Platforms have distributed propaganda that cultivated bigotry, all the while being prone to security breaches. When coupled with the looting of economic sectors like journalism, plus the installation of mass surveillance infrastructure which collaborates with state and corporate entities, the emerging image is of firms whose routine operations are wholly adjacent to broad-based democratic imperatives. Moreover, the centrality of privately owned platforms to American culture is indicative of the extent to which capital has gained control of public discourse. This algorithmic public sphere presents a general impediment to democratization in the US and elsewhere. But this is only the departure point for an analysis of class rule and unfreedom in American life.

More broadly, conditions for capital accumulation have never been more favourable. But the efficiency of this social logic is necessarily bound together with the dramatic acceleration of global social inequality and thus the beginnings of revolutionary demands from the many who have been excluded and for whom it has come at their expense. One looping effect of this deprivation and the contradictions upon which it rests is that an organic crisis emerged in the US. One ‘fix’ to this crisis has been to embrace Caesarism, to redirect grievances and curtail some means of democratic redress. The political terrain is shifting so it would be foolish to offer declarative forecasts about these developments as there is much struggle ahead. But the ruling class has the advantage of incumbency. Presently they are using it to shore up their positions. For example, between the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 and the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act of 2020, the US has seen the largest upward transfer of wealth in the country's history, with a projected tax revenue shortfall of $195 billion over ten years (Whitehouse and Doggett, 2020). All of this reveals the deep cruelty of the American ruling class. But it also generally vindicates American democratic socialists’ analysis of the structural problems in the country's political economy as well as the agenda that can directly address the causes and the ‘fixes’.

Still, due to the ruling class's entrenchment, the socialist agenda will not be on the November 2020 ballot, an election presented as a selection between either democracy or authoritarianism.