Three Empires: 1. China's Mandate of Heaven

Aztec - from Teotihuacan to northern border of San Antonio to San Francisco.
United States - capitulate to the Nixonian troll Patrick Buchannan, an admixture of mostly eastern eurasians and west africans with an indigeous mesoamericans.
China - a 5000 year old civilization. Chinese exceptionalism; continuous return from a lost Mandate of Heaven

It seems to me that Chinese exceptionalism; a recurring return from the loss of the Mandate of Heaven, completely subsumes American exceptionalism; a recurring dominance of all things under heaven. There must have been several discredited mandates for the middle kingdom. Some witnessed a recurring dominance for a period. Our naturalistic fallacy writ large consists mainly or entirely of the fruits of a frozen accident - a Constitutional Republic forged by Bacon, Hobbs, Locke but most especially Hume and Darwin. These two brought forth the witness of science on the fleeting quality of the frozen accident. The retreat from reason on both fringes threatens our exceptionalism. Our recurrent dominance depends on emotions tempered by reason - the roots of the tree of liberty.

Our economic liberty beguiled us into giving our old enemy; our defeated enemy Marx, the clearest victory imaginable. We are slaves to the very communism that American exceptionalism defeated - you read the blogs you know in your heart we won a cold war. We tied the hangman's knot with rope manufactured in China.

But leaving off the fringe we still have a vast wisdom in the crowd. Republican sentiments continue to whither with each Medicare payment until an independent is born into the middle.

The upshot for the PRC is that they don't put a land war in Asia in the five year plan. What they have is 5000 years of history that proves they can come back from circumstances unimaginable to a centrist American suburbanite.