Historians will debate when America derailed and why. They may be interested in the perspectives of an everyday generic citizen. Well, future historian, here you are.
TLDR;
- when: 1998 America started to derail. The Republic collapsed in 2024.
- why: too much too fast
Longer version
I pick 1998 because that's when America stopped making sense. Tech stock valuations were growing with the dot-com bubble, and the finance industry was taking off. Globalization and the rise of China and India was in full swing.
After 1998 America got wealthier, but manufacturing moved away. The historic "middle class" of home ownership, stable employment, vacations, benefits, started to require a college degree or small business ownership. Work favored by non-college men was less available. The post WW II collapse of rural America accelerated. Technological change and the cognitive demands of increasingly essential technology grew quickly. The average person no longer understood their telephone. From 2000 to 2010 America had rapidly growing IT powered fraud and scams (Enron was just one example), 9/11, the catastrophic invasion of Iraq, and the Great Recession of 2008.
Since 2006 or so, I've written about these themes as mass disability, the Rise of China and India, complexity, proliferating fraud exploiting vulnerable adults, the Left Behind, and the problem of disequilibria (too much too fast),
Today, in May 2025, as I look over the train wreck of the first American Republic, I think all of the above played a role. Most of all globalization and IT, but even more fundamentally too much change too quickly. There is a speed limit to how quickly humans and human societies can adapt to change, how quickly our train can take the bends and turns. When the limit is hit the train derails. Then we hope there's a period of slower change while we try to put the pieces back together.
