(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.

  • Frogmanfromlake [none/use name]
    ·
    1 year ago

    Decline is not good and will be very messy both domestically and internationally. I think the US has been declining since 9/11 and it's only become more noticeable. I don't think it will lose its superpower status anytime soon though. It will just have to share it with a few other countries, China being the most notable.

    As much as I hate to say this, it's something both sides do. One overestimates how much more powerful the US is and the other underestimates it.

    I also think that the US will become "isolationist" for a brief period to lick its wounds and focus their attention on North America and extracting as much as they can before returning to global imperialism again.