>Do you believe that the United States is in decline today? Now imagine you asked an American this question 30 years ago. How would they have responded? No one

>Do you believe that the United States is in decline today? Now imagine you asked an American this question 30 years ago. How would they have responded? No one would have even talked about it with you. Every American citizen was, first and foremost, a patriot of their country and firmly believed that Americans are the greatest nation at the peak of its powers with a great future ahead. I disagree with this assertion, and I'm in my 50s so I remember the 1990s well. Sure, there was maybe a bit more optimism than now given that the USSR had collapsed and the former Soviet nations were just gettting started (and China had yet to rise), leaving the USA as the only superpower, but there was a lot of concern that we had "gotten soft" and that the "Greatest Generation" during WWII was the real peak.