[OZYMANDIASAK]

At what point can we say that the US truly has fallen from being the leader of the world?

Each and every decision taken by the current administration is bringing the US closer to an age of darkness and idiocy.

I’m from Europe, I’m not saying the US was ever perfect but I don’t understand how it came to this.

My bet is a on a combination of extreme individualism due to a poor internalisation of the ideals of liberalism combined with a predatory capitalistic environment.

It’s sad to see what happens to a society that has the highest concentration of the brightest minds in world mostly working towards money related goals. So many great people that could work for the greater good and are dutifully tuning algorithms for the 0.01% capturing everyone’s attention and ideas.

Sad state of the world but I guess you can’t stop “progress”.

[sanderjd]

I'm sympathetic to your perspective that it's a broad cultural thing.

But from my point of view, it's more of a demonstration of the problem with governments that are designed to have a very strong executive. Eventually you get an executive that really sucks, and when that happens they can do a lot of damage.

One of the biggest influences on my thinking from listening to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History is a point he made about hereditary monarchy, that among its problems is that sometimes the next ruler in line is just a total dud, and you're just stuck with them.

Well, you can get a dud through voting as well. Ideally having fairly short terms mitigates this risk, but there is still a lot of damage that can be done in a short term, and there is a "who watches the watchmen" problem with the executive being required to fairly run the election to potentially replace them.

If we make it through this period with elections that remain fair and with successful transitions of power, I hope we'll find ways to weaken the presidency.

[foobarchu]

> it's more of a demonstration of the problem with governments that are designed to have a very strong executive

The system WASN'T design to have a very strong executive, quite literally the opposite. The other branches have simply bowed down and let him bulldoze them. And yes, this has been building up for decades, but these cases are and above any overreach of previous presidents.

[sanderjd]

A presidential system is a design that has a strong executive. I agree that the presidency has grown stronger then intended, but it was always strong relative to other kinds of systems.

[pgkr]

The Federalist Papers show the thinking behind how and why the three branches are mostly co-equal but the executive is designed to be ever so slightly more potent.

[skissane]

> But from my point of view, it's more of a demonstration of the problem with governments that are designed to have a very strong executive. Eventually you get an executive that really sucks, and when that happens they can do a lot of damage.

The presidential system, widespread in Latin America, has an inherent tendency to produce caudillos. The US had the good fortune of escaping that fate for decade after decade, but maybe with Trump its luck has finally run out.

The parliamentary system, as used in the rest of the Anglosphere and most of Western Europe – it doesn't require a monarchy, see parliamentary republics such as Germany and Ireland – avoids this problem by putting greater limits on executive power – Prime Ministers derive their authority from the legislature and can be removed by it with a simple majority; while the US cabinet is essentially an advisory body to the President, Westminster cabinets are collegial bodies in which the Prime Minister is just one vote among many and can be outvoted by their colleagues.

> One of the biggest influences on my thinking from listening to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History is a point he made about hereditary monarchy, that among its problems is that sometimes the next ruler in line is just a total dud, and you're just stuck with them.

"Great Britain is a republic with a hereditary president, while the United States is a monarchy with an elective king" (The Knoxville Journal, 9 February 1896)

[sanderjd]

Yep, you put my thoughts much better than I could have. And great quote! Hadn't ever come across that.

[mrtksn]

There's nothing about luck in this though, the "non-dud" ones were just able to push the problems under the rug and make it a problem of the people of the future.

The reason why you end up with a dud through election is that the rug can't cover all that anymore.

[_aavaa_]

Except the legislative branch could keep him in check, they are simply choosing to go along with it.

[sanderjd]

One facet of the strength of our presidency is the degree of consensus required for Congress to exert itself in opposition to the president. Both impeachment and veto overrides are high hurdles.

[apercu]

>At what point can we say that the US truly has fallen from being the leader of the world?

When a ridiculous, obtuse con man was elected President in 2016 and his party lost whatever little desire they had left for a functional government?

Of course, I would argue it was when "W" was elected for the second term.

[mnky9800n]

To be fair to W, some part of the world followed america into iraq. it wasn't like he did it all by himself. i think if these countries had not supported this war, there would have been a reckoning for the usa much sooner than trump. in much the same way that people now question, what could we have done differently with how we treated russia prior to 2014 when they started a war with ukraine, the world should ask itself how it should have responded differently to joining america in a war in iraq in 2003. but so far, i don't hear anyone having these conversations about how did the world allow america to arrive to now.

[giraffe_lady]

Yeah everyone's reckoning needs to go back to bush and sept 11 2001 frankly. The consolidation of executive power, the labeling of "enemies" and "terrorists" as inherently applying to some groups which therefore do not have the same rights of due process, the torture prisons it didn't quite all start there but it was a massive turning point.

The way the wars fed back into american policing, the justifications for the drone assassination program (but not here! not quite yet). A lot of what we're seeing now is the natural endpoint of processes that were started under bush "in reaction" to sept 11 and expanded under obama and later biden.

The main stream of the republican party has been, first quietly but then openly, fantasizing about authoritarian control for 25 years. And through that whole time the democrats have made it one of their biggest priorities to help them construct the apparatus needed to accomplish it. And our allies have been eager to get their hands on these same powers & systems to apply to their own citizens.

Honestly looking back the biggest mistake I made was that I thought the things that are happening now would happen in bush's second term. When they didn't I took seriously the possibility that I was wrong about the bloodlust of the american right, sincerely spent many years convincing myself they were in working in good faith towards what they understood was best for the world. I had it right the first time. For there is no truth in their mouths; their hearts are destruction; their throats are open graves.

[monkeyfun]

I think we were almost all lulled into a sense of "huh, I guess I slightly misread them..." fueled by the failures to capitalize, the little losses of momentum that almost gave the hopeful impression that maybe people had finally gotten over the bloodlust and the worst of the power grabs.

By the way, the ending of what you wrote is beautiful.

[mnky9800n]

That's because it was written by the author of Psalms. haha.

[giraffe_lady]

It's from psalms. We're not the first to go through this.

[ZeroGravitas]

The danger of this both-sides approach is that Trump used it as cover and painted himself as anti-war (despite his recorded comments at the time) compared to both Democrats and Republicans before pivoting to talking about invading Canada and turning Gaza into a Trump Hotel resort.

[apercu]

Agreed, both side-ism is ridiculous. One party has pursued their personal wealth and power, concentrations of wealth for the elite class, and globalism and the other side has done the same, but also embraces fascism and theocracy as core tenants.

The former is the only choice, because democracy is still able to maintain a slight pulse under their "leadership".

[giraffe_lady]

I was trying to avoid both-sidesing here, sorry I failed. I only briefly mentioned democrats to point out that while the republicans were openly planning all along to implement an authoritarian regime, the democrats broadly supported building out the means to do it. The democrats have always considered their right flank colleagues and their left flank adversaries, have put a lot of energy into ignoring the fascist dreams of the republicans: this was the predicted outcome.

[apercu]

The capital class has been squeezing people for years (and it's gotten worse since covid made the serfs feel empowered by actually letting them breathe for a moment), so I don't know that people have time and space to _think_ about these things.

Social media has joined religion as the "opiate of the masses".

[ctack]

How did covid allow a respite?

[cactacea]

> since covid made the serfs feel empowered by actually letting them breathe for a moment

...the irony

[bgwalter]

This link contains a map of the coalition of the willing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalition_of_the_willing_(Iraq...

You see Eastern European countries who were grateful for NATO expansion or wanted future NATO membership. You see the UK and Australia which always follow the US. There are a couple of wildcards line Spain, Denmark and Italy.

Germany and France are absent and there was huge criticism of the Iraq invasion at the time.

In general, the whole EU was much more critical of the US in the 2000s than it was in 2020-2024. The current criticism is mostly Trump related and not fundamental. To summarize, in the 2000s the EU had an independent foreign policy which is now completely gone. How that evolved exactly is interesting. Has the US played off the Eastern European countries against heretics like France and Germany to achieve this goal? Is it a symptom of the international elites moving in lockstep?

[fabian2k]

The EU doesn't make foreign policy, that lies with the member states. And why do you think those don't have an independent foreign policy?

The US hasn't started an illegal war recently, which could explain why there is much less criticism of US foreign policy compared to the time of the Iraq war.

[apercu]

>US hasn't started an illegal war

The US hasn't declared a war since WWII since executive privilege allows the President to pursue war without Congress declaring war. Does that mean that every time we take military action (which the US is doing daily, right now) we're pursuing what the founders of the country would (rightfully?) classify as an illegal war?

(I didn't take any political science, and I'm not really informed on constitutional law so I could have this partially wrong)

[vonmoltke]

> The US hasn't declared a war since WWII since executive privilege allows the President to pursue war without Congress declaring war.

That's not correct. Congress no longer passes declarations of war, it passes authorizations of the use of military force (AUMF). The change was made starting in Vietnam because a declaration of war can only target a recognized sovereign nation, while an AUMF can target any state or non-state actor. The President is still heavily restricted from employing the US military without an AUMF.

I think the confusion about this stems from Congress having passed several, a couple of which are pretty broad, and never repealing them. This has allowed various Presidents to use one of the active AUMFs to justify actions, but for those who don't know or pay attention to the details it seems like the President is going around Congress.

[t0lo]

There's only less criticism if you live in a post trump columbia bubble ;)

[insane_dreamer]

Yeah I thought W 2.0 was bad. But this is even worse (at least for Americans).

[j_timberlake]

Don't just blame the reds here. The blues let their primaries get rigged 3 presidential elections in a row, and they still don't talk about it. I think most haven't even noticed, probably because their chosen information sources (social media and late-night comedians?) haven't told them.

[t0lo]

>I’m from Europe, I’m not saying the US was ever perfect but I don’t understand how it came to this

Because 30+ different countries were able to wage information war on a population for 15+ years with unrestricted access and no recourse.

[insane_dreamer]

30+ different countries waging information war? Nah, it was Fox News.

[AlecSchueler]

> At what point can we say that the US truly has fallen from being the leader of the world?

About six weeks ago.

[swat535]

> At what point can we say that the US truly has fallen from being the leader of the world?

It's easy to talk about the "decline" of the U.S. in abstract geopolitical terms, but let's be honest: the day the global tech community stops posting on Hacker News, stops building with U.S origin technologies, and stops looking to Silicon Valley as a benchmark, that's the day we can seriously start talking about America's fall from global leadership.

Until then, we're all still running our infrastructure on AWS, building apps with React, debating threads on HN, and watching YC Demo Day like it's the Super Bowl. The world may grumble, but it's still plugged in, literally and figuratively, to American innovation.

[rstuart4133]

> the day the global tech community stops posting on Hacker News, stops building with U.S origin technologies, and stops looking to Silicon Valley as a benchmark, that's the day we can seriously start talking about America's fall from global leadership.

I guess that's the correct answer to the question as posed. But it does raise another question: if it happens, something undermined the foundations of America's prosperity long before the fall. What was it?

This post to HN describes what lead to the US becoming a science superpower: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43692360 I found it convincing. The post also speculated if those conditions were removed, it America's superpowers will wither.

My take on the post is science has exponential return on investment over the very long term. But the return is random in that most scientific investigations fail to yield a return, and the time span so long that the usual capitalist incentives don't work. Or to put it another way, firms making investing in basic science get out-competed in the short term by others that don't make the investment. So you have to find a way to make societies at large pay for basic science, and give way what works to the capitalist engine. The USA found a way to do that. It's beginning to look like China has too. Now the USA is winding back the investment.

On the positive side, I suspect it will take a long time to kill the institutions that drive the USA's prosperity, I suspect many more than 4 years of madness. Putin pulled the same thing off, but it took him decades.

[inglor_cz]

Unfortunately us HNers have a lot to do with this, even though approximately none of us had this in mind when coding the relevant stuff.

This is how politics looks like when the radical fringes from social networks take over national parties and squeeze out the so-much-mocked "enlightened centrists" from their seats. Missing them yet?

The same problem in Europe is somewhat tamed by proportional voting systems, but various edgelords have invaded our politics as well. Slovakia, right next to Czechia, is a horrible political circus. AfD in Germany mostly built its electorate online etc.

[thrance]

AFAIK, there are no "enlightened centrists". Most of those so-called centrists (Lex Fridman, Joe Rogan, you name them) are now neutral to friendly with Trump. This state of affairs is not grassroots, it was deliberately manufactured by convservative media like Fox News or right-wing influencers, funded by a massive influx of cash from the top billionaires who are now the only ones currently profiting from the administration.

[sanderjd]

That's not who this person was talking about. They were talking about the boring institutionalists on both sides of the aisle that edgy people have been scoffing at as "The Blob" or "The Village".

[ZeroGravitas]

Isn't Nate Silver who wrote about "The Village" a classic enlightened centrist?

Has the far-right hijacked and ruined yet another useful phrase?

[inglor_cz]

Precisely. MAGAs call them "cucks".

[AlexandrB]

Why does being "neutral to friendly" with Trump mean you're not a centrist? There are only two options in the US political system. Would being "neutral to friendly" with Kamala mean someone is more centrist somehow?

There's the assumption infused to a lot of these conversations that Trump is uniquely bad or uniquely extreme and so that "centrism" would still mean opposing him.

I also don't get what's particularly "grass roots" about support for the Democrats. During the Kamala campaign we had a string of celebrity endorsements including a cringey Avengers reunion zoom call. These are rich, privileged people from a specific social milieu - not grass roots by any means.

The last "grass roots" candidate was probably Bernie Sanders (someone Joe Rogan also supported, incidentally), but he was too dangerous to corporate profit margins for the DNC to let him win.

[Braxton1980]

You can have a grassroots campaign while also having celebrities endorse you. They are two different things

[thrance]

Between Trump and Harris, yes, Trump is uniquely bad and extreme. While I do not hold the democrats in my heart, their party holds much milder views that those of Trump.

Indeed, being friendly to Harris would make you "not a centrist", hence why I think it's weird how we're able to stick that label to obviously pro-Trump people.

The GOP received the lion share of financial aids during their last campaign, and it has been so for quite a while. Let's not even speak of dark money. That is not to say the democrats relied on 100% grassroots initiatives, far from it.

Can we stop this whataboutism and bothsideism from polluting the discourse? It is hardly relevant.

[BlueTemplar]

Easy : when the dollar stops being the reserve currency of the world.

(Well, easy in retrospect, I guess it might be hard to realise that/when this is happening when you are in the middle of it ? Reading about the other times it happened might help ?)

[HEmanZ]

I find some Marxist-ish ideology always wants to blame these things on the material conditions, wealth. My personal network is a sea of trump worshipers (quite literally, like my cousins say a prayer for trump at every dinner since 2016), and I think the analysis that this is a wealth thing is wrong.

Everyone has pet theories. Mine is that a section US society, urban coastal highly educated elites, coalesced around one set of ideas (I’m not exactly sure why, but probably in part because this group is less religious and very urban) and formed a very powerful ideological block that wasn’t in the US pre 1980s. This Trump thing is a reaction of the people who don’t fit into this political block (religious, less educated, rural, culturally not urban) against them.

It’s fundamentally identity politics, not some material conditions thing. People have a hard time believing this, because some people think the world is all about money, and ideas and identity mean nothing to people, but I really think the money-only view of human politics is flat wrong.

I say this because of my personal network of family, friends, and acquaintances from my hometown. When I try to gently get to the bottom of it, what I really find is a deep deep hatred for the coastal elites. They feel belittled and marginalized, not monetarily but culturally. They feel no one from those backgrounds has any right to tell them what to do. They feel that a coastal expert has no right to contradict their feelings on a topic, because that expert is not “one of them”, not because that expert is wealthy.

The network I have does not feel this way because they are economically struggling. Europeans often imply this is the case, but in my experience after 40 years in America, it is just not. Many of the people you see wearing maga hats and waving maga flags at rallies have mansions, 5 trucks, a vacation home in Hawaii, etc. my extended family and network has plenty of money. But they feel anyone who is an educated, coastal liberal is out to destroy them. They feel so completely culturally and identity wise different from the coastal elites, that they bristle under the thought that someone with an “education” could know more about something than them.

I think Republicans gained power in the last few years because of the economy, and Trump gained control of the republicans because of identity. This isn’t going away by “solving” the wealth gap.

[andrekandre]

  > It’s fundamentally identity politics, not some material conditions thing.

  > deep deep hatred for the coastal elites. They feel belittled and marginalized, not monetarily but culturally.

i would argue that is still 'material conditions' because marginalized also implies economic disparity, also a lot of the 'angry internet' is rural people with not much material futures

  > Republicans gained power in the last few years because of the economy

material conditions then

  > This isn’t going away by “solving” the wealth gap.

'material conditions' is much more than just wealth gap/money in my understanding; our media and economic incentives (rage baiting, grifting) for it are a large part of it for example

[thrance]

You're exacly describing material forces. The various positions individuals adopted toward identity politics did not grow out of a vacuum. Their place of birth, the environments they were raised in, their socio-economic classes... Everything shaped them to make the choice they made last november. The profund discontent that was exploited by the GOP last election stems from ever-increasing socio-economical disparities among the population. This can and has been measured.

On a side note, funny that this group that supposedly defines themselves by their opposition to coastal elites rallied themselves behind... Trump, a prime representative of the east coast elite.

[int_19h]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxist_cultural_analysis

[anal_reactor]

> But they feel anyone who is an educated, coastal liberal is out to destroy them.

The reverse of this was the prevailing attitude among many democrats. The approach of lots of people was "we won the culture war, everyone who doesn't agree with us will get cancelled and suffer, deal with it". When you hung out in online circles, and more importantly in offices of famous American companies, the general vibe was "if your friend doesn't have left political views, you shouldn't be friends with them". So it's not like the idea was born in republican circles, the only new thing is democrats finding themselves on the losing side of the culture war.

[acdha]

What you’re describing is only true to the extent that “be respectful to other, “don’t force me to follow your religion”, or “don’t pressure your subordinates for sex” are “left political views”. The myth of widespread cancellation has been heavily marketed but when you look at the handful of people who suffered any real consequences they came down to trying to force bigotry or sexual activities on unwilling participants.

[anal_reactor]

> The myth of widespread cancellation has been heavily marketed but when you look at the handful of people who suffered any real consequences they came down to trying to force bigotry or sexual activities on unwilling participants.

Doesn't matter. The public perception was that you could get cancelled for having an opinion, and that's enough to radicalize a lot of people. Not to mention that the general "left" did nothing to ensure people they won't get cancelled.

[acdha]

It does matter, because it changes the concern from a real phenomenon to the right-wing lying for political gain. In the latter case, you can’t win by playing their game because the rules change whenever they want, with a multi-billion dollar media machine to reinforce the message.

[anal_reactor]

> In the latter case, you can’t win by playing their game

We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas

[carlosjobim]

The reason why you don't understand the American perspective on the world and on life, is because everybody in Europe who didn't think exactly like you think moved to America, and everybody who thinks exactly like you think stayed in Europe.

No matter if you think the European or the American mindset is better, there was an enormous split of nations with the mass migration of Europeans to America. And it was a certain kind of person who would stay and a certain kind of person who would go. It's still that way.