Great Leaps in American Collapse

How The World’s Richest Country Became a Failed State Plunging Down the Authoritarian Abyss

You might rightly chuckle, groan, or even scream — the weekend that America’s set to appoint an accused rapist as a Supreme Court justice for life, the Nobel Peace Prize goes to a man and a woman who’ve fought to define mass rape as a war crime. It’s vivid evidence: the world’s richest country is a ruinously failed state, plunging into an authoritarian abyss. A place where a Nobel Laureate sells his prize to pay for healthcare. Where people die without insulin, never retire, buy their kids bulletproof backpacks — and now, quite possibly, one where they will be tried and judged by a bellowing, screeching man who thinks all of that is pretty wonderful and grand.

How funny. How strange. How sad. How did America get here? When the history of American collapse is written, I think it will be seen as a series of great leaps, which punctuated slow, steady erosions, corrosions, and crumblings. In norms and values, among institutions and expectations, of rules and responsibilities — until at last democracy itself was a smoking, belching wreck, and in its place arose every kind of backwardness, from authoritarianism and kleptocracy to theocracy and fascism. Do you think I exaggerate? Am I being unfair? I will make my case, and you be the judge.

The first of these giant leaps — or the first one that I want to discuss, at any rate — is what happened in the aftermath of 9/11. The Department of Homeland Security was created — a new institution. Now, it’s not that Americans shouldn’t have wanted safety from terrorists — of course they should have. And yet every society makes choices. You see, the real threat to America wasn’t mullahs in a cave — how could it be? — it was that American incomes had been stagnant since the 70s, and a sense of unease was growing. People were losing faith in institutions to give them decent lives again — and so they were tuning out of democracy, “polarizing”, or to put it more accurately, becoming mistrustful and resentful of one another, as they had always been. The American experiment was beginning to fail from within — and as any great strategist knows, if you can get a society to collapse from inside, you don’t need to fire a bullet.