In our defense, we're a huge country and the states are quite varied. Not so much as Europe, but that's the nature of human settlement and expansion post locomotive travel/industrial revolution.

Our generational drain on education, health care, and quality of life by Republican politicians created the mess, but the decision by Democrats to be complicit in it, for profit, meant there was no more "right left pendulum of politics" swing because the "liberals" were a ratchet that prevented the Overton Window shift any way except Right.

Our empire has been in decline for decades due to political, governmental, and corporate malfeasance. Our representative "democracy" evaporated, mostly, by the 80's. The vestiges continued a bit into the 90's, but campaign finance fuckery and a captured judiciary has doomed any chance of return.

I part with this, large, interconnected systems collapse rapidly. Once the USD is no longer the reserve currency, the United States will collapse like the USSR. This is the fault of the US Baby Boomers, particularly their leadership, but they can't grok it because that requires education and empathy. Instead of reinvesting the untold riches in infrastructure, health care, and all the other things that developed nations do. It was allowed to be pilfered and hoarded by the great dragons of our age, and the tech robber barons. Billionaires are hoarder sociopaths to a person, but it's impossible to tax their wealth with the current system because it is thoroughly corrupted by many factors, but mostly the power that comes with extreme wealth inequality in a "capitalist" state that perpetuates the problem instead of dealing with it.

The question is, what is there to do besides leave, for a better life, and party for the next few decades until the Great Filter erases the podunk experiment that was intelligent life on planet Earth. Beats targeting 800ish billionaires for wealth repatriation, when your fellow citizens are organized enough to do it because any sense of community has been thoroughly destroyed.

I find the phrase “US Americans” to be cringey in and of itself mostly because of its use in that viral clip if the beauty contestant talking about Iraq.