I feel your cynicism. It definitely expresses how I feel much of the time.
But I remind myself, the US can’t really be dead, because it is merely the amalgamated expression of hundreds of millions of people’s desires and goals.
If, magically, we all decided that we won’t stand for regulatory capture, or people going bankrupt because they get sick, or the attack on trans people., it could stop in a day. The machine is simply us. We are changeable. And often the way things change (like gay marriage, for example) is that it slowly changes in enough people’s minds that it reaches an inflection point, and all of a sudden (in a few years) the majority agrees and the thing that seemed impossible for centuries becomes commonplace and obvious.
So if it seems hopeless at the moment, I get it. But the more we talk about it, the more we get fed up with things as they are, and the more we convince others to feel the same, the closer we are to that inflection point. The only thing that can defeat us fully and finally is not trying, becoming resigned or nihilistic.