The world has "fallen" to communism. The last liberals and fascists on Earth flee to Puerto Rico (sorry) and basically turn it into another Taiwan for a few months or years. The ruling class there maintains that it has suffered only temporary setbacks at worst and that victory is at hand. And besides, if you like communism so much, why don't you move to [the rest of the world]? And they aren't even real communists there anyway because they have not instantaneously transformed the planet into paradise. They're just befogging the masses, who are too stupid to understand that the best days of capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, and patriarchy lie ahead!
I'm just thinking about this because of the Yankee cope I'm seeing all over the place. Ukraine just needs more weapons and European soldiers, then it's bound to prevail against Russia, which is collapsing anyway. China is a heartbeat from balkanizing. Haiti is just run by a bunch of cannibal criminal gangs. Palestine can't possibly win. Etc.
To do the “history doesn’t repeat but it rhymes” bit, I think we’d see a mix of countries/regions with outright revolution that eliminate the existence of a capitalist class, and then others where the capitalist class ends up taking on a ceremonial role. Functionally, genuflecting to the new socialist hegemony as to avoid the chaos of the revolutions, but baking in some sort of perch that doesn’t give them any real power but lets them feel like they’re still a special, protected class.
Now the rhyming part is, with capitalism and the feudal order, the perch has a neat patrilineal mode of self-replicating; son of king becomes king. With the capitalist class, class birth right is more de facto than de jure. So probably something more symbolic, like job titles within the socialist economy that invoke a capitalist imagery/throwback. Instead of “research and development engineer,” it’s “innovation and entrepreneurialism VP”.
