After its independence, America turned its back on its philosophical origins. Republicans and Democrats became more made of the same cloth. The differences between them were about praxis rather than about logos, as just a flash in the philosophical pan. Even the choices made in foreign affairs were mostly pragmatic, imposed by circumstance, not by ideology. The USA entered two world wars not as much by choice as by unforeseen pressure. President Wilson's intellectual ambition to rescue a coherent word-view was just a philosophical parenthesis. The involvement in Europe during and after World War II was also the result of a strategic imperative, the need to protect itself behind a first-in-line European reef...and one can go on. The Roosevelt/Churchill camaraderie was likewise not devoid of deceit, cunning and booby traps.
Europeans always try to maintain a more philosophical narrative or fig leaf for their endeavors. It allows them to brag when they achieve and to be despondent and fatalistic when things go wrong. The Americans regroup more easily since their actions belong more to the behaviorist pattern. They can afford to be pragmatic as long as they feel to be on a path leading to the "shining city on the hill". Hence, they were able to avoid the crisis points as they regularly occur in Europe (May 1968, Brexit, immigration), where change is always doubt's twin.
Today the American consensus is gone. In the absence of any Hegelian mindset the gates are open to let in any form of frustration, which is all the more dangerous since it lacks the coat of an alternative appealing theory. Trump (mostly) and Secretary Clinton are not seen as alternative "concepts". They became interchangeable while being miles apart. Still, both the path and the destination set them apart.
Now that some Spenglerian doom scenario (Decline of the West) has been awakened and nurtured by the Trump camp, which by the way doesn't know what it is talking about. The drum of class warfare mobilizes "white blue-collar men in the rustbelt ( the wrong ZIP code)", who do not realize they are being manipulated. That the narrative is insulting and paternalistic seems to be forgotten. Women, Latinos, African-Americans and the LGBT community know better. If Trump, "the Unfit", were to win he would get stuck in a mass of discontent of his own making. If he loses this same mass might repeat some march on Versailles, with the difference that there are no Danton, Robespierre in the US political disaster.
The United States will enter stormy times. Secretary Clinton, probably victorious notwithstanding the new turbulence, will have to battle for the three branches of power to work normally. Even the Supreme Court is no longer the arbiter of last resort. The justices are reduced to be the spokespersons of prejudice "ante". They have been divested of their ultimate raison d'etre. Not later than today Trump suggested that the elections could be skipped all together and that he should get the nomination. Speaking of a "coup", right-wing style!
There are still enough pundits and commentators who lament this descent of too many into this angry mindset, without any claim to legitimacy. Therein also lies the reason for President Obama's melancholic final stretch. Both his persona and his actions belong to a cultural prism which does not appeal to a segment of the population hooked on noise and vitriol. He does not slice society in strata of race, gender or creed. Europe too has its floating, unpredictable mass of discontented individuals. Their more structural beliefs now, right or wrong, can nevertheless still act as a deterrent against primary instinct. If "disenfranchised" Americans cling to a set of religious bigotry, Second Amendment supremacy and naked frustration, the positive mix retreats.
The near future looks increasingly bleak if one of the main actors only legitimizes sound over meaning and insult over reason. His inability to look inwards, his unfamiliarity with emotion or beauty stand in opposition with the spirit of America's Magna Carta, the Declaration of Independence.
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