The Blame Game has started for the Democrats loss in the 2024 US Presidential Election (here) as have fears for what might happen in the future (here). If you ask the AI System ChatGPT what happens when countries collapse, the answer is that "...overlapping crises disrupt political, economic and social stability". Taking a World-System perspective: political, economic and social systems start to fail.
What happens when systems start to fail (see the graphic above, click to enlarge): the internal workings of the Failed System no longer control inputs or produces reasonable outputs. The system continues to run, if at all, on its own without any feedback between outputs and inputs.
Using the Failed System model, it seems clear (at least to me) that the systems in the US are starting to fail. The Political System failed to prevent a demonstrably (after the first term) incompetent candidate from becoming US President again. The Congressional System failed to Impeach a sitting President for High Crimes and Misdemeanors. The Legal System failed to hold an ex-President with 34 felony convictions accountable. The Educational System failed to produce voters who could apply critical thinking to their voting decisions. The Economic System failed to deal with the COVID-19 Inflation. The Information Systems (mass media, social media, etc.) failed to produce unbiased information. Pick some system that you understand well and ask yourself whether it is functioning properly.
Do all these failures mean that the US System is collapsing? Of course, we cannot know the future and many of us were surprised that Trump won the 2024 Presidential Election. What I can do is ask a Systems Model of the US Socio-Economic system to project the future. The forecast is presented in the graphic above (dashed red line, click to enlarge) with 98% prediction intervals (the blue and green dashed lines). The solid black line extending beyond 2000 is the dominant state variable for this system. It captures growth in essential variables in the US. The forecast shows that the US System will not peak until after 2050, well into the Post-Trump World of the future.
I have multiple models of the US Socio-Economic system and not all of them predict collapse. Each presents an alternate future and I will not be alive to see which model is most accurate. All the models do show that US growth is slowing. My hypothesis is that the political response to slowing growth (Secular Stagnation) will not be resignation but increasingly unhinged (and possibly Fascist) attempts to return to the Attractor Path of unlimited growth which is an impossibility (here). The Trump Administration will only be the beginning.
The Trump Administration may well destroy the political, legal, economic and educational systems in the US that are currently failing. These institutions will have to be rebuilt whether Trump destroys them or not. The really difficult task is to think about how these institutions might be rebuilt to support a Steady-State Economy and prevent Fascism from triumphing in the post-Trump World.
