It might be politics all the way down, but it's economics al the way up and the rip in this ship is that exponential debt. The rest is just fighting over the deck chairs.
The federal debt began to grow with the New Deal, so not only was Roosevelt putting unemployed labor back to work, but unemployed capital as well.
Then WW2 came along as the largest public works project in this county's history and the die was cast. Remember the Civil War was 80 years prior and much of the population were fairly recent immigrants still in their ethnic communities.
To the extent peoples form states as social super organisms, government functions as the nervous system, while money and banking are blood and the circulation system.
As cells within these bodies, people resent the control of government, while money serves as their economic umbilical cord. So without some focus to tie the community together, it simply grows, like bacteria racing across the petri dish.
Which is why our melting pot of a country can only really rally around the military, while it is held together by the dollar. Which is making banking more powerful than government, such that the only real job the flunkies allowed in office have, is running up the debt the banks need to grow metastatically.
Money is not so much a commodity to mine from the economy, like gold from the ground, or bitcoin from computer processing, but the social contract enabling society to function. The medium of exchange, like blood is the medium in the body.
Yet since we lack the deep trust that older countries have, money is our god, not just a tool, so we want to save and store it.
To store the asset side of the ledger requires a debt to back it and that is why debt generation is so important to our system. That much of it is spent blowing up odd corners of the world is an afterthought. Though poor actual investment, that will come back to bite us bigly.
When the price of bread starts going up like it's Nvidia stock, the US will be in the rear view mirror, as states start issuing local currencies and policing them. Then foreign policy is between Texas and California, etc. Then they might build a border wall around DC.
When the big tree falls, saplings grow up in its place.
