Those who have are amassing wealth at a much greater rate. There’s a growing discrepancy between those who have and those who don’t have. “Inequality has been worsening for a while. “We are now in the middle of all of these things happening at once,” Dr Grgic said.īut decades of inaction on addressing systemic failures, particularly surrounding social inequality, has come home to roost.Īnd that growing inequality among much of the American population adds a different dynamic to the challenges the country is facing. It’s true that America has been confronted with serious issues relating to those indicators of a failing state – but perhaps not all at the same time. If you head to Google and type in “America is failing”, you’ll receive a plethora of analysis pieces dating back to the birth of the search engine.Īmerica seems more divided than ever – on a multitude of issues. “It is in crisis – convulsed by riots and protest, driven by a virus that has galloped away from those charged with overseeing it, and heading into a presidential election led by a man that has possibly divided the nation like no other before him.” “The US is increasingly performing poorly on key predictors of state failure – ethnic and class conflict, democratic and institutional backsliding, and other socio-economic indicators including healthcare and inequality,” Mr Rennie wrote in an article for The Conversation. The notion that the world’s oldest functioning democracy could ever fail was, until recently, “unthinkable to all but the most radical critics”, says George Rennie, an expert on US politics and international relations at the University of Melbourne.īut based on the most common metrics available to political scientists, there are clear signs that the superpower is in trouble, he said. Instead, America is exhibiting all of the key indicators that political experts use to characterise a failing state – the kind of nation on the brink you might’ve found in the post-Soviet era or in war-torn regions of Africa and the Middle East. These days, the country is far from dominant. For generations, the United States has been viewed by much of the world as an infallible beacon of strength and power, thanks to its economic, military and social prowess.