At this year’s National Football League Super Bowl, the Trump regime could not resist politicizing the event by attacking the halftime performance of Bad Bunny, a celebration of Puerto Rican musical culture conducted entirely in the Spanish language. President Donald Trump endorsed an alternative country western streamed halftime program of Kid Rock, which was dedicated to the conservative icon Charlie Kirk. It was the president and his party inciting the MAGA base to campaign for congressional Republicans.

The two shows represent two radically different cultural streams in America, roughly approximating the struggle over ethnic, gender, and racial representation in public life. On a more material level, however, the unfulfilled day to day needs of working people caught up in this ideological divide suggests that rhetorical claims about the culture wars are not grounded in the quotidian realities and material demands of most people.

The real crisis is America is not the deep political cultural divisions among its citizens as much as the concerted efforts of both political parties to play on imagined differences, while orchestrating a massive shift in wealth from working people to the super-rich class, which includes the congressional millionaire unrepresentatives. At least two-thirds of the Senate membership and more than half the House are millionaires, compared to 9% of Americans overall.

Diminishing access to basic human needs, a news topic that does not attract advertising revenue, except perhaps from Big Pharma, has a huge impact on the quality and very meaning of democracy. The real crisis of the working class is not on the MSM agenda.

True to its propaganda mission of creating legitimacy for the hegemonic state, the mainstream corporate media fails to help Americans understand that in their individual family struggles to survive or just about make ends meet, they are not alone.

In the midst of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln referred to an ideal America as a country of, by, and for the people. Looking at the political and civic participation and well-being of people, all the people, as a proxy for democracy, it is clear that the legitimacy of the democratic state is at a dangerously low level and in inverse correspondence with the degree of American military or police aggression at home and abroad. The largest injuries of wars fall on the working class.

The lower the trust the public invests in the state, the more the ruling apparatuses are compelled to distract public attention. Trump apparently believes he can override constitutional restraints on his power mandate, ignore public opinion, and function as a quasi-autocrat. He also hopes to deflect attention from his failed economic policies by redirecting the public gaze toward a constructed enemy threat.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton melded her identity politics strategy to neoconservative, pro-Israeli, and Russophobic rhetoric bereft of any vision or coherence, in the process losing the working class, 52% to 44%, to a faux pro-labor campaigner. Her “basket of deplorables” gaffe directed at the white working class didn’t help her chances. The Democrats under the neoliberal Clinton wing of the party turned away from the New Deal and toward neoliberal, anti-welfare, corporate-friendly, austerity, and tough-on-crime policies.

In 2024, a disunited working class voted overwhelmingly in favor of Donald Trump, who was anything but a pro-labor politician. According to the Pew Research Center, 67% of Trump voters were without a college degree, a proxy for working class, compared with 51% for Harris. Clinton protégé Kamala Harris captured just 42% of working-class voters, while Trump carried 56%.

Clinton-Obama acolyte Joe Biden, often identified as progressive, cut federal food stamp and childcare benefits during his presidency and allowed child poverty to nearly triple, while millions of Americans lost Medicaid and CHIP (Children's Health Insurance Program) support. On the international front, as Barack Obama’s vice president, Biden acted like an imperial proconsul in Ukraine, forsaking even token gestures of diplomacy in dealing with the Russian head of state, whom he publicly dismissed as “a thug.” His unconditional military assistance that enabled the Israeli genocide lost him and his stand-in much of the youth vote in 2024 prior to his decision to drop out of the presidential race.

The Democrats have followed the same militaristic, hegemonic foreign policy approach as Republicans. As secretary of state, Clinton, following John Foster Dulles’ style of “brinkmanship,” promised to confront Russia in Ukraine with a “no-fly zone” that she proposed would halt Russian aid to the rebellious Donbas region in eastern Ukraine. Overall, her identity-based politics campaign strategy in 2016 lost out to a faux labor-friendly campaigner, who took 52% of the working class vote to Clinton’s 44%.

Perhaps the only thing worse than a party of the billionaire class led by a real estate tycoon is another party of the billionaire class pretending to be an alternative. In reality, the well-being of Americans has continually declined for nearly 50 years under neoliberal governments of both parties. As a result, public trust of governing institutions by 2024 had reached a near all-time low in the post-war period. Today, Democrat voters are only marginally more trusting of the federal government, 35%, than Republicans, 11%.

The purported polarization of Democrat versus Republican voters has been constructed as an ideological trope to hide the more substantive economic and class basis of the great divide, which is the public’s recognition of the corruption of the state on the one hand and the concentration of wealth and power that has hollowed out the democratic status of citizens, especially workers and urban minorities, on the other.

In November 2025, the Kettering Foundation found a new low, 24%, in its tracking of American adults who believe that democracy is working in the country. The relatively weak organic character of American democracy measured in terms of social distribution corresponds to the perception of diminished state legitimacy that is documented in several studies of public trust in state institutions. Of all public institutions in America........

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