So this is how it ends — in a whimper wrapped in self-pity and recriminations.

With President Obama on the defensive at his final press conference, Hillary Clinton’s last campaign event resembling a wake, and Electoral College protests ending in total failure and farce, the Democrat Party is limping off the stage and into the political winter.

It was supposed to sit atop the national power pyramid for decades, a new paradigm of liberals, progressives, the young, the old, the unions and blacks, Latinos, Muslims and Asians.

The torch would be passed from Obama to Clinton, a liberal Supreme Court would vastly expand executive power and the regulatory state would enforce climate-change orthodoxy on all industry and elitist dictates on every American. Globalism would be the new patriotism.

But a funny thing happened on the way to one-party dominance: The people who work for a living said no, hell no. Their revolt brings Donald Trump to the White House amid hopes of a revival of the economy and of the American spirit.

Thoroughly beaten, the Dems are at their lowest point in nearly a century. From the White House to Congress to statehouses, they are on the outside looking in.  Are we witnessing their death throes as an organized political party?

The Italian referendum and close-shave Austrian election are symptoms of a continent that may be teetering on the brink of political disintegration.

It’s just possible that an empire may be collapsing before our eyes, as the Habsburg and Ottoman empires did before it, in or around the same neighborhood.

With the rise of nationalist parties in Italy, Austria, Hungary, Poland, the Netherlands, France, Germany and Britain, the possibility that the Brussels union has fomented, rather than suppressed, nationalism can no longer be dismissed.  The European Union may be encouraging precisely what it was founded to avert.

Against this background, it is worth recalling that the leading theory among economic historians for why Europe after 1400 became the wealthiest and most innovative continent is political fragmentation.

Precisely because it was not unified, Europe became a laboratory for different ways of governing, enabling the discovery of regimes that allowed free markets and invention to flourish, first in northern Italy and some parts of Germany, then the low countries, then Britain.

By contrast, China’s unity under one ruler prevented such experimentation.  Just what the mandarins of the EU are doing now.

As the Dow flirts with Trumpian heights of 20,000 on Wall Street, the Shanghai Composite in China has been drifting down for seven consecutive weeks.

It is hard to construct a case that reconciles this split, given the tightly intertwined nature of the world's financial system and the trans-Pacific symbiosis that we call Chimerica. One of these two markets must reverse.

If you are waiting for the next Chinese boom, you have already missed it. The latest 18-month mini-cycle has peaked. The authorities are being forced to tighten. China's $9 trillion bond market is seizing up.

Forty companies have had to cancel or postpone bond issuance this month. Nomura says 24 large firms are in default negotiations, ranging from steel and construction to shipbuilding, chemicals, textiles, and solar.

Beijing let it rip earlier this year with a fiscal deficit of 4% of GDP - a one-off loosening of two to three percentage points that you would expect only in an emergency - and it deliberately stoked a housing bubble in the cities of the Eastern seaboard.

The stimulus was comparable in scale China's post-Lehman blitz, but the effects have been far less because the efficiency of credit has collapsed.  It now takes four yuan of loans to generate one yuan of growth. Since there has been almost no underlying reform, this has merely bought time at the cost of greater imbalances.