Actually, that's reassuring. Virtually everyone agrees we are in a state of decline right now.

Strongly disagree we’re (the US) in decline at all.

If you think we are, you’d have to agree that the EU is post-decline. The UK, France (the list goes on) are all countries that are past their peak of power, influence and prestige.

But I would argue those EU countries haven’t declined in a negative sense. They’ve just evolved into something other than a global superpower.

Strongly, why? The us is declining in lifespan, people's happiness, education, govt and this was all before covid. Cv19 failures have revealed the problems more than ever.

Europe has some issues too but they don't have the same systemic failures we have. Also, Europe can be independently successful or failing from the us.

France is not past their peak of power unless you count centuries old empires. UK and Germany sure, neither of them have any strong foreign policies and especially the UK isolated itself by their own decision.

France in comparison is building alliances in the Mediterranean, the Middle East and Africa. I believe they have a lot of growth in their future. They are far form done and very much realpolitik and with expansion in mind( plus one of the few countries that still holds colonies across the world).

the EU is the white dwarf of human societies

Covid aside, which is self inflicted, I highly disagree.

Funny, I agree with him because of things like Covid being self-inflicted. We're so unable, as a species, to avoid even known risks (yes, we've known about the risk of new Coronaviruses since SARS), prepare for them, or deal with them when they've actually occurred. Even now, a not insignificant part of the US population thinks Covid is a hoax. Or that climate change is a hoax. We're reaching a point where catastrophic failure is just a stone's throw away, and we're already seeing the system buckle (rise of the Republican's hold over Congress, the rise of Trump, the rise of far right activists across Europe, growing environmental issues causing things like surges of refugees and civil war, unrest across the globe, etc.). It's only going to get worse from here as problems go unsolved and people's suffering grows.

You may want to refresh your knowledge of American history. All those things you flag have always existed. It’s no different now.

History tends to get highly filtered and very little attention is paid to the incredibly bumpy road those times represent.

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Respectfully, politicians you don't like gaining power isn't evidence of the system buckling.

The other issues aren't exactly unconcerning, but I think we have to acknowledge that this is a quite peaceful time. For most of history, what we call "unrest" was the status quo, and there were in addition wars of open territorial conquest which are nearly extinct today.

If you believe:

- Continued urbanization is essential to growth as we know it

- Non-urban voters are less attuned to what cities need to grow

Then regardless of political ideology, our disticts + FPTP method of growing makes non-negligible growth of the real economy very difficult.

Do you have any references for these letters ? It would be very interesting to read through them.

That's really interesting. Do you know if this cluelessness extended beyond the military elites?