America Is in Warp-Speed DeclineIt's Way Bigger Than Trump

[Rollo]

America Is in Warp-Speed Decline—It's Way Bigger Than Trump

Say what you will about the early Roman emperors, they at least knew something about governance. Then, in the 1st century AD, the imperial stock started to run thin and the empire ran into serious trouble under the deranged progeny of Augustus. Donald Trump is the Caligula of our times: lascivious, incurious, and power-drunk. At what point will our American Caligula, running out of willing and even marginally suitable candidates, try to appoint a horse to his cabinet?

It’s bad enough from a domestic standpoint to have a laughing-stock for a president. The international implications are even worse. As Patrick Cockburn writes in The Independent, “It will be difficult for the U.S. to remain a super-power under a leader who is an international figure of fun and is often visibly detached from reality. His battle cry of ‘Fake News’ simply means an inability to cope with criticism or accept facts or views that contradict his own. World leaders who have met him say they are astonished by his ignorance of events at home and abroad.”

It’s no surprise that other countries are rushing to take advantage of the Trump administration’s early missteps. “It’s not just that Trump seems to have abandoned the larger geopolitical playing field to America’s principal rivals,” writes analyst Michael Klare. “He appears to be doing everything in his power to facilitate their advance at the expense of the United States. In just the first few weeks of his presidency, he has already taken numerous steps that have put the wind in both China’s and Russia’s sails, while leaving the U.S. adrift.”

China sees an enormous opportunity to cast itself as the responsible global leader on trade and climate change. Russia is angling for more influence in its near abroad, the eastern parts of Europe, and the Middle East. Germany and the European Union more generally have sought to replace the United States as a moral leader on diplomacy, human rights, and intercultural engagement.

[dchill]

1. There is only one reason for this situation - and it's not Trump.

It's the Republican Party. The regressive, recalcitrant, reactionary GOP. When this nation does not progress, it regresses. The conservative philosophy is a scam. The only things it means to conserve are the wealth, power and authority of a very few greedy and ignorant crooks.

They use racism and fear to garner the support of the ignorant, uneducated masses. This scheme has never worked better than now, in the aftermath of the second term of the popular first non-white President. These ignoramuses all agree on one point: the democratic citizens and the Democratic Party need to be punished for their arrogance. How dare we presume to make the world a cleaner, smarter place? How dare we try to guarantee a future for all?

They are hateful. And they are scared. This manifests as righteous anger. It is not.

[napi21]

4. I agree. The Con is being used as a tool of the GOP. The GOP has been the regressive Party for

several decades, and they believe they have a body in the POTUS chair who will sign all their dreams into law. Whether that turns out to be true is unknown. The Con however is busy making enemies of our allies and ruining the reputation of our Country. I HOPE the Dems are strong enough to slow things down to a snails pace and keep neither the GOP nor The Con from enacting much if anything so we can fix some of the mistakes we made and at least win the Senate back in the mid-terms next year. I'm pretty hopeful that many of our voters have been shaken so badly by The Con and his Party having total conttrol of our Gov't, they WILL get to the polls in the mid-terms this time.

[dchill]

6. "get to the polls in the mid-terms..."

At a minimum. I worry that that is too far away. There is a flaw in our Constitution regarding presidential succession, and process regarding flawed elections.

[lunasun]

2. lHow's that MAGA working out folks?

[Warpy]

3. What happens with empires, our own included, is that all the decisions and investment

are made outside the home country. Romans taxed to support the military to protect them on the frontier, and the frontier was always being pushed back. In the meantime, the empire became too large and unwieldy to be governed by a more or less democratically elected Senate, which is where the Caesars came in, executives at the top capable of making quick military decisions. By the time the barbarians conquered it, Rome had become a backwater, with the only places to make real money out in the provinces.

It's getting about that way here with our industries offshored and the population beggared and losing civil rights. It was largely that way in England before the two world wars, the best place to get rich quick outside England, the Edwardian era seeing the widest income gap and most severe social stratification ever in England, itself.

This country has been in decline since the early 60s, IMO, as the military spread out across the world with the infrastructure at home largely ignored after the Interstates had been built. While we haven't been all that keen on conquering territory and setting up our own governments, we have been keen on keeping a military presence to ensure they do things to suit us while we "protect trade routes." With so much of our national wealth going to a bloated military, there's little left over for much else back home.

The next few decades will see us lose our empire, either ceding it gracefully, getting kicked out one country at a time, or having the world unite to take it away from us. It's the last one that scares me the most, especially with the man-baby Trump in the White House.

Empire is the worst thing that can happen to any country and its people. Unless you're the one in several millions who gets to be Emperor, you're pretty much fucked and so is your country. England is still recovering from theirs. The Italians seem finally happy to be who they are and enjoy life without that kind of imperial ambition. Let's hope the end of ours is largely peaceful and it doesn't take us 1500 years to emulate the Italians.

I won't see the American Empire end. I just take a great deal of comfort in the fact that it will, especially if it's a fade out instead of an explosion.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

5. My take on the decline of this country is that it started in 1980, when Reagan was elected.

Not before. Up until then we really were the dominant country. We'd come through WWII relatively unscathed, although by the early 1960's the decline of our industrial capacity was being noticed. We had an aging infrastructure, and Germany and Japan had had the good fortune to have had their infrastructure bombed into oblivion, so they rebuilt, and rebuilt with newer technologies.

No matter. We still had lots of advantages, including a society that mostly welcomed most newcomers, which openly embraced others. Our public schools were extremely good (not necessarily everywhere, but in enough places) and our universities were amazing. We were willing to educate almost all of our young, encourage them to go on to college. Until about the mid-70s public Universities were relatively cheap. And our very best universities, the private ones, offered decent scholarships to the deserving poor, and their standards were high enough that those rich enough to pay their own way were mostly very bright.

But then Ronald Reagan was elected. And the undercurrent of dislike of foreigners, suspicion of The Other, wariness of anything not deemed fully American, those things came to the fore. And so began our decline.

The other thing we cannot begin to underestimate is our spending on military. From hundreds of bases in other countries, to bloated weapons systems, from under-financed support systems for ex-soldiers to overpaying for toilets, every penny spent on the military is a penny not spent on domestic priorities: education, infrastructure, medical care.

What we are now experiencing is the extremely rapid decline of our country, something I thought would play out over the next twenty or thirty years. Instead it's happening very quickly. Donald Trump is making this country something between a laughing stock and one to be totally despised. Foreign travel to this country is already down more than 10%, and is going to further decline rapidly. The EU is going to require Americans obtain visas to travel to any of their countries, ending some 70 years of non-visa travel to Europe. Trump intends to cut funding to things like the EPA, arts and public broadcasting, while pumping up money to our already outrageously bloated military. Oh, and he'll cut taxes for the rich.

I remember reading some years back (five, maybe ten) that in the 16th century England and Spain were reasonably equal world powers. But Spain went the route of exempting their wealthy from taxes, thrusting the entire burden of financing their country on the poorer classes. England went another way, towards a reasonably egalitarian tax system. Do I need to tell you which country rather rapidly became a backwater and which became a long lasting world power?

And now we look to be going in the direction that Spain took some 450 years ago. Oh, I know our decline won't be too rapid. We'll hang in there for another decade or so, carried along by our reputation and the presence of so many military bases in so many countries. But this is the end. It really is.

[world wide wally]

7. America has two choices right now.

1) Allow this mentally ill man to bring our country down in the name of partisan politics. Protect the GOP at any cost. or
2) Take measures to remove a mentally ill man from office and suffer the consequences of Pence.

This is a classic lose-lose situation, but you have your neighbor to thank for that.

[zentrum]

8. Every day it's clear

....that a new part of America is damaged or broken by these people. The idea of America is undone around the world.

[raccoon]

9. Good article, but I am highly pissed at this:

Last edited Sun Mar 5, 2017, 09:12 AM - Edit history (1)

That's because we'll either be short, sick, or dead."[/div

I find it offensive to equate being short with being sick or dead.

It may be true that Americas aren't growing taller. But does that mean that we're not as "good as" we used to be? I can think of countries were people tend to be shorter than Americans who have made astounding strides. Not to mention there have been people in history who were short Queen Victoria for one and General George Meade for another.

I'm sick of people talking and acting as if being short is inferior.

[avebury]

10. If you are familiar with the work of Johan Galtung

he has predicted that the US would lose its position as the dominent world power by 2020 and will most likely suffer a collapse similar to what the USSR experienced by 2025.

Trump, with the aid of the Republicans, is speeding up the process.