Why American Society Is Incredibly Stable

Part I: The Crisis Machine (2,400 words, 12 minute read)

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America Is Always About to Fail

These days, it is more popular than ever (at least in my living memory) to predict the imminent demise of America. Commentators across the mainstream political spectrum spanning left to right offer a growing list of reasons, often framed differently but converging in tone. Some highlight America’s declining global power and influence: the rise of Global South economies and the slow erosion of dollar dominance in global trade; the inability to keep pace with China’s accelerating innovation; and the growing incapacity to sustain or win major military conflicts abroad. Others focus on internal decay: deepening economic contradictions, rising inequality, and the evaporation of the “American Dream”; cultural and moral disintegration marked by the collapse of religion, family, and shared norms; the centrifugal effects of mass immigration and multiculturalism, leading to the erosion of national identity along racial, ethnic, and gender lines. Finally, as a matter of political ritual, whichever party is in power at any given moment is cast as the treasonous force responsible for hastening the end.

Undoubtedly, all of these negative diagnoses of American political, economic and social life are true to some extent, regardless of how they’re framed. The world is reverting to its historically default multipolar configuration now that the brief post-Cold War “unipolar moment” is over, and rising powers, especially China, are displacing U.S. preeminence in multiple strategic sectors. China has already overtaken the U.S. in critical technologies and by many metrics has a far larger, more globally connected economy with greater strategic depth. Meanwhile, America lurches from one poorly explained military entanglement to another—wars that end ambiguously, with no victory, no honor, and growing global resentment. Even without American “boots on the ground” since the end of the disastrous war in Afghanistan, we continue to pursue costly and morally indefensible proxy wars in Ukraine and the Middle East.

On the home front, it is undeniable that the quality of life for the vanishing American middle class has declined. Housing, education, and healthcare have grown vastly more expensive relative to income. Life expectancy is falling after decades of steady increase, a decline which began before Covid-19 accelerated the trend. “Deaths of despair” continue to rise, while fertility remains well below replacement level. This material breakdown is accompanied by cultural decay: widespread consumption of pornography, online gambling, and industrialized junk food are symptoms of spiritual exhaustion. While the decline in the church may be celebrated by secular critics, even they struggle to name any new moral or ethical center that might replace the lost functions of religion. Everyone agrees something is rotting, though there is little agreement on what it is.

The transformation of national identity through immigration and multiculturalism also exerts a powerful dissolving force; while there is sharp disagreement on the desirability of these changes, few deny their scale or pace, and for many, the speed of cultural change is disorienting and destabilizing. Social science consistently finds that greater diversity correlates with lower community cohesion and engagement, and the atomization already brought about by economic and technological forces is accelerated by mobile and constantly shifting demographics. Economic atomization and high geographic mobility also drive internal migration patterns that further undermine rootedness. Internal economic migration, often overlooked in debates about the merits of immigration, contributes as much or more to the erosion of established communities, even if its cultural impact differs from foreign immigration.

Finally, American politics has grown harsher and more delegitimizing over the last two decades. While I can only speak directly from my own living memory, it seems increasingly common for large segments of the population to see elected leaders not just as opponents, but as illegitimate or even treasonous. Obama’s citizenship was publicly questioned; during his presidency, fringe theories circulated about his administration setting up internment camps for US citizens. Trump, himself a key promoter of the Obama “birther” narrative, was accused of being a foreign agent, and the Russia investigation consumed his presidency. Biden’s election was met with allegations of stolen votes and foreign interference, culminating in the January 6th riot. Without assessing the factual basis of any of these narratives, they each enjoyed broad support among partisans. The idea that the country could cease to exist “as we know it” now accompanies every presidential transition, a troubling sign for any pluralistic democracy, which, as Przeworski notes, is supposed to be “a system in which parties lose elections”.

And yet, with all of these points of failure in mind, America somehow seems to steamroll through an incredible array of challenges, year after year. It is hard to imagine a fragile state, riddled with all the contradictions we’ve described, surviving the 9/11 attacks, the highly politicized Global War on Terror, and the domestic mass surveillance regime and erosion of civil liberties that followed. Just as the War on Terror was losing legitimacy and public support, another world-historic disaster struck from the heart of American finance: the 2008 global financial collapse. This was followed by the divisive but decisive election of Barack Obama, a brief culmination of “Hope and Change” that rapidly faded as foreclosures mounted, criminal banks flourished, and the wars and surveillance state not only continued but expanded.

Without pause, the system lurched into its next convulsion: Donald Trump stormed onto the political scene, a brash businessman-entertainer with no political experience, who all but single-handedly executed a hostile takeover of a major political party. There were no sacred cows he wouldn’t attack, triggering a sustained intra-elite conflict and an institutional war against his presidency that mobilized nearly every major organ of American power. The final year of Trump’s destabilizing first term saw the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, which upended American life across all domains—economic, social, and political. At the height of the pandemic, Trump’s presidency ended violently in a contested election leading to a direct (if largely ineffectual) attack on the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to block the certification of electoral results.

The establishment-restoration victory of Joe Biden ushered in a fragile period of recovery from the social and economic aftershocks of the pandemic, during which the intra-elite war between the now-entrenched Trump faction and the old liberal establishment continued, with dozens of criminal and civil legal attacks launched against Trump (many with a significant legal basis). Throughout this period, a clearly mentally and physically deteriorating President Biden declined to a level that forced the unprecedented handoff of his reelection campaign to Vice President Harris. Trump, meanwhile, survived multiple assassination attempts and roared back to power, his movement and electoral support more energized than ever.

We’re early into the second Trump presidency, but it has opened with a massive assault on the very state itself: dissolving agencies, firing hundreds of thousands of civil employees, siphoning trillions of the national wealth to the super-wealthy by stripping away social protections for the most precarious. Once more, all the conditions seem to be aligning for a major crack-up in American society. But if history is any guide, it remains a bad bet to assume America’s end has finally arrived. Somehow, through all of these convulsions, the system seems not only to persist, but to adapt and even thrive. In fact, there may be solid structural reasons to believe that these very crises are what generate the conditions for America’s continued stability.

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Inner Contradictions: A Surprising Wellspring of Resilience

During the 1980s, under the shadow of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, German sociologist Ulrich Beck coined the term Risk Society to describe a new phase of modernity. Beck’s thesis was that we had transitioned from the industrial society inaugurated in the 19th century, premised on continually expanding the output of wealth and goods, to a qualitatively new type of society in which the complexity and scale of the industrial system now produced both goods and bads, or risks, in equal measure, such as climate change, pollution, and out-of-control technologies. These new risks are fundamentally different from those of pre-modernity or even early industrial society, such as famines, natural disasters, or local pollution, because they are not only man-made but are in fact foreseeable byproducts of human activity and truly global in scope. Many of the tail risks of modern industrial systems are so large that they are uninsurable, breaking down the traditional model of privatized risk management priced by insurance. For instance, you cannot insure against a global financial crisis or a nuclear disaster. In the Risk Society, public and private bureaucracies revolve around mitigating and managing risks that are knowingly produced by rational, scientific human activity, but whose consequences can only be studied and analyzed after they have played out, since there is no way to test the large-scale effects of pollutants or networked digital technologies in a laboratory.

This leads to what Beck calls Reflexive Modernity: the process by which society is continually forced to confront the consequences of its own modernization. Institutions, norms, and categories (such as science, politics, the state, or the corporation) are no longer taken for granted but become subjects of critique, mistrust, and continual revision. Public debates increasingly revolve around unintended side effects, accountability gaps, and institutional failure, where techno-scientific expertise remains central but is increasingly doubted and contested. Politics becomes centered on managing risk, even as the capacity to do so diminishes, and each partial solution or mitigation creates the preconditions for a new crisis.

Paradoxically, this system that constantly renews and expands the source of risks also constantly renews its own self-justification, since risks never stop arising and the public demand for safety has become the paramount value of the modern welfare state. Novel risks emerge from within the system’s own logic, and crises are no longer seen as breakdowns; they are the fuel and rationale for further innovation, managerial expansion, and re-legitimation of elite control. Every shock is treated as a justification for more intervention, more expertise, more surveillance, more liquidity, and more “resilience” infrastructure. Although science and expertise are increasingly contested, they are never rejected wholesale: crises merely open space for disputes about orthodoxy and “the right kind” of science, such as the debates over vaccines and lockdowns that arose during the Covid-19 crisis. No one seriously calls for discarding the system or building a new one. In effect, adherence to the system only intensifies through the purification ritual of critique. The ultimate strength of this system is that there is no alternative, no outside perspective, only endless transmutations of the techno-industrial order. And with each crisis metabolized, the system becomes more entrenched and more elaborate, making fundamental reform or reversal increasingly unthinkable.

Most prognosticators of American decline or collapse implicitly assume a kind of linear process, in which the accumulation of negative developments (more bad things like medical bankruptcies, or fewer good things like social trust or civic engagement) eventually sum to a breaking point at which society collapses, or the people revolt and demand a new system. But in reality, America behaves far more like Beck’s Risk Society: it does not collapse under the weight of its contradictions; it turns them into new sources of power. Crises do not ultimately weaken the system but rather present occasions for adaptation, expansion, and internal consolidation that in many cases expand and entrench US power at home and abroad.

The shock of the 9/11 attacks, rather than collapsing public trust in the very government that had failed to prevent them, instead enabled a massive expansion of the state. The federal security apparatus ballooned in size, while the U.S. military footprint grew dramatically across the Middle East and Central Asia. Domestically, the crisis inaugurated an era of expanded surveillance, policing, and coercion under the newly constructed logic of “homeland security.” The wars that followed were not only profitable for the defense sector – they also produced unforeseen technological gains. One of the more morbid ironies is that trauma medicine developed on battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan eventually improved urban hospital outcomes in the U.S., significantly reducing mortality from gun violence and contributing to a lower homicide rate. Meanwhile, the creation of a mass-surveillance regime did not weaken corporate power; it bound private tech firms and intelligence agencies together in a dense web of public-private infrastructure that would later form the backbone of both national security and digital capitalism.

The inevitable backlash to the Bush administration’s openly authoritarian and militarist policies helped condition the rise of the Obama movement, which promised transformation, restoration, and a return to legality and reason. But the timing of Obama’s ascent, which coincided with the near-collapse of the financial system, meant that his administration governed not in the spirit of rupture, but of preservation. Rather than reform the financial sector or roll back the authoritarian measures of the Bush years, Obama presided over a sweeping expansion of both. The banking system became more deeply interconnected, more centralized, more indispensable to state stability, more “too big to fail”. Banking reforms adopted in the US were forced on global partners, bringing the world even more into line with US financial authority and even tearing down the famed secrecy of Swiss banking. The mass surveillance apparatus moved from ad hoc to formalized, covert war replaced overt war, and previously extralegal policies like indefinite detention and drone assassinations (including of U.S. citizens) were not abolished but refined and placed on a more solid legal footing.

What Obama offered was a kind of technocratic pacification: a more palatable, rhetorically humane face on an underlying architecture that had only grown more complex and entrenched. But as the promises of transformation faded, disillusionment deepened. The post-2008 recovery was spatially and socially uneven. Economic prospects dimmed for large parts of the population, national identity fractured further into competing cultural narratives, and the “forever wars” ground on with no explanation or justification compelling enough to bind the polity together. Hope gave way to exhaustion and disappointment, but rather than catalyze reform, this became a new condition of governance. The sense of betrayal, rather than generating revolt, produced a new kind of reflexive accommodation: the emergence of the Trump phenomenon, which remains, in many respects, the most astonishing reflexive pivot the system has executed to date.

In the next part, we will examine the reflexive dynamics of the Trump phenomenon in depth, as well as other obscure but critical financial, technological, and psychological systems that channel disruption back into order, and allow a visionless, decentralized system to thrive and continually reinvent itself.