America's downfall

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America's fall from grace has been nothing short of spectacular. Undisputed global hegemon since 1945, the United States has somehow managed to collapse into a global laughing stock in just a couple of years. Once touted as the arsenal of democracy, US institutions are now bending to a despot. The US president is a convicted rapist, a serial paedophile, who spends most days insider-trading the proceeds from his own corrupt dealings. Congress is a herd of arse-licking sycophants. The US Supreme Court looks more like the board of directors of a mafia organisation than a serious legal institution. And America's toothless press proves daily that it is wholly incapable of doing its job of holding any of America's failing institutions to account.

As if that was not enough, America's once awesome military and political alliances, its long-standing commitment to free trade, and what were once healthy public finances and the most credible currency in the world are now gone. People are 'disappeared' off the streets and sent to torture camps in Third World backwaters. Children are locked up in concentration camps. Cutting-edge scientific research and excellent universities, which used to drive America's remarkable productivity growth are now being gutted in front of our very eyes with the sole aim of preventing truth from being spoken. America's tech giants, once beacons of hope for a brighter future, have turned into quasi-fascist monopolistic monsters, which, tumour-like, eat away at heart of America's once thriving capitalist economy.

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How did all this come to pass? And so quickly, so easily? Why did the checks and balance fail so spectacularly?

Truth be told, I am amazed it didn't happen sooner. The potential for institutional collapse in the United States has always been greater than in other Western nations. In fact, the US has been lucky to have had so many relatively wise and moral people in the White House over the years. Even the crook Richard Nixon had enough decency to step down, when he was threatened with impeachment.

Not so Donald Trump.

Trump re-defines all terms of immorality. By his actions every day, he shows us how the foundations of American democracy are made of sand. All it took for things to begin to crumble was a president, who did not feel honour-bound to uphold the country's laws, who did not respect moral codes, and whose ideals did not extend beyond personal self-aggrandisement.

Granted, all democracies can elect a Trump. It happens. Even twice. However, what makes the United States different from other developed nations is that once in power Trump has been allowed to continue to commit crimes with complete impunity. America's institutions do not stop him. The American people tolerate him, many venerate him. Even now. After all this.

In other countries, a criminal like Trump would be ousted from office in short order. We got a reminder just this week, when news broke that Hui Ka Yan, the founder of Evergrande, once the largest property company in the world, was jailed for life. In the United States, the most crooked property tycoon was made president. How is this even possible?

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To answer that question, we should first recognise that the core issue here is not that a bad seed can make it to the top. As mentioned earlier, this can happen anywhere. Rather, the real issue is that Americans allow the seed to germinate and sink its poisonous roots deep into the very fabric of American society.

Ask yourself these questions:

Where are all the court cases against an obviously corrupt Executive?

Why do journalists not grow and pair and confront a president who humiliates them every day?

Why do supposedly moral Christians support a paedophile rapist?

Why are so many civil servants willing to do Trump's bidding?

Why do members of the US military agree to participate in Trump's illegal war?

Why do Americans blithely tolerate concentration camps?

Why are so few Americans protesting?

I see five reasons why America tolerates Trump to the point of letting country's institutions fall apart. All five reasons can ultimately be traced back to core values held by ordinary Americans, that is, to American culture itself.

First, Americans associate success with virtue, which means that rich people like Trump generally get too much deference. Success is the highest virtue in American society and success is defined in monetary terms. Not only is Trump very rich, he is getting richer all the time, so he is, by American cultural norms, virtuous. Many rich people get rich from inheriting money or through ill-gotten gains and it takes far more than the ability to make money to run a country. Trump happens to be a very bad leader, who inherited money and then went on to make a lot more of it by the most immoral means imaginable. He is patently not virtuous, yet many Americans are blind to his failings because of his wealth. At no time in US history has so much deference been misplaced in one so ill-deserving as Trump by so many people.

Second, a strain of selfishness runs through American culture, which makes it difficult to motivate Americans to act collectively against injustice. While American selfishness encourages great entrepreneurship and dynamism, it leaves little room for collective action. Texans will protest against data centres in their own backyard, but don't count on their support if the data centre is being built in the neighbouring state. The few examples of successful organised protest - the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s and the anti-Vietnam War protests in the 1970s - are still viewed by many Americans as fundamentally un-American. Protest may yet unseat Trump, but it is far more likely to be a protest over rising gas prices than Trump's abuse of power; the threshold for getting Americans off their arses to help each other is far, far higher than the threshold for getting them riled up over gas prices.

The third reason Americans allow Trump to destroy their society is that so many of them believe his lies. More than 70% of Americans practice one religion or another. According to Gallup, a reputable pollster, only 24% of Americans believe humans evolved over millions of years through natural processes without any divine involvement. These statistics are shocking, because if so many people believe religious non-sense without a shred of evidence, then they will literally believe anything. Which they do. On Truth Social, Trump's platform for spreading mis-information, the US president feeds his cult followers one lie after another, each one carefully crafted by Trump's personal Joseph Goebbles, Stephen Miller. His lies are swallowed hook, line, and sinker.

Fourth, most Americans are still woefully ignorant about the world and America's role within it. How many Americans can point out Germany or Kenya or India on a map? Most Americans have no idea how other countries view the United States and what role the US plays overseas. This ignorance has allowed Trump to destroy NATO to appear mighty, even though it is America's most valuable political and military alliance ever. By also abandoning America's long-standing commitment to free trade with its allies, Trump has undermined the trust that until recently guaranteed that America's allies would finance the US trade deficit by buying US Treasuries. If foreign buyings of Treasuries stops, then belt-tightening of a kind Americans have not known for many decades is on the menu.  

Finally, Americans are quite naive, so they don't fully appreciate the dangers posed by Trump and fascism. The US is a young nation by Western standards with a very limited range of traumatic experiences. Sure, Vietnam was traumatic in the minds of many Americans, but let us be real: fewer Americans died in the entire Vietnam war than the number of Gazans, who were killed by IDF since the Israeli invasion of October 2023 (58,000 vs 76,000). I find it comical that Americans often berate Europeans for their reluctance to go to war. They do not seem to understand that Europeans are reluctant to enter into armed conflict precisely because Europeans have so much experience of war. Europe 'hosted' two extremely traumatic world wars on its own soil. By contrast, America's only traumatic experience of war on its own soil was the US Civil War of 1861-1865. While the Civil War was bad, the trauma pales into insignificance compared to what Europeans faced in World War 2 alone. The US Civil War killed about 2.5% of the American population, but World War II killed 25% of Belarusians, 20% of Ukrainians, 12.7% of Russians, and 8.5% of Germans. The reason why Americans are blasé about Trump is that they have no idea how bad the full Hitler, Mussolini, or Stalin experience can be.

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Americans are culturally programmed to venerate the likes of Trump, because he is successful and rich. They don't care about Trump's victims, because at root Americans are deeply selfish people. They are oblivious of many of the negative consequences of his actions, especially abroad, and, due to America's short history they are blind to what may lie in store for them down the road of fascism. Worst of all, Americans are highly prone to superstition, so they believe anything you tell them as long as you do so with conviction. 

The cultural veneration of Trump is problematic, because the US political system does not have sufficient checks and balances to overcome this cultural force and culture itself only changes very slowly over time. Like other young countries, the United States will continue to strike out on its own, make mistakes, and then gradually learn from its experiences until, eventually, its institutions get strong enough to withstand the likes of Trump. While this goal will remain elusive for some time, Americans will hopefully learn a lot about how not to run their country from Trump's disastrous spell in charge.

The End