America circa 2025 reminds me of post-Soviet countries during the 1990s.
Here are what looks very familiar to me as someone who was growing up in Ukraine 30 years ago (side note, all those things do not apply to Ukraine anymore, many problems were solved):
- rise of oligarchs - people who got rich quickly because of new changing circumstances (in Ukraine it was move to capitalism and in America it was tech boom that produced tons of billionaires in a short amount of time) and decided to stop focusing only on the business but to impact politics using media
- huge mass of people who lack basic reasoning tools to deal with a new reality (in Ukraine it took a decade for people to learn about media, how it works, who owns it etc, people who had grown up in the Soviet state and were not ready for it; in America it's even more intense because America famously has poor public education and people lack basic skills, so it does remind me of the post-Soviet population)
Fascinating and scary thing is that while post-Soviet countries like Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Ukraine spent decades moving forward (with tons of work and tons of personal sacrifices), America seems to move completely backwards: we now see rich new money billionaires controlling social media platforms and old school newspapers, we see billionaires influencing elections, we see rich people in power publicly accusing each other of pedophilia. We see people in government giving government contracts to their buddies and supporters. We see public with no skills to understand what is going on (famously America didn't even know what "oligarchy" means), no desire to sacrifice anything for the greater good and no civic society institutions (America is famous for private donations and very good at it, but that is where civic duty nowadays stops).
I'm not 100% sure what is coming yet, but I do see The Age of Oligarchy. And I do wish to be wrong here. Because it's going to be unpleasant for all of us. It is hard to undo corruption and breaking down of social contracts.