Our Second Gilded Age May Destroy Our Democracy, But Will Population Size Sink Most of Us Worldwide?

By Donald A. Collins | 18 February 2025
Church and State

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As my readers may recall, I have compared our present situation with the original Gilded Age at the end of the 19th century, but it is highly different because the wealth and political power gap is even greater today than it was then.

As we moved through the 20th century, following World War II America was certainly by far the most powerful and influential country in the world. This feeling was also abetted by our seemingly overwhelming victory when the Soviet Union came down and its leader, Mihail Gorbachev came to the US and was honored by President Ronald Reagan for his role in accomplishing what seemed to be the end of the Soviet empire.

We appeared to be the unstoppable force, but conditions were evolving even beginning as early as the 1970s with what has come to make a major change in our status as the world’s premier power.

Since at least the 1960’s as our world population numbers soared from 3 plus billion to over 8 billion today, efforts to slow its rise have failed. In WWII 75 million died and probably an equal number since, growth is still the mantra of too many and the ability of wars to bring us to a sustainable level will with the present mindset fail.

The good news is that the rising level of women’s power means they are having fewer children, not fast enough and the expansion of artificial intelligence will cut many jobs. Women gaining equality will prove the most effective method of fertility reduction.

The bad news is the continuing willingness to ignore the science of climate change. Trump calls it a hoax, but the UN has the science! Read here.

Except for when Franklin Roosevelt asked for Congressional approval to declare war in World War II, no President since has gotten approval from Congress to conduct the various foreign adventures which began with the Korean war. Adjudged a success our help provided a place for South Korea to prosper while North Korea turned into a permanent dictatorship.

This success story provided a template which allowed the industrial military complex about which Dwight Eisenhower warned us in his farewell speech as president to engage in various foreign adventures, which caused death, destruction, millions killed and the expenditure of huge US resources, which would not have been required to keep our role in keeping world stability as we had since World War II.

Our failure to keep Cuba from falling into communist hands when Castro took over in 1960 should have been a lesson that we could not control things even in our own back yard.

However, our main failure occurred in Vietnam in the 1960s when we embarked on a war which we did not win!

Meanwhile, the countries to which we had offered aid and support after World War II were beginning to become independent and powerful. This was particularly evident with China, which now is a center of accomplishment, despite its repressive government.

As governments around the world learned to manufacture goods with a much less expensive labor force, many of our most powerful corporations would close more expensive facilities in the United States and use the cheaper labor overseas facilities to make greater profits which were certainly not shared with the poor people that were unemployed in the United States as the resolve of this overseas trend.

Now those countries over time have formed 22 countries known as BRICS and their GDP now exceeds the US and all our allies.

Thus, as with all other powerful empires, it is possible to observe that the United States is in a state of decline as citizens become less affluent, since the wealthy have decided to share less with those who are not as wealthy.

Now as the US Empire declines, our wealthiest people such as Elon Musk, seek more power and influence to protect their status!!

Particularly ironic considering Trump’s failure to open his personal tax files, we find “Musk’s DOGE seeks access to personal taxpayer data, raising alarm at IRS”!!!!

You can read here about this tawdry invasion of our privacy as a route to more precise retribution which Trump can employ against Trump’s political enemies.

Many Americans don’t understand what a fundamental shift means if orchestrated by the present oligarch system now headed by Trump and his criminal team who are well on the way to inflicting authoritarianism on America and destroying the democracy that had survived since 1792.

We are now a witnessing what the power of oligarchs can accomplish, even in the short month in which Trump began his second term after promising to make America great again, ending the overseas war in Ukraine in one day and turning Gaza into a seaside resort for the wreathy while sending the Palestinians into other countries. Well, we did that to our native Indians.

As we abandon Ukraine and dismiss or criticize our NATO and other key allies, will our long-time implied threat to protect Taiwan falter and allow China to take it over?

Obviously, the above events that led to Putin, and the present seemingly endless hostilities in Europe, have vastly changed our status for the future. Without closely including Zelensky or out NATO allies, Trump began his negotiations with Putin to end the war in Ukraine. He has already ceded to Putin the main advantages which are Ukraine’s side! Will he demand the vital metals Ukraine has been given to us for more support? Trump loves dictators and wants to be one.

Does the continuation of our second Gilded Age ensure that our democracy will be ended by Trump and his greedy oligarchs who realize they can protect their wealth and take whatever they can from the rest of us citizens as our country continues its decline. Didn’t the 1789 French Revolution occur with this wealth has it all scenario? Our course in our fledgling war against the British those French guns and other aid from France helped set the stage for its own revolution.

What chance exists to turn this around? It grows less and less the longer the gutless GOP Congress, and other elected officials stand by and allow the vicious unconstitutional fraudulence to continue.

When will the criminality of Trump inspire enough citizens to impeach, indict and remove this felon?

Former US Navy officer, banker and venture capitalist, Donald A. Collins, a free lance writer living in Washington, DC, has spent over 50 years working for women’s reproductive health as a board member and/or officer of numerous family planning organizations including Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Guttmacher Institute, Family Health International and Ipas. Yale under graduate, NYU MBA. He is the author of “From the Dissident Left: A Collection of Essays 2004-2013”, “Trump Becoming Macbeth: Will our democracy survive?”, “We Humans Overwhelm Our Earth: 11 or 2 Billion by 2100?”, “What Can Be Done Now to Save Habitable Life on Planet Earth?”, “Vote”, “Can Homo Sapiens Survive?”, “Will Choice and Democracy Win?”, “Can Our U.S. Survive 8 Plus Billion of Us”, “Economic Growth: A Cancer on all Earthly Life”, “On the Precipice of Political Disaster in 2024”, “Democracy at Red State Risk”, “Does Trump Go to Jail or to The Oval Office?” and “Trump: Pardon or Punish?: The Nixon Precedence Was Not A Trump Coup Denied!”.

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