Hard by the end of the 20th century the United States of America stood astride the Earth. It possessed preeminent military forces and weapons of mass destruction, the largest most aggressive most productive economy in history, the scientific and infrastructural wellspring of technological civilization, a language displacing native tongues planetwide, and one of the few (mostly) neutral systems of courts and litigation to be had anywhere on the globe. The US was restrained by nothing beyond the will of exercise of its own appetites.
Conquest was inevitable. It was purely incapable of aiding the strong and smart while discarding the pathetic and stupid; genetic, developmental, and behavioral trash; reproductive warriors, and the Officially sad. It was god-besotted and amoral, too cowardly to reconcile a facade of Apollonian prig morality with Dionysian operational reality. It slackened exercise of sophisticated and eldritch sciences while fanatically worshiping and subsidizing smothering poseurs: relativists, perspectivists, feminists, constructionists, deconstuctionists, postmodernists, social engineers, "artists," sexual queers, celebrants of ethnic diversity, therapists, counselors, social workers, health care providers, New Age hind gut fermenters, the "other-abled," spittle-pitching evangelists, and a fat cauldron of heavily armed unrestrained Federal alphabet soup of incompetence storm troopers staring in at its own citizenry.
The US ravaged its educational system lest the endemic 30% of all children intellectually incapable of benefiting from it sustain loss of self-esteem. Dropouts mutated into high school graduates by lowering requirements to their feeble abilities and banishing standardized assay of those. Teenage pregnancy roared as delicate children were spared atrocities of lucid sex education in deference to family values. Universities offered courses in bonehead calculator arithmetic. Resources formerly devoted to instruction were diverted into counseling and management of counselors. Clear visions of citizenship and language were wholly lost within Balkanized squabbles amidst rights opportunists whose apocryphal ancestral atrocities became university departments of fabrication and instruction.
1970s' Federal tinkering with the economy according to elegant econometric models protected from criticism by complexity burned a lot of fingers with 20% inflation. The national monetary policy thereafter summed to simply keeping the price of gold steady. Waiting in the wings was a $10 trillion implosion of the Social Security system and Medicare as 60 million Baby Boomers retired in system-lethal numbers Officially noticable by 2015. Like airbags these were mandated Safety Net programs - social engineering - that protected citizens by protecting them to death. Washington tinkered with the Ozone Hole, the Greenhouse Effect, and the Carbon Tax on Everything. We are the government. We are here to help ourselves to you. We have come for a piece of all mankind.
As the War on Drugs propagated armed resistance across the land, children compacted into untenable primary school contexts were drugged into obeisance with Ritalin or Adderal. Self-medication with alcohol and marijuana retained their Official Puritan stigmata. Organized crime and ethnic gangs merchandising recreational pharmaceuticals grew wealthy beyond even ethical pharmaceutical manufacturers' spreadsheets. When high school and college and life itself became perceptually indefensible Prozac and succeeding (failing) selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors made happy faces for all, plus anorgasmia.
The War on Drugs was enforcing "no" to hard drugs, healthcare providers were screaming "yes," and pushers were doing landslide business. The lay public industriously prosecuted headaches, muscle pains, and achy feelings; heartburn, gastric reflux, and gas bloating. Awesome annual tonnages of aspirin gave way to awesome annual tonnages of acetaminophen and aspirin analogues (ibuprofen, ketoprofen, naproxen). Aspirin rebounded by becoming a daily heart medicine, and never mind the gastric bleeding. Acetaminophen progressively ate away livers and kidneys as folks with deficient hepatic glutathione (from fasting or drinking alcohol) did not neutralize its aggressively toxic N-acetylquinoneimine metabolite. Cimetadine, famotidine, and ranitidine histamine H2-receptor side blockers shut off gastric acid across this great nation, impeding Vitamin B-12 absorption, causing impotence (recurrent theme?), and doing odd things to protein digestion. Antacids were not necessarily something your body needed anyway. If the ones containing aluminum were ingested with citric acid, ferrying aluminum citrate across your gut and into your brain, your brain rotted. The microscopic diffusion of silicone fluid from breast implants was worth a multi-$billion Dow court settlement. The macroscopic ingestion of silicone fluid to quell intestinal bloat was worth about $2.28/package and voluntarily ingested.
Sucrose polyester, vegetable gums, carboxymethyl and hydroxypropyl celluloses, microcrystalline cellulose, and a watershed of zero-caloric chemists' fantasies wormed their way into a food supply already rich with cyclamate, saccharine, aspartame, and sucralose artificial sweeteners.
One day it all collapsed despite Homeland Severity putting its scarred hairy fists down citizens' shorts and NASA killing Man in Space. Pigmented people from the south arrived to join their smuggled brethren, reproductive warriors all, in plunder. Careful analysis shows that nobody was at fault. It was only bad luck.