America is anxious, and awesomely powerful
Restlessness is what prevents the republic from sinking into stagnation
Illustration: Nash WeerasekeraFROM THE start, 250 years ago, America’s founders believed that their republic would shine out as an example to all humanity.
But the republic was also an experiment, and they feared that it could soon collapse into disorder or tyranny.
Such has been the dance throughout America’s extraordinary history.
Slavery and xenophobia, corruption and robber barons, civil war and world war have all jostled the republic even as America rose to become the beacon of the free world.
On July 4th Americans are celebrating their semiquincentennial.
All those syllables rebut the founders’ gloom.
Far from succumbing to tyranny, America saved the world from tyrants three times over.
Glorious disorder created a dynamism that has long sustained America as a superpower.
Dominance comes with temptations, but the United States has by and large held out republican virtues as the salvation of people everywhere.
Yet this birthday comes at another anxious moment in America’s story.
Virtue is under threat and talk of decline is in the air.
Even as citizens celebrate together, public life is scarred by division.
America is demolishing the world order that it created after the defeat of fascism in 1945.
The restless republic is opening a new chapter, but does that signal retreat, as some Americans worry, or instead herald a renewal?
To understand this moment, and to mark the 250th anniversary, The Economist retraced the footsteps of Alexis de Tocqueville, a French aristocrat whose tour of the country in the early 1830s furnished the material for “Democracy in America”, a trove of enduring insights into the republic.
If you listen to our podcast, you will discover that many Americans today echo the founders’ fears.
They worry that the separation of powers is degenerating into a White House-takes-all world.
Congress was meant to be the leading branch of government, but it is gripped by a vicious partisanship in which “we” are right and “they” are bad.
To pass laws requires give and take, but the parties punish compromise and gerrymandering rewards extreme views.
The Supreme Court is adding to the might of the executive.
This week, though it struck down one of the president’s schemes, over birthright citizenship, it also expanded his power by ruling that he can sack officials in federal agencies.
A nation of immigrants, the United States has at its best treated the people flocking to its shores as a source of vitality and a validation of the American dream.
China has a dream, too, but foreigners are excluded by the unalterable fact that they were not born Chinese.
By contrast, people of any race or faith can become American.
Their welcome is the promise that what they and their children can accomplish is limited only by their imagination and capacity for hard work.
But the American dream has soured.
Bits of the MAGA movement want to shut down legal immigration, not just the illegal sort.
This year net migration could be zero.
As the share of Americans who call themselves “white” sinks towards 50%, some on the right want to give a special status to “heritage Americans”, whose forebears have been in the country for generations.
This is an ugly throwback to the racism that Americans rejected as part of the moral and material progress that best define the republic’s success.
Abroad, America is also retreating from its values.
As our essay this week describes, Donald Trump is leading a Wrecking-ball revolution to smash the institutions and alliances that the postwar generation set up to keep the world safe from despotism.
He and many Americans on the right and left feel contempt for a global system that they blame—misguidedly, in the view of The Economist—for aiding China, punishing America’s workers and sending its young soldiers to spill their blood in far-off countries.
Accordingly, America is throwing its weight around like any other country chasing wealth and power.
Freedom and democracy for foreigners are off the agenda.
Trade used to be a system of mutual benefit; it has become a tool for extracting concessions.
Shared values once united America and its allies; now allies are seen as dependants to be exploited.
Many people conclude that America is in decline.
That strikes this newspaper as a grave misreading.
America’s power is immense—and it could be about to grow beyond all recognition.
For evidence of the country’s unabated dynamism, look outside its dysfunctional politics.
America’s artificial-intelligence companies have rapidly mobilised hundreds of billions of dollars to finance the pursuit of a technological lead.
If, as they predict, AI changes everything, then America and its AI stack may become utterly dominant—for a time, at least.
Some of that is bound to rub off on America’s businesses and its formidable armed forces.
Its allies, however much they have been antagonised by Mr Trump, would face a bleak choice between submitting to America or siding with authoritarian China.
As America amasses awesome power, the great experiment could go disastrously wrong.
Mr Trump has tainted public life with an ugly cynicism that always sees the worst in everyone.
Boosted by AI-enhanced agencies, executive power could become overwhelming.
The concentration of wealth and political power could foster a predatory elite.
Partisanship, fanned by social media, gerrymandering and party primaries dominated by zealots, could become further entrenched.
Politicians might prove unable to deal with the economic and social upheaval that lies ahead.
Present at the destruction
As domestic politics grows dirtier and nastier, America could also become more predatory abroad.
Imagine that its abandonment of the project to promote liberty is permanent.
Other countries will copy it.
Violent, ambitious leaders will feel emboldened to conquer or coerce their neighbours.
The world will descend into chaos.
However, as the founders would attest, that dark future is not certain—or even likely.
The corollary of America’s dynamism is its capacity for reinvention.
Episodes that set the republic back—Pearl Harbour, Sputnik, Watergate—spurred it to recover and charge ahead.
Roused, Americans set about making sure that next time they would do better and be better.
One way or another, change is coming to America, because too much today is unsustainable.
The social contract, which is financed by borrowing, is fiscally unsustainable.
Mr Trump’s generation is biologically unsustainable: his successor will belong to a new, younger group of Americans.
The hope must be that voters will decide that the two parties’ sterile mutual contempt has become politically unsustainable, too.
As celebratory fireworks light up cities and towns across America, remember that restlessness is precisely what prevents the republic from sinking into stagnation.
All those arguments and fights are a precondition for the creative destruction that precedes the nation’s renewal.
Naturally, the founders would be worried today, just as they were 250 years ago.
Yet their revolutionary insight was to build their great experiment on the wisdom of the people.
Time and again, that faith has been richly rewarded.
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