On this very day four years ago in 2021, United States vice president Mike Pence, presiding over the U.S. Congress, certifies the official tally of Electoral College votes in the 2020 election campaign of Pence’s boss, U.S. president Donald Trump, against challenger Joe Biden, a former vice president. Biden is declared the winner, 306 to 232. As Pence brings down the hardwood gavel onto the block on the speaker’s podium, he closes a long day’s proceedings — hours after a violent insurrection inside the U.S. Capitol building, instigated by Trump himself, that had sought to overturn Trump’s loss in the election and reinstall him illegitimately as president. Other members of Congress, at Trump’s urging, had also attempted to sabotage the vote certification proceedings, but to no avail.

Today, 6 January, four years on, when current U.S. vice president Kamala Harris brings down that gavel and does the same job, as she must, certifying the re-election of Trump over Biden in the 2024 election, 312 to 226 votes, she will be facing a much different nation and world. She and her boss, Biden, will be following the will of the American voters in ushering back into the White House in Washington DC a convicted criminal, career shyster and serial sexual predator who has since moved to the extreme-right, neo-fascist end of the political spectrum. The voters of the United Stagnant States of America (USSA) have spoken, and their will shall now be done.

But something else will happen this day when Harris strikes that gavel in Congress. It will mark the beginning of the end, the tolling of the death knell, of this curiosity we call American democracy.

The USSA, before the 2024 re-election, was far from practicing democracy in its truest form. The United States as a nation was founded from the get-go as a flawed system of democracy, not a pure one. Now, with the banging of that gavel today certifying the re-election of Trump, the United States will stand as both a flawed and a severely weakened democracy. The precious freedoms that Americans so love to embrace and flaunt before the rest of the world may or may not ever be retrieved from this point onward; history has long shown that once a country loses or turns away from democratic norms, the people rarely get them back intact.

There are many angles from which to view this historic election outcome, be it economic factors, political party elitism, ineffectual campaign strategy, the allure of authoritarianism, changes in voter demographics and so on. But whichever side of the Rubik’s Cube we see this past election from, one fact seems obvious: An elegy for democracy back in the USSA, such as it was, is in order.

SHIFTS AND SWINGS _ How to make sense of the shocking 2024 election results and Trump’s re-election victory to begin with? The media talking heads and the hacks and flacks of both political parties, the Republicans and Democrats alike, have weighed in with their own finger-pointing, blaming, self-praising and analyzing the situation to death: Harris would have won if she had only reached out more to the Republican Party base of voters. The Democrats could have heeded Palestinian American voters more than they did. Harris should have appeared on more male-dominated podcasts. Woulda, coulda, shoulda. The fact is that all these factors combined, plus many more, influenced the course of the election.

There are narrow ways of looking at this election outcome, and there are long-view ways. Dr. Peter Turchin, a Russian-born scholar and social scientist based in the U.S., has documented patterns of shifts and swings that have occurred in human societies around the planet over the course of thousands of years. The 2024 election outcome, he notes, fits perfectly into the clear patterns of rising and falling societies that he and his research team have confirmed over past decades.

According to Turchin, it goes like this: When working-class people’s wages in any country remain steadily low or stagnant over time, the quality-of-living standard drops as the wealth in society flows ever upward, not downward. As the resulting social unrest and acts of violence grow at the working-class level, the upward flow of a country’s wealth enriches and expands a rising class of elites. But when the number of uber-wealthy elites grows too large to sustain, members of the elite class (as represented by Biden and Trump, in our case) likewise then start battling each other to the death for the remaining spoils of society and for control of political power. This all happens against a backdrop of a financially overextended government that is struggling to stay afloat. That scenario is precisely what is playing out in the U.S. today, as Turchin notes:

“The American ruling class, as it has evolved since the end of the civil war in 1865, is basically a coalition of the top wealth holders (the proverbial 1%) and a highly educated or ‘credentialed’ class of professionals and graduates (whom we might call the 10%). A decade ago, the Republicans were the party of the 1%, while the Democrats were the party of the 10%. Since then, they have both changed out of all recognition.

“By 2024 the Democrats had essentially become the party of the ruling class — of the 10% and of the 1%, having tamed its own populist wing (led by the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders). This realignment was signalled by Kamala Harris massively outspending Trump this election cycle, as well as mainstream Republicans, such as Liz and Dick Cheney, or neocons such as Bill Kristol, supporting the Harris ticket.

“The GOP, in the meantime, has transformed itself into a truly revolutionary party: one that represents working people (according to its leaders) or a radical rightwing agenda (according to its detractors). In the process, it has largely purged itself of traditional Republicans.”

In other words, the 2024 election outcome could have been easily predicted, if only we all had been paying attention. And the future? Turchin cites patterns in world history in asserting that this chaotic state of affairs we see in the U.S. will unfortunately continue for many more years until finally a revolution of some kind — be it from forces outside or inside the government — drastically changes the political and economic course of the nation. This kind of social revolution is not likely to happen anytime soon in the USSA, though, a sure sign that things will get much worse for the Americans before they get better.

FEEDING AT THE TROUGH _ As we have seen, the U.S. has long been a society that waters the seeds of oligarchy. An oligarchy is what you get when the people who have hoarded the most money control a country’s entire governing and financial machinery, exerting almost complete dominion over the rest of the population. The graveyards of human history are littered with the remains of oligarchic societies that came and went off the face of the Earth. The American oligarchy, by contrast, is stronger today than ever and giddily emboldened by the re-election of Trump.

Just three years ago in 2022, during Biden’s term of office, an agency of the U.S. government released a report on income inequality in the U.S. over the past 30 years. The Congressional Budget Office found that the rich had been getting more filthy rich over the past three decades while everyone else had become poorer, making it all but official: The United States is now an oligarchy. And as we know from history, when oligarchies rise, democracies tend to die off.

The Biden administration, especially since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, has made a great show of going after Russia’s oligarchic cronies affiliated and aligned with Russian president Vladimir Putin. But one does not have to look too far to find the rise of America’s own oligarchy within its borders and what it is these merchants of extreme fortune are really after. As Mother Jones magazine accurately reported around this time last year:

“This American oligarchy offers a twist on the pilfering of the commons that produced Russia’s [oligarchy]. It is built on a different kind of resource, not nickel or potash, but you — your data, your attention, your money, your public square. These men (mostly) exult in their almost godlike status over the politicians they fund, the platforms they own, and the industries they’ve effectively monopolized. They are prone to grandiose proclamations about outer space and immortality. But the day-to-day effect of their power is felt less in the glitter than in the gravity it exerts on everything else — the accumulated burden and strain that hardening political and economic inequality puts on public services, on policy, and on the places we live and work. This world ropes you in with its yachts and private jets, but the story of American oligarchy is not just about the spoils. It’s about what everyone else is losing in the process.”

As of September 2024, just a couple months before the November election, it was confirmed that 801 billionaires in the U.S. held a combined wealth of $6.22 trillion. Topping the list of American oligarchs was Elon Musk of Tesla, X social media and SpaceX fame with more than $250 billion to his name. The world’s richest person at present, Musk is slated soon to become the world’s first-ever trillionaire.

Musk had donated $277 million to the Trump campaign and the Republican Party during the 2024 election, the biggest donor by far in this presidential election cycle. In the days and weeks immediately following Trump’s re-election, Musk also managed to reap billions more dollars in profit through his investments. As the subject of a slew of ongoing U.S. federal investigations into his business practices, Musk is set to soon become co-head of a newly created advisory body in the incoming Trump administration, the Department of Government Efficiency, which will ostensibly restructure federal agencies and slash government budgets. Clear conflicts of interest aside, multinational corporations like Musk’s are expected to be treated most favorably.

What this all means in dollars and cents is that the big pig-feeding trough is now being polished up and prepared for an unprecedented access to government coffers by Trump’s right-wing cronies, his worshipful loyalists and anyone else in America’s oligarchy class of mega-owners who can buy their way into the returning president’s favor. The wave of corruption that he will usher into the highest levels of government in the USSA, to use a Trumpian superlative, will be like nothing the world has ever seen before. The corruption is likely to make Trump’s misdeeds during his first term look like child’s play. Who remembers now that Trump, refusing to divest from his companies while in the White House, actually made about $2.5 billion through his companies in the four years he served as president the first time — almost $8 million alone in personal gain from foreign governments?

And the worst part of it all is that the current reactionary version of the United States Supreme Court, for its part, is more than likely to have Trump’s back when it comes to making greed great again and allowing corruption in the executive branch of the U.S. government to be treated as a non-prosecutable crime. So, as they say in the business, let the looting begin.

HEIL HITTERS _ There was much debate and discussion during the 2024 election season about whether or not Trump was actually a fascist, and if his policies represented a possible return to the horrors of fascism as the world knew them way back in World War II. Was Trump the next American equivalent of Adolf Hitler of Germany or Benito Mussolini of Italy?

Kamala Harris and even others inside Trump’s orbit during his first administration maintained he was fascist to the core. Loyal Trump supporters scoffed at that notion — even as they gathered en masse at a sold-out rally at Madison Square Garden in New York in 2024 to honor their Dear Leader, an event that was eerily reminiscent of a public rally held at that very same venue in 1939 in support of Nazi Germany under Hitler’s dictatorship.

Authoritarians, autocrats, dictators, nationalists, fascist leaders — whatever you choose to call them, the international trend is unmistakably ascending in their favor, as economist and scholar Francis Fukuyama correctly attests: “The authoritarian strongman government is on the rise” worldwide. The Freedom House nonprofit organization in the U.S., founded in 1941 to promote democracy against the evils of Nazi Germany, affirms the dire reality of authoritarian rule on the global stage today: “The present threat to democracy is the product of 16 consecutive years of decline in global freedom. A total of 60 countries suffered declines over the past year [2021], while only 25 improved. As of today, some 38 percent of the global population live in Not Free countries, the highest proportion since 1997. Only about 20 percent now live in Free countries.”

Will that number drop to 19 percent come 2025 in the USSA? In any case, Trump’s re-election victory is being warmly welcomed in Europe and elsewhere by far-right and ultra-nationalist political parties that are following the dark road of fascism. No less a public figure than Elon Musk has recently declared, on his X social media platform and in a newspaper in Germany, his unequivocable support for the pro-Nazi political party Alternative for Germany (AfD). An editor at that newspaper subsequently resigned in protest and the government of Germany has accused Musk of unduly interfering in an election to be held in that country next month. If this kind of thing is unacceptable to the Germans, a people who know firsthand about the horrors of Nazism, then it should be unacceptable to the Americans too.

At press time, Musk is being harshly criticized in Britain as well for using his social media platform to spread misinformation about rape victims in an attempt to adversely influence the country’s political affairs. This is how the world’s wealthiest wonk will continue to use his access to political power in the United States: to sow discord and chaos in democratic societies in the true tradition of fascism.

DEFYING THE CARNAGE _ And so, when all is said and done, it seems somehow perfectly fitting on this special day that Trump, the same political cult figure who once vowed to “drain the swamp” of officialdom in the nation’s capital, is the same one who rises anew from the proverbial grave — not to drain the Washingtonian swamp but to refill that swamp to capacity and beyond, keeping it overflowing with his own brand of pungent corruption, slimy self-idolatry and a declared dictatorship “on day one” of his second presidency: The Swamp Creature from the Orange Lagoon Goes Back to Washington, as Hollywood’s version of Trump’s second go-round may well be titled someday.

Millions of American zombie voters, having made their choice in the 2024 U.S. presidential election, now await the fate of the probable neo-fascist mafia state that they have wrought on themselves, their fellow citizens and by extension the whole world. Many of us, meanwhile, will no doubt be listening to the elegiac strains of a flawed democracy somewhere off in the distance, plotting a robust resistance to the coming Trumpian carnage from both within and without the USSA every day for the next 1,460 days.

Let the record show that from today forth, if Trump has his way and follows up on the fascist-state agenda of Project 2025 as expected, the USSA will be functioning essentially as a monocracy — a drastically dumbsized democracy of one and only one. Welcome to the Terrordome, indeed. How will you defy it?