Well this post is an embarrassment of riches. So many things I want to comment on. I have to restrain myself. A couple of observations.
Regarding the velocity of Trump's "just do things" that has left the entrenched opposition in such disorientation and disarray. He is assisted in this by arming himself with a team which can wield the power of AI. I made this comment a few days ago:
"AI represents a giant leap forward in analytical bandwidth. Trump’s alliance with Elon Musk makes Trump the first American president with the means to exploit AI for governance. This creates a massive informational mismatch between the legacy press and the president. Even the legislative branch and federal bureaucracy are out-gunned analytically by a President with his hands on AI. AI's ability to rapidly mine the data for outrages will leave everyone else constantly playing information whack-a-mole, as the administration steamrolls through the bureaucracy.
The Trump administration is combining high-bandwidth governing analysis with unfiltered access to realtime media platforms, like X, which bypass the curated approach preferred by the legacy media and needed by them to establish a narrative. The administration’s ability to share its analytical findings in realtime may mean that the legacy media has lost, for good, the ability to curate a narrative. They may always be a day late and a dollar short. Already, legacy media reporting is beginning to emit an aroma similar to what one gets when sitting down to a meal of last week's leftovers."
And I was intrigued by your reference to Mary Harrington's observation about "the exultant male response" to all of these doings. Immediately following the election, I conjectured that one way to understand the election was as a referendum on masculine achievement. (That post is here: https://www.keithlowery.com/p/in-the-world-of-atoms). In it, I suggested that "the material world’s resistance to alteration serves to function as its own form of discrimination against women, if by “discrimination” we mean that women should be as accomplished as men at anything they decide to undertake. But women’s experience is sometimes less an artifact of discrimination by men than discrimination by material reality itself, which has circumscribed some kinds of female achievement...Trump cut his professional teeth building physical things, altering the very form of the material world in pursuits historically associated with the physical strength more characteristic of men. And it is equally noteworthy that he attracted support from others who were likewise high achievers in the world of atoms. While Elon Musk may have started out innovating in digital bits, he has become a history altering figure for his innovation in the world of atoms. From rockets to cars, from boring machines to manufacturing technologies, the sheer breadth and success of his accomplishments in the world of atoms is without parallel and without precedent for many generations past. On the other side of the electoral contest were people who trafficked primarily in words, and laws, and regulations, and socio-political machinations. But they had little to recommend them in the form of any significant accomplishments in the world of atoms...And one suspects that men like Donald Trump and Elon Musk are unnerving to progressives precisely because their quintessentially masculine accomplishments serve as embarrassing evidence of the appalling mendacity of the entire progressive narrative."
The misandrist feminist assault on the empowered masculine ultimately turned to the destruction of an empowered feminine as well. It was a totally mercenary movement joined at the hip with the corporate/bureaucratic desire for access to, and the creation and control of, uneducated manipulative labor. The Trump/Musk reveal, that access to tax largesse for the creation of a propagandist MSM, social programs and NGO's that placed spooks and political operatives in key positions to control and subvert the truth/fact based healthy national dialogue We the People deserve is no surprise to anyone paying attention. The healthy masculine and feminine was replaced ("no such thing as a man or woman") with the surgically altered sexless sterility of the illiterate trans humanist ready for the microchip roboworker sans history, culture and mythology. Pretending anything other than inhuman avaricious greed is perpetrating the horror (not aimed at you) is self-deception. 8% of deaths in some Canadian provinces can be attributed to the
proactive staff of final solution euthanasia centers.
The desire for totalitarian one world rule by criminal financiers fronting utopian concern gave us WWI, WWII and almost managed to burn
the 20th Century to the ground. Trump is reprieve not salvation. He is only President because of the survival of our Republic's First Amendment and the human moral reason our founding fathers worked to enshrine in our Constitution. As in Starmer's England and across Europe, the Harris/Biden travesty fully intended to take those away. "Ism's" are dead. The only authentic is the human. "Tech"/AI offers an expansion of human consciousness but any machine is only as effective as the person driving it. So far those in control of it have only shown their willingness to use it for personal economic gain and control. The "greatest upward transfer of wealth in human history" has spiritually/economically impoverished Americans, destroyed institutions and scattered the walking wounded across every underpass and byway in the country.
Thanks for your great comment and thanks to the UPHEAVAL for its work in demystifying the mal pathologies attempting to subsume our Republic.
Appalling mendandacity rooted in bigotry towards us, their fellow citizens. “Never again” had the practical implication of viewing their fellow man as pigs and dangerous. Mendacity indeed.
"The Great War of 1914-1918 lies like a band of scorched earth dividing that time from ours. In wiping out so many lives which would have been operative on the years that followed, in destroying beliefs, changing ideas, and leaving incurable wounds of disillusion, it created a physical as well as psychological gulf between two epochs." The Proud Tower, Barbara Tuchman
Your essays increasingly remind me of the work of one of America's greatest popular historians. They blend sharp insights into individuals - I never thought of Dick Cheney as a proponent of an open society - with analysis of social trends on their own merits. Moreover, said analysis is rooted in appreciation for Western societies as organic entities and not abstractions/propositions. (You did the same thing with your early analyses of China.) I strongly encourage you to build on this idea of the twentieth century ending by looking at Tuchman's various dissections of the failings of Western policymakers in the first half of the long twentieth century.
I wonder how the - what I call - The Great 20th Century War (starting in 1904 with the conflict between Russian & Japan and ending in 1995 with the Bosnian conflict) might fit into your concept of Long Twentieth Century.
Thanks for the excellent essay, and for the citations. Forty years from now my grandchildren will ask what it was like to be alive during Trump, and this essay will help me answer.
One question I can't shake - I know where I came from, where we came from, we being the dissident right; during the lonely years we read books, talked online, shared memes, and slowly came to reject the Long 20th Century. But where did Trump come from? He was from a completely different generation, one that seems to have totally hated the Strong Gods. There was little in the way of intellectual support for his position. Not that he would have bothered to read it. Which perhaps is how he believes it? And here he is seemingly from nowhere.
This is not your error, but I am alarmed by the seemingly uncritical acceptance, bordering on adulation, of the new administration’s projects - borne of an understandable relief that the insanity of the old era is apparently behind us.
There are three major areas of activity - what I consider to be the real game - that Trump did not run on at all. All the fun stuff he is doing to “dismantle” the deep state, although welcome, is distracting his base from what looks to be the true agenda: expanding the technological-monetary surveillance and control grid; building a larger and more powerful Israeli state (thereby extinguishing Palestine); and establishing a “North American Technate” as a precursor to a global government.
Many of these projects are anathema to the “America First” and libertarian elements of Trump’s support, but are being carefully framed to seem not only compatible with, but instrumental to the success of the strategy. For example: Doge’s technology is presented as essential to root out the corruption of an unaccountable bureaucracy. Christian support for the Zionist project is a counter to atheism and the threat of Islam created by tolerance in “open societies.” And a north American union is fine so long as we run things - so long as it’s OUR version of an expanded America…as if our founding constitutionalists would have countenanced such an aggressive and arrogant foreign policy. Trump is presenting himself as anti-war while not ruling our violence to re-take the Panama Canal, absorb Canada and/or “buy” Greenland. Not to mention his specific promise to annihilate Iran on behalf of Israel - as if it’s a certainty that the former was behind two assassination attempts.
The irony that Elon Musk is using all-seeing technology to unhide and unwind the “social technologies” of the deep state seems to be lost on most people. Isn’t that how it always happens? If you want to introduce a new political reality that most Americans would not accept (i.e. a Chinese-style social credit system), then start with a very unpopular target of the new approach. Who will have access to these technologies of “transparency” in the future? Not us!
I couldn’t stand where the former administration was taking us, but I am skeptical the new one will be much better. Accountability for those who are pulling the strings remains elusive.
Have you heard about Richard Day? Lawrence Dunegan’s revelations are essential learning.
As glad as I am to see DEI take some body blows, I fear we're just replacing one version of Leviathan with another. Technocratic neoliberalism is still technocratic neoliberalism regardless whether the culture leans left or right. The Machine is nothing if not flexible and accomodating.
BTW, you missed a few figures in your catalog of returning archetypes: warlord, mad king, child soldier….
Also, a few oldies but goodies from the previous times of the strong gods: war, famine, genocide, pandemic, massacre, invasion, slavery, rape and pillage, colonialism, religious fanaticism, crusades, autos da fe….
Finally, yes, let’s loose all that autistic masculine energy that is now boosted by unprecedented technology and is now morally unconstrained because the boys have read nothing other than Ayn Rand and adolescent-level science fiction wet dreams, and have played nothing other than solipsistic first person shooter and world domination games on their computers. What could possibly go wrong?
It seems as if the goal of the post WWII consensus was to remove the humanness from humanity. To make everything neat and tidy and predictable. The opposite of strong, messy, ambivalent, loving, hating, self-centred humans. It turns out that when you try to make humans inhuman, they lose the will to live.
Thank you for this essay. While the Allies had some justification for going to war in 1939, the aftermath was disastrous for all, as you suggested. The American Denazification programs in Germany were, in some ways, more damaging than what the Soviets did in East Germany in that regard. Some American efforts in post-war Germany seem to have become templates for what later became "Cancel Culture." A very perceptive, little-known American economist named Ralph Keeling warned about this at the time, and I discuss it a bit at.... https://williammarkley.substack.com/p/they-suffered-also-germans-in-the
Where I live, it has been a very long, bitter winter, but Trump's substantial attempts at reform make it feel like an early spring. One of Trump's strengths, I think, is that he's not an ideologue. He clearly loves America, and appreciates our Founding ideals, and of course he has been a capitalist, but I wouldn't place this in the same category that most recent ideologies fall into. Trump, like Andrew Jackson, is a nationalist, but that seems to tap into those natural bonds that most people feel--family, community, nation, people--rather than some abstraction.
Excellent thoughts as always, but I wonder if I might--not disagree--but posit a wrinkle that must be considered to truly understand the mid-20th century consensus and which, I think, needs to be considered as an aspect of the managerial consensus. Yes, Hitler served as a useful embodiment of the forces the open society wished to contain and prevent, but I take the true obsession of the original priestly cast of the managerial state was the containment of the threat of nuclear annihilation. Nationalism was and is indeed a strong god, but the immanence of the god of the mushroom cloud is surely stronger, and the original justification for these managers (I am thinking of men like my grandfathers who were both le-level federal bureaucrats in the 50s, 60s, and 70s) was not preventing a new Hitler, but preventing the bombs from flying. The Specter of Hitler seems to have replaced this concern with the collapse of the Soviet Empire (there is no other way to explain to utter lack of concern this heir of the Cold-War managerial establishment shows to poking the nuclear armed Russian bear) but I don't think this was the original justification. I am glad that the old order is passing away, we should have taken steps to dismantle it in the 90's when we had some breathing room, but now I fear it is too late. Still, we have to ask the question how a multipolar world of strong gods can avoid Armageddon in the age of nuclear weapons even more terrifying than the H-Bomb. The strong gods demand wars, and real wars at that (not the fake wars we in the West see only vaguely through our empire of screens). Perhaps I'm wrong and it was the other way around; still, it is a question we must contend with.
Trump's earliest political statements were about nuclear weapons. He talked to Ron Rosenbaum in Manhattan Inc. about wanting to negotiate between the US and USSR.
Yes. The phrase that struck me reading this essay is "I'm a fish that just had someone present water to me in a way I actually comprehend."
And yes, I'm aware that this is exactly the same mechanism that happens when one becomes enlightened to anything, including false things. In this case I think my decades of reading (and living) politics and history has armored me against falsehoods in this area. Then again, pride goeth before a fall, so it's time to contemplate for a while.
Wow, thank you for this. with everything that is going on, its helpful to stand back and look at the macro environment. Thanks for helping make sense of it
Another really brilliant piece. As for mayhem to come, my sense is that the Long Twentieth Century isn’t going to be ushered off stage without some serious kicking and screaming. Two modes it should be very good at in its latest form.
All over we read meditations on the “vibe shift” and how this is the end of politics as hall monitor. That “the left” is demoralized, in disarray. I think it’s temporary, and that the kicking will begin in earnest with the first signs of actual pain from A or B Trump policy. Tariffs and inflation? Very possibly.
But in any case, the strong gods have returned. And aren’t going to slump off to the principal’s office again.
The Strong Gods or the Gods of the Copybook Headings. Or are they the same.
It is correct to say that Hitler is the avatar of the awful part of the 20th century but why is that so since he wasn't singular. Stalin and Mao both ran up a bigger body count. Is it that Hitler targeted a particular ethnic group while Stalin and Mao were more "Kill them all and let Marx sort it out". Had Hitler won the war though I suspect the genocide of the Slavs would have surpassed the Holocaust. Hitler published a blueprint for that too and there were a lot more Slavs. And what about the other monsters that also targeted a particular ethnic group like Enver Pasha and Talat Pasha.
The Smart Kids gave Stalin and Mao a pass because they supposedly had good intentions. And Hitler, as bad as he really was, fought against Communism, so that's another reason to have emphasized his evil avatar status. As some authors have pointed out, there were many parallels between the actions of Hitler and Stalin, but I think ideology trumps all for the Left. Body counts in the long run don't matter for them, and I'm more convinced than ever that Leftism always has very dark and murderous destruction at its heart, no matter what supposedly good intentions are involved.
One could say that Hitler had good intentions--no matter how evil and destructive--since he and his fellow Nazis were advocating for their own people--Germans, Nordics, etc. But of course we all should know where the road paved with good intentions leads.
Your essays express the most thoughtful and intelligent advocacy for the return of the “strong gods” that I’ve read, and I look forward to every new one. I agree that the Long Twentieth Century has become enfeebled and chronically ill. But, let’s not forget that its dominant ideology—liberal, globalistic capitalism—produced the greatest amount of human flourishing, world-wide poverty reduction, and long term violence-reduction in history. This is a bad thing? And what is its ruling principle? Reason, rationality, science. Can reason co-exist with the strong gods?
True, it—the LTC—has also resulted in the industrial impoverishment of the U.S, and the actual impoverishment, both materially and spiritually, of the American working class, and I agree that this must be fixed. Whether Trump’s electro-convulsive therapy to the body politic will work is TBD, but the flailing helplessness of the left at this point is something to behold.
But I remain unconvinced that the villain in the story is liberalism. As an old liberal Boomer who grew up and was molded by the LTC, I remain deeply suspicious of ethno-nationalism. Still, I do think it’s possible to have BOTH an ethno-nationalist state that retains the best aspects of the liberal order: openness, freedom, rationality, technological superiority, and tolerance, AND a commitment to a dominant culture and religion. The only current example of that is Israel, which has demonstrated its ability, despite intense internal partisanship, to furiously unite in the face of an existential threat. I seriously doubt if the U.S. could do the same, at the current moment, but maybe after a few years of shock treatment we could
I am not convinced the positives of the LTC were due to this ideology. The LTC lacked violence compared to the pre-WW2 era, but it could have been very short twentieth century had the nukes been launched, as nearly happened on more than one occasion. You could argue the Cold War was WW3 in permanent pause mode, and that only blind luck averted it turning into WW3.
What's more the LTC ideology led directly to the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam and so on. All justified by bringing the open society to societies that were inexplicably resistant to such things.
Finally, I reject the idea that the LTC was dominated by reason and science. It was not. It looked superficially like that was true at the time, because post WW2 science funding was massively increased by the government and in the latter part of the LTC university attendance was ramped to extreme levels. But what became clear in the past 15 years or so is the staggering rates of fraud in academia, to the extent that large amounts of the "science" the LTC has left us with must be tossed out because it was never actually real.
Even if you focus just on the papers describing experiments that actually took place, the underlying reasoning is of such low quality that most of it qualifies as pseudo-science. All this of course reached its pinnacle with COVID, perhaps another key event that marks the close of the LTC. A worldwide two year festival of pseudo-science, bullshit and very visibly fake expertise destroyed a core mythic pillar of the managerial era: that the technocrats in charge have superior knowledge and wisdom to the bloke in the pub.
Outstanding essay. As always, I feel like your work is something to be studied and not simply read.
Well this post is an embarrassment of riches. So many things I want to comment on. I have to restrain myself. A couple of observations.
Regarding the velocity of Trump's "just do things" that has left the entrenched opposition in such disorientation and disarray. He is assisted in this by arming himself with a team which can wield the power of AI. I made this comment a few days ago:
"AI represents a giant leap forward in analytical bandwidth. Trump’s alliance with Elon Musk makes Trump the first American president with the means to exploit AI for governance. This creates a massive informational mismatch between the legacy press and the president. Even the legislative branch and federal bureaucracy are out-gunned analytically by a President with his hands on AI. AI's ability to rapidly mine the data for outrages will leave everyone else constantly playing information whack-a-mole, as the administration steamrolls through the bureaucracy.
The Trump administration is combining high-bandwidth governing analysis with unfiltered access to realtime media platforms, like X, which bypass the curated approach preferred by the legacy media and needed by them to establish a narrative. The administration’s ability to share its analytical findings in realtime may mean that the legacy media has lost, for good, the ability to curate a narrative. They may always be a day late and a dollar short. Already, legacy media reporting is beginning to emit an aroma similar to what one gets when sitting down to a meal of last week's leftovers."
And I was intrigued by your reference to Mary Harrington's observation about "the exultant male response" to all of these doings. Immediately following the election, I conjectured that one way to understand the election was as a referendum on masculine achievement. (That post is here: https://www.keithlowery.com/p/in-the-world-of-atoms). In it, I suggested that "the material world’s resistance to alteration serves to function as its own form of discrimination against women, if by “discrimination” we mean that women should be as accomplished as men at anything they decide to undertake. But women’s experience is sometimes less an artifact of discrimination by men than discrimination by material reality itself, which has circumscribed some kinds of female achievement...Trump cut his professional teeth building physical things, altering the very form of the material world in pursuits historically associated with the physical strength more characteristic of men. And it is equally noteworthy that he attracted support from others who were likewise high achievers in the world of atoms. While Elon Musk may have started out innovating in digital bits, he has become a history altering figure for his innovation in the world of atoms. From rockets to cars, from boring machines to manufacturing technologies, the sheer breadth and success of his accomplishments in the world of atoms is without parallel and without precedent for many generations past. On the other side of the electoral contest were people who trafficked primarily in words, and laws, and regulations, and socio-political machinations. But they had little to recommend them in the form of any significant accomplishments in the world of atoms...And one suspects that men like Donald Trump and Elon Musk are unnerving to progressives precisely because their quintessentially masculine accomplishments serve as embarrassing evidence of the appalling mendacity of the entire progressive narrative."
The misandrist feminist assault on the empowered masculine ultimately turned to the destruction of an empowered feminine as well. It was a totally mercenary movement joined at the hip with the corporate/bureaucratic desire for access to, and the creation and control of, uneducated manipulative labor. The Trump/Musk reveal, that access to tax largesse for the creation of a propagandist MSM, social programs and NGO's that placed spooks and political operatives in key positions to control and subvert the truth/fact based healthy national dialogue We the People deserve is no surprise to anyone paying attention. The healthy masculine and feminine was replaced ("no such thing as a man or woman") with the surgically altered sexless sterility of the illiterate trans humanist ready for the microchip roboworker sans history, culture and mythology. Pretending anything other than inhuman avaricious greed is perpetrating the horror (not aimed at you) is self-deception. 8% of deaths in some Canadian provinces can be attributed to the
proactive staff of final solution euthanasia centers.
The desire for totalitarian one world rule by criminal financiers fronting utopian concern gave us WWI, WWII and almost managed to burn
the 20th Century to the ground. Trump is reprieve not salvation. He is only President because of the survival of our Republic's First Amendment and the human moral reason our founding fathers worked to enshrine in our Constitution. As in Starmer's England and across Europe, the Harris/Biden travesty fully intended to take those away. "Ism's" are dead. The only authentic is the human. "Tech"/AI offers an expansion of human consciousness but any machine is only as effective as the person driving it. So far those in control of it have only shown their willingness to use it for personal economic gain and control. The "greatest upward transfer of wealth in human history" has spiritually/economically impoverished Americans, destroyed institutions and scattered the walking wounded across every underpass and byway in the country.
Thanks for your great comment and thanks to the UPHEAVAL for its work in demystifying the mal pathologies attempting to subsume our Republic.
Appalling mendandacity rooted in bigotry towards us, their fellow citizens. “Never again” had the practical implication of viewing their fellow man as pigs and dangerous. Mendacity indeed.
Absolutely brilliant.
"The Great War of 1914-1918 lies like a band of scorched earth dividing that time from ours. In wiping out so many lives which would have been operative on the years that followed, in destroying beliefs, changing ideas, and leaving incurable wounds of disillusion, it created a physical as well as psychological gulf between two epochs." The Proud Tower, Barbara Tuchman
Your essays increasingly remind me of the work of one of America's greatest popular historians. They blend sharp insights into individuals - I never thought of Dick Cheney as a proponent of an open society - with analysis of social trends on their own merits. Moreover, said analysis is rooted in appreciation for Western societies as organic entities and not abstractions/propositions. (You did the same thing with your early analyses of China.) I strongly encourage you to build on this idea of the twentieth century ending by looking at Tuchman's various dissections of the failings of Western policymakers in the first half of the long twentieth century.
Thanks Tim, a great suggestion!
I wonder how the - what I call - The Great 20th Century War (starting in 1904 with the conflict between Russian & Japan and ending in 1995 with the Bosnian conflict) might fit into your concept of Long Twentieth Century.
I’d like to second that: I think certain key individuals can be (often unwitting) archetypes of an era or its ideas
Thanks for the excellent essay, and for the citations. Forty years from now my grandchildren will ask what it was like to be alive during Trump, and this essay will help me answer.
One question I can't shake - I know where I came from, where we came from, we being the dissident right; during the lonely years we read books, talked online, shared memes, and slowly came to reject the Long 20th Century. But where did Trump come from? He was from a completely different generation, one that seems to have totally hated the Strong Gods. There was little in the way of intellectual support for his position. Not that he would have bothered to read it. Which perhaps is how he believes it? And here he is seemingly from nowhere.
It's absolutely bizarre.
Astute and compelling.
This is not your error, but I am alarmed by the seemingly uncritical acceptance, bordering on adulation, of the new administration’s projects - borne of an understandable relief that the insanity of the old era is apparently behind us.
There are three major areas of activity - what I consider to be the real game - that Trump did not run on at all. All the fun stuff he is doing to “dismantle” the deep state, although welcome, is distracting his base from what looks to be the true agenda: expanding the technological-monetary surveillance and control grid; building a larger and more powerful Israeli state (thereby extinguishing Palestine); and establishing a “North American Technate” as a precursor to a global government.
Many of these projects are anathema to the “America First” and libertarian elements of Trump’s support, but are being carefully framed to seem not only compatible with, but instrumental to the success of the strategy. For example: Doge’s technology is presented as essential to root out the corruption of an unaccountable bureaucracy. Christian support for the Zionist project is a counter to atheism and the threat of Islam created by tolerance in “open societies.” And a north American union is fine so long as we run things - so long as it’s OUR version of an expanded America…as if our founding constitutionalists would have countenanced such an aggressive and arrogant foreign policy. Trump is presenting himself as anti-war while not ruling our violence to re-take the Panama Canal, absorb Canada and/or “buy” Greenland. Not to mention his specific promise to annihilate Iran on behalf of Israel - as if it’s a certainty that the former was behind two assassination attempts.
The irony that Elon Musk is using all-seeing technology to unhide and unwind the “social technologies” of the deep state seems to be lost on most people. Isn’t that how it always happens? If you want to introduce a new political reality that most Americans would not accept (i.e. a Chinese-style social credit system), then start with a very unpopular target of the new approach. Who will have access to these technologies of “transparency” in the future? Not us!
I couldn’t stand where the former administration was taking us, but I am skeptical the new one will be much better. Accountability for those who are pulling the strings remains elusive.
Have you heard about Richard Day? Lawrence Dunegan’s revelations are essential learning.
https://drrichardday.wordpress.com/audio/
As glad as I am to see DEI take some body blows, I fear we're just replacing one version of Leviathan with another. Technocratic neoliberalism is still technocratic neoliberalism regardless whether the culture leans left or right. The Machine is nothing if not flexible and accomodating.
Yes. Recalcitrant human nature reasserts itself.
BTW, you missed a few figures in your catalog of returning archetypes: warlord, mad king, child soldier….
Also, a few oldies but goodies from the previous times of the strong gods: war, famine, genocide, pandemic, massacre, invasion, slavery, rape and pillage, colonialism, religious fanaticism, crusades, autos da fe….
Finally, yes, let’s loose all that autistic masculine energy that is now boosted by unprecedented technology and is now morally unconstrained because the boys have read nothing other than Ayn Rand and adolescent-level science fiction wet dreams, and have played nothing other than solipsistic first person shooter and world domination games on their computers. What could possibly go wrong?
Idi + AI = the next Elon?
Nonsense
Thank you for this! This is the best explanation of our historical moment and its context that I’ve seen. Brilliantly done!
It seems as if the goal of the post WWII consensus was to remove the humanness from humanity. To make everything neat and tidy and predictable. The opposite of strong, messy, ambivalent, loving, hating, self-centred humans. It turns out that when you try to make humans inhuman, they lose the will to live.
Thank you for this essay. While the Allies had some justification for going to war in 1939, the aftermath was disastrous for all, as you suggested. The American Denazification programs in Germany were, in some ways, more damaging than what the Soviets did in East Germany in that regard. Some American efforts in post-war Germany seem to have become templates for what later became "Cancel Culture." A very perceptive, little-known American economist named Ralph Keeling warned about this at the time, and I discuss it a bit at.... https://williammarkley.substack.com/p/they-suffered-also-germans-in-the
Where I live, it has been a very long, bitter winter, but Trump's substantial attempts at reform make it feel like an early spring. One of Trump's strengths, I think, is that he's not an ideologue. He clearly loves America, and appreciates our Founding ideals, and of course he has been a capitalist, but I wouldn't place this in the same category that most recent ideologies fall into. Trump, like Andrew Jackson, is a nationalist, but that seems to tap into those natural bonds that most people feel--family, community, nation, people--rather than some abstraction.
Excellent thoughts as always, but I wonder if I might--not disagree--but posit a wrinkle that must be considered to truly understand the mid-20th century consensus and which, I think, needs to be considered as an aspect of the managerial consensus. Yes, Hitler served as a useful embodiment of the forces the open society wished to contain and prevent, but I take the true obsession of the original priestly cast of the managerial state was the containment of the threat of nuclear annihilation. Nationalism was and is indeed a strong god, but the immanence of the god of the mushroom cloud is surely stronger, and the original justification for these managers (I am thinking of men like my grandfathers who were both le-level federal bureaucrats in the 50s, 60s, and 70s) was not preventing a new Hitler, but preventing the bombs from flying. The Specter of Hitler seems to have replaced this concern with the collapse of the Soviet Empire (there is no other way to explain to utter lack of concern this heir of the Cold-War managerial establishment shows to poking the nuclear armed Russian bear) but I don't think this was the original justification. I am glad that the old order is passing away, we should have taken steps to dismantle it in the 90's when we had some breathing room, but now I fear it is too late. Still, we have to ask the question how a multipolar world of strong gods can avoid Armageddon in the age of nuclear weapons even more terrifying than the H-Bomb. The strong gods demand wars, and real wars at that (not the fake wars we in the West see only vaguely through our empire of screens). Perhaps I'm wrong and it was the other way around; still, it is a question we must contend with.
Trump's earliest political statements were about nuclear weapons. He talked to Ron Rosenbaum in Manhattan Inc. about wanting to negotiate between the US and USSR.
"what united that establishment was the open society consensus" This was the key that I was missing in my worldview.
Yes. The phrase that struck me reading this essay is "I'm a fish that just had someone present water to me in a way I actually comprehend."
And yes, I'm aware that this is exactly the same mechanism that happens when one becomes enlightened to anything, including false things. In this case I think my decades of reading (and living) politics and history has armored me against falsehoods in this area. Then again, pride goeth before a fall, so it's time to contemplate for a while.
Wow, thank you for this. with everything that is going on, its helpful to stand back and look at the macro environment. Thanks for helping make sense of it
Another really brilliant piece. As for mayhem to come, my sense is that the Long Twentieth Century isn’t going to be ushered off stage without some serious kicking and screaming. Two modes it should be very good at in its latest form.
All over we read meditations on the “vibe shift” and how this is the end of politics as hall monitor. That “the left” is demoralized, in disarray. I think it’s temporary, and that the kicking will begin in earnest with the first signs of actual pain from A or B Trump policy. Tariffs and inflation? Very possibly.
But in any case, the strong gods have returned. And aren’t going to slump off to the principal’s office again.
The Strong Gods or the Gods of the Copybook Headings. Or are they the same.
It is correct to say that Hitler is the avatar of the awful part of the 20th century but why is that so since he wasn't singular. Stalin and Mao both ran up a bigger body count. Is it that Hitler targeted a particular ethnic group while Stalin and Mao were more "Kill them all and let Marx sort it out". Had Hitler won the war though I suspect the genocide of the Slavs would have surpassed the Holocaust. Hitler published a blueprint for that too and there were a lot more Slavs. And what about the other monsters that also targeted a particular ethnic group like Enver Pasha and Talat Pasha.
The Smart Kids gave Stalin and Mao a pass because they supposedly had good intentions. And Hitler, as bad as he really was, fought against Communism, so that's another reason to have emphasized his evil avatar status. As some authors have pointed out, there were many parallels between the actions of Hitler and Stalin, but I think ideology trumps all for the Left. Body counts in the long run don't matter for them, and I'm more convinced than ever that Leftism always has very dark and murderous destruction at its heart, no matter what supposedly good intentions are involved.
One could say that Hitler had good intentions--no matter how evil and destructive--since he and his fellow Nazis were advocating for their own people--Germans, Nordics, etc. But of course we all should know where the road paved with good intentions leads.
Is there really any difference between National Socialism and "Socialism in One Country".
Your essays express the most thoughtful and intelligent advocacy for the return of the “strong gods” that I’ve read, and I look forward to every new one. I agree that the Long Twentieth Century has become enfeebled and chronically ill. But, let’s not forget that its dominant ideology—liberal, globalistic capitalism—produced the greatest amount of human flourishing, world-wide poverty reduction, and long term violence-reduction in history. This is a bad thing? And what is its ruling principle? Reason, rationality, science. Can reason co-exist with the strong gods?
True, it—the LTC—has also resulted in the industrial impoverishment of the U.S, and the actual impoverishment, both materially and spiritually, of the American working class, and I agree that this must be fixed. Whether Trump’s electro-convulsive therapy to the body politic will work is TBD, but the flailing helplessness of the left at this point is something to behold.
But I remain unconvinced that the villain in the story is liberalism. As an old liberal Boomer who grew up and was molded by the LTC, I remain deeply suspicious of ethno-nationalism. Still, I do think it’s possible to have BOTH an ethno-nationalist state that retains the best aspects of the liberal order: openness, freedom, rationality, technological superiority, and tolerance, AND a commitment to a dominant culture and religion. The only current example of that is Israel, which has demonstrated its ability, despite intense internal partisanship, to furiously unite in the face of an existential threat. I seriously doubt if the U.S. could do the same, at the current moment, but maybe after a few years of shock treatment we could
I am not convinced the positives of the LTC were due to this ideology. The LTC lacked violence compared to the pre-WW2 era, but it could have been very short twentieth century had the nukes been launched, as nearly happened on more than one occasion. You could argue the Cold War was WW3 in permanent pause mode, and that only blind luck averted it turning into WW3.
What's more the LTC ideology led directly to the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam and so on. All justified by bringing the open society to societies that were inexplicably resistant to such things.
Finally, I reject the idea that the LTC was dominated by reason and science. It was not. It looked superficially like that was true at the time, because post WW2 science funding was massively increased by the government and in the latter part of the LTC university attendance was ramped to extreme levels. But what became clear in the past 15 years or so is the staggering rates of fraud in academia, to the extent that large amounts of the "science" the LTC has left us with must be tossed out because it was never actually real.
Even if you focus just on the papers describing experiments that actually took place, the underlying reasoning is of such low quality that most of it qualifies as pseudo-science. All this of course reached its pinnacle with COVID, perhaps another key event that marks the close of the LTC. A worldwide two year festival of pseudo-science, bullshit and very visibly fake expertise destroyed a core mythic pillar of the managerial era: that the technocrats in charge have superior knowledge and wisdom to the bloke in the pub.