Speeding through reagan’s America for a Tocquevillian travelogue on ‘the only remaining primitive society on earth’, Jean Baudrillard noted a paradox about us power in the late 1980s. ‘America no longer has the same hegemony’, yet ‘it is, in a sense, uncontested and incontestable.’ Presaging the unipolar moment that would follow, he claimed that ‘American power does not seem inspired by any spirit or genius of its own’, but rather ‘works by inertia.’ If the us originally possessed the features of power, was it now ‘at the face-lift stage?’ Or was it rather entering a phase of hysteresis—the process by which something continues to develop by inertia, whereby an effect persists even when its cause has disappeared? For Baudrillard, this was the real crisis of American power—‘a potential stabilization by inertia, of an assumption of power in a vacuum’, much like ‘the loss of immune defences in an overprotected organism.’footnote1

Baudrillard offered two explanations for this. The first was the absence of dependable adversaries. The us had been more powerful in the two decades after 1945, but so too were the ideas and passions ranged against it: ‘There is no real opposition anymore; the combative periphery has now been reabsorbed (China, Cuba, Vietnam); the great anti-capitalist ideology has been emptied of substance.’ The second explanation was endogenous—a loss of inner dynamism: ‘But here again, though it seems quite clear the American machine has suffered something like a break in the current, or a breaking of the spell, who can say whether this is the product of a depression or of a supercooling of the machinery?’footnote2

Surveying the American political landscape of 2024, Baudrillard’s diagnosis seems prophetic. There are enemies everywhere now—from Tehran to Moscow to Beijing; not to mention Palestine’s embattled defenders in Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iraq—but scant recovery of a ‘spirit or genius’. Despite its continuing stature as world hegemon—a formal empire stretching from Okinawa to Guam, via Ramstein and Incirlik; unchallenged control over the global reserve currency; the most influential culture industry and most powerful armed forces in human history—the costs of America’s faltering machine have become acutely clear. The assorted patch-ups for the malaise—globalized cheap labour, bottomless household debt—began to come unstuck in 2008; the next round of fixes—qe, near-zero interest rates—fuelled a housing crisis while channelling funds to tech monopolies and the super-rich.

Over the past decade, the country’s political scene has undergone a series of spectacular convulsions, with the two parties and electorates seeming to drift ever further apart. Despite America’s unrivalled dominance on the world stage and continued cultural magnetism, Democrats and Republicans now find it nigh impossible to cohabit the same political space. In recent presidential contests, key postulates of liberal democracy—legitimate oppositions, peaceful handovers of power, constitutional continuity—appeared up for grabs. Extra-parliamentary mobilization, on the streets and in the courts, was egged on from on high; the anti-Trump Resistance matched by the Occupiers of January 6; the battery of legal cases against the 45th President by prosecution of the hapless son of the 46th. ‘Stabilization by inertia’ has eroded American elites’ capacity to buy consent from their population—and from each other.

Since Andrew Jackson’s 1828 election in the first direct presidential vote—after which electors were allowed to hold a cookout in the Oval Office—American politics has been marked by a compound of demotics and plutocracy. In 2024, a late-modern rendition of this amalgam was delivered with flair, yet not without a tinge of paranoia absent in previous presidential cycles, and clouded by a sense that the us has increasingly lost its grip on political developments at home and abroad, symbolized in a head of state whose mental capacity was a matter of conjecture.

The past year has provided its own perpetuation of the turbulence. Presiding over an inflationary economy slowly cooling down and an international order bursting at the seams, Harris and Biden’s Democrats sought to consolidate a transversal bloc to stabilize their grip on American power in the coming decade and put the world economy on track for a green transition. In the meantime, the gop fully acquiesced to its Bonapartist drift: a hollowed-out party, more business cartel than mass outfit, was colonized by Trump operatives blusteringly prepping themselves for regime change. The party conventions were showcases: wwe wrestlers and country stars pledging to physically shield their candidate from harm at the rnc, Georgia rappers counting down to state announcements at the dnc; Sun Belt frat boys for Trump, Ivy League poetesses for Harris.

The social anatomy of the two parties reflects the shifting tectonics of American political economy in the 2010s, stuck between the supposed imperatives of green re-industrialization and those of on- and off-shore fossil-fuel production; inflation-fighting and continued demand for the dollar as the world’s safest asset. Two blocs have coagulated around this complex. On the one hand, a cross-class, carbon-intensive coalition is grouped around Trump and his cronies, mostly purged of gop neo-conservative stalwarts, and trading suburban conservatives for peripheral blue-collar workers, along with rural petty bourgeois, exurban middle management, real-estate capitalists, crypto merchants, Silicon Valley’s right-wing and steel producers who survived the laissez-faire onslaught of the 1980s. By contrast to the coalition that Reagan assembled, Trump’s is denuded of white college graduates but buoyed up by degreeless whites.footnote3 It benefits enormously from the anti-majoritarian features of the American Constitution and relies on voter suppression both formal and informal for its mandate. Its mobilizational capacity is now cushioned by a Ford-like tech tycoon who hopes to use Trump to guarantee his access to state funds, while some labour leaders have warmed to a newly revisionist right in the party formally interested in co-determination schemes and collective wage bargaining.