1. Unabashed and unhinged capitalism (growth at all costs)
2. Nearly every social media platform
3. The mainstream media
4. Billionaires and more generally the ultrawealthy
As far as I can tell, basically no one in power cares about any of these (likely because they benefit from all of them), and they're tearing the U.S. apart from the inside.
A further and more generalized abstraction is that the biggest threat to any civilization are self-interested power centers of any kind. Those can take the form of states, corporations, unions, billionaires, etc. Any entity that begins to operate in its own interest and has vastly disproportionate power when compared to the individuals of which the civilization is made.
No it’s not absent. The state is controlled by (1)-(4).
See : MS, LA, AL and consort.
At some point you can’t ignore the division between the map and the territory.
At best the USA is a country, with rich people in it.
As opposed to say, Switzerland, a rich country.