THE NEW WORLD
When European settlers first arrived in what they called the “New World,” they were astonished by the land’s abundance. Forests stretched beyond the horizon, rivers teemed with fish, and grasslands rolled like oceans. To the settlers, it seemed an untouched Eden waiting for civilization to tame it. But they were wrong. The wilderness they admired had been carefully shaped and stewarded by Indigenous peoples for millennia. Forests were pruned to encourage nut-bearing trees, the prairies burned seasonally to maintain healthy grasslands, and the rivers were managed for sustainable fishing. This was no chaotic wilderness but a cultivated landscape—an ecological mosaic maintained by cultures that understood reciprocity and stewardship.
Indigenous land management was not based on domination but on relationship. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy, the tribes of the Pacific Northwest, the Anishinaabe, and countless others operated under principles that today might be called “permaculture” or “regenerative agriculture.” They practiced controlled burns to prevent catastrophic wildfires, used crop rotation and companion planting to enrich the soil, and managed hunting grounds to avoid depleting animal populations. This was not agriculture as the Europeans knew it—plowing, planting, exhausting—but a subtler form of cultivation that maintained biodiversity while ensuring human survival. The land was seen not as property but as kin, alive and deserving of respect.
But the settlers brought with them a fundamentally different worldview, one shaped by centuries of feudalism, mercantilism, and an emerging capitalist ethos. Land, to them, was a resource to be claimed, fenced, and exploited. The concept of private property was alien to Indigenous societies, where land was held in common and stewardship was collective. The settlers’ created an extractive economy that would tear through the continent like wildfire, consuming forests, soil, water, and people alike. They cleared forests for farmland, dammed rivers for mills, and introduced cattle, sheep, and monoculture crops that compacted soil and stripped nutrients. The fur trade wiped out beaver populations that had once shaped entire watersheds through their dam-building. The passenger pigeon, once the most abundant bird in North America, was hunted to extinction. Bison herds that had thundered across the Great Plains were slaughtered not just for profit but to deliberately starve Indigenous nations into submission.
EXPANSION BUILT ON EXPLOITATION
Between the 17th and 19th centuries, American ships transported hundreds of thousands of Africans in chains, fueling an economy built on forced labor. Even after the transatlantic trade was officially banned in 1808, domestic slavery flourished, with enslaved people being bred, sold, and transported across the expanding United States. The wealth of Southern plantations, Northern banks, and entire industries—such as cotton and tobacco—depended on this human trafficking. The legacy of this trade did not end with abolition; it metastasized into segregation, disenfranchisement, and systemic racial disparities that persist today.
As this new economy grew, so did the machinery of extraction. The Industrial Revolution accelerated the process, transforming landscapes at an unprecedented scale. Coal powered factories, railroads carved through ancient forests, and steel mills belched smoke into skies that had once been clear. Cities expanded, displacing Indigenous peoples, wildlife, and sustainable ways of life. Rivers were dammed, wetlands drained, and prairies plowed under for industrial agriculture. The land was no longer seen as a partner but as raw material, fuel for the engine of economic growth.
This era saw the rise of corporations—initially as chartered entities created for specific projects, like building canals or railways. But by the late 19th century, corporations had evolved into permanent institutions, accumulating wealth and power far beyond what any individual should wield. The Gilded Age saw the emergence of monopolies like Standard Oil, U.S. Steel, and the railroad barons, whose influence extended deep into politics. Governments, once theoretically accountable to the public, increasingly served corporate interests. The state and the corporation became intertwined, with laws crafted to protect profits rather than people or ecosystems.
In the early 20th century, labor unions grew in strength as workers fought back against brutal working conditions, child labor, and poverty wages imposed by industrial capitalism. Strikes, sometimes met with violent repression, pressured business owners and the government to address worker exploitation. The Great Depression exposed the failures of an unchecked market, and in response, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal introduced sweeping labor protections. The Wagner Act of 1935 secured the right to unionize, while Social Security, minimum wage laws, and unemployment insurance provided a safety net for millions. These reforms, won through relentless union organizing, reshaped the American economy and helped build the middle class—until later decades saw a corporate backlash aimed at dismantling these gains.
THE ORGANIZING POWER OF MONEY
After World War II, the United States took on the role of global stabilizer, weaving together a web of trade agreements, military alliances, and economic institutions to create a world safe for business—though not always for democracy. When democratically elected leaders threatened corporate interests or Cold War strategy, they were quietly removed, replaced with more cooperative (if often brutal) dictators. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union built a rigid state-controlled economy that functioned more like a monopoly-ridden corporate empire than Marx’s vision of worker-led communism. But in the American narrative, nuance was inconvenient. “Communism” became the all-purpose boogeyman, an existential threat requiring endless military budgets and foreign interventions. The irony, of course, is that while the U.S. was busy fighting so-called communism abroad, it was perfecting its own version of corporate oligarchy at home.By the late 20th century, the marriage between the state and corporations had become so complete that it was hard to distinguish one from the other. Regulatory agencies, theoretically established to protect the public, were often captured by the very industries they were supposed to oversee. Lobbyists wrote legislation, and politicians—dependent on corporate campaign contributions—dutifully passed it. Trade agreements like NAFTA prioritized corporate profits over labor rights and environmental protections.
Money, which once whispered in the halls of power—through lobbying, campaign contributions, and the occasional backroom deal—became shouts, after Citizens United v. FEC (2010), which opened the floodgates. Corporations and billionaires, no longer restrained by limits or transparency, could pour unlimited, untraceable sums into elections, turning democracy into a high-stakes auction. What began as influence peddling metastasized into outright purchase, where a handful of oligarchs now bankroll candidates, craft policy, and drown out the voice of the public. The result? A political system where money doesn’t just talk—it dictates, deciding who runs, who wins, and what laws get written, leaving the people only an illusion of choice.
Deregulation became the mantra, as if markets, left to their own devices, would correct themselves. But markets do not self-regulate. They extract until there is nothing left. The 21st century dawned with clear signs of ecological collapse: climate change accelerated, biodiversity plummeted, and pollution reached every corner of the globe. Plastic now contaminates the most remote oceans and the tissues of living organisms, including humans. Industrial agriculture continued to expand, draining aquifers and eroding topsoil at rates far faster than natural regeneration. Wildfires, once seasonal, became year-round events. Coral reefs bleached, forests died from beetle infestations driven by warmer winters, and heatwaves killed thousands in cities ill-equipped to handle extreme temperatures.
INCAPABLE OF CORRECTION
The economic system driving this destruction proved incapable of self-correction. Corporations, bound by fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder returns, had no incentive to slow down. Governments, tethered to corporate interests through campaign financing, lobbying, and the revolving door between public office and private industry, lacked the political will to implement meaningful reforms. The system became a runaway train, with each crisis met not by structural change but by quick fixes designed to prop up the status quo. Bailouts for fossil fuel companies, subsidies for industrial agriculture, and greenwashing campaigns disguised as environmental responsibility became the norm.
The psychological impact of this extractive economy is hard to overstate. People became disconnected not just from nature but from each other and from themselves. Work became more precarious, communities fragmented, and mental health deteriorated. The constant push for productivity left little room for rest, reflection, or connection. As the natural world suffered, so did the human spirit. The very systems designed to deliver prosperity instead delivered anxiety, burnout, and despair.
Meanwhile, Indigenous peoples, whose ways of life had been systematically dismantled, continued to resist. From the Standing Rock protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline to the fight against logging in the Amazon, Indigenous communities stood on the frontlines of environmental defense. Their struggles highlighted an uncomfortable truth: the ecological crisis is not an accident but the inevitable result of a system built on exploitation.
This system cannot correct itself because its very logic is predicated on endless growth. It sees land, water, and human labor as resources to be exploited, not relationships to be nurtured. It treats externalities—pollution, habitat loss, social inequality—as someone else’s problem, to be managed rather than prevented. It relies on short-term profits, ignoring the long-term consequences of ecological collapse. The inability of modern systems to correct is not just structural—it is philosophical. At the heart of the crisis lies a materialist determinist mindset, the belief that the world operates like a machine, reducible to parts, predictable, and ultimately controllable.
This worldview, born from the Enlightenment and amplified by industrial capitalism, placed humanity not within nature but above it, as master and engineer. Nature became something to dissect, exploit, and conquer, rather than a living system to which we belong. Science, stripped of humility and yoked to corporate interests, became less about understanding the world and more about controlling it for profit. This mindset has driven every environmental failure, from industrial agriculture’s soil depletion to the overfishing of oceans, under the false assumption that technology will always find a solution, that growth can be infinite, and that nature’s resilience is boundless.
SOCIAL DEMOCRACY OR AUTHORITARIANISM
Today, around the world, authoritarianism is rising, not just in the usual strongholds of dictatorship but in democracies that once prided themselves on their resilience. The United States, long seen as a beacon of democratic stability, now teeters on the edge of becoming another cautionary tale. It is not just a failure of governance but a failure of imagination—a failure to believe that their democratic experiment, without constant tending, could fall to the same forces that have undone others.
The 21st century offered a choice. As inequality deepened and institutions faltered, people sought alternatives. Vermont governor Bernie Sanders proposed one: a democratic socialist vision built on healthcare for all, living wages, environmental responsibility, and an economy that served the many, not the few. His platform was not radical—it was common sense, rooted in the principles that other thriving democracies, from Scandinavia to New Zealand, had long embraced. But Sanders was systematically undermined by the Democratic Party establishment in 2016, and yet again in 2020. They viewed his challenge to corporate power as more dangerous than the creeping rise of authoritarianism.
Abandoned by leaders who should have offered real solutions, many voters turned to the only other change on offer: the strongman. Donald Trump rose to power not because of his competence, but because he understood how to weaponize fear and resentment. He scapegoated immigrants, demonized minorities, attacked the press, and painted himself as the sole savior of a nation supposedly in decline. This playbook is not new—it is as old as authoritarianism itself. When people are frightened, when they feel abandoned by their leaders, they may choose the illusion of strength over the hard work of reform.
Now, the consequences are clear. Trump, once dismissed as a passing aberration, has entrenched himself within the Republican Party, transforming it into a vehicle for personal power. His allies in Congress, terrified of losing their positions, have ceded their authority, turning the legislative branch into little more than a rubber stamp for executive overreach. The Supreme Court has ruled the President legally immune for all “official actions.” Trump’s inauguration saw the world’s three richest men visable front and center, with career polititians sitting behind them. Trump and the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, are purging long-serving civil servants, replacing nonpartisan experts with loyalists who will enforce their will without question. The U.S. government, once designed to function through a careful balance of powers, is being hollowed out, leaving behind only the facade of democracy.
Trump’s admiration for authoritarian rulers is not just rhetorical; it is strategic. He has aligned himself with Vladimir Putin, working to reshape the global order into one where authoritarianism, not democracy, is the dominant geopolitical narrative. Under this vision, power flows not from the consent of the governed but from brute force, suppression of dissent, and the consolidation of wealth and influence into ever fewer hands. The post-World War II order, flawed but committed to the idea of human rights and democratic norms, is being actively dismantled.
The signs are everywhere, from the increasing normalization of political violence to removing all mention of climate change from government websites in service to fossil fuel interests. Who will stop it? Will the courts hold up? Authoritarianism rises because its opponents are divided, complacent, or convinced that it cannot happen here. But it can. It is. Unless people reclaim the principles of justice, accountability, and wise leadership, America’s vulnerable democracy will become a footnote in history.
