Broken

BROKEN is a collection of twelve original essays by twelve independent voices who converge on a single, unsettling conclusion: American politics is no longer merely broken-it is actively producing dangers that threaten the country's future. Incentivized polarization, performative outrage, and zero-sum partisanship have hollowed out constitutional governance and replaced problem-solving with permanent conflict. The result is a political system that systematically converts dysfunction into risk.

Several essays examine the growing likelihood of civil unrest escalating beyond control. As political rhetoric dehumanizes fellow citizens and government responses become increasingly militarized, contributors explore how cycles of protest, repression, and armed factionalism could spiral into sustained internal conflict-potentially involving martial law, fractured federal-state authority, and scenarios that begin to resemble civil war.

Other essays focus on the looming federal debt crisis. They trace how political paralysis around spending, budgeting, and the debt ceiling could trigger a loss of confidence in U.S. creditworthiness, setting off cascading failures across bond markets, equities, the dollar, and global trade-followed by a deep and protracted worldwide depression made worse by the collapse of recovery-enabling institutions.

A third group of essays addresses foreign policy. America's habitual resort to military intervention, often pursued with unclear objectives and weak diplomacy, is shown to carry escalating risks in a nuclear, technologically accelerated world-where a single miscalculation could draw the nation into a conflict beyond its control.

BROKEN makes a blunt case: these outcomes are not accidents. They are the foreseeable products of a political system that rewards division and punishes restraint-and unless that system changes, the risks will continue to compound.

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