Alan Watts used to say that the real church...what matters....is not the building we call "The Church", it is what takes place in that building.
Same theory goes here, and America is not great, in fact it is so not great that it almost does not exist anymore.
America as well as the American Dream are almost dead now...in many ways it was suicide.
Very hard times are coming.
This seems obviously the case. It's very depressing, but .... you can't fool life.
The future is not predictable in any detail, but ... here is the one thing that could REALLY be very bad news for the whole species, not just Americans: the US still has immense military power, including a large and sophisticated nuclear arsenal. Almost every living American has grown up with this situation -- we just assume, in our bones, that we are top of the heap, militarily unassailable. All the horrible little snowflakes and Victim-culture peddlars exist precisely because they live in this bubble. Their grandparents, parents, and themselves have never faced what a large part of the world has either faced in living memory, or faces every day.
But that is changing, and the name of the Changer is China. Within ten years, China will have a larger economy than the US. We will be number two, and going down. Assuming current trends -- which cannot be assumed -- China will have a higher per-person income than us by the middle of the century. (And although you cannot assume current trends will be projected forward for several decades, you had better not assume that the trends which do occur will be in our favor.)
Now ... as the US has shown, a big economy means, if you want it to, a big military. China will get this. The time will come when their military will overmatch ours. They will overmatch us not just in raw firepower and material capacity, but in internal effectiveness and morale: they are not sentimental -- no Chinese officer will be sacked because he offended someone's delicate sensibilities.
Now many things can happen before then. Perhaps China will evolve -- or convulse -- into something like a liberal democracy. Unexpected events in Europe or the Middle East may overtake the US/China rivalry.
But ... as the US declines, and China rises, there is the terrible possiblity of a serious military clash. We tend to think of the Chinese as cool-headed, willing to wait ... and there is a lot of truth to this. But at the same time, don't think they have forgotten things like The Summer Palace. ["In 1860, the French and British looted the Summer Palace at the end of the Second Opium War and on October 18, 1860 the British burned down the nearby Old Summer Palace (called the Yuanmingyuan in Chinese). The destruction of the palace was ordered by Lord Elgin, the British High Commissioner to China, and was undertaken in response to the torture and killing of two British envoys, a journalist for The Times, and their escorts. The destruction of large parts of the Summer Palace still evokes strong emotions among some people in China".
Source . ] They have a powerful racial pride (however, they are not 'racist' towards us in the conventional sense, just as you are not racist towards your dog).
Can anything be done to reverse course in the US, and if so, what would a re-invigorated US be able to do as it slides into number two position? I personally would like to see a new political party emerge, along the lines of FDR and JFK and Ike -- but that's unlikely. Few ruling classes in history, at the head of powerful countries, have been able to look up from the trough long enough to see that 'in order for things to remain the same, things will have to change'. The French aristocracy didn't, nor did the Russian.
But ... the future is not predictable.
