https://archive.ph/ojVDk
What has led to “the relative decline in U.S. standing,” as the report asks? The opening chapter explains America’s problem starkly: “Its competitive position is threatened both from within (in terms of slowing productivity growth, an aging population, a polarized political system, and an increasingly corrupted information environment) and outside (in terms of a rising direct challenge from China and declining deference to U.S. power from dozens of developing nations).”
This decline is “accelerating,” warns the study. ...
What causes national decline? The Rand authors cite triggers that are all too familiar in 2024. “Addiction to luxury and decadence,” “failure to keep pace with … technological demands,” “ossified” bureaucracy, “loss of civic virtue,” “military overstretch,” “self-interested and warring elites,” “unsustainable environmental practices.” Does that sound like any country you know?
The challenge is “anticipatory national renewal,” argue the authors — in other words, tackling the problems before they tackle us. Their survey of historical and sociological literature identifies essential tools for renewal, such as recognizing the problem; adopting a problem-solving attitude rather than an ideological one; having good governance structures; and, perhaps most elusive, maintaining “elite commitment to the common good.”
No chance in hell on that last one, so here's hoping the rest of their analysis is right.
Exactly, there's no path towards turning things around politically. I think the last chance to save capitalism was the whole green new deal thing that Sanders was pushing. These were minimally necessary changes to arrest the decline, and the establishment soundly rejected that idea. So, we know for a fact that it's not possible to do anything differently.
I think the last chance to save capitalism was the whole green new deal thing that Sanders was pushing.
Capitalism is doomed?
It's not a good thing, at least in the short term. Without the right intervention, the decline of capitalism is the rise of fascism.
This is the wrong way to think about things. The task of communists is not to save capitalism from itself (as the social democrats wish to do) out of fear of fascists taking over. It is to build a disciplined, militant and class conscious revolutionary movement such that when the time comes it is us and not the fascists who will lead the masses. It is a complete waste of your energies to worry about whether capitalism is declining too quickly. If it is declining quickly that just means we have a better opportunity to educate, agitate and organize, taking advantage of the discontent that the decline is causing. The more the collapse accelerates the more we must redouble our efforts.
So all the US would have to do to stop their decline is to get rid of the toxic nepotism, corruption and hateful, close minded, short-sighted behaviour that has been present in their system since day one and their people have been taught to worship as the only correct state of things.
I'm sure it'll be no problem for them.
Livemap started as UALiveMap, a project by pro-USA Ukrainians to map the donbass war. Later expanded to the more famous Syrian live map.
They will never cover a US civil war.
Is Rand a trustworthy organization? I feel like whenever these types of studies emerge that it's for the express purpose of securing funding. Especially considering this was commissioned by the Pentagon.
Not doubting that the US is driving itself into a situation where they won't be able to recover, but I don't think a study of this nature was necessary to prove that.
RAND tends to be fairly sober all things considered. I think the interesting part of the study is the admission that there isn't really a clear path towards arresting the decline.
I often look at submissions like these (and there are many), gloating about the fall of the us empire, which is fair enough, but the articles/studies themselves are usually lamenting this fact (at the very least implicitly), and are essentially trying to drive support for maintaining it, like brainstorming solutions. I get confused, because it seems we are looking for direct confirmation of the decline of empire.. from channels of the empire? I think it's better to link to and discuss sympathetic material showing why and how the machine is failing and what we can build in its stead, not submissions linking to the machine's awareness of it and attempts to "correct" it from within the same narrow scope. The former will increase knowledge of theory etc, the latter is just a strange circlejerk. Seems like it might backfire. And is easily abused.
Ngl it feels like places such as WaPo that benefit from empire do not want the imperial decline but also do not in anyway wish to try an alternative except for imperialism and so will likely slowly support the shift towards direct fascism/barbarism that will come as none of the leadership nor media apparatus would ever willingly support socialism.
This is partly why I worry that these kinds of "confirmations" of the decline is doing anti-imperialism a disfavor (and also becomes an easy way for ops to confuse, misdirect, redirect) -- the alternative is not going to magically be a shift to a socialist economy, that needs concerted effort. The "alternative" is more likely to be what you described.
Of course I still think that there is value in discussing these kinds of pieces, but often the comments will echo simplistic "lolz" type sentiments which will just be used to represent socialists and sympathisers as a brainless, directionless, destructrive force, at which point you might as well be an anarchist, "rationalist libertarian" or some other individualistic aesthetic self expression, bleh.
Fwiw I'm not against gloating/mocking humor when it's principled, informed, on point, and cuts deep like what I assume hexbear tries to do with its memes and shit (I'm not too familiar yet).
Yeah that's true, in all honestly I fluctuate between being down to honestly discuss what the decline of US hegemony will lead to (fascism) while also being down to mock or meme the decline as well (given that both instances I can't really do out in the open where I'm at or risk being killed by some nutter because I'm an "ebill commie!!!"). Overall not looking forward to the next decade or two but then again to quote Lenin "There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen", so who knows how this clusterfuck will eventually end.
Inshallah
Unless Americans can unite to identify and fix these problems, we risk falling into a downward spiral.
Not going to happen, so the decline is inevitable
There's that hope again. The only question is how quickly. I won't live to see communism but it would sure be nice to live to see the fall of the last capitalist empire and hope on the horizon.
I have little hope for things getting better in the west during my lifetime, but I'm very optimistic for the rest of humanity. We already see the grip of the empire slipping everywhere now, and this will only accelerate in the coming years.
Seems like something I would have written half-drunk the night before it was due in undergrad.
“Recovery from significant long-term national decline is rare and difficult to detect in the historical record,” the authors note. Think of Rome, or Habsburg Spain, or the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, or the Soviet Union. “When great powers have slid from a position of preeminence or leadership because of domestic factors, they seldom reversed this trend.”
This screams "Wiki-level analysis of history." First, no fucking way did they do any real digging into late-17th century Spain, to say nothing of the USSR, which may be the only relevant comparison anyway. This is starting with your thesis and arguing how historical facts fit it, not starting with the facts and developing a thesis from there.
The first example is Britain in the mid-1800s... But Britain rallied with a wave of reform that swept British life and transformed politics.
I'd love for someone with better knowledge of British history to chime in, but pretty much every part of this seems suspect. Britain was in decline in the mid-1800s? When it was winning the Crimean War, taking Crown control of India (after putting down the Indian Mutiny) and expanding all over Asia, including kicking off China's Century of Humiliation? Pretty sure most of the big internal social reforms came in the 20th, too.
A second case study can be found in the United States itself, after the binge of the Gilded Age of the late 19th century. That industrial boom transformed America, but it created poisonous inequalities, social and environmental damage, and gross corruption. Republican Theodore Roosevelt led a “Progressive” movement that reformed politics, business, labor rights, the environment and the political swamp of corruption.
And it's just flat-ass wrong to suggest the U.S. was in decline after the Gilded Age. That was when the U.S. was openly calling itself an empire, right in the middle of all sorts of heavy-handed interventions throughout Latin America, when the fully-industrialized U.S. started to take economic, political, military, and cultural leadership from Europe. Just... what?
Lol mid 1800’s for the British is known as their imperial century. Don’t know what that author is thinking
