Has the US entered its late Soviet phase? The country is a gerontocracy led by ailing leaders and with a crisis of confidence in its dominant ideology; it is a flailing superpower suffering foreign humiliation (not least in Afghanistan); and its economic system struggles to meet the needs of many of its people. The similarities are a little uncanny.

There are, of course, clear differences too. The US is a democracy, albeit one severely compromised by wealthy vested interests and concerted rightwing efforts to weaken voting rights, and it is a racially diverse union of states, rather than an unstable federation of nations. But, crucially, if Joe Biden is a Leonid Brezhnev or one of his two short-lived elderly successors, then Donald Trump is no Mikhail Gorbachev: he is more of an American Vladimir Putin.

The attempted assassination of Trump marks a further descent into the darkness. Earlier this year, a poll found that more than a third of Americans believe civil […]