Debate:Where is the USA going in the longer term?

Elaborating the question
To begin with, which features of US culture really stand out? The pop-culture influx I grew up with here in Sweden has it that the US is a place of several things in a very weird mixture, including prominently: That's relative to Europe and "the Western world" in general. But in those terms, much of what's seemed to change over the years in my shorter personal view is just in the intensities and proportions. I'm thinking more of longer-term developments than shorter ones. The most significant political development in the last few years is still, I think, that the current overall trajectory of change was softened (perhaps greatly) with Trump's 2020 defeat.
 * Science and progress
 * Melodramatic politics
 * An extra dose of senseless violence juxtaposed with a general obsession with guns
 * Religious craziness

Sometime in mid-2020, I read the opinion of a Danish operating system developer on how the USA used to be a beacon for the hope and promise of science and technology back in the 1960s and for some time on. And then... He wondered, "What happened?", a still-relevant question which I didn't see get any good answer.

Between the 60s and now, Polish clinical psychologist Andrew Lobaczewski in his book described his impression of American society and culture in the 1980s while he lived and worked there. He compared it with what he knew of hysterical times in Europe around the beginning of the 20th century, and also the greater general psychological maturity in Europe post-WWII even in the midst of the remaining horrors in some countries. One of his main impressions was that by the 80s in American culture, there had formed "a mania for taking offense", reminiscent of the era of the dueling craze in Europe much earlier. He also perceived a decline in American intellectual and meritocratic culture, its corporate world mostly "a united front of mediocrity", in which the best talent and potential for actually accomplishing things (rather than everything just revolving around marketing and money) goes to waste. I think he'd have found the current era more extreme in both ways.

On the current times, I've mused on QAnon and Trumpism and related matters. This is not very original, but it's struck me that currently, still, a large minority of the USA's population is essentially striving to transform society into some kind of Christian version of Saudi Arabia (in which crazed evangelical fire-and-brimstone teaching mixed with heavy-duty conspiracism becomes the theocratic foundation and political oligarchs end up in a role similar to ruling royal families). Some of the formerly ostensibly staunchly truth- and freedom-promoting "alternative" crowds, which used to be firmly anti-Establishment, have tied themselves very firmly to Establishment politics, either embracing neoreactionary ideology outright or (in much larger numbers) becoming "useful idiots" for such causes and so furthering the derailing of Establishment politics.

Anyway, societies are messy and history is a roller-coaster. "Happy times" are, according to Lobaczewski, times in which the most well-off have the strongest cultural influence and people become more and more hysterical as they soak up Orwellian distortions of thought – not through great oppression, but rather as part of a generalized culture of shoving uncomfortable things under the rug, including the ways in which many have it good at the cost of others (including others elsewhere in the world). This gradually makes people so blind to psychological reality, so unrealistic, that they end up embracing the influences leading to truly "bad times", until they all go through hell and become wiser in the process, leading again to "good times"... whether those come decades or centuries later. Do you think there's hope for skipping the bad part of such a cycle for the USA, and if not, how bad is it likely to get?

Which features of the whole American mess are coming and which are going? Which ones are actually rather stable and long-term, whether they seem so or not based on prominent media coverage? What types of turn of event are likely to greatly change the big picture of what ends up happening? What part does normal politics actually play in what brings bigger social and cultural change (I think most political debate is about less-relevant detail-wrangling)? --ApooftGnegiol (talk) 14:29, 4 November 2021 (UTC)