The nation recently discovered that the FBI has a new "MAGA Extremist" category. All this hard work by government is aimed at "preserving democracy." Clinton is particularly concerned about the small extremist "tail" wagging the House Republican caucus, and destroying not only decorum, but the institution itself.

It is tempting to be mildly entertained by all of this, but as Tho Bishop noted "Weak regimes are particularly dangerous." The Western/NATO/Blackrock conversation about Ukraine turned to "next steps" many months ago. Our current weak regime here at home – a group of dominant state beneficiaries looking down the barrel of a financial, societal, and military hegemonic collapse trifecta– is also considering next steps for us.

Beyond hunting down MAGAts, and perhaps loading them on trains for deprogramming somewhere, what else is coming, and what can we learn now that will help?

We can learn from the collapse of the USSR in 1989, a seemingly sudden breakdown of what appeared to be a strong and centralized federal state, that had in actuality lost control of the economy, the culture, and the narrative at least a decade earlier. People and regions itching for independence, and those challenging the narrative, were enemies of the State. At the end of that story, what remained were many of the same political oligarchs, many of them internationalized, in control of most of the former USSR's economic and natural resources. The poor, invested in and dependent upon socialist promises, stayed poor, and many got poorer.

For several years, the death rate climbed in Russia. Power shifted, but maybe not as radically as we were told. While we celebrate Gorbachev as the leader who made the end of the USSR possible with restructuring and transparency – many Russians saw, and experienced, what happened a little differently.