Just like Mother Nature is undefeated, so too is this historical reality: All “great” nations eventually decline and/or fall.
Americans don’t want to hear it, but it is what it is.
Great Britain once controlled an empire, controlling territories and colonies all over the globe. Today, that empire is a fraction of what it was. Ancient Ghana, Mali, and Songhai, great West African kingdoms, once stood as major centers of global commerce, scholarship, and political power. Kemet—ancient Egypt—exerted influence for roughly 5,000 years. Greece and Rome rose to extraordinary heights before declining.
Which brings us to the United States. After a short 250-year run, it’s already being kicked out of the global leader club. Don’t get me wrong. America will still exist. But the influence it once had is fading fast.
The warning signs are everywhere. Here are five.
Commitment to ignorance
A nation cannot remain globally competitive while treating education, intellectual curiosity, and critical thinking as enemies.
In recent years, political battles over critical race theory, “wokeness,” DEI, and affirmative action have turned education itself into a culture-war battlefield. Policies restricting or eliminating DEI programs, for example, have spread across states and institutions, while debates over curriculum increasingly focus on what students should—or should not—be taught.
The consequences extend beyond race, especially since whitefolk, by a wide margin, are the largest recipients of DEI and affirmative action policies. Scientific literacy, historical knowledge, civic understanding, and technological competence all matter when a nation competes globally. And because right-leaning politicians and their voters have been so hellbent on keeping any educational benefits from Blackfolk, they’ve blocked intellectual advancement of the entire nation.
The result: Regarding math, science, social progress, democracy, healthcare, etc., America is a C-student at best. On average, Americans read at a 6th-grade level, while global competition demands a Master’s Degree-level of understanding or more.
America cannot educate itself into irrelevance and then complain when other nations leave her in the dust.
A sucker for BS
Political messaging works when voters accept slogans without examining who actually holds power. Consider Texas. Republicans have controlled the governor’s office since 1995 and have maintained legislative control for decades. Yet Governor Greg Abbott’s re-election campaign ads paint him as the savior delivered to stop runaway spending. And they’re counting on you to be too stupid to realize that the out-of-control spending was created by him and the rest of his Texas GOP homies who control the Texas House, Senate, Supreme Court, and Governor’s Mansion.
A democracy cannot function with people committed to being suckers for the BS.
Commitment to anti-Blackness
U.S. Senate candidate Ken Paxton knows his audience. His campaign commercial, which runs on every station nonstop, talks about his commitment to sending child sex traffickers to jail. What’s amazing and so on-brand for Paxton is the fact that while America has a whole-ass White House administration that’s protecting a national ring of hyper-wealthy, white, and white-adjacent child traffickers and abusers, Paxton features some dirt-poor Black man in his commercials.
As long as America is cool with demonizing any random Black man while ignoring a person listed in the Epstein Files 38,000 times (his name rhymes with Ronald Bump), it will continue to hasten its own exit from the global stage.
The predator pass
Speaking of those Epstein Files and the hyper-wealthy and powerful folk mentioned in them in sickening detail, the fact that an entire major political party is willing to turn a blind eye to those atrocities guarantees this nation doesn’t have the moral backbone strong enough to be a global power for much longer. Selective accountability and free passes for billionaires and celebrities while Blackfolk are over-scrutinized, over-policed, and over-incarcerated, reduces phrases like “justice for all” to jokes we can all get a good chuckle from as America fall off a cliff and into near irrelevance.
God don’t like ugly
As Trump’s policies hurt the very people who voted for him three times, they’re saying things like, “He tricked us. He lied to us. This isn’t what he said he was gonna do.” They weren’t tricked. They were lied to, but also told the truth. Trump and crew announced with a global bullhorn the harm they intended to cause to his enemies. In fact, one Trump supporter whose life was upended by a natural disaster from which her POTUS delivered no relief, told a reporter, “Trump’s not hurting the people he said he would.” Her answer encapsulates the real Trump voter truth—they voted for him because he promised pain for all those “others” (Blackfolk, immigrants, the college-educated, the media, liberals, etc.). But as that pain hits his voters, now “they mad.” But if they could, they’d vote for him a fourth, fifth, and sixth time. And because God sho-nuff don’t like ugly, America is losing global ground fast. And it’s ground that the country won’t get back.
America’s problem is not that it lacks resources, intelligence or talented people. It’s that too often, the nation refuses to use those resources intelligently when doing so would require confronting racism, hypocrisy, ignorance, or concentrated power—things that make great nations fall.
Great nations don’t fall simply because an enemy becomes stronger. Sometimes they decline because they become too committed to their own contradictions to change.
