What Derailed America?
The American Dream didn’t fade all at once and it has not faded completely. But it has drifted further and further out of reach for Americans over time.
Dysfunction in government has become the norm, not the exception. Truth has become negotiable and subject to preference, and inequality seems to be seen alternately as either acceptable or unfixable.
In tracing back how we got here; how our politics became theater, our economy abandoned its workers, and our conversations turned to combat, there are three core shifts that explain what went wrong:
The rise of gridlock politics, starting with Newt Gingrich’s transformation of Congress from “the world’s greatest deliberative body” into a permanent partisan battlefield.
The shift from a stakeholder economy to a shareholder monopoly, where corporate profits became the only factor of how we measure the American Dream.
The collapse of local, community-based interactions, replaced by outrage-driven national and social media ecosystems.
Individually, these shifts were slow enough to be normalize in every day life. Together they’ve gutted the foundation of our democracy. What once felt like progress now feels like decay, and what once held us together now pulls us apart. So as we look towards solutions we must learn about what happened, how this took place, and how to build towards solutions to get us back on track.
WHAT WE MUST THINK ABOUT
1. The Politics of Sabotage
He did not invent partisanship, but in the early 1990’s Newt Gingrich began to weaponize it. He began training members of Congress to use words like “corrupt”, “traitor”, and “sick” when talking about opponents. Compromise and collaboration wasn’t just weak, it was disloyal.
The “Contract with America” in 1994 was a well designed PR campaign that made national messaging the centerpiece of every House race. Under Gingrich’s leadership, government shutdowns became tools, not failures. This is when politics became a zero-sum game for party leadership.
Since then, bipartisanship has been an endangered species. Legislating turned into messaging, and winning the news cycle became more important than governing. Political sabotage has been the status quo for too long, and it’s time to find alternative pathways to prosperity in America.
2. The Economic Bait-and-Switch
The Great Depression exposed the failures of unregulated capitalism, which led to strengthened unions and increased government responsibility for social welfare. After WWII, with national pride at an all time high, American companies viewed themselves as part of a social contract. They paid decent wages, supported communities, and offered a sense of stability in return for continued service to the company.
Then came Milton Friedman’s infamous 1970 doctrine which stated: the sole purpose of a business is to maximize shareholder value. Suddenly, the game changed, which many blame for the rise of short-term profit obsession and decline in corporate social responsibility.
Over the next few decades, with the rise of NeoLiberalism, corporations began outsourcing jobs, crushing unions, and funneling profits upward. CEOs used stock buybacks to inflate their bonuses. Workers were reclassified as “contractors.” Wages stagnated while the market boomed.
Today, we live in a country where the average CEO makes 350x the average worker, with 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. All while the stock market hits record highs. Capitalism didn’t fail, it simply stopped serving to benefit the American society it relies on.
3. The Media Meltdown
As politics turned tribal and the economy hollowed out, something deeper broke—our ability to talk to each other.
Media consolidation, corporate influence, and social media algorithms replaced local news and shared facts with outrage, echo chambers, and nationalized drama. We stopped agreeing, not just on solutions, but on reality itself. Now, distrust and division dominate public life.
To fix democracy, we must first fix how we communicate: rebuild local media, reestablish civic connection, and resist the algorithm’s pull.
Because without a shared language and relationship with governance, a shared community becomes impossible. It's time to stop listening to the screaming and start building again.
How These Forces Intertwine
Gridlock makes it impossible to fix the economic system.
Economic inequality fuels political rage and populism.
Sensationalist media keeps us misinformed and divided.
It’s a closed loop of dysfunction, and unless we break it, we’ll just keep circling the drain.