A Democratic Future for the USA?

TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 16 Feb 2026

Glen T. Martin, Ph.D. – TRANSCEND Media Service

Only if We Pass This 28^th Amendment to the Constitution

8 Feb 2026 – The tide may be turning in the fight against a Trump-led dictatorship replacing the US Constitution and whatever remnants of democracy were in place before Trump took office.  A return to Constitutional government will require nothing less than putting Donald Trump in prison for his crimes. The constant refrain that we need to show that “no one is above the law” must be demonstrated through similar prison time for most of the enablers and sycophants in the Trump Administration.  Nevertheless, it will substantially require more than this.

Since the Presidency of Ronald Reagan, every subsequent President, Democrat or Republican, has enabled the transnational business and financial class to abandon the United States and the common good of its working citizens, for the maximizing of unprecedented profits in a globalized economy that has zero concern for the more than one billion human beings worldwide who live in grinding, life-threatening poverty.  Nor has there been the slightest concern that the working people of the USA have been sliding ever more into poverty since that time.

Both Democrat and Republican representatives in the House and Senate have increasingly relied on the donations of the super-wealthy, who fund their deceitful populist campaigns disguising the fact that they really intend to work for big business and the rich, rather than ordinary people.  This system has gone on steroids since the 2010 Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court in which the Court decided that money and free speech were equivalent, thereby strangling and submerging the voices of the vast majority of American citizens.

Not only are the voices of the majority silenced, but as the Jeffrey Epstein saga shows, there really is a two-tier system of justice in which the super-wealthy get away with endless crimes while the poor in the ghettos and minority neighborhoods of the nation are held to strict account with rigorous policing and punitive punishments under the delusional rhetoric of “stopping crime” within a system in which the real criminals are running the show.

Are the real criminals going to continue to run the show after the Trump tyranny is deposed?  In all likelihood, yes, unless some truly visionary leaders arise who understand what real democracy looks like.  We can count on one hand those in the legislative branch who have the necessary vision, concern, and understanding.  The mainstream media, largely owned and run by the super-wealthy, has not abandoned their propaganda against “socialism” or “communism,” or, as Trump puts it, “those radical left Democrats who want to destroy America.”   German Protestant theologian Jürgen Moltmann, in his 2012 book Ethics of Hope, writes the following:

“Without social justice with regard to changes in a life and living conditions, the common good dies—that is to say, the good of the whole community and with it the bonds that hold society together. The liberty enjoyed by individuals and the wealthy classes becomes a public danger if ‘privatize profits, socialize losses’ become the ruling motto. Ever since the deregulation of the economy and the financial world in the great economic nations of earth, the imbalance for many people between liberty and equality has become life-threatening, because the outcome is their impoverishment. A political capitalism—a capitalism no longer controlled by the common good—is the enemy of democracy, because it destroys a society’s sense of community.  We are on a downward path, socially speaking”  (p. 47).

Moltmann understands what I expressed in the second paragraph above. American (and European) societies have been on a “downward path” since at least 1980 when the financialization and globalization of economics took off big time.  Banking was deregulated, financial speculation deregulated, globalized commerce deregulated, and the common person abandoned at the behest of the rich. Democracy is about the common good, a common good in which every person has reasonable opportunities, and in which every person starts from an economic place that is not impossibly behind and extremely difficult to overcome.

A free market socialism takes advantage of markets while institutionalizing concern for the common good of every person.  Philosopher of Law Ronald Dworkin writes: “Equal concern is the sovereign virtue of political community—without it government is only tyranny—and when a nation’s wealth is very unequally distributed, as the wealth of every very prosperous nations now is, then its equal concern is suspect.”  But I argue that this equal concern must be institutionalized not in a “regulated capitalism,” but in a market socialism. There is a huge difference.

William Greider in The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy, calls the fundamental assumption of capitalism a “fraud” involving “the economic pretense that people can be treated as things” (2003, 60-61).  People are merely another factor in the equations of how to invest and maximize a return on the investment. Economist Dunkin K. Foley emphasizes that “the logic of commodity exchange is opposed to moral logic in both its principles and its conclusions” (2008, 85).  Moral logic treats people has ends in themselves that can never be used “merely as a means” (as Immanuel Kant put this in 1885). Capitalist assumptions directly violate this principle assuming that people and their labor are, for economic purposes, simply part of the “logic of commodity exchange.”

Similarly, Philosopher Michael Luntley says that capitalism gives us “a society in which our moral traditions have been erased by forces inimical to the moral life.” Socialism (which makes moral living possible) does not mean “government ownership” of all production. It means economic theory premised on the common dignity of each person, and markets can indeed be established that promote this common good, that is, they are directed to earning wealth for the common good of all rather than accumulating extreme wealth for a tiny minority. Global thinker Anthony E. Mansueto writes that capitalism “is so destructive of social organization precisely because it treats human beings as individual atoms related to each other in a purely external fashion” (1995, 51).  Moral relations are “internal” relations. They involve people caring for one another and forming a social solidarities or caring communities.  The external relations assumed by capitalism are simply dehumanizing.

The external relations assumed by capitalism are not in principle different from the external relations built into the system of sovereign nation-states.  Theoretically each state is responsible for the human rights of its own citizens and not any other citizens worldwide. To each state, people from other nations are considered “aliens” or “illegals” and therefore have no enforceable rights, despite some international UN treaties that assert differently. In this way the global capitalist system of dehumanization is complemented by the planetary sovereign state system of dehumanization. There is no institutionalized moral framework binding humanity together, only gigantic systems of fragmentation and alienation: global capitalism and sovereign nation-states. No wonder there is worldwide corruption and tyranny. The system adopted by the US is global, and US imperialism since the Second World War has helped ensure that it is remains global.

None of the handful of US political leaders mentioned above (who are envisioning a truly reborn America after Trump) have even dreamed of questioning the militarized sovereign nation-state system.  They are all blissfully ignorant of the world federalism movement going back to Kant in the 18^th century.  But how can you establish a democratic socialism in the USA after Trump in the face of the immense state-sponsored capitalisms of China, Russia, and numerous other countries following their lead? Of course, you cannot. We have reached the point in history (facing very possible nuclear holocaust and certain climate collapse) when the time has come for politicians in every country to think and act globally.

Just as it has often been said that “you cannot have socialism in single countries” (for they will always be destroyed by the global nation-state-capitalist system), so let us face the fact that you cannot have democracy in single countries (for exactly the same reasons).  The twin-faced world system, based entirely on “external” relationships, destroys all local attempts to establish society on moral principles, which require internal relationships. Both faces of the system were first institutionalized in the 17^th century on principles that 17^th century philosopher Thomas Hobbes was to describe as the “war of all against all.”

Christian theologian and philosopher David Ray Griffin recently declared that “global democratic government is now necessary for the survival of civilization” (2021, 111). He continues: “This is not an impossible vision. It is simply a vision of a world ordered in terms of moral principles” (ibid. 133). He is exactly right. Both capitalism and sovereign nation-states are contingent phenomena—they originated four centuries ago and they will at some point disappear.  Moral principles, however, go back to such scriptures as the Bible, the Buddhist sutras, the Tao Te Ching, to the Hindu Bagavad Gita, and the the Quran of Islam. They are fundamental to our common humanity. The so called “Natural Moral Law” tradition of Western philosophy identified a universal moral law that encompassed all humanity, with its roots at least 6 to 8 centuries before the Common Era.

Our human reality is now one reality,  as Japanese Buddhist philosopher Masao Abe has declared: “we must internalize and grasp ‘mankind’ as a qualitative concept…. For without doing so we can never overcome the conflicts between nations which we are facing, and we cannot bring true peace to the world. Nor can we build a profound and rich human society which is permeated by individual freedom and the special characteristics of races and cultures wherein all live in harmony with each other…. The age of the nation-state must end. The age of mankind must begin” (1985, 251, 260).

The one reality that we are as human beings is informed by our common human dignity, which is the basis of the universal moral principles articulated by the natural law tradition.  These principles can be elaborated at length, but they are basically very simple and can be understood by every normal human being: kindness, compassion, mutual respect, love, openness to dialogue, cooperation, peace, freedom within the framework of the common good of all, justice, and the rule of democratic laws for all. The principle that binds them all together is the principle of our common human dignity. Dignity, the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights declares, is the “foundation for freedom, justice, and peace in the world.” All people share this dignity, yet the world systems institutionalized since the 17^th century deny and violate our common human dignity at every turn.

The world already has a brilliantly written template for a world-system premised on human dignity which is the text of the Constitution for the Federation of Earth.  This was written by hundreds of world citizens working together and finalized at the “Fourth Constituent Assembly,” in Troia, Portugal, in 1991.  There have been 16 sessions of the “Provisional World Parliament” that have met under its authority, the last of which was in December 2025 in Pondicherry, India.  The Parliament has a Permanent Secretariat promoting its ratification and promoting another Constituent Assembly in which the nations and people of Earth can update the Constitution to the present year of 2026.

The Constitution never mentions the words “capitalism” or “socialism.”  It simply develops a tricameral World Parliament so that all peoples are represented, including all the nations of the world in the House of Nations. It includes two Bills of Rights, making it clear that human dignity is the real foundation of democratic world government.  It assumes a market economy but one that works for the common good and that does not undermine the welfare of all.  As mentioned above:  you cannot have democracy in individual sovereign nation-states because the world system will inevitably destroy that democracy, as it has clearly done in the United States under Trump.

The pending defeat of Donald Trump in the United States will mean that much repair of the devastation he has caused will have to be done.  Nevertheless, his fall will provide opportunities for a major upsurge in democratic thought and reformed institutions.  First and foremost Congress should pass a 28^th amendment to the US Constitution that reads: “The government of the United States of America shall be open by law to the development of a supranational democratic world parliament such as the one envisioned by the Constitution for the Federation of Earth.  In its foreign policy, the US government will pursue all possible peaceful, honest, and just means to promote such an Earth Federation that is premised on the common welfare of all the people on Earth and the common good of the whole of humanity.”

Such a 28^th amendment would, more than anything else, help restore the tradition of human rights and dignity that the founding fathers of the Republic envisioned for the United States.  Greatness comes from moral leadership (and not mere power), and such leadership is nearly impossible within the current world system that institutionally undercuts universal moral principles, as we have seen. America can become the true world leader through claiming such moral leadership. Such an amendment would do more than anything else could possibly do to “Make America Great Again.”

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Dr. Glen T. Martin:
– Member, TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment
– Professor of Philosophy Emeritus
– Founder/Chairperson Emeritus, Program in Peace Studies, Radford University
– President, World Constitution and Parliament Association (WCPA);
– President, Earth Constitution Institute (ECI)
– Author of twelve books and hundreds of articles concerning global issues, human spirituality, and democratic world government; a recipient of many peace awards.
www.earthconstitution.world – Email: gmartin@radford.edu

This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 16 Feb 2026.

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