Why the US Collapsed

I wrote this a few years from now…

Historians, political analysts, and much of the general public around the world have long discussed why the United States of America collapsed in the mid- to late 2020s. So many books have been written about it by now, they could probably fill a thousand shelves of a library.

I’ve been reading through the literature as best I can and talking with experts to try to understand the basics. I’ve honed it down to 19 factors that contributed to the fall of the US. It’s a long list, to be sure, but it is certainly not exhaustive. Some will surely argue I’ve missed something critical. Others may say I’m emphasising something too much.

Still, for me, these are the key aspects of the leading theories trying to explain the background and underlying causes of those epic events. I hope it can provide some guidance for future study.

1 – Impunity at the top had devastating consequences. Violent criminals at the highest levels of the political system were almost never punished. They got away with even serious crimes like treason at least as far back as the Civil War. Authorities even erected statues to the leading traitors, people who started a war against the country. This acceptance, even celebration, of top-level treason and lawlessness became a guiding lesson for others in later ages.

The most obvious example was how President Donald Trump was allowed to get away with treason and insurrection after he tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election in January 2021. But that was hardly the only example of high-level political leaders escaping prosecution for violent crimes in the final decades of the US. Recall how during his administration, President Barack Obama decided the Justice Department should not prosecute former Vice President Dick Cheney and others for torture under the administration of President George W. Bush.

The message of these failures of justice was clear: the people at the top knew they could ignore the law and human decency with no fear of consequences for themselves. When the Trump regime started tearing the country apart through internal violence, Trump and his top henchmen could rightly calculate they would get away with all their crimes, because top-level impunity had long been built into the system.

2 – The presidency became more like a monarchy. Presidential powers in all sorts of policy areas had been increasing for decades. This was encouraged by both major parties and was extremely unhealthy for democracy. By the country’s final years, the notion of checks and balances, like the law, could simply be ignored by the president, who assumed, largely unchallenged, that he had absolute power.

3 – White supremacy was central to the fall of the US. This had been a core underlying philosophy of the country from its birth, of course, and despite real improvements in the country over 250 years, the idea never went away. It wasn’t simply that some folks were rabid nazis or Klansmen, and it wasn’t just that ICE was more and more staffed by white supremacist thugs. They were merely the most violent tip of a disturbingly deep iceberg in American society.

Too many people had been brought up surrounded by an atmosphere of white supremacy. It was pervasive, and it was very difficult for people to unlearn it once it was lodged in their heads from a young age. Ultimately, this mindset was what allowed ICE and its crimes to exist and proliferate, along with so many other forms of government brutality. Everything they did was justified, the ideology confirmed, because they were fighting a so-called “invasion” (in the regime’s words) of non-whites.

4 – For decades, the US had been a country plagued with violence, especially gun violence. By all measurements, the US was a far more violent country than any other in the industrialised world at the time. A key contributing factor was a peculiar political fetish for half a sentence about a right to bear arms, written into the Constitution back in the musket era. In the final decades of the US, many took that half sentence out of context to apply it to mass murder machines like automatic and semi-automatic weapons, which could fire more shots in a couple minutes than a late-18th-century musket could fire in a day.

The failure of US leaders to understand the new technology of killing and adjust the country’s laws appropriately had no parallel in any other country of the period. The more outdated the Second Amendment was, the more it seemed like a national suicide note. By the final years of the country’s existence, arms had spread so thoroughly that they outnumbered people. It seems hard to imagine now, but there were mass shootings every day, schools and communities were torn apart, and yet politicians of both major parties failed to address the issue adequately. Decades went by with little or no action. When the slaughter later became political and intensified, plenty of guns were available, and society had long normalised daily body counts from gun violence.

5 – The rise of the security state. Mass electronic surveillance, expanded numbers of and powers of security forces, and the weakening of individual rights in the wake of the September 11 attacks in 2001, was another key factor. These new technological tools, new agencies, and legal shifts were not introduced by the Trump regime, of course, but they enabled the Trump regime to ramp up and accelerate its authoritarian actions far more easily than it otherwise might have. In short, the regime wasn’t starting authoritarian rule from scratch.

6 – The increasing political focus on upping anti-immigrant sentiment for electoral advantage exacerbated social tensions. This was prevalent in other countries at the time, as well. However, it reached its peak in the US, and as serious state violence expanded, at least some countries in Europe and elsewhere learned the lesson and tried to stop themselves going down that disastrous road.

7 – Wealth disparities in the US grew to extreme levels, and the glorification of the ultra-rich accelerated, increasing feelings of inferiority, envy, and anger among the majority of people at a system so obviously unfair. It’s true that many countries had extreme wealth disparities at the time, but the US suffered in particular because of two long-running, even foundational, narratives in the national psyche.

The first was equality, enshrined in the earliest documents of the country. The Declaration of Independence told people: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” That sentiment was not a reality at the time it was written, nor later, but Americans at least came to understand it as aspirational, and it did underlie some of the most important advancements in the two and a half centuries the US existed. But with the emergence of dollar-trillionaires amid widespread poverty and near-poverty, the words seemed like mockery.

The second classic American narrative was the idea that anyone could be a success if they worked hard. Generations of citizens, including immigrants, were educated with this ideal. News and entertainment media constantly reinforced it. Yet, people saw the reality around them. They understood the system was not living up to its own promises, and this was a factor in the dissolution of national cohesion. If a system seems only to keep you down, if you are only getting poorer and poorer no matter how hard you work, why should you keep believing in the system?

8 – The US generally also lacked the coherency of other nation states of the era in terms of national policies and programmes that tend to bind societies together – affordable healthcare, childcare, and higher education, to name just three. It also supported divisive policies that most other modern nation states had long rejected, for instance, the death penalty, which made murder by the state, not the red line it ought to be, but an acceptable practice.

9 – Atomisation of society through social media had a damaging impact in the final years of the US. Two decades or so before the US started falling apart, before social media existed, most people read, watched, and listened to the same small set of news providers. This meant people shared an understanding of what the national news narrative was, even if they didn’t agree on what to do about it. That shared reality had been important for national cohesion, and when it weakened and later disappeared, national cohesion suffered.

Obviously, many other countries were facing this issue at the same time; it was not just a US problem. How do you govern a country with a million different sources of news, most of them pushing partial truths or outright lies for political gain or seeking outrage clicks for profit? The problem of “who to trust” became overwhelming and drove many people toward an authoritarian leader, a sole source of truth and a man who claimed to have all the answers.

10 – The proliferation of car-based lifestyles had already been atomising US society for some time. Random, in-person encounters between diverse individuals became rarer. This weakened the sense of shared space and shared destiny.

Socially distant in suburbia, many individuals, as time went on, experienced the majority of their human interactions with strangers online, and many of them were anonymous, which increased the likelihood of a negative, antagonistic encounter compared to a face-to-face one. This was also not unique to US at the time, of course.

11 – The difficulty of distance played a role, too. The US was very big, making effective mass protests extremely difficult. Also, government was rather decentralised in the US. It wasn’t like in, say, France, where governance was more centralised, and huge numbers of people could get to the capital for a major demonstration relatively easily in a few hours. Weak labour protections added to the distance problem to make national general strikes very difficult to organise.

US federal government leaders in Washington thus saw with their own eyes very little, if any, mass public anger against their increasingly authoritarian actions. What they saw were videos moderated by (sometimes even created by) media micro-channels that each told a different story about an event, allowing federal leaders to pick the version that best suited their preferred narrative. They almost never had to face public outrage in person or outside their own window, so it was easy for them to minimise it.

12 – The US shift towards global empire was a bad move for a country claiming to have democratic values. Imperialism and democracy are incompatible. Over the span of generations, military expansionism also empowered defence industries and gave them too large a say in policy and appropriations. Military equipment was so plentiful and so frequently renewed, the military was passing it on to civilian police forces, and the terrible consequences of this proliferation of armour and arms became all too clear in the downward spiral of violence seen in the final years of the US.

13 – Mass incarceration, slave labour, and similar brutalities – much of it highly discriminatory, being rooted in white supremacist ideology – became the norm. This accustomed the general population to think of dehumanising methods as legitimate policy options. In its final years, the US had more prisoners per capita than any peer country, and they were sending many people to prisons in places like El Salvador, where torture was common.

Many US prisons had become privatised, which created entire industries whose interests were vested in the continuation of mass dehumanisation. The more people got locked up, the more money those industries made. As the Trump regime became ever more authoritarian, its masked thugs and other henchmen put more people behind bars, and the private sector was ready and all too eager to provide the “service”.

14 – The absence of any real opposition party is a key feature of every authoritarian regime, and this was true in the end days of the US. For many years, the Democratic Party had been shifting to the right, and it often supported some of the more authoritarian moves against immigrants in particular. Like some parties in Europe at the time, they mistakenly strategized they could win voters from the right by mimicking the right. The Democratic Party eventually became something of a centre or even centre-right party by the standards of other industrial countries at that time. Many voters came to believe the Democratic Party wasn’t offering anything substantially different, and their role as an opposition party weakened as the days went on.

The Party leadership failed to see the rising danger of authoritarian rule. Even when it was clear the Trump regime’s anti-immigration drive was acting way beyond the law and basic morality – warrantless searches, shooting US citizens, sending people to be tortured abroad – the leadership of the Democratic Party was treating the Trump regime as just another spell of a Republican administration in a functioning two-party system. They figured they merely had to say nothing, do nothing, and wait until the next round of elections to reap the electoral rewards among dissatisfied voters.

Some historians argue Democratic Party leaders had simply been in Washington too long to recognise that what was happening in the country at large was not business as usual. They refused to heed the warnings of, or even work with, groups with on-the-ground experience of what was happening for fear of appearing “too radical”, even though the Trumpists were demonising them as “radical left” regardless of what they did or didn’t do. They continued to offer compromises to Trump’s Republicans as if it was still the 1980s or 90s, when such bipartisanism was possible. This made the Democratic Party obsolete at the national level.

15 – Other possible sources of organised opposition were weak or failed to rise to the challenge of authoritarianism. No other opposition parties had scale or scope to succeed at the national level. Trade unions had already been weakened significantly in the US over time, long before Trumpism. Major law firms and universities collapsed under pressure from the Trump regime with embarrassing speed.

16 – Religion was hijacked to serve the regime. What might potentially have been a guiding moral force, Christianity, was in large part co-opted by nationalist ideology. For many, Christianity became more about personal identity than personal integrity.

The founder of the religion had preached in favour of helping the poor and welcoming the foreigner, yet too many American Christians ignored this message of compassion. Jesus insisted the meek would inherit the Earth, but self-declared Christians in the Trump regime era chose to praise political domination instead. Jesus was a radical activist facing an imperial regime, yet his name was used by some people to support an imperial regime. A religion whose core texts are based in humility was twisted to justify hubris.

Of course, this was neither the first time when, nor the first place where, Christ’s teachings were perverted to mean their opposite and used to justify mass brutality. Still, the neglect of American Christians to the core values of their declared saviour was notable and important to the rise and maintenance of the Trump regime.

17 – Americans’ image of their country’s democracy was too unquestioning and simplistic, and this caused problems on many levels. For some, it was basic patriotism: the US was just the best country in the world, a shining city on a hill, an example for others to follow. They would criticise individual government policies they didn’t like, but they couldn’t ever imagine the country being so weak and rotten as to fall apart. It would last forever. For others, it manifested as an unshakable faith in the country’s legal system, which would ultimately see the courts push back the Trump regime’s authoritarian drive.

Note that both beliefs here tended to encourage passivity: people felt the country/system was unshakable on its own, as if democratic systems don’t require constant engagement and active defending. Many people scoffed at comparisons to historical authoritarian precedents like Nazi Germany and insisted, “it can’t happen here” – right up until it did.

18 – US allies abroad, particularly in Europe, never really tried to help by applying the appropriate combination of carrots and sticks, neither diplomatic nor economic, to push the Trump regime back onto a more democratic path. The world order European leaders had known their whole lives was collapsing, and they had no idea how to respond. Russia’s murderous military was pushing westward from the east. The Trump regime was destroying the trans-Atlantic alliance that once helped keep Europe safe. And European leaders stood stunned like deer in the headlights of oncoming cars.

19 – The regime accelerated the country’s demise by expanding its use of violence. As seen in the collapse of other countries, an increasingly authoritarian US government used ever more violence against peaceful demonstrators exercising their Constitutional rights to gather and express their opposition to government policies and actions. Rather than listen to peaceful protesters’ calls for the law to be upheld and for human dignity to be respected, the regime had its masked thugs shoot them. As the death toll climbed, some people argued that peaceful protest was not working, and they started to adopt non-peaceful means. The government responded with even more force, and the cycle of violence spun ever downward into the situation we see today: collapse, disintegration, failed state, civil war – whatever you want to call it.

…

Ever since the collapse of the US some years ago, people have wondered whether it was inevitable. Historians look at it a bit differently, however, asking instead: at what point did the collapse become unstoppable? It’s impossible to say for sure.

For me, there will always be a lot of “what if” questions…

·      What if Americans had found a way to organise peaceful mass protests and general strikes better and sooner?

·      What if more rational heads in the Republican Party had stood up to stop the increasingly authoritarian Trump regime?

·      What if the Democratic Party hadn’t folded its cards nationally so soon?

·      What if leaders from both parties had joined together and made survival of the country’s democracy their top priority?

·      What if allies abroad had tried to find ways to convince the US to leave its authoritarian path before it was too late?

These are intriguing “what ifs” to speculate on, but, of course, they are only abstract, hypothetical discussions today. What’s past is past and can’t be changed. The country is gone, and we all struggle to deal with the consequences to this day.