Hard to beat...

Hard to beat this one for accuracy...

I'm still torn between whether today's dynamics are best captured by:

• the era when Christianity co-opted Roman political institutions, or
• the 1600's when Protestantism challenged Catholicism's thought and political controls.

The Roman era captures the negative sum dynamics which are coming.  It also reflects wokeism's use as a vehicle to empower one political tribe by leveraging popular sentiment for a new morality of "equality".  Thus it really captures elite over production (see Turchin) and the use of a simple signalling convention as a way to filter out a lot of elites.

The Protestant wars miss a lot of this.  Protestant upstarts were more revolutionary than co-opting.  But the war of religions capture the dynamics of mass communication and censorship.  The Roman era doesn't reflect that much (at least as far as we know).   The Protestant era also better captures the physical admixture between the two competing tribes.  US's state system matches this well.  Europe - not so much.

The French revolution really doesn't seem to fit.  Napolean does fit Trump pretty well.  All the elites thought the emergence of a populist outsider was an existential threat to order.  I'm sure their Napolean derangement syndrome matches TDS pretty well.  Napolean was just a better fighter...

The American Revolution is another good dynamical mirror.  But, land expansion dynamics really make for a different scenario, despite the obvious mirrors with deplatforming and liberty vs parochial governance.  The major thing I don't like with this revolution's parallels to today is that the revolutionaries had pretty decent representation in the media.  Also, today, institutions are tending toward authoritarian governance.  In the American Revolution they were largely tending away from it.  This messes up a lot of the dynamics.  You get the wrong momentum vectors for multi-level selection dynamics.  Thus, you're mainly looking at superficial behavioural similarities, not deep structural parallels.  That's why I like Protestantism and the Roman era.

The Roman era seems better when you're looking at things from a woke / egalitarian or elite perspective.  The Protestant move looks better when you're looking at things from a populist / freedom or commoner perspective.