For a country that chants about greatness, we’ve gotten disturbingly comfortable with failure — not accidental failure, but failure chosen, defended, and repeated by people in power who expect the rest of us to pretend it’s normal. If America feels like it’s slipping, that’s because it is. And it’s slipping for reasons we can name.

Let’s start with the rule of law. When Congress issued subpoenas during the January 6 investigation, Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro didn’t just ignore them — they dared the system to stop them. Both were convicted of contempt of Congress. Mark Meadows, a former White House Chief of Staff, refused full compliance and walked away untouched. We also had Jim Jordan, who refused to comply with a subpoena from the House January 6^th Committee in 2022, openly defying the panel's order for him to testify about his actions surrounding the attack on the Capitol. We now have Trump declaring war and attacking Iran without the approval of Congress, which is a direct violation of the Constitution. If insiders can shrug off the law, then it’s not the law. It’s a costume.

Meanwhile, the people who actually follow the rules are getting crushed. In Indianapolis, a full-time worker making seventeen or eighteen dollars an hour — the standard wage for warehouse, retail, and healthcare support jobs — still can’t afford a basic one-bedroom apartment. Indiana also has one of the highest rates of medical debt in the Midwest. This isn’t a blue‑state problem. This is the American heartland being hollowed out while politicians argue on cable news. This is the same scenario that is playing out all over the nation, with no one working to solve it. Why? It seems like the only important thing is tax cuts for billionaires, yet the problems of the working man are ignored. Yet the very people who are suffering at the hands of the billionaires are told it is some poor immigrants' fault. Funny, but when that immigrant is removed, it doesn’t seem to get better. In fact, it just seems to get worse.

And when we actually found a policy that worked — the expanded Child Tax Credit — we let it die. It cut child poverty nearly in half. Then, Senator Joe Manchin blocked its renewal, citing costs and work-incentive concerns. Because the Senate was evenly divided, one senator’s refusal was enough to double child poverty the next year. That wasn’t fate. That was a decision, and that decision is like many that are made in Washington that affect the quality of life for our children and their future.  

If we’re going to talk about accountability, we can’t ignore the people who built their careers on avoiding it. Senator Rick Scott of Florida didn’t just run a healthcare company — he ran Columbia/HCA, which later paid what was then the largest Medicare fraud settlement in U.S. history. The company paid $1.7 billion in fines for fraudulent billing practices. Scott wasn’t charged personally, but he resigned as CEO and left with a payout worth hundreds of millions. Think about that: the man who oversaw a company involved in massive Medicare fraud now positions himself as a watchdog of federal spending. Ordinary Americans go to jail for far less than what he did. But in America’s two-tiered system, some people walk away from a historic scandal and become a governor and then land in the U.S. Senate. That’s not a strength. That’s rot.

The same self-inflicted wound shows up in energy. While South Korea and the EU sprinted ahead with battery plants and wind‑turbine factories, we got stuck in political trench warfare. States like Ohio, Indiana, Kansas, Iowa, Wisconsin, North Carolina, and parts of Texas blocked or stalled wind and solar projects that companies were ready to build. Those jobs didn’t evaporate. They left. Now we put on tariffs to try to bring back manufacturing while ignoring the science that could help create millions of jobs right here at home. At the same time, other countries are leaving us in the dust when it comes to green technology. We are not protecting jobs in America. We are hurting the future of our grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Our justice system is no better. A low-income person who commits small-scale fraud can get years in prison. A corporation involved in a billion-dollar scandal often pays a fine and moves on. No executives in handcuffs. No accountability. To find the best example of no accountability, all you have to do is look at the Epstein scandal. Some billionaires have been accused of raping minor girls, who, as I understand it, were as young as 12. The world knows this. There are millions of pages of investigated documents that have been either redacted or just withheld to protect the billionaires who committed the crimes. Some co-conspirators were just erased from the system. When the law stops caring about its children and protects criminal billionaires, it has a real problem.

And then there’s education — the foundation of everything. National surveys show that only about half of Americans can name the three branches of government. We even have a working Senator who, when he was elected, could not name the branches of government. Instead of fixing it, politicians in states like Florida, Texas, and Oklahoma have spent years restricting what teachers can say about history, race, and government. They’ve banned books, driven teachers out of the profession, and siphoned money away from public schools. The result is predictable: students who know less, think less, and are easier to manipulate. This will greatly affect the future of this nation, and the people who have created it will have long gone. We have to think of the future now, and we are failing to do so.

Science hasn’t fared any better. During the pandemic, public‑health agencies presented decades of research on vaccines and masks. Large media ecosystems and political figures pushed misinformation instead. Why? The first reason was for political power by making our then-President Joe Biden seem like he was taking away their rights. He was only trying his best to save lives, but that didn’t matter. Because of the misinformation, thousands and thousands of people died who didn’t have to. Climate scientists have reached an overwhelming consensus on human-driven warming, yet some leaders from mostly one political party still dismiss the science outright. Again Why? Oil! Which is the very thing that is driving climate change in the first place. Too many people are making too much money to want to help slow down climate change. That decision will more than likely cost millions of lives worldwide, but that is not their problem because when the bill is due, they will be long gone, I guess.

And finally, immigration. Most immigration violations are civil matters or, at most, federal misdemeanors. Yet the U.S. has repeatedly placed migrants — including children — in jail-like detention centers and chain‑link enclosures while they wait for civil proceedings. Why? Hate, racism, and bigotry? Yes! We also have a political party that points at those immigrants and says they are the problem in the country. They are the reason why our healthcare is so high. They are the problem why our rents are so high. We have exposed thousands of immigrants to inhuman treatment for a political lie that takes advantage of people's hate.

America isn’t failing because we’re divided. America is failing because too many leaders have chosen culture‑war theater over governing, propaganda over truth, and power over responsibility. We’ve let them. We’ve normalized it. We’ve excused it. And we’ve paid the price and will continue to pay an even higher price in the future. If we want America to be great, we have to stop lying to ourselves about what’s holding us back — and who’s holding us back. History will remember their names. The question is whether we will hold them accountable now?