Stepping back, the larger American perspective on governance seems to be that everything is, and will always be, just fine. The economy will self-regulate. Nothing bad will happen. And this gives rise to wholly unqualified governors, at all levels of the federal system. Americans have become accustomed to the idea that politics and government are just games to be played, that have no meaningful effect on outcomes. The entire American system seems to be thought of as "too big to fail," therefore, somehow, it won't, no matter what actions are taken. I don't like where that's headed.
I recently read an interesting book about the fall of the (Western) Roman Empire by Peter Heather. Heather does a good job of working his way through the issues that led to the fall of the Empire and debunking the ones that don't work.
For example he shows that the ruling classes were neither decadent or religiously unworldly, and instead fought for the survival of the Empire almost to the end
*. Rather than a popular image of Romans accepting the inevitability of the Empire's fall over the course of the 5th century, Heather instead suggests that the main attitudinal problem of the Romans was a cheerfully arrogant assumption that the Empire would
survive - the Republic and Empire had fought their way out of several major crises in previous years, this was another major crisis, so they'd fight their way out of this one too. What the Romans didn't realise was that the world had changed in subtle ways over the preceding centuries, which was why methods which had worked in previous centuries failed in the 5th century.
Applying that to the current situation in the USA, it's enough to send a little shiver down the spine. Either the situation can be compared to the fall of the Roman Republic, in which case the USA survives but in a very different form; or the situation can be compared to the fall of the Empire, in which case the USA doesn't survive and the world undergoes a massive geopolitical shift. Either way the outcome will echo down the centuries.
And this is the thing: major realignments of geopolitical power not only cause major upheaval for the people living through them, but they often appear to occur with little warning as events which people think they've all seen before suddenly spiral in a different direction. The collapse of the Bronze Age civilisations in the early 12th century BC, the Macedonian conquest of the Persian Empire, the rise of the Islamic Caliphate and the Russian Revolution are all examples that come to mind of times when the world changed massively in ways which probably wouldn't have been predicted a decade before they occurred.
* Heather fingers the year 468 (only 8 years before the Western Empire's final collapse) as the point of no return. That year the Eastern and Western Empires combined to launch an amphibious attack on the Vandal Kingdom of North Africa. Had it succeeded it would have returned the richest part of the Western Empire to Roman rule, giving it the resources to restore Roman rule in Spain and overawe the barbarian kingdoms in Gaul, and thus giving the Empire a new lease on life. Instead the invasion fleet was trapped by unseasonal winds and destroyed in battle.
