America’s decline is self inflicted

Some people often say that America is in decline. They hold that powerful enemies are conspiring against it. That immigrants are invading the country and changing it from within. They hold that Americans need to fight back and protect themselves from their enemies.

I also think that America is in danger, but I have a different reason for it: the fact that almost nobody cares about the values that are worth to be protected. By ignoring the values at stake, they are losing them by default.

For too long, Americans have lost their ability to love what this country is truly about. They have lost their willingness to protect liberty. This is a problem rooted in the nation’s philosophical flaws at its very conception, and how it chose to educate its young. However, exploring this fully would require offering a deeper analysis, considering history and philosophy.

But deep analysis is not the intent here. The intent is simply to offer evidence that America is losing itself because people at large no longer believe in its original American political ideals.

I start that justifying my claim by looking closely to what is offered by Trumpists and progressives alike. Trump wants to win elections. Progressives want to win too. To do so, they are offering Anti‑American collectivism. They offer either fascism or socialism. They offer them because doing so seems to be a winning strategy - people want collectivism and centralization of political power.

The latest economic policies of Trump are enough to send chills down the spine of anyone who cares about free markets—and therefore liberty, and therefore America.

They are the very policies many progressives love: immediate, demagogic measures designed to please ignorant masses while hiding awful long‑term consequences—centralization of power in government, confusion among economic agents, depressed investment, and economic decline. The same type of measures that wreak havoc in third‑world countries that attempt to let a central authority dictate how the economy should function.

Even CNN admitted that Trump is acting similarly to socialist progressives (see here) perhaps in an attempt to push Republicans who still care about capitalism to start looking elsewhere to save what remains of freedom in America.

But those who care about fundamental American ideals knew this all along. Trump is a collectivist, anti‑American figure—just like socialist progressives. He offers for America what Mandami offers for New York.

For too long, Americans have lost their ability to think about politics in the long term. All they cared about was preventing the people they feared most from gaining power. Most of them voted for whatever garbage was offered, simply to avoid the worst. Most did not vote considering values worth protecting. Trump election was no different.

Americans lost their ability to identify political values. They became unprincipled pragmatists chasing immediate political gains while abandoning the values worth protecting—like liberty, like the America that was originally meant to exist.

Maybe there will come a moment when power‑hungry pragmatists, or simply non-ideological apathetic center—left and right alike—realize that while they were scrambling with compromises for short‑term power, they were losing an entire future for their children and grandchildren. They were losing the country their forefathers left them.

But when that moment comes, they will have no idea what happened to America. It became something it never was—something unrecognizable even to them.

Those who care about America for what it truly is knew this all along. But almost nobody listened, because they thought that fighting for political values that they could rationally justify was a waste of time.

When America becomes what was never intended to be, those who cared will simply say to those who ignored them: “You asked for it.”

But I still hope good ideas prevail somehow.