The End of America?

The return of convicted felon Donald Trump to the US presidency in a better organised far right putsch than in his first term has triggered a torrent of analysis about the consequences for US democracy and geopolitical stability.

But understanding America's grim plight should begin with a clear-eyed examination of its history - ideally by an outsider who both has an affinity for the country and an ability to see through the myths upon which it is built.

This is the service provided by Nick Bryant, the BBC’s former chief correspondent in Washington, in his recently released deep and masterful volume - 'The Forever War: America's Unending Conflict with Itself' .

As a boy in Britain, Bryant had fallen in love with the USA - initially via his parents' stories of the revered JFK and a mural in his native Birmingham of the murdered president. Later, doing his undergraduate degree in history at Cambridge, and doctoral thesis in American politics at Oxford, he realised the degree to which Americans' view of their country is built on myth.

"In the telling of the American story, acts like Kennedy's assassination have been treated as abnormalities, a tendency that obscures the reality that they are more reflective of normalcy," he writes. "And that speaks of a broader analytical failing. So much of our understanding of America is based on false narratives and self-validating folklore."

In journalism, Bryant added to his academic knowledge of US politics with first-hand experience of its day-to-day reality working as a correspondent for the BBC in Washington. So “Forever Wars’ is drawn from both his on-the-ground experience covering the chaos of the first Trump presidency and his detailed understanding of America’s constitutional and political history..

If there is one message from this book, it is that the sickness we can all see in the US today - the bitter polarisation, the social division, the extreme inequality of wealth and incomes, the endemic gun violence, the culture wars, and the loss of public faith in the institutions of democracy - are not the result of the administrative apparatus that Trump dismisses as the 'deep state', but a legacy of the country's own deep and troubled history.

While ‘Trumpism’ - that mix of right-wing populism, xenophobia, conspiratorial fantasy and neo-fascism - is often portrayed as a break with America’s liberal democratic past, Bryant contends that today's dysfunction is really an extension of everything that came before.

“American democracy has become so diseased because for most of the country’s history it has never been that healthy,” he writes. "Always there has been a tendency to downplay the full extent of American violence and extremism. Always there has been a false narrative."

For example, the right to vote was never enshrined in the US constitution, the Bill of Rights made no mention of voting, while slave owners were granted more protections than anyone else. Indeed, Bryant notes that the constitution's framers were hostile to the very notion of democracy and designed a system of government to guard against ‘the tyranny of the majority’. This is why a popularly elected president can still be thwarted by the so-called Electoral College. (Trump's victory in 2024 is the first time a Republican candidate has won the popular vote in two decades.)

Yet for all the built-in distortions, Americans for 250 years have bought the idea of their own exceptionalism, casting their polity as a shining city on the hill for the world to emulate. For the rest of us this is hard to fathom. This is a country wracked by obscene levels of inequality, now routine school shootings, a politicised judiciary, a rigged and chaotic electoral system that disenfranchises millions, a corrupt legislature bought by big money, a state driven by religious fundamentalism, ruinous levels of public debt, a succession of failed foreign wars and attempts at regime change, attacks on women’s bodily autonomy, a broken healthcare system, an opiate crisis, deaths of despair, and declining lifespans - who in their right minds would want to copy the USA?

For much of the rest of the world, Trump's first presidency had a cartoonish quality. How could such a vulgar buffoon, incorrigible liar, huckster, crook and illiterate slob (just to cite some of his least worst qualities) be considered a viable candidate for the most powerful position in the world? Worse, how could so many people - knowing all of that - go on to vote for him? And after the attack on the Capitol Building in 2021, a violent insurrection Trump actively encouraged, how on earth could they vote him back?? The cartoon of the first term looks set to become a horror movie in the second.

Bryant writes that he himself thought the idea of a Trump candidacy, never mind presidency, was far-fetched the first time around (his book predates the 2024 poll result). But he came to the view that Trump is part of a same dangerous tradition in US politics behind the early 19th century populist president Andrew Jackson, the pro-fascist priest Charles Coughlin of the 1930s and the America First isolationism of aviator Charles Lindbergh.

"Trump tapped into precisely the same anxieties as his demagogic forebears: A deep-rooted suspicion of central government; a collective sense of victimhood; an ugly nativism, racism and hostility towards the other; an anti-intellectualism; an anti-elitism; a populist anti-capitalism; a nostalgic nationalism; and the drawing of battlelines which portrayed him as a David up against Goliath."

But Trump effectively channels the American working and middle classes’ white hot anger and resentment without doing anything about the sources of their grievances. Despite portraying himself as on the side of the 'little people' against the hated coastal 'elites', he has cut taxes for the rich, allied himself with plutocrats like Elon Musk and proposed policies including tariffs and attacks on public services that will only make the lives of his supporters even more desperate and miserable.

This ‘punching down’ strategy is an old tradition in populist politics - redirecting the electorate's often legitimate anger at unfairness away from the real culprits towards those at the very bottom. It's just that Trump, as other writers like Naomi Klein have written, is far better at expressing the people's fury than his Democratic opponents who remain beholden to the discredited neoliberal ideology of the Clinton and Obama years. In other words, Trump may have got the facts wrong but he got the feelings right.

The result is that the American public, fed insane conspiracy theories by social media and the criminally distorted 'journalism' of Murdoch's Fox News, have bought the lie all over again. The billionaires, gun lobby, fossil fuel companies, right-wing think tanks, Christian nationalists and crypto bros are laughing all the way to the bank.

Suffice to say, Brand America is wrecked and much of the rest of the civilised world is now trying to put as much distance as it can between itself and a Washington riven by dysfunction and at war with itself. Even the charm of America's once enormously successful ‘soft power’ - built upon Hollywood blockbusters, popular music, advertising, fashion and spectacle - is rapidly fading. To the rest of us, including writers like Nick Bryant who once loved America, the country appears to have lost its mind, its heart, and its soul. Ever-greater polarisation and escalating violence look inevitable.

"The United States is buckling under the weight and contradictions of its history for the simple reason that so much of that history is unresolved," Bryant writes. "But it was ever thus. America has rarely had a sense of oneness, so why should we expect it today?"

Trump’s depressing and disheartening victory in 2024 seals the deal - heralding the likely final destruction of US democratic institutions, arguably killing off whatever remaining chances we have to slow climate change and bringing America closer to an all-out military confrontation with China..and ultimately with itself.

It’s a tragedy for the US. Unfortunately, given America’s still overwhelming economic and military power, it is just as much a tragedy for the rest of humanity.

Bryant left the USA after the January 6 violent attempt to overthrow the result of the 2020 presidential election which brought Joe Biden to power. Appalled, he now watches events unfold from afar at his new family home in Sydney, where I also live.

I’d like to believe our shared distance from the centre of the madness will protect us. But I’m no longer so sure.

Essential reading.