The first year of the second Trump administration saw an alarming abandonment of the traditional checks and balances that have guarded against the descent of U.S. democracy into an authoritarian state. These included brazenly illegal acts by the executive branch with no oversight or accountability; aggressively cruel immigration enforcement designed to strike terror in communities; targeted prosecutions of President Trump’s political adversaries; and countless other offenses.

But alongside these horrors, another factor surfaced time and again: the economic oppression that accompanies the corruption and intentional inequity of an authoritarian regime. Whether it’s the shutdown of USAID, trillions in tax cuts for the ultra–wealthy while gutting food and healthcare programs from the federal budget, or the invasion of a sovereign country while openly planning to harvest its oil reserves, the consolidation of absolute power is both a cause and effect of the stratospheric divide between the ultra-rich and everyone else.

“We’re in big trouble,” Pope Leo said about the prospect of Elon Musk becoming the world’s first trillionaire. Following the stunning election of a U.S.–born pope, the first major teaching document from Pope Leo XIV focused on love for people impacted by poverty. In that document, Dilexi Te, the pope cites the words of Pope Francis about economic inequity: “A new tyranny is being born, invisible and often virtual, which unilaterally and relentlessly imposes its own laws and rules.”

‘Made poor’

“Almost all people in the U.S. have experienced dehumanization from our nation’s current systems of community–harming oppression. Their main tools are fear, scarcity, and isolation,”  says NETWORK Executive Director Laurie Carafone. She notes that the right–wing media ecosystem pushes narratives promoting resource hoarding, hatred, racism, sexism, and xenophobia. The cultural fallout has been predictably disastrous.

“We are made poor when we no longer see our neighbor as ourselves; when we no longer allow ourselves to be open to seeing our own poverty and when we physically isolate those society identifies as materially poor,” says says Jennifer Stallbaumer–Rouyer, a social worker and NETWORK advocate in Kansas City, Missouri. “When we look behind this person, however, we see an entire system that perpetuates poverty and the lies that accompany it.”

“Most troubling to me is the obvious effort to demonize immigrants,” says Sr. Beatrice Haines, OLVM, based in Hungtington, Indiana. She sees this as a clear “effort to disparage people of color and create an ‘us versus them’ situation. ‘They then are perceived as the cause of my economic situation.” She cites the passage of the GOP’s “Big Bad Budget Bill” as one bitter fruit of this narrative.

NETWORK Fellow Ralph McCloud, who led the Catholic Campaign for Human Development—the U.S. bishops’ domestic anti–poverty program—for 16 years, has encountered attitudes against marginalized communities and sees clearly how they manifest in U.S. politics.

“There is the temptation that God intends for people to be poor, minorities to be separate, wars to happen, famine to exist, and that it is all happening because it is God’s will and there is nothing that can be done. So we live in apathy, despair, and, in some cases, pious and devout glee.”

 

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“Almost all people in the U.S. have experienced dehumanization from
our nation’s current systems of community–harming oppression.”
-Laurie Carafone, NETWORK Executive Director

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Letting these attitudes fester in politics and culture, McCloud says, directly led to the erosion of the foundational systems of U.S. democracy.

“We neglected to recognize that our systems are so fragile that without intentional and deliberate care, authoritarian and selfish stakeholders can attack them and strategically place themselves in positions of power that can destroy decades of progress and erase significant gains.”

The pope and some hope

As the leading American voice providing a moral vision on the world stage, Pope Leo offers hope with his witness and a critique of the ideas that have enabled the dangerous state of his
home country’s political moment.

“At a time when we see a rise in Christian nationalist sentiment in the U.S. and we are seeing domestic hunger and the number of people who can no longer afford healthcare increase … it is crucial that a clear moral teaching about poverty come from the highest authority in the church,” says Lexington, Kentucky Bishop John Stowe, OFM Conv. “Our English–speaking pope has provided a document … with crystal clarity for American readers that asserts … that indifference to people in need anywhere in the world is contrary to our faith.”

Perhaps most crucially, Pope Leo directly takes on the economic philosophies that have led this government to abdicate its responsibility to promote the thriving of all people through policy.

“At times, pseudo–scientific data are invoked to support the claim that a free market economy will automatically solve the problem of poverty,” the pope writes in Dilexi Te. He adds, “[A]lmsgiving does not absolve the competent authorities of their responsibilities, eliminate the duty of government institutions to care for the poor, or detract from rightful efforts to ensure justice.”

Committing U.S. politics to a sense of the common good and universal solidarity, necessary to defeating an authoritarian regime, requires the same actions as taking on fascism directly.

“Countering all this destruction fueled by fear, scapegoating, and isolation requires real efforts to forge strong community,” says Carafone.

Rooted in her community, Stallbaumer–Rouyer hasn’t given up on the prospect of recovering a better politics.

“I have hope for re–imagining something different that can be forged out of recognition, repentance, reconciliation, and solidarity. This work is a marathon, not a sprint,” she says. “If we look beyond ourselves and our given situation, we might just see a flash of abundance, not scarcity. We will see that we are all in need of care and filling up.”

This story was originally published in the Quarter 1 2026 issue of Connection.