The problem with America

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lenny unencumbered

February 1, 2026

You can always count on Americans to do the right thing—after they’ve tried everything else.

– Winston Churchill (attributed)

The problem with America is not that Trump Always Chickens Out (TACO). The problem isn’t even Trump. He’s just the most conspicuous symptom of a disease that’s been raging unchecked for decades. Trump is a manifestation of that disease, resembling a humongous, angry, orange-tinged pustule ready to gush like a volcano.

Many say America is currently at a tipping point. That is evident to anyone paying attention, ironically, even to those who have not noticed the slide through decades of successive Democratic and Republican administrations, each blaming the other for a myriad of social and economic problems. Amazingly, Americans tolerated this illusion of choice for decades. However, even as they face this critical moment, the appetite for more of the same seems steadfast, as the bitching about it reaches new heights. That is part of the problem!

From my vantage point at the Southern tip of Africa (a place, incidentally, where an imaginary White genocide is raging and which Trump no doubt includes on his list of shithole countries), I have been following with mild interest the massive nationwide demonstrations against ICE, which is implicated in two clear murders of American citizens. This is a federal agency once trusted to keep foreign rabble honest and in line, but which many protesters are now likening to Hitler’s World War II Gestapo. Whether trust in a federal arm of government has been irreparably damaged remains to be seen. This is part of the problem!

As with all previous protests, and except for a committed few, Americans will go back to work at the end of the weekend, and their normal lives will resume. They will wait for the next ICE murder or other horrendous incident to spark their outrage once again. Who knows! At the current rate of ICE lawlessness, America will be dealing with another set of murders at the hands of its own government in the coming week, and yet more demonstrations next weekend. This is part of the problem!

While extra-judicial killings are now becoming common among the citizenry, the American government has a long history of murdering people around the world who are deemed to be in opposition to its imperialist foreign policy machinations. Thousands of innocent people around the world have fallen prey to America’s assassinations, drone strikes, bombings, sea piracy, regime change, abductions, and smear campaigns. I’m pretty sure that I’m not even listing all the evil shit America has perpetrated around the world.

The American government can and invariably does designate anyone standing in the way of international domination as nuclear threats or terrorists (domestic and foreign), or narco-terrorists or drug smugglers or rapists or whatever fake label can be dreamed up at a whim. How many Americans have noticed that the bombing of fishing boats allegedly carrying drugs has stopped since Trump got his hands on Venezuelan oil?

How many Americans actually care that over a hundred fishermen lost their lives so that their country could snatch the oil reserves of a sovereign nation? How many cared when it happened in the Middle East? Would I be egregiously wide off the mark to assume that the average American supports their country’s military aggression if it ensures and safeguards their personal material comforts and prosperity? This is part of the problem!

While at least 40 people have died in interactions with ICE in 2025 and 2026, there is ample video evidence that Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, both Minneapolis residents, were murdered in cold blood by its agents. However, Trump’s cosplaying Homeland Security Secretary, Kristi Noem, insists that both deceased were justifiably killed as they were a threat to the ICE agents. Absurdly, everyone in Trump’s demented orbit supports her unequivocally, even as I suspect none of them believe any of their own lies. Maintaining the narrative is of singular importance.

It’s for this very reason that the Trump administration insists that the American public not believe what their own eyes are seeing in the video evidence. Astonishingly, that’s not a hard sell because the majority of Trump’s MAGA base believes it, even if they have to force themselves to overcome any cognitive dissonance. Cult celebrity worship is a truly strong force in American culture. It’s worrying how easily reality is being discarded. This is part of the problem!

While the Republicans in recent times have become notorious for their overt racism and bigotry, the Democrats, in contrast, are hardly the good guys, even if they tick all the right boxes when it comes to social and health issues. In fact, the Democrats are equally conniving when it comes to the economy and foreign policy. Serving their corporate donors and perpetuating the military-industrial complex will always take precedence over everything else. Maintaining a good standing on social and health issues is all part of the illusion and advances the political grift that every American citizen is a perpetual victim of. This is a major problem!

While some Americans are talking about civil war as a natural consequence of the dystopian reality America finds itself in, I doubt it will come to that. President Abraham Lincoln, who presided over the American Civil War, had a dire warning for the country, which hopefully will be amplified by those who haven’t been corrupted by the wiles of Trump’s MAGA cult:

America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it
will be because we destroyed ourselves.

Restating the quote attributed to Winston Churchill at the beginning of this essay, Americans are in the trying everything else phase. It’s the perennial FAFO enigma. In other words theyr’e still fucking around before finding out. It remains to be seen whether they finally do something about it before their cosy empire evaporates before their eyes.

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6 responses to “The problem with America”

Bob Lynn

February 1, 2026

You’ve spotted something real – that America’s crisis isn’t primarily about one pustule-faced figure, but about the anaesthetised acceptance that got us here. Fair observation. But I’d gently push back on a couple of things, and I say this as someone reading from the Southern Hemisphere vantage point you claim.

On the performative protest cycle: You’re right that Americans mostly return to their desk jobs come Monday morning, and that there’s a rhythm of outrage-dormancy that lets the machinery keep grinding. But your tone suggests this is uniquely American capitulation. It isn’t. Europeans do it too. Australians do it. We all do. The difference is that Americans at least have the infrastructure for mass demonstration in the first place – the legal permission, the cultural expectation, the bandwidth. That they underutilise it is damning, yes. But the idea that they’re uniquely spineless on this front? That’s where I think you’re being ungenerous to human nature generally, which tends toward the path of least resistance everywhere.

On the “both sides equally bad” framing: You say Democrats are “hardly the good guys” despite ticking the right boxes on social issues, then essentially argue those boxes don’t matter because they’re just grift. This is a seductive symmetry, but it’s also a sleight of hand. A federal agency staffed and directed by Republicans murdering American citizens isn’t functionally the same as Democratic corporate cowardice – one is an active present-tense atrocity, the other is structural betrayal. Both are problems. They’re not the same problem. The fact that Democrats colluded with the military-industrial complex doesn’t erase that one party is currently using state violence against its own citizens with video evidence ignored wholesale.

On what Americans “actually care” about: Your rhetorical question – “Would I be egregiously wide off the mark to assume that the average American supports their country’s military aggression if it ensures and safeguards their personal material comforts?” – is both true and incomplete. Yes, Americans tolerate a degree of moral compromise for material security; humans do that everywhere. But the question worth asking is how much tolerance, and whether that tolerance is passive acceptance or active choice. There’s a meaningful distinction. Some Americans are actively complicit; others are simply busy, distracted, or genuinely uncertain what effective resistance looks like when the levers of power are rigged. That’s still a problem – a massive one – but it’s different from what you’re describing.

On the Lincoln quote and the FAFO phase: Here you’re absolutely right, and it’s the strongest part of your piece. Americans are still in the “trying everything else” stage because the consequences of their own dissolution haven’t yet felt immediate enough to everyone simultaneously. The cosy empire is visibly vapourising at the edges for some people; others haven’t felt the temperature drop yet. That’s not excuse-making – that’s just the tragic timeline of collapse. By the time it’s undeniable to everyone, it may indeed be too late.

The thing you’re missing: Your distance from America – geographical and perhaps emotional – gives you clarity about the symptoms. But it also lets you off the hook from having to live in the ambiguity of actually being inside a failing system, where visibility and paralysis often coexist. Americans aren’t uniquely stupid or cowardly; they’re trapped in a legitimacy crisis where both major parties have forfeited moral authority, the courts are compromised, and the media ecosystem is fractured beyond repair. That’s not an excuse to do nothing. But it is a reason why doing something feels like screaming into a void, and why most people, exhausted and afraid, just go back to work.

The real problem, as you hint, isn’t Trump or even the two-party grift. It’s that Americans have lost faith in the possibility of meaningful change through legitimate channels – and haven’t yet found the collective will to build anything outside them. That’s what needs to shift. Whether it will, before the empire finishes collapsing? That’s the only question that actually matters.

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1. lenny unencumbered
  
  February 1, 2026
  
  Thanks for taking the time to read. Fair criticism. Just a few points I’d like to clear up.
  If there was any suggestion that Americans are spineless, that was not my intention. On the contrary, they’re some of the bravest people around, stupidly brave at times.
  I didn’t mean to imply that social issues don’t matter. The point I was trying to make, unsuccessfully, apparently, is that Democrats are hypocritical about social and humanitarian issues. You can’t pretend to care about such things while funding a genocide, then giving the butcher of Gaza a standing ovation in Congress. The hypocrisy is too stark.
  Further, the Democrats in Congress not only haven’t done anything tangible to stop ICE, they voted in collusion with the Republicans to approve more ICE funding.
  I’m not excusing anything Republicans are doing. Just pointing out Democrat hypocrisy.
  I accept your point about tolerance.
  I’m commenting as both an observer and a victim of American imperialism. I hope you’ll forgive me for not taking time out to place myself in their shoes. Palestinian resistance to Zionist settler colonization and ethnic cleansing, as well as in my case personally, resistance to apartheid is a case in point. Is it fair to ask us to try to understand our respective oppressors?
  Your last point seems to concur with my conclusion.
  Thanks once again.
  
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  1. Bob Lynn
    
    February 1, 2026
    
    Fair dos. You’ve clarified what you meant, and now I see where the real sting was.
    
    You’re absolutely right about the hypocrisy. A party that wraps itself in human rights rhetoric whilst funding a genocide and then applauding the architect of it in Congress isn’t just failing morally; it’s actively insulting the intelligence of anyone paying attention. That’s not a minor inconsistency. That’s a fundamental betrayal of the values they claim to stand for. And you’re correct again: Democrats voting alongside Republicans to expand ICE funding is collusion, full stop. It reveals that their social posturing is exactly that – posturing – when the chips are down and the military-industrial complex needs feeding.
    
    Your point about hypocrisy lands harder than spinelessness ever could, because hypocrisy assumes moral capacity they’re then actively choosing to betray.
    
    And fair play on the second point: you’re right to call me out there. I was doing that thing where I implicitly asked you to be more generous to oppressors because understanding them is supposedly more mature or nuanced. It isn’t – not when you’re living under their boot. A Palestinian or someone resisting apartheid doesn’t owe Americans a sympathetic reading of their paralysis. You live the consequences; they debate them on podcasts. That’s a real distinction, and asking you to split the difference was me asking you to absorb someone else’s moral labour.
    
    I was also perhaps being too cautious about the “both sides” language – which, I see now, you weren’t actually wielding as false equivalence. You were naming a specific hypocrisy, not saying they’re equally bad. They’re not.
    
    And yes – on that last point we do converge. The legitimacy crisis is real, and it will either break America from within or remake it. Either way, you’re watching from a place where you’ve already had to imagine what comes after empire collapses. That’s not a comfortable vantage point, but it’s a clear one.
    
    Thanks for the reply. You clarified without condescension, which is rarer than it should be.
    
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  2. lenny unencumbered
    
    February 1, 2026
    
    Thank you Bob. I appreciate your understanding of where I’m coming from.
    I actually have family in the States who are now naturalised Americans. I hope they’re as understanding as you.
    
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Mary K. Doyle

February 12, 2026

We’re a mess, for sure, Lenny. There are many, many of us who are sad and disturbed and doing what we can in small ways. I was going to post something about it today, but I decided to put something positive on my blog for personal reasons.

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1. lenny unencumbered
  
  February 13, 2026
  
  I truly feel for those who are morally strong and fighting the good fight.
  Unfortunately there’s a clear groundswell supporting the current erosion of morals and ethics and they’re in the ascendancy.
  We’re watching in horror from afar. I can only imagine what it must be like for those resident.
  
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