Ultimately all empires fail, usually caused by the very things that once made them great. As Margaret Thatcher once said, the problem with socialism is that sooner or later you run out of other peoples' money to spend. And as the burden of more and more free stuff for the masses turns into more and more taxes on a decreasing number of people paying the taxes, sooner or later something has to give. When it does, politicians of all stripes and flavors have done such a good job of pitting one group against another that we can be sure it's going to be ugly. Whether it's black against white, old against young, citizen against immigrant, man against woman, gay against straight, there's going to be a whole lot of finger-pointing going on.
Demographics is the only study that is needed to show how badly broken things are. In decades gone past couples typically married young and had children. Families were larger then, so couples were replacing themselves with maybe a spare or two thrown in. As their children grew older they married and had children. The result was that as older people retired and drew retirement funds they were replaced with more and more people joining the workforce. Essentially the group of economically unproductive people stayed more or less the same, while the group of economically productive people grew (to be clear, in this context I'm using the term "economically unproductive" to refer to anyone who isn't working regardless of the reason - be they idle, disabled, retired, whatever). Now with the expectation of earlier retirement, longer lifespans, and a growing welfare state that requires little to nothing of its beneficiaries, working couples can't afford to have so many children so they marry later and have fewer children while the economically unproductive tend to have more children. The result is more and more people who are economically unproductive. The automation of much of industry has done away with a lot of jobs, making it more likely that people who might have worked in those fields are economically unproductive as there are fewer jobs available. Hence a diminishing body of economically productive people are carrying a growing body of economically unproductive people. And of course along the way globalisation has made it possible for companies to grow ever-larger and shift income around the world at a stroke of a pen, reducing the amount they pay in taxes and shifting more of the burden onto the already struggling middle classes. It doesn't take a genius to see the whole thing collapsing, nor does it take a genius to figure that the left and the right are little more than two sides of the same coin, set up so that each can blame the other and distract the people from how they have been plundered.
In historic times empires grew by conquering neighboring areas and then funded the expansion by levying taxes on the newly conquered areas. These days it seems we spend vast sums on conquering far-flung areas, then instead of levying taxes on them we spend further vast sums rebuilding everything. It's good if you're one of the favored contractors who gets to either supply the bombs to destroy it or the construction services to rebuild it, but not so good if your Joe Taxpayer who gets stuck with the bill for both sides.
