Hence you can’t take the starting conditions from thousands of years ago and assume they will evolve in the same way now

it's also likely that some (but not all) historians will put the peak of the American Empire in the 1960's somewhere

Based on what metric?

I would agree with that stance and that classical antiquity ended then. But you still have to acknowledge that the Roman state, its culture and institutions not only survived but arguably came out even more dominant (with the exception of pagan religion), e.g. with a second political stronghold in the East.

There are many episodes in Roman history that people would have experienced as decline or even collapse within their lifetimes, including multiple sackings of the city of Rome itself. But in most of those cases things actually did bounce back and the Empire continued to dominate. That's kind of the point I was making. Empires would seem to be far more resilient than contemporary observers would think if one only looked at Roman history. But the problem is that the Roman Empire is a bit of an outlier in that regard. Ancient cultures of Central America would be interesting to study there (there were far more than just the Mayas, Inkas and Aztecs, most of them relatively short-lived, hence good case studies for the question of collapse). Unfortunately much less is known about them than about Romans.

I think the educational policies are most interesting to compare. There was systematic attrition of academic talent driven by xenophobic ideologies. It started slowly and well before the 1930's, before it turned into an all-out purge. There was also ideological alignment of academia in multiple ways. The timing might not perfectly line up with what we're discussing now, but it definitely qualifies as within-lifetime, and I think the overall parallels are interesting.

WW2 and it's consequences will be a big part of this.

Consider the Oppenheimer movie. The majority of physicists depicted there are people who left Europe around that time.

It's this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49210165

> Trump has greatly stressed the safeguards in our system, but I don't think that he has broken them.

His sentencing for 34 felonies was voided because the justices he personally appointed to run some of those safeguards decided he should be immune to them. Come on.

> Also, let's not forget that the Trump admin is a problem of 2.5 years at most.

If he invades Greenland, the US not only loses all NATO allies, but may be at actual war (rather than merely trade war) with them; the Asian allies are also getting worried because of how he's interacting with China. This administration is also somehow managing to piss off Israel despite having gone into a war as a co-belligerent with them against Iran, also pissing off all the other American allies in the middle east, and the Iran conflict is currently making people question the benefit of even having the US as an ally in the first place because the US can't keep them safe from Iranian counterstrikes, but even more broadly the US don't seem to be able to keep Iran from charging tolls on Hormuz so everyone else with a similarly strategic strait may be wondering if they can do the same.

The administration also has problems with re-emergence of diseases due to a combination of cutting funding and chaos (e.g. while screwworm may have come back anyway, the government response was suboptimal), and in some cases actively promoting disinformation (e.g. vaccinations). It takes a lot more work to eradicate some disease than to keep it away.

And this is without any of the current, justifiable, concerns that Trump may use ICE or similar to interfere with even this year's elections, let alone the end of his term.

Trump may not kill the US outright in just this term, the ships of state are slow to turn let alone sink, but he may do a Great Leap Forward.

[dead]

I expect things to actually get better by some measures for a little while as the U.S. liquidates its holdings of international political and socioeconomic influence. A sort of short-lived glut from voluntary cannibalization.

There a quite popular narrative saying JFK's murder was a coup, and the US is still couped to this day (voting does not truly matter: the dark budget agencies make the policies anyway, those votes into office simple have to follow suit).

> Did the US? I would argue it’s been going on for 80 years, in tandem with the rise of the military industrial complex.

That's pretty fast, historically.

> But the US was never really an empire in the traditional sense, no?

Sure it was/is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_imperialism