In each of the last six years, the Danish NGO AoD (Alliance of Democracies) has compiled and published the Democracy Perception Index, an international survey of national sentiments regarding democracy. What sets the survey apart is the inclusion of economic reasons as threats to democracy. So, instead of having American politicians psychologize economic dysfunction as ‘anxiety,’ survey respondents are able to answer the questions themselves.

Surprise, the survey responses have nothing to do with anxiety. They reference the distribution of economic power. In descending order, the threats to democracy are 1) concentrated income and wealth, 2) corruption, and 3) corporate control over politics. And preceding Donald Trump’s first term was the conclusion by a near-majority of Americans that the US is not ‘a democracy.’ A far larger percentage of Chinese believe China to be democratic than Americans believe the US to be.

Graph: economic inequality, and not ‘Putin,’ ‘China,’ or ‘authoritarianism,’ leads the list of threats to democracy, according to AoD. In fact, the top three categories are economic in nature. It’s almost as if the US doesn’t want for its people to know what ails us. The threats that we (Americans) have been handed all serve the foreign policy interests of the US. How is this not authoritarian? Source: allianceofdemocracies.org.

By asking the citizens of the world for political assessments of their respective nations, what is revealed is both what is valued by citizens generally, and what is particular to each nation. The survey results are used below to illuminate the social ambitions of the peoples of the world, as well as their assessments of the impediments to realizing these ambitions. While the Americans are correct that citizen rule is valued, the US is amongst the least likely places to find it globally, according to the survey.

This essay proceeds from a generalized discussion of world politics, it applies the findings of the AoD survey (link above) to this politics, and explores the possibilities with the goal of crafting a new peoples’ politics. From the premises laid out here, none of this is intended to be imposed. Such an imposition would represent the opposite of citizen rule. Also, left unstated so far is the obvious problem of class relations. The global wish for more democracy seems a decent proxy for less rule by economic elites.

For the young, the young at heart, and those averse to learning from history, the purpose of ‘Trump!’ in 2025 is to give American-style capitalism one more try. Missed in the prior iteration were impurities in execution according the Trump & co., and not the conceptual flaws of capitalism. From Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton to George W. Bush to Barack Obama, capitalism would have worked as advertised if only capitalism’s executors had been homicidal enough.

The immediately prior version (of capitalism) had it that abandoning industrial policy, deindustrializing the US, sending sensitive national production (e.g. defense, critical minerals, agriculture) abroad and handing national decision making to self-interested corporate hacks and inheritance wastrels was the necessary curative. The resulting rolling crises of capitalism were explained as temporary disruptions, as bugs, not features, to the point when the economic, and with it social, decline of the US became an embarrassment to our overlords.

When, around 2022, those two heads of the same coin, the Davos Man – Gold Toilet crowd, realized 1) that they were being offered fewer VIP room entries / swag bags while traveling internationally and 2) that other nations had learned the lesson that out-arming the US was the only way to get a decent night’s sleep, they decided to get radical. Ethnic cleansing in Gaza that would have made Germans of the WWII era proud, combined with JFK-on-a-meth-and-cough-syrup-bender........

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