1. The USA proposed a ‘Third Way’ (meritocracy), but that “third way” is very hard for the underclasses, who want to restore the old.

  2. Fiat money, Scale, Wealth from selling off a conquered continent, Inheritance of the British empire and German science, created windfalls.

  3. But those windfalls, and the temporary lifting of the underclasses into middle class consumption post civil – and world-war because of them, created too much incentive for those against meritocracy.  And so they sought under marxism, and postmodernism to use US openness to destroy it.

  4. The uneducated speak in theology. The educated speak in morality, philosophy, and pseudoscience. But those with existential responsibility speak in history, economics, and incentives. If you cannot explain phenomena in economic terms you are just inventing fictions