Can America survive?

The rich may be ever richer, but the average American grows worse off each year. At the bottom, workers are mired in poverty even as a large proportion of the lower classes, especially blacks, languish in prison. The American economy is splitting in two, the nervous rich and the increasingly destitute poor.

Abroad the economic situation is no better. For some years America has got away with being the world’s greatest debtor nation, thanks to the role of the dollar as de facto global currency. Now, the euro is emerging as a challenger, and Asian central banks in particular are considering their huge dollar reserves. If the loans that have kept America solvent and consuming dry up, the American economy will immediately tank, and perhaps the global economy will go with it.

With all this going on, one big question arises: can America survive?

The United States has always been a singularly strange creation. It is not a “natural” nation as such, based in some ethno-cultural history, but a conglomerate of cultures held together by government power or economic wealth. It was wrested by colonists from the British because it was just too rich to control from Britain, and the struggle gave Americans a false sense of national identity. Even then the separate colonies saw themselves as more important than any national entity.

Americans then benefited from the richest natural resources in the world and the wide moat that separated their country from war-riven Europe. With few internal physical boundaries and only a small indigenous population to overcome, and with expansionist governments buying or stealing huge tracts of land, white Americans soon claimed the whole north American continent bar Canada. The population rapidly expanded to fill it up thanks to the biggest migration in history from a large number of different countries and cultures.

The vast new nation was so large, diverse and rich that two very different approaches to economic development took off. One, based in industrial production and mostly domestic markets, took off in the north and one, based in agricultural production for export, in the south. Slavery was the basis of the southern economy, and this abhorrent system became the issue that sparked civil war.

The American Civil War remains the great war of American history, the first modern war and one that killed more Americans than any other. It is highly significant that the worst war America ever fought was against itself.

After the war, with the south militarily occupied, northern political and business elites pulled the US back together again, and soon the explosive growth associated with mass-industrial production for national markets largely overcame regional and cultural differences.

National government also took on the job of promoting national-scale economic activity, the ugly side of this being the virulent imperialism that gained the US control over Cuba and the Philippines. A sense of national identity grew as the US became the most powerful nation on earth, economically, ideologically, culturally and militarily. This supremacy was made clear by victory in World War II and then the Cold War.

But this unity has been somewhat illusory: the US has always been riven by great differences, racial, cultural, economic and political. Initially geographically defined in terms of north versus south, they have increasingly become east versus west, or as the most recent political maps show, coastal versus central. Serious cracks are showing in the American project, and as things get worse, these cracks may widen to become real divisions.

Overall, there is a profound shift happening in American politics as a gaping divide opens up between red Democrat America and blue Republican America. The divide reflects that great schism the Civil War, and it reflects the growing gap between wealthy, progressive, cosmopolitan America and poor, white, reactionary America.

This big shift came to ahead with the last two presidential elections. Somewhat foolishly in retrospect, the Republican-right establishment chose as its candidate for president the son of a past Republican President, thinking they were about to get a chip off the old block. For whatever reason - a flaky religiosity, the malign influence of a bunch of Washington insiders known as neo-cons - President George W. Bush has proved to be an enormous risk taker. Furthermore, he has manifestly failed in his most important gambles.