It's hard to grasp this when we look at an issue just in the context of what we've seen in our lifetimes, but the sobering truth is that the "superiority" you describe was really just an anomaly of the post-WW2 decades when the U.S. was the only major industrial power that hadn't been decimated during the war. We may have had less than 10% of the world's population but we probably had more than 80% of the world's GDP at one time -- but that was only because the rest of the world wasn't capable of producing very much. That has obviously changed, and we'd better come to grips with it because that's the way it's likely to be for a long time.
You need to factor into the equation that American manufacturing is being moved overseas to take advantage of cheap labor, and illiterate hordes are being move in here to destroy what is left. How is that just due to the flow of natural forces? There is no natural law that requires that a country impoverish itself to accomplish a disastrous goal such as free trade, when it is not free trade, but economic suicide. Alexander Hamilton was a great proponent of protective tariffs for American manufacturing. Americans can never compete with the low wages in China, for example, (l out of 4 people on Earth is Chinese). Whatever kind of work you do, it can be accomplished much cheaper by someone overseas.