Assessing the threats to the Republic
A somber 4th of July post, but hopefully also a sober one.
Every Fourth of July, I do a post assessing the threats and problems that face the U.S. Last year’s post was about the 2020s as the “New 1970s” — a time of general exhaustion and bitterness following an era of upheaval and unrest. I still think that’s a good model for thinking about where we are as a nation, though of course no historical analogy is ever perfect.
This is an election year, though, and so everyone is even more worried about the future of the nation than usual. Pronouncements of doom are flying fast and furious on social media.
Progressives fret that Donald Trump will cancel democracy, declare himself a dictator, and implement fascism with the help of a captive Supreme Court. Conservatives worry about the border, DEI, and the trans movement, while muttering darkly about civil war. Leftists wring their hands about climate apocalypse, centrists decry America’s thicket of red tape and inertia, and libertarians predict hyperinflation and the collapse of the dollar. And in the background, everyone is worried about China, and about the risk of war.
Most of this is just Americans’ usual tendency to catastrophize everything. If you go back and read what people were writing in any decade in our past, there were always plenty of people warning that doom was imminent. In fact, I think that although this behavior is undeniably annoying, it can be very useful — it’s good to address problems before they become severe, and a rich country with well-established institutions has a lot of inertia. Throughout our modern history, America’s biggest disasters — 9/11, the Great Recession, and so on — were usually things we didn’t worry and fret about for years beforehand.
So this Fourth of July, I thought I’d go through the various threats to the Republic, and assess how dangerous each one is. Broadly speaking, my view is that the greatest danger from internal turmoil, civil war, and authoritarianism has passed, despite the probable election of Trump this fall. The economy is likely to be OK, but the national debt is a huge and looming problem that could hurt us a lot if it’s mismanaged. Various chronic issues will continue to hurt the country going forward, despite modest progress.
If this were the entire list of threats, I would conclude that America will muddle through, and that would be the end of that. But unfortunately it’s not. While most of the threats from within are less dire than commonly believed, external threats to the United States are grave and getting graver by the day. The U.S. faces an axis of enemies that is larger, more productive, and more technologically advanced than any we have ever faced before, and which is ideologically bent on the degradation of U.S. wealth, stability, and autonomy. Failure to respond vigorously to this New Axis could easily result in catastrophe — either from a U.S. loss in Cold War 2, or from a World War 3 that we fail to deter.
And this danger makes America’s domestic troubles much more severe than they would otherwise be, because our internal squabbling could weaken us and prevent us from dealing with the real threats out there.
American democracy will be degraded a bit but it will survive
On its face, it might seem strange for me to claim that American democracy is not in imminent danger. I think Donald Trump has extremely anti-democratic instincts. He denied the result of a free and fair election that he lost in 2020, he encouraged a mob of his supporters to physically storm Congress in an attempt to stop the election from being ratified (which I’m pretty sure counts as a coup attempt), and he will almost certainly pardon the people who were convicted for that coup attempt. It’s clear that he considers any election he loses to have been illegitimate. It doesn’t get more anti-democratic than that.
But the thing is, I don’t think Trump is going to lose another election. Biden’s age has made Trump the odds-on favorite, and the only real substitute that could be swapped in for Biden is Kamala Harris, who is deeply unpopular. So I think Trump will simply win the election outright, meaning there will be nothing for him to challenge.
Even if by some miracle Trump does lose, I doubt he’ll be able to stage a repeat of 2020. Congress passed a bipartisan reform of the Electoral Count Act, signifying their refusal to allow Trump to use fake electors to overturn an election loss — which was his strategy in 2020. And of course security services will prevent a repeat of January 6th.
Once in power, Trump will degrade American democracy a bit by trying to beef up presidential immunity. This is because he has committed many crimes, and he would prefer not to be prosecuted and convicted for those crimes. I expect that Trump’s attempts to make the President above the law will be adjudicated by the Supreme Court. I expect him to win some victories there, but not nearly as many as progressives expect. The recent SCOTUS decision on presidential immunity was probably not a radical departure from what existed before, and I’d be surprised if SCOTUS actually allows the President to become an elected dictator.
I’d also be surprised if they allowed him to “reinterpret” the Constitution in order to serve three terms. Trump is also only a little younger than Biden, and is clearly on the downslide as well — he’s not going to be around for long, no matter what.
Meanwhile, I doubt that Trump will degrade the American electoral system in permanent ways. The reason is simple — in my assessment, Trump only cares about himself and his own victories. He does not care about Republicans in general, and he doesn’t care about building a political movement that extends beyond his own person. Therefore, changing the American electoral system to try to put Republicans permanently in power is probably not high on his priority list.
In other words, my assessment is that Trump would prefer to be a dictator to being an inmate, but that he won’t go out of his way to become a dictator if he doesn’t feel he needs to.
I do think it’s possible that Trump will make some electoral changes that Republicans think will help them win in the future. I also think that if they do this, it’ll backfire. GOP measures to tilt the playing field in their favor fall into one of two categories — gerrymandering, which is adjudicated by the courts, and measures to suppress turnout. In the past, suppressing turnout helped Republicans, because Democrats tended to be less-educated working class types who tend to vote less. Now, though, education polarization means that low turnout tends to help Democrats — the marginal voter is a disengaged low-information person without a college degree, and that type of person increasingly supports the GOP. So if Trump enacts measures to make it harder to vote, his own party will likely suffer as a result.
I also think that although the much-ballyhooed Project 2025 is bad, it’s not going to implement fascism in America. Basically, the idea of Project 2025, which was created by the Heritage Foundation, is that Republican presidents should clean out merit-based appointees from the civil service and replace them with partisan Republican political appointees. This is a response to education polarization — there are fewer Republican merit-based civil service appointees every year, because few educated people who want to have a career in the civil service are Republicans:
So the idea of Project 2025 is to “fix” this by replacing lots of merit-based civil servants with, effectively, partisan hacks. This is far from unprecedented in American democracy — it’s basically just Andrew Jackson’s “spoils system” — but it will probably degrade the effectiveness of the bureaucracy quite a bit. If you’re old enough to remember the Bush administration’s bungling of Hurricane Katrina, you’ve seen what can go wrong when political hacks get in positions of responsibility.
That’s bad. But it’s not fascism. Yes, partisan GOP appointees will do all kinds of right-wing stuff — kill efforts to fight climate change, curtail government provision of abortion and other reproductive health care, kill DEI, reduce federal education funding, and so on. And yes, GOP-appointed judges will continue to reverse many of the progressive SCOTUS decisions that Americans came to take for granted in earlier decades. But that’s what you get when you elect Republicans! Conservatives winning elections and doing conservative things is a democratic outcome.
In general, Americans have forgotten the importance of elections. The myth that the country is run by a “uniparty”, and that voting doesn’t matter, is an unfortunate side effect of having competent nonpartisan institutions. Sometimes people need to remember that their vote matters. But the ability to vote for people who take the country in a bad direction is sort of a key feature of democracy.
So although I strongly urge people not to vote for Donald Trump, and although I think Trump has no respect for democracy, my assessment is that a Trump victory will not make America into an autocratic or fascist state.
Oh, and I also don’t think America will have another civil war. I laid out a detailed case for why I think that in a post last September:
Basically, unrest is ebbing, so the only way there will be a civil war is if the U.S. Military splits and fights itself over a disputed presidential election. And I don’t think that’s likely to happen.
Keep in mind, of course, that all of these predictions come with error bars. I think there’s a fair amount of uncertainty here, and that uncertainty worries me. Just because I think the very bad outcomes aren’t the likeliest doesn’t mean I think they’re impossible.
America’s economic problems are manageable, but debt/inflation is a big risk
Now let’s talk about economic issues. Overall, the U.S. economy is still great — employment is near all-time highs, and inflation is down to a tolerable 3% or so:
Wealth is up, the younger generation is significantly richer than their parents were at the same age, and wage inequality and wealth inequality both seem to have plateaued. The U.S. is growing much faster than other rich economies, and might even keeping pace with China (depending on which set of Chinese numbers you believe). Yes it’s more expensive to finance a house these days, but rates aren’t at historically high levels, and most people don’t buy houses in any given year anyway.
Meanwhile, most of the things that doomsayers predicted would collapse the economy in the years since the pandemic ended up being the proverbial dog that didn’t bark. When a handful of mid-sized regional banks collapsed in early 2023 due to higher interest rates, the government simply stepped in and guaranteed deposits for a while, and the whole crisis was forgotten a month later. Inflation didn’t spiral, thanks to the Fed’s decision to raise rates.
As for immigration, everyone is upset about the flood of asylum-seekers crossing the border. This won’t be fixed until the U.S. changes its asylum law to disallow people who entered the country illegally from applying for asylum. In the meantime, we seem destined to stumble along with executive actions that patch things up but get intermittently struck down by the courts. Those executive actions are now bipartisan — Biden is now just as tough on the border as Trump was.
In any case, the asylum seekers don’t seem to be hurting U.S. wages, which are growing strongly for workers at the lower end of the distribution. In fact, by alleviating labor bottlenecks in certain industries, low-skilled immigration is probably giving the economy a small boost. So illegal immigration is at worst a chronic annoyance — something that exacerbates low-level popular unrest, and strains the welfare budgets of some cities, but doesn’t really hurt Americans’ pocketbooks.
Another chronic problem is climate change. Already, wildfire risk in California and flood risk in Florida are collapsing insurance markets in those states. Meanwhile, heat waves are already making life more unpleasant for Americans, and sending air conditioning costs soaring. But basically, the U.S. is a rich country and it will handle fires, floods, and heat waves without catastrophe — at least, for the next few decades. (Poorer countries, of course, are another matter.)
Of course the most important chronic problem in the U.S. economy is our institutional inability to build things, due to a thicket of environmental review laws, regulations, broken contracting processes, political funding battles, atrophied civil service, burdensome contracting requirements, and a general lack of the requisite expertise. A lot of people are trying to fix this, but there are big headwinds — conservatives who want to slash the civil service even more and who are opposed to anything that seems like it might combat climate change, progressives who don’t want housing or factories built near their neighborhoods, etc. I expect this to be a tough ongoing battle — the task of a generation — but I don’t expect U.S. state capacity to get actively worse anytime soon.
So from an economic perspective, the U.S. looks likely to muddle through. But there’s one big looming economic problem that I worry about, which is the national debt. Rising interest rates have caused the government’s interest payments to explode. The obvious way to fix that is austerity, but neither party seems especially interested in austerity, and Trump seems especially unlikely to do what needs to be done.
Instead, Trump will probably pressure the Fed to cut interest rates, in order to sustain growth while reducing government interest payments. But if he succeeds, the result could be spiraling inflation. The fact that inflation is still above its long-term target suggests that there are underlying pressures for rising prices that are currently being suppressed by 5% interest rates. If that lid is removed, the consequences could be very painful for America.
One more reason not to vote for Trump, of course. But while this is the main economic risk that should keep us up at night, it’s far from certain, even if Trump does succeed in monkeying with interest rates. There’s no guarantee that underlying inflationary pressures will remain; they might subside, despite Trumpian tariffs, Houthi attacks, and so on. If so, Trump might luck out again, and America will return to the goldilocks economy of low rates, high employment, and low inflation without having to do anything about the debt. Of course that would just kick the can down the road.
The biggest risk by far is the New Axis
If civil unrest, an authoritarian Trump, conservative overreach, climate change, low state capacity, illegal immigration, and a mountain of debt were all America had to worry about, I would say: Don’t panic. Yes, those are problems, but with effort, America is highly likely to muddle through. Disaster does not loom.
Except I can’t actually say that, because disaster does loom. There is one threat that the U.S. cannot muddle through, and that’s the threat of the China/Russia axis.
One obvious threat is the outbreak of a U.S.-China war, either over Taiwan or over the U.S.’ treaty ally the Philippines. This would be World War 3, even if it didn’t spiral into a nuclear exchange. I wrote a post about this a few months ago:
As I argue, there’s a good chance that America would lose this war. The U.S.’ manufacturing sector, and especially its defense-industrial base, has atrophied while China’s now dominates the world. Any war that went longer than a couple of weeks — which most wars do — would heavily favor the country that can produce more ships, missiles, drones, and ammunition. That country is China.
Some people — especially folks I hang out with in the tech industry — try to comfort themselves by believing that the U.S. would never go to war over Taiwan. They are sticking their heads in the sand. The reason is that if China invaded Taiwan, it would be very unlikely to run the risk that the U.S. would intervene to stop it. And that means China would probably preemptively attack U.S. bases in the region:
Even if a President Trump had no intention of defending Taiwan, the sudden unprovoked death of thousands of American servicemen in a Pearl Harbor-style attack would make popular pressure for war overwhelming. The only thing the U.S. would accomplish by failing to properly prepare for such a war would be to make itself more likely to lose quickly and ignominiously in the early days.
But even if China doesn’t attack Taiwan and World War 3 never begins, the U.S. is in serious long-term peril. The leaders of both China and Russia clearly have imperial aims, seeking to reconstitute some approximation of their countries’ 19th-century empires. Those dreams will outlive Xi and Putin. And both China and Russia recognize that, Trump or no Trump, the United States of America is their biggest rival and the most important long-term threat to their imperial ambitions.
The New Axis will therefore seek to weaken the U.S. any way that it can, in order to reduce the threat. The first step, of course, is to defeat, dominate, or subvert America’s allies — Europe, Japan, Korea, Australia, India, and the UK. But that won’t be enough for the new imperial powers to feel secure. To fully neutralize the long-term threat from America, they will want to impoverish America’s economy, sabotage its infrastructure, and disrupt its internal social and political stability.
Impoverishing America will involve cutting it off from trade or forcing it to trade on unfavorable terms. No matter what Trump might think, the U.S. can never be self-sufficient in all the things it needs — cut off from critical minerals and export markets, America will be a much poorer nation. So China and Russia will try to do that, by controlling global trade routes.
Disrupting America’s internal social and political stability is a project that’s already underway, with propaganda efforts like TikTok algorithm manipulation, armies of social media bots, co-opting U.S. media personalities like Tucker Carlson, and so on. The U.S. and its democratic allies are currently losing this information war. I have no idea how effective subversion efforts like this are, or even how effective they can possibly be. But if you enjoyed the turmoil of the last few years — the extremism of the Right and the Left, the “cancel culture”, the constant roiling discussion of politics that permeated every facet of daily life in America — I don’t think you’ll like what China and Russia have in mind for our future.
America showed some sign of waking up when it passed a bill ordering China to sell TikTok to an American company, but China managed to win Trump to its side on the issue, and Trump will try to scuttle the divestment bill once he’s in office.
China’s government may profess not to care who wins the election, but secretly it must be overjoyed that Trump looks set to win. Despite Trump’s China-bashing rhetoric and tariffs, he backed off of serious export controls, showed little interest in working with Asian allies, and has demonstrated that he can be flipped on issues like TikTok.
Unfortunately, Trump’s reputation as a China hawk will probably give him the political space to concede to China on any number of key issues without serious domestic repercussions. It’s the “only Nixon could go to China” effect, but this time “going to China” means letting Xi Jinping have his way in Cold War 2.
But as much as Trump and his advisors might secretly hope that backing off of China will appease it, they’re wrong. China’s leaders — and also Russia’s leaders — know that America could have a change of heart in 4 or 8 or 20 years, and once more become a formidable opponent. So they’ll take the breathing room Trump gives them, and use it to set up their long-term strategy of weakening and ultimately destroying the U.S.
That’s only my own forecast, of course. As with my other predictions, it comes with substantial error bars. Trump’s advisors — Matt Pottinger, Robert C. O’Brien, and so on — are true China hawks, and might manage to persuade him Trump to be more hawkish than I expect. But from where I’m sitting, a Trump win looks like it puts America in danger of losing Cold War 2, and the long-term consequences of that would be very bad.
My impression is that relatively few Americans care about this. China and Russia are both deeply unpopular with the U.S. public, but most Americans’ overwhelming focus is on partisan political conflict, culture wars, and economic issues. To the degree that foreign policy even shows up on Americans’ radar screens, it’s in the context of the wars in Ukraine and Gaza — neither of which America is actually fighting in. The more general geopolitical contest against China and Russia isn’t something that most Americans even realize is happening — much less something where they understand the consequences of losing.
In other words, America’s internecine conflicts might not bring the country down directly, but they prevent Americans from focusing on the true threat to their country. The U.S. will probably not become an authoritarian country, have a civil war, or suffer an economic collapse in the short term. We will likely muddle through. But while Americans are distracted by their bitter bickering, their enemies — vast, powerful, and purposeful — gather their strength in distant lands.
That’s what worries me the most on this Fourth of July.
Sure. Trump ‘probably’ won’t be too much of a threat. But that’s a big risk IMO. If there’s only a 5% chance he succeeds that’s still the worst internal threat American democracy has has in decades
Holy hell Noah, you're awfully cavalier towards those who will suffer at the entrenchment of right wing policies. Your heavy use of "probably" and "doubt" demonstrate a wild-ass lack of concern about the fallout currently underway. Maybe you'll escape the horrors but check in with the women in your world, just to name one group that are headed back to 1950. Or 1650 if the religious nuts have their way.
You aced your previous column about our tenuous grip on survival. This column is a flaming fail.