America has stopped working.

After the recounts and tenuous lawsuits, the 2020 Presidential Election has finally been decided. It has revealed a country that is falling apart at the seams and American journalism must shoulder much of the blame.

For Trump’s Presidency, the music seems to have finally, definitively stopped. Certified results in Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Nevada, and the collective failure of his lawsuits, had already ensured that Joe Biden will become the 46th President of the United States in January. With the Electoral College having now officially certified the results, all options are off the table.

The definitive nature of Biden’s Victory has been lost on far too many people. The chaotic maelstrom of the 2020 Presidential election has left half the country more relieved than happy at the outcome, and the other half largely convinced that the whole process was rigged. This electoral cycle has felt particularly pivotal, as if by questioning the outcome of the election, Trump and his allies were trying to roll back the façade of American democracy and reveal the ugly banana republic lurking beneath. On the other side of the divide, the ever-jittery Democrats are only encouraged to see the back of the country’s most corrosive presidencies, still aghast at the public rage and conspiracy theories it continues to foster.

American elections used to be very different. America used to be very different.

Throughout most of the late twentieth century, there was no such thing as a ‘swing state’. From one election to the next, both Republican and Democratic candidates were perfectly capable of winning more than 40 states each. Dwight Eisenhower in 1956, Lyndon Johnson in 1964, Richard Nixon in 1972, Ronald Reagan in 1984, Bill Clinton in 1992, all these men managed to convince vast numbers of Americans, both liberals and conservatives, to align themselves to platforms with bipartisan appeal. This was an America characterised by a growing middle class that was comfortable voting for either party, both of which fostered strong political coalitions that could rely on broad support in every state. In the 1988 election for instance, Michael Dukakis, the losing Democratic party candidate, did not win a single state by more than 6% of the vote, just 12 years on from another Democrat winning the White House. There were conservative Democrats, there were Liberal Republicans. There were trade unionists in Oklahoma and Kentucky, and there were motivated evangelicals in Oregon and Vermont. Congressmen were happy to work together because fundamentally, they weren’t all that different.

No one can be entirely sure when exactly things went wrong for American democracy. Political polarisation as we currently understand it had its roots in the success of the civil rights movement in the 1960’s and the rise of conservatism in the 1970’s. According to Harvard Professor Jane Mansbridge, the cause of the polarisation was not so much a hardening in the attitudes of individual Americans, but instead white southerners abandoning the Democratic Party for the Republicans, which in turn created a GOP that was more consistently conservative.

Armchair academics and the party establishments are usually quite satisfied with this explanation, because it doesn’t ask too many hard questions of the republic itself. It’s true that the initial stages of polarisation in America were driven more by a great ideological “sorting” of the two parties, rather than radicalisation. But since cable TV networks and the internet have begun to leave weightier footprints in the political world, Democrats and Republicans have been pulled ever further apart.

In 1986, when a group of corporate raiders, led by General Electric and Warren Buffet, bought majority stakes in America’s three largest TV networks, CBS, NBC and ABC, they effectively ensured that the integrity of news would become subservient to the amount of eyeballs you could glue to the screen at any one time. The Walter Cronkite school of rigorous, dispassionate analysis found itself increasingly out of vogue. In its place, an information landscape was born that exploited button-pressing sensationalism and prejudice reinforcement to keep viewers hooked as long as possible. Out went the Larry Kings and Christiane Amanpours in the public consciousness, in came Sean Hannity, Rachel Maddow, Glenn Beck and an assortment of talking heads who went from telling the American Public what was happening in the world to telling them what to think about it. This is news journalism as magazine journalism, and it had come to subvert what used to be the very dispassionate way in which Americans obtain information.

The internet and social media have emerged to pour gasoline on this fire. Whilst cable news companies such as FOX had been able to filter reality to suit their viewership, web-based platforms such as Infowars and Breitbart have Americans arguing over what reality even is. Complex algorithms that flood our phone screens with conspiracy theories and button-pushing headlines have turned windows of information into mirrors, reflecting the subject’s perception of world events back onto themselves. This is not a political ecosystem that maintain democracy for very long. Every American is now, in some shape or form, living in their own constructed reality, where political tribes are convinced their side could never lose a presidential election fairly and that the other side are always illegitimate.

The result? a two-party system that acts as a focal point for what increasingly resembles two armed camps. A situation which practically ensures that any New President can ever hope to fully heal wounds and turn over a new leaf. In a country where the centre can’t hold, overtures across the widening political chasm are only met with accusations of disingenuity or radicalism, further driving wedges between American citizens and encouraging congressional gridlock.

This is not to say that most Americans, who voted for Biden, shouldn’t be relieved. Donald Trump has arguably been one of the very worst presidents in the history of the Republic. His stoking of social divisions, blatant cronyism and disregard for democratic norms will ensure that history will rank him down there with the Likes of Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, and Warren Harding as one of the Oval Office’s most egregious occupants. But Trump and his actions over the last two months are very much symptomatic of the challenge the new president will face. Trump’s flurry of last-minute lawsuits had very little to do with challenging the result, the aim was solely to reinforce the illusion for his base that he was a winner. This is, after all, a reality TV star who understands the influence of perception. Trump and the people around him know full well that he didn’t win the election. With an eye on 2024, they are merely trying to feed the beast he rode to get into office in the first place. The one which frames the President as a lone crusader against corruption and fraud in the Democratic Party, the one that says only Trump alone can be trusted and only Trump alone can win a fair fight. Trump desperately needs to construct this reality because he can’t drain a swap when there is no swamp to drain.

The second law of thermodynamics states that closed systems that remain immune to outside influence invariably descend into disorder and entropy. America has been a closed system for a very long time now. Her political establishment has grown complacent in the decades since the Cold War and stayed blind to the forces gnawing away at its most treasured democratic institutions, the chaotic fallout of the 2020 election has shown that they can no longer afford to be asleep at the wheel. The scale of the Challenge that Joe Biden and his successors will face cannot be alleviated by platitudes alone. If the USA is to be stitched back together again, real efforts need to be made to pull Americans out of their echo chambers and back into the real world.