The problem they cannot face is the formation of political consensus. The more streetwise among them probably sense that the lobbying system — a romanticized form of corruption — lies behind Trump; they can clearly see that certain oligarchs of the American economy have by now formed a circle around power, yet they continue to think that Trump is behind what is happening. What they do not understand is that Trump is simply the face, the front end, of what has actually taken power.

Paradoxical as it may seem, the problem is that Americans do not see money. Suppose I were to say, for once, that the political problems of a country are caused by, let’s say, breathable air. Simply because… well, yes. The parties of that nation have too much access to breathable air, let us say. Then many people would jump on me. What are you talking about? Air is everywhere, it is natural, it is obvious. How could something we do not even see, precisely because it is so ubiquitous and neutral, ever be a problem?

Obviously, as everyone knows, breathable air can be anything but neutral: if we take a hurricane, for example, we immediately notice a less “neutral” or absolutely normal form of it. But in that case we no longer call it breathable air, but precisely a “storm” or a “hurricane”, or at least “wind”.

Americans are so accustomed to thinking about everything in terms of money that money has become transparent to their eyes. And worse still, they adore money so much that they cannot understand its political and social danger.

It is as if we refused to understand that the wind blowing in our face, or slowing us down in one direction and pushing us in another, or that storm causing so much damage, are still “breathable air” — even in a condition where we could always think of them as an excess of breathable air, or of atmosphere.

No: those are hurricanes and wind, and we refuse to place them in the same category. But the problem is that hurricanes are made of breathable air, and American fascism is made of money.

If you can see money as a problem, and understand that a hurricane is made of breathable air, then you can see how their fascism is made of money. And if you follow the money, you immediately reach the heart of the problem.

Some time ago, in the United States, the limit on the amount of money private donors could give to electoral campaigns fell away. This drove campaign spending upwards, to the point where a candidate now needs the backing of extremely powerful economic entities in order to win an election. From there, the next step was simple: the candidate in a US election is simply the representative of enormous financial groups, the only ones able to compete in a race where donations to an electoral campaign take on gigantic proportions.

But Americans cannot understand this. It's a limit in their culture.Used to thinking of money as we think of breathable air, they cannot grasp that it is a problem. The answer “but politics needs money” is, for them, like saying “but breathable air keeps us alive.” Which is true. But they miss the “hurricane” part, when breathable air starts causing damage.

And so they do not understand who is governing the United States, and who is transforming that power into laws and institutions. It is not Trump. It is the economic world behind him. And every single decision has been taken by that economic world.

The war in Iran? That economic world needs it in order to raise fuel prices, and to strike at its competing industry: Europe’s. The war in Ukraine? Again, it falls under the heading of striking at European industry. Putin, Netanyahu, or Iran itself have nothing to do with it: the United States is following the political agenda of big money, of big industry, and of all those American neo-colonial companies that base their strength on wealth extraction from other countries.

For this reason, it is perfectly pointless to think that the Democrats can change policy. They may change the communication, or its style, but as long as the flow of money into elections remains unlimited — and therefore enormous — in order to win, the Democrats too will need to be allied with that big Wall Street, that big industry, and that big IT which today are pulling Trump’s strings.

Not much would change. At most, the name given to the war in Iran would change. But little more than that.

In terms of democracy and civilisation, the United States are lost. It is useless to delude ourselves that they will ever place a limit on the enormous sums of money circulating in politics. And it is useless to imagine that they can break out of an infernal cycle that binds politics to rivers of money, and to the owners of that money, in a country that has only one religion — money itself — and where “less money” is literally a heresy.

A heresy to which the response is violence.