For as long as the United States of America has had a global stature, the stature has been said to be shrinking. As early as 1925, after US blood and treasure had tipped the scales in World War I and its economic dominance was ascendant, F. Scott Fitzgerald described in The Great Gatsby his quintessentially American protagonist’s blind devotion to “a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty…the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us.” By 1956, after the US had triumphed over Hitler and Tojo and was the undisputed planetary superpower facing down the totalitarian enemy of the USSR, Allen Ginsberg in “Howl” blasphemed the false god America had become: “Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen!…Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river!” In 1972, when the US was putting men on the moon, the film The Godfather symbolically opened with the lines “I believe in America…America has made my fortune,” as the speaker appealed to the beneficence of an American criminal kingpin. The notion of American moral and political deterioration became so clichéd that, as the US was preparing to impose democracy on the Middle East in 2002, New Yorker critic Louis Menand shrugged off author Gore Vidal’s appraisal that “the American government is hateful, the brutal face of ‘a seedy imperial state’ in terminal decline. He has been saying this for fifty years.”

Yet many people are now suggesting that the 2024 re-election of Donald Trump as US president really does mark something irrevocable in American history. From its longstanding claims to be the leader of the free world, the indispensable nation, the shining city on a hill, and a beacon of democracy – highflown rhetoric that was nonetheless often plausible – America has been diminished into just another failed state. Trump’s return to the White House has “undermined global confidence in America’s abiding purpose, as well as its staying power as a liberal hegemon,” asserted Brian Stewart in Quillette; Michael Schuman in The Atlantic warned, “if Washington breaks its promises, or even if its allies and enemies believe it has or will – or if it fails to uphold democracy and rule of law at home – the pillars of the American international system will collapse, and the United States will suffer and immeasurable loss of global influence and prestige”; the Guardian‘s Andrew Gumbel concluded “The US we thought we knew is broken indeed, and may well be finished”; Andrew Coyne in The Globe and Mail bluntly lamented “There is no sense in understating the depth of the disaster…The government of the United States has been delivered into the hands of a gangster.” Plutocracy, demagoguery, and fascism have been spotted lurking in the American character for decades. Usually such sightings were metaphor, dystopian projection, or partisan paranoia. Not today. Today the sightings are confirmed.

The United States is still the third-most populous country in the world. It still possesses the world’s most formidable nuclear and non-nuclear military forces. Its dynamic economy is still the engine of global wealth, and it is still home to the world’s biggest companies and most of its richest individuals. From Hollywood, Ford, and Wall Street, to Facebook, Amazon, and AI, its technical and cultural innovations still affect billions of lives around the planet. Neither India, Brazil, Russia, a united Europe, nor even China appear poised to replace the United States’ central presence in human society, at least not neatly or painlessly. Yet since November 5 there is an inescapable sense that America’s moment has passed: culminating a long era of damaging downturns, foreign humiliations, and betrayed principles, the US presidential election has fatally undermined the standing of the US presidency and the US republic. If this is the people’s pick for the top job, goes the reaction, both the job and the people themselves must no longer be very important.

America’s greatest strength, its potential to inspire better civilizations at home and abroad, is now spent. It is, indisputably, a seedy imperial state in terminal decline. Perhaps the portents were apprehended by Scott Fitzgerald and Allen Ginsberg, by The Godfather and Gore Vidal; perhaps they were there in Vietnam and Watergate and the end of the postwar boom; perhaps they grew more apparent with Columbine, Bush v. Gore, “Mission Accomplished,” Abu Ghraib, the Great Recession, Sandy Hook, Citizens United, Pulse, Parkland, Las Vegas, Dobbs, and January 6 2021. But the evidence of America’s final fall from international leadership and its own noble ideals has never been more glaring than when a majority of American voters chose to reinstate in their highest office a man as incompetent, ignorant, and ignoble as Donald J. Trump.