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It's very obvious that 
is circling the drain now, but clearly this didn't just happen in a vacuum. It must've started crumbling at some point... but when?
Some people might say it started after 9/11, others might say it goes back to the Raegan administration. A few might even say it started after losing the Vietnam War, or when they went off the gold standard. Or maybe even earlier...
What do you think? 
I'd argue it never did. This is what it was intended to be. This is what its original founders wanted. A country where white wealthy slave-owners could reap the benefits of a country's productive power without having to maintain any sort of social contract with those not of their class.
I mean, that is their dream, that is indeed the ultimate capitalist goal that you're right they have largely achieved. But an important aspect of that capitalist dream world would be to do that in perpetuity, with all this kept in a stable balance they forever control from the top. That is where the dream can never be truly realized. They do have to struggle to maintain it, and while they have been doing an astoundingly good job of that for the most part (despite how well all of us here can see the gaping contradictions, we also rightly lament how communists are an insignificant minority in the west/core and how captured by capital nearly every institution is), that struggle still demands they have to keep inventing increasingly complex and stratified apparatus to keep their contradiction-riddled structure of exploitation afloat.
And that's what we're really talking about here. At what point does that corrosion from the countless contradictions become so extensive that maintenance of the structure becomes a truly lost cause? Where is the point where the downward slide back out of their capitalist dreamworld (the proletarian nightmare) accelerate into the certainty of waking up from it? The answer is necessarily subjective, since we can all pin different moments where we think this has or will happen. But it is an inevitability.