Is This Rock Bottom?

America is broken. We need to fix it.

I keep waiting for someone in power or seeking it to say the quiet part out loud: the amount of work required to fix this country is far bigger than “beating Trump” or “restoring norms” or whatever line gets handed to Democratic donors and MSNBC panels. I keep waiting for someone to look the public in the eye and say: we’re not going to vote our way back to the America we think we used to have, because the America we think we used to have never actually existed for most people.

Here’s the reality: we are the richest country in the history of the world — not just now, but ever — and one in eight Americans needs SNAP benefits to eat. Not because of COVID. Not because of a recession. Because our economic structure literally cannot sustain the basic well-being of tens of millions of people without federal food aid.

We spend twice as much per person on healthcare as Japan or Italy, and yet we live shorter lives, get worse outcomes, and bankrupt people for getting sick. Medical debt is the number-one cause of personal bankruptcy, and 70,000 people a year die because they can’t afford care in time. That’s not a healthcare system. That’s an extraction machine.

So yes, the fights over SNAP, ACA subsidies, and shutdowns matter — but they’re symptoms, not causes. You don’t get 40 million people needing food aid and 100 million drowning in medical debt because of one bad president or one unlucky decade. You get there because the institutions that were supposed to protect the public spent decades serving somebody else.

And the Supreme Court is the clearest example of that failure — not because it suddenly became partisan, but because for seventy years it has sided with corporate power, police power, and concentrated wealth over constitutional rights and public power.

The New York Times ran a piece this week about a “strategic debate” among the three liberal justices. Elena Kagan wants to play the inside game quietly, hoping for incremental wins. Ketanji Brown Jackson thinks the institution is already compromised and the only honest thing left is to dissent loudly. Sonia Sotomayor is somewhere in the middle.

And the whole article treats this like a serious tactical question: should liberals whisper or shout? Which strategy is smarter?

But that framing only works if you believe the Supreme Court was functioning properly until recently — if you think Mitch McConnell broke it or Trump corrupted it. It only works if you think the crisis is new.

It isn’t.

Once you look at what the Court has actually done — not what it says, not what the civics textbooks pretend — the question isn’t “Which strategy should liberals use?” The question is: why are we still pretending this is a legitimate constitutional institution at all?

Let’s run the tape.

The First Amendment says “Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech.” Clear. Yet in 1951, the Court upheld jailing Communist Party leaders for teaching Marxism — not violence, just ideology. It rewrote the First Amendment to say: free speech, unless your ideas threaten the economic order.

The Fourth Amendment protects people against unreasonable searches and seizures, requiring warrants based on probable cause. But in 1968, the Court invented “stop-and-frisk” and lowered the standard to “reasonable suspicion” — meaning whatever a cop says it means. That ruling built the legal foundation for mass policing and racialized surveillance.

In 1978, the Court gave corporations First Amendment political-speech rights, paving the way for Citizens United in 2010, where unlimited corporate and billionaire money in elections became “free speech.” The Constitution says “We the People,” not “We the Shareholders.” Show me where it says money equals speech. You can’t — the Court had to invent it because the economic order required it.

In 1996, the Court said police can seize your property even if you’ve committed no crime, have not been charged, never get a trial. The Fifth Amendment says “no property shall be taken without due process.” The Court said police can take your car, your cash, your house if they claim it was involved in a crime — even if you’re innocent.

In 2013, the Court gutted the Voting Rights Act — even though the Fifteenth Amendment explicitly gives Congress the power to enforce voting rights. Congress used that power. The Court killed it anyway.

Then in 2019, the Court ruled that partisan gerrymandering — election-rigging so extreme that one party can get 45 percent of the vote and 75 percent of the seats — is a “political question” courts can’t touch. Too complicated. Not our job. But when corporate money wants into elections? First Amendment freedom. When citizens want fair representation? Sorry, can’t help.

And none of this even mentions qualified immunity — the made-up doctrine that makes it nearly impossible to sue police for violating your rights. It’s not in the Constitution; the Court invented it in 1967 and then spent half a century expanding it until accountability all but disappeared.

If you’re still telling yourself this Court “lost its way” recently, you’re living in a fantasy.

The Supreme Court didn’t break under Trump. It was already broken — Trump just walked through the hole where accountability used to be.

And here’s the part almost no one in mainstream politics will say: Trump is not the cause of the crisis. He’s the expression of it. He didn’t hijack the system. He’s what the system produces after fifty years of abandoning the public.

Martin Luther King Jr. said a riot is the language of the unheard. Trump’s election — both times — was a political riot. Not literal fire in the streets, but the same impulse: when people feel abandoned by every institution, when every promise has been broken, when the system stops working for them, they reach for the brick. Trump was the brick. He wasn’t the answer to their problems; he was the fuck-you to everyone who created them. You don’t get Trump without fifty years of elite failure first.

He’s what it looks like when elites offshore the jobs, financialize the economy, legalize corporate control of elections, militarize police, shred unions, and strip public services — and then act shocked when people stop believing in the system entirely.

And here’s what people miss about the Court: the justices aren’t neutral referees who got captured. They are the elite. They went to Yale and Harvard. They clerked for previous justices. They came up through corporate law firms or the Federalist Society. They live in a world where the system works — for them and for people like them. When you benefit from a system, you interpret the Constitution in ways that protect that system. You don’t have to be corrupt. You just have to be who you are.

Look at the timeline. The Court starts radically expanding corporate rights and gutting individual protections in the 1970s — the exact moment American elites decided to abandon domestic manufacturing and shift to finance. When you’re going to deindustrialize a country, hollow out the working class, and concentrate wealth on a scale not seen since the Gilded Age, you need legal infrastructure to make it possible.

The Supreme Court supplied it.

So when the Times writes about whether Justice Kagan is being smart and diplomatic or whether Justice Jackson is being too loud, what they’re really doing is protecting a fantasy — the fantasy that we had a functioning constitutional system that recently got knocked off balance. The fantasy that if we just get the tone right or the next appointment right, we can go back to normal.

But normal was already broken. Normal produced this.

The Supreme Court is just one example. You can tell the same story about nearly every institution in America. We hollowed out our industrial base and called it trade policy. We let private equity loot pensions and called it innovation. We turned healthcare into a profit center and called it efficiency. We rigged elections and called it redistricting. We militarized police and called it law and order.

And now we’re shocked — genuinely shocked — that the system doesn’t work for most people. That trust has collapsed. That someone like Trump could take power. But he didn’t break the system. The system was already designed to concentrate power and wealth at the top. Trump just understood that better than the people who built it.

So let’s be clear about what solving this requires, because it’s not what the political class is offering.

This won’t be solved by removing Trump or “beating MAGA.” It won’t be solved by one charismatic president with the right message. The problem isn’t one man or one movement. The problem is fifty years of institutional rot and elite capture — and you don’t undo that with one election.

We need a cohort of candidates — for Senate, House, governor, state legislature — running together on a platform that tells the truth about how we got here. Not the consultant version. The real one: that the system was designed to serve concentrated power, that it worked exactly as intended, and that fixing it means rebuilding it from the ground up.

Candidates willing to say: we should impeach justices who violate their oaths. That the Court is captured and must be restructured. That we need to build public capacity in healthcare, manufacturing, infrastructure, and energy — not because it polls well, but because it’s the only thing that works. Candidates who understand that the entrenched elite will hate them for it — and who welcome that hatred.

And those candidates have to run in coordination, not isolation. Because one progressive in Congress gets swarmed. One honest governor gets blocked by a hostile legislature. One senator telling the truth gets buried in corporate money. But fifty candidates running together, backing each other up, refusing to be picked off one by one — that’s a different equation.

This isn’t a purity test. It’s a reality test. Are you willing to acknowledge the scale of the failure and do the unglamorous, grinding work of taking power back from people who will fight like hell to keep it?

Because here’s the truth the political class won’t say: you can’t restore what never worked. You can’t defend institutions that already failed. And you can’t go back to an America that only existed in speeches and nostalgia.

If you actually want a government that serves 300 million people instead of 300 boardrooms, the answer isn’t restoration. It’s reconstruction.

A Court that enforces rights instead of inventing corporate ones. A healthcare system that treats care as a public obligation. An industrial policy that builds instead of speculates. A political system where votes matter more than donor checks. A government that exists to serve the people — and isn’t ashamed to say it.

The Supreme Court isn’t the whole story. But it’s the clearest example of the larger truth:

The system didn’t malfunction. The system worked — just not for us.

And if we want something different, we don’t go back.

We build what we were promised and never got I will being coming out with an idea for how to go forward together soon.

Corbin Trent