The Case for Collapse

There’s an odd reason for hope in the idea of Trump’s return to power

Photo by Harrison Mitchell on Unsplash

One of the most petrifying truths for many about Trump’s impending second term is that it could very well represent the end of our democracy — of our entire system of government. But it’s rare when addressing those existential risks for us to stop and ask the question, “Are our institutions still worth fighting for?”

If our worst fears come to fruition and the America as we know it devolves into authoritarianism, there may no longer be sense in trying to regain what was.

In recent years, the possibility has grown harder to ignore that the pains of holding on to our unstable government could be more damaging to the future of the nation than ripping off the band-aid completely. One issue on which both sides of the aisle can agree is that our system is by and large broken.

According to the Pew Research Center, just over 20% of Americans in 2024 trust the federal government to do what is right in any given scenario. A 2022 Gallup poll found that the public confidence in the three branches of government is at an all-time low, with the Supreme Court at 25%, the presidency at 23%, and Congress at just 7%.

Well before Trump entered our politics, people were cynical of what our democracy had become. From gerrymandering and all of the erratic uncertainty of the Electoral College to the unlimited sums of cash that we allowed to enter into our political process, it’s been clear for well over a decade that our democracy is in dire straits. 

So many of us live a strange dichotomy, one in which we’re happy to express our fundamental discontent with the system, but will still fight tooth and nail to preserve our conflicting versions of it each time these weighty election years round the bend. Today, these disparate visions of ours have left this country on the brink of civil war. And so much of America hates living in this constant state of tension. Yet we’ll toil and argue until the end of time within our two-party system about issues on which we’re as likely to compromise as Israelis and Palestinians. 

Despite this bipartisan disapproval of the system we have, and our fundamental disagreements about how it should operate, we continue to safeguard these age-old structures and interpret remnants of bygone times as though we channel the righteous glory of the Founding Fathers. We hurl, “That’s unconstitutional!” allegations as though Americans can make head or tail of even the document’s Second Amendment. 

Our constitution is one of the most comprehensive, idealistic, and unifying founding documents of any nation. But the very language in which it’s written is from a different world. It shouldn’t be a reach to hope that the average citizen of our country can parse the meaning behind our most essential founding edicts. It shouldn’t require years of study and a degree in Post Elizabethan English to process our Declaration of Independence. Expecting the generation of TikTok to grapple with these arcane, ten-clause sentences written by musket-carrying slaveowners is such an obvious problem it’s a wonder we so rarely even seem to consider it.

It’s generally unfair to judge figures of the past by modern standards. But nor is it logical to put these generations-old mandates on a pedestal and act as though the people who wrote them were prophetic. These venerated politicians of the past are treated as something more than human. Their words are regarded as borderline biblical. 

Yet the reality remains that many of their hallowed, bedrock decrees have aged more poorly than the ornate powdered wigs our founders used to wear. Many skip over the fact that the Declaration of Independence enshrined no rights to African Americans and that the Constitution wasn’t amended to allow women to vote until the 1920s. 

Trump epitomizes the widening gap between our founding and our present, and in so many respects he is the leader we’ve earned. He’ll bumble through the timeless halls of a centuries-old building without even a curiosity about the historied figures that once walked those same corridors. He’ll preside over institutions whose machinations he does not understand. He’ll swear to uphold a document that neither he, nor the country whose citizens can name more Simpsons characters than constitutional amendments can begin to make sense of.

It’s difficult to deny the crises that can arise from a population that can’t understand the literature of its most basic founding principles. And never more boldly has that damning truth been written across the wall than in this aftermath of the 2024 election.

It was the promise that Trump would drain the swamp that earned many American’s attention. It was the hope he’d serve as a plain-talking face to the incomprehensible maze of jargon and manipulation that is American politics. People were tired of the same old statesman’s dialect and wanted someone whose words they could comprehend. In Trump’s brash simplicity, there are over 70 million Americans who see something relatable. 

We’ve grown so detached from those documents on which our country was built that electing a reality TV personality has become conceivable. Social media needed to slowly creep its way into our politics before it was possible for a demagogue to weaponize it.

Our ignorance as a nation served as implicit permission for many of the officials we elected to ignore their oaths of office when Trump was impeached for recruiting foreign interference in our election and again when he directed his followers to stop the certification of the 2020 race after Biden had been soundly declared the winner.

If even our politicians upheld these documents, a second Trump term would never have been possible. Trump would have been barred from running. Instead, senators were happy to violate their constitutional obligation— plainly acknowledging the former leader’s guilt while still voting not to impeach him. The few who broke party lines to uphold their oaths were made into pariahs, threatened, and attacked on Twitter.

It’s remarkable how far these founding documents have been able to guide us — and even other emerging democracies throughout the world — but it isn’t useful to imagine perfection in the words of these pre-electricity colonizers. They didn’t envision weapons that could exterminate crowds within seconds or algorithms and automated intelligences that could result in coups and influence the results of elections. They didn’t anticipate a world where we’d learn to rip apart an atom, nor that we’d create weapons that could level whole cities in seconds. 

They didn’t foresee the competitive stockpiling of WMDs, or that our planet’s very biodiversity could one day collapse as natural disasters grow in frequency and intensity. They could hardly begin to fathom a thing like a a radio, let alone a modern marvel like the internet and a world so seamlessly connected through it. So bitterly divided by it.

Our founding fathers could never have expected that their words would still hold weight in such a world. They couldn’t know that our planet’s spin would accelerate to this maddening speed. 

The framers of the Constitution could have never foreseen a leader like Trump taking high office.

It’s astonishing that they were able to devise such a long-standing system of government back in 1776. The reality that it may no longer effectively serve the people of this country has loomed closer and closer for decades. It’s a stark truth that’s underlied each call to vote I’ve ever uttered — the notion that we’re a democracy, but not fully. Our votes count, but wealthy donors can buy laws and leaders. We’re empowered in our capacity as individuals, but not as empowered as corporations. 

Much of the population has been happy all along to admit that the system we have is broken. If our institutions don’t survive this next decade, the enduring life they’ve lived is still worth being thankful for. We’ve all witnessed a slow-rolling degradation of our democracy. The whimpering cries of these past few years are those of a creature in pain. 

But the disintegration of the America we know doesn’t only need to be a cause for grief. We’ve accomplished colossal things throughout this democratic experiment. Many of us have gotten to experience the fruits of all who labored before us. We’ve celebrated a level of luxury befitting an empire at its height. But the long arc of history is one that’s measured in peaks and valleys. It was always certain that fraught times would come again. 

To restructure ourselves and start anew may sound lofty or dramatic or even impossible. But if we ask ourselves honestly whether what we have works, we know that it does not. Our two-party system has never been so irreconcilably divided about how to save this country — about what this nation should look like and who should be allowed to live here. About what races they should be and what religions they should practice. 

Compromise between parties in America no longer appears possible and our current system may not have much longer left. We may need to begin thinking about what will replace it, and whatever turmoil we could face as the one we know continues to simmer and erode. The America of the future may well not be one of fifty states. 

The United States could fracture into something unfamiliar. We might come together under a new constitution and take a fresh stab at democracy. We might live quietly under tyranny. We might realize that the benefits that come with fifty states united under one flag are no longer worth the risks of living beside so many people we hate and fear. Or our divides might heal over time and we’ll slowly figure out a way to weather this storm and come together once again.

The 100 million eligible voters who abstain come each election day might finally feel called to participate in the process if our government were only more functional. We need a country where voters’ whims aren’t decided by the limitless pocketbooks of nameless donors, and billionaires can’t buy social media platforms to manipulate elections. We need a nation where felons, fascists, and insurrectionists can’t take power to begin with. 

To look at the longer arc of history, and the place at which we currently stand, it’s clear that the restructuring our moment requires won’t be simple or swift. Should the government during Trump’s second term continue to devolve in the way that so many anticipate, then the path toward that better place is unlikely to be bloodless. But when tyrants take control, democratically or otherwise, their overthrows are rarely conflict-free.

If Project 2025 is instituted and democratic elections stop taking place, then there will be revolutions and civil unrest before we see the light at the end of the tunnel. But it’s useless to deny that our system is broken. The road toward a better one won’t be easy, but that winding boulevard toward that faraway place is one we need to begin walking. The future of America may not be as we know it today, but the America we know today doesn’t work. It hasn’t worked for a long time. 

Should this period we’re living in really bring the collapse of this great nation, in its ashes, there’s still hope we might pave the road to a better future.