My immediate reaction is to say "yes, this country is in decline," because of the lack of social cohesion here. Watching public civility fall apart over the last two years (but perhaps that collapse can be dated earlier) has been a ghastly spectacle, and even as anyone with half a brain is capable of critiquing the cable-news-fueled information bubbles many Americans inhabit, the media outlets are too deeply entrenched to effect serious change.
I hear at least two different stories about our daily lives: the first is similar to another post on this thread, namely that TikTok, Instagram, etc. are ruining people's attention span and lives, especially those of the youngest people, and we are all more or less powerless to do anything about it. However, I also hear rumblings among some of my peers (I'm 26) that people are growing tired of this sort of thing, and have become more aware every year of the massive void in American life.
Many of fiction writers of the last century, such as John Updike, implicitly criticized the hedonistic and consumerist lives led by large swathes of the US population. What makes reading about that period interesting is that for a long time certain traditions and mores from the first part of modernity (e.g., religion and the nuclear family) were able to weather the storm, as it were, and to temper some of the younger generations' excesses. In short, at least the social rebels of the 1960s and 70s had something coherent to rebel against in the first place, which we do not have. Now, for the members of the ultra-relativist, atheist, and choice-obsessed US society, there is nothing on offer except a perverse seesaw (very pronounced among 18-30 year olds) between enjoyment of bodily pleasures on the one hand, and then anger and indignation about the news on the other. To be sure, this emptiness is a global problem, but has become pronounced in the US over the past three years, and does not seem to be going anywhere for the moment.
I am glad to read the more sanguine opinions on the United States' economic position, but socially and culturally, America is in a lot of pain, and we need to do something about the total absence of values and positively asserted ideas. We are adrift and distracted, with nothing to anchor us to reality, and nothing to pass on to our children