The 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence has arrived at a moment of some embarrassment for the Republic. The United States of America, established to overthrow a mad king, has elected, 250 years later, a mad king of its very own. America is setting itself on fire at its birthday party. It always had a dramatic streak.

In 30 or 40 years, scholars of history, if they exist, will want to know how the richest country in history, with the world’s most powerful alliance network, and a scientific and research capacity fuelled by the talent of the world, chose to throw it all away.

I have been closer than most to some kind of answer. For my book The Next Civil War, I interviewed hundreds of experts, trying to fathom the underlying causes and structures of the decline. I met with extremists on the left and right. I argued that the dark dawning was coming. And yet, in some part of me, I didn’t really believe they would do it. The American self-destruction, I can only inform those future historians, is a mystery to us, too.

When did it all go wrong? Most of the researchers into political collapse that I spoke to blamed 2008, the financial crisis that crippled the dream of social mobility, but others brought up 1980, when income inequality first spiked and trust in institutions began to crater, and yet others 1876, the end of reconstruction, and those with even longer memories back to the civil war, or to the War of 1812.

But that was before Trump 2. It’s become obvious, since he took office again, that the crisis America currently faces has been there from the beginning.

From the beginning, the most intelligent Americans understood that their origin contained, within itself, the seeds of its own destruction. George Washington’s Farewell Address predicted, with startling precision, the hyperpartisanship currently ripping apart the nation he founded.

Abraham Lincoln prophesied: “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher … as a nation of freemen we must live through all time or die by suicide.” His prophecy has come true.

The semiquincentennial is an opportunity to reconsider the American project, and not just because it has provoked a reconsideration of the revolution itself. The American experiment has ended, and the beginning must offer at least some clue to its ending.

Like those of any creation myth, the details of the Revolution are fuzzy but the impressions indelible. A boy stands beside a hack-down cherry tree. A man rides through the dark, waking villagers. Men hurl tea into a harbor. Women stitch stars into a flag. The events surrounding the revolution exist half in a dream space. History bleeds into the shades of myth.

One of the earliest signals of the sudden and rapid American decline has been the intellectual whiplash of its understanding of its own........

© The Guardian