American history can best be understood not as a single continuum but as a series of Republics, each arising from the ashes of its predecessor. The First Republic, born of the American Revolution, ended with Andrew Jackson’s Trumpian assault on the genteel elites of his day. Jackson’s Republic in turn collapsed into the fratricidal bloodshed of the Civil War, which gave birth to a Third Republic, ruled by an incredibly wealthy class of Northern-based industrial capitalists, which collapsed in the face of the Great Depression. The Fourth Republic, Franklin Roosevelt’s, was centred around the strong Federal state that won the Second World War, sent men to the moon, and overcame the rival Soviet empire.
Whether Roosevelt’s Republic properly ended with the social chaos of the late Sixties or with America’s victory in the Cold War, and whether we are therefore currently living in the Fifth, Sixth or arguably even the Seventh American Republic, is the type of question that future history students in Beijing or Singapore are bound to contemplate on their final exams. The more immediate point is that another American Republic is collapsing, and also that we’ve been here before. In recent years, as in the Sixties, we’ve seen the take-over of large sections of American cities by armies of drug-addicted zombies, riots in Washington, dirty political tricks by the FBI and the CIA, the capture of universities by militants obsessed with race and gender, dire warnings about the fate of the planet, and the wholesale abandonment of American military allies. The difference between now and the Sixties is that today the people with Angela Davis posters on their walls are living in gated communities, rather than communes.
More troublesome, however, than the sight of America once again shedding its skin, is the shape of the American Republic to come — and the question of whether it will be a republic at all. Since the end of the Cold War, America has transformed itself from a country in which most citizens proudly imagined themselves to be “middle class” into a bi-coastal oligarchy. The hallmarks of this new republic’s politics are the sorts of pathologies that used to be associated with the countries to America’s south: a wildly unequal distribution of wealth, choking bureaucracy, paranoid mass politics, the weaponisation of the security apparatus, and the merger of monopoly capital and invasive state bureaucracies.
The beginning of the current crisis can be dated to the election of 2016, in which a large majority of voters expressed their rejection of the American socio-political order by voting for either Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump over the neoliberal establishment candidate, Hillary Clinton. Trump’s election was followed by coordinated attacks on his flailing presidency by large sections of the American power structure, including the national press, corporate monopoly internet platforms, and a security apparatus that used the press as a megaphone for a series of conspiracy theories and lies that were often spread under cover of anonymity. The media’s already-tattered credibility with the public was plunged into the toilet.
This toxic combination of widening political polarisation and institutional failures was contaminated further by the country’s disastrous response to Covid-19, which crushed small and medium-sized businesses while padding the profits of large investors and internet-based monopolists. The result was the largest single transfer of wealth in American history since the Civil War, and the disenfranchisement of a significant portion of the American middle class — accompanied by a steady drum-beat of “woke” discourse that gleefully demonised the losers as “white supremacists” and “insurrectionists”.
The election of Joe Biden in 2020 was supposed to restore the legitimacy of the American political system and bring a measure of social peace. Instead, President Biden went in the opposite direction, attacking his opponents as “white supremacists” and “fascists”, setting the FBI on domestic foes, and endorsing a banana republic-style raid on Trump’s home.
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