politics

Democratic erosion is not random. It follows a familiar pattern, and we are already on the path. The details differ by country and era, but the sequence is boringly consistent: first you get “free-ish,” then you start paying in loyalty and silence, and eventually the history books get rewritten to make the whole thing look tidy. The rhythm shows up in literature because writers pay attention to systems under stress. It shows up in today’s headlines because institutions are easier to weaken than to rebuild....

America’s pullback from the world is not a clever strategy to conserve strength. It is a symptom of an internal systems failure: a country that cannot agree on what it is for will struggle to decide what it is for in the world. The United States has done this kind of reset before. After World War I it turned inward, then rebuilt an outward posture by World War II. The difference today is that the internal argument is less about policy and more about identity....