Reply #5: Who can say?

[bemildred]

A nice summary.

The American "Empire" seems well on it's way out via economic
collapse, and there is no chance at this point (IMHO) that
military means will preserve it, because of the cost, and
the unwillingness of the American polity to support with blood
this sort of effort. That was the lesson of VietNam, and the
ruling class has been struggling to digest it ever since.

Also, military power and economic power cannot be separated, and
the long steady decline in American economic power continues, for
the most part with the unthinking and enthusiastic cooperation of
the ruling class.

The question is what comes next? Nobody knows. There are several
heartening factors, the two I find most important being:

1.) Military colonialism simply does not pay like it used to. The
natives are educated and sophisticated and the methods of resistance
are widely known. Thus the level of consent and cooperation that
the ruling must obtain from the ruled is much higher than it once
was.

2.) The control of knowledge and information on which all ruling
elites rest in much more difficult to maintain in the modern world.
Since the ruling classes are in fact not different from the
rest of us in any important way, it becomes more and more difficult
for them to maintain the distinctions that justify their existence.

It must be said, however, that watching the decline in American
political and economic culture over the last 50 years or so has
been most depressing, and there is no telling how long it will take
to repair that.