A slew of Republican senators have thrown in the towel. At least five GOP incumbents are planning not to run for re-election next year, making way for a potential seismic ideological shift in the upper chamber.

With most of the outgoing lawmakers considered to be old school, pragmatic conservatives, their GOP colleagues say the institution may be adrift without their leadership.

This exodus may offer Democrats increased optimism that they may be able to hold onto a Senate, despite the long tradition that the sitting president's party typically loses seats in midterm elections. But on the other side of the aisle, it remains to be seen what path the Republican Party chooses to go down: Does it back candidates who align themselves with Donald Trump, or those who try to distance themselves from him?

The writing is on the wall, argues GOP strategist Susan Del Percio, citing the retaliatory measures numerous state Republican parties have taken against members of their party who voted to impeach Trump. But Del Percio sees danger here: Shifting further to the Trumpian right would further undermine the possibility of substantive policy debate and open the door for more Democratic wins, she said.

"It's the latest casualty of what Trump has done to the Republican Party," Del Percio told Salon. "State committees are Trump-controlled. You'll see people go more and more to the right in who they nominate and support. It doesn't mean they'll win the seat."

On Monday, Sen. Roy Blunt of Missouri became the fifth GOP senator to reveal that he will not seek re-election next year, joining a list of departing colleagues that has swelled in recent months.

Blunt's revelation meant that one-tenth of the Senate Republican Conference is leaving, a startling statistic that could continue to grow; Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Chuck Grassley of Iowa have not yet announced their plans for 2022. (Grassley, now in his seventh term, will turn 88 just before the next midterm election.) Zero Senate Democrats have said they plan to retire.

"After 14 general election victories — three to county office, seven to the United States House of Representatives and four statewide elections — I won't be a candidate for re-election to the United States Senate next year," Blunt said in a video statement posted to social media. He did not cite a specific reason for his decision to step aside.

A leadership member who often immersed himself in detailed policy negotiations as an institutionalist and conservative lawmaker, the 71-year-old has now joined Richard Burr of North Carolina, Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, Richard Shelby of Alabama and Rob Portman of Ohio on the list of Republican retirees.

"It seems that in recent times, it's all about beating the other person or preventing them from winning, not about putting forward good, sound policies," Del Percio said. "These are more than just political people like Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz. They cared about what they were doing, and about moving policies forward. It is devastating."

Most of the departing senators are on the older side, although Toomey is just 59 — relatively young, for the Senate — and they're all younger than Grassley. This flight of conservatives from federal public office is more likely a byproduct of the fatigue among sitting Republicans created under the Trump era, which saw the traditional, conservative wing of the party diminished, if not conclusively defeated.

Blunt's retirement caused at least one election forecaster to shift the Missouri race one rating to the left, from "Safe R" to "Likely R." It's hard to imagine states as red as Missouri or Alabama ever going for a Democrat. Then again, Alabama's 2017 special election, in which Democrat Doug Jones triumphed over Republican Roy Moore, who was accused of repeated acts of sexual misconduct with underage girls, proved it's possible against the right candidate. In states like Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Ohio, open-seat Senate races are likely to be competitive, and candidates hewing too closely to the Trump mold could alienate all-important suburban voters and galvanize Democratic turnout.

Praise for Blunt from his current and former colleagues came immediately, mirroring that for his fellow retiring Republicans. Lawmakers and aides who had the pleasure of crossing paths with Blunt agreed the Senate is losing a valuable policy wonk, who is generally well liked on both sides of the aisle. Both Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, described his retirement as a "big loss" for the upper chamber. In a statement, McConnell called Blunt "a true leader, a policy heavyweight and a driving force behind both key conservative victories and essential bipartisan work." Whether his departure offers an unexpected opening for Democrats or another pathway for Donald Trump's total conquest of the Republican Party, it's too early to say.

My formative experience of America came during this country's great summertime of resurgence. It was 1984, I was sixteen years old, and I had flown into Los Angeles on the eve of the Olympics. For the next six weeks, I watched, wide-eyed, as the long national nightmare of Vietnam, Watergate and the Iranian hostage crisis was brought to an end by a modern-day gold-rush.

A multi-racial team of US athletes, led by the likes of Carl Lewis, Mary Lou Retton, Michael Jordan and Greg Louganis, completely dominated the medal table. Team USA even performed well in some of the more obscure events - a calorific boon for customers of McDonalds, which ran a scratch-card promotion, planned presumably before the Soviet boycott, offering Big Macs, fries and Cokes when Americans won gold, silver or bronze. With the thumping chant of "USA, USA" echoing from coast to coast, it was hard, even as a visiting outsider, not to be swept up in this torrent of patriotism.

Later that year, of course, Ronald Reagan surfed this red, white and blue wave to a second term in the White House, winning 49 out of 50 of states. For millions of his supporters, many of them lifelong Democrats, truly it felt like morning again in America, the sunny slogan of his re-election campaign.

My new book, When America Stopped Being Great: A History of the Present, began as a quest for understanding. How had the United States gone from the self-confidence and swagger I experienced in the Reagan years to the American carnage of Donald Trump's dystopian inaugural address? What had turned this country into a place of such chronic disunion, shared land occupied by warring political tribes?

Then, as I was writing it, further questions arose, which came under the same rubric. Why was this superpower so vulnerable to the viral onslaught of COVID-19? How had we arrived at the point where an insurrectionary mob could storm the US Capitol, violently seeking to overturn a presidential election in which Joe Biden had so obviously emerged the victor?

Like the unexpected victory of Donald Trump four years earlier, the botched response to the coronavirus outbreak and the brazen attack on the US democracy were culminating moments. They could not be written off as historical accidents or aberrations. Arguably, they had become historically inescapable.

How had this come to pass?

In locating the origins of this troubled present, we could reach back to the earliest days of the new Republic. "1776," chanted the mob of MAGA diehards who invaded Capitol Hill, fervently believing they were acting in the spirit of the Revolutionary War. We could revisit the Constitutional Convention and the deliberations that produced the Electoral College, a relic of the Eighteenth Century that could never be described as the Founding Father's finest work.

To understand America's inherent contradictions, we could consider how the author of the Declaration of Independence could write that "all men are created equal" while also penning a pseudo-scientific treatise outlining what Thomas Jefferson believed was the biological inferiority of slaves. Or we could journey to the battlefields of the American Civil War – Fort Sumter, Antietam, Manassas, Gettysburg – to be reminded of how division has long been this country's default setting.

Instead, however, I have retraced the steps of my own American journeys: as an impressionable teenager during the Reagan era; as a student in the Nineties conducting research into the struggle for Black equality; as a fresh-faced foreign correspondent dispatched to Washington to cover the impeachment of Bill Clinton. Witnessing his Senate trial, I felt sure it would be a once-in-lifetime event. But afterwards those kind of mega-stories came thick and fast: the disputed 2000 election, the attacks of September 11th, the war in Iraq, the Great Recession, the election of Barack Obama and presidency of Donald Trump, with its back-to-back impeachments.

Part history, part memoir, my book describes the role of each successive president in paving the way for Donald Trump – and, yes, they all contributed to his rise. Reagan, who was the first commander-in-chief since Dwight D. Eisenhower to complete two full terms, elevated the presidency while at the same time dumbing it down.

After the showmanship of The Gipper, George Herbert Walker Bush demonstrated the value of a less theatrical presidency, but this moderate Republican failed to halt the rightward lurch of the conservative movement. Radicals, led by Newt Gingrich, snuffed out his thousand points of light. The Baby Boomers, who had cut their political teeth during the culture wars of the Sixties, usurped the Greatest Generation, whose belief in patriotic bipartisanship was forged during the Second World War.

Bill Clinton may indeed have built a bridge to the 21st Century, but for much of Middle America it felt more like a bypass. And though he presided over a period of peace and prosperity, the Nineties were pregnant with so many of the problems encountered in the new millennium: the financial meltdown of the subprime crisis, the unchecked power of Big Tech, the problem of mass incarceration.

George W. Bush, by pursuing his war on terror in such a polarizing way, failed to seize the opportunity presented by the calamity of 9/11 to reunify an ever more fractious nation. Like his father, he also failed to steer the conservative movement in a more compassionate direction.

Barack Obama helped stave off a financial meltdown when he first took office in the midst of the Great Recession, but during his eight years in office he struggled to soothe the fears of blue-collar Americans who felt like castaways in a globalized and digitized economy. His presence in the White House, rather than closing the country's racial rift, fuelled the rise of white nationalism and the presidential candidacy of the untitled leader of the birther movement.

And there are so many more milestones and waystations on the path to polarization.

The political success of Donald Trump should not have taken us all by such surprise. So many trend-lines – political, economic, racial, cultural, spiritual and technological - converged and culminated in his presidency. As the 2020 election underscored – a contest, remember, in which he won 25 states and amassed more than 74 million votes – his presidency was not some American aberration. He became the figurehead for much of this country, and remains so even after his role in inciting his moshpit of MAGA diehards on January 6^th.

Just as few weeks ago, I was on the inaugural stand in Washington, just as I had been four years earlier, and listened to America's 46th president, Joe Biden, make his plea for national healing. "We must end this uncivil war," he said, in one of the more searing lines of his speech. Alas, the disturbing conclusion I reach in When America Stopped Being Great is that genuine national unification may now be impossible to achieve. The United States is riven with so many unbridgeable divides. Its very name has become a misnomer.

Travelling this vast land, I struggle to identify where politically, philosophically or spiritually it will find common ground. Not in the guns debate. Not in the abortion debate. Not in the healthcare debate. Not at weddings, where more than a third of Republicans and almost half of Democrats say they would be unhappy if their children married a partner from the other party, compared to 5 percent in 1960. Not in the singing of the national anthem at American football games. Not in the debate over the country's history, and how it should be memorialized.

Few, if any, national events, are politically benign, ideologically neutral or detached from the culture wars. No longer are there demilitarized zones in US politics. It seems that everything is contested. Even the most rudimentary of facts. Even the simplest of protections, like the facemask. Even the most clear-cut of presidential elections.

After talking so much this century about the emergence of a post-America world, I fear we are living in a post-America America. The land that I fell in love with during that summertime of resurgence has entered a bleaker season.

Nick Bryant, the BBCs New York correspondent, is the author of When America Stopped Being Great: A History of the Present.

When the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 — a $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package — was passed by U.S. Senate over the weekend, not one Republican senator voted for it. Liberal Washington Post opinion writer Greg Sargent, this week in his column, argued that the bill is not only designed to help blue states, but Americans in general. And he slams GOP opposition to the bill as a classic example of Republicans harming their own voters.

"When every Senate Republican voted against President Biden's $1.9 trillion rescue package over the weekend," Sargent explains, "it revived a question that analysts have asked about the modern GOP for decades: Why do so many conservative Americans vote against their own economic interests? A new analysis by three leading political scientists theorizes this question in a fresh way: by comprehensively analyzing the political economy of red states, relative to that of blue ones. In so doing, they have captured some striking truths about this political moment."

That analysis was authored by Jacob Grumbach, Paul Pierson and Yale University's Jacob Hacker, who told Sargent, "Red America is falling farther behind, but the politicians who represent it at all levels have gotten more unified on an economic agenda that hurts the people who live there."

Sargent notes that the elements of the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 include "large stimulus checks to most individuals, extended unemployment benefits, a big infusion of aid to state governments, and a new child cash allowance that could cut childhood poverty in half" — all of which, the columnist notes, are as helpful to people living in red states as they are to people living in blue states.

The Grumbach/Pierson/Hacker analysis, according to Sargent, "brings deep historical context to this problem."

Sargent explains, "For decades throughout the 20th century, it notes, the industrial economy — combined with large federal expenditures, particularly in the South — drove a 'great economic convergence,' in which poorer states steadily caught up with better-off ones. But more recently, the development of the knowledge economy, whose benefits are largely concentrated in cosmopolitan hubs, has reversed this trend. Meanwhile, in many red states — mostly in the South — the model of weak unions and low wages, which made them competitive for business inside the national market, is faltering in the face of globalized production."

The analysis of Grumbach, Pierson and Hacker reads, "Blue America is increasingly buoyed by the knowledge economy …. Red America is struggling to find a viable growth model for the 21st century."

According to the political scientists, "low road states" that have a lot of people who are struggling economically have something in common: right-wing governance.

"Consider the rescue package," Sargent writes. "It would provide a boost in financial assistance for people who get health insurance through the Affordable Care Act's exchanges. Those are people who might be struggling to afford health care amid the current economy, many in red states. Yet Republicans uniformly voted against this, after spending years trying to repeal the ACA with no alternative vision — and even as many red states have still refused to take federal money to expand Medicaid."

According to Hacker, Republicans use their advantage among rural voters in a way that only hurts those voters.

"Republicans enjoy a huge advantage because the Senate overweights rural areas and because Democratic voters are packed into urban areas, which is made worse by gerrymandering," Hacker told Sargent. "The tragic irony is that this huge rural bias also helps Republicans get away with ignoring the economic needs of their own constituents."