I’ve just read the Rebel Wisdom interview very carefully, and it was most illuminating. For me at least the penny finally dropped of where and what N S Lyons is. This quote from Rebel Wisdom was like a great red flag, “N.S isn’t his real name; it’s the pen name of an analyst and writer working in the broader US foreign policy establishment. He’s an expert on China, and writes brilliantly on the deeper sociological and mythic dynamics of Western culture”. It began to solidify all my doubts about N S Lyons. He is indeed a US foreign policy establishment figure – but of course something of an outlier there today, a bit like Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney are in a Republican Party that they feel has been corrupted by populism, Trumpism, and has veered away from what they believe is the “true spirit’ of the Republican Party. Just so N S Lyons is a traditional, establishment conservative who detests the great wrong turn he feels that establishment has taken towards wokeness, identity politics, climate change fanaticism, and longs for a day in which it can be returned to its true nature and mission – the great imperial mission of globally dominant American conservative capitalism and nationalism. A kind of Reaganism but much, much purer. So like all establishment conservatives what he yearns for most of all is a rapprochement with the current establishment and elite, but one that has abandoned its silly identity politics and wokeness, so that they can both return to the true mission of restoring American greatness. At heart I’m afraid there is just that nasty little core of mean-spirited, triumphalist nationalism and narcissistic intellectualism. And this is why the Ukraine war is so important to N S Lyons – it is the issue he hopes might finally lead to the current establishment coming to its senses, abandoning its crazy woke preoccupations and coming together with the sensible conservatives, like - guess who – N S Lyons.
We are now approaching a great crisis point in modern societies. It is not the woke revolution as N S Lyons suggests. It is what the woke revolution has precipitated, a great struggle between ordinary people represented often very imperfectly by populists (both on the right and the left) and the elites that have ruled since the demise of hunter gatherer societies, most recently in the west with the façade of a fake and corrupt democracy. It is an inchoate, unorganized, and intensely messy struggle and how it will end no one can say. But on which side people like N S Lyons stands I now have no doubt.
Great read, very interesting on how Xi may be thinking about what is going on in Ukraine today.
My belief is that Xi will take Taiwan, but it will look more like the frog who was sitting in a pot of cool water, and didn’t realize it was a boiling until it was too late. Step by step, inch by inch. Over a very long period of time.
Ukraine reminds us, as Fukuyama comments in his latest work, that liberal democracy rests on a nation. It is a necessary but not sufficient condition. Rejecting national identity as anthema to liberal democracy undermines both liberalism and democracy.
Great interview.
As a theoretical physicist, I was most pleased by this remark: "the virtuals do provide many good things – art, for example, or theoretical physics."
I’ve just read the Rebel Wisdom interview very carefully, and it was most illuminating. For me at least the penny finally dropped of where and what N S Lyons is. This quote from Rebel Wisdom was like a great red flag, “N.S isn’t his real name; it’s the pen name of an analyst and writer working in the broader US foreign policy establishment. He’s an expert on China, and writes brilliantly on the deeper sociological and mythic dynamics of Western culture”. It began to solidify all my doubts about N S Lyons. He is indeed a US foreign policy establishment figure – but of course something of an outlier there today, a bit like Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney are in a Republican Party that they feel has been corrupted by populism, Trumpism, and has veered away from what they believe is the “true spirit’ of the Republican Party. Just so N S Lyons is a traditional, establishment conservative who detests the great wrong turn he feels that establishment has taken towards wokeness, identity politics, climate change fanaticism, and longs for a day in which it can be returned to its true nature and mission – the great imperial mission of globally dominant American conservative capitalism and nationalism. A kind of Reaganism but much, much purer. So like all establishment conservatives what he yearns for most of all is a rapprochement with the current establishment and elite, but one that has abandoned its silly identity politics and wokeness, so that they can both return to the true mission of restoring American greatness. At heart I’m afraid there is just that nasty little core of mean-spirited, triumphalist nationalism and narcissistic intellectualism. And this is why the Ukraine war is so important to N S Lyons – it is the issue he hopes might finally lead to the current establishment coming to its senses, abandoning its crazy woke preoccupations and coming together with the sensible conservatives, like - guess who – N S Lyons.
We are now approaching a great crisis point in modern societies. It is not the woke revolution as N S Lyons suggests. It is what the woke revolution has precipitated, a great struggle between ordinary people represented often very imperfectly by populists (both on the right and the left) and the elites that have ruled since the demise of hunter gatherer societies, most recently in the west with the façade of a fake and corrupt democracy. It is an inchoate, unorganized, and intensely messy struggle and how it will end no one can say. But on which side people like N S Lyons stands I now have no doubt.
Great read, very interesting on how Xi may be thinking about what is going on in Ukraine today.
My belief is that Xi will take Taiwan, but it will look more like the frog who was sitting in a pot of cool water, and didn’t realize it was a boiling until it was too late. Step by step, inch by inch. Over a very long period of time.
Ukraine reminds us, as Fukuyama comments in his latest work, that liberal democracy rests on a nation. It is a necessary but not sufficient condition. Rejecting national identity as anthema to liberal democracy undermines both liberalism and democracy.