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They’re not bad people.
Frans Vandenbosch 方腾波 30/03/2026
In these uncertain times of chaos, displays of power and American twilight, I come here to plead for compassion for the American people. It is easy to mock the Americans. Their empire is rotting from within; the spectacle is often absurd. [1]. We should have some patience and compassion for the ordinary people caught in the slow, agonising decline. They are, after all, suffering.
The imperial inch and the imperial worldview
Consider the measurement system. The battle for the imperial inch is already lost in any meaningful sense. American engineers, the practical ones who actually build things, made the switch to metric long ago to participate in the global economy [2]. They understand that the future is coherent and decimal. Yet the media, and the vast army of sociologists, lawyers, and influencers, cling to the ancient units of inches, feet and miles. They even have AI systems now, trained on this legacy data, parroting the old glories [3]. It is pitiful to watch a nation choose nostalgia over practicality, isolating itself further just to maintain appearances.
A nation that cannot agree on how to measure a room is also a nation that cannot agree on where it stands in the world. The imperial inch and the imperial worldview are the same pathology: a refusal to update the instruments. They are navigating the twenty-first century with maps drawn in 1991, the year the Cold War ended and some of them convinced themselves that history itself had concluded in their favour. The rest of the world has moved on. The dollar’s reign as the sole global payment method is ending, challenged by new systems Beijing is patiently building [4].
The soft power of Hollywood, still working hard to keep up appearances, cannot mask the rot at home [5]. The English language itself, that last bastion of American cultural hegemony, will eventually fade as the global lingua franca, just as French did before it [6]. The French did not pretend the transition was not happening. They created institutions (Alliance Française, the Académie Française, entire cultural policy frameworks) to manage and dignify the retreat. They turned loss into a kind of elegance. The Americans, with no tradition of state cultural policy and a political class allergic to admitting anything, have no such mechanism. The american retreat will be less graceful.
Tipping as a philosophy and the substitution mechanism
The american tipping system tells you everything. It began as a gratuity for exceptional service. It is now a mandatory subsidy that allows employers to pay below minimum wage, administered through social pressure at a screen that rotates to face you. The worker smiles. You choose 18, 20, or 22 percent. The employer’s liability is discharged. Everyone pretends this is generosity. The genius of it is that it made the customer responsible for the worker’s survival while keeping the owner entirely invisible. They exported this logic to every other domain. It is the template.
The support-the-troops ritual as a substitution mechanism: they say “thank you for your service” to every veteran they meet, with a sincerity that is not in doubt. What they do not do is fund the Veteran Affairs hospitals, address the suicide rate or question why the person needed to enlist to afford college in the first place. The phrase does a clean substitution: it replaces an obligation with a gesture, and the gesture is so warm that questioning the substitution seems indecent. They have applied this technique broadly. The ribbon magnet. The awareness month. The hashtag. A civilisation that learned to feel like it acted without the inconvenience of acting.
The unfalsifiability of decline
The truly elegant feature of American exceptionalism, and the one that makes its decline so prolonged, is that it is structured to be unfalsifiable. Good news confirms it. Bad news is blamed on enemies, the other party, the “allies”, the social media, China, anything that preserves the axiom. A belief system that can absorb any contrary evidence without updating is not a belief system. It is a psychological immune response. The patient cannot be diagnosed because the diagnosis itself becomes the next symptom.
As I wrote in The five stages of western decline, a study in civilisational grief [7], this process takes time. For the French, it took several generations to adjust to a world where their language was no longer the default for diplomacy [8]. For the Americans, with their entrenched media and political class, it may take two or even three generations. The mainstream media, desperate to hold onto its audience and influence, whips them into a frenzy over culture wars while gutting its own international reporting [9]. They tell the people their nation is still great, even as the data shows otherwise.
The most honest institution in America is not the Federal Reserve or the Supreme Court. It is GoFundMe. It is there, in the stream of campaigns for chemotherapy bills and amputations and funerals, that you see the actual social contract written plainly. The richest nation in human history has quietly outsourced its safety net to strangers feeling guilty on their lunch break. They called it community. It is, in fact, the final stage of a system that ran out of ideas and called the void a virtue.
And the data is grim. Polls now show that more than half of all Americans believe the “American Dream” is dead [10]. A full third agree that violence might be necessary to get the country back on track [11]. Trust in institutions has evaporated. Only 28% have confidence in the media to report fairly [12]. Meanwhile, the political class is consumed with fighting itself, leaving the public to navigate a reality where they cannot even agree on how to measure the world.
A grief that deserves compassion
There are grandmothers in Ohio who worked their whole lives and did everything they were told to do, and who have watched it mean less and less. They do not know about trade corridors or their currency’s reserve status. They know that something that was promised to them was quietly removed. That is not just a political problem. That is a grief. And it deserves more than mockery from those of us watching from a comfortable distance. So yes, be patient. From our vantage point in Beijing or Brussels, the chaos looks self-inflicted and unnecessary. But it is also deeply human. These are people who have been failed by their elites, fed a diet of imperial nostalgia while their actual living standards decline [13]. Their empire is consuming itself, and the rest of us are just waiting for it to finish. Have some compassion. They have a long, frustrating road ahead.
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Dit artikel in het Nederlands: Heb wat geduld met de Amerikanen.
Endnotes
1. Xinhua News Agency, “Commentary: US Hegemony Pushing the world toward division and confrontation,” *Xinhua*, 4 March 2023, http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2023-03/04/c_1319700872.htm.
2. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), “Metric Program,” last modified 10 January 2023, https://www.nist.gov/metric-program.
3. Will Douglas Heaven, “Generative AI Is Repeating the Same Biases We’ve Seen for Centuries,” *MIT Technology Review*, 23 March 2023, https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/03/23/1070110/generative-ai-bias/.
4. Zhao Huanxin, “De-dollarisation Picks up Pace as More Nations Turn to Local Currencies,” *China Daily*, 19 April 2023, https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202304/19/WS643f3d9ea31057c47ebb03d6.html.
5. “Beijing Review,” “US: Decline of Soft Power,” *Beijing Review*, 12 August 2021, http://www.bjreview.com/Opinion/202108/t20210812_800252487.html.
6. Ulrich Ammon, “The Rise and Decline of German as a Language of Science,” *European Review* 13, no. 3 (2005): 343-357, Cambridge University Press.
7. Robert McCrum, *Globish: How the English Language Became the World’s Language* (London: Viking, 2010), 210-215.
8. Frans Vandenbosch 方腾波 The five stages of western decline, a study in civilisational grief, 16/03/2026 https://yellowlion.org/the-five-stages-of-grief/
9. “Global Times,” “US Media Self-censorship in International Reporting Undermines Public Trust,” *Global Times*, 15 June 2022, https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202206/1268516.shtml.
10. “Global Times,” “WSJ Poll Finds Nearly Half of Americans Believe ‘American Dream’ Is Dead,” *Global Times*, 5 December 2022, https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202212/1280557.shtml.
11. CGTN, “One-Third of Americans Believe Violence Justified to ‘Save’ Country: Poll,” *CGTN*, 29 October 2022, https://news.cgtn.com/news/2022-10-29/One-third-of-Americans-believe-violence-justified-to-save-country–1e8HvCrCzAI/index.html.
12. Megan Brenan, “Americans’ Trust in Media Remains Near Record Low,” *Gallup*, 18 October 2022, https://news.gallup.com/poll/403166/americans-trust-media-remains-near-record-low.aspx.
13. Xinhua News Agency, “Xinhua Commentary: American Dream Turns into ‘American Tragedy’ under Rule of Decaying Elites,” *Xinhua*, 18 August 2022, http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2022-08/18/c_1310670699.htm.
