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Why Is It So Hard to Imagine the End of American Empire?
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this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2026
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It’s not hard to imagine, and I think it’s time for that. I say this as an American citizen. This country does not deserve to be the dominant empire. I really don’t know who does though.
Nobody.
I think we, humans globally, should try for no dominant empire. I think if we all get together and think really hard, we can come up with a better system than "whichever group has the most guns and money gets to do whatever they want and take whatever they want, whenever". It just never ends well. Or middles well. Or begins well! It's a bad system for most of the people, most of the time, inside and outside of the dominant empire du jour.
Getting rid of the bullshit "veto" power of some countries in the United Nations would be a start.
I think we should start a world government from scratch. A global, grassroots, democratic fellowship of people, operated locally and cooperating globally. All persons are considered members, and they can assert their membership by joining a local group or starting their own. We recognize the other power structures in the world; the governments and the corporations and the religions. We may even belong to some of them, this fellowship is not exclusive.
Unfortunately I haven't figured out how to define membership, or verify the integrity of votes or member identity, or implement a functional judiciary, so this is more of a long-term project. But I think long-term, humans need to figure out how to settle our differences without killing each other, and I don't trust the existing power structures to willingly give up their authority. It has to be bottom up, and every one has to have a voice.
No corporations they are not people no matter what Americans think. They well just be companies and do not get person hood or personal rights.
You're nor wrong, but good luck trying it.
Thank you. My hypothesis is that other systems are similar to capitalist imperialism, in that they require a certain percentage of people to believe they're workable before they work. It's not sufficient, but it is necessary.
Good that most people believe anything you tell them then, right 😁?
I think for decades the US empire was seen as the lesser of 2-3 evils, the others being the USSR/Russia and China.
Now the US has gone the way of Russia, so China is the next logical answer, with Iran coming out of the current conflict as a major world power in it's own right.
What we're seeing is the logical conclusion of decades of having a sense of supremacy in the USA. Dipshits in this country bought into our own hype, thought we were invincible, and are still in denial that its all crashing down, and that its their fault.
America today is only somewhat more evil than it was, say, 20 or 16 years ago. The "lesser of X evils" thing has always been bunk.
I meant moreso the way if Russia in that its a pariah state
south america
True, but even at its pre-Trump worst America never tried to starve Cuba to death. You could say that Trump is willing to be more brutal in doing the things America has always done.
"America never tried to starve Cuba to death"
Uh what? Did we just forget about all the shit the US was doing to Cuba in the 60s and 70s trying to destabilize Castro's socialist government?
The sanctions, embargo, and blockades?
Admittedly I'm not well-informed on the early years of the Cuba thing (except that the Bay of Pigs was a thing), only the pre-Trump status quo, so I guess if you could point me to something that goes into more detail that'd be nice. That aside what I'm trying to say is that while the American embargo has been impoverishing Cuba, for the most part Cubans could get the basic necessities of life. Trying to cut off fuel is a new low.
Impoverishing is the same as starving.
What the US is doing today is no different from the decades of Imperialist oppression we have been engaging against Cuba since the 60s.
It's just more of the same shit we have always done.
we are entering into a multipolar era without a dominant empire. don't let the us sabotage it.
Haha I don't think Xi agrees with that assessment.
lmao, the geopolitics understander walked into the comment section.
what do you think BRICS is even for?
I trust that your opinion on BRICS is much more confident than mine. You can spare me the proof.
as someone actually living in a brics country, yeah.
i trust your western opinion of it is not racist at all. but ill let you out yourself if you want to.
As we Americans have so thoroughly demonstrated, the most confident opinions of the international workings of imperial powers usually come from the people living within those power structures. It's nice to see that that self-confidence isn't a uniquely American trait.
stop projecting your defects on us.
deal with your own fascism instead of being so confident you know anything about us.
LMAO I am neither projecting nor being confident. I am doing neither of those things. I don't even know what country you're from. I do know that imperialism existed before the US was a thing and that the temptation to power through the exploitation of others exists everywhere. No human society is immune to it, and those who proclaim their immunity to it are the most vulnerable to it, as we are seeing play out right now in my home.
As for dealing with my own fascist problem, you have no idea what I do. Which is nothing; I only post silly internet comments and never participate in local resistance networks or take any real world actions to disrupt the fascist power grab currently underway. That would be illegal :3
if your home is the us, your country has been the one making that happen globally for the past century or longer. its proclamations of immunity are meaningless in this light for just as long but that doesn't reflect on everyone else. pre-industrial, pre-capitalist and currenty-socialist societies are much better at being egalitarian compared to what is imposed by the empire.
keep dealing with the now more obvious problem if you really are, but take a real look at how your country has been working tirelessly through that entire period towards keeping the rest of us down, and that making our imperfect way out of it is not as bad as your media has you believe.
You know, I think some governments use "Socialism" the same way America uses "Freedom". America has spent its whole life loudly proclaiming, to itself and the world, that it had "Freedom", the most "Freedom", the best "Freedom". It became a Brand that became trusted more than the actual goods it packaged. A lot of Americans confused the Brand "Freedom" for actual freedom, because they had been taught the Brand Name version of freedom . And that trust in the Brand over the thing itself is the mechanism by which the thing itself, whatever version of it had existed before, withered, without anyone ever taking corrective action, if they even noticed. Many Americans still haven't. Brand Loyalty is a strong force in human behavior, that's why everybody exploits it.
Anyway I think the same thing happens with the "Socialism" brand.
that's what your country does, right now and for the last century. every country is imperfect, but there is a consistent set of western countries actually executing most of that evil for a while.
who is participating directly or indirectly on all of the many world wars right now and mostly for the last century or so? who is the consistent power that's always there causing mayhem or talking shit? just who always invades or interferes whenever any Socialism brand you talk about looks like it cames up by very visible popular willed revolution or even election?
which cold war is it, again? aren't we on a thread about the apparent inevitability of the empire's economic and political system upon the world?
I try to recognize similarities in systems, and I am more intimately familiar with US government than any other, so a lot of my political theory starts with identifying US patterns and trying to find similar examples. If I can find similarities, I try to identify them along with differences to sketch out a general hypothesis of what the pattern actually is. I do try to identify and account for American peculiarities, though it's not always easy. Like, I think America's gun culture is unique in the world, maybe in history, and it infects fucking everything in the US in ways that don't have good analogs in other countries. There are lots of eccentricities like this but gun culture is one of the big ones.
I think confusing those eccentricities for part of the common pattern, either in ignorance or malice, are projecting. So it's possible that I am projecting without realizing it. It has happened before.
But I really don't think the US is the only nation on Earth that weaponizes and exploits Brand Loyalty. That I am pretty confident about. I'd go so far as to say every nation creates a Brand of itself, though most people use the term "national identity". Governments abuse it for the same reason corporations do: it makes people feel like they're part of the team, even if they're not.
wtf are you talking about? i will urge you once again to carefully study what your country does abroad. it's the most military spending in the planet for a reason, this isn't about "brands". this is about real genocide and poverty happening NOW and for the last CENTURY being perpetrated by a few western countries through a complex global political/ideological, economic, and military system.
the reason i'm saying this instead of just disengaging from this conversation like i usually do with libs is because you genuinely seem to me like you want to get to the bottom of this, and going by your own individualized vibes and whatever US media tells you is very insufficient to understanding how this shit works.
please study some political theory and stop deflecting from the evil your capitalist imperialist country is doing, as it's the one thing disproportionately holding the world down. take a serious look into your own external policy before blaming whoever else who may have smaller things to criticize.
your username implies you are queer, so i can also urge you to listen to the perspective of the ones you oppress, just like your allies listened to yours before they were able to properly understand what happens.
I'm talking about the mechanisms by which the words we use to describe ourselves and our conditions get subverted by those who seek to control other people, and how that subversion confuses the concept. Americans are confused about what "Freedom" means, because freedom has been rebranded to mean things like the open road, and feelings of patriotism, and being able to smoke wherever I damn well please. It makes us miss the things like the long working hours, and the mountains of debt, and how badly my boss could ruin my life if they so chose, and how much power that gives bosses. We think what we have is freedom, and are confused because the concept itself has been subverted. Via Branding, in this case. I hope that answers the question, I... thought we were both talking about that.
I have individualized vibes? What are they like?
I love reading political theory. I read it critically, the way I would read a peer's code. I internally check it against my own understanding of the world, and if there's a dissonance I check to see which of us, if either, is correct. It's slow work. There's so much political theory I haven't read. The vast majority of it, I expect. And I balance political theory with some lighter topics because if I read all the political theory I want, I despair of the future of humanity and wish for death to take me. So I take my time.
I do listen to the voices of those I oppress, both myself personally, and in my capacity as an American citizen, and in my capacity as a white person, and in my capacity as a landowner, as an older adult, etc. etc. There are millions of demographic dimensions on which I relate to my fellow people, and none of them are independent of the others. People are complicated, that's just the system we got. I listen as closely as I can, because the voices can be faint or distorted in transmission. They are easily misunderstood, especially if misunderstanding redounds to my benefit. I think I have gotten better at hearing, but that sort of thing is difficult to quantify. I think I can identify more easily things that bear close attention, anyway. I'm interested in all suffering in the world, which can roughly be divided into the two categories, "caused by me" and "not caused by me". the categories are similar in a lot of ways, different in some ways, and many things are a mix of both. It does necessarily introduce bias because things I cause and things I observe have fundamental differences that are difficult to account for. My heuristic is to see if I can act to help them, and coming up with a solution often casts some light on whether I am a cause. Then I do the solution and see if it worked. Some of the time, it does not and I have to go back to the drawing board. But, sometimes it helps.
i know. and power has been spreading and dilluting that us-centric view about what their freedoms and of others are. this is not how others think, it's how you do.
i'm not saying all of the many ways in which we choose to defend our interests are moral and correct.
i'm saying that in general, most of us aren't like america and never have, and that we all already have the seeds for a better world.
i don't mean to be rude, i'm just trying to put it.
The disembodiment of freedom is an American idiomatic example of the general pattern I'm talking about. Leaders cloaking their cronyism and corruption in the Branding that best hides their true purpose from the people they seek to control. They can do it with "Freedom", or "Republic" or "Independent", or "Populist", or "Blue-collar", or "People's" or literally any word that ever existed.
This kind of branding hijacking depends on the word having a strong emotional resonance with the people because the leaders seek to co-opt the value of the word for their own selfish ends. The more valuable the idea, the better to steal.
This is a universal dynamic of human political behavior, and whoever told you it's an American peculiarity is taking advantage of you.
again with the projecting: this pattern is coming from your media empire to justify it's atrocities as human when it's as inhumane as it gets. this is about you, not us.
there are no both sides here perpetuating a couple genocides and an ecocide. socialism didn't provoke two wars in a century and isn't about to provoke a third. there was never a "people's republic" or "blue-collar" group that ever interfered in an entire continent's democratic processes for their own resource grab in actual real life. the ussr didn't use any nuclear weapons on innocent civilians, china never entrapped other nations with fake deals.
please notice how, in real obsevable life, this pattern comes from one culture.
i don't think there's anything else i can say to get this conversation moving forward. i do hope you and westerners like you look inside in the meantime, and leave us alone.
The UN, as in, the sum of all nations and people in the world.
The UN in theory maybe. But an institution that allows an illegal trade embargo to continue 33 years in a row (longer before votes on it even began) because "special vetos" are more important than human rights. Yeah. Fuck that.
Like, the idea of what a "United nations" might be in the average westerners head. Sure. But, that's not what the UN is at all. The UN exists to create a hierarchy that exists to uphold the American empire and it's capital interest. So, I'd start over from the drawing board.
Edit: Cuba trade embargo if it wasn't obvious.
That sounds like a good goal to strive for.
The problem with a monopoly is that it tends to abuse its position, no matter the intentions of the people in it.
Multipolarity with international rules that are followed out of self-interest because conflict is more costly than cooperation. That's about the best equilibrium we can hope for. Until we have O'Neill cylinders, ofc .