noun

• The belief that a particular country, society, or institution is in a state of significant and possibly irreversible decline.

  ‘polls showed a rise in declinism after Nixon's devaluation of the dollar’

  More example sentences

  • ‘The essential problem of declinism was that it sought to explain Britain's undoubted relative decline in terms of British failure.’
  • ‘Declinism tends to produce overly cautious behavior that could undercut our influence.’
  • ‘The authors noted that declinism in America had a long history going back to late seventeenth century Puritans.’
  • ‘It is important to prevent the errors of both declinism and triumphalism.’
  • ‘Declinism is conditionally pessimistic.’
  • ‘Cycles of declinism tell us more about psychology than about underlying shifts in power resources.’
  • ‘Polls showed a rise in declinism after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957.’
  • ‘Declinism is historically deterministic: nations naturally, and perhaps inevitably, evolve through phases of rise, expansion, and decline.’
  • ‘The heart of economic patriotism is rejecting declinism and the doctrine of defeat.’
  • ‘A third wave of declinism took place in the 1980s.’