The United States is arguably in its darkest place, and facing its most urgent crisis, since the Civil War and the Great Depression. Our democracy is facing an existential crisis.
This is not routine polarization or cyclical stress, but a rupture in which core assumptions about democracy, shared obligation, and the role of government are being rewritten in real time, more often by force than by consent.
Over the past year, the country has not merely flirted with illiberalism but has normalized it.
Housing scarcity is treated as immutable, even as homelessness reaches levels once thought unimaginable.
Immigration is addressed through mass detention and deportation, justified by claims of finite capacity and existential threat.
Social breakdown is met not with investment, but with policing and incarceration.
What makes this moment especially dangerous is not only how bad conditions have become, but how limited our political imagination has grown.
Across housing, immigration, and the criminal legal system, the same logic prevails: there is not enough to go around, systems cannot be expanded, and coercion must take the place of governance.
Scarcity is framed as reality, punishment is sold as necessity, and this is the premise we must reject.
Housing is a clear but perhaps surprising embodiment of this artificial scarcity mindset.
In a country capable of building millions of homes, we have instead chosen to restrict supply through zoning, procedural delay, and political vetoes that protect asset values while treating shelter as a privilege rather than infrastructure.
The resulting crisis—soaring rents, displacement, and mass homelessness—is then treated as an unavoidable fact of life, reinforcing the fiction that there is simply not enough to go around.
Scarcity here is not imposed by limits but instead is produced by design, and when people inevitably fall through, the response is not construction at scale but criminalization—encampment sweeps, fines, and police enforcement.
Immigration policy follows the same logic, even as a broad range of mainstream economic research continues to find that immigration is a net positive for growth, labor markets, and long-term fiscal health.
Instead of governing from that evidence, the country has embraced a scarcity mindset—treating immigrants as competitors for jobs, housing, and public resources presumed to be in fixed supply.
Legal pathways are narrowed, humanitarian relief is rationed, and administrative backlogs stretch for years, producing undocumented populations by design.
That manufactured scarcity is then invoked to justify a harsh response: detention, deportation, and a steadily more militarized enforcement apparatus, offered as solutions to a crisis created by the system itself.
Policing and the criminal legal system complete the picture. Courts still operate, hearings are held, and due process formally remains.
But instead of addressing the conditions driving disorder—untreated mental illness, substance use disorder, and the collapse of affordable housing and social support—the state has increasingly relied on repression as a substitute for care.
People who are unhoused and unwell are treated not as individuals in need of treatment, education, and work, but as problems to be managed through arrest, jail, and supervision.
Cash bail, probation revocations for technical violations, the rollback of diversion programs, and the aggressive prosecution of protest all reflect the same governing instinct: when social capacity is constrained by choice, discipline fills the gap.
Across these systems, enforcement has become a substitute for confronting economic inequality and the policy choices that sustain it.
This is the point at which the idea of artificial scarcity becomes unavoidable.
As Bernie Sanders writes, “The United States is the wealthiest nation in the history of the world. Given that reality, we now have the opportunity to create the kind of society that has only been dreamed of in the past—a nation in which every man, woman, and child has a decent standard of living. This is not utopian thinking. This is doable, and exactly what we should be fighting for.”
This is a rejection of the premise now animating so much public policy: that scarcity is inevitable and ambition naïve.
Sanders is arguing that we should not be where we are—that mass deprivation in a wealthy society is not tragic necessity, but political failure.
“Make housing affordable,” Sanders writes. “At a time when nearly 800,000 Americans are homeless and over 20 million families are paying at least 50 percent of their limited income on housing, we must expand the National Housing Trust Fund to build at least 4 million more units of low-income and affordable housing.”
The same logic applies to education, another domain where scarcity has been normalized.
“The United States used to be the best-educated nation on Earth. Not anymore,” Sanders observes.
The decline did not occur because the country lacked wealth or talent, but because investment was deferred, access narrowed, and inequality tolerated—turning education, like housing, into something to be rationed rather than expanded.
Once scarcity is accepted as natural, punishment follows easily.
If housing is limited, homelessness must be policed.
When immigrants are viewed through a scarcity lens—as competitors for jobs, housing, and public goods rather than as contributors—presence itself becomes something to be policed.
When opportunity is constrained, poverty and illness are treated as disorder—and suppression becomes the response.
In short, a finite-pie worldview now dominates governance: there is not enough to go around, structural failure is recast as individual blame, and enforcement becomes the default response.
Scarcity performs powerful political work: it lowers expectations, narrows imagination, shifts attention from why relief is unavailable to who deserves it, allows leaders to promise order instead of improvement, and creates fertile ground for authoritarian politics rooted in fear, resentment, and managed decline.
But this is all choice, not destiny. And while the moment is dire, it is not too late to pull back.
We did not have to arrive at this point. We did not have to restrict housing supply instead of building at scale. We did not have to treat immigration through the lens of scarcity and competition rather than contribution and capacity. We did not have to rely on policing and incarceration to manage poverty, illness, and instability rooted in inequality and exclusion.
A wealthy society that governs from a recognition of abundance can expand dignity, address vulnerability with care, and build order through shared capacity rather than enforcement.
The deeper danger is not only the damage already done, but the risk that this limited thinking hardens into inevitability.
We can no longer accept what we have convinced ourselves cannot be changed.
This country is in a dark place, but darkness is not destiny. We must act before it is too late.
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Well said.