Part of America's global hegemony has been based on its military and economic strength. This remains largely intact.

But a huge part was based on a narrative image of the US that was portrayed to the world. That image has now eroded to a vanishing point.

While not entirely comparable to the Soviet Union, there are parallels. The Soviet Union was an industrial powerhouse with arguably the greatest military.

But its time as a true superpower was pretty much over once the myth of its revolution was exposed.

We forget how powerful the grip of Marxist ideas was on huge swathes of the world, and how much the Soviet Union benefited from the image of itself as the embodiment of the 'working class ideal'.

When all but the most brainwashed leftists started to see it for what it was, a failed revolutionary regime which held power only through terror and a contradictory appeal to domestic facts it had sworn to eradicate, it lost the power of an ideological state.

It was then just a poorly managed behemoth.

People often say that America's strength lies in it being a 'proposition nation', and we deride this despite it being essentially true. America's superpower status was in large part dependent on NOT being a true nation.

This allowed it to grow large and excuse its imperialism in ways that didn't often require naked force, as the imperialism of kings almost always had.

What we neglect to mention is that the Soviet Union was also a proposition nation, just with a different proposition.

The Founding myth of America is itself just as mythological, just as quasi-theological, as the myths of the Soviet Union. It's a hard truth, but the US was built on just as many lies as its old eastern foe.

To this day, Americans revel in hallucinatory fictions about the constitutional origins of their country which are if anything more outlandish than the bullshit Soviet children were taught about Tsarist Russia. Is it really so surprising you see your own Pavlik Morozovs today?

But the illusions eventually end, and often in a more traumatic way than do reigning dynasties or even national bloodlines.

Nobody believes in America's fairy tale anymore, least of all its own citizens. Increasingly it is exposed as a naked oligarchy of economic parasites.

What does this mean for the future? For the Soviet Union, it meant that reliance moved entirely to its military and economic reach. The problem is, if your citizens' lives only get worse, if their founding myth is no longer any motivation, you will inevitably watch these decay.

Innovators will continue to innovate, but the pencil-pushers will stop giving a crap and take no pride in their work. It will be hard to quantify, but slowly you will find that everything is of a lesser quality with corners cut at every turn.

The global elite have an interest in keeping the US afloat, and in this sense it has more going for it than the Soviet Union did, but I think we're soon going to see just how much they needed to dupe Americans (and the world) about the United States.

Our future will be violent and unpleasant, for all of us. Make peace with that now. You won't have the life your parents had, because we no longer live in the annex of America's fantasy condo; where free speech, free markets, liberal democracy, and all that shit actually work.

You will likely never have job security, and certainly not financial security into old age. Crime will be normal, and celebrated depending on the perpetrator. You will be penalized for noticing even the slightest thing wrong with the increasingly insecure regime.

The meme: "you will live in a pod, you will eat the bugs" will not be a meme, but a potential future, the merits of which will be touted by Pinker and similar scum.

We stand at the end of an era. Time to pick a side. There is no turning back.