No single explanation exists for how our American democracy came under siege. But with Donald Trump having spent 2025 in escalating conflict across the hemispheres, there is one big factor we shouldn't keep ignoring: the role that our bloated military budget has played in expanding authoritarianism in the United States.

Year after year, trillions are spent on military affairs—via the Pentagon, nuclear weapons programs, Veterans Affairs, and interest on war debt. War and preparation for it takes an ever-bigger bite—now two-thirds—of the discretionary federal budget. Add security work in Homeland Security and the Justice Department, and just 25% of Trump's 2026 budget request is left for Americans' other needs, including transportation, housing, disaster response, cancer research, education, and more.

Squeezed domestic spending and extravagant military spending have widened inequality, with dire consequences for democracy.

That Pentagon spending creates a more unequal America may seem counterintuitive when it is so often touted as a boon to communities with military bases or weapons makers. But military spending has complex effects that belie its reputation as an economic good for the American public as a whole.

Making it harder to go to war is one critical way to help revive democracy.

The truth is that millitary expenditures create far fewer domestic jobs than other types of federal spending—health, education or housing, for example. What Mary Kaldor called the "baroque arsenal" of ultraexpensive, advanced technologies requires a much smaller workforce than did the more numerous mass-produced weapons of the past.

So, where does all of that federal spending on defense go? To military contractors. In the 1980s, many uniformed military jobs were outsourced to private companies; then came phenomenal consolidation in the defense industry. The top five contractors now eat more than half the Pentagon budget. While enlisted soldiers receive pay that leaves many qualifying for SNAP benefits, CEOs and stockholders of these firms dine on the rewards of larger budgets.

Some of this spending goes to a few tech billionaires, whose wealth explodes as most Americans' sputters. Pro-authoritarian Trump donors such as Palantir's Peter Thiel and SpaceX's Elon Musk walk the halls of power as systems providers,........

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