What's next??

A specter is haunting America: A sense that we will no longer be THE dominant world power.

And, more troubling, a sense that our future may NOT be brighter than our past, a sense captured in a recent poll revealing that nearly half of Americans believe our best days are behind us.

In a way, this is nothing new, says author and journalist James Fallows.

"As the early American republic was first taking form, already there were warnings - 'Are we going to become Rome?' - even before there was any sort of great empire to worry about," said Fallows.

This idea - call it "relative decline," the concept that other nations may equal or surpass our economic or technical mastery - may be hard for a "We're Number One!" America to accept. But for Paul Kennedy, who wrote "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers," it is nothing new - nor troublesome.

"No one stays on top," he said, "and the U.S. has a very hard time in realizing that. Great powers, like the U.S. - like the British Empire, like the Ottomans - rise to a position of prominence over, you know, a century and a half or so, and stay at the top for a long while, and then, usually, gradually decline."

But it's a different idea that you can sense in the public conversation today: A sense that the some of America's most enduring beliefs about itself are in doubt . . . beliefs that are at the center of what kind of country we are and how effective our political system is in dealing with what threatens us.

At the center of the doubts is the wounded American economy: Not just the 15 million who are jobless or underemployed, not just the trillions lost in the economic meltdown of the last few years, not just the millions who have or may soon lose their homes.

It's the broader picture:

"In the last 35 years, the median wage in America has gone down," said Fallows. "Most Americans, in the last, now, two generations, have done worse economically, which is unprecedented in American history."

And it poses a special threat to a pattern we took for granted from World War II through the '70s - blue-collar workers finding secure well-paying jobs that provided them and their families a measure of security and comfort.

Moreover, if America's economic machinery is stalled, it means trouble - serious, potentially devastating trouble - for our governments, and their obligations.

"The reversible things are what you do with your national budgets, with your science and technology programs, with your education," said Kennedy. "Those are reversible.

"And, therefore, my answer to you about, you know, is America ultimately in decline is that there's the irreversible stuff. Just forget about it. Concentrate on what IS improvable, what IS reversible - and then we start looking better."