The USA is just a Franco-British colony, or a French colony, squared. Made independent by France from Britain, while England was already France’s own Middle Age fabrication. Asking only the US, a very recent contraption, how its degeneracy into wokeness and stupidity is going… does not bring enough historical depth.
As the US is a cultural extension of France, squared, one should ask French history. France was long the most populous and powerful European nation, and basically built Europe, creating as states, Germany, England, Hungary and Sicily, among others, initially included in various Frankish empires.
Did France sometimes mentally degenerate in the past? Yes. Absolutely. The main degeneracy was the rebirth of the Catholic Inquisition, starting in 1026 CE, with burning heretics at the stake, after a hiatus of five centuries imposed by the takeover of the Romanized Franks who had resisted Catholicism for two centuries… although they had helped initially their ally Constantine to impose it..
That mental degeneracy into religious correctness of the rabid type, relaunched in 1026 CE, brought, inter alia, the Crusades which, the way they were conducted, were disastrous, the holocaust of the Cathars, and then the seven (7) religious wars at the end of the 16C. A century later the lunatic sun-king threw the Protestants out of France…10% of the population, rightfully full of anger, feeding wars for centuries to come.
Similarly, the decline of the Roman empire was NOT economical. It was mostly a MENTAL DECLINE … which in its terminal acts brought military catastrophes. And that’s worse, and harder to correct. In turn everything collapsed, including demography up to, or even beyond… 90%….
There too the mental decline reached new heights by the invention and imposition of Roman Catholicism (a forerunner of Islam)… It became outright terror by January 381, when the tyrant Theodosius invented the concept of “heretic”, calling them insane, and declared the state would punish heretics in whatever way caught its fancy (slap on the wrist for dear friends, or certainly expropriation, or perhaps torture to death, for people the state didn’t like, etc.)
Fascist monotheism from a jealous, erratic and self-contradictory god extolling cruel irrationality, has been the metaphysics which has kept on giving to plutocrats, justifying their way of life, and enabling them to throw those they exploit into stupor. Hence the historical success of Judeo-Christo-Islamism as a slave religion.
There is a further subtlety: Evil doers may exploit whatever: they always will.
But by not innovating enough,we build an evil context which is the ideal environment for evil doers to up their game. Now fascist, irrational metaphysics kills the motivation for innovation, thus rendering civilization more unsustainable, bringing an evil context which can then exponentiate, a perfect home for cannibalizing plutocracy to thrive in.
And now? The sudden worshiping of the Wahhabist and Shia interpretations of Islam, imposed from above, is a development reminiscent of 1026 CE. Being anti-Catholic was a French tradition for millennia: entire villages converted to Judaism in the 8C; just read the Fabliaux, where priests are represented as ludicrous lubricious murderous monsters deserving the worst tortures… The violations of human rights by these particular interpretations of godism are extensive, yet, to criticize them is viewed as… racism by hordes of raging idiots, culturally challenged.

Temple of Athena at Paestum in Italy (initially the Greek colony of Poseidonia), 25 centuries old. One of several large temples there (and not the largest at all). The cult of wisdom (Athena) was replaced by the slave religion of turning the other cheek until one can finish one’s days nailed on a cross… And that was a promotion1… The masters said, chuckling, while embracing for themselves a super predatory morality (Nietzsche, following Sade, himself following millenial old French intellectual traditions, pointed that out)
The fundamental cause of mental degeneracy is plutocratic stupidification: making people so stupid that they can be exploited by evil masters. So the rise of hyper wealthy masters leads to mental degeneracy. Thus the way to avoid mental collapse is to avoid exaggerated wealth disparity…. wealth and, or POWER disparity. Hence the sort of obvious conspiracy like the World Economic Forum (“Davos”) are exactly what has to be rejected firmly.
Not suffering oligarchy, and a fortiori its acute phase, plutocracy, is a matter of mind, not just equity and tyranny avoided.
Patrice Ayme