Is the us considered a third world country

Noahpinion







The other day a friend asked me whether it made sense to call America “the richest third-world country”. I’ve been hearing people ask similar questions for decades, and before, I always thought they were a bit silly and histrionic. Yes, the U.S. has dirty and run-down inner cities, high crime rates, and crappy public transit. But the average American lives in sprawling suburban comfort that only the wealthy of other developed countries can attain. America has chosen a different lifestyle and development pattern than France or Japan, but at the end of the day its middle class is still much richer.

But nowadays, when people call the U.S. a “third world country”, I find myself taking the epithet much more seriously. American
politics
is starting to look decidedly like something you’d encounter in a dysfunctional middle-income nation — Turkey, Hungary, Brazil, or Israel. Like in those countries, a populist strongman won power through democratic means, and then proceeded to usurp unprecedented power to the executive, often through open clashes with the country’s key institutions.

Consider a partial list of things that Donald Trump has done in just the last coup

Trump and I can agree: The US is a ‘third-world country’


When on August 8 the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) raided Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida in search of classified documents, the ex-president of the United States decried the episode as “an assault [that] could only take place in broken, third-world countries”. He continued to lament that America had “now become one of those countries, corrupt at a level not seen before”.

Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr, chimed in on Twitter with the assessment: “This is what you see happen in 3rd World Banana Republics!!!” Never mind that the FBI’s seizure of secret documents does not fit the “corruption” bill quite as well as some other characteristics of American democracy: say, the fact that non-taxpaying billionaires can be president or that the country is run as a crooked, oligarchic corporatocracy.

This is not the first time Trump has likened the US to a “third-world country”, which was also his epithet of choice when he lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden. But Trump & Co are not the only members of the US ruling elite to exercise this vocabulary. The January 2021 attack on the US Capitol prompte


The concept of the Third World emerged after 1945 as a way to refer to the developing regions of the world, most often encompassing Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. As a descriptive shorthand, the Third World entered common usage to contrast these regions from the capitalist “First World” and the communist “Second World,” even though some nations in these regions overtly aligned with one of the superpowers while others did not ascribe to such classifications. The term thus defies easy categorization and was used by historical actors to reflect different political and economic understandings of their geopolitical status. In the latter half of the 20th century, the Third World also gained purchase among some political leaders to describe non-Western, anti-imperialist, and anti-racist nations that had gained their independence from colonial rule and worked together to resist Cold War alignment. However, Third World leaders struggled to sustain their transnational solidarity, sometimes dividing along the lines of the broader superpower rivalry, regional or sectarian conflicts, and differing aspirations for world order.

US relations with the Third World were often f


Are things really that bad or do you just need to log off the internet for a while?

Nowadays, it seems as though one cannot browse through social media apps like X or TikTok without seeing a post about how –for the lack of a better word— everything “sucks.” 

A big target of such “criticism,” and I’m using that word lightly because there is a difference between “criticism” and “whining,” is the average life in the United States and how supposedly we are living at terrible times. It is not uncommon, for example, to see memes claiming that “the United States is a third world country with a Gucci belt.” 

Such claims seem to be one of the few things that people on both the left and the right agree these days. In one hand there is Sean McElwee, the executive director of Data for Progress, writing editorials comparing the US to third world country on Rolling Stone; and in the other hand there is former president Donald Trump calling the U.S. a third world country in his Super Tuesday speech earlier this month.

But is life in the US
really
that bad? All signs point to no, you are just out of touch with the rest of the world.

Being dissatisfied with the state of our country is a j