The US has been through periods like (and much worse) in the last 60 years:
- 60's race riots across most major cities that resulted in the deaths of hundreds & Vietnam War where every opinion article lamented about "America's global leadership is over"
- Watergate where a sitting president was forced from office due to truly breathtaking corruption and law breaking
- The 80's when Japan was on the rise and people talked about the US falling behind and no longer being a major economic player (I remember people smashing Japan electronics on the Whitehouse lawn)
- Gulf War, LA Riots, Clinton scandals, pre-9/11 terror attacks in the 90's
- In the 2000's, 9/11, the financial crisis (aka "The End of Capitalism")
It's always been like this.
America will be fine.
The widespread idea that somehow Modernity is a new, tabula rasa (blank slate) epoch in which the old rules and realities don't apply anymore.
“This time it’s different” comes up again and again (tech bubble, housing bubble) and it turns out, no, it’s not different.
The latest is MMT, in which people say “you can print as much money as you want without fears of inflation because this time it’s different”. And maybe it is? But there is a good chance that, no, it’s not different this time.
Also, pretty sure MMT knows that printing money leads to inflation. Thats why the theory has taxes to remove money as well, if you want to tax someone other then those who hold capital evenly (which is inflation).
You could argue that it means that we aren't sufficently historically literate but I don't see how it stands out as worse given ample precedent.
Current domestic issues have nothing to do with the Civil War. There is no state-like military complex ready to secede. There is no geographic division that lends itself to secession. Etc. etc. The only reason this is invoked is because it's the only meme that most people are aware of, not because it's even remotely accurate. Even something like the 90s Balkan Wars is so far from the contemporary American situation, it's absurd to compare it.
The only thing that's truly new is the media's profit motive for creating a perception of chaos.
Of course, the fact that things have worked out in the past doesn't mean they will always work out in the future. But people who compare contemporary America to the Fall of the Roman Empire or the American Civil War really don't know much about either.
- Immediately after a massively destructive war that affected all levels of society
- Populace of young men with PTSD and military experience
- Little/no social safety nets
- No history of democracy - remember that prior to Weimar, Germany was governed by Prussia and basically had no democratic traditions
IMO the real actual historical comparison to use in 2020 is the Printing Press and Protestant Reformation; i.e. established power structure (the Catholic Church) dealing with new information-propagation technologies and factions. I'd bet that 2050 is going to look a lot like 1550.
Take the Vietnam War for example - what’s taught in school is the Domino theory, support for a corrupt Southern government, quagmire, withdrawal and fall of the South. But, if you read through a bit of the Pentagon Papers you pretty quickly get a sense of how nuanced it was and how it wasn’t a single decision to support South Vietnam, it was a complex web of global geopolitics with messy arguments, fears, overconfidence, “fake news”, etc. And the people making those decisions were not dumb, in fact, they were pretty damn smart and considered a lot of different options and the risks that went with them. It just didn’t turn out how they thought it would.
And then it dawns on you just how much history is repeated over and over. Sure it’s a little different each time (and those small differences have a big impact), but the same types of things happen again and again.