End of Empire ...

Thomas Cole -  The Consummation: The Course of the Empire 1836

Empires, at their zenith, present themselves to the world in grand fashion as seen in the Thomas Cole painting depicting why this is so but this illusion doesn't last forever ...

The look of the painting suggests the height of Ancient Rome. The decadence seen in every detail of this cityscape foreshadows the inevitable fall of this mighty civilization.

With this in mind, channel 2021 and the state of America with yet another Cole work.

Destruction. Oil on canvas, 1836, ​39 1⁄2 × ​63 1⁄2 in.[11]

The inevitable decline starts with inequality and corruption, the two headed construct

 that leads every empire to decay without question.

To whit ...

Just down the block, I can see the line of people that has formed every weekday since early December. Masked and socially distanced, they wait patiently to cross the street, one at a time, for a Covid test at a center run by the San Francisco Department of Health. My little street seems an odd choice for such a service, since — especially now that the school has closed — it gets little foot traffic. Indeed, a representative of the Latino Task Force, an organization created to inform the city’s Latinx population about Covid resources told our neighborhood paper Mission Local that

“Small public health clinics such as this one ‘will say they want to do more outreach, but I actually think they don’t want to.’ He believes they chose a low-trafficked street like Bartlett to stay under the radar. ‘They don’t want to blow the spot up, because it does not have a large capacity.’

What do any of these very local sights have to do with a crumbling empire? They’re signs that some of the same factors that fractured the Roman empire back in 476 CE (and others since) are distinctly present in this country today — even in California, one of its richest states. I’m talking about phenomena like gross economic inequality; over-spending on military expansion; political corruption; deep cultural and political fissures; and, oh yes, the barbarians at the gates. I’ll turn to those factors in a moment, but first let me offer a brief defense of the very suggestion that U.S. imperialism and an American empire actually exist.

And this

What better source for a definition of imperialism than the Encyclopedia Britannica, that compendium of knowledge first printed in 1768 in the country that became the great empire of the nineteenth and first part of the twentieth centuries? According to the Encyclopedia, “imperialism” denotes “state policy, practice, or advocacy of extending power and dominion, especially by direct territorial acquisition or by gaining political and economic control of other areas.” Furthermore, imperialism “always involves the use of power, whether military or economic or some subtler form.” In other words, the word indicates a country’s attempts to control and reap economic benefit from lands outside its borders.

Read Rebecca Gordon's detailed piece titled The Rubble of Empire in its entirety as it delineates why the US empire is crumbling as we speak.