State of the union: Deep faultlines weaken dominant US

Donald Trump says America is “dying”; a third world country “overrun with migrant crime”. Joe Biden says the state of the union is “strong”.

So what? Both are wrong. Trump is more wrong than Biden, but Biden would be foolish to pretend the American system isn’t misfiring on three fronts:

• the shape of its economy;
• the application of its constitution; and
• the functioning of its main parties.

Partly as a result, in eight months, US voters will be asked to choose between misleading messages from unpopular candidates for the toughest job in the world with the future of their country at stake.

For the record. America is so far from being a third-world country that it’s worth recalling just how far.

• Eight of the world’s ten biggest companies are American.
• 15 or 17 of the world’s top 20 universities are American, depending on your ranking*.
• 14 of the world’s richest 20 people are American.
• US GDP exceeds that of the next nine economies combined apart from China.
• US defence spending exceeds that of the next ten biggest defence-spenders combined.
• US defence spending in 2022 was more than ten times Russia’s.
• Nine of the world’s ten leading AI companies by market value are American.
• Three of the world’s five biggest entertainment companies are American.

And so on. Biden wasn’t wrong to say in his State of the Union last night that the US economy is the envy of the world. But historians will point to structural features of the dominant superpower of 2024 that are eroding its dominance – and could help explain voter behaviour.

Deep inequality. Income inequality in the US decreased in 2022 for the first time since 2007, but wealth inequality is still extreme: as of December last year, according to the Fed, the richest 0.1 per cent of Americans owned more than five times more wealth than the poorest 50 per cent. In clock face terms, that means more than 8 minutes of wealth for a thousandth of the population, and less than two for the less fortunate half.

Average incomes have grown eight times faster for the top 10 per cent of earners over the past half-century than for the bottom 50 per cent. In the last quarter analysed by UC Berkeley’s Realtime Inequality project,  income inequality was on the rise again after its post-Covid pause.

The political impact of inequality is hard to map in a culture that celebrates wealth as the US does, but it could help account for

• the two thirds of voters who say their country is on the wrong track; and
• Biden’s near-record low approval numbers even though the US economy has grown more than three times faster since 2020 than in the Trump years.

A creaking constitution. The electoral college has handed the White House to a Republican for 12 years so far this century, even though the only GOP candidate to win the popular vote was George W. Bush in 2004. The Senate affords the same representation to 576,000 people in Wyoming as to 39 million in California. In the lower House, gerrymandering of district boundaries makes districts less responsive to voter needs, according to a recent Harvard study. It also makes them more likely to send hardliners to Congress.

Pole-axed parties. The Republicans and Democrats have contrived a presidential contest three quarters of Americans don’t want. Nearly six in ten voters think Trump is unfit to run. 86 per cent think Biden is too old, but it fell to Dean Phillips, the Minnesota congressman, to say it out loud to his party. It fell to Nikki Haley to campaign against a rematch of 2020. Both were right to do so. Both are out of the race.

The historian Joshua Zeitz sees parallels between Harry Truman’s unexpectedly successful White House run in 1948 and Biden’s in 2024. They do exist – between the “do nothing Congress” and Speaker Mike Johnson sabotaging aid to Ukraine; between civil rights in 1948 and reproductive rights today. But Truman had no Trump to contend with, no social media, no bots – and he was 62.

Trump is underperforming his opinion polls and having trouble raising funds. Still, Biden has his work cut out.

*Times Higher Education: 15; USN&WR: 17

More than 70 countries are holding elections this year, but much of the voting will be neither free nor fair. To track Tortoise’s election coverage, go to the Democracy 2024 page on the Tortoise website.