I saw this article today.
Now imagine a different scenario. A dissatisfied state has been building its power and expanding its geopolitical horizons. But then the country peaks, perhaps because its economy slows, perhaps because its own assertiveness provokes a coalition of determined rivals, or perhaps because both of these things happen at once. The future starts to look quite forbidding; a sense of imminent danger starts to replace a feeling of limitless possibility. In these circumstances, a revisionist power may act boldly, even aggressively, to grab what it can before it is too late. The most dangerous trajectory in world politics is a long rise followed by the prospect of a sharp decline.
As we show in our forthcoming book, Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China, this scenario is more common than you might think. Historian Donald Kagan showed, for instance, that Athens started acting more belligerently in the years before the Peloponnesian War because it feared adverse shifts in the balance of naval power—in other words, because it was on the verge of losing influence vis-à-vis Sparta. We see the same thing in more recent cases as well.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/09/24/china-great-power-united-states/I'm a big fan of Kagan, BTW.
I think it goes far in explaining why China is so bellicose: It knows it has peaked, and there is no place to go but down. As my OP suggests, this rings true with the democrats as well.
This is it. This is their one big shot before sliding into impotence and irrelevance. They are (thankfully) at war with themselves and have no strong leader to guide them and their policies initiatives. Normally party leader is a role normally fulfilled by the president. They have no president, they only have his committee of handlers. They can't prevail outside of their political enclaves because - as the article points out - their assertiveness provoked a "coalition of determined rivals" (think: school board meetings among many other possible examples).
The Democrats are at war with each other over the prospect of going to (metaphorical) war with the rest of the nation. Those in swing states blanche. Those who are leftist dictators see that the time is now or never.
Consider the next paragraph from the article and tell me you do not see parallels with the actions of the Democrats:
Over the past 150 years, peaking powers—great powers that had been growing dramatically faster than the world average and then suffered a severe, prolonged slowdown—usually don’t fade away quietly. Rather, they become brash and aggressive. They suppress dissent at home and try to regain economic momentum by creating exclusive spheres of influence abroad. They pour money into their militaries and use force to expand their influence. This behavior commonly provokes great-power tensions. In some cases, it touches disastrous wars.
