If you can handle the dryness of the text, you really ought to read Joseph Tainter's Collapse of Complex Societies. We in the US are living through a collapse exactly as he theorized. It's very possible that the federal government becomes so unwilling to fix anything that it just stops mattering.
Tainter's basic theory is that societies are there to do stuff for the people in them. To fix problems, provide things, etc. And to that end, they build complex systems to get that done. Democracy isn't necessary for this. Imperial Rome had titanic social welfare programs to stave off civil war.
Those systems require energy to function, defined extremely broadly. Sometimes it's food, sometimes it's electricity, sometimes it's oil, all kinds of other things. And increases in complexity cost energy. It costs to have people run bureaucracies. They need to eat and don't grow their own.
Early on in a society, the returns it gets from increased complexity are huge. Basic public health, agriculture, electrification, create huge returns. But soon enough the easy and big marginal returns are used up. The problems that aren't easy to fix require more complex solutions.
Those complex solutions require more energy of every kind. Sometimes the marginal returns are still huge, but most of the time they're not as big as the previous ones. And the people who are paying those costs aren't seeing the same returns as they did earlier, or their parents or grandparents.
So it's costing more and more energy to implement the more and more complex solutions to fix problems. And if things actually work and continue to get solved, then you can keep going, because problems are being solved. But if they don't get solved, well that's a real problem.
Not every solution works of course. When costs and complexity are small, or there's more than enough energy to go around, you can deal with that. You can try something new because it doesn't cost much to try. But as things get more expensive, and there's not much spare energy, it's not so easy.
Now, you would rightly say, don't we have a shit ton of energy? Isn't the green energy and battery revolution finally undercutting carbon fuel? And you'd be right, except for the fact that the important thing is *available energy* and what is available can be limited by more than just nature.
Say you have a president, who along with his political party, think that non-carbon energy sources are evil, and they use every legal and illegal method to make using those forms of energy more expensive than the ones they think are good. You know, just like Trump and the Republicans have done.
And lets say that president just cuts off huge swatches of your economy. Imposes huge blanket tariffs, cuts off all money, which is a proxy for energy, to scientific and medical research into solving problems, sometimes in very complex ways. You know, like Trump and Musk and the DOGE boys just did.
Well then, what you get is a titanic drop off in the supply of available energy. Energy societies, like the US, need in order to implement the solution to problems. Even evil solutions like sending your own private Gestapo out illegally kidnapping and disappearing people..
Straight outta Émile Durkheim... sociologist who studied bureaucracies. Eventually they get so big and complicated that they almost have to collapse.