It was 250 years ago, on July 4, 1776, that the American Declaration of Independence was signed at the Pennsylvania State House (now Independence Hall) in Philadelphia. The United States’ America 250 celebrations come during a time of great political turbulence in the United States, and in The Guardian, Canadian author/podcaster Stephen Marche (host of the “Gloves Off” podcast) argues that future historians will struggle to understand the “American self-destruction” of the Donald Trump era.
“The United States of America, established to overthrow a mad king, has elected, 250 years later, a mad king of its very own,” Marche argues in a 4th of July op-ed for The Guardian. “America is setting itself on fire at its birthday party. It always had a dramatic streak. In 30 or 40 years, scholars of history, if they exist, will want to know how the richest country in history, with the world’s most powerful alliance network, and a scientific and research capacity fueled by the talent of the world, chose to throw it all away.”
Marche notes that when he was working on his 2022 book “The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future,” he “interviewed hundreds of experts, trying to fathom the underlying causes and structures of the decline.”
“I met with extremists on the left and right,” Marche recalls. “I argued that the dark dawning was coming. And yet, in some part of me, I didn’t really believe they would do it. The American self-destruction, I can only inform those future historians, is a mystery to us, too. When did it all go wrong?”
Marche continues, “Most of the researchers into political collapse that I spoke to blamed 2008, the financial crisis that crippled the dream of social mobility. But others brought up 1980, when income inequality first spiked and trust in institutions began to crater — and yet others 1876, the end of Reconstruction, and those with even longer memories back to the Civil War, or to the War of 1812. But that was before Trump 2.”
Marche argues that the “crisis America currently faces” has “been there from the beginning.” The “seeds of” the United States’ “own destruction” existed from the beginning, according to Marche — only now, more extremists are coming forward.
“One of the earliest signals of the sudden and rapid American decline has been the intellectual whiplash of its understanding of its own history,” Marche observes. “During the grand iconoclasm of 2020, mostly devoted to the desecration of civil war generals, protesters also tore down statues of Jefferson and Washington. In response to the radical critique of U.S. history, both Florida and Texas have rewritten their school curricula on the revolution, to promote more conservative viewpoints…. As the Americans return to their origin, to their primal urge, they are losing themselves.”
Marche continues, “In a kind of atavistic dissolution, the originalists are rendering the Constitution increasingly meaningless. The icons are desecrated. They paint over the granite of the (Lincoln Memorial) Reflecting Pool. They have torn down the White House all on their own; the British didn’t need to burn it.”