How Long Will The United States Last?
The Good Ship Point Reyes, photo by Martha Ture
Soviet Union dissident writer Andrei Amalrik, who escaped to Western Europe after periods of arrest, rearrest, and confinement, wrote in 1970 that the Soviet state and the Soviet system—both the country and communism as a political and economic order—were headed for self-destruction. To make his point, he titled his essay “Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?”.
Amalrik wrote not just about the Soviet Union, but about the process by which any great power succumbs to self-delusion and dissolution.
He was, to quote Charles King, “concerned with how a great power handles multiple internal crises - the faltering of the institutions of domestic order, the craftiness of unmoored and venal politicians, the first tremors of systemic illegitimacy. He wanted to understand the dark logic of social dissolution and how discrete political choices sum up to apocalyptic outcomes.”
Amalrik concluded that one can’t make political predictions or good analyses about a country by surveying its main ideological currents.
In other words, predictions about the USA tomorrow based on the liberal and MAGA idiologies, or religions, will not give you accurate forecasts. This is because people are sorted into conflicting groups by mainstream media, academics, and social pollsters, with the goal of having one’s version of reality by accepted as the sole truth. But the people thus sorted will probably disagree among themselves about what their group believes is their political program.
We’ve seen endless examples of this when media interview supporters and opponents of Democrats and Republicans. As it happens, the way a poll question is asked, the context (in person or on cell phone, in studio or at cafe, the date of the query, for examples) and the order of questions determines the answers. This much-studied bias is hard to root out.
A better way to think about political divisions, Amalrik wrote, is to look at the parts of society most threatened by change and the parts who want to hasten change. After that sorting, we could then game out how nations could manage the differences between the two camps. Some tools are suppression of some voters, empowerment of others, gerrymandering, ameliorating reform legislation, empowerment of one camp over another.
And of course, one has to look at the specific time periods involved and the changes on offer.
In the 2024 election, for example:
But in the 2020 election:
These conflicting demands on public policy threaten executive power.
“Self-preservation is clearly the dominant drive,” Amalrik wrote. “The only thing [the government] wants is for everything to go on as before: authorities to be recognized, the intelligentsia to keep quiet, no rocking of the system by dangerous and unfamiliar reforms.”
But in times of rapid disruption, economic transition, social evolution, generational changes, rising income inequality, increased communications, and climate disasters, stability is less and less possible.
Repression is an option, as we see today. But in general, public discontent was most often misdirected toward the government but not toward the actual perpetrators of the inequalities.
“Everybody is angered by the great inequalities in wealth, the low wages, the austere housing conditions, [and] the lack of essential consumer goods,” Amalrik wrote. But if enough people believed that the policies coming out of the nation’s capitol would ultimately improve matters, there was general contentment. That faith in government has not existed since the housing crisis and economic bailout of 2008.
Amalrik then asked Where is the breaking point?
How long can a political system seek to remake itself before triggering one of two reactions—a devastating backlash from those most threatened by change, or a realization by the change makers that their goals can no longer be realized within the institutions and ideologies of the present order?
Or, as Norman Ture once told Newt Gingrich, “Your programs will not achieve your vision.”
Insert Self Delusion Here
Here, Amalrik warned, great powers’ proclivity for self-delusion and self-isolation puts them at a particular disadvantage.
“They set themselves apart from the world, learning little from the accumulated stock of human experience. They imagine themselves immune to the ills affecting other places and systems...Yet the longer this state of affairs helps to perpetuate the status quo, the more rapid and decisive will be its collapse when confrontation with reality becomes inevitable.”
Amalrik identified some catalysts of this process. One was that the government would grow increasingly intolerant of public expressions of discontent and violently suppress “sporadic eruptions of popular dissatisfaction, or local riots.”
A protester confronts a line of U.S. National Guard in the metropolitan detention center of downtown Los Angeles on June 8, following Saturday's immigration raid protest. (Eric Thayer/The Associated Press)
It was a fourth trigger that would spell the real end of the state: the calculation, by some significant portion of the political elite, that it could best guarantee its own future by jettisoning its relationship to the national capital. As, for example:
California Gov. Gavin Newsom is floating a federal tax boycott.
The spat began with reports that the Trump administration is considering cutting funding for California's university system, the largest higher education system in the nation with about 12% of all U.S. enrolled students. In response, Gov. Gavin Newsom wrote Friday afternoon in a social media post that California provides about $80 billion more in taxes to the federal government than it receives in return.
"Maybe it's time to cut that off, @realDonaldTrump," Newsom said.
In times of severe crisis, institutional elites face a decision point. Do they cling to the system that gives them power, or go forward with the understanding that the ship is sinking?
Especially if the regime is seen to be “losing control over the country and even contact with reality.”
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In such an unstable moment, Amalrik said, some sort of major defeat—for example, “a serious eruption of popular discontent in the capital, such as strikes or an armed clash”—would be enough “to topple the regime.”
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