underlying strategy of the Party has always been to make sure their followers never know these facts, nor any other inconvenient facts that might reveal the true nature (and the true beneficiaries) of their policy agenda. The model of America they want in the heads of their followers is one built on a mountain of lies that they believe are necessary to mobilize the votes they need to stay in power.

If Republicans want to hide the fact that they are committed to expanding wealth and income disparities in America — disparities that all Americans, including Republican voters, both underestimate and reject as fundamentally unfair — they need to give their followers something else to think about, something they will see as more important than living in an unequal society that 1) violates their basic intuitions about fairness and 2) transfers trillions of dollars out of their pockets and into the accounts of millionaires and billionaires.

The Republican solution? Instill in their followers a model of how America works that sees most Americans as existential enemies, not to be trusted, not to be listened to, not to be treated as equal participants in the American experiment. Once these enemies have been identified, they can be invoked as the cause of any discomforts Republican voters might experience in their lives.

To distract their followers from the true GOP agenda, Republican elites and their media allies have injected the poisons of distrust, suspicion, contempt, and hatred into the American bloodstream.

Distrust: The Poison that Kills Democracies

In a Pew Report released in June 2022, Americans’ trust in the federal government was found to be historically low. Just 20% of polled Americans said they trusted the government in Washington to do the right thing “always” or “most of the time”. This result is quite similar to results I found in the 2020 American National Election Study (ANES), where only 14% of the weighted sample reported high levels of trust in government. Even with their hero Donald Trump in the White House, only 20% of Republican voters in 2020 expressed trust that the government would “do what is right” always or most of the time.

While distrust in government and suspicions about the motives and competence of political office holders is widely shared across the American political spectrum, Donald Trump and his media allies have managed to spread that distrust and suspicion deeper than it has ever been before.

Rising inequality makes that easier to do. As inequality increases, more and more Americans get left behind, facing stagnating incomes, mounting debt, and chronic economic insecurity. This, in turn, exacerbates peoples’ fears that they are competing against each other for their fair share of a shrinking economic pie. Social cohesion and any sense of shared community is lost. Over time, this produces a “zero-sum” perception that any gain made by someone else in America must be a loss for me. It creates an “us versus them” mentality that is ripe for exploitation via scapegoating. And that is precisely the project the Republican Party and its media allies have taken up with gusto.

In the 2024 election, distrust was a significant factor in the Democrats’ losses at both the Presidential and down-ballot levels. According to a detailed post-mortem by Democratic pollster David Shor, Democrats faced a rising wave of distrust in 2024 that found them less trusted than Republicans on almost every issue rated as important by voters. The chart below illustrates this “trust deficit” Democrats suffered in 2024. Put simply, Democrats were trusted more on policies that were rated less important, while Republicans were trusted more on policies that were rated more important.

Chart by David Shor, Blue Rose Research. Presented in discussion with Ezra Klein, source. X-axis is ranked importance of policy issues, Y-axis is relative trust in Democrats vs. Republicans to deal with the issue.

To all appearances, the Republican strategy of sowing distrust and doubt has been wildly successful. While low-information, low-involvement Republican voters express high trust in their leaders’ ability to “do the right thing” on important policy issues, better-informed, more-involved Democratic voters are mired in distrust. That loss of trust, if not reversed soon, is going to be a huge challenge for the Democratic Party going forward.

Some commentators like to call this state of affairs “polarization”. But that is not quite right.

Polarization is when you hold some policy position “A” and I hold the polar opposite position “B”. We’re polarized. But in America today, Republicans lie about their true policy positions, because they know those positions are rejected by vast majorities of Americans.

Democrats tell voters what policies they support and how those policies will benefit them. Republicans have never honestly told voters what policy positions they support, they simply tell them never to trust anything Democrats say. This is what passed for “policy” among Republicans. In the 2024 election, the strategy worked. More voters believed Republican lies than Democratic facts, and that’s why Donald Trump and not Kamala Harris is sitting in the Oval Office today.

This is not polarization. It’s one side engaging in democracy and the other side engaging in a deliberate poisoning of the foundations upon which any functioning democracy depends (source). It is behavior outside the bounds of democratic discourse. It may be a vote mobilizer, but ultimately it is a democracy killer. Republican elites know this, and they seem to like it just fine.

The Myth of “the Far Left”

How do Republican elites make sure their followers never believe a word Democrats say? How do they ensure that Republican voters will dismiss any effort to enlighten them about the giant confidence game being played against them? With one magic word: socialism.

The curse of socialism

Using socialism as a cudgel to attack just about anything you don’t like has a long and well-established legacy in the Republican Party. Indeed, Harry Truman described it perfectly 70 years ago:

“‘Socialism’ is the epithet they have hurled at every advance that people have made in the last twenty years. Socialism is what they called Social Security. Socialism is what they called farm-price supports. Socialism is what they called bank-deposit insurance. Socialism is what they called the growth of free and independent labor. Socialism is their name for almost everything that helps all of the people.” (quoted in The New Yorker, 2019, emphasis added.)

Republicans want their followers to believe that socialism is a kind of prison within which an evil cabal called “the Far Left” wants to trap all Americans. Socialism is Venezuela and Cuba. (It used to be Russia, but that assessment appears to be changing.) It is failed states, planned economies, empty store shelves, secret police, and corruption. It is a form of government designed to ensure that everyone is miserable, sick, and starving.

What is important here is that this is the model Republicans want their supporters to have in their heads when they hear the words “socialism” or “Far Left”. That this model is a giant fabrication is beside the point. It is absolutely critical to Republicans that Americans think of socialism as a dangerous threat and the Far Left as a bunch of crazies who want to turn America into Venezuela. (I will not dwell on the fact that we now see this is another example of classic Republican projection.)

One wonders: why invest so much effort creating a false mental model of words? For Republicans, these words are their equivalent of a hazardous materials symbol. They represent a final, insistent message to all true believers: do not look behind the door labeled “socialism”.

If Republicans did look behind that door, what would they find? What is socialism, really?

The threat of socialism

“Socialism” is one of several terms (“democratic socialism” is another, “welfare state” is another) used to describe a form of government implemented by several countries, mostly in Europe, based on a simple proposition: that the purpose of government is to increase the overall happiness and quality of life of the country’s residents … all of them.

Contrary to the message blaring from the Republican lie machine, socialism works. Countries that could accurately be called “socialist” are widely and consistently judged to have the happiest citizens and highest quality of life on the planet.

Happy citizens! This is the biggest threat the Republican Party faces in America.

If Americans were not weighed down by the risks, uncertainties, and anxieties in our dog-eat-dog, scarcity-driven society, what need would they have for the GOP to “protect” them from all the enemies the GOP conjures up for them? How much harder would it be to manipulate and exploit them? “Happy” is the last thing Republicans want Americans to be.

As an example of real socialism in action, let’s take a look at the “socialist hellhole” called Denmark. Consistently ranked among the top 5 places to live in the world, here are some benefits that Danes receive as a matter of course:

• Education is provided cost-free, including tuition-free college for all Danes who want to attend.
• Students receive an additional $900 per month to finance their educational needs.
• Parental leave is provided for up to 52 weeks, with 32 weeks of monetary support for new parents.
• Childcare is subsidized.
• Most healthcare is provided at no cost.
• The elderly receive generous pensions and care providers to help them live at home.
• Danes work an average of 33 hours per week.
• The Danish labor market provides both flexibility for employers, security for employees, and services to keep unemployed workers skilled and active.

In terms of outcomes, Danes live longer than Americans, are healthier than Americans, and are happier than Americans. Indeed, far happier than Americans. What’s the secret? Nothing too surprising:

“People are more satisfied with their lives when they have a comfortable standard of living, a supportive social network, good health, the latitude to choose their course in life, and a government they trust. The highest echelon of happy countries also tends to have universal health care, ample paid vacation time, and affordable child care.” (Joe Pinsker in The Atlantic, 2021)

In democratic socialist countries, these kinds of programs and services are called investments, not entitlements. They are paid for by collecting significantly higher taxes than Americans pay today. In 2019, for example, Denmark’s tax-to-GDP ratio was about 46%, compared to about 25% in the United States. So Danes are willing to invest almost half of their GDP to support the quality of life of their citizens. In contrast, Republicans have always made sure the American government is deliberately underfunded, so that any programs and services that might improve the quality of life of its citizens are dismissed out of hand as too expensive.

The Bottom Line: Can American Democracy Be Revived?

At the top of this post, I asked the question: How can we return the American people to democracy? I have highlighted three major challenges that must be addressed before we can even begin to answer that question. All three refer to false beliefs.

• First, American need to become better informed about the insane levels of inequality existing in the nation today, and getting worse every day. How this might help a democratic (small-d) revival: if voters understand how massively they are being robbed by the morbidly rich ($80 trillion over 50 years), at least some of them will no longer vote for the robbers. Communicating this gobsmacking fact should be Job #1 for Democrats.
• Second, Democrats must rebuild trust in their Party and its mission. Being the Party out of power, they cannot do this directly. How this might help a democratic revival: trust in Democrats will go up as trust in Republicans goes down, as this Administration continues its destruction of American institutions and values. This appears to already be happening.
• And third, Democrats must find a way to bury the myth of “the Far Left” and the demonization of “socialism”. Doing so will allow Americans to recognize real-world alternatives to the dog-eat-dog autocracy Republicans are now attempting to impose on the nation. How this might help a democratic revival: when people see that “socialism” is not a bogeyman be be feared, they will be more willing to embrace social and economic policies that have produced significant social benefits in democratic socialist nations like Denmark.

As I’ve argued elsewhere, America’s descent into … whatever this is … oligarchy, plutocracy, autocracy, monarchy, neofeudalism, authoritarianism, kakistocracy, or idiocracy … it is not in any defensible sense a democracy.

We have now reached the end stage of a 50-year project in anti-democratic conditioning of a large segment of the American population.

Thanks to this concerted Republican effort that finally achieved victory in 2024, approximately half of America’s voting population has left the democracy building. It is my belief that they cannot be persuaded by Democrats to come back home. They will only come home when they are convinced that the path they are on is crushing them, and further convinced that Democrats might be able to save them. How much pain will be required to achieve this goal is presently unknown. But the Trump Administration is working diligently to find it.

So … nobody expected the Spanish Inquisition (aka Project 2025), but that’s what we got. It will take years, maybe decades, to dig our way out of the damage already done, and the real damage hasn’t even started yet. The problem today, in a nutshell, is that the American people are not receptive to a message of democracy revival. I believe they will only become receptive if the 50-year project run at their expense finally crashes around them. A growing body of evidence points to this happening, probably sooner rather than later.