Our National Obituary

Australian journalist Crispin Hull takes a first crack at writing an obituary for the United States. He uses the writings of Soviet dissident, Andrei Amalrik, regarding the collapse of the Soviet Union as an illustration of how a great power can rapidly disintegrate.

 "The 'comfort cult', as Amalrik called it - the tendency in seemingly stable societies to believe "that 'reason will prevail' and that 'everything will be all right'" - is seductive. As a result, when a terminal crisis comes, it is likely to be unexpected, confusing, and catastrophic, with the causes so seemingly trivial, the consequences so easily reparable if political leaders would only do the right thing, that no one can quite believe it has come to this ...

Hull lays much of the rot in the US system to extreme partisanship and he is not reticent to call Republicans out as the most virulent proponents of that "my way or the highway" approach to governance.

The underlying weakness in present US democracy is that partisanship has become so extreme that the nation is incapable of dealing with the major issues that face it. COVID-19 has illustrated that starkly, with every word and act predicated on party allegiance. Meanwhile, other problems like race, police violence, gun control, inequality, the health system, climate change and energy policy go unattended.

Hull sees Trump as an extension of this partisanship.  However, he also recognizes Trump's psychological incapacity as an example of a failing system putting forward the least qualified  person to deal with the situation.

...Its president is so psychiatrically disordered with narcissism that he is incapable of dealing with the COVID-19 crisis in a coherent, empathetic way. Everything he says and does is through a prism of himself. He has now turned his whole re-election campaign into one of race hate, law and order and a bizarre invention of a threat from "left-wing fascists".

Hull points out that just excising Trump won't save the US.  Americans will need to take a hard look at there own beliefs and assumptions and decide if "American exceptionalism" has been a delusion that allowed Americans to believe that they didn't have to work cooperatively to maintain their democracy.

Tragically, American exceptionalism - "we are the first and best democracy on Earth" - contributes to the self-delusion of indestructibility. There is nothing automatically self-correcting in US democracy. Even the so-called checks and balances are not working - they are causing gridlock, rather than adding a bit of mild caution to a system that is overall supposed to be geared to problem-solving, not political point-scoring.

The system has become so warped that those disenfranchised, disempowered and disenchanted are taking to the streets, questioning the legitimacy of the whole system.

 The only question is whether the taking to the streets can break these vicious circles, or whether it is just another step in the decline and fall of a great power.

I hope this is not the first draft of our national obituary.  Will the chaos and disaster of the last four years be a useful lesson about the fragility of our democracy?  Or, will our hyper-partisanship, growing anti-science bias and social stratification be the forces that put an end to the special country that we imagine ourselves to be?