On the one hand, according to Eisfeld, the USA, the country that gave Alexis de Tocqueville the impetus to write about the advance of equality 200 years ago, has become the scene of blatant social inequality, with the serious consequence of a de facto ruling political oligarchy. And secondly, the scholar continues, the same liberal country that took in Thomas Mann, who was expatriated from Germany by the Nazis, is currently demonstrating that it has the same dark side - isolationism, racial intolerance, obdurate resistance to social change - that Thomas Mann recognized early on (1944) with the sensitivity of the once-expelled.
"The fixation on Donald Trump's person, on his shock-and-awe practices," Eisfeld emphasizes, "must not obscure the undesirable developments that have made Trump's rise possible and are working against a revival of American democracy." As such, he names: "A deeply insecure society armed to the teeth; a 'lockdown state' with currently 1.9 million prisoners (the largest number on earth) who are and often remain disenfranchised; the power of an alliance of private wealth and political influence, which ensures that the political system is highly unrepresentative. Add to this a political culture steeped in fantasies of white dominance; a Republican Party that has been usurped by a racially tinged white evangelical nationalism. And finally - far too often neglected - a Supreme Court whose decisions act as a gateway for the consolidation of the shift from democracy to an increasingly authoritarian oligarchy."
According to Eisfeld, this must be seen as a fundamental conflict against the backdrop of a current upheaval in American society: its demographic composition has been profoundly changed by the Immigration Act of 1965, which abolished the quotas for "desirable" and "undesirable" countries that had been in force since 1921. Since the 1990s, the U.S. Census Bureau has used the term "majority-minority area" for cities and states in which the non-Hispanic white population makes up less than 50 percent of all residents, without any other single ethnic group making up the majority. In 2015, 25 major cities - including Chicago, Los Angeles and New York - were classified as such, and in 2020 the states of California, New Mexico, Nevada, Texas, Florida, Georgia and Maryland. The forecast for the entire USA is that it will be a majority-minority country in 20 years' time.
Rainer Eisfeld has taught as a visiting professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). He previously worked twice as a visiting scholar at the UCLA Center for European and Eurasian Studies and then at the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Eisfeld: "I'm not the only one to show how threatened America's universities are by Trump's alignment strategies. But that's also why this essay had to be written."
Rainer Eisfeld: America's democracy on the brink of failure. Inequality, oligarchy formation, Trump - and the Supreme Court. Wiesbaden: Springer 2026
Further information for the media:
Prof. Dr. Rainer Eisfeld, Osnabrück University
Institute of Social Sciences
E-mail: rainer.eisfeld@uos.de
