US on the way down

At the gym on the stepper the guy next to me gave a 20 minute long hate speech against the neo-cons and George W. Nothing much to disagree with there.
But it came to me that the real difficulty the US now faces is that the institutions and ideology that were developed here after the successful 1776 Revolution (which was really not a revolution but an irredentist struggle) and which basically have served it very well during two centuries and more of continually increasing power and wealth are not going to serve it so well over the next two centuries as its power and wealth decline, at least comparatively.
What worked on the way up needn't work on the way down.
It's not just that 'founding' institutions and ideology did not emphasise efficiency or community support: they emphasised 'freedom,' constitutionalism and individualism. It's that the US has never really be able to affirm the role of the state as the administrative expression of society. In times when all social resources have to managed tightly both because the market cant achieve largescale improvements in individual lives and because other nations are gaining power and influence and, presumably, because natural resources are becoming more expensive, then a wholly legitimated state becomes crucial
Yet I suspect that these are not values that help most when there's a need to confront serious limits and competition in relation to growth. This is a scary thought, since, if accepted, it would lead to a stronger state here, and while a stronger state could certainly implement more egalitarianism and more environmental sanity, for instance, it could also reduce the kind of chaos that means that America can't actually win wars like those against Vietnam and Iraq. And America, like most continental nations, does not really have much experience in building an effective and responsive strong state.