Politicians Are Keeping Us In Denial Of America ’ s Steep Decline
By Richard D Wolff
Societies survive and grow when they successfully navigate their contradictions . Eventually , however , accumulating contradictions overwhelm existing means of navigating them . Then social problems arise that persist or worsen inside such societies because they are unsuccessfully navigated or go unattended . Sometimes , the dominant conscious reaction to such social problems is denial , a refusal to see them .
Denial of internal social problems displaces navigating the contradictions that cause them . The resulting social decline , like the set of internal contradictions it reflects , is denied and ignored . Instead , narratives or rhetorics can arise that position such societies as victims of abuse by foreigners .
The United States in 2025 illustrates this process : its rhetorics of refusal aim to end its victimization .
In today ’ s United States , one such rhetoric refuses to allow continued abuse by foreigners “ threatening our national security .” This rhetoric blames bad US political leadership for its failure to put America first and thereby make it great again .
Another rhetoric demands that “ we ” refuse to allow “ our democracy ” to be destroyed by foreign enemies ( and their domestic equivalents ): people who are said to hate , not understand , or undervalue “ our democracy .”
Still another rhetoric of refusal sees foreigners “ cheating ” the United States in trade and migration processes . Most Americans embrace one or more of such rhetorics . Yet , as we propose to show here , such rhetorics are ever less effective .
One reactionary rhetoric , Trump ’ s , gestures toward former greatness by literally renewing American imperialism . He threatens to retake the Panama Canal , change Canada into the 51st of the United States , conquer Greenland from Denmark , and possibly invade Mexico .
All those foreigners are said to threaten national security or else “ cheat ” the United States . Trump ’ s typical bloviating aside , this is remarkable expansionism . Such repeated colonialist gestures feed broader notions of making America greater again .
Colonialism repeatedly helped European capitalism navigate its internal contradictions ( temporarily escaping the social problems it caused ). Eventually , however , it could no longer do so . After World War II , anti-colonialism limited that escape . The subsequent European neo-colonialisms and the informal colonialism of the American empire had shorter life spans . China and the rest of the BRICS countries are now everywhere closing that escape . Hence the frustrated rage of Trump ’ s insistence on refusing that ending by deliberately reopening the idea of an escape hatch of colonial expansions .
It resembles Netanyahu ’ s idea ( if not yet his violence ) in trying to reopen that hatch for Israel by driving Palestinians out of Gaza . United States support for Netanyahu likewise associates the US with colonialist violence in a world overwhelmingly committed to end colonialism and its unwanted legacy .
80 The Trial Lawyer