The fall of Rome also took centuries, historians can't even agree on exactly when it began.
replyTrue for the empire, not true for the republic (which still took decades but not centuries)
replyWhen would you date the beginning of the current fall though? Late 20th/early 21st century? When would you end date it without longer hindsight? (honest question)
reply1970 or so. There is this version of it
replyhttps://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
Certainly the fall of the Breton Woods monetary system was part of it.
The fall of the Bretton Woods system was inevitable due to trade imbalances that ballooned in the 1960s. The U.S. Dollar was pegged to an artificially high value and the French central bank was right to arbitrage it by withdrawing specie. Simply resetting all the exchange rates was not sufficient, especially since the Federal Reserve under Nixon continued inflating the currency. The need to have variable rates was decades in the making.
replyKinda hard to pin down a date.
replyWhen I think of the current social and political trends, I'm reminded of Asimov's quote about anti-intellectualism in 1980. Or Douglas Hofstadter's Pulitzer-prize winning book, "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life", published in *1963*.
These things aren't new. They just wax and wane in power, over time, and recombine in new and interesting ways to yield long-term trends.
In the case of Rome, it depends how you define "fall". There were certainly some military setbacks and also some bad climatic conditions (which affected central America and China around the same time.) Probably better to say that Rome was in decline for a long time.
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