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Comment by dv_dt | Hacker News Reader

France and Spain continue to exist and they were former hegemons. China has stably existed with long periods of turning inwards after more regional hedgemony.

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It's really straight forward -- Do you consider things like liberal democracy, property rights, freedom of expression, freedom of thought, freedom of association, due process, and the rule of law to be essential features of society?

If you don't -- Chinese hegemony and the path it will lead the world down is the one for you.

If you do -- Then American hegemony with all its flaws is something worth fighting for.

Being ideals, all of those ideals in reality are implemented with different tradeoffs in different nations with different risks going forward. Discussing in more detail how one arrives at that particular choice of options is more interesting than an end presentation of what looks like a fallacy of false dichotomy.

People value freedom in different ways. Personally, I would ally myself with tomorrow’s bully, rather than today’s. I understand the implications, but it looks like most of nations are shifting in the same manner.

One note, some of the things you’ve listed has been proven as “mostly on paper, once people get their way, mental gymnastics will overcome the reason” in the past month. For a bastion of “freedom and democracy”, it’s really not looking like one from outside.

It's easier to fix a broken democracy than to turn an authoritarian state into a democratic one.

China hasn’t threatened to annex my country.

I'm Canadian as well.

Stop and think about this for a moment -- do you think that China doesn't spread authoritarianism across the globe because they don't want to or simply because they can't do it yet?

One is actively threatening, and one may threaten in the future.

Also, I am Canadian, but I could also be Panamanian, or Danish. Maybe it would be different if I were Taiwanese or Vietnamese or Japanese, but, China is far away and playing nice, and America is close and not.

It sounds like you agree with the premise that we need to see a return to democratic ideals and a rules based order in the United States?

It’d be amazing, but I don’t have a lot to do with that one way or the other. If it happens, I might reconsider my stance on US v China. Right now it looks unlikely.

Authorian to democracy transition happens more often than democracies come back from severe backslides, which... is basically never. I struggle to think of an example.

Recent events have showed that all that good American stuff doesn't really exist.

It’s hard to convince people to think the US is in any position to protect those principles when the current administration is attacking each and every one them head on.

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