The Death And Rebirth Of America
Countries are emergent complex adaptive systems that evolve over time - or die. The USA, in contrast to the sponsored illusion of the thing being eternal, is in full-on Collapse mode.
This post is not explicitly about the Ukraine War, so if the future of the USA is something you would prefer not to think about, skip it. But on this Fourth of July holiday in America, the people of Ukraine and other allies deserve to know the deeper story about what’s happening to the USA right now.
This is a classic case of a complex adaptive system caught in a rigidity trap that persists until something vital breaks beyond repair. Death and rebirth, if you will. And this isn’t the first time that America has gone through the loop.
By my count, America has died and been reborn three times, once about every eighty years. Fourth America is ending right on schedule, and what the next version might look like is now an open question. A systems-based historical look at the evolving American system is necessary to reveal the essential dynamics.
We’re witnessing an engine in dire need of major overhaul get pushed beyond its natural limits with catastrophic consequences. For too many people across too much of the country, the USA feels stuck at every level. The American Dream no longer works for millions, and so the norms and institutions that better serve the Haves are increasingly rejected by the Have Nots. It’s not a new story.
The Rise And Fall Of Countries And Empires
Any system defined by interacting independent agents, whether warring armies, political movements, or animals in a biome, tends to go through four sequential phases as the populations within amass and dispose of vital resources. It’s easiest to call them Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter, with the actual seasonal cycle being one of several different drivers of and constraints on change. The following diagram (not mine) does a good job of visualizing the dynamics:
Groups as well as the broader system that their interactions produce experience times where there is more available energy and space and others where there is less. Naturally, disparities between different agents at any given moment can prompt an attempt to rewrite the rules of interaction in someone’s favor. Power gradients form and decay, and no balance lasts forever.
In winter, real or metaphorical, the world is quiet and agent activity low. In nature that’s because the solar energy plants require to do photosynthesis isn’t as readily available. Carnivores are forced to reduce their activity levels to cope with a reduction in prey.
Come spring more energy is suddenly available everywhere, and soon growth makes a landscape much more complex and productive. Agents inside also steadily become more interdependent, which eventually limits growth potential as available space is used up. The same mechanism is at work on a busy highway at rush hour.
Autumn is caused by a decline in sunlight that sets off a chain reaction. Some species grow while others rapidly fade, complexity unraveling until the process reaches a settling point in a new winter. Recessions are the classic example in human systems, but even relationships often follow this pattern.
Between winter and spring the underlying landscape itself, real or metaphorical, has low resilience and is so prone to evolve. This is often termed a regime shift, the entire system jumping from one mode of operation and reorganizing around another. Most elements of the prior one survive in some form, but major and lasting shifts can take shape in these moments.
This systems insight, simple as it might seem today, revolutionized environmental science about fifty years ago. Then, as was common in a lot of academic disciplines, the default assumption was that landscapes evolved to a terminal point and stayed like that unless damaged. This led to maladaptive management decisions across the world.
The same general pattern holds across most systems with autonomous agents. Change is inevitable, but it can be steered.
Any country is a living organism with a life cycle defined by the interaction of three component systems, the Political, Economic, and Social domains. The Economy distributes resources, both labor and its products. Society determines what products are valued and what behaviors are acceptable. Politics handles matters involving formal authority, mainly focusing on the ability to set and enforce laws that shape the Economic and Social domains.
A country’s peculiar history and the shape of its institutions impacts how quickly each domain tends to naturally move through the phases of the cycle. Social systems turn over every generation, around 20-30 years, Economic systems flip on the order of 10-20, and Political systems are more variable, usually 2-10 in a democracy but often much longer in authoritarian regimes - which also tend to fall much harder. When collapse phases in all three domains coincide, major trajectory changes often result. In general, most large countries seem to go through very difficult periods every century.
America has exhibited a regular recurrence pattern since the late 1600s of about eight decades. The root cause of the inevitable crisis, except in the case of natural disaster (most of the time), is too much inequality in all three domains. Wealth, authority, celebrity - each in its own way functions as a kind of latent cancer. Whenever power concentrates it fights to protect itself, and often expands to other domains seeking gain. Rich people may go into politics or buy a major media outlet, for example.
A degree of inequality is only natural in human affairs. Nobody is good at everything, and as a person goes through life they usually acquire skills and knowledge that allow them to do more work with less effort. Too little inequality destroys any incentive to produce quality work or achieve anything, but too much makes trying at all futile, transforming life into a pure casino where the objective is to make contact with a more powerful person and build a relationship based on subservience, as in Feudalism. Communism, Capitalism - even Centrism will all produce the same dead-end outcome if taken to the extreme.
For a country to work, the majority of people have to believe that it serves a purpose beyond exploiting them. You can tell them they’re wrong to feel angry about a system that they think has failed them, but it rarely does any good.
The Evolution Of America
There is one overriding continuity in the evolution of America, and that’s the presence of a self-aware elite comprised of wealthy and influential people who see themselves as holding an almost divine right to rule. For generations powerful interests have invested in a narrow story of America that limits the terms of national debate and distorts history.
The country has always been too large and diverse for any single group to directly dominate, however, try as it might. While America’s high and mighty have always tried to limit the freedoms of other social classes, the reality is that they’ve only ever been able to cling to the back of this particular bucking bronco. The American people drive the system, even if the elites are always trying to mold it.
America’s claim to unity has always been propaganda. How could it not be, when the tale of the country is written in the rapid expansion of its borders? When the Constitution was written, it was only envisioned to cover North America south of the Great Lakes and east of the Mississippi. The rest was incorporated later, often through legally dubious means. I mean, who gave Spain, France, or Britain any claims to lands already long inhabited that they could then sign away?
American society at the national level has always been a pyramid-shaped class system constructed to perpetually empower a small group of families whose ancestors won big in the grand American casino economy. This clique is no conspiracy or deep state, just a club of people numbering in the tens of thousands who broadly agree that they deserve what they have and must defend key institutions that secure their privileges at any cost. Membership is restricted to properly vetted individuals who look and act correctly, usually those with a personal connection to an existing member, whether through family ties or Ivy League schooling.
America’s elites mainly exert power indirectly; like their Puritan forebears they mainly wield the threat of public shame to neutralize troublesome perspectives. Writers they sponsor compose homilies in Op-Ed sections and partisan magazines that overtly or implicitly hold America to be blessed by God, with anyone granted privilege and power chosen to lead the ignorant masses. Influence helps channel capital flows, however, with investors as susceptible as anyone else to social manipulation.
It is this pseudo-religious order that spreads the pernicious myths of America which are used to beat down rational opposition and excuse outrageous crimes at home and abroad. By convincing Americans to personally identify with a purely mythic version of American history, America’s elites are able to escape accountability for waging wars that shed the blood of ordinary Americans. This social system also views foreigners as inherently lesser, though some - fellow English-speakers, mainly - get to be a few rungs higher on the ladder if they behave.
There have always been two very different sides of America: the one filled with millions of people trying their best to get by and even a little ahead, and the fantasy land where brilliant leaders of yore built a mystical paradise that must always be safeguarded against malevolent barbarian deviants at home or abroad. The first is a real country bound by the Constitution, the other a saccharine illusion designed to trap the unwary in a feudal relationship masquerading as patriotism.
Even from its earliest days American society was a paradox. While most of the settlers brought church-imposed ideas about racial superiority with them, in what became the USA their colonies also depended on the goodwill of the indigenous American peoples to survive and eventually thrive. America was never a virgin land ready for the till; diseases brought to the Americas by the Spaniards over a century before the first British colonies were founded had shattered local populations. The survivors mostly saw the Europeans as another tribe and treated them as such, merely another thread in the fabric of life.
By the time the War of Independence was on the horizon over a hundred years later, the relationship had shifted thanks to the steady influx of European settlers. Indigenous groups across the Appalachian Mountain range were more keen on resisting additional migration now that they had seen how Europeans operated. This led to violence and calls for armed force to allow more settlers to move across the mountains.
A major reason why the colonies ultimately rebelled was that Britain wanted to avoid getting drawn into more frontier wars after spending a few decades waging them. London began limiting further colonization efforts, creating a large pool of frustrated former indentured servants who threatened to demand reforms.
Europe’s empires early on had learned to use the American colonies as a dumping ground for people dispossessed by rapid changes underway in the Old Country as industrialization accelerated. The common lands which most ordinary people had relied on for generations were being privatized by wealthy landlords and industrial tycoons.
In the colonies, by the 1700s earlier generations of migrants had built up enough wealth that they were able to import manual labor. To pay the Crown’s taxes they had to produce goods for British markets. The institution of Indentured Servitude was an ideal way to exploit the ready supply of desperate workers: simply pay for their passage across the Atlantic, then you could work them nearly to death during the years that you owned all of their labor.
However, once free, former indentures needed land of their own to work in order to survive. To avoid large numbers of landless men demanding social reforms like the breakup of large estates, colonial governments preferred to send them towards the frontier. With expansion across the Appalachians curtailed, tensions between colonial elites and the Crown soon grew.
Chattel slavery in the American South created a different and even more pernicious set of problems. Even setting aside the moral component, slaves with no hope of improving their lot have every incentive to rebel and none to work particularly hard. You need a ruthless police system to prevent slaves from running off into the hills to set up farms of their own. This allows powerful leaders to bully poor free folk, too, and to sustain that predatory relationship Southern elites strove to convince poorer free Southerners to embrace race theory. Bigger estates could naturally manage the necessary infrastructure for this system more effectively than smaller ones, and so the Southern colonies were politically dominated by a small cohort of powerful landholders. Like their Puritan cousins to the North, they also wanted to expand west.
Tensions reached a boiling point by 1775. Only a third of colonial residents are said to have openly backed the War of Independence, but that plus French military support was enough to see off the British. After more or less forcibly exiling the loyalist portion of the population, the Thirteen Colonies then had the job of coming up with a workable governing arrangement. No small task when each colony had generations of history and distinct identities!
It remains a minor miracle that the Constitution was ever adopted at all, marking the start of Second America, Founders America. The Constitution represented - still represents - a fragile compromise between political agents with very particular interests. Though an important moment in the history of democracy, the Constitution also enshrined a system where only landowning men had the right to vote. Considering slaves to count as only a fraction of free citizens was a solution demanded by Northern colonies to dilute the power slave owners would otherwise have thanks to controlling their votes.
From the outset the Constitution sparked a fierce debate over the proper balance between the powers reserved for the Federal and State levels of government. Obviously, how these differences were resolved would have lasting economic and social impacts across the new country. A series of compromises were necessary that eventually became unworkable. The seeds of Second America’s fall were sown early on, the political conflicts between slave and free states never fully resolved. And the echoes of their vicious fight still haunt America today.
Still, the economic and social stresses that had led to rebellion were tamped down by the explosion of opportunity presented by Westward Expansion. Originally, America’s Western Frontier lay between the Appalachians and the Mississippi. Soon the new US Army was fighting Mexican forces along the Rio Grande and skirmishing with the indigenous people’s of the Great Plains - where they forcibly deported whole peoples along the Trail of Tears. Thus Manifest Destiny papered over America’s divides - for a time.
New states were swiftly added to the original thirteen; this led to renewed tensions over slavery. The wicked institution itself was not the actual political issue so much as the emergence of very different conceptions about America’s future that happened to fall across the existing North-South divide. As time passed, the different economic systems prevalent in the North, South, and Middle states along with their settlement patterns led to divergent social patterns. New migrants began to flow in from places like Ireland and Germany, bringing different social values that the largely Anglo-Saxon elites encouraged American society to look down on, even criminalize.
Free and Slave states were on diverging trajectories, many among the latter seeking colonial expansion into Mexico and the Caribbean to sustain the soil-taxing, labor-intensive plantation economy. The former, though equally motivated by the same expansionist urge, largely embraced the ideology of abolition during a series of Protestant religious revivals in the first half of the century. The Puritan moral economy re-emerged in a brand new mode.
Moral economy refers to the way social relations structure economic interactions. Reciprocal obligations between people of different classes, even small gestures like sending a thank you note to anyone who has given you a gift, are part of a culture’s moral economy. Legal restrictions on prostitution, drugs and other activities declared vices are as well.
Contrary to classical Marxist arguments, classes are not static groupings defined by control of capital alone. They dynamically emerge, with predatory classes taking root where institutional gaps persist then creating hard class distinctions to limit competition.
In the Northern states, the dominant Puritan moral economy came to hold that the slave-master relationship was inherently sinful. This was convenient for Northern politicians North because they could oppose the expansion of slavery at little immediate economic cost while using Southern states’ violent commitment to it as a cudgel. In the Puritan mindset, anything associated with something bad becomes bad itself, with the point of debate being to label a thing properly so it can be appropriately shamed.
More impactful than abolitionism itself, when it came to the stability of the USA, were the constant efforts by slave states to force free states to arrest and deport slaves who had managed to free themselves, often with the aid of the Underground Railroad. This sort of intervention by the federal government in state affairs represented the greatest fear of the small colonies back in the 1780s. If a federal government controlled by a few large states could impose its will on smaller ones, the situation would eventually become intolerable and the system would self-destruct.
The truth about the American Civil War that has been submerged by partisan rhetoric over the past century is that the entire affair was a needless tragedy brought about by the refusal of two groups of powerful elites to accept the inherent limits to power that must sustain any federation. Yes, the wicked institution of slavery was finally abolished after the end of the war, and the fighting did make that possible - I do not question the morality of the fight against slavery or excuse the Confederacy.
But an important and often overlooked truth is that neither the Confederacy nor the Union fought the Civil War over the status of the slaves alone. Both were seeking to dominate the entire country - the Confederacy as much as the Union.
That is why the Confederacy spent a good portion of the war trying to capture Washington, D.C. The famous town of Gettysburg is in Union Pennsylvania, not Confederate Virginia. Had the Confederacy defeated the Union, the instability of its own elite-driven political arrangement would likely have led to rapid reunification - naturally, on terms suitable to the slaver elites.
Likewise, Lincoln’s Union didn’t send its rich and powerful to mount futile charges against Confederate trenches. Rich folks could buy their way out of service while immigrants fresh off the boat from Ireland were press-ganged into service right on the docks of New York City. The road from there to Grant’s command and then a shallow grave in northern Virginia was mighty short.
Adding to the grim irony, the final end of slavery in the USA came about not as a result of military action but a Constitutional Amendment that freed the remaining slaves held in Union states like Maryland and Delaware. Lincoln’s famous Emancipation Proclamation only applied to places the Union didn’t then control.
After the war, freed slaves in the South soon found themselves trapped in economic relationship just as predatory as the last one, even their right to vote not legally secured for another century. Smart Southern elites consolidated the landholdings of ruined ones and wound up richer than ever while the communities around them languished. Naturally they deflected lasting anger about the situation in their communities onto the freed slaves, fostering the Lost Cause myth which imagined the war to be solely about state’s rights.
Their dominance over America fully established, the Northern elite was satisfied. After a few years of halting Reconstruction across the South, widespread resistance by the fading plantation elite led to the federal government ultimately abandoning the effort for fear of sparking another civil war. The USA simply attempted to return to business as usual, the tentative peace leading to the spring of Third America, Gilded or Imperial America.
With Union victory came a new conception of how the federal system would operate going forward. States were now explicitly subordinated to the federal government to a degree unheard of before, Americans actively encouraged to see themselves as a coherent “we” for the first time - the parameters defined, of course, by the right people with the correct connections.
Never isolated from trends in Europe, America’s wealthy sponsored newspapers and other media to spread a new narrative about the USA rooted in nationalism. American first began to mean anything resembling the modern use of the term around then, though naturally the Anglo-Saxon identity was considered the default.
The late 1800s and early 1900s saw the USA emerge as a nascent global power, seizing colonies across the Pacific. The American press ate up all the latest European fads when it came to viewing American soldiers as morally and intellectually superior to the insurgents who nevertheless managed to vex them. Wiser veterans, like Marine Corps general Smedley Butler, advocated against the futility of conducting eternal police actions along the expanding frontier to boost profits for corporate boards in New York City and Chicago.
Sadly, to little avail. Thousands of Americans got to experience the hell of the trenches in France during 1917 and 1918 and various international interventions, including the Russian Civil War, over the next decade. Regardless of the wisdom of getting in the middle of a war between brutal European empires, the world economy by the early twentieth century was much too interconnected for America to remain isolated from the impacts of the European World blowing itself up in spectacular fashion.
Thanks to the mythology that developed during Fourth America, most Americans today don’t realize just how close the USA came to fragmenting in the 1930s. There were even coup plots - real ones, not the pathetic joke that January 6, 2021 was insofar as these things go (for the Capitol police officers who died, it wasn’t funny at all). However, unlike 1775, 1861, or even today, America’s divisions were not as neatly correlated with geography then. And the magnitude of the global crash was too big for states to handle.
Socially the USA was dominated by the Puritan Northeast, with the South still recovering and the West too new to exert any coherent influence. The West Coast was hardly distinct from the rest of the West, with the Pacific Northwest still attracting more people than California thanks to the superior farming climate. The old Northwest, now the Rust Belt, was an amalgam of Puritan and later immigrant influences, especially Central and Northern European. Unlike the Civil War, the social collapse of the 1930s didn’t produce rival geographic coalitions.
Economically, the Great Depression devastated pretty much everyone who didn’t own a farm outside of the Midwest. There, human-augmented environmental impacts helped devastate a swath of American agriculture during the Dust Bowl and sent a stream of climate refugees to the West Coast, especially California. In a way, the universal effects of the economic crash might have averted serious political fragmentation because nearly everywhere the challenges were the same.
Further, international affairs became increasingly dire by the late 1930s. Japan was progressively seizing chunks of China while Nazi Germany remilitarized and swallowed Austria, then Czechoslovakia. The USSR under Stalin was industrializing at a rapid pace and building a huge military too. The epic global crash of 1914-1945 was simply too big for any American state to handle. Unlike America’s prior crashes, the main political divide cut between those who demanded more federal intervention and the dwindling holdouts who resisted this.
It makes sense that Fourth America, Postwar America, saw unity get elevated to a kind of religious faith. Though America’s elites didn’t face a threat of secession as Third America collapsed, they all remembered well that this possibility is always lurking beneath the surface of every federation. Unfortunately for those of us living at the twilight of Fourth America today, it is now this false unity that is tearing Americans apart.
The Fall Of Fourth America
Most of the world is familiar with the story of Fourth America’s rise because the end of the Second World War has been ruthlessly mythologized by American media. While the USA certainly was the Arsenal of Democracy, it only went to war because it was attacked by Japan, not to stop the Holocaust, drive Hitler from power, or stop Japan’s invasion of China.
America’s Postwar leaders inherited pretty much the only intact industrial bastion on the planet - plus a vast institutional apparatus adapted to wage a total war involving all of society. An important part of this machine was its propaganda arm, which employed journalists, writers, film-makers, and other creatives to generate patriotic content. And after the war, Nazi knowhow when it came to rockets wasn’t all that America imported. Goebbels’ ability to enrapture German audiences on behalf of Hitler was closely examined.
Americans in the 1940s were habituated to accept an incredibly high degree of government intrusion into their lives. Food rationing, mass conscription - these would be unthinkable in today’s USA. No one was giving up that power easily, hence America’s never-ending panics over communists, terrorism - and lately, opposing partisans. Also introduced during the Second World War was the idea that elites in industry and politics should coordinate in the national interest - defined, of course, by the right people.
It’s easy to forget today that not too long ago Americans didn’t habitually look to their presidents to address every little problem. Any president’s actual power over the economy, social issues, or global affairs has always been limited despite media myths. But in the USA, especially inside the Beltway, politics is a business, nothing more. Maintaining the illusion that this isn’t the case is essential to the survival strategy of America’s elites.
Fourth America’s Spring came as the country stood astride the ruins of the European world order. Only the Soviet Union could dream of challenging the US, which as the British and French empires fell apart became the master of the world ocean and so able to strangle any enemy’s maritime trade. Though the Soviet Union’s development of atomic and then nuclear weapons prevented the USA from pushing too far, they also ensured that the USA stood close to zero chance of ever being directly attacked by a nuclear power.
In a sense, it was Fourth America’s dominance by default that sowed the most potent seeds of its own demise. By the 1970s Europe and Asia had largely recovered from the war; being newer, their factories were also generally more productive. American industry lost a competitive edge it is unlikely to regain. To cope, the USA embraced a financialized economy where US companies provided money and knowledge while foreign ones handled labor.
Lower labor costs outside of the USA made goods cheaper for domestic consumers, and at the national level the cost of imports was more than offset by investment capital flowing in from abroad seeking to use the US as a safe haven. This is a wonderful relationship for some, but if you don’t have a job then buying what you used to make yourself from a foreign company is a double blow even if it’s cheaper. It’s triply frustrating when a day trader on Wall Street can earn a living making bets on stocks, confident that as long as everyone else gets wiped out at the same time the government will jump in to bail everyone out.
Economic shifts are necessary and healthy, but not everyone benefits. A working government can balance the power differentials to avoid certain groups always winding up on the losing side. That’s the ultimate source of most social ills, including crime and political extremism.
In the US, the political system has degenerated into a pure market, allowing monied interests to buy special privileges. This lets them gut important public services or push the costs of maintaining them onto taxpayers in lower income brackets. Partisan rhetoric allows politicians to evade accountability by blaming the other team.
As America ages, its regional differences in dialect and culture are growing more prominent. Different parts of America are evolving in very different directions. The internet has dramatically lowered the cost of communication, making it easy for people to find a reality bubble that suits their psychological needs. Yet the political system still relies on pretending that Americans are all one big family. This papers over the predatory class system that allows rich people and the media they favor to justify maintaining a status quo that grows more unstable every year.
That the existing system is badly broken should not be in doubt. Americans generally pay twice as much per capita for major services like healthcare and public safety as residents of other wealthy democratic countries do. At the same time the average quality of most services is notably lower. Education, healthcare, police, defense - in each the pattern of routine under-performance is identical.
In the USA of today, precious few people feel that any federal institution works as it should except the military - and that’s only because close cooperation between the Pentagon and the media since Vietnam. Polls and studies run by highly reputable organizations like Pew Research and Gallup consistently show that a strong majority of Americans distrust Congress, the President, the Supreme Court, and most federal agencies. It’s been getting steadily worse for two decades now. Most Americans agree that democracy isn’t working well and want it to improve, but this never seems to happen no matter who is in charge.
All classic signs of a system in decay. It’s been Autumn in America for a long time.
Small wonder that only two-thirds of eligible voters turned out in 2020 despite it being billed as the most important election in American history. Between America’s for-profit partisan political theater, economy dominated by a few extremely rich shareholders, and society where people are encouraged to worship vapid celebrities, is it any wonder folks are fed up, a significant fraction even willing to consider violence to effect change?
In the United States, the very idea of democracy has been colonized by a clique of wealthy, well-connected families who have perverted it and the Constitution to serve their interests. In the modern USA you only have the Constitutional rights that you can afford to defend in a court of law. This is unacceptable whatever your partisan lean, or should be.
Americans are once again in a position of being taxed without effective representation thanks to partisanship. Corruption is endemic, taking various forms: a tiered justice system, hidden fees, a media that pretends this is the only possible state of affairs, and more. Half of all American income tax revenues flow to a Pentagon that has proven suspiciously incapable of winning wars, deterring China or Putin from taking aggressive actions against their neighbors, or even passing an independent budget audit.
Most Americans understand that something is very wrong in this country. But any effort to develop a viable alternative is soon brought under relentless assault by partisan interests and fearmongers of all stripes. The resulting gap is filled by charlatans largely enabled by the partisans they pretend to oppose.
The Covid-19 pandemic accelerated deteriorating social, economic, and political trends to a degree that most Americans are apparently still not ready to accept, hence so many holding mistaken beliefs like it being a hoax, engineered in a lab, or the vaccines that protect against it containing microchips. Extreme partisanship of the sort that led to violence after the 2020 election is a natural consequence of the collapse phase of a human system.
Postwar America is dying because too much power is concentrated in too few hands while the minds that control them are blinded by egoist delusions. Everyone wants to find someone to blame because the Puritan-inflected mass manufactured society exemplified by American popular culture has convinced the majority that we’re all living in a Disney fairy tale. People keep waiting for the plot turn that makes the other side see sense at last, but this doesn’t happen in a systemic crisis. Especially not when the fundamental problem is the emergence of opposing definitions of even the most basic truths.
Americans are constantly being told that they are divided on Right-Left lines, but a more sophisticated grouping uses two independent axis along which Americans have naturally grouped themselves about as shown in the diagram below. The second axis, Authority-Freedom, broadly represents faith in government power. Each bubble roughly corresponds to the size of the tribe’s voting population, and I’ve also included their general position on Ukraine and governance in general, for reference. Presidential candidate positions also shown, as well as their areas of greater and lesser appeal.
This is a kind of gravity model - the closer a candidate sits to a group, the tighter the bond. A successful politician invests in rhetoric that allows them to affiliate with as many groups as possible. However, groups far apart on the rhetorical landscape are in opposition, so you can’t appeal to them all. Also, the more closely you affiliate with any one group, the less you tend to be able to appeal to others, making coalition-building a constant balancing exercise.
Each partisan team in modern American politics is a corporate brand composed of franchises perpetually jostling for power. A generation ago the circles on this chart were much closer together, which is why people could legitimately speak of a political “center” back then. The internet has helped drive the clusters apart, leading to a growing gulf between Left and Right but also tribes within each coalition that the U.S. political system is poorly equipped to reconcile.
The same ideological groupings are present in each state and region, but their size varies, which determines where a state falls on the political spectrum and how it votes. With about 90% of House seats and most of the Senate no longer competitive, the stability of the geographic-cultural connection in American life is quite remarkable. There are Blue voters in deep Red states and vice versa, but the Big Sort has been underway or so long that America’s political geography today looks a lot like it did in the 1850s. There were pro-Union areas in the Confederate states and pro-slave parts of the Union, too.
American politics is dominated by coalitions that fight as much for the sake of fighting as anything else. With federal policy largely static because of the structural stalemate, all anyone has going for them is their ability to get attention by acting crazier than the next loon in line - or playing centrist to pretend like they’re the only sane voice in the room.
In contemporary America, everyone is talking past each other because they have no incentive to do anything else. Politics is an expression of tribal morality. It’s this way because of the lack of necessary structural change.
There is a real danger of the USA fragmenting politically along geographic lines in the near future as feedback loops emerge driving partisans to demand ever more extreme acts. A written Constitution is a powerful tool, but it doesn’t eliminate the need for politics to resolve questions of what the words mean when put into practice. And if enough people believe that a system is being used to permanently subvert their interests, it loses legitimacy. Eventually, an alternative is sought. Sometimes a very bad one.
The pressing question in America right now is how to bring structural reform to a country riven into two ideologically opposed partisan camps with clear geographic strongholds. A full forty American states are dominated at the state level by the same partisan team; in most, their federal delegations are strongly partisan too. Since 2011, Republicans have never held trifectas in fewer than 20 states while the Democrats have usually - except for a brief period about a decade ago, held around 15. Congress is little different, with no more than 20% of House districts competitive thanks to gerrymandering. The Senate also hardly changes, while neither side is ever able to muster enough votes to beat a determined filibuster.
This is the living definition of a breakdown in democratic accountability, and the geographic dimension is impossible to unsee once you’ve truly taken it in:
America is divided. It always has been. The question is how to maintain the right degree of unity to prevent outright conflict.
One solution is promising, if unprecedented. Article V of the Constitution allows state legislatures to call a Constitutional Convention. This pathway has never been used because Congress actually produced Amendments until about fifty years ago. But nothing says that it never will.
If 38 states ratify an Amendment saying that all federal powers are hereby devolved to six regional federal administrations, it has force of law. Under the Constitution, the will of the people is the source of legitimacy. Splitting the federal government up by existing Census regions would produce clear Blue or Red majorities in at least four of six. This would break the political deadlock for most Americans.
Here’s the thing - a poll done back in 2021 even then showed that a significant number of Americans already consider outright secession of their census region a viable possibility:
Instead of secession, the Constitution can be Amended. Difficult to accomplish, certainly. But possible - and without violence. If Americans knew about this option, many would consider it.
Even better, the two-party system as it stands would die. The thing forces highly diverse coalitions onto teams of necessity. It wants to produce a stalemate because this benefits the powers that be. However, as soon as Democrats and Republicans in places like California and Kentucky no longer have to share the same national party, they can better appeal to local audiences. Competition will return to politics.
Sadly, a decisive move like this remains unlikely. More probable is a future where the country staggers on as the federal government loses more and more control. States with geographic advantages and better leadership will do well, others will look like places around the world that many Americans love to look down on. People will continue moving to where they feel they belong. Everyone will just be at each other’s throats the whole time.
Fortunately, Americans are much too lazy to actually go to war with each other. Though in times like these, even that can’t be totally ruled out. It’s probably more likely than peaceful separation, Czechoslovakia style.
Whatever happens, the death of Fourth America is nigh. Fortunately, America and the Constitution aren’t synonymous with the elite culture that has colonized them. They are what people make of them. Sooner or later, they decide it’s time for a change.