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Periodically, the United States falls prey to the obsession with economic and geopolitical "decline," that is, the fear of losing its position as the dominant economic and military superpower. The latest example is the militaristic and jingoist enthusiasm of the press for the conflict in Ukraine, a perfect chance to erase the memory of the precipitous withdrawal from Afghanistan and "put Russia back in its place." "Decline" was also at the heart of Donald Trump's election campaign in 2016; in his campaign slogan, "Make America Great Again," the emphasis was definitely on the word again. Trump's promise was to halt and reverse the Midwest's industrial decline, something that no president could really accomplish.
In the 1980s there had been the obsession with Japan and its brilliant economic performance; now the issue is if America has been economically caught up and economically overtaken by China and if its long hegemony over the world system is coming to an end.1
However, this focus on the imperial status of the country has obscured a long and far more destructive process of political decay. If we put aside for a moment the dangerous role of a turbulent financial system, the United States' weaknesses lie not in its economy but at the heart of its institutions, at the political level. For a number of reasons, some structural and historical, some contingent, American democracy is a patient in critical condition (Klinenberg, Zaloom, and Marcus 2019). That is, the constitutional arrangements created in 1787 and successfully maintained for 235 years could collapse. If nothing else, the aborted coup organized by Donald Trump on January 6,2021, is evidence enough.
Looking superficially at the characteristics of democratic regimes (regularity of elections, separation of powers, independence of judges) one often forgets that democracy is first and foremost a system in which there is a peaceful transfer of power. The losers are not afraid of being put in prison-or worse-by the winners. In the United States, once the results were known, the phone call from the losing presidential candidate to the winner has always been a powerful democratic ritual. No more.
Philip Roth published The Plot Against America in 2004. Sinclair Lewis wrote It Can't Happen Here in 1935. But it did happen: on January 6,2021,...