World
Social distress is growing in the US
It is revealing that the growing social distress is generated not on the periphery of the Western world-system, but in the American metropolis itself. Equally revealing is that the West’s decline was not provoked by any catastrophe; on the contrary, it became evident at the very peak of the globalization-Americanization of humanity.
After the collapse of the USSR and the Soviet bloc, US military hegemony and the dominance of the world’s reserve currency turned the United States into a global center for the capitalization of resources – the supreme beneficiary of the outflow of capital, brains, and ambitious youth from across the world. Only twenty-five years have passed since the apotheosis of the food-chain “finalists” was captured in Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History, and already the desperate Donald Trump, calling to “Make America Great Again,” has drawn a line under Pax Americana.
What, then, happened?
A different country
Over the last quarter of the twentieth century and the first quarter of the twenty-first, the population of the United States grew by one hundred million people. Yet this impressive growth conceals a deep deficit: the United States is experiencing a decline in the production of life itself.
Since the 1970s, the American population has increased only due to immigration. Within the country’s own social space, the number of births has steadily fallen while mortality has risen. The story of religious salvation and the shine of economic success have turned into their opposites: a stream of seekers of the “American miracle,” inflated by financialization of GDP and the Pyrrhic victory of globalization, continues to pour in – but life itself is ebbing away from America.
In 2023, the number of births in the US dropped to the level of 1979, when the nation’s population was a third smaller than it is now. Fertility has declined to 1.6 children per woman (see chart below), and among white Americans to 1.5. Depopulation now affects all major demographic groups – not only whites, but also African Americans and Hispanics.
Because immigrants are predominantly from Latin America, Asia, and Africa, those communities continue to grow in the US, while the share of white Americans has plummeted. In the United States that, together with the USSR, won World War II, white Americans of European descent made up almost 90% of the population. In 1990, they still accounted for 80%; in 2010, for 72%; and by 2020 their share had dropped sharply to 62% (see maps below).
Spread of white American population over time
According to the 2020 census, whites became a minority in America’s three largest cities: New York (31%), Los Angeles (25%), and Chicago (31%), as well as in Washington, D.C. (38%). The 2020 demographic map clearly shows that the phrase “a different country” is no exaggeration – it merely records a demographic, genealogical, and ethnocultural transformation.
It is certain that since 2020 this transformation has only intensified, especially after President Biden effectively opened the border with Mexico. According to estimates from his opponents, another 10 million immigrants have moved to the United States.
Meanwhile, the 2020 census not only documented the declining proportion of white Americans but also recorded something unprecedented: for the first time in US history, the absolute number of white Americans decreased, by 5.1 million people in ten years.
The accelerating decline of the white population – a bitter hangover from the “end of history” – indicates that the elite of the “golden billion” is rotting at the root. The inflow of culturally different immigrants deepens the decay of the American nation but is not its primary cause. In a striking paradox, the inhabitants of the world’s most privileged summit have stopped reproducing and, even more strangely for a highly developed country, have begun dying more often.
Depression of the nation
Anne Case and Angus Deaton documented and analyzed the rise in mortality among Americans during the first two decades of the 21st century – particularly among white people aged 45–54 – due to alcoholism, suicide, and opioid addiction. In their study titled Deaths of Despair, the authors indict large pharmaceutical corporations, their lobbyists in Congress, and collaborators in the medical community who, in pursuit of profit, have cultivated widespread dependence on dangerous and addictive painkillers.
Another “progressive” way of combating alcoholism and mass depression has been the legalization of soft drugs. This created a legal and rapidly growing marijuana market worth $50 billion annually, a market now being exploited by fast-food giants as a related line of business. According to some estimates, the lion’s share of marijuana production remains under the control of drug cartels; since legalization, it has become much harder for police to maintain any semblance of order.
Scientific data add to the picture: over the past 30 years, the content of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) – the main psychoactive component of cannabis – has quadrupled in the US supply.
The lobbyists for marijuana legalization promised it would reduce alcohol consumption. Marijuana has indeed “defeated” alcohol in the sense that its use now exceeds alcohol consumption in the US – but that does not mean alcohol use has declined. At the end of the yellow-line curve on the relevant graph, there is only a minor rebound after the spike in alcoholism during the COVID-19 lockdowns.
Doctors warn that cannabis consumption – especially with THC levels four times higher than in the past – dramatically increases the risk of psychosis. Half of American teenagers now exhibit symptoms of depression, and dissatisfaction with life among US teens has doubled in the past decade. Psychologist Jean Twenge links this surge in youth depression to the pervasive internalization of digital social networks, and she is right. Yet it is also striking how closely her depression-trend graph mirrors the rise in marijuana use.
Many such “spikes” of problematic growth can be seen across US social data: symptoms of depression among youth have doubled; the number of daily marijuana users has reached 18 million people; 42% of the population is now overweight; the share of the LGBT community in the US has grown to 5.6%, and among Generation Z (born 1997–2002) to 15.9% of adults. (Gallup, notably, interprets this not as a problem but as a “progressive trend.”)
Growing anomie
The phenomena observed in recent years – the unprecedented decline of the native-born population and the growth of replacement immigration; the simultaneous increase in alcohol and marijuana use amid opioid addiction and mass obesity; the unnatural depression among youth alongside an unnatural transformation of sexual identity – all this, taken together, indicates that the United States has entered a phase of social anomie. To test this hypothesis, let us examine data on crime and homicide rates.
In 2020, there were 21,570 murders in the US – an immediate 30% increase compared to 2019, the largest single-year rise ever recorded in the country. Explaining this by the socioeconomic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic seems unconvincing, since all countries faced pandemic-related challenges, yet this dramatic surge in murders occurred specifically in the United States.
It is enough to compare the US trend with that of Russia, which under Putin has been moving steadily away from the dire criminal records of its post-Soviet collapse.
As can be seen, the number of homicides in Russia continues to fall, reaching historical lows for the country, while in the US, after the 2020 surge, the homicide rate stabilized at a much higher level.
The frequency of murders naturally correlates with overall crime levels. And since everything is known by comparison, let us again compare the US with Russia – which, to be fair, still remains far from the safest country in the world. The chart from 2020 shows the rates of murders, assaults, robberies, and rapes per 1 million residents in both nations.
The diagram is quite telling. One could assume that in Russia many assaults or rapes go unreported, but it’s hard to imagine the same about robberies. So if Russia’s crime rate, though still high, has declined, then the US is currently experiencing a true crime wave.
In addition, the United States has been swept by a surge of spontaneous street violence: the number of aggravated assaults in 2020 rose by 100,000 cases from the previous year, reaching 922,000 incidents.
The trigger for the police crisis and the sharp rise in crime in 2020 was the high-profile case of George Floyd and Derek Chauvin. Floyd – who died during arrest while under the influence of a large drug dose – became the icon of the Black Lives Matter protest movement. The police officer Chauvin, who detained Floyd and was charged with his death, became the scapegoat of liberal crusaders against alleged police violence and was sentenced to 22.5 years in prison.
The vilification of police and the tolerance of street crime, elevated to public policy, became a vivid expression of social anomie and a factor in its amplification. Thus, the post-2020 rise in crime is entirely logical. Here are a few notable examples:
Freight train raids have grown in arithmetic progression. In 2023, US shippers reported 1,183 cases of cargo theft, causing total losses of $694 million per year. The West Coast and California’s Central Valley are especially affected; in California, 54% of passing freight trains are attacked.
Union Pacific, the nation’s largest railroad company, considered rerouting because theft in Los Angeles County was harming business. In the three months preceding the holiday shopping season, an average of 90 containers per day were broken into, and over 100 arrests were made – but local courts treated these as petty offenses and released offenders within 24 hours, as the company’s letter to the Los Angeles district attorney complained.
Metal thieves have gone from raiding bridges, Tesla charging stations, and traffic lights to cutting main telephone lines, including those used by emergency services. In Washington State, 2-3 incidents of copper cable theft occur weekly, with each requiring up to 48 hours of repair and costing at least $100,000 per episode.
In New York, moped robberies have sharply increased. Gangs of illegal migrants enter cafés and restaurants, rob patrons, and escape before police arrive. In 2023 there were 32 such incidents, and in just the first six months of 2024 – 116.
When mass aggressiveness combines with a policing crisis, both criminal violence and broader social irresponsibility increase. Another manifestation of social anomie is reckless behavior on the roads and a rise in traffic fatalities. And since road mortality has long been a painful issue for Russia, let us again compare.
We see that traffic-death rates in the US follow the same upward trend as murder rates, reflecting the general rise in crime. In fact, the US level of these negative phenomena has now surpassed that of the Russian Federation.
Destruction of civil cohesion
Particular attention should be paid to the fact that the rise of anomie in the United States coincides with the degeneration of productive social inequality into counter-productive social divergence. Inequality, when moderate, is necessary for social order and development – but it always carries the risk of destroying civic unity and marginalizing the poor. Therefore, the state must constantly keep inequality within bounds that allow the competition of private interests to coexist with national cohesion.
The consolidation of the nation during World War II and the subsequent rise of the United States in its rivalry with the Soviet Union would have been impossible without the so-called egalitarian revolution – an unprecedented reduction of inequality during the war and the thirty post-war years that followed. Franklin Roosevelt’s and later Dwight Eisenhower’s progressive taxation on super-incomes – at rates from 72 % to 94 % – together with a progressive inheritance tax, subsidized retraining for demobilized servicemen, and the broad democratization of education, as well as Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty programs in 1964, all reduced inequality in the United States to its historical minimum and ensured the flourishing of the American middle class.
The radical liberalism that triumphed under Ronald Reagan launched the reverse process – an elitist counter-revolution, the essence of which was the financialization of capitalism and the concentration of financial assets in an ever-narrower elite. What came of it? “The Triumph of Injustice” – that is how economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman titled their analysis of the long, bipartisan policy of lowering taxes for the rich and for corporations, and of tolerating large-scale tax avoidance through the practical abolition of the inheritance tax and the rise of a whole industry helping corporations hide profits in offshore accounts. As a result, the US tax system became regressive. During Donald Trump’s first presidency, for the first time in a century, billionaires paid a smaller share of their income in taxes than steelworkers, teachers, or pensioners. And this, note, is not a purely American phenomenon: in this matter the Browns, Macrons, and Trumps of the entire globalized West agree with one another.
The calculations of these cited authors may be debated – but the objective reality cannot. Hyper-concentration of capital eliminates democracy: the American middle class has disappeared, and in nine cases out of ten, children no longer live better than their parents. To confirm this, let us look at the distribution of household wealth in the US:
Percentile GroupShare of National Wealth (%) 1990 Q4Share 2024 Q3Top 1 %14.922.080–99 %43.746.860–80 %18.214.640–60 %12.68.720–40 %7.54.70–20 %3.13.1
Source: Federal Reserve System, “Distribution of Household Wealth in the U.S. since 1989.”
From these figures we can conclude the following. The concentration of wealth in the United States has risen even further over the past thirty-three years. In 1990, the wealthiest fifth of households owned 58.6 % of all assets; by 2024, that figure had reached 68.8 %, while the remaining 80 % of households share only 31.1 %.
The bottom two quintiles (40 %) of poor households became even poorer: their meager share of assets fell from 10.6 % in 1990 to 7.8 % by 2025. The next two quintiles (another 40 %), representing the traditional middle class, suffered the greatest losses: their share shrank from 30.8 % to 23.3 %.
Even within the top fifth, wealth is highly unevenly distributed: of the 68.8 % of all household assets held by the top 20 %, nearly one-third belongs to the richest 1 %. And among that top 1 %, wealth is growing faster than for anyone else: from roughly 15 % to 22 % of all assets. In essence, almost all growth in American wealth now fits within the “golden” boundaries of this one-percent elite.
Ranked globally by the decile coefficient (DC) – the ratio of the income share of the richest 10 % to that of the poorest 10 % – the United States, with a value of 13.7, holds 96th place, showing more inequality than any other developed nation except Israel (14.5) and the United Kingdom (13.8).
The COVID-19 pandemic and the economic recession it triggered drastically worsened the condition of low-income groups. Looking at the enormous number of COVID deaths in the United States – over 1.138 million – it is important to note that in poor counties, people died from the virus nearly twice as often as in wealthier ones. At the same time, large-scale government spending drove up stock and housing prices, which, in turn, further enriched the wealthy while deepening poverty. A radical manifestation of mass pauperization is the rise in homelessness: according to the Institute of Global Homelessness, the US has 653,100 homeless people.
Income and educational polarization strongly correlate with racial and ethnic composition, leading to territorial segregation between states, counties, and cities – rich and white on one side, poor and non-white on the other. This is clearly visible on CNN’s detailed map “Race and Ethnicity Across the Nation.”
Segregation is most dramatic in the largest metropolises, where ultra-wealthy white districts border impoverished Black and Latino neighborhoods. This extreme polarization breeds anomie – vividly illustrated by New Year’s scenes of looting amid the ashes of elite Los Angeles villas. Perhaps it was not just looting: a viral video showing an arsonist suggests that the causes of California’s “most expensive wildfire” were as much social as natural.
If we compare the racial-ethnic map of Greater Los Angeles with a map of California wildfires, we can see that the fires engulfed areas of expensive real estate owned by the white minority. On the map, white population clusters are marked in blue, and the fire zones outlined in green overlap them.
In recent years, “Latino” sectors on the US map have clearly expanded. There are now over 60 million Latinos – roughly 20 % of the population – and they have become the predominant ethnic group in California and Texas. When migrants fill up the areas they have already settled, they move into neighboring ones, and former residents quickly move out. A more radical method of “redistribution” is the fire.
In the US, people now openly talk about civil war, and Hollywood has even portrayed it on screen. Everything suggests that, in Marxist terms, the agenda now includes a class war – with a racial dimension. Whoever writes the script, the villas of Hollywood seem destined to become a theater of combat.
Another terrifying manifestation of social breakdown was the murder of UnitedHealthCare CEO Brian Thompson, a crime that defies the usual American categories of violence: psychopathic mass shootings, criminal feuds, killer cops, or partisan hunts for autocrats. The disinterested killing of the head of one of America’s largest companies, and the public sympathy for his 26-year-old killer Luigi Mangione, strongly recalls the social-revolutionary pathos of Russia’s early-twentieth-century “storm petrels.”
The black-hole effect
Luigi Mangione’s act would never have resonated so widely were it not for the public’s perception of health-insurance executives as people who turned medicine into a cynical business built on human suffering. Even those who condemn the murderer are compelled to acknowledge that they understand his motives and share his resentment toward the existing insurance-based healthcare system.
Let specialists debate the details of how that system functions; for assessing social well-being, what matters most are the cost and the result.
Healthcare in the United States is both a major component of the economy and an embodiment of the American spirit: private providers deliver medical services whose high cost is partly reimbursed through competing insurance systems, including public programs, while the rest is paid directly by patients. As a result, US medical spending is roughly twice the OECD average, amounting to about 18 percent of the nation’s GDP – the largest in the world.
Roughly half of that astronomical sum consists of government spending (federal and state budgets), and the other half comes from private sources (insurance premiums and out-of-pocket payments).
And regarding the growth of US GDP: the share prices of health-insurance corporations keep climbing, as do the prices of medical services, equipment, and pharmaceuticals. The flip side of this growth is grim: 66.5 percent of all personal bankruptcies in the country are linked to medical expenses. In the realm of “medical bankruptcies,” the United States is an unmatched world leader.
The nation’s achievements in increasing life expectancy, however, are far more modest. Despite leading the world in healthcare spending, the US does not rank among the top 30 developed countries where average life expectancy reaches or exceeds 80 years. After the COVID-19 pandemic, the US even fell below China in global life-expectancy rankings.
According to the data, US life expectancy stopped rising after 2010, never reaching 79 years. In China, the indicator continues to grow; in Russia, after a post-COVID dip, it has already surpassed the pre-pandemic level. But in the United States, life expectancy has not returned to pre-pandemic figures.
Another universal indicator of a healthcare system’s quality is infant-mortality rate. This metric reflects not only medical standards but also the state’s commitment to social responsibility and the overall culture of preserving life. And by this measure, the world’s top spender on healthcare looks unimpressive: the US ranks 48th in infant-mortality, between North Macedonia and Uruguay.
In the 2020s, the US infant-mortality rate has not decreased – it has even risen, reaching 5.6 deaths per 1,000 live births. By 2016, Russia had already overtaken the US on this metric and continues to lower infant mortality; China, according to recent data, has now surpassed the US as well.
But nowhere is the failure of the American healthcare system more vividly exposed than in comparison with Cuba: the island’s GDP per capita is six times smaller, yet its infant-mortality rate (3.94) is significantly lower than that of the transcontinental “American democracy.”
The lag of the United States behind China and Russia in manufacturing, agriculture, and several high-tech sectors is no longer news. But what is important is to grasp the general trend and the historical scale of transformation. Today, the metropolis of the globalized West has become a hotbed of social anomie, its viability sustained solely by assimilating external resources – every resource it can reach. As long as the American ruling elites continue to think of themselves as the subject of “global law,” the social well-being of the United States – and of the rest of the world – will remain a zero-sum game.
