The United States is no longer a democracy

The United States is no longer a democracy.

We can argue over the hour and day that first became true, or whether there was ever a point in which the nation could claim itself a full-fledged democracy, given that a majority of its citizens were barred outright from voting from the nation's very founding, but it is certainly true on this day, in this moment. The premise of democracy is of informed consent; a nation's citizenry itself is empowered to choose its laws and its leaders, and empowered to later revise those laws or depose those leaders if the outcome is not what was expected or if motivations change. Regardless of the structure any democracy takes, however, it cannot function without the environment presupposed by its own definition.

• It presumes that the electorate has a plain and non-onerous means of determining the true state of the country. The electorate cannot "consent" to government acts it does not know of, or execute its informed will if the information provided to them is misleading, false, or fraudulent.
• It presumes that laws adopted by the people will be followed, fairly and with consistency. A law cannot be adhered to if its interpretation shifts wildly but inscrutably each time it is applied; a law that binds not from its application to circumstances but on the pleasures of its vested enforcers was not, unless such frivolity was written into that law from the outset, the law consented to.

It is impossible for any democracy to be perfect; there will always be opaque regions, and petty deceits, and regions of law that through their complexity will be indecipherable to the majority of the electorate even if the electorate did concede, in bits and pieces, to each caveat and sub-caveat. It should be obvious, however, that democracy cannot exist without these two planks, because if either is missing then the premise of consent has been abandoned and the government should be considered something else.

It is equally apparent, then, that democracy cannot exist in a nation with free-flowing propaganda or with large-scale institutional corruption. The first deprives citizens of knowing the facts that would inform their decisions, and instead turns the system of government into a contest of manipulation. The second erases whatever laws and presumptions the citizens did eventually vote for, but only for whichever defendants are in the good graces of the enforcers.

The largest danger to any democracy, then, is concentrated wealth. It is the concentration of great wealth into the pockets of a handful of individuals that allows near-monopolization of the distribution of information; there is rarely a corrupt manipulation of the law that is done for any reason other than the monetary advantage it brings to the abusers.

And that is where we are at, in October 2025.

• Our government proliferates disinformation with wild abandon, from Donald Trump's insistence that Portland is "on fire" to pseudo-medical lunacies to the invention of fake enemies and the official proclamation of fake crises.
• Our national and local information systems have collapsed into propaganda-friendly monopolies; a handful of wealthy individuals and megacorporations have explicitly altered the information flow to prioritize ideological battles over verified facts. Elon Musk, and X. Jeff Bezos, who disemboweled the most prestigious newspaper in the country in order to better align himself with thuggery. Larry Ellison, who was gifted control of a vast media empire by his unspeakably wealthy and ideologically obsessed father. Lachlan Murdoch, the same.
• Of the three branches of government, none now believe that the law binds them. The executive branch breaks long-settled legal requirements with abandonment, nullifying congressional powers to tax, to spend, and to legislate under the pretext of "emergencies" that do not exist. Congress abides it, with a majority even endorsing it. The Supreme Court majority is now of the opinion that each longstanding law is null and void if one particular president wishes it to be—after aggressively asserting the contrary during the prior presidency—with most of those assertions made without explanation on the so-called emergency docket and to the increasing frustration of lower courts that presumed the laws were still in effect.

We cannot claim to be a nation of laws because our government has now insisted that it is exempt from following them. We cannot claim to be informed when the tools that might inform us are not only the captured playthings of a scattered handful of billionaire ideologues, but which have provably been manipulated to emphasize false claims over true reports. We cannot claim to be "free" as a now-unencumbered leader directs troop movements to cities held by the supposed opposition.

The United States is now an oligarchy. Many oligarchies continue to have elections, and those elections do not matter because voters are doused in whatever false claims and invented emergencies the oligarchy can invent to manipulate the vote. If the citizens vote against their oligarchs the oligarchs declare the vote to be fraudulent and therefore void. The law is used by elites solely as weapon; aimed at those without power, it becomes a tool of petty harassment and an excuse for retribution and violence, even as those in power insist that the law means nothing at all when it catches up against their own interests.

We are not a democracy, because if we were a democracy Hunter Biden would not be hounded for petty attempts to trade on his family name only to see the unfathomably richer oligarchs themselves, from Elon Musk to Donald Trump, gleefully use actual government powers first and foremost as tools for their own self-enrichment.

In a democracy, there is no oligarchic party insisting that the minions of oligarchy are allowed to accept sacks of cash in exchange for manipulating government contracts, even as they vow the arrest of party opponents on far less plausible grounds. Such things might exist in a democracy in sporadic form, evidence of corruption in local municipalities or by individual officials, but when the corruption is insisted on by a president, endorsed by the legislature, and made valid by the highest court then it is the corruption, not the democracy, that holds true national power.

Once you come to terms with the knowledge that the United States is not a democracy but an oligarchy masquerading as one, it becomes possible to evaluate the news of the day with more clarity. It becomes apparent that the more outrageous tidbits of each news cycle are not, in fact, orchestrated by an angry god who wishes to make you insane. It is just the whirring gears of oligarchy, parts borrowed from Putin-era Russia, parts from North Korea, parts from a dozen other times and places. If it were happening in any other country but this exceptional one, the newspapers would have no trouble describing it as the detritus of a soon-to-be-failed state.

Which brings us, now that we've got all of that out of the way, to this little shit.

The details are simple enough. TikTok has been at the center of one of the more bizarre episodes of crony government pseudo-capitalism in recent memory. Access to the Chinese-owned video sharing app was supposed to have been banned inside the United States as of last January, according to a law passed by Congress. The pretense for the law were claims that the app was a tool for data mining and therefore espionage by the Chinese regime, thus rendering the app an intolerable risk to Our Youths.

But then Trump signed an executive order blocking the law from taking effect while the company searched for a United States billionaire or consortium to sell itself to, and that has been the situation ever since. Great efforts have been made inside the Trump-allied wealthy class to cobble together new, Trump-friendly ownership. Nearly a year later, an oligarchic grenade-in-waiting led by billionaire Larry Ellison (the one who gifted his son his own media conglomerate) and including Rupert Murdoch (who just finished a long legal battle cementing control over the Fox News empire to his own son, over the objections of his less overtly white nationalist children) seems to be on the cusp of a deal for majority ownership, and Trump himself signed yet another executive order greasing the skids of the deal, and nobody, anywhere, seems to give a flying damn that Donald Trump had no legal power to do half of this.

But there was never any question that TikTok would be handed over to pro-Trump oligarchs, if it were to remain running at all. There is considerable speculation that the entire premise of the original TikTok ban, the ostensible conspiracy against American privacy by the devious Chinese government, was a manufactured controversy intended to disgorge the foreign-owned social media giant into the hands of American social media billionaires who had become alarmed that TikTok was growing even as their own companies enshittified themselves out of those younger audiences.

It was an oligarchic play from the beginning, according to that theory, and among the more compelling bits of evidence for that interpretation is that never before and never since has Congress given the slightest damn about egregious abuses of privacy being waged by every media platform, security camera, "smart" doorbell, and fitness tracker under American control. We can see from Trump's extralegal never-mind of the law ostensibly shutting TikTok down that the alleged risk from the application was, at the best, a non-urgent concern. We can see from the identities of the purported new owners that the risk was never that young Americans would be manipulated by a potentially propaganda-boosting social platform; the risk was that such a powerful tool existed but was not in the hands of either Silicon Valley or corporate media oligarchs. And we can all imagine, oh so easily, how quickly those same oligarchs would have flown to Congress to block a sale of the platform to anyone who wasn't them.

Which brings us to this new national shame.

Donald Trump’s 19-year-old son, Barron, could be in the running for a top job at TikTok, according to the president’s former social media manager.

Trump has previously claimed that he “saved” TikTok and that users now “owe” his government for allowing it to remain available in the US.

Jack Advent, the president’s 22-year-old former social media manager, joined in by saying that Trump should give his teen son a position on the social media platform to broaden its appeal for young people.

If you sand down the edges of those quotes, you get what would be another rote corruption story in any other nation. After flaunting laws to force a foreign-owned resource into the hands of regime allies, a Dear Leader figure is urged to appoint their unaccomplished teen offspring as one of the principal minders of the now-captured entity. The ostensible reason is that the barely-seen once-sperm is, supposedly, beloved by the nation's youth, though nobody can quite clarify how or why, and so will enrich the company by merely existing there.

The more useful and more universally understood reason, though, is always that the newly blended mostly-private but government-controlled entity needs what it typically referred to as a political minder—someone who may have nothing of note to offer the company in question, but who is placed in a position of maximal access so that if something happens inside the company that might piss Dear Leader off, there is a maximally loyal ally at hand to immediately squeal about those doings so that Dear Leader knows who to remove or publicly ruin.

It is a given, in autocracies and oligarchies, that appointees will bring nothing to the table other than their loyalty to Dear Leader. Nobody expects a stitch of experience, much less competence; it is a meritocracy in which the oligarchy will presumably install their weird and never-challenged offspring in any and every position, limited only by personal birthrates.

It is a given, then, that 19 year old Barron, who may or may not be struggling at NYU's D.C. campus as he lives at home in, sigh, The Fucking White House, has earned $150 million in the last year purely from a hanger-on position in the cryptocurrency empire father Donald Trump is building in a brazen display of fuck-you corruption that remains unremarked upon by the other ostensible branches of government. The scions of oligarchy are expected to have enough wealth to retire before they leave their teen years. It is a given that they will be given control of a movie studio or news empire; they are precious. Their hobbies and momentary interests must be catered to not just by their families, nay, but by the whole of a grateful nation.

If you were to look at the United States as a capitalist free-marketish country, a democracy in which laws written to apply to the wealthy in fact did and in which companies were generally expected to both abide by the law and be operated for the general purpose of not hemorrhaging money, the notion of tossing any 19 year old barely-adult full-time college student into a top board position would be almost entirely insane.

Why? Because the premise of a corporate board is, in theory, to provide many decades worth of top expertise that can act as a check on executives who typically have less. But that premise has been itself battered beyond recognition in recent decades, and the positions have more often been sinecures provided to executive loyalists for the purposes of raising executive and board pay both to absurd levels.

In an oligarchy, though, even that is expected. The sinecures are the point; whether the company is or is not successful is of less relevance, and when free markets give way to oligarchies the focus becomes not long-term profit but on personal profiteering: companies in the oligarchs' portfolios are just as likely to be merged and remerged in eternal financial shell games or, more often still, gutted down to the copper wires to finance the next oligarchic captures. So long as whatever remains is squarely in the hands of the ultra-elites, everything else can be corrupted and abused or be made the plaything and training ground for the next generation of ostensible elites.

$50,000 of bills in a bag. The ever-increasing manipulation of media algorithms, "intelligent" or otherwise, to prioritize ideology and create ambiguity as to what is true and what is false. A parade of the bizarre and the inexperienced, all thrust into top positions of power not for their competence or knowledge but because they have a certain "look," or a certain pedigree, or loyalty to the cause that transcends the need to know the details of what they are asked to oversee.

And, of course, the expectation that wealth and genes ought go hand in hand, a meritocracy in which every hateful and domineering gasbag's son is coincidentally the citizen most capable of doing whatever task happens to need doing, from forging peace pacts to leading pandemic responses to running news networks to social media watchdogging. That is what oligarchy is.

It's not something that comes easily to democracy, not on the national level. It is, in fact, anathema; when the nation's topmost officials brush off laws to enable such things as matter of extended policy it becomes quite apparent that democracy is no longer the prevailing force. It may still be pretended at, but if there is no informed than there is no consent, and if laws apply to some but not to all then there are no laws to begin with.