Another common element the US and the USSR will eventually have ...

... an inevitable decline.

http://www.hipfishmonthly.com/2011/04/our-warped-priorities/

The rights of an individual person to exist, grow and pursue the American Dream in society with rights is a thing of the past.

And while many speak of the US today as an empire, Berk asserts the conditions as something otherwise -

First, other countries like India, China and Indonesia, created industrial economies with very low labor costs, inducing American corporations to outsource factory production to those low cost venues. This was accompanied by intensive lobbying for a free trade regimen which would ultimately make it impossible for American based industry to compete with more cheaply made foreign goods. Thus we witness the rapid de-industrialization of America. In some respects we are returning to what we were as a group of colonies, a provider of raw materials, like timber, to other economies that manufacture finished items they sell back to Americans.


But the majority of Americans no longer have the industrial jobs that pay them a living wage and enable them to enjoy a higher standard of living. They no longer have the ability to consume on postwar levels. At the same time, goods are becoming more expensive with the rise of the cost of scarcer fossil fuels. Education, the greatest means of personal advancement, has become more and more expensive as government has withdrawn support for it. Also medical costs, due to expensive high tech treatments, are skyrocketing, and government does little to provide relief. Yet the federal budget is at an all time high, because we insist on spending over seven hundred billion dollars a year on wars and militarism.

Collective will to act - as long as Americans are focused on "The Voice", Twilight, and endless crap from places like Disney - may come now too little too late.