The American model has been in decline for some time. Since the mid-1990s, U.S. politics has become increasingly polarized and gridlocked, making it impossible to perform basic government functions, such as passing the budget. There are obvious problems with the American system — the contamination of politics by money, the influence of a voting system that is increasingly inconsistent with democratic choice — but the country seems incapable of reforming itself. Early crisis periods such as the Civil War and the Great Depression produced visionary institution-building leaders; this was not the case in the first decades of the 21st century, when U.S. policymakers directed two catastrophes—the Iraq war and the subprime mortgage financial crisis — and then witnessed the emergence of a short-sighted demagogue stoking an angry populist movement.
