All is not lost. Countries have gone off the rails before and recovered. The financial corruption in the US today is not all that different from the Gilded Age. The bad news is it usually takes a leader coming in who saves the day. Teddy Roosevelt was the leader who helped bring an end to the Gilded Age. Roosevelt started the process of breaking up the trusts, but he didn't reform everything. FDR was the one who shifted the scales to help the "little guy" more and started shifting wealth more evenly.
Lincoln started the 3rd Party System, Teddy Roosevelt kicked off the 4th Party System, FDR the 5th, and Reagan the 6th. Party systems start when the old ways of doing things are no longer working and the ills that developed during the last system need addressing. There are problems with each party system and corruption does often creep in as time goes on.
Long ago when I was trying to get my own head together, I observed humanity could be divided into two groups: givers and takers. It seems to be an inherent thing in a person's wiring. At least some people can be trained to be the opposite and I think everyone should fight their nature at least a bit to come to a balance. Givers who only give often end up burned out and ill. Takers who never give usually end up hated by everyone. The people who seem to be healthiest are those who give all they can when they can, but know when they are overextended and pull back when needed.
The 6th Party System has largely been about the takers. "Greed is good" is the mantra from the 80s that has characterized this era in American politics. Collectively we are becoming aware of the terrible things that can come out of a taker mentality. Many of us have been aware of the lobbyist culture in Washington, the corruption in the prescription drug business, the corruption with defense contractors, and all the other graft going on.
But there is a fairly large segment of the population who don't get upset until they experience it and feel it. And that is beginning to happen. The greedy jerks have also been able to distract those who were feeling it and getting upset and blaming someone other than them for their predicament. Most of those people voted for Trump.
This isn't just happening in politics, we also have things like the Me Too movement and Black Lives Matter bringing attention to abuses that have been going on for decades under the radar. The givers are beginning to get the upper hand again and we're waiting for the seed crystal of a leader to emerge and make it all happen.
This isn't just an American phenomena. Other countries have reformed too. Oliver Cromwell stepped into the void created when England got rid of the monarchy and he rigged parliament to be a rubber stamp on anything he wanted to do, but eventually parliament acted to stop him. It was a moment in British history equivalent to the Republican party in Congress rising up en masse to get rid of Trump. Nobody thought it would happen until it did.
The Catholic Church split with two popes at one time for almost 40 years in the late 1300s to early 1400s. An earlier split saw the Eastern Orthodox Church split away from the Roman Catholic Church, but in the later split the western church figured out how to resolve the schism and get the two factions back together again. But in the Reformation, new churches split off from Rome.
So sometimes these things end with factions splitting and new groups forming. Other times the factions figure out how to get along together. Sometimes the system collapses, which has happened too. In the case of the US, it's pretty much impossible for the factions to split permanently because of the way they are distributed. One faction is primarily urban and the other primarily rural with the suburbs leaning towards the rural for much of the 6th Party System, but now leaning the other way. The suburbs would also have to side with the urban in a real split because most people in the suburbs make their living off the nearby urban center.
The US can't physically split into two countries along urban+suburban and rural lines. It would be unviable. Some other solution has to be found. There is the possibility that the US could devolve into a de facto civil war with the more violent factions fighting the government which will probably be in the hands of the urban+suburban faction. But I doubt there would be enough extremists in the rural areas to carry out more than a short insurgency campaign.
There is talk of another New Deal and if that happens, a lot of the upset people who are supporting Trump now would be happy because they would see their lot improving. Ultimately economic factors are what drives most Americans' votes these days. If the economy really is lifting the lower part of the population, even just a little bit, it will settle a lot of the instability.
That doesn't answer all the problems. You mentioned gun violence, which is a problem that is not purely economical (though the gun lobby throwing money around has made the problem worse). The issue may take care of itself as the NRA is in serious financial trouble and so are gun makers. Gun makers raked in huge profits during the Obama years with the "the black man is going to take your guns" scare tactic, but now with Obama gone, all those people who spent their life savings on guns have quit buying. The gun industry is collapsing.
That doesn't solve the gun violence problem directly, but with the lobby fighting against any changes weakened, rational heads my prevail.
It isn't guaranteed, but in 10 years or so we might collectively be in a much better situation than today. There are a lot of ideas out there about how to solve the problems, all it takes is a good leader to make it happen.
In chemistry you can have a thing called a super saturated solution. That is a solution that is holding as much dissolve solids as it can. For example take water and dissolve as much table salt as possible in it. Crystals won't form yet out of the solution, but when it is in that saturated state, all it takes is a bit of a jolt or a seed crystal to make the whole thing crystallize. We are at that state politically right now. The 7th Party System is past due.
Here is an example of what I'm talking about:
The Twitter comments have been withering. Some people pointed out San Antonio once had a wall, at the Alamo, and it didn't stop the Mexicans.
Over the last week he's been talking about such "great" ancient technologies like walls. I would point out that spears were used as weapons of war for thousands of years, but how many spears to we issue to the US Army today: 0. Why? They are an obsolete weapon. Walls are obsolete as a barrier for this kind of job. Just like spears are still used for fishing, walls have uses, but not the best option along a border anymore.
If Trump is obsessing about something, the question to ask is how he's going to profit from it, or how will it make him look better. At this point I think even Trump is realizing the whole wall thing isn't making him look better, so how does he profit from it? Here is the probably vector:
Letter: Who will profit from Trump’s border wall?
The mill in Portland is the only one in the country that can make the specific slats for Trumps steel fence.
The way Trump is obsessing, I think he owes some kind of debt and the oligarch who owns the steel mill is taking a border wall in payment. When Trump restarted the Keystone XL project he gave a no bid contract for the steel to a Russian oligarch (possibly the same one, I don't remember at the moment).
If Trump was just going to get a kick back from this, I think he would have dropped it right now. I think he's being threatened with something, possibly Russian cooperation with Mueller if he doesn't give them what he wants.
wdolson,
I just really have a problem with waiting for a savior to come in and fix things when we are the things that seem to need fixing.
As social animals our herding instinct is augmented by following a leader. You are absolutely right we now have a bad "leader" who is leading the herd to destruction. History always cries out for good leaders to clean up the mess. Like rating agencies and polls, history is at best an ex post guide. There is a saying from Wordsworth for this.
Maybe its time for us to learn from elephants rather than stubborn donkeys. Time for a matriarchal society? Odd that should be more common in Scandinavia.