Unfortunately, the two previous times that this has happened in the history of the US, it has ended in war, first the Civil and next WWI and II.

What is "war?" Ask that at a cocktail party full of intelligentsia and they will smile slyly and say "a continuation of politics by other means" because you can't open the New Yorker without that one fuckin' Clausewitz quote being in there somewhere but they're intelligentsia mostly trying to impress each other so none of them will say

a violent dispute over territory.

- The Civil War was a violent dispute over the governance of half the country

- WWI was a violent dispute over the governance of half of Europe

- WWII was a violent dispute over the governance of half of the world

San Francisco is not going to war with Tampa because nobody in San Francisco wants anything from Tampa and no one from Tampa wants anything from San Francisco. They can hate each other, sure. They can interfere in each other's elections. They can wear t-shirts talking about how much each other sucks. But the US and USSR actively murdered each other's agents with megatons of death on a hair trigger pointed at each other for fifty years without so much as a troop carrier rolling.

I think a foreign war is more likely than a civil war, because many of the factors that preceded WWI seem to also be present here.

Between 1918 and 2018 the acceptable American casualty ratio went from 1:1 to 100:1. With the abandonment of Afghanistan, America isn't fighting a war somewhere for the first time since 2001.

besides the obvious domestic parallels to the Gilded Age, you have Great Powers vying for international influence in far flung places around the globe, and you have the strife in the Mid East that looks very Balkan.

You have a failed trade initiative by the Chinese and the Russians eagerly selling BUK400 missiles to anyone who wants to piss off the US. That's it. Conflict in the mid-east is related to resources while strife in the Balkans was related to the end of Soviet containment of ethnic strife.

Today, I think that China resembles 1910s Germany in many ways.

China today resembles China under the founding of the Ming Dynasty. An era of cosmopolitan innovation ends with the Han Chinese insisting that the only Chinese are Han Chinese, oppressing everyone else, installing a rigid monarchy and closing their minds for 300 years.

Germany in 1910 was a collection of warmongering tribes encircled by treaties and non-aggression pacts dating to the founding of the Hapsburg Empire. China in 2021 is a totalitarian culture whose core values of ethnic superiority, cultural isolationism and resistance to innovation have been reinforced since Moses. Germany has been a free-trade zone and contested battleground since before the Greeks; China has been a big fish in a small pond that "wins" its wars by paying tribute to whatever barbarians are raiding in the moment.

China, having suffered a couple hundred years of international humiliation, probably feels about the same.

The only wars China has ever won are civil ones. "International humiliation" is what the Chinese cry whenever they aren't allowed to exterminate Uyghurs with impunity. You know what started the Opium War? The Chinese refusing to have an ambassador prostrate himself in front of a painting of the King while requiring the British ambassador to prostrate himself in front of the Emperor. Well, and then they violated every trade agreement with impunity despite being aware of Western military and technological superiority for three hundred years.

They have used their money influence to rebalance in Asia and Africa to a certain extent, but as long as the US leads the international monetary system, they're always going to play second fiddle.

Hang on there, homey. They've used OUR money. The whole of the Chinese "economic miracle" is globalism pouring investment into a third world economy where people work for pennies on the dollar. Know why things are getting dicey now? they aren't anymore. As soon as the delta between "dishwashers made in Shreveport" and "dishwashers made in Shenzen" doesn't pencil out, Shenzen is a swamp again. There's nothing inherent about China's "economic miracle" it's entirely the result of the Fortune 500 watching Tank Man and shrugging. That shit will close up overnight.

We did this once before, and recently, with another "ancient empire" that goes by Iran these days.

As we've all learned from the recent headlines, China is perhaps facing some sort of economic reckoning for the first time in a long time.

lol

Great Powers have never had a direct hot conflict in the Nuclear Age, and with good reason.

Yeah but India and Pakistan have come to blows like four times since they both had nukes. The Soviets shot down two American airliners since we had nukes. I grew up spooked to fuck from nukes but it's all been pretty chillax since the Cuban Missile Crisis if we're being honest.

I think where Democrats really fail right now is in thinking that we can legislate our way out of this hole. We can't.

Don't hate the playa, hate the game. The Democrats are doing exactly what the Republicans did - legislation without politics. That's the whole game - "how much can we do without your participation" and that's why the Democrats are busy tearing each other apart. Everyone has acknowledged that the Republicans are busy trying to keep their seats at the tea party and any acknowledgement of the actual governance of the country means you're a traitor.

The GOP should be in free fall.

Who says they're not? What substantive change have the Republicans achieved since the tax cuts? What substantive change do they have on the game plan? They're playing a bunch of abortion games which is gonna work until they get Roe repealed at which point it becomes just another Defense of Marriage Act.