All great empires fall, from the British empire to ancient Rome, and with America currently the dominant empire in the world today, I've been wondering just when our country will start to crumble. While I do not think that America will ever have another civil war, I do think a possible diminishment of global power and influence, which could lead to some kind of fracturing, is entirely possible, and perhaps even likely, sometime in the future.
Now understand, I'm not just saying this just because I'm a progressive that doesn't like Donald Trump, it's also because America, in my opinion, has never really been able to overcome the central contradiction at the core of our founding. And that contradiction is that the land of the free allowed and slavery, and that many of our founding fathers had slaves themselves. Or, as Marie Jenkins Schwartz, professor of history at the University of Rhode Island, reminds us, 8 of the first 12 presidents owned slaves. Slavery affected our country before it was even founded and has continued to every year ever since. For example, the reason the country uses the electoral college instead of a direct popular vote to elect our president was partly because of a compromise to give slave holding states more power. And while the American civil war may have ended in 1865, there has been a cold civil war between the Union and Confederate states that has been going on ever since (most of today's blue states were Union one, while the red states were Confederate).
I think the start of America's fall can be pinpointed to one of its greatest legislative moments: the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights voting bill. By extending voting rights to all Americans, Democratic President Lyndon Johnson did the right thing historically but the wrong thing politically. The shift in politics was immediate: after the civil war, the South had been staunchly pro Democrat, as a reaction against Republican party founder Abe Lincoln. But after the passage of that bill, the Republican party was ready willing and able to play up to the white Southern voter backlash against it, developing a successful "Southern Strategy" for Richard Nixon in 1968 that is still used today. The formula for this strategy was summarized in this shocking quote by Republican strategist Lee Atwater in 1981: “You start out in 1954 by saying, “N-", "n-", "n-.” By 1968 you can’t say “n-” — that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites." The 1980 campaign of Ronald Reagan knew this well, as he blasted people welfare and defended tax exemptions for segregated colleges. And that tradition has certainly continued into the Trump era, with a recent study by political sociologist David N. Smith and his University of Kansas colleague, associate sociology professor Eric A. Hanley, found that 75% of Trump’s voters supported him enthusiastically, mainly because they shared his prejudices, not because they were hurting economically.
History books will look back on Reagan's election as a transformative one in the US, and, I think, one that also contained the seeds of America's economic downfall. Because Reagan didn't only use the Southern strategy to get elected, he used it to convince blue collar middle class white voters to support policies that did nothing for them personally. It was, after all, the Reagan administration that first pushed the theory of supply side economics, the idea that tax cuts for the rich pay for themselves by stimulating the economy, which has become a guiding principle for the Republican party from then onward. The problem is that that economic argument has simply has never been true: mainly because of those tax cuts, Reagan left behind huge deficits when he left office, which swelled from 781 billion dollars when he took office to over two trillion when he left.
Many economists have asserted, rightly in my opinion, that some deficit spending is a good thing to help pull the country out of a severe economic crisis or during a war. But to add to it during times of relative good economic growth is foolish, and could lead to big economic problems down the road.
Now, unlike Ronald Reagan, George Bush, actually raised taxes during his one term. But the next Republican president, George W Bush, passed yet another tax cut mostly for the rich in 2001. Then after the 9/11 attacks he led the country in invading Afghanistan and Iraq while also creating a new government agency, the Department of Homeland Security. Then he passed another round of tax cuts in 2003. All of this spending and tax cutting caused the deficit under him to grow from 5.8 trillion when he took office to 10.6 trillion when he left. In a telling quote, Vice President Dick Cheney once asserted that "Regan taught us deficits don't matter." Essentially, he shrugged off the nation's growing debt as Reagan had done before him, assuming that eventually it would be paid for.
Which brings us to Donald Trump who, in his first term, passed a corporate tax cut that once again mostly favored the rich, and once again when he left office he had added another two and half trillion dollars to the deficit (to be fair, some of that was necessary pandemic spending). And now Trump and the Republicans in congress are trying to pass a bill that would make those tax cuts permanent, which would, according to the non partisan Congressional Budget Office, increase the deficit by 2.4 trillion dollars over the next ten years. ($1.1 trillion of that amount will go to tax cuts for Americans making more than $500,000 a year.) As the New York Times put it "Already, the federal government spends more each year on interest on the debt than it does on national defense. If the House bill becomes law, federal debt could exceed 125 percent of G.D.P. by 2034, according to independent projections. That would be the highest since the country’s founding." And all this debt used to make the rich even richer while cutting programs for the poor.
There's one way to start to control our debt that doesn't just involve not passing the bill: start raising taxes on the rich. The idea that the rich should pay a high tax rate is actually nothing new: in the 1950's the income tax on the wealthiest Americans stood at around 90%, and it was still as high as 70% in the 1970's. And it's not just the income tax rate on the rich that should be raised, the high end of capital gains tax rate currently sits at 20%. This means that, as billionaire investor Warren Buffett once pointed out, his secretary actually pays a higher tax rate than he does. And yet the idea that the US should never raise taxes on the rich has become such a part of Republican lore that anti tax crusader Grover Norquist famously boasted that he has gotten almost every Republican member of congress to sign a pledge to never raise taxes. And as the rich have gotten richer, their power has also grown: as we all know, we now have a political system in which the richest man in the world can just drop over a quarter of a billion dollars into a presidential campaign and we just accept it.
And falling deeper into the debt is just one way that the Trump administration is sowing the seeds of America's downfall. Another way is Trump's steep cutting of scientific research in college campuses all around the country. The administration claims that these cuts are in response to recent anti Semitic activities during protests of the conflict in Gaza, but as Jewish State Sen. Scott Wiener put it, "Trump doesn’t care about Jews or antisemitism, he only cares about his own power. They are on a methodical quest to destroy higher education in this country.” The effects of this could be devastating in the future, and already there are reports of many our nation's top scientists are leaving the country to continue their research in other countries that are willing to fund it. All of this happening really because Trump perceives colleges as breeding grounds for the woke, even though much of the research done there is not political. As Eden Tanner, a chemist at the University of Mississippi put it, “I would like to cure brain cancer, I think that's not particularly controversial.” But here we are on the verge of faltering in the area of scientific research, which has been one of America's greatest strengths since WWII.
And while we're on the subject of science, Trump has also denied climate change and opened more land to drilling and mining for oil and coal. This is not only foolish from an environmental standpoint, but also from an economic one; a recent Reuters article pointed out that in 2025 green energy investment world wide will hit over three trillion dollars. Already 40% of the world's energy comes from renewable sources, with solar being the cheapest source of energy in the world. For America to resist transitioning to renewable energy means that clean energy companies in other countries will overtake us on the global market as we foolishly cling to outdated fossil fuels. Amazingly, even the oil rich country of Saudi Arabia is starting to invest in green energy, but instead of constructing solar panels and wind turbines, we're still drilling for oil because the billionaire oil executives have bought the Republican party want more wealth and power.
And then there's the message that Trump is sending to the rest of the world: stay the hell out! Although the administration claims to only want to deport undocumented immigrants, it's obvious that his her wants to extend that to any immigrant that isn't a white South African. From his attempt to block foreign students from attending Harvard to his revoking refugee status for hundreds of thousands of residents, it's clear that his administration is working under the so called "great replacement" conspiracy theory that claims that certain American power elites (usually Jewish) are purposely trying to replace white people in America. Not only is this racist garbage, it couldn't come at a worse time: our country's current birth rate is at a historic low of 1.6, too low to reach replacement level. Without young workers, we soon won't have enough money to pay for the retirement of our aging population. The only solution to this is for young workers to come into our country and pay into our retirement system, so Trump's stay out message is absolutely the wrong one for the country. Things have gotten so bad that, according to the World Travel & Tourism Council, in 2025 the US has lost $12.5 billion in international visitor spending. It certainly hasn't helped that Trump has absurdly said that the European Union was "formed to screw the United States". Really, why would anyone in Europe or Canada want to visit a country with a leader who has openly insulted them?
And it's not just his anti immigration stance that's hurting the country, his tariff driven trade war, which the Wall St Journal editorial board called "The Dumbest Trade War in History" is also doing damage. While much of it is aimed at China, he has also hurt relations with our allies, who, instead of making the deals Trump claimed they would, are now turning to other countries like China to make deals that circumvent the US. Perhaps worst of all, right now we have a heavy 25% tariff against most goods coming from Canada, one of our oldest and strongest allies, for no possibly good reason.Trump briefly even talked of the US taking over Canada, childishly calling it the "51st. state", which inflamed hatred of the US there. Although he's recently seemed to have backed away from that crazy notion, it still deeply soured our relationship with that country. And really, If Canada feels that they can't trust America, who can?
So if America, driven by decades of poor economic choices and Trump's current awful decisions regarding science, immigration and tariffs, is poised to crumble as the preeminent global super power, than who will replace us? Well, a recent editorial in the New York Times summed that up succinctly in its title: "In the Future, China Will Be Dominant. The U.S. Will Be Irrelevant". As the article points out, China "leads global production in multiple industries — steel, aluminum, shipbuilding, batteries, solar power, electric vehicles, wind turbines, drones, 5G equipment, consumer electronics, active pharmaceutical ingredients and bullet trains. It is projected to account for 45 percent — nearly half — of global manufacturing by 2030." And, unlike the US, they are investing in the future, with the government recently announcing a huge government spending program in cutting edge technologies. They're even poaching some of those scientific researchers that are leaving our country. Trump's desire to bring manufacturing jobs back to the US seems doomed to failure, with Chinese dark factories, which are fully robotic, producing products 24 hours a day 7 days a week. It's depressing to consider that our nation's status as the world's global powerhouse may be replaced by a Communist country with. a terrible human rights record, but that seems to be the trajectory we're on. America is burning while Trump fiddles.
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