The American People Are Inwardly Dead. Are All Western Peoples?

Wednesday, 6 August 2025, 11:55 am
Opinion: Martin LeFevre - Meditations

The post mortems on the re-election of Donald Trump after his disastrous first term, and an interregnum of relative normalcy under Joe Biden, continue on both sides of the Atlantic. Confining their examination to the political level, the pundits are missing the mark by a mile.

Skimming along the surface like water bugs, journalists like Jake Tapper and Ezra Klein the USA, and Timothy Garton Ash in the UK are focusing on the failure of Democrats to replace an aging and declining President Biden, who had promised to only run for one term, with a younger, more vibrant candidate.

Without addressing the spiritual, cultural and philosophical levels of our descent into national and global darkness, we cannot understand how we came to this pass, much less how to halt the slide into the abyss.

In short, the most powerful nation on Earth twice elected a fascistic narcissist because this nation had first lost its soul, it’s essential intactness a people. The question is, given America’s cultural influence in the global society, how many other peoples have inwardly expired?

Looking no deeper than political excrescence and no further back than Biden’s last two years, Tapper, Klein and Ash are united in blaming Joe for not getting out of the race earlier.

In the words of the Brit, “Had Biden cleared the way for a Democratic primary in autumn 2023 the strongest candidate could have defeated Trump, and the entire world would have been spared the disaster now unfolding.”

The commentariat on both sides of the pond are clinging to the wisdom-of-the-people illusion as what passed for democracy corrodes in real time. They echo the refrain, “In 2023 77% of Americans thought Biden was too old to be president for another four years,” but the Democratic poobahs wouldn’t listen.

Timothy Garton Ash makes a statement sure to rile up 97% of Americans: “This partly stems from the 237-year-old US constitutional device of rolling your prime minister and monarch into one.”

It’s a bit rich for people upholding the decrepit institution of monarchy to criticise the modern-day empire that replaced their empire for not ousting a decrepit leader, given that Americans fought a war of independence to free us from their monarchy, which was already decrepit in 1775.

With regard to the present, when “the people” are moribund, it matters little how decent the candidate is. The way things played out was no accident of history, or the result of Jill Biden and the “politburo” (their word) around Joe concealing his decrepitude.

Even now, with the benefit of double hindsight, there’s widespread willful blindness. Journalists, academics and the commentariat should have seen after Trump’s coup attempt that a growing darkness had engulfed America, and without a basic change in course authoritarianism was inevitable.

Now, it’s much harder to rid a nation of a tyrant than to prevent him from rising to power.

In a column I wrote in June of 2022, “Indict the Bastard,” I said that if Trump wasn’t indicted and tried for his political crimes in time to keep him out of office, he and the servile Republican Party would steal the election, as they had tried to do with the January 6 2020 coup attempt.

Though I’ve never underestimated the stupidity of the American people, I didn’t think Trump would win cleanly over Biden or Harris.

At the moment the Repubs are brazenly planning to steal both the midterm elections. They’re ruthlessly gerrymandering districts in Texas, and will do so in every other state they can under the direction of their dictator, who said today “we’re entitled” to add more Republican seats to the House and Senate.

Trump knows that if the Democrats win both Houses of Congress, the House will impeach him for a third time, and this time, if the Democrats control the Senate, he’ll be convicted and removed from office.

The governors of California and New York are saying they’re going to fight fire with fire. Kathy Hochul, the governor of New York, called it a war yesterday. America is entering a gerrymandering civil war, but without a living, irate citizenry behind them, the Democrats are going to lose again.

Deadness of the heart is the cultural and spiritual background that allowed the iniquity of Trumpism to emerge, just as it is the underlying reality that allows Netanyahu’s campaign of starvation and genocide in Gaza to continue. Those who still have a beating chamber in their heart must face the virus of indifference if we are to rid ourselves of this global malignancy.

The metaphysical momentum for our perilous predicament (and by ‘our’ I don’t just mean Americans) has been building for a very long time. Here in California, the last best place on Earth, it’s clear that man has reached the end of his long run, and no appeal to indigenous peoples or our indigenous past can meet the challenge we face as individuals and a species.

Three or four of the nine core tipping points of the Earth’s ecosystem have already been breached, and the rest are on the verge of being breached. The cornerstone nation-state has crumbled, as Israel’s genocide in Gaza and Russia’s WWI trench-warfare-plus-drones in Ukraine make a gut-wrenching mockery of the international/multilateral system.

Radical change is imperative at all levels in a globalized world, but callow thinkers like Ezra Klein cling to a nationalistic framework and fantasise about “abundance,” in an updated version of Reagan’s trickle down economics of 40 years ago.

Irrespective of the nationalistic mindset, that’s an inherently false hope, since giving priority to material abundance ineluctably produces tremendous inequality. Why? Because it doesn’t address human motivations of greed, power, comparison, competition and consumerism.

Though the elites of media and academia have to think, speak and write within their prescribed lines and limits, those of us who aren’t serving corporations or clicks can and must think more broadly, and especially, more deeply.

Martin LeFevre

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Martin LeFevre - Meditations

Scoop Contributor

Martin LeFevre is a contemplative and philosopher.

His sui generis “Meditations” explore spiritual, philosophical and political questions relating to the polycrisis facing humanity.

lefevremartin77@gmail