Proximately, the U.S. is in a bad way because Trump and MAGA secured a federal trifecta and also control the U.S. Supreme Court, as well as the governmental apparatus of many states, because our laws do too little to discourage the concentration of economic power.
Political theory seeks to explain what factors in the complex political economy we live in led to this situation.
This post surveys some of the possible answers.
An institutionalist approach
An institutionalist approach is a social engineering outlook on why political systems work or do not work. It takes as an axiom the belief that the right rules and systems and organizations more or less directly produce good political economy outcomes, so reforming existing institutions is the path to a better political economy.
This is closely aligned with a notion that the rule of law is the key to a good society, something that is an article of faith in "Western culture" (with its roots in Western Europe) and is widely rejected in "Eastern culture" (with its roots in China).
Fundamentally Broken Institutions
The U.S. Constitution, other key laws, and important institutions of political and civic society (like political parties and the media) are broken. There are deep design flaws with the status quo that can't right itself without decisive, and indeed, perhaps revolutionary change in our institutions.
Common reform proposals in this approach are campaign finance reform, gun control, abolition of the electoral college, expansion of the franchise, proportional representation electoral systems or ranked choice voting, better procedural rules within legislative institutions, improved methods of selecting judges and other key public officials, tweaked checks and balances (like a unicameral legislature, a conversion from a Presidential to a parliamentary system, laws prohibiting corrupt practices enforced by effective enforcement agencies, and so on.
Imperfect, But Fundamentally Sound Institutions
The U.S. Constitution, related key laws, and important institutions of political and civic society (like political parties and the media) are flawed but are not fundamentally broken. These institutions are robust enough to eventually right the ship of our political economy, even though they aren't as fool proof and rapid as we'd like.
Really bad Presidents produce electoral backlash and encourage more competent people who otherwise would pursue careers other than politics to resist bad political leaders, which puts us back on track. But this feedback mechanism can't react much sooner than every couple of years, can't prevent serious abuses and failings, and often takes decades. Lessons learned in the last crisis are forgotten until we pay the price for forgetting those lessons again. In worst case scenarios, it can take long insurgencies or wars or full on Great Depressions to trigger support for the necessary reforms.
Bad high court judges need to be threatened with court packing to overcome their biases. Legal scholars seeing legal doctrines producing bad results propose new legal theories. New political parties need to replace old ones much like the GOP replaced the Whigs. People come to realize that voting for openly corrupt liars and criminals is maybe not such a good idea.
Culture
The main counterpart to an institutionalist approach to the success of a political economy (which has strong parallels in the economic development literature), observation that laws and institutions that are identical in all material respects can produce wildly different results, when people who are culturally different utilize these institutions.
This approach concludes that the character, morals, norms, and values of the people who use the institutions profoundly influence the quality of the political economy outcomes that a society produces, while the particulars of the institutional arrangements put in place to facilitate management of the political economy aren't particularly important within a fairly finite set of combinations of big choices in institutions.
Differences between the success of parliamentary systems and Presidential systems, in this view, have more to do with the political culture of the people utilizing those systems than with the inherent, universal virtues of different reasonable sets of institutions and rules.
There may be some sets of institutions and rules that usually led to bad outcomes, but people with a good political culture can make any remotely reasonable set of institutions produce good outcomes, while people with a political culture ill-suited to their demands of their current circumstances will find a way to break any set of institutions and rules, no matter how expertly crafted.
The optimal political culture is also not universal. In times of economic hardship and scarce resources which give rise to weak states, cultures of honor, clan based societies, cousin marriage, and systems that reward might over right may be more functional. In times of economic abundance that facilitate the rise of strong states, more atomized social structure, meritocracy, forgiveness, out marriage, and systems that reward truth over power may be more functional.
For example, one way to explain the rise of Christianity in the Greco-Roman classical era is that Christianity was a tool of cultural change that helped a society that was becoming more abundant, more urban, and more mercantile transition managed by a strong state, and away from a Greco-Roman pagan culture more suited to rural living, herding, and tradition based allocations of resources, in small and weak states. The expansion of the Islamic empire likewise involved a massive cultural change from a decadent and disorganized society without strong state management in the post-Roman era to a society with more firm and decisive, yet decentralized leadership that functioned well in the absence of Western Roman Empire type institutions.
This cultural-first approach to political theory is closely aligned with a notion that rule by good and moral leaders is the key to a good society, something that is an article of faith in "Eastern culture" (with its roots in Chinese Confucianism) and is widely rejected in "Western culture" (with its roots in Western Europe), where the "rule of man" is synonymous with authoritarianism, corruption, and arbitrary treatment of people.
Malleable culture
One version of a cultural approach to political economy sees a society's political culture as harder to change in many respects than institutional rules, but feasible with measures like widespread public education, religious conversion or deconversion, and grass roots activism through "movement politics" over decades. And, while this takes longer to accomplish than institutional rule changes, it is almost more robust and enduring.
A malleable culture theory concludes that while the relative political leanings of groups and geographic regions with different cultures are persistent over time periods measured in centuries, that societal progress is attainable over time. Yesterday's segregationists become today's advocates of a color blind society without affirmative action. Yesterday's corporal punishment advocates become today's advocates of large fines and long sentences of incarceration.
In absolute terms, society gradually abandons specific practices and norms that are conservative or backward at the time, while the descendants of people who held those specific practices and norms come to adopt views that were liberal in the times of their ancestors and are conservative now. But the descendants of the liberal leaning ancestors in turn, become even more progressive.
Even proponents of malleable culture approaches to political economy acknowledge that the process can be two steps forward and one step back. But ultimately, technology and the accumulation of knowledge and fundamental, universal human impulses that are masked by different immediate material conditions point humanity in the same general direction in the long terms (although there are shorter and longer routes to progress), so we progress more often than we regress.
Static culture
In contrast, a view that culture at an ethnic group or geographic area scale is predominantly static, even if isolated and exceptional individuals can change their cultures, see mass movements and programs to change a society's culture intentionally as largely futile.
It isn't that this view believes that the culture of a particular geographic area can't change. But, it sees the main mechanism for a change in the culture of a particular geographic area to be replacement of people of one ethnicity or mix of ethnicities with people of another ethnicity or group of ethnicities.
In this view, some of the main mechanisms of cultural change are colonization by people of a different ethnicity, genocide (through forcible abandonment of culture, actually murder, restrictions on fertility, or economic marginalization), immigration, and differential rates of births and deaths between ethnicities, with these mechanisms being particularly strong among men, while women more easily assimilate into new cultures in which they find themselves. This is also a more zero sum worldview. Flavored with ideas about ethnic or religious or cultural superiority, this can morph into righteous missionary zeal, ethnic nationalism and/or religious nationalism.
Along the same lines, languages associated with dominant cultures tend to increase their market share of language speakers in a society, while languages associated with economically marginal ethnicities tend to decrease their market share of language speakers in a society, in both cases at a pace measured primarily in generations, rather than within the lives of individual speakers of a language.
This outlook was heavily disfavored in the 1960s and 1970s in the Western world (under the motto that pots are not people), but has enjoyed a resurgence as research into ancient DNA, historical linguistics, and physical archaeology have been synthesized in a manner that has reviewed that over time frames of centuries and millennia, that these mechanism of demic change have been far more common than culture change through intercultural contact and elite dominance. Admittedly, there have been notable exceptions to this general trend (e.g. the linguistic transition of the country now known as Hungary, or the Brahui people, or the expansion of the Islamic empire, or the rise of Christianity). But cultural transition without demic change has been the exception rather than the norm.
This outlook on political economy, for example, perceives Zionism and the formation of new West Bank settlements in Israel, or ethnically and religiously motivated raids by Sahel Muslims from traditionally herding societies in Africa on Christian/animist communities to their immediate South, from a very different worldview framework than a worldview in which institutional approaches or malleable cultural views are the norm.
More generally, a political theory bent rooted in the worldview that culture is predominantly static, particularly when fused with the concepts of economic and environmentally driven cultural change discussed below, tends to see political tactics that "civilized society" condemns most intensely, as largely inevitable and natural, even if it is not morally desirable at an individual level.
Political worldviews and theories that emphasis the static nature of culture at the group and regional level are more sanguine about the inevitability of progress than those which see culture as malleable. These worldviews tend to see cultural progress as exceptions to the general rule that require specific and rarely recurring conditions, rather than as a universal law or inevitability.
Environmentally determined culture
A premise which is widely accepted in anthropology, but less widely accepted in political theory, is that people's material conditions determine which cultures are optimal for those conditions.
While no culture is inherently better than any other in a vacuum, in any given set of circumstances, some cultures are more functional than others.
Plough based agriculture tends to favor patriarchy and patrilocal clan systems. Hoe based agriculture and hunter-gatherer societies can tend to favor matriarchal social structures, with households often led by brother-sister couples rather than households led by monogamous co-parent households.
Affluent, urban societies, without low rates of childhood morality that rely on skilled labor that takes many years of investment in human capital tend to favor small family households; poor, rural societies, with high rates of childhood mortality that rely on unskilled labor tend to favor large family households.
Weak states tend to favor cultures of honor, and clan based social organization. Strong states tend to favor a focus on individual autonomy, meritocracy, rule based justice, and weaker extended family ties.
Perceptions of economic scarcity and uncertainty favor conservatism and societies where religion and/or superstition are important. Perceptions of economic abundance and security favor secular, liberal societies that rely on science rather than superstition.
Perceptions of economic decline or stagnation of an ethnicity or geographic group or social class, and societies where the economy is heavily reliant upon economic rents like land ownership or fossil fuel resources, can further fascism, far-right movements, ethnic and religious nationalist movements, and support for authoritarianism. Shared prosperity in a society where the economy depends heavily on a diffuse class of merchants, professionals, and skilled labor rather than natural resources, in contrast, tend to further democracy, an absence of corruption, respect for individual rights, and tolerance for diversity.
Cultures ill-suited to their conditions decline, due to both conversion to better suited cultures and economic and demographic decline. Cultures well-suited to their conditions thrive. Conversely, religious institutions that support threatened cultures tend to thrive, while religious institutions associated with establishment, secure, dominant cultures tend to wither despite the fact that the communities that they serve tend to have more economic resources.
The notion that culture is economically or environmentally determined is relatively agnostic about whether culture is malleable or static, with their very different mechanisms and tactics that give rise to cultural change.
Synthesis
Of course, none of these political theories is 100% true.
Even a strong culture oriented political theorists who takes a hard look at all the data will acknowledge that institutions and rules can matter, and can shape culture. You can see this particularly clearly when looking at the divergent paths taken by North Korea and South Korea, by Taiwan and mainland China, by East Germany and West Germany prior to unification and persisting in regional culture differences in the thirty-seven years that have elapsed since unification, even though the highly distinct institutions in these places that once shared a common culture including a political culture arose only about eighty years ago or less, in these cases.
On the other hand, scholarly works like Albion's Seed, and studies of persistent regional cultural differences in Germany (that predate the formation of a unified Germany state about 150 years ago), also establish that once regional or ethnic cultures are established, they are remarkably resilient in the face of institutional change and political unification, and can persist for centuries.
If you were to guess how politicians in the late 1700s and early 1800s in newly formed U.S. states leaned politically relative to each other on major groups of political issues like being pro-war or anti-war, or on economic or social issues, based upon the current political leanings of those states, you would overwhelming be correct 250 years plus or minus a few decades later.
The Catholic-Protestant divisions of Europe have been mostly static for the entire early modern period that started with the Protestant Reformation in the 1500s that were decided based upon the decisions of late stage feudal lords to choose one side or the other of this divide in European Christianity. And, those religious divisions, as famously noted by Max Weber in the 19th century, are associated with a whole suite of larger cultural divides epitomized by what he called the "Protestant work ethic."
Persistent culture divisions whose effects predominate in places where different cultures function within the same formal political institutions, like divisions in economic prosperity and political economy between regions dominated by different ethnic groups in Nigeria, whose characteristic cultures and cultural identities pre-date the relatively recent conversion of southern Nigeria to Christianity across a wide variety of diverse ethnicities starting in the 19th century or so, are still very real (even though many formal statistics on African immigrants to the U.S. aren't so fine grained and don't make these distinctions in their record keeping mask these differences).
In India, genetic testing has confirmed the anthropologically well-documented phenomena of caste endogamy and inequalities, pin pointing the time frame, centuries ago, when endogamous caste divisions at the jati level started to harden upon which historical accounts from those time periods were inconclusive and scarce, and eighty years of Indian independence with egalitarian institutions and ideals have only modestly dented the resilient cultural juggernaut of caste divides. Genetic studies also establish the time frame of the much older origins of varna level caste/ethnic divisions within India and help establish more clearly the magnitude, timing, and nature of introgression of people from one varna into another one.
Particularly in my own personal world and my own country, I am well aware that I instinctually lean towards institutional explanations and solutions, and that I also tend to favor malleable culture worldviews over static culture worldviews, to a greater degree than that evidence available to me supports.
How We Got Here
Each of these political theories naturally lends itself to a different narrative about how we go here, and the deeper driving factors behind the proximate causes of our woes.
Environmental determinism points to technological changes and human driven climate changes as the source of structural economic changes and changes to the U.S. social structure and social class system that has shunted the benefits of economic growth to an educated upper middle class serving a thin veneer of old money and new money billionaires and big businesses, and while reducing the less educated whom the modern economy has little use for, from a broad unifying middle class that has a stake in our society to a working class and underclass. The upper middle class has small stable prosperous families, while the working class is seeing their families fall apart despite having as many or more children, and their prospects for social mobility or comfort without generational wealth and social capital fading. The upper middle class has become far more secular, while comparatively the working class has remained more religious despite its long term trend away from religion as well.
The neo-fascist MAGA movement is, in this analysis, a natural consequence of two generations of economic stagnation for the non-college educated working class.
Static cultural worldviews emphasize the fact that there is a straight line from antebellum Southern whites to the KKK and Jim Crow and segregation supporters and American Nazis prior to WWII to opponents of the civil rights movement to MAGA.
Malleable cultural worldviews emphasize the fact that far right political viewholders skew heavily towards older white men while younger generations are much more liberal on a wide variety of issues. They note that the divorce between the MAGA worldview and reality is the product of intentional propaganda by billionaire class funded conservative media outlets like Fox News, conservative think tanks, talk radio, and fundamentalist Christians and Christian clergy who are wary of reality based inquiry because it undermines their religious doctrines, and can be reversed with carefully crafted interventions to deprogram MAGA adherents.
Institutionalists who see the system as fundamentally broken see the proximate causes of our woes as more directly caused by particular flaws in our Microsoft of political systems which was state of the art in the late 1700s, but had rules that didn't benefit from the next couple of centuries of experience with democratic political institutions which addressed the inherent flaws in our own system which the Founders, not being omniscient, and with their own narrow franchise and biases could not have foreseen. The trouble is, that if indeed, our Institutions are fundamentally and deeply broken, there is no clear path to fixing them.
Institutionalists who see the system as flaws but fundamentally sound, in contrast, acknowledge that the flaws in our system have prevented our political system from preventing or more swiftly ending the MAGA scourge. But they are more optimistic and stoic. In an analog to the idea that suppressing all wildfires can make a forest more vulnerable to more devastating big wildfires, or to the hygienic hypothesis that an environment that is too sterile and devoid of threats can lead to autoimmune diseases and allergies because the immune system didn't have a chance to do its job non-pathologically, they argue that as unpleasant as it is at the time, healthy political economies need periodic threats to its values so that the people served by them remain vigilant in developing a combination of institutions and political cultures that can defeat even strong threats to their health.
People never exposed to fraud become too trusting and become easy marks (something that is a big problem in the overall high trust society of Mormon Utah). Politicians who grow too used to playing nice with their political opponents forget the tactics that their predecessors used to win when their political opponents didn't play fair.
A near miss constitutional crisis of our political economy with fascism and authoritarianism, with an scary dose of corruption and lies, may be what it takes to build broad enough support to fix the most important institutional flaws in the status quo, much like the U.S. did in the New Deal, and again in the 1960s and 1970s.
Institutionalists who see the "bones" of U.S. political institutions as fundamentally sound will note that the U.S. system has been good enough to last 250 years including multiple comparably bad or worse political crises, like those leading up to, during, and following the U.S. Civil War. And, they see the gridlock and shifting political coalitions that have predominated in the time frame from the 1980s to the present, as a feature rather than a bug, by preventing thin majorities from making big and bold political changes in the absence of widespread, bipartisan, cross-ethnic, cross-regional support. Our federal system funnels paths to innovations to the states and refrains from making big changes until with the passage of time, some approaches are widely understood to be desirable, and other approaches are seen as failures. And, like the seventy year plus era of doctrinaire communism in Eastern Europe, China, and Southeast Asia, on one side, and mixed capitalism in the "West" and some Western leaning East Asian nations, this deadlock can seem completely intractable and static, until sudden it collapses, with Eastern European communism collapsing in just a few years, and Asian communism more resiliently adopting market-style reforms to the point where it has become communism in name only with billionaire capitalists holding all positions of power in these one party states.
We saw something similar leading up to the abolition of slavery in the United States. This issue divided the new republic for eight-five years from its inception right up until 1861, only for slavery to be formally abolished four years later all at once, in turn followed after a brief reconstruction interlude, with another eight-five years of so of Jim Crow, only for that institution to in turn collapse over the course of about a decade when it had seemed in 1950 that Jim Crown might persist eternally. Sixty years after the Civil Rights movement had achieved most of its major objectives, MAGA is trying its best to undo the reforms of the civil rights era in a last dying eruption of a movement that know that democracy will mean its death as socially and economically regressive Baby Boomers, some of whom were born in the era of segregated water fountains, bathrooms, and schools, die and reduce their share of the electorate only to be replaced by liberal Generations Z and Alpha in the electorate for whom racial diversity is second nature and is their generation's reality.
Trump has been a racist all of his life, just like his Nazi father. Joe Biden came around later in his political career, but got started in Congress on a platform of opposition to school desegregation in Delaware. Many of the leaders in Congress, and especially in the U.S. Senate, are from that same generation and still wear ideological and worldview boots of clay developed in their politically formative years.
Eventually, however, cancer, cardiovascular diseases, dementia, COVID, geriatric falls, and the like will do the job of replacing them with the next generation of politicians, that Baby Boomers have prevented from happening in the ordinary course as it should have a couple of decades ago.
The midterms in 2026 could end the GOP's trifecta control of the federal government and reducing the bleeding that our national institutions and esteem on the global stage have been suffering. Ideally, its defeat could be crippling enough to lead to the GOP's replacement with some new center-right opposition party that starts over after MAGA has burned all of the GOP's bridges and poisoned the well with several younger generations. Democrats could take the Presidency in 2028 with majorities not seen in recent memory and a commitment to play hardball after the horrors of Trump 2.0, and make enough major reforms to put the U.S.A. on track again with wide consensus backing, even though it may take decades to undo the damage done by Trump already that is not irreparable. And, if that happens, the Institutionalists who believe that flawed as it is, that the U.S. political system is not broken beyond all repair, will be vindicated. The fact that the U.S. has weathered past crises makes this a far from unlikely scenario, and the optimist in my wants to hope that they are right. Polling leading up to the midterms that are barely more than five months away, suggest that they might be right.
While MAGA stayed loyal during Trump 1.0, his more radical Trump 2.0 term has finally seen Trump's steadfast support start to erode and has seen some prominent GOP/MAGA leaders, like Marjorie Taylor Green, break ranks with him.
What Happens If We Don't Escape And End Up In A Deeper Circle of Hell?
I want to believe that they are right, because the alternatives are very dark indeed. If Democrats can't do this over the next three years or so, because its institutions are too badly broken to return the nation to a positive path, all of the paths before us are nightmares.
One need look no further than North Korea, Cuba, Albania until the fall of communism, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Afghanistan, East Germany, the Soviet Union, post-Soviet Russia, the Ottoman Empire, and the slave states of the U.S. prior to the U.S. Civil War, to observe that the fact that a regime is authoritarian, undemocratic, and performs dismally economically in its non-natural resource sector, and faces significant sustained pressure from the international community to reform, does not mean that these regimes are fragile or vulnerable to prompt collapse. Eventually, many of these regimes did collapse. But it took an entire lifetime or so to do fall, and more often than not it took an international military intervention (or at least a costly cold war interspersed with periodic hot proxy wars) to make it happen.
The U.S. is to big and militarily powerful for a turn for the worse to be cured with a foreign military invasion of the U.S. to liberate us any time soon.
If one of the darker scenarios has developed in the U.S. by 2028 or 2030, it is entirely possible that the U.S. will degenerate into a full fledged malevolent dictatorship and remain in that state until sometime in the early twenty-second century.
This dark era for the U.S. could possibly punctuated by an ugly and deadly military insurgency, and waves of assassinations, asymmetric warfare, sabotage, and non-violent resistance that persists as long as Afghanistan has been in a state of near continual war since the 1970s, that may only end or at least subside when it is put down with brutal ruthless efficiency that scars our nation with horrors we have yet to imagine like the annihilation of every soul in a whole liberal leaning rebellious metropolitan area like Minneapolis, rather than a mere attempted ICE and National Guard driven show of force. The Handmaid's Tale was meant to be a warning and not a prophecy, but there is no certainty that it won't turn out to be one.
There are happier paths that one could imagine, like a bloodless coup that is followed by a new covenant that replaces our existing political and economic institutions, if the existing ones don't solve the problem in the next three year or so, that reboot our nation in some manner or another, or a wave of blue state successions, that leaves unsubsidized red state America in a state of total economic collapse, and followed by reform or reunification.
One could also imagine something like the experience of the Romans, who first transformed from a genuine Republic, to a more flawed Republic, to a truly non-democratic empire, stuttering from crisis to crisis, with bandaid temporary political fixes that don't last, punctuated with emperors like Nero and Caligula, who are still remembered about two thousand years later for their perfidy and insanity. Trump could end up being a model for future corrupt, authoritarian, delusional demagogues who are equally bad, but even less restrained by the democratic actions of the electorate or the courts or federalism or military independence, than Trump 2.0 which is actually exploring every avenue to end these constraints upon it.
Some of these nightmares seem almost unthinkable now, after the imperfect and slow mechanisms and institutions for slowing down Trump and MAGA's destruction of the federal government and everything good in the United States of America finally started to kick in. But the United States doesn't get three strikes. If the midterms to provide a decisive and effective check on Trump 2.0 in what has so far been a Congress that has ceded its responsibilities, we'll be lucky to get a federal election at all in 2028, and if there is one then, it will probably be less free and less fair (despite the fact that Republicans are pulling out all stops to undermine the regularity of the 2026 elections and to persecute Trump's enemies with no regard to the law or any notion of anything greater than Trump's momentary whims).
If Americans, collectively, fail to decisively interrupt its current course in either 2026 or 2028, we're pretty much done. Democracy and democratic values and the rule of law and civil liberties will be no more, and there will be no way back within the confined of legal political action or even civil disobedience. The U.S. is too big, and too culturally divided to secure the final turnabout that ousted a far right authoritarian regime in Hungary earlier this year.
Those who can will become political refugees, much like the scientists who fled Germany when the Nazis came to power, and fled the Soviet Union as it grew ever more oppressive. Those who can't will suffer, or sell their souls for petty subordinate power at the whim of some unsteady dictator (probably not Trump for long, given his ill-health and age, but possibly some successor who is equally evil but more competent).
