Empty strip-mall parking lot Credit: kevinjeon00 / Getty

This is a story about America, an America that, even today, exists largely beyond the serious attention of mainstream politics and news media. Rather, these institutions ignore or marginalize the story’s deeper significance, at a great cost to the country. In other words, the story is not about the usual things that are said to have caused the crisis in American democracy: policy gridlock, electoral fraud, political corruption, even insurrection. Nor is it about the competition between the ideologies of capitalism and socialism, nor the various threats to democracy, such as autocracy, plutocracy and kleptocracy.

The story offers a different perspective on politics, based on different evidence, from that offered by most political analysis. It draws on people’s profound disquiet about life in America, and on the existential challenges America faces, both physical and social. This condition is also true, to differing degrees, of other liberal democracies and beyond.

In 2013 I collaborated in a survey that investigated the perceived probability of future threats to humanity in four Western […]

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