Presidential election, 2016

[Odin]

A relevent Post I saw on Reddit:

Quote:I've got a sense that, in addition to the rise of white racial politics, there's another narrative at work here too that historians will use to understand this whole period.

You've got to ask yourself - why Bush, and then Trump? Isn't it odd that during America's unipolar moment, we elected two of the most unqualified presidents in modern history? This isn't a fluke anymore, there's a trend at work, and I have a feeling as to what it is (I've written something on this earlier):

My gut feeling is that historians are going to look back on the post-Soviet period of intense political polarization in the United States as the beginning of Imperial Decay and the end of the American moment.

Institutions, people and corporations always get flabby in the absence of an external competitor. What happened after the fall of the Soviet Union? In the absence of an external enemy, Americans turned on each other, tearing each other to pieces over marginal differences in policy. When Pat Buchanan launched the "culture war" at the 1992 Republican convention, he was sounding the harbinger of what would eventually augur American decline.

Americans could have gone another way. Americans could have seized the mantle of leadership, capitalized on a unipolar world and led the world against the dangers of the 21st century. But instead the country indulged its very worst instincts, elected two unqualified buffoons to the highest office, and squandered every opportunity fate afforded. As Americans fell to squabbling, the mantle of leadership passed on to others, and the American moment came to a close.

We've grown flabby, incurious and self-indulgent - besotted with fake news, propaganda and infotainment. We're a shadow of our former selves, bleeding from a thousand self-inflicted wounds as we slump off into irrelevance. Like all monopolies, we got lazy and like all late-period empires, we turned that hatred inwards.

The worst part will always be knowing that we did it to ourselves.