[W]e are swimming, or drowning, in a rhetoric of national, social and individual failure. Producers of this rhetoric … are so filled with narcissistic self-doubts as to depict America’s many adversities and frustrations as impending apocalypses or Auschwitzian holocausts. … No responsible historian advocates insensitivity to America’s historical warts, present difficulties and conceivable future problems … . Attention must obviously be paid to a nation’s dynamics of decline if this is what afflicts us. But attention does not require accepting an assumption that America’s reverses or unfulfilled goals are equivalent to total failures or disasters, or that America if not uniquely blessed, is uniquely cursed for allegedly singular sins.
Harold M. Hyman, American Singularity: The 1787 Northwest Ordinance, The 1862 Homestead And Morrill Acts, and the 1944 G.I. Bill
The Western Roman Empire collapsed in a few decades; the Eastern trundled on for a millennium. There’s no telling.
We’ll be fine once we get moving.
We need to recognize we have predatory elites, and as for the punditry they’re owned by same elites. Houses in Chevy Chase come not cheap, Mr. Will.
Nearly every other nation on earth has had predatory rulers, it’s simply our turn. We’re yet young.
Mr. Dearieme, we’re not going to collapse as far as the United States although they’ll be a Trial. If you mean the Empire abroad well fine, that should have 20 years ago.
If we are facing a Dark Age it’s much more akin to the end of the 2d Bronze Age, that is global. Perhaps we should stop being so eager to meet it and get moving on the work needs doing.