It is the fate of enemies and competitors to look ever more like each other. Carthage looked too much like Rome, imperial Britain too much like imperial Germany. The United States now is a fractured and militarized nation. In America’s cracked vanity mirror, Christian fundamentalists want a permanent jihad against the world, and share views on gender which converge ever more closely with their veiled nemesis, Salafist Islam. Meanwhile America’s Wall Street pirates and lawless multinationals subvert common people’s labour to private, tax haven profit which benefits nobody. Their tools are public lies (spin) and the backdoor coercion of supposedly democratically chosen politicians. Across the Pacific Ocean, China’s pretend-leaders and grasping billionaires subvert the common people’s labour to casino binges and private, tax haven profit which benefits nobody. Their tools are public lies (spin) and the open coercion of any citizens who asks for real choice about the deployment of China’s wealth. America has a broken system of democracy. One study of voter participation (1969–86) showed that only 45% of American people considered it worthwhile to vote. As the blindly obstructionist US Senate shows, all the incentives in that system are to block good government. (Australia with 94% compulsory participation, the world’s highest, showed much more popular attention to major issues over the same period, with more beneficial outcomes). China, with no sanctioned popular participation, has seen a leadership brutal in its disregard for the opinions of ordinary people, and consequently faces almost 500 “mass incidents” (riots) every day of the year , and near universal corruption amongst its public officials. The United States looks almost incapable of genuine democratic reform; ditto for China.