We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.

Louis Brandeis

Every civilization carries the seeds of its own destruction, and the same cycle shows in them all. The Republic is born, flourishes, decays into plutocracy, and is captured by the shoemaker whom the mercenaries and millionaires make into a king. The people invent their oppressors, and the oppressors serve the function for which they are invented.

Mark Twain

I am writing at the end of the week when Charlie Kirk was killed, so the current political temperature in the United States is red hot. Conservatives, who are so quick to dismiss all other gun violence as the product of some bad seeds with mental issues, have seen this particular murder in a different light, as the clarion call for a full-scale civil war, with Donald Trump fanning the flames. When asked about how Americans can come together in the wake of the Kirk shooting, how we can fix the country, Trump said, “I couldn’t care less,” and then launched into his usual demonization of all things Left. And the anti-liberal cause du jour is now the American city, which has suddenly become the center of attention for conservatives. Like Iraq in the wake of 9/11, cities are suddenly in need of liberation from tyranny. And also like Iraq, Trump’s use of military occupation is a distraction from the actual problems we’re facing. It’s an old playbook: when people are angry, lean into it and give them an enemy to rage against.

How have we gotten to this point, where the richest economy in history is unable to keep its citizens content, where our vast wealth is not enough to keep tens of millions of us from wanting to dominate and destroy tens of millions of others? Why are we seemingly on the brink of another civil war, one that will be fought not over an actual and nefarious institution like slavery, but rather in the archaic and decaying realm of religious division, where not only our “enemies,” but also our friends and neighbors can be carelessly and recklessly dropped into warring camps of Good vs. Evil?

The answer is not particularly mind-blowing or cosmic in nature. In short, it’s plutocracy, which means, rather blandly, rule by the rich. In most circles of the Left today, the big concern is with fascism, authoritarianism, dictatorship, or oligarchy. But I prefer the term plutocracy, because that more accurately describes the root problem, and those other terms can be seen as proximate effects of the deeper layer of rule by the wealthy. And while Donald Trump is certainly an autocratic, dictatorial threat, the lack of real pushback from the establishment is a testament to the persistent-if-veiled power of the plutocrats.

The plutocracy is basically waiting to see how all this chaos caused by Trump will really affect them. So far, the main things that plutocrats have gotten from him, via Project 2025 and the Big Beautiful Bill, are good for them: tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, huge rollbacks in government regulation, cushy jobs for the well-connected, clear pay-to-play rules on how to get good stuff from the administration (Mara Lago memberships are a good first step), the potential for expanded privatization of healthcare, as federal programs like Medicaid are stripped back and gutted, and perhaps even the privatization of Social Security, a long-time wet dream for plutocrats. In other words, Trump has basically accelerated the domination of the plutocracy, so they’re bending the knee and kissing his ass right now.

The thing that the plutocrats are probably most concerned about is the jerky-jerky nature of the tariffs, and what that does to corporate planning and the potential for widespread demand destruction via inflation, flat wages, and stagnant job growth. As far as everything else that Trump is doing, plutocrats don’t care. They’ve made their nut many times over, so ICE abuse and overreach, the blackmailing of higher education institutions, the erasing of unpleasant aspects of American history, the impoverishment of public health programs, the attack on scientific reality — none of that matters to plutocrats, as they are not even bound to this country if things really go belly-up. Indeed, many plutocrats already have their crypto-driven island sanctuaries stocked and ready for the impending collapse of the system.

Beyond and beneath the historical levels of inequality, the lack of economic mobility for regular people, and the withering of the American Dream, the biggest problem with plutocracy is that it completely shuts off exploration, discussion, and enactment of concrete, substantive paths out of our current quagmire. The vehicle for this straitjacket of inertia is the Polarization Industrial Complex, a creation of the plutocrats which keeps everyone at each other’s throats, by transforming the rural vs. urban split into a religious end-times battle of good vs. evil. This is a stage-managed arena of cultural combat, heavy on virtual communities and the social-media claptrap that spews forth from them.

The PIC allows the system to continue to be run for the benefit of the plutocrats, while the rest of us sink into a morass of anxiety, stress, rage, and depression, as we become exhausted by the endless need to keep track of the latest outrages issuing forth from our sworn enemies, who happen to be our fellow citizens. This manufactured conflict sucks up all the oxygen in the political and cultural spheres, so that, conveniently, it just never seems to be the right time to act decisively and directly to help regular people. Instead, we’re funneled off to side-fights: flag burning, transgender athletes, non-existent urban crime emergencies, classroom religious displays, and the like. Anything that might have the hint of assisting all of us with practical issues of day-to-day life, the things that really matter, is always funneled into the the approved solutions rubber-stamped by the plutocracy: trickle-down tax cuts, business-liberating deregulation, union busting portrayed as “right to work,” a commitment to economic growth as the only way to create positive outcomes for society, and other nostrums of the professional economist caste, all in service to abstract principles which always seem to conveniently help the already wealthy.

That brings us to an even bigger problem for the United States. Yes, I know it’s hard to imagine a bigger issue than plutocratic dominance and hyper-polarization, but trust me, it’s there. And it’s a global problem. Our fundamental dilemma is that the global consumer-industrial system itself is unsustainable, and is currently in the process of shredding the natural world, which, surprise-surprise, is actually our only home. Every major natural support system on the planet is in decline, most of them steeply. There are simply too many of us, and the technologies we are deploying as a species are too damaging. (And here I am using a broad concept of technology, one that includes our soft economic and political technologies, as well as the hard technologies of machines, metals, and chemicals.)

At this point in history, it doesn’t much matter whether it is population or technology that is the more serious culprit for our dire situation, nor does it matter much how we rank different countries in the level of damage they have done, because we don’t have a lot of time left, and solutions are not forthcoming from international agreements and accords anyway. Rather, what matters right now is how can enact massive and rapid social change, so that we can stop doing damage to the planet, and then pivot to a radically different way of life that is centered on repairing the damage already done, while providing a way of working and living that can actually allow people and the planet to thrive together in a sustainable way.

In the US, the plutocracy severely limits the possibility of tackling that uber-task of quickly dismantling the current system from above. Instead, a completely different approach is needed, one that creates a completely new alternative from below, a different way of envisioning our economy, culture, and government. As John Zerzan put it:

Refusal to break with the totality crowns and solidifies this suicide-inducing pessimism. Only visions completely undefined but the current reality constitute our first steps to liberation. We cannot allow ourselves to continue to operate on the enemy’s terms.

The only off-ramp from our current path of pathological polarization is to create brand new models for living that transcend all the obsolete battles of the past. That is the only way forward.