Is America in decline and why?

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

Where is the 'don't care' option?

https://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=188603.0

[Cory]

Yes because of the rise of neoliberalism, the power of the corporatist oligarchy, the dismantling of the New Deal-Great Society consensus etc. etc.

[Meursault]

A decline from where?

Declinism assumes that societies can be measured by aggregate statistics, that input-output variables tell the entire story of what a society is. But this is absurd: at some point, a society becomes the map that is the territory. You can remove most of the major institutions of a civilization, blast them to ash and scatter them to the wind, and society remains. This is what happened after the Roman Empire 'fell' - the political unit ceased to exist, then the language became the province of scholars and the clergy, but the society it created continued to exist in perpetuity.

At some point people living on this continent will come to regard the Empire State Building with the same mixed sense of reverence and reverie we think of the Parthenon with. Its immediate function (as an office building) will be gone; it may be converted into a temple, or a mausoleum, or perhaps simply left to decay in splendor. Even if some future equivalent of the American State still exists at that point, claiming direct descent from the current government, those people will not be 'Americans' as we know the term, any more than contemporary Americans would be recognized as such by some Bostonian trader who began his life as a subject of George III.

We really have got to get beyond this idea that social structures are physical objects. This reification does more harm in political discourse than anything else.

EDIT: My fear is that, in fact, we won't 'decline', in the sense that Americans will remain married to the idea that the only useful role in the world for their nation is as a globe-spanning socioeconomic colossus - because to be anything else is to decline.

I can picture a decentralized America, of local co-operatives and emerging industries blooming according to the regional needs of the local public, with a fourth of the population and four times the level of popular happiness. But to get at it requires letting go of this idea that bigger is, in fact, better, and that the only useful business is a hierarchically-integrated one.