Nations do not choose the circumstances in which they commemorate themselves. The story, indifferent to symbolism, rarely aligns itself with the ceremony. The United States is celebrating its 250th anniversary at a time of structural contradiction: it remains the most powerful country in the world, but uncertainty is growing about its political identity, the legitimacy of its institutions and its leadership capacity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
By conventional indicators, the United States remains unmatched. Its military power has a global reach; its universities lead scientific production; its companies are at the forefront of the technologies of the new digital frontier, and its financial system continues to be a relevant central asset of international capital. But behind this position of external dominance lies a growing internal fragility. Political polarization has hardened into a seemingly persistent form of alienation, and public trust has declined toward almost all major public institutions. The disagreement no longer revolves only around policies, but about the very legitimacy of the system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This anniversary takes place under the political shadow of Donald Trump, who embodies at the same time the energy and instability of contemporary American politics. He has not caused this crisis, but he is making it clear and has accelerated it. The underlying forces\u2014polarization, inequality, cultural fragmentation, and technological disruption\u2014precede him, and his presidency is best understood if it is interpreted as the political expression of these transformations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But the issue at stake is whether the United States still retains the institutional and civic capacity necessary to govern itself properly in the new conditions of the twenty-first century. The founders, especially James Madison and George Washington, faced a central problem: how to build a system strong enough to govern a new nation that was heterogeneous and, at the same time, limited enough to avoid tyranny. Their response was the structural fragmentation of power. The Constitution was not designed to eliminate conflict, but to make it governable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Contemporary America has moved away from this balance. The authority of the executive has expanded, while the capacity for action of the legislature has been weakened under the effect of polarization and institutional blockage. Emergency governance, administrative expansion, and protracted security commitments have concentrated power in executive and technocratic institutions. Successive crises \u2013 from 9\/11 to the pandemic, including the subprime crisis \u2013 have normalised forms of exceptional governance. The result is a gradual transfer of power away from the deliberative bodies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This internal tension is unfolding in parallel with a broader transformation of the international system: the erosion of the post-Cold War order. When the country celebrated its bicentennial in 1976, the United States was leading a coherent Western system, despite the fiasco of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal. In 1991, after the demise of the Soviet Union, liberal democracy and American supremacy seemed to converge into a lasting order. But now this order has disappeared.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The current system is more fragmented and competitive. The rivalry with China affects technology, industrial policy, supply chains, and military modernization. Alliances persist, but they are increasingly conditional. There is no longer a single consensus capable of stabilizing the system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
U.S. foreign policy reflects and reinforces this shift. Global commitments have been reassessed under the weight of internal division, fiscal constraints, fatigue stemming from the war in Ukraine, and scepticism toward liberal internationalism. Alliances are increasingly treated as contingent realities and institutions as mere instruments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This creates deep uncertainty among the allies: American power remains decisive, but its permanent protection is no longer guaranteed. Global stability is increasingly dependent on the internal cohesion of the United States. However, neither institutional tension nor geopolitical transition fully explains the U.S. situation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The most profound transformation affects civic trust. Its collapse is not only institutional; it is also epistemic. For much of the twentieth century, American political life operated within a shared informational framework. Despite partisan biases, the media and institutions provided a common factual basis. The political conflict was developing within a shared reality. That, however, no longer exists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the twenty-first century, digital media have fragmented the information space into socially segregated algorithmic spheres. Citizens inhabit different universes, defined by divergent sources, incentives, and logics. Politics is more difficult today not because the disagreement is new, but because the shared reality is no longer guaranteed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The consequences for democratic governance are profound. The constitutional system was designed for a slow republic: it was assumed that deliberation and institutional confrontation would moderate conflicts over time. Digital communication has reversed this logic. Now the mobilization is instantaneous, the escalation is continuous, and the slowness is often perceived as obstruction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A system built to slow down the times of politics operates today in an environment designed to accelerate them. This raises a structural question: to what extent the institutional design of the eighteenth century and the informational conditions of the twenty-first century have moved beyond what is institutionally repairable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The United States has survived the Civil War, the Great Depression, two world wars, and profound social transformations. Their resilience is due both to the adaptability of institutions and to the trust of citizens. This premise can no longer be taken for granted. The central concern, therefore, is not America\u2019s ability to maintain global power, but its capacity to remain an autonomous republic in a politically substantive sense.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Great powers rarely decline because of an external defeat. Democracies rarely collapse suddenly. More often, systems are weakened from within, as legitimacy erodes more quickly than institutions can adapt. The benchmark of the American experience, therefore, is no longer whether it can lead the world or manage internal division. It is whether it can still generate the minimum epistemic unity necessary for self-government to remain intelligible and whether it still retains some meaning in a world that has ceased to share a common frame of reference.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Photography: A water-damaged sign in Washington, DC that reads “Happy 250!”. Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain.<\/sub><\/p>\n\n\n\n Ainara Barreiro Escobar, trainee at the CETC, has contributed to this issue of Idees d\u2019actualitat<\/em>.<\/sub><\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Nations do not choose the circumstances in which they commemorate themselves. The story, indifferent to symbolism, rarely aligns itself with the ceremony. The United States is celebrating its 250th anniversary at a time of structural contradiction: it remains the most powerful country in the world, but uncertainty is growing about its political identity, the legitimacy of its institutions and its leadership capacity. By conventional indicators, the United States remains unmatched. Its military power has a global reach; its universities lead scientific production; its companies are at the forefront of the technologies of the new digital frontier, and its financial system\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":84487,"template":"","category_newspaper":[679],"segment":[],"subject":[],"class_list":["post-84526","newspaper","type-newspaper","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category_newspaper-679"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n