6 ms·

The fatalism around America’s relative decline is so tiring to read about. Apparently the only thing that can occur is a sudden and disastrous collapse of Pax

• ahelwer 6y ago
  The system can of course continue to grind & lurch for a very long period of time. However, here we have a global forcing function: climate change, and the likely mass refugee crisis. America is not set up politically to welcome those refugees. The plan is to let them die at the border. It's unlikely a sizable portion of the American population will accept this solution.
  • abduhl 6y ago
    The United States welcomes more immigrants than any other country in the world with fewer restrictions on who can immigrate than any other country in the world. What more can America do?
    • grey-area 6y ago
      That's not true any more. The US is now actively hostile to immigrants - travel bans (prior to covid19), border walls, detention camps, separating young children from parents, denying visas for students with online courses (the government wanted this, the courts stopped it). That may change, but the current US administration is very hostile to immigration.
      • rbecker 6y ago
        But none of that hostility made much of a dent in any immigration statistics I was able to find. In fact, legal immigration under Trump even increased by a few percent compared to under Obama: https://www.dhs.gov/immigration-statistics/yearbook/2018/table1 https://www.dhs.gov/immigration-statistics/yearbook/2018/tab... (latest year for which data is available)
        • grey-area 6y ago
          It would take a while, but if sustained, I think these policies would lead to a significant drop in skilled immigration.
      • throwaway0a5e 6y ago
        The US has always been hostile to low skill immigrants. Reading the civil laws in any "progressive" northeast state is basically a big game of "were they trying to screw the Irish or the Italians back when they wrote this."
        • adventured 6y ago
          The US is among the least hostile developed nations when it comes to low skill immigrants. Few other nations allow them in, much less in such massive numbers. Half of all US immigration is low skill chain migration. The US is one of the few developed nations not operating primarily on a merit-style immigration system. See: Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Austria, Japan, South Korea, Germany, etc. Just try immigrating into those countries and becoming a citizen if you can't support yourself and or are low skill. Good luck, you'll need it.
      • adventured 6y ago
        All except for one of your examples are entirely bogus in support of your "any more" premise. Border walls? Nope. Close to zero new miles of border wall has been constructed under Trump. Almost exclusively what they've done is repair existing border wall that was built under prior administrations. Detention camps? What is your suggestion for what should be done with the hundreds of thousands of immigrants that are caught illegally crossing the border into the US every year? Every developed nation on the planet has some form of detention centers for illegal immigrants that are caught, including our neighbor to the north. Canada doesn't just let you freely wander into their country and become a citizen, they have a strict process; they must be super xenophobic and racist eh. Detention centers for illegal immigrants have existed for decades in the US. Calling them "camps" is language stretching at best, it's obvious what that's meant to bring to mind. Are they camps in Sweden, Italy, Greece, France and Canada too? Want to discuss Canada's low skill immigrant policies and why they're only 1.5% Hispanic (the Americas are ~73% Hispanic)? Somehow people think they're very immigrant friendly, it's fascinating, double-standards abound in judging US immigration policies. Travel bans? Every country implements travel bans when it's convenient. Check out the travel bans going on right now. The US has routinely implemented travel bans, including against Muslim majority nations, in decades past. Separating young children? That shouldn't have happened, that's a super fair point. It's no longer a policy; it ended two years ago and only existed for a very brief period of time.
    • syllogism 6y ago
      > fewer restrictions on who can immigrate than any other country in the world Citation needed? This seems obviously false if you include non-OECD countries, and even within the OECD, it's surely untrue? For instance, immigrating to Germany is much easier than immigrating to the U.S., especially if you include the fact that anyone who has a European grandparent can usually get a passport.
    • arethuza 6y ago
      The US does have a lot of immigrants in absolute terms - but its a huge country. Per capita relative to the size of the existing population immigration to the US isn't that large: https://www.npr.org/2014/10/29/359963625/dozens-of-countries-take-in-more-immigrants-per-capita-than-the-u-s https://www.npr.org/2014/10/29/359963625/dozens-of-countries... And looking at per capita net migration it's quite a bit less than the likes of Germany, Italy and the UK (and many more): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_net_migration_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_net_migra...
    • newacct583 6y ago
      > fewer restrictions on who can immigrate That's just laughably wrong. In fact the US issues near-zero green cards for the jobs immigrants are actually doing, and not near enough for the "prestige" employees we claim we want. > What more can America do? Fix its regulatory setup so that the immigrants arriving to do real work are doing it legally, like everyone else in the world does.
  • istjohn 6y ago
    Sadly, I have less faith in my fellow Americans. I think Trump has proven that a sizable portion of America is happy to embrace "America first." A sizable portion of America is even unphased by policies that will kill tens of thousands of fellow Americans, we are now learning with COVID-19.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
• KaiserPro 6y ago
  > At no other time in human history has one nation been as powerful and influential as America was Imperial Britannia says otherwise. Before that Spain/ottermans/muhgals. But, to tackle your main point. The USA is suffering from two things: a crisis of self identity, and a yawning prosperity gap. The whole point of america is that a pennyless immigrant can land in some backwater of the USA, work hard and become a millionaire. But that can't happen now(if it ever could is another matter). America worked because you had the freedom to get a new job, raise a family and live in relative comfort, even if you didn't go to further education. None of that really holds true anymore. This is being played on by those in power (both left and right). Unless and until measurable changes happen, the USA will continue to have civil unrest. What will make that change? someone/somepeople uniting and sorting out some of the endemic social problems. be that jobs, health care or addiction. The biggest barrier to that is the default position of polarisation. (Us vs them)
  • solidasparagus 6y ago
    > The whole point of america is that a pennyless immigrant can land in some backwater of the USA, work hard and become a millionaire. But that can't happen now(if it ever could is another matter). No, the point of America was that a pennyless immigrant can land in the US, work hard, find a better life and give their children a chance at much more. And that happens regularly. I grew up overseas and I can't tell you how many people from the places I grew up in have done exactly that. Similarly every day I work with people who have moved to the US for work. And many of these people never leave, which must say something about America.
    • toyg 6y ago
      You are basically saying the same thing. The point of the American Dream is the promise of improvement on one's status. Different groups decline that promise in different ways: for the migrant, it means an untroubled existence in a land under a stable rule of Law; for the working classes, it means doing better than your parents ("becoming a millionaire"); for the wealthy, it means more personal empowerment ("freedom"). Some of these promises can still be fulfilled, which is why people still come to America and follow the script. Others have not kept up with the times, maybe because social and economic institutions are struggling to keep up with the rate of change.
• Barrin92 6y ago
  > At no other time in human history has one nation been as powerful and influential as America was, and to a certain extent continues to be. The US is influential in a broad way but not in any particular deep way. Even Russia still has significantly more ability to penetrate the culture of countries where it is present. If you visit a city like Astana this becomes blatantly obvious, the way the Russian language and politics influences daily life is present everywhere. In the Middle-East that is evident as well as Russia has re-established historical ties. Whenever the US has gone somewhere militarily the way to build influence was basically with guns or coffers full of money, but it could never compete with the sort of influence historical empires or cultures can built that have deep religious, linguistic or ethnic ties, the US is in a very real sense isolated and fundamentally disconnected from history. In the same sense exactly like the British Empire was, and we can see where the UK is now and it didn't even take 100 years. Bruno Macaes recently wrote a great piece about the comeback of the 'civilisation-state'[1], and here the US cannot compete. [1]https://www.noemamag.com/the-attack-of-the-civilization-state/ https://www.noemamag.com/the-attack-of-the-civilization-stat...
  • michaelt 6y ago
    > The US is influential in a broad way but not in any particular deep way. Depends whom you want to credit/blame for things like Hollywood, x86, the internet, wikipedia, google, facebook, jeans and tee-shirts and sneakers, apple, microsoft, smartphones, laissez-faire capitalism, private car ownership, crossover suvs, climate-change scepticism, the post-British-empire popularity of the english language... Perhaps some people are so immersed in American culture they can't see the forest for the trees, but American culture has been hugely influential over the past century.
    • Barrin92 6y ago
      >Depends whom you want to credit/blame for things like no it doesn't, which is the point. Free market capitalism or common law or the internet is not culture, it's a sort of operating system and infrastructure to build stuff with, which can be adopted or discarded as a civilisation sees fit. China now has capitalism, is China now liberal? What are a hundred years? China and India are thousands of years old. Britney Spears and Steve Jobs and Disneyland are exciting for a few decades. Are they exciting for three thousand years? No, and that's something that the US has painfully experienced over the last few decades. It's sold its operating system to other societies the same way Microsoft sells copies of Windows, but it hasn't touched their culture.
• spaetzleesser 6y ago
  “15-20 years ago America enjoyed total and complete hegemony over the rest of the world “ I think this was an illusion. There was a lot going on in the rest of the world. Americans just didn’t notice.