The USA has not only ceased being leader of the free world, it has ceased being a member of the free world. It betrays democratic allies and supports expansionist dictatorships.

The only question Americans need to ask themselves is do they want this to continue?

– Phillips P. OBrien

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You know what makes me sad the most?

We weren’t Rome. We weren’t the Mongols. We weren’t some blood-soaked empire held together by terror and the divine right of some inbred lunatic with a crown.

We were something else.

We had it all.

Economic power. Military dominance. Cultural gravity. Scientific leadership. The reserve currency. The aircraft carriers. The universities. The movies. The fucking moonshot.

The entire world — allies and enemies alike — hung on our every move.

Every speech.

Every election.

Every carrier group.

Every… fucking… word.

We ran the world without quite admitting that we did. That was the strange magic of it. The Americans never fully thought of themselves as emperors. Romans knew they were Romans. The British knew they were an empire. We still talked like a republic of shopkeepers and mechanics while half the planet calibrated itself around our existence.

And say whatever you want about the United States — and God knows there’s plenty to say — but the broad truth is this:

When America functioned, the world functioned better.

Not perfectly. Better.

Trade expanded. Poverty collapsed. Technology spread. Democracies multiplied. Global violence dropped. People lived longer. Markets stabilized. Even our enemies benefited from the order we imposed simply by existing.

That’s the part the morons never understood.

The real American empire was not conquest. It was a giant, humming system of incentives, guarantees, markets, security arrangements, norms, and absurdly optimistic assumptions about humanity itself. We believed — naively, arrogantly, sometimes stupidly — that people ultimately wanted freedom, prosperity, and peace.

And for a long stretch of history, we were right.

Oh, we fucked things up plenty. The moment America consciously tried to engineer history with tweezers and PowerPoints, we usually stepped on our own dick. Vietnam. Iraq. Afghanistan. Pick your catastrophe.

But when we were simply ourselves — productive, confident, future-oriented, open, inventive, ambitious — things mostly worked.

People’s lives improved.

The world got richer.

Humanity moved forward.

And now? Gone. Squandered. Traded away for ragebait, tribalism, conspiracy theories, and the political judgment of people who think Facebook memes are research and the price of eggs is a civilizational crisis.

Esau selling his birthright for stew, except somehow dumber.

Nothing like America had ever existed before. Not Rome. Not Britain. Not China. Nobody.

Because nobody else ever combined that bizarre cocktail of power, optimism, industriousness, idealism, missionary zeal, and almost childlike belief that tomorrow could genuinely be better than today.

That combination is probably gone now.

And now that it’s gone, I doubt humanity ever gets another version of it.

– Bryan C. Del Monte

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