Between this, Chinas rise (the lights-out factories etc) and the gestures around general atmosphere here in the USA it really doesnt seem like we're in for a good 20-50 years.
One of the deep ironies of the current world order is that as America recedes in power, other countries are receding even faster (and less documented). America has too much in the way of natural resources and favorable demographics and can continue to fail forward for a long time.
edit: fertility rate in the US is near historic lows. maybe you're thinking of something else re: demographic trends, but that seems pretty alarming to me.
China is at 1.7, but I am not sure I trust the number if they report it themselves.
Either way, I have no idea where you take that there's a large number of children being born.
https://thefeminismproject.com/global-news/china-cracks-down...
The rule of law is holding on a bit tighter, and quality of life isn't as bleak as the States, but Canada needs some serious reforms to break the hold of the elite class.
Seriously, look at how the temporary foreign worker program enriched the elites and then is used by their centralized media machines to radicalize the population against immigrants. It's a bad joke, and this exact regulatory capture runs deep and wide.
The US only has one additional political party beyond China has, and arguably both US parties are simply 'wings' of a larger party owned by the actual ruling class, something neither party wishes to acknowledge. When viewed through this lens the US and China aren't that different politically, and at the same time China is far more meritocratic and promotes leaders on a much more results-oriented basis.
It's like a household where the voters are the kids and the leaders are the parents. In China the parents are happily married and communicate with each other. Kids can't really manipulate the parents, but the parents are reasonable and the household is demonstrably a successful one. In the US the parents are bitterly divorced, bickering, and are easily played against each other by the kids. The household is a disaster, in constant disarray and the kids are going to end up dropping out of high school. However, at the end of the day both of these households are overseen by the same leadership system: the parents.
What would happen if we took a more consequentialist look at democracy rather than caring mainly about the forms?
There's also a significant growing political push to transition away from FPTP voting in the US, which would dismantle the current duopoly.
You can get locked up with a 2 million dollar bond for posting a facebook meme in the US, as demonstrated by a recent case[1]. I don't know what value the transparency holds here? It's certainly already crossed the Rubicon into overt authoritarianism in the past year.
[1] https://reason.com/2025/10/10/tennessee-man-arrested-gets-2-...
The transparency I referred to was primarily to the American political system's airing of its dirty laundry out in the open, which is inherently going to look more chaotic than disputes between internal factions of a single party because so much of it is performative.
as a European who frequently travels to both, in recent history it was at an American airport, not China that I was being asked for my social media profiles and had a 30 minute discussion because they didn't believe me when I told them that I don't actively maintain a social media presence.
Of course China has no free discourse as such, but at least there is a gentleman's agreement in the sense that if I don't stage a protest they'll not bother me, whereas the US now increasingly looks like Latin America, where you need to be afraid of being harangued by some goon squad of people hired off the streets at the behest of some kleptocrat
it isn't though, that's the point. It's already more disorderly, arbitrary and unpredictable, the point is you have no expectation when you go to the US these days. You're not getting Prussian/Chinese autocracy in America, it lacks the people for it. You're going straight to Turkmenistan with the leader building himself golden statues of his favorite horses on the taxpayers dime, not the shiny trains
The reality is that everyone in China who managed to build up some wealth sooner or later exfiltrates it despite capital controls. And Russia prior to the war was similar. That's a large part of why London's and Vancouver's real estate markets got screwed up so hard - tons of real estate just sitting empty because it's just a proxy, a storage for wealth in a country that has laws and follows laws instead of the will of a dictator.
I’ve seen growing arguments, even on the right about wealth inequality being an issue. Like specifically too much of the S&P 500 is tied up in 10 companies.
And this video on a bro-podcast where a right wing marketer/economist talks about wealth consolidation: https://youtu.be/ajGmL1gus9A?si=5Vf4dW_7jtK8A5y2
Specifically something like “I’m right-wing on income but not on wealth”