What will democracy in the US look like after 250 years?

TWO hundred and fifty years on, the experiment launched in Philadelphia, where the Founding Fathers of the US signed the Declaration of Independence, has outlasted nearly every prediction of its collapse. Empires that seemed eternal in 1776 have dissolved; ideologies that promised to bury liberal democracy have themselves been buried.

And still, the US endures, not merely as a surviving nation but as a reference point through the 20th century – the country that other people measure themselves against when they argue about what their own societies should become.

That status was never guaranteed by size or wealth alone. Russia is larger. China now rivals America in economic output.