https://wendy664.substack.com/p/the-republican-party-has-spent-half
~~ recommended by newestbeginning ~~
This is one of the most insightful articles I have read in a long time... "Administered poverty" to achieve a political objective and subjugate the working class as much as possible by Republicans. Seen from this lens, their actions and joyful cruelty make sense, NB
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Cliff Dwellers Credit: George Bellows, 1913. Republicans sold the American dream upward. They delivered crowding below, then taught those trapped there to praise deprivation as freedom.
Huntington Called Americans the Problem. The Republican Party Called That a Platform.
In 1975, a Harvard professor commissioned by some of the most powerful financial and political figures in the Western world delivered to the American ruling class a document diagnosing what they considered their most consequential governance problem and prescribing remedies. The threat was not inflation weakening the dollar, the Soviet Union pressing NATO’s eastern flank, or the energy crisis convulsing global markets. The threat was the American people.
Samuel Huntington, writing for the Trilateral Commission, a body David Rockefeller assembled from senior corporate executives, bankers, and political strategists across three continents, described the condition with the clinical detachment of a man who had already chosen the cure. American governance had become ungovernable, Huntington argued, because it suffered from what his 1975 report called an “excess of democracy.”
The remedy Huntington prescribed was neither censorship nor martial law, but a more durable and less constitutionally visible instrument: a population too resource-depleted to sustain meaningful political participation.
Huntington argued that the effective operation of a democratic political system “usually requires some measure of apathy and noninvolvement on the part of some individuals and groups.” Four years earlier, Lewis Powell had sent his confidential memorandum to the US Chamber of Commerce, outlining a coordinated campaign to capture the legislature, judiciary, and academy. Huntington furnished the governing rationale. Powell had already outlined the institutional machinery.
Both documents found their primary instrument in the Republican Party, which has been executing that coordinated mandate through legislation, litigation, and executive policy for five unbroken decades.
This program’s architects understood its consequences. Social psychologists Jim Sidanius and Felicia Pratto identified the dynamic: Social Dominance Orientation, a measurable predisposition toward preserving group hierarchies across institutions. High-SDO actors build frameworks that block subordinate groups from gaining political power and treat collective mobilization as a threat demanding suppression.
Huntington’s 1975 commission report did not emerge in a vacuum. Through the framework Sidanius and Pratto later formalized, the document reveals an institutional high-SDO response to the most consequential democratic mobilizations in modern American history. The civil rights movement, the women’s movement, and organized anti-war campaigns expanded participation among populations Huntington identified as sources of democratic excess. Huntington prescribed demobilization, and the most constitutionally invisible instrument for achieving that objective at scale is administered poverty.
Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir documented the mechanism across multiple empirical settings: resource scarcity narrows cognitive capacity and consumes the bandwidth civic participation requires. A person managing an unpayable medical bill alongside preventable illness rarely retains the reserves necessary for precinct organizing, sustained advocacy, or ballot access.
Reducing the electorate was always the objective. Formal disenfranchisement was one instrument. Exhausting citizens before the ballot reached their hand proved quieter, cheaper, and more durable. The developing-nation metrics the United States now records across health and infrastructure indices are not incidental byproducts. They are measurable evidence of a governing model that converts hardship into political withdrawal.
The criteria separating developed from developing nations are methodologically specific and internationally standardized. The United Nations Human Development Index measures life expectancy, educational attainment, and per capita income as composite indicators of welfare. The WHO ranks healthcare systems through mortality outcomes, equity of access, and systemic responsiveness. The World Bank and OECD assess infrastructure through roads, water systems, energy grids, and transit networks. Labor economists classify workforce protection through paid leave and occupational safety enforcement. Social scientists measure safety-net strength through poverty-trap rates and the share of households one medical emergency from destitution.
The comparative record is unambiguous. The WHO and UN classify access to clean running water as a primary marker separating developed from underdeveloped infrastructure. According to DigDeep and the US Water Alliance, 2.2 million Americans lack running water, plumbing, or wastewater treatment, while 46 million rely on systems violating the Safe Drinking Water Act. On the Navajo Nation, nearly 40% of homes lack running water. This is the United States in 2025.
In 2024, US life expectancy reached 79.0 years while peer nations averaged 82.7, a 3.7-year deficit produced by long-term policy choices that underfunded public health. The United States ranks 43rd globally, below Costa Rica, Chile, and Qatar. Mississippi’s 71.9-year expectancy falls beneath Latvia, the OECD’s lowest-ranked member. America trails OECD peers on 77% of health indicators and records preventable mortality of 238 per 100,000 against 158 among peers. Americans pay nearly three times more per capita for healthcare yet die earlier. These outcomes are the measurable residue of legislative decisions across decades.
In 2023, the CDC documented a US maternal mortality rate of 18.6 deaths per 100,000 live births, the highest recorded figure among all high-income nations by a substantial margin. Norway recorded zero maternal deaths per 100,000 that period. Switzerland reported 1.2. Germany, Japan, and the Netherlands consistently report fewer than three maternal deaths per 100,000 live births across comparable measurement periods.
Black women in the United States died at 50.3 per 100,000 live births that same year, a mortality rate the Commonwealth Fund’s international analysis positioned above nearly every individual nation in comparative review. Under-5 child mortality registers at 6.7 deaths per 1,000 live births, placing the United States in the same mortality tier as Albania, a universally-insured NATO member. American per capita health expenditure dwarfs Albanian spending by every measurable index.
The United States stands alone among high-income nations in guaranteeing neither paid parental leave nor universal healthcare coverage as statutory baseline policy. Every comparable high-income government has mandated postpartum home visit infrastructure. The United States remains the singular exception.
Republican governors in Medicaid non-expansion states used healthcare policy to block low-income women from prenatal care. States enforcing abortion restrictions, overwhelmingly Republican-led, recorded maternal death rates 62% higher than states without them, according to peer-reviewed research. These outcomes are not neglect. They produce the exact condition Huntington required: a population too burdened by survival to sustain civic participation or political organization.
The American Society of Civil Engineers gave US infrastructure a C in 2025, the highest grade since formal scoring began in 1998, and directly credited the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021. House Republicans opposed that law 201 to 13. Before passage, every ASCE grade from 1998 through 2017 was D or D-plus. Reagan’s 1981 tax overhaul removed an estimated $750 billion in federal revenue over five years and helped construct the fiscal decline that followed.
Nine of eighteen categories still remain in the D range. Schools, aviation, wastewater, stormwater, and transit continue below functional adequacy. ASCE projects a $3.7 trillion repair gap. Republicans then sought to reclaim unspent funds from the first law in four decades that measurably slowed national deterioration.
Healthcare access bears the same legislative authorship. 27.1 million Americans lacked insurance in 2024, as Medicaid redeterminations stripped working families of coverage nationwide. The Congressional Budget Office projects 10 million more uninsured by 2034 under laws already enacted. Universal healthcare reached the federal floor four times since 1945, yet Republican opposition blocked each attempt. The Affordable Care Act then survived 70 House repeal votes. Fourteen Republican-led states refused Medicaid expansion for years, preserving a manufactured coverage gap while medical debt remained the nation’s leading bankruptcy trigger.
America’s vaccination system shows the same pattern. The CDC declared measles eliminated in 2000 after immunity exceeded 95%. By 2024-2025, kindergarten MMR coverage had fallen to 92.5%, while non-medical exemptions rose to 3.4%, roughly 138,000 children. Republican-led states weakened school-entry safeguards, producing double-digit declines across five states. What appears as administrative drift is legislative design.
In the first three months of 2026, the United States recorded 1,671 confirmed measles cases, representing 73% of all 2025 case volume within a single quarter. Three Americans died from measles in 2025, the first domestic fatalities attributable to the disease in over twenty years. The Republican Party formalized the institutional trajectory driving those fatalities by confirming Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services, installing a documented opponent of established immunization protocols at the administrative apex of the federal public health apparatus.
A 2025 JAMA simulation determined that a 10% further decline in national vaccination coverage produces 11.1 million measles cases under current transmission conditions. That figure is not a theoretical projection. The number reflects a trajectory calculation derived from current epidemiological conditions under leadership acting on documented public intent.
Republican leadership constructed this outcome. Donors sustained it for five decades, from the Powell Memorandum through the Heritage Foundation to Project 2025. Strategists shaped law and regulation with full awareness that engineered deprivation would reduce the democratic participation Huntington cast as dangerous excess.
Republican voters ratified the program. They returned officials who cut Medicaid, blocked prenatal care, and empowered vaccine denial as measles re-entered their own communities.
Huntington warned the ruling class that Americans had accumulated too much democratic power. Republican donors funded the systematic solution. Republican officials legislated its operational components. Republican voters ratified every mechanism at every election cycle for fifty years, and the developing-nation metrics the United States now posts across international indices are what that sustained ratification purchased.
Nations do not acquire developing-world classification through negligence. The Republican Party constructed this record across half a century of documented legislative action. The documentation sustains one conclusion: deliberate, systematic dismantling of the public health and civic infrastructure the United States built across the preceding century.
Sources
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Maternal Mortality Rates in the United States, 2023 (2025). https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/
American Society of Civil Engineers. 2025 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure. https://
infrastructurereportcard.org/ United States Census Bureau. Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2024. https://www.census.gov/
Congressional Budget Office. Federal Subsidies for Health Insurance Coverage for People Under 65: 2024 to 2034. https://www.cbo.gov/
KFF. Measles Elimination Status: What It Is and How the U.S. Could Lose It. https://www.kff.org/
DigDeep. Closing the Water Access Gap in the United States: A National Action Plan. https://www.digdeep.org/
OECD. Health at a Glance 2023. https://www.oecd.org/
Huntington, Samuel, Michel Crozier, and Joji Watanuki. The Crisis of Democracy. New York University Press, 1975.
Powell, Lewis F. Attack on American Free Enterprise System. 1971. https://scholarlycommons.law.
wlu.edu/ Mullainathan, Sendhil, and Eldar Shafir. Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much. Times Books, 2013.
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