ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the most prominent features of America’s political situation at the current moment—early 2022. Liberal democracy remains under siege, but the principal sources of political deterioration are social, cultural and economic in nature. The country’s present political stalemate—which is unquestionably the result of Republicans’ opposition to progressive social and economic change as well as unusually rigid political institutions—is analyzed. The notion of the “current impasse” recalls Karl Polanyi’s argument in The Great Transformation that a society’s final turn to fascism is caused by institutional deadlock. In the context of the United States, the country’s governing ethos has become seriously degraded just as new and unpredictable social forces have gained traction in the political culture, altering basic assumptions about self, other, community and world.
