Third, the interface. America still feels like a country. You can go to DMV websites, call 911, vote, argue on Reddit, see Supreme Court headlines. It’s like using a beautifully skinned app whose backend database has been corrupted for years. The front-end performance persists. The core logic does not.

Together, these three props allow for a condition we might call “velvet failure”: the soft, slow erosion of governance that looks like normality but functions like managed decline.

To paraphrase (as much as I'd dare) Historian Ernest Gellner, nationalism is what happens when a state and a culture disagree about whose borders contain whom. America’s version of that disagreement is internal. The state believes it governs a united polity. The culture has already seceded into a hundred overlapping simulations - religious, ideological, algorithmic.

In some simulations, America is an empire. In others, a failed experiment. In others still, a corporation with a military. These simulations do not resolve. They coexist, and in doing so, render collective action impossible.

What happens when a country cannot update its shared reality? When every major institution is in epistemic freefall? When its myths are pristine, but its outputs are broken?

America is not going to become Venezuela. It’s going to become something stranger: a state that performs itself convincingly even as it forgets how to function. A simulation of governance wrapped in prestige television.