Thanks! I'm glad you posted this. Millenialism has a strong attraction in America, both the classic form "Jesus is coming soon, repent!" and the secular version "the USA is one year away from financial catastrophe".
In fact you see one or the other of these in 1/2 the replies on this thread.
But as you note every era has people saying these things, and mostly they never come true.
In fact there is a market for anyone saying "the world as you know it is going to end soon". Ravi Batra made a pretty good living writing that book every 10 years:
There is always someone making the case:
.
These are the secular/financial milleniumists. But there are lots of classic ones too! This guy got rich and famous calling on the imminent second coming. (maybe he still is?):
Here is the intro for the Wikipedia article on the book:
The Late, Great Planet Earth is a treatment of literalist, premillennial, dispensational eschatology. As such, it compared end-time prophecies in the Bible with then-current events in an attempt to broadly predict future scenarios leading to the rapture of believers before the tribulation and Second Coming of Christ to establish his thousand-year (i.e. millennial) Kingdom on Earth. Focusing on key passages in the books of Daniel, Ezekiel and Revelation, Lindsey originally suggested the possibility that these climactic events might play out in the 1980s, which he interpreted as one generation from the foundation of modern Israel in 1948, a pivotal event in some conservative evangelical schools of eschatological thought
Didn't happen.
Empires are durable things, the British empire fell, but the Commonwealth replaced it. There was not a dark age, things changed, but many things remained the same too.
Their is a famous story of the 18th century economist Adam Smith:
One day Sinclair brought Smith the news of the surrender of Burgoyne at Saratoga in October 1777, and exclaimed in the deepest concern that the nation was ruined. "There is a great deal of ruin in a nation," was Smith's calm reply.
Rally big powerful empires take even longer to fall. Rome was an incredible long drawn out process. The usual year given for the fall of the Roman Empire is 474 AD, when the Emperor Romulus was deposed by a German tribal warrior-king. One might stay the fall started in 33 AD when the Republic was replaced by the Imperial system. Or perhaps 117 when the Empire reached it's greatest size. Regardless you are talking hundreds of years.
And by the time Rome itself and the Western Empire fell the Roman Empire had already split itself into two, established a great new capital city in Constantinople, and this Eastern Roman empire continued on until 1473, when Constantinople was finally sacked. 1,000 years after the fall of Rome itself.
I think a lot of millenielism (of both secular and religious) is driven by people's own disagreement with the way things are going. I see this on the prepper and patriot boards I participate in.
Many people believe the system is so evil that (surely!) is must fail soon. But I think history shows vile and wicked regimes can be quite stable. I'm sure many Roman's thought that Rome must sure fall soon during the reign of Caligula (37 AD - 41 AD), perhaps when he made his horse a Senator. They were off by more than 400 years, even using the earlier date of the Western empires demise.
Maybe historians will look back at Obama as sort of like Caligula, but even if you say "things move faster now", it could easily be 100, 200 or 400 years before the American Empire falls. And it's much more likely that the fall will be more along the lines of the fall of the British Empire, which did not include the Queen having her head lapped off, the destruction of St. Pauls, or the sack of London by anyone.