Rome, Italy
This article examines the current state of the United States of America, analyzing the origins of widespread polarization, government and institutional distrust, social unrest, and diffuse depression. Using historical models and examples, a theoretical framework, and comparative analysis, the article delves into the state of affairs in the United States.
INTRODUCTION
In 1630, John Winthrop, leader of the Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony, delivered his famous sermon “A Model of Christian Charity”. Near its conclusion, he exhorted:
“We shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.”
This vision of moral leadership became the bedrock of American exceptionalism, a redemptive project rooted in liberty, democracy, and global security. It was recovered by both Reagan and JFK, with Kennedy referencing it in his historical speech to the Massachusetts legislature in 1961. American exceptionalism was fundamentally ideological, in contrast with European supremacy based on race and culture.
It was a world drama in which people who had fled the corruption and tyranny of the “old world”, from the first colonies, set up a new order based on rights, liberty, and democracy. This narrative has formed the core of United States foreign policy since the Second World War; the United States of America has had the mission of redeeming the world by spreading liberty and democracy, and it has been the narrative of many United States presidents.
However, critiques of this model’s long-term sustainability arose over four decades ago. An important influence is Paul Kennedy’s “The Rise and Fall of Great Powers,” where he emphasized the critical issue of overstretching, especially when it surpasses economic capabilities. For example, the Athenian expedition in Sicily during the Peloponnesian War diverted Athens from its conflict with Sparta and drained vital resources, contributing to Athens’ loss. Today, the narrative of American exceptionalism is unraveling under the weight of structural, cultural, and political crises, depleted after decades of attempted missionary efforts to reshape the world.
This article examines the sources of that collapse – from economic overstretch to societal decay – and analyzes how figures like Donald Trump, Vance, and his establishment exploit the vacuum left in this wake. The political elite has lost its ability to sell this vision to the average voter and has failed to deliver on its promise. As a consequence, distrust in institutions, polarization of parties, and grievances – all expressions of malaise that Trump capitalized on to power and continues to fuel. This trend is likely to continue aggravating the evident economic and social deterioration, marking a permanent shift in the political culture before a reconstruction or an irreversible decline.
Those who voted for Trump represent the backbone of the country; they do not have a strictly isolationist worldview. However, the growing rift between the population and the establishment over the last decade demonstrates that the United States’s foreign policy isn’t working well as the establishment thinks; this explains the appeal of disaffected voters for Trump. The true existential threat to the United States is not mass migration, uncontrolled technology development, Chinese rise, nor Trump himself, but rather the cultural clash between the different “ways of life”, what is the real American identity, and who is and is not an American.
THE DECLINE OF THE MIDDLE CLASS AND THE CULTURAL FRAGMENTATION
A Pew Research report found that in 2015, the American middle class was no longer the nation’s economic majority and was falling further behind financially. This represents not merely an economic change but, more importantly, a socio-cultural transformation. By 2044, the United States will become a “minority-majority” country with whites below half the population and white non-college-educated still representing the largest voter bloc. The sense of dislocation among the working class arose from the grievances of carrying the heaviest load and sacrifice from the establishment’s foreign policy; indeed, unlike the Second World War, the Americans who sacrificed themselves in the recent wars have disproportionately come from the poorer regions of the country.
The society is divided and polarized, with opponents considering each other the cause of the disease. For example, a 2020 survey of the Institute for Family Studies detected that only 4% of marriages were between democrats and republicans. When Americans change houses, 70% of the time, they transfer to a neighborhood politically similar or neutral. Bill Bishop offers an interesting account of this phenomenon in his book “The Big Sort”. People do cluster by values and lifestyle, countries are more politically homogenous, big cities are liberal, and rural areas are conservative, a clear autosegregative trend that reinforces polarization.
Midwest, in this case, serves as a mirror of the country for political and demographical heterogeneity. It is politically and socially fragmented, representing the trend expressed by Bishop, from the ultra-liberal Chicago, to the pure conservatism of North and South Dakota, passing through the centrism of the Great Lakes. The United States faces an era of erosion of constitutional capacity to negotiate and compromise, a rise in identity politics that emphasizes especially division of race, culture, religion, sexual preferences, as well as increasingly violent populist style political conduct.
The United States affirmed as global hegemon with a narrative of redemption and a strong internationalist foreign policy; however, there is another profound tradition of selfishness, inward-looking, and nationalistic, all aspects that resemble the Monroe Doctrine, sometimes even openly exposed today. This tradition emerged predominantly in 2016, Trump capitalized on those sentiments, and Trumpism became an expression for those visceral feelings about the United States’s historic mission; it is no fleeting phenomenon.
ELITE OVERPRODUCTION AND INSTITUTIONAL STRESS
Peter Turchin provides a useful analytical framework through cliodynamics, suggesting that periods of instability are primarily caused by “elite overproduction”. Indeed, there is a structural-demographic problem behind Western countries’ instability. Similar to the Gracchan period in ancient Rome, when a small elite amassed vast wealth while a large population segment was left behind, populism directly engaged disaffected voters and popular consensus, turning them against the establishment. In the Gracchan period, the Roman checks and balances were heavily stressed; today, even if in a more complex world, judicial appointment, congressional norms, and politicization of the federal agencies through Schedule-F deeply stress the United States’s institutions.
The origin of such instability for Turchin lies in an overproduction of the ruling class; while alumni of elite schools take up lucrative positions in technology or highly competitive fields like finance and consulting, there is also an excess production of lawyers, PhD holders in social science or humanities, with very dim employment prospects. Therefore, a huge number of university-educated people graduate, competing for limited elite positions.
This competitive environment fosters intense intra-elite rivalry, corruption, and scandals (as college admissions scandals); therefore, public anger and resentment toward a system that doesn’t work as it should, the consequence is a deeply destabilised society. In addition to falling or stagnant wages, as in many “Western” countries, the elite overproduction framework generates sociopolitical stress. Turchin has affirmed that elite overproduction explains societal distress in the late Roman Empire, during later years of many Chinese dynasties, the French Wars of Religion and the later Revolution. Through this framework, Turchin correctly predicted in 2010 that this situation would cause social unrest in the United States during the 2020s.
THE CYCLE OF IMPERIAL DECLINE
While Turchin expects a resolution of this crisis by the 2030s, it will significantly alter the character of the United States. Other models, however, suggest it may simply be one of the physiological symptoms of a superpower’s decline. Ray Dalio identifies six stages in the grand cycle of empires and superpowers: new world/post-conflict rebuilding, peace and prosperity, credit expansion and financial bubbles, wealth gaps and internal tensions, debt + conflict + decline, and finally revolutions or external war (collapse).
According to his framework United States is in the fifth stage, characterized by a huge debt, a polarized society, and a socio-cultural and technological decline relative to other rising powers.
SOCIETAL DECAY AND ITS SYMPTOMS
Emmanuel Todd provides a clear example of the moral, economic, demographic and spiritual decline in the United States, which could be related to the turmoil of Dalio’s fifth stage. As a evidence of this, in 2023 29% of americans had been diagnosed with depression during their lifetime (compared to 19.6% in 2015) with 18% currently experiencing depression; the increase in mortality between whites 45-54 years old due to alcoholism, suicide, use of weapons, obesity and drugs (fentanyl mostly) caused life expectancy drop drastically from 78.8 years (2014) to 76.3 years (2021). The United States is the only country among those “developed” to register a decline, despite having the highest health spending in the world (18.8% of GDP).
Aging, low birth rate, and disintegration of family structures erode the social fabric, secularization and loss of common ideologies drive the population to nihilism. Paradoxically, the ideology of globalization and liberalism used to achieve world hegemony appears to be the same cause of its decline. Immigration, secularization, and consumerism have supplanted the so-called “WASP” (white Anglo-Saxon protestant) culture, the historical foundation of the United States.
The political elite is dominated and corrupted by Eisenhower’s “military-industrial” complex, which nowadays might have become a “military-technological-financial” complex. The loss of a collective project and a common identity has left violent power ruling the country, unable to pursue its strategic objectives. The United States triggered irrational conflicts, such as the war in Ukraine or the many wars in the Middle East, and lost sight of a rising power such as communist China. Instead, the United States has committed itself to prolonged conflicts while having a declining industrial complex – a paradox at present times, depleting resources and strategic focus.
Furthermore, the possibility of restructuring the industrial complex seems remote, considering the scarcity of STEM workers who are indeed heavily imported using H-1B visas and the decades of United States companies offshoring that have irreversibly invested and exported a precious know-how. The United States’ reliance on foreign talent can be shown by considering that in the top ten United States companies by market capitalization, six of the ten CEOs are foreign-born. These are evident extraction logics driven by profit-seeking that lack a policy-making toward a common interest, unable to lead to sustainable long-term growth. Similarly, the reliance on debt issuance comes from a mentality of short-termism, aimed at attracting new voters and satisfying donors’ requests without consideration of future repercussions.
MILITARY OVERSTRETCH
A nation’s long-term military strength depends on its productive economic base: industry, trade, technological innovation, and capital. The United States currently faces rapid technological innovation, particularly from China, a degraded industrial complex, and reliance on third countries, and a growing number of nations collaborating to avoid the SWIFT system or dollar payments.
The economic base supporting the military commitments is weakening; however, the United States in the last decades has continued to expand militarily, straining resources in endless wars. The United States appears to face a phase of overstretch with two wars that are diverting attention from China . This exemplifies Paul Kennedy’s crucial framework: historically, great powers decline from the imbalance between means (economy) and ends (power).
CONVERGING CRISES
The United States is facing a powerful convergence of crises, marked by both internal and external conflicts, and aggravated by a huge debt. Historically, when superpowers confront simultaneous domestic and international challenges, they risk to enter in a phase of decline and eventually collapse after shocks erode their fiscal and productive capacity to sustain state needs. The internal conflict not only regards the socioeconomic distress but also growing tensions between political movements and the establishment. Another important factor is the “monetisation of politics”: in 2024, the candidate that spent the most money won 94% of House races and 88% of Senate races, which represents a clear pay-to-win dynamic in politics (Open Secrets 2025). As during the Gilded Age, when wealthy individuals wielded significant power, nowadays we experience a very similar phenomenon, a resurgence after the reforms in the early 20th century. In 2010, Citizens United v. FEC effectively dismantled many campaign finance restrictions, creating concern about plutocratic governance.
CONCLUSION
In light of these intersecting crises — a cultural fragmentation that stresses the economic overstretch and an economic overstretch that triggers and fuels the cultural fragmentation, both reinforce one another in a feedback loop while elite overproduction and monetisation of politics act as major forces that unleash instability in a delicate moment — it becomes essential to understand the personalities and forces now shaping America’s future. At the center stands Donald Trump, not merely for his political figure but as a political phenomenon: a mirror and product of the era’s anxieties, contradictions, and ambitions. To grasp the trajectory of the United States, we must now turn to examine the man who seeks to redefine it and those around him.
REFERENCES
– Johannes Spath, The Rise of Techno- Authoritarianism and its Impact on US Foreign Policy, oiip-Österreichisches Institut für Internationale Politik
– James Curran, “Americanism, not globalism”: President Trump and the American mission, Lowy Institute
– Brigitte L. Nacos, Robert Y. Shapiro, and Yaeli Bloch-Elkon, Donald Trump: Aggressive Rhetoric and Political Violence, Terrorism Research Initiative
– Ofir Dayan , China and the Trump Cabinet 2.0: Between Hawkishness and Interests, Institute for National Security Studies (2024)
– Miguel Angel Centeno, The new Leviathan: The dynamics and limits of technocracy, Princeton University
– Kenneth Rasmussen, JD Vance, Peter Thiel, and the Silicon Valley Digital Radical Right, Psychohistory Forum Research Associate
– Musk o Trump al bivio, Limes, 12-2024
– L’ordine del caos, Limes, 01-2025
– Alessandro Scassellati, La sconfitta dell’Occidente oligarchico e nichilista. La profezia di Emmanuel Todd, Transform Italia (2024)
– Patrick Porter, Was Paul Kennedy Right? American Decline 30 Years On, War on the Rocks
– Micheal Cox, For over 30 years, Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers has been the backdrop of the shifting debate over American power, LSE
***
Autore dell’articolo*: Leonardo Di Piazza, Undergraduate Student in Economics at Tor Vergata University.
***
Nota della redazione del Think Tank Trinità dei Monti
Come sempre pubblichiamo i nostri lavori per stimolare altre riflessioni, che possano portare ad integrazioni e approfondimenti.
* I contenuti e le valutazioni dell’intervento sono di esclusiva responsabilità dell’autore.
Editor’s Note – Think Tank Trinità dei Monti
As always, we publish our articles to encourage debates, and to spread knowledge and original and alternative points of view.
* The contents and the opinions of this article belong to the author(s) of this article only.