The United States is considered the longest-standing "democracy" by bourgeois thinkers because it's never actually been a democracy, and has survived so long by undemocratically suppressing its proletariat. The jingoists who say it's a republic and not a democracy are at least being honest about the nature of the social order they support. The USA was designed to be a modern version of Rome, an empire that only represented the interests of those who most directly benefit from the violence against the oppressed nations. Those being the rich, and the social base that's bribed to align with the interests of the rich.
The founding fathers modeled their empire after Rome because Rome was one of history's most powerful societies. What they didn't consider was that the way in which the Romans gained this power, that being theft from other civilizations, came at the cost of making their own republic unsustainable.
America's increasingly shaky foundations of parasitism
When a society is parasitic, reliant on stealing from other civilizations for its wealth, after its imperial influence inevitably falls apart it resorts to eating itself. The slaver republic loses its democratic faà §ade, inequality grows within its borders, and the types of violence the empire has inflicted abroad come to afflict the empire's center. As Michael Hudson has written: "If some Milton Friedman or Margaret Thatcher had persuaded Sumerian, Babylonian or other ancient rulers to follow today's neoliberal philosophy, civilization could not have developed. Economies would have polarized - as Rome did, and as today's Western economies are doing. The citizens would have run away, or else backed a local reformer or revolutionist to overthrow the ruler who listened to such economic advice. Or, they would have defected to rival attackers who promised to cancel their debts, liberate the bondservants and redistribute the land."
If you're an American today, and are paying attention to the instability the country has been experiencing, Hudson's description of a fracturing empire sounds familiar. Insurrectionists are carrying out attacks, threatening to secede from the union, attempting coups, and occupying federal lands. Unlike Marxists, who can't afford to go on the offensive at the current stage, the dissension of these reactionary rebels is rooted in anxiety that they'll lose access to the benefits imperialism gives them. These aren't the types of radicals who intend to dismantle settler-colonial land relations and fight for socialism, they're white supremacists that want a bigger share of the colonial occupation's spoils. They also tend to be petty capitalists and labor aristocrats, ones who don't trust the federal government to protect their parasitic interests. Actual revolutionaries who seek a new social order aren't aligned with them. But the rise of their presence is a symptom of U.S. imperialism's decline.
As Washington's hegemony has waned, it's adopted policies that redistribute wealth upward. When inequality grows, the potential for unrest grows along with it. The country is a tinder pile for instability, and the ruling class can't stop adding more wood to the heap; what choice do they have? The system is being forced to cannibalize itself.
The more severe these contradictions get, the closer we become to a point where the unique type of equilibrium that the USA depends on to remain stable gets shattered. In A People's History of the United States (one of the books the jingoists are now frantically seeking to ban), Howard Zinn observed how thoroughly the U.S. bourgeois dictatorship is able to control its people:
The American system is the most ingenious system of control in world history. With a country so rich in natural resources, talent, and labor power the system can afford to distribute just enough wealth to just enough people to limit discontent to a troublesome minority. It is a country so powerful, so big, so pleasing to so many of its citizens that it can afford to give freedom of dissent to the small number who are not pleased. There is no system of control with more openings, apertures, leeways, flexibilities, rewards for the chosen, winning tickets in lotteries. There is none that disperses its controls more complexly through the voting system, the work situation, the church, the family, the school, the mass media--none more successful in mollifying opposition with reforms, isolating people from one another, creating patriotic loyalty.
The problem with this control model is that it depends on the perpetuation of extraction from the neo-colonies in order to keep itself viable. When that extraction gets cut off, the arrangement falls apart.
The only way to have so many flexibilities within a bourgeois dictatorship, especially one that rules over such a huge country as the United States, is by making that dictatorship intensely subjugate and exploit billions of people outside of the core. The extreme despotism and overwhelming poverty the American population would otherwise be experiencing is displaced onto those in the exploited countries. Like how capitalism's crisis of overproduction can only be solved by exporting capital into the peripheral countries, the social crises capitalism causes can only be lessened in the core by relocating them to the neo-colonies.
The more imperialism wanes in its reach, the less the bourgeoisie can afford to grant these relative benefits to the core's people. And these benefits were always relative, not absolute, so as the core declines it starts off from an already damaged state. Poverty, especially black poverty, was a severe issue in America during the civil rights era. Then with the crises imperialism underwent following the Vietnam War and the 1973 oil embargo, the ruling class reacted by embracing neoliberalism, and this poverty has since been getting progressively worse. With the rise in wealth inequality has come a rise in political inequality, where corporate money gets more normalized and legalized within the electoral system as restraints on big business get stripped away. The country has come to increasingly resemble what the neo-colonies looked like prior to neoliberalism's implementation: most of its population living in poverty, stunted in its economic and infrastructural development due to rampant corporate looting, and shedding its "democratic" pretexts.
The attacks on global democracy that the U.S. empire carried out with its '60s and '70s coup spree have been getting applied to the U.S. itself in equivalent form throughout this slow-motion corporate-power clampdown. The core's bourgeois state has been growing less flexible in the tools it uses to maintain control, resorting to militarizing its police, restricting voter access, and fusing corporations with the government to a degree that makes the "democratic" mask no longer truly present.
These developments towards a more inwardly oriented form of imperialism, where the American people get treated less and less like they're supposed to be treated in the country's founding mythology, have happened at the same time as the key events in imperialism's decline. The Iranian revolution, the breakaway of many Latin American countries from neo-colonial control, Russia's rejection of client-state status, China's rise, the failures of recent U.S. regime change attempts, the Global South's rejection of the Russia sanctions; these defeats for imperialism have collectively made our ruling class double down on their embrace of anti-worker policies. Capitalism can only survive in its modern stage by colonizing ever more of the planet, and when it's deprived of this need, it intensifies extraction from the population it still has control over. The bourgeois dictatorship therefore grows more brittle, more dependent on brute force and intimidation, less willing to give "handouts" or raise wages.
This process of imperialism consuming itself can only last for so long. When the breaking point is reached, the final stage in the collapse will begin.
A desperate U.S. government will treat its people like Baghdad during the insurgency
The threshold between the empire's expansive and stable Pax Americana stage, and its severely diminished and chaotic fortress America stage, is not one definite event. It's a long, incremental process, one that arguably started all the way back when the imperialists lost the Indochina wars in the mind-20th century. The empire started to decline as soon as it reached the height of its power. Because the system's contraction has been consistent over these last several generations, as reflected by the progressive decline in U.S. profits since World War II, the ruling class has been working to intensify exploitation for most of this time. Neoliberalism was a way to engineer a collapse of the prosperous society that imperialism could previously afford to cultivate in the core, while acting like America had entered a "morning" of renewed strength.
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