America, The New India
I’ve been asked, in the aftermath of my previous post on America’s fall from world superpower status, what I think our future is for the rest of this century and the next.
I think we’re going to be the new India.
Now, this is not a bad thing. Sure, a lot of white people are going to be upset at our drop in power and prestige but, hey, truth be told, you voted for him, you threw away 120 years of hard earned superpower status. This is the world we told you we’d inherit, so don’t feign surprise that your arrogant ignorance whipped around to bite us on the ass.
Like India, we will remain a regional power, a regional player. Our bailiwick will be North America down to Central America, with some residual influence extending into South America.
Canada will be vying for power status against us, and even Mexico will feel its oats, but like India in their corner of the world, we will be the dominant local power.
Our military will be reduced greatly: Since our force projection will no longer be acceptable in much of the world, we will not need -- much less be able to afford -- our current massive military. Like India, we’ll still be packing nukes but once removed from superpower status we really don’t need a lot of overkill, just enough to guarantee no major attack on our mainland.
This is a good news / bad news scenario: Millions will be thrown out of work as our military declines; conversely more resources will be available for our citizens…presuming the 1% doesn’t snatch it all up first.
Our influence in the world will be greatly diminished but will not vanish. American pop culture -- music and movies in particular -- will still circle the globe…but they’ll no longer be the dominant art form.
This will be a good thing, even for us: It will finally force us to look at what other cultures do if for no reason other than to better compete with them.
We can expect a significant brain drain from our shores (Canada is already recruiting our best and brightest, ditto Australia and New Zealand). We, in turn, will need more educated immigrants to maintain our infrastructure and standard of living, so the xenophobes amongst us are in for a rough century.
Speaking of nativist xenophobes, another couple of similarities to India will be our de facto caste system, our primitive religious beliefs and superstitions, and our largely undereducated and virtually irredeemable underclass.
I’m talkin’ ‘bout white folks, of course. The bulk of whites have hidden behind their ignorance and refused to wise up, to acknowledge the changes rushing at them headlong; non-whites, on the other hand, is “woke” as they are wont to say and will be benefitting from this demographic / socio-political shift.
On the one hand, this is terrible: Millions of people are going to be born into a society that is engineered against them and that is a genuine tragedy. On the other hand, they and their parents and their grandparents and their great-grandparents and all their other ancestors repeatedly embraced policies that virtually guaranteed this outcome, so let ‘em learn the hard way; it isn’t as if they weren’t warned repeatedly about this.
Because of this big drag & drain of poorly educated / arrogantly ignorant people, America will be held at arm’s length by the rest of the world.
The Americans and those aspects of our culture that will be accepted around the world will be those people and parts that are least “American” i.e., less arrogant, less ignorant, less jingoistic.
“Make America Great Again” is actually going to mean condemning our country, or at least the flyover portion of it, to irrelevance.
Like India, we will maintain a certain degree of scientific prowess, both in space and in nuclear weaponry. And we will continue to contribute to world progress.
But it’s pretty clear China and mainland Europe are going to be the dominant forces in the world of the 21st and 22nd centuries, and they both have a lot more experience, a lot more sophistication, and a lot more success in running empires than we ever hoped to garner.
So, like India, we will be tolerated at the table but nowhere near the head, and we’ll be allowed to contribute a bit here and there in our own unique way, but the American Era has ended.
For good.
© Buzz Dixon
