What has already been said, coupled with the fact that starting with Reagan, a war upon decency and the value of the commons has been waged, quite successfully. Reagan started it all with his Welfare Queen nonsense. Bill Clinton ended "Welfare as we know it" throwing millions of people, mostly children, into dire poverty. Military expenses have steadily spiraled upward, while spending on public education continually goes down. Worse yet, on the education front, far too many students are bamboozled into borrowing huge sums of money for college degrees that will never lead to decent jobs, locking them in a prison of student debt for much, if not all of their lives.
Think about Japan and Germany and what WWII wrought upon each. The only reason they recovered and became prosperous was that each country had its wartime leadership replaced, and they got to start from scratch for everything, especially including their industrial infrastructure, which was destroyed in the war. I'm not a sufficient student of either country's history to offer a date by which either one could be considered to have fully recovered. But I remember clearly that into the 1970's "Made in Japan" was shorthand for cheap and shoddy.
Here's another example I like to offer: In the 16th century Spain was a world power. It had lots of colonies around the world and was quite rich. Around the time of the Armada in 1588, its failed attempt to invade England, it made two crucial decisions: not to tax the rich, only the poor, and to keep its military spending at a high level. Thus started its decline from the world stage, and even almost 450 years on, it's still a backwater. Now, I'm sure these days Spain is a lovely country to visit or live in, but it stopped being a world power a very long time ago.
So with this country. The decision to cut the taxes of the rich and maintain increased military spending, those two things alone guarantee that this country will fade from the world scene. I've been aware of this for a couple of decades by now. It's just that our decline hasn't been obvious until quite recently.
Donald Trump is accelerating our decline, but he's not the only cause. What he is pretty much the only cause of is our becoming a laughing-stock on the world stage.
If we are extremely lucky, we'll take back the House and maybe the Senate this November. No doubt Kavanaugh will have been confirmed to the Supreme Court by then. Which means for the next 30 years there will be dreadful Supreme Court decisions which will continue to cut away much of what is decent and good. But then, if we're incredibly lucky, some amazing Democrat will rise in the next year or so and win the Presidency in 2020, along with an even larger number of Democrats in the House and Senate. Taxes will be reimposed on the rich. The safety net will be increased, along with Medicare for all or something similar. The infrastructure will start being repaired and strengthened. Military spending will start decreasing. And so on. But I have zero confidence that it will happen this way. Instead, even if we do well this fall, even if a Democrat becomes President in 2020, we'll simply muddle along, falling deeper and deeper into debt, both personally and governmentally. Even if we continue to be invited to the various summits, we'll be ignored, even if future Presidents aren't insulting other world leaders and their countries. In short, the damage has been done and it's essentially irreparable.
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