(e.g: sanctions against Russia backfiring, Ukraine being a US quagmire, or a fantasy that decline will mean a great awakening of the masses to seize the moment for a second Civil Rights movement or even revolution)
A state of decline can still be kept afloat through debt and intimidation. With receding rewards and profits of being the imperial core, this system of domination and exploitation can , like a dying sun, become more intense, destructive, and normal.
Think of how much in the past twenty to thirty years has been normalized in the US: school shootings, police shootings/murder and abuse of power by police, state, and federal government. Spying on its own citizens, extrajudicial assassinations and black sites. The list goes on.
A state of decline can find a new grounds of sustainability for its capitalist engine through more overt adopted fascist strategies and tactics against labor and enemies, foreign and domestic.
Is decline a good thing in this context? Would a state of decline transmute the volatility of the state to revolutionary moments seized by a neo-nascent American communist front?
These are just some background thoughts I've been having in my mind when I skim the website, forgive me if the tone comes off as :reddit-logo: :debate-me-debate-me: but I found the insight of some of the posters here quite helpful and astute and was hoping for some of thst collective wisdom.
when was it?
I'd put it from the early-mid 50s to maybe the mid 60s. It's definitely over by 1973. The country is the world's biggest agricultural producer and manufacturing hub with undisputed control of the Pacific, and a Europe whose countries west of Berlin have basically signed on as junior partners to Washington. Even Britain is on the outs after Suez in 1956. A lot of central america and the carribean is also underfoot during the mid 50s, until Cuba manages to upend things, and the US' prsence is strong enough in Asia that Japan is a client state and we can replace France as the occupying colonial power in Vietnam even after the height of the Korean War.
But the Cuban Revolution and Bay of Pigs then end up as imperial embarassments, the Kennedy assassination (I think) shows the internal fractures between different factions of the capitalist and political classes, and unaddressed social tensions start to crack in the civil rights movement, the anti-war protests and other 60s counter-cultural movements. By 1973 there's really nowhere left to go but down, even if the financialization of the economy leads to some people ever-more ridiculous giant piles of money. It's a very gentle slope down at first, but there's never reclaiming that brief time in the mid 50s when it took the global imperial steering wheel from Britain.
My guess is they are alluding to the nineties.
In 1945 the USA had half the world's wealth and was the only country that split the atom.