Overall the strategy which Western media is operating in calling out every other country's parallel sins -- homophobia, misogyny, racism, xenophobia -- is to say that any challenge to American hegemony must take place in a purely material dimension. No moral challenge is valid.

Meaning, America's liberal elite are ready to relinquish the illusion that we are a morally exceptional place. They're content now to engage in a kind of moral MAD -- everyone is guilty of everything -- exception now is that America remains the most able and willing to change.

Thus, American decline is global decline, because America will be usurped by a rival who is just as morally bankrupt, but because it is even more ambitious and power hungry, it won't even be ready to accept any criticism as valid, the way America elites do.

Being lured into this framing of the issue is very beneficial to American hegemony, because it's erasing the entire history of American settler colonialism, slavery, and imperialism, and replacing it with a simple and satisfying story of moral equivalency.