“Is the world’s greatest democracy and economy broken?” bestselling author Steven Brill posits at the outset of his recent study of America in decline Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America’s Fifty-Year Fall — and Those Fighting to Reverse It. The country may not be in utter shambles, Brill argues, but all evidence suggests it’s getting there. Trump’s administration was just the latest manifestation of rampaging anger and resentment. Declining social mobility, a shrinking middle class, widening income inequality, crumbling infrastructure — there’s plenty to be mad about, and plenty of blame to go around. “The most talented, driven Americans chased the American dream,” he writes, “and won it for themselves.” They then pulled up the ladder, “so more could not share their success or challenge their primacy”.

Once revered as a great bastion of hope, opportunity and glamour, the US has endured a decade laden with button-down establishmentism and outright fear, resulting in a loss of global appeal. Not since the early 1930s has America been viewed so unappealingly by those living there and those looking in, but with endless headlines involving school shootings, systemic racism, ICE and the opioid crisis, the international cultural superpower we once associated with The Land of The Free is slowly fading. 

In this generation of accountability, the US is the husky CEO dealing with reparations under a microscopic lens. It is forced to reckon with itself and find flaws in what once was deemed a perfect system. 

“I think there has been a decrease in the allure of America in recent years, and the rise of Trump has been largely to blame for that,” says Nicholas Grant, a lecturer and historian in American Studies at the University of East Anglia. “I’ve had students who are entitled to a year abroad with their university course come to me and say they didn’t want to go to the States largely because of him and those who follow his politics.

“While we still see America as a key reference point and a way to shape our understanding of the world and our local circumstances, it’s now by way of a far more critical lens. There is definitely a rejectional view of America as a force for good in the world – but that may not necessarily be a bad thing.”

The pursuit of happiness

Let’s hark back. To 1990, where North Americans hit peak happiness. According to data compiled by the General Social Survey, one of the longest-running and most highly regarded public opinion research projects in the nation, this was the year that the fewest Americans surveyed were unhappy – at just 8%. In 2018, that number jumped to 13%. In 2020, happiness hit a five-decade low. Of course, COVID-19 was largely to blame – but numbers had been going that direction for years before. Why?

Firstly, the economy. After the lengthy peacetime expansion of the 1980s, inflation began to increase and the Federal Reserve responded by raising interest rates from 1986 to 1989. This weakened but did not stop growth, but some combination of the subsequent 1990 oil price shock, the debt accumulation of the 1980s, and growing consumer pessimism combined with the weakened economy to produce a brief recession. 

By the late 90s, American was finally getting its economic act together and the world seemed like not such a terrible place to be in, following a post-Cold War fragmentation. However, the good times only come to a privileged few, meaning an ‘us and them’ narrative causes immediate divides. The vast majority of the US faced a future of stable poverty – despite a relatively robust economy around them. This changed at the turn of the century, when a high economic growth brought unprecedented good times to all. The US was flooded with an array of new technologies, new jobs, new international business which benefited most everyone. The world kept expanding and expanding, credit was extended to more and more people across all demographics but then the crash came. The sub prime mortgage crisis birthed the crash which was the moment America became untethered from its dreams. From the ruins, the divides became more extreme and while there had always been an elite, now many Americans felt, for the first time, that they couldn’t join them. The drawbridge had been pulled up and there was suspicion and fear on both sides.

The US has traditionally viewed economic success and failure as the result of individual effort, E pluribus unum, for better or for worse. Rugged individualism and self-reliance have been defining qualities of the American character – the promise of the American Dream, lest we forget, is that anyone, regardless of their origins, can have a fair start if they work hard. Albeit, individually. On the other hand, European nations are much more likely to attribute poverty to structural factors such as social class or the lack of jobs. As a result, other OECD countries are much more willing to invest in a robust social welfare state designed to help ameliorate some of these structural inequities. 

End of the line

“If you look at the model they’ve been working on for a very long time, it’s just one of relentless growth,” Associate Professor of American Politics, De Montfort University Dr Clodagh Harrington says. “And that worked okay for a while, but that can’t go on forever. What once seemed like an open road has now really manifested now as a cul-de-sac, laying bare the gaps in the system.”

Poverty, interestingly, is also frequently seen as a “Black problem” rather than as an “American problem.” Race has been used to divide poor blacks and whites from seeing their common economic interests. As President Lyndon Johnson once explained to an aide in 1960, “I’ll tell you what’s at the bottom of it. If you can convince the lowest white man that he’s better than the best coloured man, he won’t notice you picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” Research has shown that more racially heterogeneous societies tend to be less generous in their economic redistribution policies to address structural inequities. The reason for this may be that we tend to be less concerned about the needs of others when they look different from us. 

Regarding those who look different from us at its core, the US immigration has made countless headlines in recent years past for their by-any-standards barbaric practice of compulsorily detaining or imprisoning people seeking political asylum, or who are considered to be illegal immigrants. The Trump administration signed off on this, with hopes it would save jobs for the common man – jobs that the common man never desired in the first place. 

It’s an industry, says artist David Taylor, who has used drones to take aerial photography and video of 28 privately run ICE detention centers near the US southern border, in a 2021 interview with The Guardian. “We’ve commodified human displacement.” The footage confirms the worst, that North America’s pivot towards capitalism has nosedived into anti-socialism, using fear as a for-profit industry. It backs up what Brill suggests, that the last generation of working Americans climbed the ladder only to then hoist it out of reach of those behind them. A damning choice for a country whose constitution begins with the words ‘we, the people’.

This, in turn, has naturally influenced those who were looking to head to the US for any number of reasons. During his administration, Trump set a goal of reducing legal immigration by 63%. Of this, he was wildly successful. The number of persons obtaining legal permanent residence in the US from 2016 on steadily declined year by year and tourism itself underwent a ‘Trump slump’. Illegal immigration, however, did not follow the same pattern. One can only assume the impetus to flee an unfulfilling place is not hindered by who’s in The White House. But from a middle-class world view, it seems that the former superpower of the US (and its unforgiving healthcare, systemic prejudices and its unempathetic by-the-book attitude) no longer boasts the same appeal it once did 

Morning in America

Closer to home, demand for J1 visas also fell dramatically (from 8,000 in 2013 and 7001 in 2015 to 4,347 in 2017 to 3,392 in 2019) as did Irish emigration to the US in general – falling from 6,500 in 2017 to 5,200 in 2019. 

“I first went over to the States on a J1 back in the nineties,” says Director of Planning and Connections at Kick Communications, Rory O’Flaherty, who just moved back to Ireland after more than 20 years in New York City. “There was a period back then where everyone who applied for a Green Card got one, I managed to sort ones for my whole family!”

O’Flaherty is six weeks back in the country, along with his wife and young son. So, why the move? 

“I’ve always had good opinions of Ireland,” he says. “I loved coming home for Christmas and during the summer. When it came to raising a child, Ireland just seemed like a better option. It was a combination of lifestyle decisions, really. The creative field here seems to be growing a lot. On the political side, the rising tide of fascism and right-wing politics were worrying. The gun laws, mass shootings and inability of legislators to do anything about it was also hugely frustrating. 

“The States definitely lost an appeal to me and my family in a number of ways, but I do believe recovery is on the way with Biden. Saying that, America’s standing in the world is definitely damaged. Trump is a symptom, but not fully to blame,” he says. “If it wasn’t Trump, it would have been someone else.” 

It would be lazy to attribute all blame to Trump, but it appears that many Americans believe him to be at the helm. In a 2021 poll of 1,019 Americans just after the riot at the Capitol, 79 per cent of those surveyed said that America is “falling apart”. The poll reflected the collision of crises besetting the country — the backdrop of a pandemic, recession, decoupling of red/blue America, and racial injustice and the immediacy of the Capitol insurrection, followed by Impeachment II. A tumultuous time, by any nation’s standards. 

“Trump rode a wave that was there before,” says Director of the Clinton Institute for American Studies at University College Dublin, Professor Liam Kennedy. “He was a creature of the moment and he’s still got a very powerful base but the reasons he got in were steeped in identity. Following the rise of Obama, the white middle class grew uncomfortable with seeing Black people in power and the loss of a social identity  – their children were no longer guaranteed to go to college or gain upward mobility. 

“We saw signs of it with the Tea Party during Obama’s administration which led us, and middle class Americans, to believe that the American Dream is on life support, something that had been a questioned myth for a long time. Post-Clinton, this boasted a very powerful appeal and sense of the US being a beacon of opportunity. All of this has also resulted in the hemorrhaging of US soft power since Trump’s reign. In academic language, a big paradigm shift has occurred in recent years – which we can see was the main factor in Trump gaining office, meaning it in no way started with just him.”

This isn’t the first time American decline has been referenced in the Trump era. Not even close. In a 2018 editorial, New Yorker editor David Remnick predicted, “Future scholars will sift through Trump’s digital proclamations the way we now read the chroniclers of Nero’s Rome—to understand how an unhinged emperor can make a mockery of republican institutions, undo the collective nervous system of a country, and degrade the whole of public life.” This followed a lofty tweet by conservative pundit Bill Kristol suggesting that Trump’s America mirrored the fall of the Roman Empire: “The speed with which we’re recapitulating the decline and fall of Rome is impressive. What took Rome centuries we’re achieving in months,” it reads. 

The Trump symptom

Trump’s presidency has long been linked to the fall of Rome, but the reality is much more complicated. The American empire has always rested on three pillars: economic strength, military prowess, and the soft power of cultural dominance. Relative economic decline is almost a given with the rise of newly emboldened regional superpowers such as China and Russia. The United States military is one of the most trusted institutions in the United States, with 72 percent of the public having confidence in it in 2020. It also provides, oftentimes, the best economic prospects for those who enlist, ensuring a symbiotic relationship throughout. 

Nevertheless, the military might of the United States is unquestionable. The U.S. Army has the largest number of active personnel, followed by the Navy and Air Force. Despite numbering over 1.4 million in 2021, the US military is outnumbered heavily by China. Where the United States truly dominates is in regards to military spending. This amounted to 2,166 dollars per capita in 2020. There appears to be no decrease in spending on the horizon, with forecasted outlays set to reach 915 billion U.S. dollars in 2031. 

The US grasp on cultural dominance is, this writer thinks, the true victim of the Trump presidency. While, just a few years ago, North America was hailed to stride the world as a colossus with unparalleled power and unmatched appeal, it is now seen near-exclusively by the cultural elite as a “profane, irreligious, pagan country of gross materialism,” as first described by Brian Friel in Philadelphia, Here I Come! 

But, according to the same cultural elite, this is nothing new. “Americans have had a low culture for a very long time, and have long promoted it,” so says author and historian Kenneth Weisbrode. Weisbrode thinks that the obsession with decline is not new, suggesting it dates back as far as the Puritans. “Cultural decline, in other words, is as American as apple pie,” he argues. Weisbrode also likens pre-revolutionary France and present-day America for their vulgarity, which he argues is “an almost natural extension or outcome of all that is civilized: a glorification of ego.”

“As far back as the 1960s, there have been rumblings and conversations of a United States decline as one of the great superpowers,” Dr Harrington says. “That conversation has been debated by academics for half a century now. But the reason it seems much more prominent these days is largely due to the acceleration of information technology – we are exposed to everything now. We know about every instance of racial brutality, every name. That wouldn’t have been possible a decade ago.  

“Saying that, the soft power they’ve traditionally held onto is looking increasingly fragile – healthcare, cultural power, income equality and racial equality etc. But one must consider the exposure element – the States now, in a way, have no place to hide.”

The failure of democracy

The most damning societal takedown of the States is yet to come, however, many argue. By way of voting legislation. Democracy suppression laws have been introduced in all but three states (the Republicans’ entire agenda is dependent on reducing the electoral base as much as possible) keeping a significant number of eligible voters from the polls. An American’s right to vote was, until recently, protected by the Voting Rights Act of 1965 which ensured that the federal government has oversight of changes to the voting systems in US states that had a history of voting discrimination. However, this changed back in 2013 with a Supreme Court ruling upending the law. It meant that the states which have dealt with discriminatory voting tactics in the past no longer have the protection of the federal government for legislation affecting voting processes. 

“We cannot let voter suppression stand,” Bernice King – youngest daughter of civil rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King who advocated for African American voting rights back in the 1950s/1960s – recently tweeted. “My father’s work is under assault.”

According to those at The Brennan Centre at New York University – the foremost non-partisan organisation devoted to voting rights and voting reform – reports that over the last 20 years, states have put barriers in front of the ballot box – imposing strict voter ID laws, cutting voting times, restricting registration, and purging voter rolls. These efforts, which received a boost when the Supreme Court weakened the Voting Rights Act in 2013, have kept significant numbers of eligible voters from the polls, hitting all Americans, but placing special burdens on racial minorities, poor people, and young and old voters.

“We must recognize that one of the two political parties is routinely engaged in sabotaging free elections with voter-suppression efforts aimed at the minority voters it cannot win over at the ballot box,’ Frank Rich wrote last year in New York magazine. “These anti-democratic power grabs became a GOP staple decades before Donald Trump, culminating in the actions of a George W. Bush–anointed chief justice, John Roberts, whose Supreme Court shredded the Voting Rights Act of 1965. As Roberts famously wrote in 2007, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” Since then, discrimination on the basis of race has only expanded in states like Georgia and Florida, where Black voting rights have been cavalierly undermined and trashed.”

In a way, the cultural decline of North America was a long time coming. All smaller countries had to do was catch up and realise they no longer depended on the US in the same way. The States – once a forerunner with a wide margin – now boasts similar (and sometimes, worse) levels of employment, quality of life and freedom than countries whose peoples once saw it as the place for those “yearning to be free”.

Not to mention, the highly racialised element which gave rise to such movements as birtherism – what Ta-Nehisi Coates quoted in her The Atlantic article about Trump’s win as “that modern recasting of the old American precept that black people are not fit to be citizens of the country they built.” “Black guys counting my money! I hate it,” Trump was once quoted as saying. “The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.” After his cabal of conspiracy theorists forced Barack Obama to present his birth certificate, Trump demanded the president’s college grades (offering $5 million in exchange for them), insisting that Obama was not intelligent enough to have gone to an Ivy League school.

The promise of the American Dream is that anyone, regardless of his or her origins, can have a fair start in life. If we work hard, we can get a good education and achieve success. But over the last several decades a disturbing “opportunity gap” has unexpectedly emerged between kids from “have” and “have-not” backgrounds. The central tenet of the American Dream—that all children, regardless of their family and social background, should have a decent chance to improve their lot in life—may no longer be “self-evident.” 

They raised their children with the same expectations. But those children—and their children—have not fared so well in an age of fragile families, crumbling communities, and disappearing jobs. Their lives reflect the diminishing opportunities that haunt so many American kids today. In addition, the United States has frequently viewed poverty and inequities through the lens of race and ethnicity. 

“The American Dream was never really for everyone anyway, just ask a non-white person,” Associate Professor of American Politics, at theDe Montfort University, Dr Clodagh Harrington astutely says. 

“But it is the American focus on individualism that has laid bare the gaps of their systemic issues,” she continues. “And that focus permeates down from whoever’s in the Oval Office to kindergarten kids stating the constitution every morning. That model – which once seemed very glamorous and attractive – is beginning to look increasingly unworkable. When in power, Obama alluded to this in a speech where he mentioned the old Republican philosophy of ‘pulling yourself up by your bootstraps’ – but questioned what those who can’t afford boots in the first place can do. 

“If you look at what we call ‘the hard power’ it bestows such as the military, the navy, the economy, it’s still up there – but the extent of their soft power has been dented and damaged in recent years, without question.”

The soft superpower

This begs the question, if North America is losing its status as a cultural superpower – what or where is replacing it? For those reporting on a culture beat, all signs point to Asia in general and China in particular. China aspires to be the world’s dominant power by 2049, the 100th anniversary of the end of its civil war. 

If we return to the three-tiered mechanic of empirical success – economic strength, military prowess, and the soft power of cultural dominance – we know that China represents less than 20% of global GDP (the US falls around 25%) but also boasts many of the world’s largest banks, industrial firms and technology/AI companies. Its military also has both the potential and capacity to deny the US sustained access to the bases, ports and allies that constitute what remains of North America’s once omnipotent presence across the Pacific. 

However, to believe that, in the times we are living, we are simply undergoing a power transition from one global hegemony to another is as overly simplistic as it is unlikely. We are living in a time where multipolarity exists – a world in which China hugely benefits. And Trump, for example, does not. 

For a country to work, you have to have a balance between personal ambition and personal achievements and the common good,” Brill said in a recent Vox interview. “The way you do that is to have all kinds of guardrails on the system. In finance, you have regulatory guardrails. You have labor laws that produce something like a level playing field between employer and employee. You have consumer protection laws. You do all kinds of things to create these guardrails so that the winners can’t win in a way that hurts everybody else. That’s what we’ve lost.” 

The common good once believed to permeate throughout the United States appears to have been lost by way of a white-knuckle grasp on the exclusivity of hard power. In a time when soft power is growing in recognition and respect, the average North American must consider which road in a yellow wood to travel – a choice never before even considered.

So perhaps this is the ticket – a purpose built set of cultural laws in place to protect the legacy that once propelled a divided nation into superpower status. Or perhaps it’s the entire breakdown and reparation of the old democratic values that the US once boasted. The values that have been annexed — Freedom of Speech, meritocracy, financial and legal engineering — need to be redirected to undo some of the damage that’s been done. Maybe that can be done by offering free beer, biryanis or even marijuana?

This, in turn, can boast international importance, according to historian Nicholas Grant. “I think from the perspective of American power brokers and policy makers whose desire is based around creating a positive view of the States, they would feel like that’s under attack,” he says.

“But I also think this more critical view of the systems that have been in place so long can benefit the States in the long run. It can create really interesting conversations – specifically, I’m thinking about the global movement for Black Lives, which you can rightly attack America for, and then go on to see how it can change things for the better in your locality. Taking that as an example, you can definitely see the cracks in American power and the problems of maintaining American exceptionalism but, once again, I don’t think that’s a bad thing.”

With a new, and history-making, duo in the White House, let us hope that more progressive policies will begin to restore the viability of the American Dream and reverse the trends towards less mobility and opportunity. Such a change would reflect a reality where every child has the opportunity to reach their full potential without fear or logistical issues. This, in turn, would reflect in the dreams of children from any number of countries. 

So, as it happens, it appears the American Dream might not actually be dead at all – it’s simply entered REM.