Signs of a Dying Empire

[pbrower2a]

(09-15-2017, 02:54 PM)noway2 Wrote: Interesting comment at the beginning of the video, that an empire typically last 250 years.  If we assume the American empire was born in 1776, then a 250 year lifespan would occur in 2026, which is I understand is roughly when we should expect to have the climax of the current 4th turning?  Furthermore, one of the potential resolutions, if you will, that I see bantered about here and elsewhere is a break up of this nation, which would certainly be the death of an empire.

1776? One could use other dates. Independence does not make an empire. 250 years is excessively precise.  1945 marks the end of imperialist regimes in Germany and Japan, but Japan was a collection of feudal micro-states for all practical purposes until 1868. Nazi Germany was for all practical purposes the continuation of the Kingdom of Prussia which was officially dissolved in 1945, but it is hard to see any nation-shaping event in Prussia in or near 1695. The British Empire comes to an apparent end with the retrocession of Hong Kong to China in 1997, with Britain having become a world power in the 1600s. The Romanov dynasty survived for 304 years. 

The degradation of American democracy has happened in stages, and the election of Donald Trump could be the start of the last stage. Could be. My most optimistic hope is that America reverts to its old pattern of a liberal-conservative divide in which quality matters more in politics than does ideology.

The slogan "Make America Great Again" exemplifies a folly. Imagine a time machine. So I am 61 in 1927 and I get to see the world of 2017. Of course there would be much that would upset me, like technologies that would seem magical.  It might upset me more that the automobiles that are in use in 2017 are impossible for me to do minor service work upon. But I would see a world safer, more just, and with more potential of personal choice. Would I have the arrogance to bring someone back to some alleged Good Old Days? I doubt it. I might see good and bad in social change.

Now think of 1957 to 2017. The roads are better. "Jim Crow" is no more. The world is safer and richer, but I am not sure that people are handling themselves better with the new technology. I am glad that the Soviet Union is no more. I am amazed that America could elect a black man as President -- but at least he reminds me of Ike in temperament and personality. But Donald Trump? A demagogue, the sort of person that I could have never expected to get past some local office. Something must be wrong with the educational system if people could elect -- that.

There is no Golden Age in American history. There are times when we did certain things better, as in politics, business ethics, and education. We solve our problems ourselves, or we risk catastrophe that can destroy all the depravity that we allowed to collect. Mass superstition and gullibility? Government by lobbyists? Big-government right-wingers who see government as something to raid for profit instead of something to constrain? Wars for profit? Such are the oily rags of spontaneous combustion.

I can imagine ourselves pushed back to the pioneering stage when we must rebuild the wreck of our world on little more than the rough victuals that farming of the Civil War era allowed. Maybe we end up with that sort of reset. I can imagine far worse.