Evan Vucci/AP/Press Association Images. All rights reserved.In March 1861, Abraham Lincoln replaced pro-slavery James Buchanan (who had defeated abolitionist John C. Frémont in 1856). A month later, the hastily formed southern rebel government attacked a US fort in the harbour of Charleston, South Carolina, and the civil war began.
72 years later on 4 March 1933, Herbert Hoover yielded the presidency to Franklin Delano Roosevelt whose administration during the famous ‘first hundred days’ would create the American version of social democracy (“welfare state lite” with an electoral base in the trade unions), as well as lay the basis for US global hegemony.
The inauguration of Donald Trump on 20 January (date brought forward from March by the Twentieth Amendment to the US constitution) will qualify as the third seismic change in the American political order. Before the end of 2017, the post-World War II global order of US hegemony will run its course, and authoritarianism will drive domestic policy.
