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No they won't. Choose the decline of different empire. You may be right that Kamala Harris presidency may be the beginning of the end of US, but it is not because she was chosen as a nominee by the democratic politburo.
I don't think that you fundamentally understand the challenges in front of the Eastern bloc and USSR. If the Soviet Union had figured out how to make a washing machine, color tv and a car as cheap, affordable and abundant as the west, we would have been communist. (But we did make damn fine hand mixer - nothing the world has ever produced can compare to the RG28 - this thing is immortal and the best piece of consumer good in its class ever created). Because that was people wanted - the standard of living the western Germans had - nothing more nothing less. Because communist didn't allow failure of state enterprise there was no feedback to push them to be better. And because all enterprise were state there was no innovation at all. So the soviet union fell behind technologically (not scientifically, we just couldn't convert science into consumer technology). And with this technology fail came diplomatic isolation.
The US have strong economy and it's biggest potential problem - the debt is not really a problem. They can just refuse to pay. Here is prediction what will happen - one party will cut SS, medicaid and medicare, the other will come to power from the backlash and fiddle their thumbs to do nothing because the math will still not work. Or they may start putting printed money into the programs and cause inflation that will dwindle the external debt away. In 10 years people will grudgingly accept it.
The other problem is that if Xi doesn't wreck china's economy (on the fence, but probably will, he has some soviet vibes) he offers a very alluring model for the authoritarians - democracy is optional as long as you make sure that people can buy a car, washing machine and color tv. And top it with AI powered surveillance state. A carrot and stick - forever. I think that O'Brien would find it amusing how this strain of Angsoc works. Which will lead to waning US influence - or turn US towards authoritarianism - it is not as if the culture war has not eroded people's beliefs in the democratic system. Everyone wants to be on top and impose their values on the others right now.
The problem with the United States is that it’s very interested in imposing all of the shitty and mean parts of authoritarianism without the parts that make the trains run on time.
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This. The Soviet Union fell because the Brezhnev generation of CPSU leadership (Andropov and Chernenko were not significantly younger than Brezhnev) was not able to recruit and develop a next generation of leaders who believed in the system to the extent that they were willing to fight to maintain it. (I don't know how long Gorbachev could have stayed in power if he was willing to be as brutal as Brezhnev, but ultimately the reason why the Soviet Union fell was that he didn't try, and Yeltsin, who was the other pre-eminent CPSU leader of his generation, actively sabotaged it when someone else did (in the 1991 coup).
And the secret weapon, the mind control ray that turned Yeltsin into the double agent who would end the Cold War with a crushing NATO victory, was a supermarket.
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This assumes that authoritarian societies will be able to match open societies in harnessing new technologies and making them available to the public. A key thesis of Acemoglu & Robinson in Why Nations Fail is that authoritarians are bad at this because vested interests prevent disruptive innovations and markets from coming into being. Xi's reluctance to facilitate greater consumer spending on goods like healthcare in China is not a good sign for China in this regard. While the CCP have done a brilliant job of incorporating the technological stack of the West, it's less clear they'll be willing to tolerate new products if they create threats to harmony.
Until there are no open societies, at which point it doesn't matter, and was 1984's premise.
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I’m not sure that non-western authoritarian societies need quite western tier standards of living- China isn’t as prosperous as South Korea, but it’s still much more prosperous than China was, and most of the low hanging fruit is there. People care a lot more about the difference between the third world and the second than between the second and first, and even less about the difference between upper first world places like the US and lower tier ones like southern Europe. Washing machines, climate control, and meat every day count for more than tv sizes due to diminishing returns.
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Healthcare is unsolved problem in all of the world right now. I don't think that there exist a system in the world that is affordable, immune to brain drain, sustainable and high quality. So there doesn't seem to be obviously wrong policies there. His management of real estate and banking sector is probably more worrying.
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