(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.
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.