More so than at any point in the last century, U.S. independence now seems like a parochial affair.
As I argue in the Democracy Project, in other representative systems when you lose more votes than you win on multiple occasions—as Trump did in 2016 and 2020—you never hold office to begin with. This fact typically diffuses the influence of the politician and those around him. But in the United States, Trump nonetheless won the presidency, with long-term institutional and cultural consequences, not least his ability to reconstitute the Supreme Court. Again, elsewhere, if you try to overthrow an elected government, you typically face criminal punishment, in addition to being barred from public office for a period of years. Yet in the United States, because of a dysfunctional impeachment process, deep elite ambivalence toward accountability, and favorable rulings from a Supreme Court that he had already reshaped, Trump remained in the wings as an ex-president—able, when the time came, to take advantage of the Democratic Party’s weakness and global anti-incumbent sentiment.
Implicit in the language of the Declaration is the foundational premise that for a public to exercise constituent power, it must be able to recognize and to act on the knowledge that its “Form of Government” has become “destructive” to the “ends” of liberty. Perhaps the gravest charge against Americans today is that large swaths of the country appear strikingly indifferent in the face of the growing danger its leaders present to the world.
As the list of violations grows longer, the moral deadening of the American people is a real worry—the breakdown of the faculty that compels a public to call to account its government for wanton destructiveness. In the United States, this deadening is aided by a long-standing climate of impunity whenever state officials, from the president down to local police officers, commit acts of violence. Trump casually threatening the total annihilation of the Iranian people—likely a war crime in itself—highlights the very extremity of this climate. It is a climate built over generations, linking the legal exemptions of white violence against Black people in the segregationist South to officials from the Cold War era and after overseeing overthrows, interrogations, targeted killings overseas, and militarized borders. For the public, the result has been a culture in which, even if most today oppose both Trump’s genocidal rhetoric and his illegal conduct, many have come to expect that nothing ever happens to those in power who violate the most essential rights.
Such impunity is a basic roadblock to a transformative agenda. No emancipatory account of democracy survives if the powerful can exempt themselves from legal sanction while manipulating the state to target enemies and sow fear. At the very minimum, the immediate challenge is for a domestic public to commit itself to imposing legal and political consequences on its own governing class. And the first step is a large-scale and sustained ethical refusal of complacency.

"This direct effect of growing inequality accounts for far more than half of the gap in Social Security’s finances, but there is also a very important indirect effect. In 1960, the Social Security tax rate was 6.0 percent, combining the employer and employee side contributions. By 1990, the tax rate had risen to 12.4 percent, an increase of 6.4 percentage points over 30 years. In the last 35 years, the tax rate has not increased at all."