America is in free fall: The collapse of the Center endangers democracy everywhere - opinion

We’ve just spent several weeks in the United States, and it was like visiting a place that’s forgotten how to be itself. The country that once buzzed with energy and invention now feels stuck and brittle, haunted by a sense of rapid decline. America used to export hope and possibility.

Now, suspicion and exhaustion have settled in. The unraveling isn’t something you have to squint to see, it’s right out in the open, and it runs deeper than any single president or party.

What always set America apart wasn’t perfection, but its knack for self-correction. The country could admit its screw-ups, debate them, and rebuild. That’s what made it resilient. But lately, even that feels like it’s slipping away. The collapse of trust between people, between neighborhoods, between those in charge and those just trying to get by is hollowing out the very idea of democracy.

The damage shows up everywhere you look. Agencies that once set the global standard, NIH, NASA, the CDC, even the military, now limp along, targets of political eviscerating and public skepticism.

Science and expertise have lost their footing. Researchers and public health officials, once respected, now hounded, even shot at, are packing up and leaving. The attack on expertise isn’t just a right-wing phenomenon. On the Left, dissent leads to shunning, and questions are met with outrage, not debate. In the vacuum, loyalty tests matter more than facts. The country is less governed by what people know and more by whom they flatter.

One piece of the problem is the Democrats’ retreat from the Center. Instead of fighting for the practical middle, they’ve let the most uncompromising voices set the agenda. Identity politics has replaced unity, and grievance has squeezed out growth. Cities that once stood for progress have become experiments in dysfunction. Tent encampments fill sidewalks, schools crumble, and downtowns empty out, not simply because of right-wing neglect, but because Democratic leaders, afraid of offending activists, have abandoned the basics: order, public safety, and a belief in shared purpose.

Nowhere is the fallout starker than in education. Teachers in Democratic strongholds are burning out, not just from workload, but from a loss of faith in the whole idea of public service. Many feel they must censor themselves, not because of government repression, but because activist groups could kill their careers if they wander off-script. The Left once stood for free thought. Now, it polices language with a zeal it used to mock. At the same time, the Right has given up a belief in free markets and has moved toward statism.

WHAT’S WILD is how quickly everyone’s gotten used to this. Friends stop talking. People at work tiptoe around every conversation afraid a stray word could nuke their careers. Psychologists call it “affective polarization” when partisanship becomes so personal that any disagreement feels like a threat. The endless culture wars, the pandemic, and the economy have left everyone so stressed out that empathy itself is in short supply. When people feel powerless, they don’t reach for more democracy, they look for strongmen, not because they want a dictator, but because chaos is scarier.

This isn’t just about science or schools. Whistleblowers and inspectors-general, the ones meant to keep the system honest, are being pushed out, replaced by Republican loyalists whose job is to protect leaders, not the public. Ask anyone in New York finance or the federal bureaucracy: rules are rewritten on the fly, and questioners get shown the door, with ongoing threats directed at the Federal Reserve Board.

You see it in the streets. In DC, military vehicles sit outside government buildings as a show of force. In cities wracked by crime, federal help comes and goes, more about politics than principle. There’s no consistency, no shared sense of mission, just grandstanding and score-settling.

Blaming it all on one side is lazy. The Left’s refusal to push back against its own radicals, to defend merit, order, and honest conversation, created the opening for chaos. Regular people, tired of being lectured and ignored, are tuning out or pushing back. The center hasn’t just been neglected; it’s been actively taken apart from both sides by those who mistook purity for progress.

Democracy was always a fragile leap of faith. That faith is fraying, replaced by learned helplessness and a sense that regular people no longer have a say. There is a gnawing belief among many that the last legitimate election in the US was in 2024. Democracies rarely collapse in a single dramatic moment. They die when trust evaporates, and citizens stop believing that anyone’s listening.

The consequences won’t stop at the water’s edge. America’s experiment, for all its messiness, has always been a model for other democracies. Its resilience, its ability to self-correct, has inspired movements and reforms worldwide.

If that spirit disappears, if the Center can’t hold in America, the lesson for other countries is bleak. The unraveling of American democracy would send shock waves across the world making it easier for autocrats to justify crackdowns and harder for reformers to argue that democracy works.

Many of us grew up believing the American experiment could renew itself and help others do the same. That faith is in real trouble now. If Democrats want to defend what’s left and hope to push back against a rising autocratic far Right, they’ll have to rediscover the old virtues: humility, curiosity, the guts to challenge their own. If not, America’s unraveling will be the world’s problem. The loss won’t just be American; it’ll be global.