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Handwringing about American decline has been a regular feature of American society since WWII. It's never been materially true though and is usually a product of either incomplete information or of the political cycle. "Moral decline" tends to be something people argue whenever the current party in power doesn't match their views (for example, ITT people are arguing that the supposed decline is because of capitalism and income inequality while during the Obama years people argued it was because America didn't have a strong enough military and growth wasn't high enough) and is impossible to quantify so I usually ignore it when assessing the "declinist" narrative. In fact, now that I think about it the nineties seemed to be the only point in time since the 1920's that Americans genuinely believed that they were in ascent even though American power has been increasing in an absolute sense since 1945 while any potential competitor flounders.
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Aug 14, 2017 02:44
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asdf32 posted:In general there is always going to be a bullet-point list of what seem to be almost insurmountable problems (name a time period in the past that was actually 'better'). The issue now is the potential death spiral of dysfunction, distrust, polarization and ideology that's choking off the system's ability to correct. I think that we're in the middle of one of those corrections right now. Corrections occur when the center cannot hold anymore and something shocks the system like the election of Donald Trump. We won't truly know if I'm right or not for a while yet, but one of the reasons Trump happened is because the political process in the USA had been stagnating for a while now (since 2000 I think, but possible since earlier) and people had been treating politics like a formality wherein the office of the Royal Presidency was designated by the powers that be that doesn't really affect them and that they don't really have any influence over anyway. Then Trump happened and delivered a mortal blow to the fantasy that you don't need to care about what happens in Washington. Right now we're in the middle of an ideological blowback against a President that I'm not sure has any precedent in the 20th century or onward. To the point where people have actually lost their minds. In some ways it's similar to the Tea Party but far, far larger, and I think that it's going to have a measurable (and, in my opinion, positive) impact on politics for the decades to come. You already have seen an immediate impact of his election across other Western democracies of right-populist candidates almost instantaneously becoming unpalatable. Trump might have ended up inadvertently saving the USA from political stagnation. icantfindaname posted:A lot of the stuff mentioned in OP is a product of the crisis of the 1970s and the victory of neoliberalism in the 1980s, and is not a product of the last 17 years. It's always seemed weird to me how little people talk about the events of the 1970s, considering how important they were. Like people talk about the 1930s, and about Trump and company destroying the "postwar order", but the postwar order ended in 1973 Yeah I really think people should spend more time looking at the 1960's and especially 1970's to understand what's going on now. That's a far better historical comparison than ancient empires. Fojar38 fucked around with this message at 03:03 on Aug 14, 2017 |
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Aug 14, 2017 02:58
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asdf32 posted:This is the optimistic view which I probably share in the long run. But its governance that's going to steer us out of this problem and when is faith in government and and democratic political process (compromise) going to return? It's harder now to imagine a world where the opposition isn't tweeting about the illegitimacy and/or calling for the jailing of the opposition. Faith in the democratic political process is hard to quantify. Nobody has tried to violently overthrow the government and nobody with any influence has called for it. Democratic institutions have so far done an excellent job checking the abilities of an unpopular President to forward his agenda (this is by design.) Advocacy for the removal of Trump has called for legal, constitutional means of doing so (impeachment.) Congressional Republicans have shown greater willingness to compromise with Democrats this year than they have at any point in the Obama years (though still not enough.) This is the correction I'm talking about. It's just not something that happens immediately, it's a process that takes years. Something really 'ought to be done about the electoral college though. That one system has resulted in two Presidents in the past 17 years who lost the popular vote.
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Aug 14, 2017 03:27
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England's fall as an empire was due to two colossal shocks to the international system mere decades apart at a time when England actually had realistic competitors within "The West", and even then it wasn't KO'd until the late 50's. And even at it's height, the British Empire was never even close to being as strong as the United States is now. The US is so strong that the word "empire" inadequately describes it. Someone recently suggested that it's more like China's status in East Asia during the Ming dynasty and that's probably a better comparison. Fojar38 fucked around with this message at 03:38 on Aug 14, 2017 |
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Aug 14, 2017 03:36
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:America is the world capital of America thinking its more important than it is In my experience most Americans perpetually understate America's status, actually. American power is ironically more respected by America's adversaries than it is by Americans themselves.
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Aug 14, 2017 03:40
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asdf32 posted:I agree that so far institutions have done a great job in general checking Trump but the simple fact that people are advocating lawful impeachment doesn't mean much. Firing comey was lawful yet I think it fundamentally undermined our republic. Turkey just lawfully voted for constitutional reform that undermines their democratic future. Far more about the success of state and society rides on convention and culture than law which is more subjective and contradictory and fragile than most people realize I can't help but feel like this is a misreading of the situation though. Did Trump get elected because Americans distrusted American institutions or because Americans distrusted the people running them? The only political figures in recent memory who have resulted in anything resembling passion among the electorate are Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, and Donald Trump. Everyone else people either straight up haven't heard of (I have a close friend who is very politically aware and he cannot name the speaker of the house off the top of his head) or if they have heard of them they treat them as aloof suits. Pembroke Fuse posted:It's also all the pork-barrel military spending that went with it. See F-35, that catamaran they built for the Navy and then dry-docked because it rotted out in a year and other random crap that gets shelved after a short stint in the real world. I, too, get all of my information on the performance of military technology from GBS threads rudatron posted:American adversaries are well aware of US technological and global logistical supremacy, but building and maintaining such a system has a cost to it, and the US real economy hasn't advanced comparably to match. The US economy is nearly quadruple the size it was in 1990 and even with meh growth still adds a Switzerland to its economy every year. And that's GDP. In national wealth the US has more wealth than Japan, China, the UK, Germany, France, and Italy put together. The problem here is not aggregate wealth or whether or not the US can afford its global role. It can. The problem is how that wealth is distributed and its effect on politics. Fojar38 fucked around with this message at 04:30 on Aug 14, 2017 |
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Aug 14, 2017 04:26
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Pembroke Fuse posted:There is a thread about someone who worked as a defence contractor right here in D&D. I do also nip out to GIP or whatever it's called these days. Also, the F-35 is really expensive, as were some of the recent Navy projects that didn't really bear fruit. The F-35 was absurdly expensive and also unnecessarily expensive. But the idea that it was a trillion dollars for no returns and the plane can't fly in the rain or whatever the current meme is is not true.
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Aug 14, 2017 04:40
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shrike82 posted:I think the US MIC throwing a couple trillion for nothing in Iraq is a good example of a hegemony in decline Or a hegemony with so much power relative to everyone else that it can afford to do so for lack of any focused goal.
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Aug 14, 2017 04:49
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rudatron posted:How much of that wealth is tied up fake over-valued/heavily speculated financial assets though? Such a small proportion as to be negligible. The aggregate figure for US national wealth is 84.7 trillion dollars. Japan is second with 24 trillion. If all 5 major tech companies disappeared overnight and took every last dollar of market capitalization with them that is ~3 trillion dollars. Fojar38 fucked around with this message at 07:14 on Aug 14, 2017 |
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Aug 14, 2017 07:04
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rudatron posted:China is in vogue rn, and rightly so, You highlighted this to an extent in your post but China has severe and acute problems that have already shown signs of coming to a head. The days of "China Rising" are over, and in terms of economic size China capped out at around 60% of the size of the US economy. And in terms of power fundamentals and international influence China is still a regional power at best. In short, it's no competitor to the USA for global status. quote:Where also witnessing a shift of the economic 'center' of the globe, from the atlantic, to that area between the Indian Ocean and Pacific Ocean, and that shift is not going to reverse. So, geographically, the US is now on the literal wrong side of the globe. This on the other hand is totally nonsensical and reads like a 2010 era puff piece from The Economist. There's no such thing as a "geographical centre of economic activity" and if there was it'd be somewhere over the arctic. Not the Indian Ocean, which is surrounded by impoverished sub-Saharan African countries, unstable Middle Eastern dictatorships, and perpetual economic basket case India. If you're going to ignore the fact that the Earth is a sphere then considering the value of trans-oceanic trade is roughly equal for both the Atlantic ($1.1 trillion worth of US-EU trade) and the Pacific (about 950 billion worth of trade between the US and Taiwan/Japan/South Korea/China) and the fact that the world's largest economic regions in order are the North America, Europe, and East Asia, you can either put the "centre" over North America or Afghanistan. One of those makes sense and the other doesn't, especially considering Asia and the EU both trade more with the USA than with each other. But like I just said, it doesn't matter. I have no idea where this whole idea of "economic center of gravity" even came from. Probably some Russian or Englishman. quote:And it's the countries that manufacture the basic necessities, own valuable commodities, and are in the best shape, that are going to weather that crisis best. That is not the US. What exactly is this supposed to mean? Do you think that the US economy is made up entirely of financiers and speculators whose only role in global trade is buying things? Do you think that the ability to manufacture "basic necessities" is something that Americans are incapable of? Do you think that the United States, a country that spans a loving continent, doesn't have any valuable commodities? Come on, dude. The idea that "America doesn't make things anymore" is one of the myths that got Trump in office. What America makes just happens to be far more complex than basic consumer goods. And even in basic consumer goods, the Iphone being the most commonly used examples, the high value portions of the device (software, semiconductors, integrated circuits) get made in advanced manufacturing economies such as Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the USA. Fojar38 fucked around with this message at 11:26 on Aug 14, 2017 |
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Aug 14, 2017 10:55
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