neoliberal deregulation and regulatory capture, not necessarily in that order, has basically killed federal consumer protection in the US.
The American sense (when we get off our butts and do it) is common sense, slowly changing law that always apportions control in equal parts to accountability.
It's the last part that is more galling (because increasingly we've failed) and ultimately will be the more decisive in any future inflection point.
Oppenheimer, Teller, and countless nameless others at NASA and Lockheed and Boeing and DARPA.
The US built the best weapons, spy planes, launch vehicles, satellites, and communications systems, and was willing to take a no-holds-barred approach to geopolitical strategy. This led to a circumstance which it seems was unparalleled in history thus far.
Who else is able to commit such technological progress to being able to command the world order by edict?
China, perhaps, but I don’t see the next TSMC or SpaceX or OpenAI or Google starting there. Technology is the name of the game. (My own personal take is that mass scale reusable rockets is the key strategic piece to geopolitical dominance over the next 50-100 years, with perhaps the ability to effectively integrate AI as an alternate or close second.)
It may be that we never see a monolithic superpower of the same kind again for generations. The post ww2 world order was really very very kind to the USA.
And why do you think it couldn't remain that way? Considering SpaceX, OpenAI, and Google were made far, far closer to today than to WWII, why would the assumption be that the output suddenly stops?
to consider your examples specifically, Musk and Brin were both immigrants to the US, and musk specifically did exactly the type of visa shenanigans that now is landing people in El Salvador
Hard to build high level stuff while the cities are flooding or burning, measles are spreading, the food is becoming toxic, the water is becoming undrinkable, out of control rogue agencies are kidnapping people indiscriminately off the streets, the literacy levels are falling precipitously, and a greater and greater percentage of the population struggles to buy food, much less healthcare or secondary education (or a useful primary education). You simply won’t have the talent pools required to do hard things at scale after a while. This is to say nothing of the complete unpredictability of the economics of supply chains, as incoherent economic policies are arbitrarily whipsawing tariffs around on a monthly basis. It becomes impossible to plan a year in advance.
You need some basic levels of functioning society and infrastructure and economy to build advanced institutions and structures and companies and technology. The US has been attacking its own society’s foundations for decades, and has recently accelerated the pace substantially.
I personally anticipate civil breakdown within a generation, certainly not continued technological innovation.
Europe was destroyed by war, and then occupied by the US and USSR. The US liberated Western Europe and backstopped their independence. The Europeans didn’t choose to be on the American side, they were forced to by circumstance of their own making.
Europeans choose to follow the US. Even recently Sweden joined NATO. If they wanted to develop their own inter-European military alliance, they could have done so but instead joined and alliance where the US calls the shots.
Also since the fall of the Soviet union, the European countries decided to basically gut their military budgets and redirect the money to other things, as seen by the fact that until very recently only a small fraction of the NATO countries actually met their 2% military budget targets.
De Gaulle after the war did not want to join NATO because he understood what that meant, alas his successors all be gave up on the concept of military independence.
It doesn't need to turn the US into some grubby mafia state. It could, but I think it is unlikely. But the road for both the US and the world IMO goes down before it goes up as many systems and alliances around the world that depend on US domination shift or crumble. My 2c.
But don't forget at the same time where China was during the end of the British power, nor Chinese revolutions, nor the state control over the Chinese populace.
Although the US vastly overweights what we think non-US-democracies would do (think Middle East and our meddling there) given the chance for US like freedom, I do not think we're seeing China in the natural so to speak. HK, for example, was not pleased with the "two systems one country" rule the CPP landed on.
Add in the fact that trade can no longer be assumed to be Chinese central, and China is slowly getting dragged into wars through Russia, and China still hasn't tried its mettle with Taiwan. A post invasion China will hit different. It's got internal issues of employment, real estate, have v. have nots ... it's got its hand full.
My guess is that China, like the US is seeing now on stretches, will be the master of its own demise. In the US a major contributing factor to Trump is the fact the US Congress has become an institutional zero especially since Gingrich. That power vacuum has been filled by the Executive branch under Trump. There's more to it of course, but this two-part crisis is an important matter to keep in mind.
China takes its state craft more seriously in some sense, but that seriousness may get it into trouble. And in fact, several articles in the Economist have argued that if China wants to keep 5%+ YOY GDP growth, the CCP will have to take a back seat which is the one thing it will not do. CCP political power is foremost; good economy is damn nice to have to when you can get it -- and the CCP will go after it hard -- but there are limits ...
This and Citizens United.
But besides, with the rightward, populist/religious nut tilt of the US and corporations being able to bribe the President to get what they want without repercussions (Disney, Paramount, Meta, X, etc), I don’t see how the US is much better. All of the branches of government are giving power to the President that should be theirs.
Equilibriums in geopolitics are inherently unstable, states naturally compete for their own self-interest. No state will be willingly co-equal with another unless some actor with greater power forces it into that position.
To your last point, given the state of the US, it would probably be better for the world if the EU were on top at the moment. But they will not be.
The US has given me all sorts of opportunities I wouldn’t have anywhere else in the world as a native born citizens. I plan to extract as much as I can from it and keep my eyes open to retiring somewhere else.
I continuously vote and advocate for policies like universal healthcare, pre-K education, etc. But what are you going to do when voters vote for politicians thst ars against their own interests - getting rid of FEMA when the states that need it the most are Republican, Medicaid, etc.
This isn’t a pie in the sky shrill “I’m leaving the US tomorrow”. But my wife and I already did the digital nomad thing domestically for a year starting in late 2022 and going forward starting next year, we are going to be spending more time out of the country in US time zones while I work remotely starting with Costa Rica.
This both-sides stuff gets me, man. Our history is by and large very right wing and every time there's a flutter of left leaning ideas, people chalk it up to some far-left political success and therefore the far right backlash is deserved, as if things ever actually went left in the first place.
Overshooting right has us building concentration camps.
The middle ground is far, far preferred. Instiutional competency is much preferred. Course correction is preferred. Equal justice under law is preferred.
But as I say under the political noise is a larger problem: failure to balance control with accountability. Congress isn't checking Trump in any substantive way. The DOJ probably took too long to prosecute Trump. And on the right the housing crisis booked no jail time after a run of deregulation. Failure to respect due process or judges orders is another problem on the right. Forget outrage: where are the real world consequences?
Congress time and time again is directly implicated in many of these issues. If Congress was doing its job instead of pretty boys shadow boxing twaddle wedge issues for complex problems on TV, there'd be less of a power vacuum that Trump ultimately filled.
I think one would have to be nieve in thinking the left did not play a major part in its own demise 2016 and 2024.
Everyone agreed with the spirit of the rule, even the two republican appointees who voted against it.
They voted against it because the FTC cheated and broke their own rule making process, they believed it would be struck down by the courts because of this.
They were right. The courts sympathized with the rule, but held that the FTC cheated it's process, and that if left unchecked it could create a tyrannical FTC issuing rules at their whim, ignoring the true economic impact of their rule.
All this court ruling said is that the FTC needs to follow the law and their own defined process for rule making.
They are free to implement this rule, they just need to do it the right way.
While we may not be happy with the short term effect, this was a good ruling. The FTC will go back and do this properly, and hopefully next time will follow the law when making rules.
Regulatory capture I have seen too often e.g. net neutrality getting killed by a Verizon cronie masquerading as a public servant in the FCC. However, from my perspective, it's been mostly conservative powers undoing consumer protections. Unless you mean liberalism in the more European sense, in which case I agree.