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https://ericzuesse.substack.com/p/the-fraudulence-of-theory-in-political  

https://theduran.com/the-fraudulence-of-theory-in-political-science/  

The Fraudulence of Theory in Political ‘Science’

4 September 2026, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

Colleges and universities throughout the U.S. empire are funded by their endowments, which (among the prestige institutions, which shape the profession’s ideals) come from extremely wealthy families and predominantly from billionaires and centi-millionaires, who, as the economic class constituting the super-rich, benefit from further expansions of the U.S. empire. Furthermore, universities obtain the rest from tuition, government support, grants and contracts, current gifts, fees, and other sources — and such sources ALSO derive the more, from an entity, to the extent the entity is funded predominantly from the rich and not from the middle class, and not at all from the poor. University financing is heavily dependent upon the federal Government, and, so, if the billionaires largely control the Government, then even ‘public’ funding of their research is largely shaped by them. Moreover, the richer a private entity is, the likelier it will be to be deriving a significant proportion of its wealth from abroad and not merely locally; and, so, the more it will be inclined toward further expansion of the empire. And, finally, to the extent that an entity is deriving a substantial percentage of one’s income from foreign operations, the entity can reasonably be expected to be concerned about protecting foreign assets — and this likewise means that the motivations will be imperialistic instead of genuinely for protecting and serving the needs and policy-priorities of one’s own citizenry, the people of one’s own nation who pay almost all of the taxes that fund the empire’s military etc. that benefit those approximately 1,000 individuals, who control America’s international corporations. In order to protect their foreign assets, they are driven to be imperialists — to use their Government for private benefit. This obviously does not fit any definition of a “democracy.”

In addition: it is essential to understand that empire is, by its very nature, dictatorial not equalitarian, because it relies upon its colonies (or ‘allies’), which are required by the imperial Government to adhere to its foreign policies and also to any domestic policy that the imperial Government requires. A colonial Government lacks full (if any) sovereignty. Consequently: empire is based upon VIOLATING democracy, according to any definition of “democracy” that values equality of rights.

Defining “democracy” is virtually prohibited in the field of political ‘science’, because the empirical evidence that exists on whether or not the U.S. qualifies as being a “democracy” is uniform in demonstrating that it definitely is not, and this fact will be documented here — but, in order for this to be done, “democracy” must FIRST be defined in such a way so that it’s capable of being scientifically measured and particular Governments can then be rated as to “more” or “less” democratic. This concept (“democracy”) must, in other words, be removed from its present status, of being a term of mere propaganda: “We are a democracy; they are not.” Then, after that is done, consideration will be given to the possibility that recently published articles in prestigious academic journals of political ‘science’ show that political ‘scientists’ either don’t want to know, or they simply refuse to acknowledge, this basic political fact about their own country — that it is a dictatorship.

In fact, the most important concept in a scientific political theory, if political theory were scientific, would be “democracy” and its opposite, “dictatorship.” I shall therefore define “democracy” as referring to a national Government whose policy-priorities correspond to its citizens’ policy-priorities. The greater the correspondence between these two orders-of-priority, the more democratic the Government is; the greater the divergence, the more dictatorial it is. No values from the evaluator will be added, because to add them would be propagandistic, instead of scientific.

Political scientists have extensively studied governmental responsiveness, policy congruence, and even congruence in policy priorities, and some have explicitly described these as central characteristics of democracy. At least as early as 1978, John D. May proposed a quantifiable conception of democracy based upon correspondence between acts of government and the desires of the governed. However, the political-science literature nonetheless generally treats such correspondence as a characteristic, quality, or consequence of democracy, rather than as making measured correspondence between citizens’ and Governmental policy-priorities the operational criterion by which a national Government is classified on a continuous scale from democracy to dictatorship. Furthermore, May’s categorization failed to operationalize his supposed ‘measure’; by contrast, the one that will be proposed here is directly able to be operationalized.

An excellent example of empirical data documenting that the United States is a dictatorship using the definition proposed here, is this: 

On 14 February 2025, the AP headlined “Where US adults think the government is spending too much, according to AP-NORC polling”, and listed in rank-order according to the opposite (“spending too little”) the following 8 Government functions (in other words: these are the governmental functions that the public wanted the most to get more funding, and the least to get reduced funding, in this order): 1. Social Security; 2. Medicare; 3. Education; 4. Assistance to the poor; 5. Medicaid; 6. Border security; 7. Federal law enforcement; 8. The Military. That’s right: the American public (and by an overwhelming margin — virtually an upside-down rank-order) were THE LEAST SUPPORTIVE of spending more money on the military, and the MOST SUPPORTIVE of spending more money on Social Security, Medicare, Education, Assistance to the poor, and Medicaid (those latter five being the functions that the Republican Party has always been the most vocal to label as being “waste, fraud, and abuse” and try to cut — and those 5 were the most-favored by the American public). Meanwhile, The Military, which actually receives 53% (and in the latest year far more than that) of the money that the Congress allocates each year and gets signed into law by the President, keeps getting, each year, over 50% of the annually appropriated federal funds — more than all seven of the others put together. (Furthermore, the U.S. Defense Department is the ONLY Department of the federal Government so corrupt, so intensely corrupt, that it has never been audited -- has never yet passed a department-wide financial audit. But it receives about two thirds of the military budget, and about 35% of the entire annually appropriated federal budget. And, according to this poll, the military budget is what the American people the most want to be reduced.)

Trump (with the cooperation of the U.S. Congress) is increasing the military and border security, and decreasing education, assistance to the poor, Medicaid, federal law enforcement, and even Social Security and Medicare (the latter two by laying off many of the people who staff those bureaucracies). This Government’s policy-priorities are like the public’s priorities turned upside-down — in other words: are the REVERSE of the public’s — and therefore the U.S. Government right now is a perfect example of a dictatorship, according to this definition. One might say that this is so in only the Executive branch, but it’s not necessarily true: Congress passed his “Big and Beautiful Bill” to fund the Government — and it violates the public’s policy-priorities just as his initial proposal had done. Furthermore, as always when one political faction (regardless whether it it is one Party or a coalition of Parties) has control over both the Executive and the Legislative branches of the Government — as is now the case in the U.S. — these two branches (Executive and Legislative) function as one, and there then will even be a totalitarian dictatorship if they can get the Judicial branch or Supreme Court to call it “Constitutional.” (And the current 6-to-3 Republican Supreme Court majority has almost perfectly completed this one-man, totalitarian, dictatorship.) Currently, the U.S. is slipping from a dictatorship towards a totalitarian dictatorship; but America has been a dictatorship ever since at least 1980. And it’s a collective dictatorship by the super-rich.

Consequently, in America, the super-rich are what the Government actually represents, and the non-super-rich are instead subjects, not real citizens, of this dictatorship (since it’s no democracy), which is a collective dictatorship by that ruling class, which, in America, constitutes approximately 1,000 of the nation’s 345 million subjects.

Many on the political right (since they are inclined to respect property-rights above any other rights) are conflicted about objecting against being ruled by the few billionaires. And because the billionaires do rule, the term that right-wingers use to refer to imperialists is “internationalists” or “globalists,” instead of the (obviously pejorative) “imperialists.” On the political left, right-wingers are called “nationalists,” even when a right-winger is an imperialist (was Hitler a “nationalist” or an “imperialist” — he was BOTH), and the reason for this is that liberal (as opposed to all-out conservative) billionaires such as George Soros are THEMSELVES imperialists and consequently do NOT generally like to advance the academic career of any committedly anti-imperialistic (progressive) political scientist. So, liberal scholars think in terms of “globalist” versus “nationalist” etc., instead of imperialist versus anti-imperialist.

And, as regards “democracy” itself, the vast majority of political ‘scientists’ STILL refer to the U.S. as-if it were still some kind of a “democracy,” instead of as being what it IS, which is some kind of a dictatorship. They should be honest about what it IS. But sometimes, for a profession, honesty is NOT the ‘best’ policy, for what its priorities actually are.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.