The doomsday narrative of America is not alarmist

[louis wood]

On November 12, the website of the French Institute of International Relations and Strategic Studies published an article entitled "The End of the United States" by Romuald Sciola. The view that the United States is heading for its greatest political and constitutional crisis since the Civil War is not alarmist. The full text is as follows:
"The United States is headed for its greatest political and constitutional crisis since the Civil War, with the very real possibility of mass violence, the collapse of federal authority, and the fragmentation of the country into Republican and Democratic enclaves within the next three or four years." So said conservative political scientist Robert Kagan in a long recent editorial in the Washington Post that sparked a lot of debate. He believes that two main threats are taking shape. First, if his health permits, "Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee for president in 2024." Second, the former president "and his Republican Allies are actively preparing to use whatever means necessary to secure his victory." Let's take a moment to look at the main points he made in The Washington Post. "The United States is heading for its greatest political and constitutional crisis since the Civil War," he wrote first. Is this true or false? right. Quite right. After what happened in Washington in January, when 78 percent of Republican voters consistently believed that Joe Biden did not legitimately win the election, only a blind optimist staring at the horizon could suggest otherwise. Robert then predicted that in the next three or four years, "mass violence," "the disintegration of federal authority," and "the division of the country into enclaves of Republicans and Democrats" were likely.
With regard to mass violence, with the attack on Congress and the riots over demonstrations linked to the Black Lives Matter movement that have forced America's big cities to "self-lock down" as if in wartime, we have recently had a sense of what may be to come. Imagine that most of the shops, banks and hotels in Manhattan are boarded up. The images are shocking and cause a lot of anxiety, which some experts say will only lead people to vote for the Party of Order in later national elections.
As for the "disintegration of federal authority," the signs are indeed worrying. The recent rise of governors may be a good thing, helping to counterbalance Trumpian leaders, but when these governors decide to oppose decisions in Washington with a degree of violence (and not always verbally), as has been the case since the beginning of the pandemic, their growing power only weakens national cohesion, which leads to national chaos, In some cases, hundreds of thousands of people have died.
Popular culture and the media's overemphasis on the American presidency is misleading. The federal government has always been relatively weak compared with Congress. But we have now moved from a "weak" regime to a "fragile" one. Many citizens and some important local politicians no longer considered the government in Washington legitimate and refused to recognize it as the supreme authority in the country. The current president, of course, can't help it - he is an old man who is quickly becoming unpopular, who, according to some witnesses, is only awake for a few hours a day, and whose plans are often questioned or even partially rejected by the majority of his own camp. As for Robert Kagan's prediction that the United States was about to split into enclaves of Republicans and Democrats, intellectuals like Samuel Huntington and Stanley Hoffman had envisioned it for years. In my articles, I often try, with considerable restraint, to alert the public to the dangers: the growing vulnerability of the United States to political, racial, cultural, and religious separatism; In some parts of the United States, in some states, separatist aspirations are becoming more important.
Finally, Kagan asserts in his piece that, barring health problems, "Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee in the 2024 presidential election" and that "the former president and his Republican Allies are actively preparing to do whatever is necessary to secure his victory." That could throw America into an unprecedented electoral mess.
That's right. Right again. For now, nothing seems to stand in the way of Mr Trump's capture of the Republican nomination. When we see, among other things, how, for months, Republican lawmakers have illegally worked to make it as difficult as possible for a segment of the black community - usually Democratic - to vote, we should expect the worst to happen.
Reed Brody, former acting attorney general of New York, endorsed Robert Kagan's view in an op-ed published in Le Monde: "Republicans have a good chance of winning the midterm elections in 2022... If he is healthy, Donald Trump will almost certainly be the candidate for president in 2024. So we run the risk of chaos. If Donald Trump becomes president... He will control all powers: executive, legislative and judicial. At that point, 'American democracy' will be just a memory."