It is still reversible. But sadly, we are still not going to reverse it. Because we are still too sick as a people to do what we need to do to reverse it.
And sadly, it will soon become irreversible, and then even if we did decide to act, we will not be effective.
The prognosis is not good. The greed and stupidity are too pervasive. And so are the fear and selfishness that it fuels.
The solution is simple: we need to vote out of office every incumbent candidate in every election regardless of their party affiliation, unless and until we get people in there who prove that they will ACT (not just talk) to stop the legalized bribery of our legislative branch of government (the Congress and the Senate). Because until we stop the corruption caused by this wholesale and legalized bribery of our lawmakers, NOTHING ELSE CAN CHANGE OR BE FIXED. And they are currently rigging and corrupting our electoral system to the point where soon, our votes will have no effect. And then we will have lost the ability to correct the problem short of a violent revolution, which would almost certainly be horrendous, and result in an even worse mess than what we have, now.
I agree with what you're saying here, particularly about voting every incumbent out of office. But I'm not sure if that will go far enough, depending on who gets elected in their place. I tend to view politicians and candidates for public office much in the same way I look at newsreaders. They are essentially products of political machines who go up before the voters and read words written by someone else.
The voters are also part of the problem. There are a lot of people struggling, suffering hardship and pain, and perhaps this puts them under a certain level of duress which can cause them to be easily led. It's not that they're necessarily "stupid." Some of them are, but I think there's more going on in terms of how voters reach their decisions and formulate their political views.
For much of my life, I've seen a general undercurrent in public opinion that America has been in decline for quite some time. Such opinions tend to be muted or drowned out by those who don't want to hear anything they perceive as "negative." There have been many who don't want to hear "doom and gloom" and have tried to push this idea that "everything is great."
Part of the problem, at least when looking at the long-term economic history of the US, is that for most of our history, we had grown accustomed to rapid expansion across a sparsely-populated continent teeming with resources and arable land. Tell millions of people to "Go West" and build towns, roads, railroads, cities, mines, ranches, factories - then some people are going to end up making a lot of money and the overall wealth of the country will be increased. Conquest, expansionism, slavery, and all the atrocities which go along with it - that's how a lot of great empires built themselves up.
It worked for a while, but eventually you reach a plateau where there's no more room to expand, no more land to conquer (or else it might antagonize another empire and start a world war, which has happened). All the things we did to build up all the wealth and power America has enjoyed for all this time - we can't really do that anymore.
I think we reached that point in the late 60s/early 70s, but we still had enough accumulated wealth that we could maintain ourselves and "live off our fat" to give the appearance of business as usual, while we slowly mortgaged, borrowed, and outsourced our way to the point where our national debt is over $25 trillion. We also don't have the same strategic advantage we once had.
I believe that we can still salvage the situation. I don't think this is irreversible either, but I think we need to take a step back and come to the realization that we may have to shift our goals. A lot of what drives the US political culture is a strong push towards patriotism which is tied in with the US role as the "leader of the free world" and the "defender of democracy and freedom." This is what leads to policies of global interventionism which have been a drain on the taxpayers but a boon to big business and the global corporate elite. So, when America finally does fall, they'll certainly have their safe havens to run to.
But I think we need to stop thinking in terms of "American exceptionalism." I'm not against patriotism, but I think we need to have a more realistic form of patriotism, not one that involves going all over the world in some military adventurist crusade. We can focus more on basic national defense and adopt more realistic goals in terms of how we will survive in this world. We don't necessarily have to be the "leader," not anymore. Both Democrats and Republicans want to maintain this delusion, and that's where they are wrong.
Trump and his followers seem to want to double-down on the same delusion (the more anachronistic Antebellum version), but nobody from either side seems willing to acknowledge that it
is a delusion.
This is the reason that empires fall and dynasties are overthrown. This is why the peasants get restless and how revolutions get incredibly nasty and violent. They all seem to suffer from some sort of delusion up until the very end. The Romanovs likely had no clue and sincerely did not know what they did wrong or why their own people hated them as much as they did. How did they wind up in such a predicament? They really didn't know. That's the consequence of deluding themselves for so long.
I think we're facing the same consequences.