“WHY can’t America get its s**t together anymore?” Bill Maher asked his 4.5 million viewers the other day. The US comedian, political pundit and chat-show host was trying – fruitlessly – to make sense of what’s gone wrong with his country. Unlike many American liberals, Maher is savvy enough to know it’s too easy to blame Trump for all the many ills plaguing the US – just as it’s too easy to blame Boris Johnson and Brexit for all our woes in Britain. Nor will simply booting Trump out of office tonight fix the crisis in America.

The American dream – not that it’s ever existed, of course, it was always a convenient fantasy – has evaporated, and it’ll never return. Even if Joe Biden wins tonight, he can’t undo the damage that’s been done over the last four years – because the truth is the self-harm goes back much further. Trump was merely a very visible symbol of American decline.

America will never fully regain the trust of democratic governments around the world. Biden might turn out to be the most honest broker who ever took office, but memories are long. Paris, Berlin, even London, will never forget the promises and treaties that Trump shredded, the insults and tantrums. Who’s to say in four years or eight, if we’re lucky, Biden won’t be replaced by someone worse than Trump – his son Don Junior maybe. Then we’ll be back to square one. The world cannot depend on American leadership anymore. That time is over. America is no longer fit to lead.

The collapse was a long time coming – the end of the American Century has been ticking steadily down since Watergate and Vietnam. But the last 20 years accelerated the decline: Washington’s ghastly vengeance for September 11, shredding international law so it could torture suspects, lock them up in Guantanamo, and assassinate them in their own backyards with drone strikes; the invasion of Iraq, a war based on lies which cost countless lives and achieved nothing except to inspire an era of global terror; the 2008 financial collapse, caused by an immoral Wall Street and paid for by middle American Main Street, and the hopes and dreams of the West. These three events alone were enough to signal that America was no longer a beacon for the rest of the world.

So even if Trump loses, and even if he slinks from the White House a defeated man, America’s standing is shattered. But that’s a hell of a big ‘if’. A year ago my friends in America shook their heads in disbelief when I told them many Europeans, myself included, worried that Trump wouldn’t leave the White House if he was beaten – that he’d cry fraud, and trigger violence in the streets. Today, those same people are openly talking about their fear of a coup.

Gun sales boom. There’s an atmosphere of intimidation. The FBI is investigating why a convoy of trucks filled with armed Trump supporters surrounded a bus carrying staff working for Biden, rammed vehicles and blocked traffic, on a Texas highway. Trump tweeted they were “patriots”. Historian Eric Cervini who witnessed the event said: “This is how a democracy dies.”

A ‘get out the vote’ rally in the key battleground state of North Carolina, near to where both friends and family of mine live, ended with police pepper-spraying demonstrators, including children. On it goes – across the country. Bob Woodward, the veteran Watergate journalist who’s spent long periods of time talking to Trump charting his years in office, says the president “is melting down”. He’s raving about having Obama and Biden indicted and charged.

As we’ve learned these past four years, Trump could do anything. The election is unlikely to be resolved quickly. It’s how the Republican Party responds which matters. If Trump refuses to accept a Biden win, would the likes of Mitch McConnell, the Republican senate majority leader, step in to ensure an orderly transition? With such enablers, it’s hard to be hopeful. If there was no orderly transition, then what? Shootings in the streets? A replay of the 1860s?

Trump’s niece Mary, who’s a psychologist, hints the president thinks he’ll end up in prison if he loses the election. “So, if he’s going down, he’s going to take us all down with him”, she says. Of course, he may also win – even though the polls seem stacked against him. “If he wins,” his niece says, “democracy is over. The western alliance is over. We’ll be entering an incredibly dark period of autocracy on a global scale.”

What happens in America will affect the rest of the world. Just think of the killing of George Floyd. The death of one man in Minneapolis ignited a global Black Lives Matter movement. The old cliché is true – if a little inappropriate in the age of pandemic: America sneezes and the rest of the world catches a cold.

Boris Johnson is waiting until he sees the result of tonight’s election before he decides his next steps over Brexit. If Trump wins he’ll be emboldened to go for No Deal. Biden in the White House, and his vocal support for Ireland, would rein in the Tory government.

Those who adhere to the ‘big history’ view of the world believe that the defeat of Trump will cause the nationalist fever that’s swept the world in the last five years to start to break. The western world might begin to edge back to normal – to staid, technocratic, centrism. If Trump wins, the populism that’s grown around the world will consolidate and strengthen.

Can democracy – at least in the shape we know it – survive that? Mass studies by Cambridge University found that a majority of millennials around the world are disillusioned with democracy. We should remember that although millennials are seen as ultra-progressive, the alt-right – or fascism-lite – is a millennial creation. The future of democracy lies in the lap of millennials – who’ve so far shown themselves as ill-equipped to be custodians as baby-boomers.

The West now needs to forge a democratic world without American leadership, regardless of today's result. The big question is who will lead that new democratic bloc? Europe? And if Europe, what does that mean for Brexit Britain? And in turn, what does that mean for Scotland?

Our columns are a platform for writers to express their opinions. They do not necessarily represent the views of The Herald.