Why Millions of Americans Are Cheering the Undoing of Their Own Country
Your Neighbors Want a Revolution
Just one month into Trump's second term, we need to face an uncomfortable truth: the dismantling of American institutions isn't happening against the people's will. It's happening with their consent. Maybe not enthusiastic support, but a weary, resentful, exhausted acceptance. People are watching a system that was supposed to serve them be torn apart, and at best, they feel indifferent. At worst, they're cheering it on.
Why? Because this system has failed them. Because these institutions—government, media, business, the courts, even unions—have presided over decades of decline, corruption, and economic rot while telling people that everything is fine. The American Dream, once a promise of security and prosperity, has been systematically stripped down and sold for parts. Now, those same institutions—the ones that ignored or profited from this collapse—expect the very people they abandoned to defend them? Against Trump, against Musk, against corporate and financial elites now running this country like their own personal casino?
For decades, Americans have watched their country fall apart. Jobs disappeared, wages stagnated, purchasing power eroded, healthcare became unaffordable, roads crumbled, and schools decayed. Communities weren’t just hit by automation or outsourcing—they were gutted by an economic model that extracts wealth and funnels it upward. Corporate monopolies wiped out local businesses, replacing middle-class jobs with low-wage work. Private equity raiders stripped industries bare, shuttered factories, and sold off what remained. Manufacturing towns became service job towns; service job towns became places where people barely scrape by. The result? Entire regions that once built things now survive by selling them.
The institutional betrayals run deep. Unions, once a shield against corporate power, became just another part of the machine—selling out their own members through corruption and compromise. They helped kill Nixon’s healthcare plan. They brokered deals that left workers behind. They didn’t just get beaten—they got bought. And now, when people hear the word “union,” they don’t think of strength. They think of backroom deals, decline, and betrayal.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court methodically stripped away rights—handing democracy to corporations, giving police unchecked power, ruling that basic human needs are "not in the Constitution." Democrats cower at the mere suggestion of reform, while Republicans grovel before the very billionaire class that holds them in contempt.
This collapse didn't start with Trump. It didn't start with Reagan, or Clinton, or Bush, or Obama. It started when America stopped building, stopped investing in itself. When we turned against ourselves and blamed taxes, regulations, unions, immigrants—anything but the real culprit: the deliberate dismantling of America's productive economy in favor of financial speculation and corporate profit-taking.
For years, people sought alternatives. They flirted with outsiders like Ross Perot and Ralph Nader. Then they embraced Barack Obama's promise of "Hope and change." Twice. But the change never came. Instead, a backlash swept the country. Democrats lost over 1,000 seats nationwide. States that had been blue for generations—Tennessee, West Virginia, North Carolina—turned deep red almost overnight.
By 2015, Americans weren't just angry. They were ready for revolution. That's why both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump surged. They represented two vastly different versions of what "burn it down" might look like. Trump won because he promised something massive, something radical. People didn't know what it would be, but they knew the system needed to be smashed.
Even he didn't deliver real change. So in 2020, people swung back to Biden—the safe choice, a return to "normalcy." But he governed as if America hadn't already collapsed, spending hundreds of billions trying to rebuild a broken system, but the money evaporated into a system designed to fail—diluted by bureaucracy, siphoned by corporate middlemen, leaving barely a trace.
And here we are again. Trump, Round Two. Another attempt to burn it all down.
This should be a moment for a real movement. A political opening the size of the Grand Canyon. But the people running the show—the New York Times editorial board, Democratic strategists, their most loyal voters—can't imagine a different country. They can't fathom a world where America actually rebuilds itself from the ground up. They aren't just afraid of radical change—they no longer have the capacity to even envision it.
This is the real crisis: America hasn't just lost its ability to build. It's lost its ability to imagine anything better.
So people choose destruction. And until someone offers them a better way forward, they’ll keep choosing the only thing left: the wrecking ball.
Funny thing is, my wife and I have had healthcare for the past four years for the first time in over a decade thanks to the Dems finally having control in our state senate and accepting the ACA subsidies. We’ve finally been able to have our back surgeries done. My kid was able to get help for their opiate addiction that we were struggling to afford. We’ve been able to piece a life together with some apps on our phones to work for ourselves for once. I was able to care for my parent’s as they died in hospice together. We live simply but we were happy (as happy as we could be obviously). I was making a little money investing. But they’ve wrecked the damn stock markets! Now we stand to lose it all again. Its like going back to the 2007 housing crises for us. Which we never really came back from. Watching the rich take control and cater to themselves openly, while saying “We the People” are the corrupt ones. After watching the opiate manufacturers get rich off our deaths and we are the parasites?!?! Everything you said about corporate profit taking and all of that is correct yet Im being told by Elon Musk that Im the fucking problem? Our countrymen are literally cheering our demise.
I can't buy a slow rot of everything. Yes things decay, but an economy in balance can rebuild. In the 70’s Nixon caused “stagflation” and Carter had the feds raise interest trying to slow it down. It was with Reagan and his trickle-down economics that we went off the rails. Corporations had been kept in relative check; it had been understood the power needed to be with the people. Corporate tax rate in the 50's and 60's was 35 to 50%. From Reagan on, the power keep shifting to corporations and the size of the corporations exploded. Wages stagnated, credit cards were introduced with little control over interest. Greed went out of control. Then we added Citizen's United, making our political system completely non-functional for the sake of the people.
There are 3 things we could do to turn our economy back in the right direction: 1. Raise corporation tax from the current 3.5% on a sliding scale upward to 20%, 2. Abolish Citizens United and take the money out of politics, forcing politicians to listen to the people rather than pay back their corporate donors, and 3. Get rid of the electoral votes and go back to every vote counts. Every vote counting means no Jim Crow laws anywhere.
It will do no good to tear everything down if we don't get rid of the mentality of greed that controls our country due to changes in the laws that allowed that to happen. If greed is in charge of the rebuild, it could be worse. A torn apart nation is a haven for investment for the wealthy.