Ideology and the Failure of Democracy: The Tragic Fate of the USA and Our Real Hope for the Future

TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 7 Apr 2025

Glen T. Martin, Ph.D. – TRANSCEND Media Service

1 Apr 2025 – The horrific fate of the USA being played out in the present is the result of governance by ideology, rather than by value-informed rationality. This is the legacy of both the Democratic and Republican parties to date. This article describes the ideologies of each of these parties and contrasts their rule by ideology with the rule of authentic democratic values, which few USA leaders have ever embraced.

An ideologue views the world through a distorted, pre-set lens, and hence distorts and misunderstands the world. Should such people be placed in power over millions and in control of a vast military apparatus? Surely not in a democracy where we want people in power who grasp the realities and purposes of their job to actualize genuine values for the common good. What is unique about recent Republican ideologues is not that they are ideologues (this is almost a requirement for being a ruler in the USA). It is that their ideology requires absolute loyalty not to the US Constitution but to the new Autocrat.

What are authentic democratic values? The 18th Century Enlightenment led to a broad emergent awareness among thinking people that drew together much of Western history since the Greeks as well as the emergent modernity happening in post-Renaissance Europe. This process culminated in the theory of democracy that was based on several fundamental insights:

1. The inalienable rights of all individual human beings;
2. The idea that the authority of government arises from the people and that rulers are responsible to the people for promoting the common good of the body-politic;
3. The implicit ability of all persons to have a developed intelligence that can participate in governing just as well or better than those of royal blood and pedigree;
4. The idea that democratic (or “republican” as they called it) government is based on the moral principles and values of honesty, integrity, respect for citizen rights (and the assumption of corresponding duties toward those rights), maximizing freedom within the framework of the common good, promotion of justice, and respect for the dignity of each person.

The “Founding Fathers” of the United States embodied many of these values fairly well: James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Adams, John Jay, and Patrick Henry. They all had a highly developed “Enlightenment” intelligence above all animated by a vision and an ideal that centered around the concept of democracy. Their highly developed practical intelligence attempted to grapple with the realities of their situation (such as slavery, disenfranchisement of women, or the lack of education in the populace) to promote and institutionalize these democratic values in a process of ongoing evolutionary development.

But the Democratic and Republican Parties of the past eight decades (and, of course, before) have been run neither by these democratic values nor by intelligent people with a practical realism trying to embody such values. They have been run by ideologues. Thoughtless adherence to an ideology has replaced intelligent assessment of realities in the light of values.

This has culminated in the Trump administration’s placing in power a collection of ideological hacks and, hence, roaring incompetents. Just take as a sampling five major participants in a high-level “security” meeting recently discussing the top-secret details of US military strikes against Yemen on a public app known as “Signal” within which they blindly included the editor of a major US magazine.

Let us ask ourselves if these are people who embody the values of democracy itemized above. The intent of the meeting does not appear to have had any governing or practical purpose. Rather, it was a kind of childish celebration of the immense power now in the hands of these amateurs and immature ideologues. It was on Signal, rather than a secure government forum, to avoid the government’s legal requirement that all conversations of its leaders belong to the people and must be recorded. Like children, they did not want their glee at bombing people halfway around the world recorded.

In this intelligence release debacle, some 19 top US high government officials, wallowing in their common ignorance and immense hubris, allowed the incompetent Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, to expose classified strike information, the weapons used, and the means of execution, clearly putting the US people executing their orders in danger. They can get away with this because the Autocrat now controls all enforcement of laws against his sycophants. They can do what they want in their glee without fear of the FBI, Congress, or the courts.

Are these people capable of intelligent practical realism in implementing the high values of democratic integrity, justice, and respect for human dignity? Their corruption is starkly revealed in the fact that they are virtually all lying about it and denying what they did. Did they have any concept of the Yemeni society or its motives in trying to stop the Israeli genocide in Gaza? Do they have any idea about the dynamics of world opinion and interrelationships such as the way Russia, China, Iran, or India might view the attack they are celebrating in their little meeting? In this all 19 revealed their dereliction of duty and their incompetence. Here is a brief overview of five of them.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Senate hearings pointed to a lifetime of accusations of drunkenness, alcoholism, womanizing, and accusations of fraud, along with right-wing television hosting in which he systematically promoted the Fox News ideological version of every newsworthy event. Nevertheless, this Hegeseth clown was rewarded with supreme authority over the world’s largest military machine that includes nuclear weapons and the entire fate of humankind. Is this in any sense democratic pragmatic intelligence in action on the part of either the President or his ideological flunkies?

National Security Advisor Mike Waltz. After a distinguished career in the US military, and service as a counter terrorism advisor in the White House, Waltz, was sworn into the US House of Representatives in 2019. He has been an extreme hawk toward China claiming that the US was in a new Cold War with China. He was one of the Republican members of Congress who signed an amicus brief claiming that the 2020 election of Joe Biden was fraudulent that (without a shred of evidence) Donald Trump has really won.

Vice-President JD Vance. After becoming a lawyer and serving as a military journalist for several years, Vance served in Iraq for six months. He became a venture capitalist in the tech industry and (with the help of a wealthy backer) wrote an autobiography called Hillbilly Elegy, published in 2016, in which he promoted himself as a wonderful product of entrepreneurial creativity rising from cultural and economic poverty, which some critics have referred to as a deceitful life of social climbing, media manipulation, and saying whatever was necessary to get himself into fame and power. He has now gotten himself into power, but, whoops, suddenly with power there has come responsibility to do something real, but critics ask, “how can a professional chameleon even begin to do something real?”

CIA Director John Ratcliffe. Ratcliffe is a lawyer and former Texas prosecutor who is so ideologically right wing that even Republican senators questioned whether he might politicize national security intelligence if he were appointed director of national intelligence. During his confirmation hearings, public scrutiny pointed out his distortions of his own history concerning the fight against terrorism and his prosecutorial experience.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio. A Cuban-American right-wing lawyer who ideologically denies the scientific consensus on climate change. The facts on which science is based are ignored while Rubio’s emphasis has been on the “rights” of business to pollute without significant restrictions. While running for President in 2016, he wanted to end the ban on exporting crude oil and stop the Environmental Protection Agency from converting the USA to “clean power.” He favored big oil, fracking, and expanded use of coal, oil, and natural gas. He would not use the phrase “climate change” in his public pronouncements.

Under the “Presidential Autocracy” of a widely known career criminal and pathological liar, with a team made up of ideological hacks as described above, here is my prediction for how the country will look by the time Donald Trump succeeds, through his reign of terror and destruction, in “making America great again.” What will the USA will look like after four years of Trump rule?

1. China and Russia, and possibly Iran, India, and Brazil, will have surpassed the USA on multiple social and political indexes and the US will be recognized as a third-rate nation.
2. There will be greatly increased mass poverty side by side with truly obscene concentrations of wealth (typical of many so-called “third world countries” today).
3. Sickness and disease will be rampant since the country will have no credible health-care system or public health system.
4. There will be mass incarceration and huge numbers of people will be either in prison or driven out of the country.
5. Like Germany in the 1930s, there will be a significant brain-drain in which scientists, researchers, thinkers, and others who can afford to escape, have left the nation. (They are already leaving in droves.)
6. The educational system will be seriously degraded and debased as is any educational system in which censorship and repression of speech replaces free debate and research.
7. There will be unchecked and unregulated corporate power to exploit, defraud, and deceive the remaining population.
8. There will be a decaying infrastructure: poor roads, abandoned shopping malls, food deserts, broken systems of transport and distribution, inefficient services from a privatized post office, as well as fragmented transportation and communication systems.
9. Voting systems will have become so colonized by the Republicans that, as with many third world dictatorships, regular confirmation elections will simply confirm the status quo.
10. Generally speaking, there will be social chaos, along with a seriously degraded environment with ever more environmental catastrophes such as wildfires and hurricanes, all repressed and “governed” by militarized, authoritarian police, with wide-spread social and psychological despair.

Such is the likely trajectory of the country under the Trump MAGA autocracy. How did we come to this sad condition? The answer, I argue, is that the country since the Second World War (at least) has not been guided by authentic democratic realism but rather by ideology, whether of the Democratic or Republican versions. Let us look briefly at the Democratic and Republican ideologies that have ruled the country for the past 80 years.

With the victory in World War Two, the United States drew on its long tradition of exceptionalism and nationalism to construct an ideology of global empire, claiming moral and practical superiority over the rest of humanity. It integrated the ideology of empire with a Cold War anti-communist ideology claiming to be the torchbearer of “freedom” globally trying to protect the world from the “evil” of communist totalitarianism. It proceeded to interfere with nations worldwide in the service of this ideological fantasy.

It committed brutal war-crimes in the Korean War, as well as overthrowing democracies whose policies it did not like in Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954). As well as crushing the incipient socialist democracy in Cuba in 1959, thereby forcing Cubans into the arms of the Soviets. In the 1960s, the US engaged in a horrific ten-year war against the people of Vietnam under ideological nonsense called the “Domino Theory” which said that the victory of communism anywhere would cause nations around the world to fall like dominos.

American ideology-buster, Noam Chomsky, pointed out repeatedly that this theory really was the “Threat of a Good Example” theory, in which a successful socialist experiment anywhere would show the world that real democracy could and should include both democratic freedoms and economic justice. But this anti-communist ideology was joined at the hip by the pro-capitalist ideology stating that “free enterprise” (for big business to exploit and dominate) was essential to real democratic freedoms. Three big lies in one ideological package, embraced by both Republicans and Democrats:

1. The lie of American exceptionalism and superiority,
2. The lie of the implacable danger of Communism instead of learning why Communism was so attractive to so many people, and
3. The lie that only unfettered capitalism was essential for democracy.

These ideological lies led to innumerable atrocities supported by the USA: the genocide of perhaps a million “left-wingers” in Indonesia in 1965, the overthrow of democratic government in Chile in 1973, and the giving of hundreds of billions of dollars to military weapons and training of some 80 countries worldwide to protect ruling autocrats and multinational corporations from possible encroachment by “socialist” ideas.

Beginning in the 1980s (with the election of Ronald Reagan) these ideological mantras began to pay off in the form of the oligarchical class in the USA becoming so wealthy and powerful that it saw the opportunity to dismantle the “welfare state” and bring the oligarchy to power. Democratic Presidents Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden (and the Democratic Party itself) as exponents of this same tripartite ideology, were complicit in this takeover.

Nowhere (with the possible exception of the brief presidency of John F. Kennedy) was this ideology seriously questioned. Trillions of dollars (literally) of our national wealth (that could have been used to enhance democratic equality and well-being within the USA) were wasted on destroying Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Afghanistan beginning in 2001, Iraq beginning in 2003, Palestine over a series of several wars by supplying Israel with weapons, Libya in 2011, and Ukraine beginning in 2014. Untold millions of lives broken and destroyed worldwide. The list goes on and on.

If we want a decent society that is democratic and thriving, we must elect, not ideologues of one stripe or another, but pragmatically realistic human beings who operate from genuine moral understanding and democratic ideals. If we do this, our leaders will not be promoting a mindless military empire worldwide whose very existence violates the human rights and dignity of people around the planet. They will be seeking ways to establish a world peace system and a world sustainability system that alone will be able to provide humanity with a credible future.

If authentic “democracy” at all resembles the four features that I have attributed to it above, then it will recognize that all people everywhere have rights to life, liberty, dignity, and freedom. If authentic democracy’s values are credible and rational, then people everywhere will also respond positively to its arguments and its moral vision (rather than by bombing them, which tends to dampen their positive responses). It will give up its absurd ideological attachment to the genocidal nation of Israel that covers a US foreign policy intending to dominate and colonize the Middle East, along with its hypocritical commitment to supporting a proxy war against Russia using Ukraine as its expendable tool to “weaken” Russia.

If we want a decent world system, it can only come about through democratic intelligence and honest communication with others (through an inspiring vision of how things could be different) not through lies, manipulation, propaganda wars, and military actions. Right now, we can use the Constitution for the Federation of Earth as a model and a template for where we can and should be going. We can also participate in the 16th session of the Provisional World Parliament scheduled for December 7–10, 2025 in Pondicherry, India.

“Democracy” is by no means a unique possession or feature of the US and its empire, which has, in fact, served to destroy the progress of democracy worldwide. If the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the concept of democracy are credible ideas, then we need to be reasoning with the people of Earth, and inspiring them, rather than dominating them. If we want a future after Trump, we need a new Enlightenment, a new vision, a new humanity, and a truly transformed world system.

______________________________________

Dr. Glen T. Martin:
– Member, TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment
– Professor of Philosophy Emeritus
– Founder/Chairperson Emeritus, Program in Peace Studies, Radford University
– President, World Constitution and Parliament Association (WCPA);
– President, Earth Constitution Institute (ECI)
– Author of twelve books and hundreds of articles concerning global issues, human spirituality, and democratic world government; a recipient of many peace awards.
www.earthconstitution.world – Email: gmartin@radford.edu

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One Response to “Ideology and the Failure of Democracy: The Tragic Fate of the USA and Our Real Hope for the Future”

1. Suryanath Prasad says:

   7 Apr 2025 at 14:22

   In Response to:
   “Ideology and the Failure of Democracy: The Tragic Fate of the USA and Our Real Hope for the Future” by Glen T. Marti:

   Under the Rule of Good Governance, there is “no physical, mental and spiritual sufferings to anybody. All love each other. No one die in early age of his life; all people are free from sorrow and pain, disease, poverty and ignorance.”
   Peace Education for Genuine Democracy, Good Governance and Nonviolence
   EDUCATION, 21 Apr 2014
   Surya Nath Prasad, Ph. D. – TRANSCEND Media Service
   https://www.transcend.org/tms/2014/04/peace-education-for-genuine-democracy-good-governance-and-nonviolence/

   Universal Peace Education: A Remedy for All Ills
   Prof. Surya Nath Prasad, Ph.D.
   L’Harmattan, Paris, France, May 2024
   http://www.editions-harmattan.fr/livre-universal-peace-education-a-remedy-for-all-ills-surya-nath-prasad-9782140488580–80186.html

   Reply