By the way, now that you mention the Qing Dynasty: I’ve seen a lot of people everywhere comparing the Trump and Musk duo to various historical figures from China. But I have no idea how no one has mentioned Yuan Shikai yet.
Yuan took power when China was already falling apart. He promised to "fix" things and stability but ended up making things worse. At one point, he even declared himself emperor, thinking people would support him, but instead, his actions sped up China’s decline.
Like Yuan, Trump misunderstood his country’s problems. The world had already changed, and his way of thinking was stuck in the past.
Both also faced elites' resistance. Yuan assumed China’s powerful families and generals would back him, but they turned against him.
I think the post-Trump era in the US will look a lot like China’s ‘Warlord Era’, where different neo-feudal oligarchs (now turning political strongmen like tech elites are already wet-dreaming or classic warlords) control their own territories and power becomes fragmented.
The difference is that China eventually reunited and rose from the ashes, but the US won’t. Because the US doesn’t have a deeply rooted shared history holding it together over time.
It’s more like an accidental creation, similar to India, a product of historical coincidences, not an organically developed, cohesive society that lived there forever and together - so what will drive them to re-unify?
For example, China has a 5,000-year history of continuous cultural development for lasting cohesion-building; China is also the most enduring civilization in history, having repeatedly revived itself from collapse while preserving its core cultural, philosophical, and administrative traditions.
In contrast, the United States, with only a few centuries of history, is a fragmented construct, a "Frankenstein" if you will that cannot be compared in terms of cultural continuity and the ability to "come back".
We should have expected China to unify and rise to greatness again because we had many such similar reference points in history coming from them in the past when the exact same thing happened. Whereas the US is totally the opposite of that. It's not even a normal Western-style nation-state, not to mention a civilization-state.
People look at the modern US today and think, "How could it collapse? People still eat well, they still spend, they still live at first-world standards." (through debt and financial bubbles and a bunch of fake data and media brainwashing.)
But they don’t realize that modern living standards have risen everywhere on average, that’s not what prevents collapse. Collapse is driven by something deeper: envy and inequality. Even if everyone were millionaires, human nature would still create resentment and conflict because we like to compare ourselves in-group socially.
And right now, millions of Americans are barely scraping by one paycheck from disaster, juggling multiple low-paying service jobs and there is an overproduction of elites who feel like they deserve more and aren't getting it. Record homelessness, and record billionaires. CEO pay 300 times workers' compared to 20x half a century ago.
What’s holding everything together? Deflationary innovations from China, East Asia, and Germany, and cheap labor from the rest of the world. Without manufactured cheap imports and technological advancements keeping inflation somewhat in check, things would be even worse.
