We (the US) had a very successful, carefully designed system that seems to have been an unstable configuration. It was neither hammer and sickle nor single megacorporation: it was balanced on a hill between both.

The combination of (1) checks and balances, (2) separation of money, religion, corporation, and government, and (3) regulation in moderation worked pretty well for around 200 years. Monopolies and labor abuses were mostly in check. Prosperity was widely shared. Churchill might have said it's "the worst possible system, except for all the others."

Around the mid 70s it started to go astray with the income gap and collection of obscene personal wealth and unchecked corporate powers. With the repeal of Citzens United, that was the end of it. We all know that playing defense against constant assault from an opponent with unlimited resources is a losing proposition.

If we do manage to oust the 1%, we could in theory reset to that decision point: with a few additional constitutional safeguards to keep money out of politics, strengthen ethics barriers for all three branches, etc, we might go another 200 years.

> We (the US) had a very successful, carefully designed system

The idea that it was "very successful" basically comes from ignoring things like the Civil War, and the idea that it was "carefully designed" comes from building a fiction around the output and ignoring the process that actually produced it (in no small part aided by people viewing the after-the-drafting sales campaign of the Federalist Papers as if it reflected a real coherent rationale that went into building the system rather than a marketing campaign developed for a particular audience for an existing product.)

I don’t think the U.S. system was ever perfectly stable even in the "golden years". There were always contradictions—like slavery that showed the checks and balances weren’t flawless.

200 years? And went wrong in 1970? The USA absolutely wasn't a good system in 1770, and has sucked for a lot of people for large fraction of those years.

Who could vote was all over the place for a long time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_voting_rights_in_t...

Civil War was about as far from "balanced" as you can get, and the problems weren't even on the axis of "hammer and sickle" vs "single megacorporation".

The New Deal was a radical change in the economic organisation of the USA, basically ended Laissez-faire. Before that point, there was enough social unrest that, for the people at the time, I think it wouldn't have seemed at all implausible the USA would have faced an actual communist revolution similar to the one in Russia, because of events such as e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain

Why would it be unstable? Most of Europe still has it. The US chose to do away with it.

> Monopolies and labor abuses were mostly in check

Really? Transatlantic slavery by far the biggest labour abuse, then the company towns, then Standard Oil which was allowed to run amok for 30 years then broken up (which then consolidated into ExxonMobil and Chevron again). These are just off the top of my head.

The US from my point of view has been a puritanical, borderline genocidal, enslaving, cowardly and hypocritical, and yet nosy entity that discarded its inconvenient founding and history.

Its success I daresay has been entirely contingent on its remoteness from the rest of humanity (which fed into its exceptionalism narrative), and comparatively sparse population. By many measures the Roman and British empires were 'more successful'.