Has America hit its "highpoint" and now crumbling?

Cheer up – tomorrow things will look better. Yes, America has had some problems – as has much of the rest of the world. America is taking longer to recover, but it is happening. It is NOT the end. It will probably never be a super power again – not in an economic sense – China will take that role for some years to come. Britain once “Ruled the Waves” then America took over. Now is it time for Asia to rise to economic dominance.

There really is little difference from a “man in the street” point of view. We have all been using predominantly Asian products for years. Car, electronics, cameras, clothing. It is little wonder with all the money flowing out, coupled with Government borrowing from Asian sources that this would happen. It will make little real difference except to the very wealthy.

Australia has never been either a militarily dominant nor a financially dominant country but it is a great place to live. America will be the same.

Thanks Scribe. i am in a great mood. this question hit me like a ton of bricks and for some unknown reason, i felt that i had to ask it.

It isn’t the 90’s anymore and things are harder than they used to be.

There’s things that need improvement:
Education
Crime
Jobs

These are all fixable conditions. Our current capitalist model (which I agree with, lets allow people to succeed) has the side effect of allowing corruption to run rampant such as with the latest news coming from Goldman Sachs. The financial institutions have too much political power to effectively deter fraud. In fact, many institutions have been rewarded for fraud. Remember AIG in the 2000’s?

Also, we don’t manufacture anything we can get it cheaper overseas. That’s part of our consumer economy which has to change. What was the last thing you bought that said “Made in USA”?

If America is to change, we have to change and start living differently.

Betting against America has always been a losing proposition.

@CaptainHarley
Betting against the US would have made you rich in the Vietnam war.

I have NO idea why, unless betting “against the US” actually means betting FOR gutless politicians.

Because you lost.

Also, the US vs Them mentality in America doesn’t help.
Working together needs to happen for the US to regain an economic foothold.

@CaptainHarley Betting against America has always been a losing proposition.

I don’t think that many are betting against it – it is too big and well established to fall, but bad leaders have done real damage. It simply is unlikely to reach a world dominant position again. Eventually we will probably have world government and all of the Jingoism currently affecting politics will go. One by one the super powers slide back into a secondary position. Russia was once in a race with America – it is now almost a third world country. America will not fall that far back, but it being affected by the same problems – it spent more than it had keeping up with the Jones. It bought too much on credit. Now the demands for payment are its biggest concern.

nations are pieces on a chess board; they are not the players

@ragingloli

That really doesn’t deserve an answer, but I’m going to give you one anyway: BULLSHIT!

@ragingloli Because you lost.

I gather from that comment that history is not an area where you can claim expertise.

There has always been a #1, and it is not the U.S. anymore, it has actually been that way for many many years now. When the people of a country loses “the spirit” that makes them what they are, when a country has more than they need and throw away things people across the world would kill each other for, when the people of a country stop caring and think “some one else will fix it”, then the country will begin spiraling downward.

Of course, that does not mean the United States is doomed like Rome quite yet, there are still people who care and hold the ideals high to this day; Thanks to them, the country survives.

If America does not pull out of its slump, we will fall quite a bit further. The longer this goes on, obviously, the worse we shall be. I am hoping that our political leaders pull their collective heads out of their asses to stop it.

As it stands, we are not top dog anymore. If we pull out of the slump we are in, we shall not fall as far as Russia did. I do not foresee it being doomed like Rome and I do not think we are going to go down that far… it would take catastrophic events and, if we were going down that far, I think that economies are interlinked sufficiently that many nations would fall. It would be more of a worldwide catastrophic decline, not just America.

I do not think we are ever going to be top dog again.

Oh let us see.
Johnson escalated the war in 1965, with no real subsequent success.
The Tet offensive handed the North Vietnamese an important political victory, causing a substantial drop in public support, and ultimately led to Johnson not escalating the war further, signalling an admission of defeat or at the very least an admission that the war could not be won at an acceptable cost with a further escalation. That, in my opinion, was the point when the US lost the war.
The final nail in the coffin was the following administration’s continuous troop withdrawals and the subsequent Paris Peace Accord, which allowed North Vietnam to rebuilt its forces and infrastructure, eventually resulting in North Vietnamese forces overrunning the south and causing the remnants of US forces to flee, marking a final North Vietnamese victory.

@ChaosCross If there has always been a #1, and we are no longer #1..
What country is #1?

@ragingloli

As I previously noted, you aren’t really conversant with history.

Your “opinion” that America lost the war is hardly fact. Were they overrun? Did they surrender? How did they lose? The war was not simply an America versus North Vietnam issue. Maybe if you grasped that you might begin to get a handle on it. Public opinion and Congress forced the Military’s hand, not a superior enemy. They withdrew – they didn’t lose.

I was there – I don’t know where you were.

@DarkScribe
The North, backed by the SU and China, involved the US in a war of attrition that eventually forced them to retreat. The retreat itself is an admission of defeat.
Moreover, the US came into the war with the clear goal of stopping the ‘communists’ from overrunning the south and gaining access to the ocean. As we all know, they failed to achieve this main goal.
If you go to war against a country with set goals, and the enemy prevents you from achieving that goal, then this is a defeat. It does not matter if they destroy all your forces, or force you to escape from an unwinneable war of attrition, or even if you win all the battles. What matters is who is last standing.

It will most likely work out somehow. Economics are always shoddy and fluctuating, and it’s gonna take more than that to bring down a country with America’s values.
Maybe I’m being too optimistic, but every country has problems, and some way worse than anything we’ve known and have come out of it…granted, many have not, but I think America has known worse before. I’m no good with history, but the point is, just because you’re not top leader anymore, doesn’t mean it spells the end.

Fortunately, most Americans don’t actually go by that mentality, so yall should be fine.

From what I’ve learned about history, the power and influence of nations often waxes and wanes. I have a feeling that there will be plenty more dips and rises in the economy and standard of living in the US, but no real bona fide collapse any time soon.

There have been much, much scarier times in the United States than these.

@ragingloli

You have no idea what you are talking about. US military fouces in Vietnam had largely pacified the South. The rug was pulled from under us by the constant press bombardment. and by politicians who were scared shitless of the media. I was there, I saw it happen. All you’re doing is parotting what you heard from others, in school or on the Internet. End of line.

@CaptainHarley
Public and Media opposition was only 1 part of the reasons you pulled out.
The other parts were the tremendous casualties incurred and the fact that a further escalation of the war would only end in a more violent and bloody stalemate as even the government back then believed that the communists would match any troop increase.
”I was there” So what.

@ragingloli

Your education has been sorely neglected. Perhaps you would like to see the truth ( then again, people of your particular political persuasion seem to avoid truth like the plague ):
http://cybersarges.tripod.com/vnfacts.html

This is common in every age for every person watching the younger generation fill in behind him. Or her. I think this is a near universal observation of older people of younger folks.

And don’t forget that in the 1980s the Japanese were going to eat our lunch. Everything from management to quality to production to food—and of course real estate values and stocks—they did better than the US. We were selling national landmarks to the Japanese and feeling like we were selling ‘everything’ to them.

Patience, grasshopper.

I bet that people asked the same thing during the last depression. It sure looked like the country was falling apart. Now if you asked, “Has the Republican Party hit its high point and is it falling apart?” My answer would be yes. I think and hope the neocons have had their last gasp. Otherwise the next step it a true fascist party to compete with the Democrats. Maybe we should be investing in a Chinese company that makes brown shirts. That would be terrific irony, the super-american tea party will have to buy their jackboots and brown shirts from foreigners because their leaders sold their jobs overseas.

I’ve heard this question asked many times before, but I want to know when this mythical “highpoint” was. Was it back when black people still had to ride on the back of the bus? or when we were in Vietnam? Or during the Reagan years when he figured out how to borrow money from the future generations to go on a spending-spree, and kicked off the “voodoo” economics that has devastated our economy?

Was it the Clinton years, when we got the spending in check and were about to FINALLY start paying down the debt (until W came into office and fucked that whole thing up). But even in the Clinton years there were tons of problems—lots of Americans dying without healthcare for example. Even Cuba manages to provide healthcare to all of it’s citizens, how can we call ourselves a superpower and not even cover the basics?

Personally, I don’t think America has hit it’s peak yet. Hopefully the very loud (but not very bright) people on the extreme right will wear themselves out just like a child who gets exhausted from throwing a tantrum. Then the rational people on the right and left can sit down together and make some decisions about how to make this country a better place.

No, not at all. Same for Europe. But we all have to realize that the other continents are catching up. In 1960 many ‘Made in Germany’ products were 100 times superior to products, say ‘Made in South Korea’. Now we are lucky if our high-tech products are twice as superior. Of course there are some innovative niches. The US faces the same situation. But in absolute terms progress is ongoing. The pie is getting larger, but the shares are smaller. There is no crumbling. But the US should wake up and take green technologies seriously. Fantasizing about new oil drilling is quite distracting and dangerous.

The only way America will crumble is if we continue to allow the frakking, mindless Liberals to run it into the ground!

Hasn’t the US been so prominent for more than 200 years already? How does that compare with other lands such as ancient Rome that dominated the world in the past?

Rome, as a coherent State, lasted about 1,000 years.