In his 1922 book Public Opinion, Walter Lippmann asserted that we live in “pseudo-environments”—subjective, simplified interpretations of the complex, dynamic and superabundant world around us. He claimed that the decisions and actions necessary to our survival don’t allow for critical analysis and thorough assessment, and the more information to which we are exposed, the less discerning we become. A recent study published in the British Journal of Political Science backs up that claim. It found that “for people with low levels of ability, consuming more political information predicts lower levels of ideological constraint and response stability.” Simply put, the more data we have to process, the less judicious and responsible we become.
Welcome to “muzzle velocity,” a phrase coined by Steve Bannon to describe the rate at which controversial statements, blatant lies and false information overwhelm our judgement. Welcome to “flooding the zone,” another Bannon phrase describing the method by which excess information may be used to stymie and stupefy those whose job it is to make sense of it all. Both hinder the ability of governments to administer justice and prevent pundits and the press from exposing and descrying abuses of power. Both allow corruption, despotism and nepotism to go unchecked. Eventually, chaos becomes the status quo and, to use a frequent phrase from Camus’ The Stranger, we “get used to it.”
On Washington Week the other night, the pundits and journalists convened on a semicircle of stools to face a live audience and summarize the current political condition of our 250-year-old republic. Their circuitous answers to questions posed by the host, Jeffrey Goldberg, were basically the long version of what most Americans already know: that the country is being governed by fear, chaos, division, confusion and graft; and that a full third of the U.S. population lives in a pseudo-environment created by the white nationalist, imperialist, authoritarian and enterprise agenda of Project 2025.
In the P25 pseudo-environment, immigrants are criminals who steal American jobs and murder American citizens; the U.S. has the right to forcefully seize resources and territory for any cause real or bogus; the executive branch has the right to dominate the legislative and judicial branches, break Constitutional laws and dismantle democratic institutions; billionaire industry elites may freely purchase and profit from government legislation; and the master race can rightfully purge the population of those who do not genetically or ideologically conform to its standards. Sadly, the pseudo-environment promulgated by Project 2025 has, to use another Lippmann coinage, “manufactured consent,” and Americans have gotten used to it.
Outside the P25 bubble, former allies regard the U.S. as a reckless bumpkin. Foreign enemies regard it as a muscle-bound sucker. They see a president who is immune to criminal prosecution and incessantly on the take; a “Magnificent 7”—Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet (Google), Meta (Facebook), Nvidia and Tesla—literally buying public policy and legislation; the working and middle classes paying a third of their income to a government that does them more harm than good; a national debt ($40 trillion) that exceeds GDP ($32 trillion) and costs the government $1 trillion per year and every household $7,500 per year in interest payments; performative wars that serve no other purpose than to upset global markets; a Republican Party that has systematically dismantled democratic institutions and rendered the Constitution a relict of forgotten history; and mass detention and persecution of immigrants on a scale not seen since Stalin’s purges.
After sixty years of undermining the prosperity and longevity of middle- and working-class Americans by starving the public sector and enriching the private sector, the Republican Party has finally achieved its goal; it has transformed the U.S. from a democracy into what political scientists at the London School of Economics call a “competitive authoritarian“ state.
The Economist Democracy Index, published by the Economist Group, ranks countries based on 60 questions in 5 domains (electoral process and pluralism, functioning of government, political participation, political culture, and civil liberties) to assess the degree to which their governments function according to democratic laws and institutions. After the 2016 presidential election, the U.S. fell in rank from “Full Democracy” (8.05) to “Flawed Democracy” (7.98). After the 2024 election, its score dropped another .33 points to 7.65. The U.S. now ranks 34th on the Democracy Index, equaling Poland (a country that has also seen an erosion of judicial independence, media freedom and civil liberties) and occupying a position between Latvia (33th) and Botswana (36th). Which suggests a revision of its national motto from “In God We Trust” to “Better Than Botswana.”
What the Democracy Index ranking of “flawed democracy” means (what it means to be an “illiberal democracy”) is that the country has a democratically elected representative government, but due to a weakened judiciary, its elected officials are no longer bound to constitutional principles, norms and laws. In flawed democracies, the electoral process is “exclusive,” meaning that elections may be free and fair, but participation is suppressed or manipulated to favor incumbents. Gerrymandering based on race, sex, social class and party affiliation and unregulated private contributions to political campaigns prevail as strategies to restrict and manipulate electoral outcomes. Government policies favor wealthy elites (oligarchs) and restrict the plurality of political and social interests. Political opposition and dissent are suppressed through punitive lawsuits and state-sponsored violence. The government has little accountability to the public. It may censor, shut down or monopolize media outlets and use modern technology to mislead the public and disseminate propaganda. Flawed democracies subvert or shutter institutions established by previous regimes and suppress scientific or historical facts that don’t jive with its propaganda campaigns.
The transformation of the U.S. from a full to a flawed democracy has been gradual and suffered setbacks over the last fifty years. The same methods, however, have persisted under republican administrations since Nixon. The Republican Party has consistently opposed the social, economic and political progress that followed the New Deal. It opposed the civil rights movement, which it spun as contributing to social unrest. It opposed and quashed the counterculture movement of the 1960s and ‘70s, which it spun as contributing to drug use and the erosion of family values and Judeo-Christian morals. It opposed the women’s liberation movement, which it spun as displacing the authority of men in the home and workplace. It opposed organized labor, which it spun as hindering free-market capitalism and making the working and middle classes too rich.
The actual agenda of the Republican Party has been to systematically erode liberal democratic institutions by packing the courts with conservative judges, to institutionalize corruption by passing legislation that favors the private sector and to crush international threats to the American brand of free-market capitalism. The overriding objective, as outlined in the Powell Memorandum, has been to put the enterprise system (private business interests) in charge of the institutions that govern the country.
In the Trump administration and Project 2025, the Republican Party has found its ultimate expression: it has dismantled democratic institutions, weaponized the judiciary, installed a white nationalist president, subdued and monopolized the media, and given wealthy industrialists unchecked influence over domestic and foreign policy.
Though all Americans who live in this flawed democracy want the prosperity and security that a full democracy would offer—equal representation in free and fair elections, government-financed healthcare, universal pre-K and childcare, free public colleges and universities, an up-to-date civil infrastructure, a safe and sustainable natural environment, progressive income taxes, consumer safeguards, strong anti-corruption laws and international support from nations who share democratic values—a full third are incapable of accommodating anything but the P25 pseudo-environment. They are convinced that the goods which only a full democracy can deliver will somehow issue from a flawed one.