"In a speech he delivered in February, U.S. President Joe Biden painted a portrait of a world fundamentally divided between democracy and autocracy. “We’re at an inflection point,” he said, “between those who argue that, given all the challenges we face . . . that autocracy is the best way forward, . . . and those who understand that democracy is essential . . . to meeting those challenges.” Biden has insisted that both his domestic and foreign agendas put the United States in the best possible position to win this epochal conflict.

But this fixation on a clash between autocracy and democracy obscures a deeper divide in geopolitics: the conflict between rich and poor. The United States asserts leadership of the world’s democracies, but it actually stands opposed to most democracies on many of the most significant global issues. From the COVID-19 pandemic to global trade rules, from climate change to economic development, the United States is actively frustrating the priorities of most of the world’s democracies. In the process, U.S. foreign policy is—in the name of democracy—compounding the global crisis of democracy and delegitimizing U.S. power.

Rich and poor democracies share many problems. Forty years of increasingly concentrated wealth, deteriorating public goods, eroding stability for workers, and a disintegrating sense of collective belonging have provided raw material for nationalism, racism, and authoritarianism in democracies of all levels of wealth. The Biden administration understands this. In speech after speech, Biden has made an essential point: people are losing faith in democracy because democracy is not meeting their needs. In his domestic agenda, Biden recognizes that investing in the common good, providing greater power and security to labor, and mobilizing people to confront the climate crisis are all crucial to the project of fending off illiberal politics and reviving democracy in the United States.

Yet Biden’s foreign policy suffers from a strange disconnect. Rather than pursuing a global strategy to revive faith in the common good, Biden focuses on outcompeting China—as if people outside the United States value democracy not because it empowers them but because it is synonymous with U.S. power. "

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2021-07-09/does-america-really-support-democracy-or-just-other-rich

America's problem, of course, simply this. It is falling flat in the department of delivering COMMON GOOD to the people domestically and internationally. A tiny number of individuals are getting very very wealthy at the expense of hundreds of millions. Given that delivering COMMON GOOD, not COMMON SUFFERING to the people is key to any democracy, China is more democratic than the US. The polls had been right.