Restlessness is what prevents the republic from sinking into stagnation
Illustration: Nash Weerasekera
FROM THE start, 250 years ago, America’s founders believed that their republic would shine out as an example to all humanity. But the republic was also an experiment, and they feared that it could soon collapse into disorder or tyranny. Such has been the dance throughout America’s extraordinary history. Slavery and xenophobia, corruption and robber barons, civil war and world war have all jostled the republic even as America rose to become the beacon of the free world.
On July 4th Americans are celebrating their semiquincentennial. All those syllables rebut the founders’ gloom. Far from succumbing to tyranny, America saved the world from tyrants three times over. Glorious disorder created a dynamism that has long sustained America as a superpower. Dominance comes with temptations, but the United States has by and large held out republican virtues as the salvation of people everywhere.
Yet this birthday comes at another anxious moment in America’s story. Virtue is under threat and talk of decline is in the air. Even as citizens celebrate together, public life is scarred by division. America is demolishing the world order that it created after the defeat of fascism in 1945. The restless republic is opening a new chapter, but does that signal retreat, as some Americans worry, or instead herald a renewal?
To understand this moment, and to mark the 250th anniversary, The Economist retraced the footsteps of Alexis de Tocqueville, a French aristocrat whose tour of the country in the early 1830s furnished the material for “Democracy in America”, a trove of enduring insights into the republic. If you listen to our podcast, you will discover that many Americans today echo the founders’ fears.
They worry that the separation of powers is degenerating into a White House-takes-all world. Congress was meant to be the leading branch of government, but it is gripped by a vicious partisanship in which “we” are right and “they” are bad. To pass laws requires give and take, but the parties punish compromise and gerrymandering rewards extreme views. The Supreme Court is adding to the might of the executive. This week, though it struck down one of the president’s schemes, over birthright citizenship, it also expanded his power by ruling that he can sack officials in federal agencies.
A nation of immigrants, the United States has at its best treated the people flocking to its shores as a source of vitality and a validation of the American dream. China has a dream, too, but foreigners are excluded by the unalterable fact that they were not born Chinese. By contrast, people of any race or faith can become American. Their welcome is the promise that what they and their children can accomplish is limited only by their imagination and capacity for hard work.
But the American dream has soured. Bits of the MAGA movement want to shut down legal immigration, not just the illegal sort. This year net migration could be zero. As the share of Americans who call themselves “white” sinks towards 50%, some on the right want to give a special status to “heritage Americans”, whose forebears have been in the country for generations. This is an ugly throwback to the racism that Americans rejected as part of the moral and material progress that best define the republic’s success.
Abroad, America is also retreating from its values. As our essay this week describes, Donald Trump is leading a Wrecking-ball revolution to smash the institutions and alliances that the postwar generation set up to keep the world safe from despotism. He and many Americans on the right and left feel contempt for a global system that they blame—misguidedly, in the view of The Economist —for aiding China, punishing America’s workers and sending its young soldiers to spill their blood in far-off countries.
Accordingly, America is throwing its weight around like any other country chasing wealth and power. Freedom and democracy for foreigners are off the agenda. Trade used to be a system of mutual benefit; it has become a tool for extracting concessions. Shared values once united America and its allies; now allies are seen as dependants to be exploited.
Many people conclude that America is in decline. That strikes this newspaper as a grave misreading. America’s power is immense—and it could be about to grow beyond all recognition. For evidence of the country’s unabated dynamism, look outside its dysfunctional politics.
America’s artificial-intelligence companies have rapidly mobilised hundreds of billions of dollars to finance the pursuit of a technological lead. If, as they predict, AI changes everything, then America and its AI stack may become utterly dominant—for a time, at least. Some of that is bound to rub off on America’s businesses and its formidable armed forces. Its allies, however much they have been antagonised by Mr Trump, would face a bleak choice between submitting to America or siding with authoritarian China.
As America amasses awesome power, the great experiment could go disastrously wrong. Mr Trump has tainted public life with an ugly cynicism that always sees the worst in everyone. Boosted by AI -enhanced agencies, executive power could become overwhelming. The concentration of wealth and political power could foster a predatory elite. Partisanship, fanned by social media, gerrymandering and party primaries dominated by zealots, could become further entrenched. Politicians might prove unable to deal with the economic and social upheaval that lies ahead.
Present at the destruction
As domestic politics grows dirtier and nastier, America could also become more predatory abroad. Imagine that its abandonment of the project to promote liberty is permanent. Other countries will copy it. Violent, ambitious leaders will feel emboldened to conquer or coerce their neighbours. The world will descend into chaos.
However, as the founders would attest, that dark future is not certain—or even likely. The corollary of America’s dynamism is its capacity for reinvention. Episodes that set the republic back—Pearl Harbour, Sputnik, Watergate—spurred it to recover and charge ahead. Roused, Americans set about making sure that next time they would do better and be better.
One way or another, change is coming to America, because too much today is unsustainable. The social contract, which is financed by borrowing, is fiscally unsustainable. Mr Trump’s generation is biologically unsustainable: his successor will belong to a new, younger group of Americans. The hope must be that voters will decide that the two parties’ sterile mutual contempt has become politically unsustainable, too.
As celebratory fireworks light up cities and towns across America, remember that restlessness is precisely what prevents the republic from sinking into stagnation. All those arguments and fights are a precondition for the creative destruction that precedes the nation’s renewal.
Naturally, the founders would be worried today, just as they were 250 years ago. Yet their revolutionary insight was to build their great experiment on the wisdom of the people. Time and again, that faith has been richly rewarded. ■
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논증 분석
유형: evaluation
핵심 주장
건국 250주년을 맞은 America은 역사상 최고 수준의 기술·군사력을 보유하면서도 민주주의 제도의 침식과 당파적 마비라는 역설적 위기에 처해 있으며, The Economist는 이를 쇠퇴가 아닌 미국 특유의 ‘창조적 파괴와 재창조’ 사이클의 또 다른 국면으로 평가한다.
논리구조
- 역설적 현실 진단: 미국은 AI 기술에서 압도적 우위를 점하고 방대한 군사력을 유지하지만, 행정부 권한 과대화, MAGA 민족주의, 의회 기능 마비로 공화국의 핵심 제도가 위협받고 있다.
- 제도적 침식의 구체적 증거: Supreme Court은 트럼프의 출생 시민권 제한 시도를 기각했으나 동시에 대통령의 연방기관 공무원 해임권을 확대했다. 이민 순유입이 2026년 제로에 근접하고, MAGA 진영 일부는 ‘세습 미국인(heritage Americans)‘에게 특별 지위를 부여하자고 주장한다.
- 대외적 후퇴: Donald Trump는 1945년 이후 미국이 구축한 자유주의 국제질서를 해체하고 있으며, 동맹국을 착취 대상으로, 무역을 상호 이익이 아닌 양보 추출 수단으로 취급하고 있다.
- 반론—AI가 만들 압도적 힘: 미국 AI 기업들은 수천억 달러를 신속히 동원했고, AI가 예측대로 모든 것을 바꾼다면 미국은 일시적으로나마 ‘완전한 지배력’을 갖게 될 수 있다. 이 힘은 동맹국들이 China과 손잡는 대안을 사실상 불가능하게 만든다.
- 위험 시나리오: 행정권의 압도적 집중, 부와 정치권력의 결탁에 의한 포식적 엘리트 형성, AI로 강화된 관료 기구, 소셜미디어·게리맨더링·당내 극단주의자 지배 예비선거에 의한 당파 심화가 복합적으로 악화될 수 있다.
- 역사적 유추—회복력의 근거: 진주만 공습, 스푸트니크 충격, 워터게이트 사건처럼 미국을 후퇴시킨 사건들은 오히려 더 강한 회복과 전진을 이끌었다. Alexis de Tocqueville이 관찰한 미국의 ‘불안한 역동성’이 정체 방지의 핵심이다.
- 지속 불가능성에 기댄 낙관론: 현 사회 계약(차입 기반), 트럼프 세대의 생물학적 한계, 양당의 소모적 상호 경멸—이 세 가지가 모두 지속 불가능하기 때문에 변화는 필연적이다.
결론
The Economist는 현재 미국의 혼란을 쇠퇴의 신호가 아닌 재창조의 전조로 읽으며, 미국의 역동성과 자기 갱신 능력이 어두운 미래를 필연이 아닌 가능성에 머물게 한다고 주장한다. 그러나 그 낙관론은 국민들이 현재의 불지속 가능한 상태를 정치적으로 인식하고 행동할 것이라는 믿음에 의존한다.