It is not a question of if it will happen...just when. My bet is within a couple decades at most. These things seem to happen quick once it starts...

The fall of the Roman Empire was predicted for over a thousand years (If you buy conception in the late 8th century BC)

Did it fall in 44 BC? Did it fall in the fifth century AD?

Some argue Christianity killed it. ahahahahah

I do not want an empire anyway.

God was revealed to man with an admonition not to try to become like Gods or we would perish. So people took the word of God, twisted it into a pretzel and did exactly what we were told not to do in the name of it.

And it starts in the Marble Halls in Washington. This is just an opinion, but I see a future portending little more than ineffective government. Though there's been political corruption since the dawn of man, the stakes seemed to be raised exponentially during the GW Bush years. As a Neo-Conservative, his cohorts fell on the political spectrum somewhere outside of the "center-right" position of his father (and even Ronald Reagan).

Most of the people on TPM won't like this, but Obama is absolutely as far to the left on that spectrum as GW was to the right. He's somewhere outside of the "center-left" position of Bill Clinton and JFK (I deliberately refrain from including LBJ into this category).

Just as the Neo-Con hijacked White House (and mostly subservient GOP controlled congress) went out of its way to not work with the Democrats, the current administration (and mostly subservient Democratic controlled congress) is going out of its way to not work with the Republicans (again, no matter how earnest Obama and the Dems are that they welcome GOP participation in the political process, do you really think Harry Reid and/or Nancy Pelosi would relinquish their long awaited day in the sun to work with the hated other party?).

The health care debate is hugely important for 2 reasons. First is the obvious notion that reform in that arena is desperately needed. We can all agree on that so there's no reason to even waste any time on why.

But the second reason is more ambiguous but perhaps even more important long term. If, for instance, Max Baucus cannot find a compromise with the GOP on his bill and the Democrats fulfill their pledge of moving forward without GOP involvement, a potentially disastrous precedent would thus be set. This would be, by far, the biggest piece of partisan legislation to ever be passed into law. Even though the Bush administration was hostile to Democrats, they never came close to passing any piece of legislation that even comes close to this in either size or scope. The privatization of Social Security was about as close as they came, but that fizzled from within from the very beginning.

When the day comes when the GOP regains power in Washington (and that day will come because the GOP is far from dead no matter how badly most of you want it), I would think the next administration and/or congress would be somewhere to the right of where GW Bush was. Not Neo-Conservatism, per se, but some other form of base conservatism. The Glenn Beck's and Rush's of the world will not let those people forget how the Obama Democrats excluded them from the health care reforms and will impose upon them an agenda of conservative aims (most of which would fall well outside of what most in "Mainstream" America would want or support). To make matters worse, there would be a mandate by these "opinion leaders" that said aims will be passed into law with or without support or involvement from the Democrats, so on and so forth.

It'll become a pissing contest. The days of the moderate will be no more and we'll be left with 2 parties that drift further and further to the right or left. Not altogether unlike what Europe has seen in the past. Remember song Won't Get Fooled Again by The Who? I'll never forget when my history teacher played that song and paid special mind to the lyric, "parting on the left is now the parting on the right and the beards have all grown longer overnight..."

I completely agree that a distinction needs to be made between what's happening culturally and what's happening politically. Hell, a vast majority of people that I talk to on a daily basis have absolutely no desire to talk politics because they are either ignorant of most issues or simply do not care.

I'm not how a fundamental force change could come about from a cultural standpoint. The attacks of 9/11 seemed to make such a paradigm shift possible, but in a society of consumption that fervor dissipated very quickly. Granted, disillusionment at the abuses of the Bush administration certainly didn't help anything either, and in fact may have hurt any chance at social change.

Makes you wonder how massive a disaster would have to be to truly get people's attention?

Re Health Care Reform. The most frustrating aspect is that it's not that we can't do it, it's that we won't do it. We won't take care of our own citizens because it's more important to funnel outrageous amounts of money to insurance companies.

Re the end of empire. It's not just the United States at fault, it's Western Culture. An interesting and entertaining book on how things came to be this way is "Ishmael" by Daniel Quinn. Our cultural paradigm is clearly unsustainable. We know it. And still we won't do anything about it. There will come a "tipping point", if it hasn't happened already. Global population probably needs to be reduced by 50%, or more. Survival will replace growth as the goal.

And I think both issues beg moral solutions. Are we participants in the community of life or simply profiteers looking to take as much as we can before it benefits someone else? Unfortunately, I think I know the answer.

The reason the Roman Empire fell were myriad. Frankly the empire buckled when Augustus passed without a clear succession or electoral reform. The rest is a consequence of this essential inertia.

And Clearthinker is right: whenever the energy necessary to sustain a civilization overruns its capacity, the civilization recedes, fractures or collapses depending on size. But we are now at a point where certain resources are limited worldwide... so what applied to a single civilization can now spread endemically.

Which means all bets are off.

To say that an empire will collapse based on moral issues just doesn't wash. Lord knows how immoral our nation has been to ourselves and others throughout its history. The moral issue of universal health care pales in comparison to slavery, Indian displacement and genocide, and "containment."

In my opinion, there is simply too much compartmenalization in our current culture to allow the realization of how far we are down the path of exhaustion. For every one individual who states the facts, there are several dozen who ignore them because the price is too high for them to pay. This health care debate is a microcosm of that dysfunction.

We need to retool green and at least somewhat sustainable as soon as possible to at least buy a little time for deeper integral solutions.

Political ineffectiveness is definitely one of the reasons for our decline.

As has been alluded to on this thread, one major danger sign that Americans should acknowledge is the fact that members of government let agenda and special interest interfere with doing what's right.

I laugh when people who are not particularly interested in politics make comments like, "those bums in Washington don't know what they're doing."

There is irony to a statement like that. First and foremost, most of the elected members of Congress are not stupid (emphasis on 'most'). But when they KNOW what the right solution to a given problem is and, through various other interests, choose to not take the necessary action, the people of this country lose. The irony comes into play because these politicians understand the game they're playing, but perhaps truly don't know what they're doing in terms of long term consequences.

Health care reform, for example, actually isn't as complicated as a lot of people make it sound, it's just a matter of ecenomics. It's almost like the debate in college football about the Bowl system versus a playoff format. Everyone and their dead grandfather wants a playoff, but the gray headed suits who run the show are afraid that somehow, some way, they'll lose their financial cushion (even though more money would almost certainly be made in a playoff format because there are more games).

And so it is with health care. Insurance companies are afraid their profit margins will be affected even though there will be millions of NEW participants.

In a nutshell, when the leaders of this country all know inside their head what needs to be done and yet fail to do it for various reasons ($$$), the system is ineffective and nothing good can come of it.