At it's base, this is an argument over the meaning of dignity and virtue. In Vivek and Elon's view of the world, dignity means "living in a nice house, with a nice car, with nice things, and nice people." This can all be ensured via growth in technology and material wealth. In this--essentially progressive--vision, virtue just means the self-discipline to produce excess value over time.
The Judeo-Christian view of dignity is far different. In this view, dignity is related to "doing what you are designed to do." Humans are designed for relationship, particularly relationship with God, but secondarily for relationship with family, and then with larger communities, leading to a nation.
You can see this in the Exodus account where God calls Israel "my children, my first-born child." This would have been no less shocking to the Egyptians than it is to us today. For Egypt, only "leaders" had dignity.
For the modern world, Vivek and Elon have "more dignity" (or have dignity at all) because they are successful.
Until we recover a Judeo-Christian vision of dignity, we are going to continue to chase "dignity that is not dignified." This path always leads to tyranny because the human person is ultimately always something to be manipulated for "something greater."
Well said. When I listen to the views of many "influencers" on social media they tend to value wealth, promiscuity, dominance. In other words, all the things the Lord commands we reject.
How we can recover from this glorification of pride is not within our powers, it really is something that only the Holy Spirit can do.
Part of this is connected to the recent comments of JD Vance about the hierarchy of love and responsibility.
It is pretty easy for a real conservative to oppose globalism but behind that is another problem. To be a nation, the United States must cease trying to be an empire. That was the downfall of Athens Rome, Britain, France, Russia and so on. A lot of the globalism we object to really came from the post-WW2 empire of the US.
I completely agree with the premise that our leaders have no particular affection or loyalty to their own people, and it would be ideal if that could be reversed. But I am not sure how much it can be reversed in that the US and Western Europe are now a hodgepodge of rival ethnic groups, many of which have only a transactional relationship or loyalty to the host nation itself. Any leader that emerges will have inherently stronger bonds with a subset of the population and weaker or even adversarial relationships with the rest.
The US does seem to do well with assimilation, provided we largely halt immigration for a period of time. Western Europe on the other hand does not and never will because they get a substantially lower quality of immigrant that moves in to compete with resources from the indigenous people and culture, of which they do not consider themselves a part of at all.
Oui et non. America "does better" because it's a huge country, while Western European countries are better compared to individual states. And I don't know how to define what makes a "lower quality" immigrant other than the fact Europe as had a major influx of Muslim migrants which are extremely distinct due to the fact they tend to come from a handful of countries.
What scares me about Europe (I write this as a European) is that the leadership class and a disturbing number of voters seem completely resigned to do anything about it if not actually happy to import muslims. Mainly because, as Lyons wrote, they lack any form of love for their countrymen and therefore are motivated by hatred of their countrymen.
It’s not just migration though, it’s also rule by markets and capital, exporting jobs, denigrating customs and traditions, taking responsibilities away from families and communities - and so on and so on …
The US, over time, has done a wonderful job of assimilation, as long as the immigrant population didn’t grow to rapidly. It’s only in the last 20-30 (?) years that the influx of immigrants has become overwhelming to the point that assimilation has seemed to stop.
Not only has assimilation stopped, it’s actually discouraged. Immigrants are expected to be far more proud of their native country than their host country.
As always, your writing is a pleasure to read, but the issue here lies in an emotional appeal that overlooks a rational understanding of our evolving reality.
You equate a nation with a family, but a nation is not a family—no matter how compelling the sentiment. A nation is an imagined community, made up of millions of strangers, most of whom we will never meet or like, and who have vastly different needs, desires, and ambitions—the current polarisation is proof of this reality.
The United States is an imagined community. Germany is an imagined community. The Muslim Ummah is an even greater imagined community. The power of such communities once lay in their ability to convince people they were in the same boat, bound by shared values, dreams, and goals.
That era is over. While this system may have functioned in the past, our radically transformed information landscape has shattered the illusion. You may long for this golden age, but my advice is to confront reality because it's far more important to face the present reality than to wish for a glorious past.
I don't agree at first blush but you made me think about it which is why I like the substack world. I think the problem is bigness. The American Empire is definitely too big as is the EU and the Ummah. The US, Russia, China, Germany, the UK are probably too big to be a real community. Japan while big is culturally coherent which may make it different.
I see the nation as one of those rings of concern shown on the heat map. Closest to the center is our immediate family, then extended family, then our community, then our nation, then our civilization, then all mankind, and so on. We work our way outward and our nation is pretty close to the center.
Also, just because times have changed doesn't mean they've changed wisely. Technology has also rendered family life very difficult but we fight to keep them together.
I don’t think anything in my message suggests that change follows wisdom, if it did, the world would look vastly different today. And how we visualise the nation is irrelevant; patterns of similarity and difference are shaped by forces other than the lines in the sand.
Actually, you are right, because we have to see what the AI development brings in the mix. The Alpha generation is wastly different even from the previous generation. They understand only pixels and buttons...
Excellent, thank you. The metaphor of the nation as a family is a striking one. What these elites fail to realize is that by being technocratic lords and treating us as mere interchangeable parts, they forego any love from us. Just as they have no loyalty to us, we have no loyalty to them. A King who loves his people is forgiven when he fails. A company that ships a bad product loses all its business. If they want grace born of love when they fail, then they must lead us in love.
Vivek found that out the hard way. No one shed a single tear when he departed the scene. The same couldn't be said of say, Ron Paul, or Massie, who show a real love and true concern for their people.
I posted the comment below this morning under a different article of this Substack, but it goes better here. EDIT: fixed broken link to Michael Lind article.
* * * * * * * *
This article reminds me of one by Michael Lind in Tablet a couple of years. Lind wrote about the top-down utopian project of the Bush administration, to democratize the world, liberate Ayn Randian free markets, and spread Protestant morality. Then we had the top-down utopian project of the Obamacrats, to green the world, impose racial quotas, and eradicate biological sex. In both cases, the true believers set about wrecking things from their institutional perch, heedless of limits or consequences, because they were so certain their project was just.
Now we have the top-down utopian project of the Vance-Vought-Miller-Musk administration, to annihilate the evil managerial class and impose a new order of loving nationhood, no matter how much damage has to be done in the process, heedless of limits, consequences, suffering, order, crisis, conflict, or anything, because you can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs, and because the soulless kulak technocrats must be liquidated as a class.
Thank you for the link! It seems that it is a clash between the established WEF doctrine, the core of the Agenda 21, and the New Order of Economics where the transactions matter the most, versus the theories that should be left for experiments, first on rats.
Beautifully written. I would love to return to the Shire, to CS Lewis's Britain of pubs and walks and strong loves *even if* it did increase the likelihood of war, though he and also I do not believe that is true. I think Vivek does share the worldview of Trudeau, but actually I don't think Elon does. Elon is a man of strong loves, he loves his British heritage, he loves America. Yes he sometimes seem to have lost his mind, but he is a man of strong loves: Like those WW1 aristocrats he has risked everything to try to drag America back. Not only has he risked his money and his peace and quiet, but his chance of assassination is very real.
My mind and gratitude is full this morning after reading yet another fine piece from N.S.
"It is a modern conceit that those with power are kept restrained, uncorrupted, and ordered to justice and the common good primarily by lifeless structural guardrails, by the abstract checks and balances of constitutions and laws. The ancients would have maintained that it is far more important that a king be virtuous, and that he love his people."
I had a gorgeous large Modesto Ash tree growing in my front yard. It was the envy of the neighborhood. The shape of the trunk and branches appeared to be designed by a landscape artist... almost too perfect. It attracted a diverse population of bird life... so much that I sometimes would see people across the street on a walk with binoculars and pointing at the canopy.
A few year ago we had to remove the tree. We noticed a crack in the trunk and some of the branches and leaves were showing signs of some disease. The arborist we hired, a local talent known for his tendency to help save trees in stress rather than earn more money from a removal. The arborist explained that it was the wrong tree for the land around it. He said that all the paving from driveways and even the recent work they did to rip up and repave the road was impacting root health.
I think of this tree as an analogy to the theme of this article... that the post WWII western world has failed to consider the importance of maintaining the health of societal foundational roots... and as a result the tree is sick and the people of the US have rebelled to elect an arborist to help save it.
Musk's and Ramaswamy's perspective, I think, is one of more balance than their X posts would indicate. But both of them are recent immigrants from other places. It is understandable how their perspective and patriotism would be of a slightly different flavor... as evident by the point of this article that people should have an emotional connection to their country of origin. To break with that... divorce from your country of origin and live somewhere else... I think it takes more than one generation for the emotional connection to shift 100% to that new home. I think both understand the importance of patriotism, but also note that the country cannot care for the people without the tenants of capitalism that rely on merit.
But there is a disconnect with respect to what capitalism is and is not. Capitalism is NOT a justification for corporations to pursue profit by any means. The idea of capitalism and the invisible hand is that the returns of domestic capital be shared by domestic labor. The exporting of working class economic opportunity while importing other country's people of poverty to compete for the declining number of available working class jobs has caused a level of economic devastation that has contributed to the decline of our foundational roots. This may be by design from our ruling managerial elites that clearly want the bottom 80% more dependent on the global corporate and administrative oligarchy. And understanding this and the comments from Musk and Ramaswamy it demonstrates that they understand this importance of working class economic vitality as a key component to restoring our foundational roots.
My last thought is the problem with the definition of nationalism being assigned to Hitler. A nationalist is a isolationist. Hitler had more in common with communists and the managerial globalists in their pursuit of world domination. Any American patriotic libertarian that today would be labeled a nationalist has no interest in continued US hegemony, war and globalism. Everyone is supportive of global trade as long as it is fair and it isn't the trade of labor only. Musk and Ramaswamy understand this... they are advocating raising the merit of Americans to power our nation's economy and ending the practice of the globalist managerial class to give all of our industrial and technological assets to other countries for the influence power and Wall Street wealth it derives.
Frank, useful commentary to add to NS Lyon’s post. Personally, I don’t see Vivek Ramaswamy’s comments as either elitist or counter to our national interests. It is not difficult to see that global trade has led to massive consumer benefits but also to global competitiveness - and the attendant demons from that box cannot easily be closed. For the US to maintain its standing in the world, and for the direct benefit of the country, why should it not be to all of our interests to understand that an emphasis on learning, study, practice and intelligence might better serve the nation than a focus on being an “influencer”, a sports jock, or a gender studies major.
I really do think that the perspective of these two would be to have preference over science, math and technology talent that is home grown rather than imported. However, to help maintain the US lead in industrialism, because the education system has failed to keep up, importing talent is required and it benefits all as the US maintains its industrial lead.
Nice commentary. It is refreshing to at least know what our current administrative elites (Musk, Ramaswamy and Trump) believe, unlike the former elites. We had no idea what they truly believed, they were like windsocks.
To paraphrase your comment It is better to import the talent to this country than to export the job.
“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”
― Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
Adam Smith had little love for capitalists but depended on the invisible hand to lead them to enhance the common interest almost in spite of themselves. But we need competition to make that work.
Love is indeed the answer. But love that looks backwards to often arbitrary lines on the map and abstract nationalistic distinctions is quite obviously part of the problem not the solution. As fanciful as it may seem to many, we need to move towards a universal sense of love based on respecting the intrinsic uniqueness of each human and their sameness as one of us. Radical hope, as philosopher Jonathan Lear defines it, transcends our current understanding by being directed toward a future goodness that we lack the concepts to fully grasp, anticipating a good that is beyond our current comprehension. That applies to our current inadequate definition of love as a human emotion rather than a universal force.
I hold out very little hope: they deeply hate us. School teaches them to hate us and it is rooted in an unbelievable self loathing. This is the fruit of the social sciences.
Arrogant little shitheads, we are, as all previous generations were, doomed to learn the hard way. This is why Christ’s sales pitch is so good, Love, no matter what. It’s all we have because we can’t help ourselves. That’s why his love spread to us, unequivocally, and without reservation , no matter what : it’s a proper evaluation of what we are.
Remember the origin of the Christian story : God sent his son to Earth, God incarnate, truth literally bestrode the Earth and we did what we do, true to form, we killed him, we are truth killers:lol.
From my populist manifesto, A Part-time Job in the Country, here are seven planks in a political platform designed to maximize the welfare of America's working- and middle-class families:
First, a wage-price equalization tax on all imported goods and services that are produced in low-wage countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, this being the only way to level the playing field on which American workers are expected to compete.
Second, an across-the-board moratorium (pause, time-out) on Third World immigration until we can prove that we know how to assimilate and integrate the more than seventy-five million first- and second-generation Third World immigrants who are already here, the vast majority from cultures with no, or very weak, democratic traditions.
Third, a biometric Social Security card as the only realistic way to enforce our nation’s immigration laws.
Fourth, a family-friendly six-hour day and thirty-hour work week, including triple pay for overtime to show we mean business.
Fifth, treaties with our major allies and trading partners (all OECD countries) outlawing shell corporations and unregistered bank and brokerage accounts in overseas tax havens, this being an essential requirement for fully enforcing our federal tax laws.
Sixth, a graduated expenditure tax (which is like a graduated income tax but with savings tax-exempt) as the only fair and efficient way to finance a whole-scale redistribution of income from capital to labor that does not simultaneously reduce the incentives to save and invest.
Seventh, an improved and vastly expanded version of the earned income tax credit on a scale sufficient to fully compensate American workers for the wages they have lost over the course of the past thirty years as a consequence of our current trade and immigration policies.
Interesting ideas, though I would out of hand reject a decrease in the work week to European levels. Can you expand a bit on how the Earned Income Tax Credit system would be modified / expanded?
If we go way back to 1848 we can perceive the first attempt to get a crude version of the EU started. It did not go well but the sociopolitical ideas were brewing throughout the West.
The WWI has demolished the empires and kingdoms in order to create a New Order. This new socioeconomic thinking, Socialist in nature, and theory, without loyalty to the population, that is described in the article as being developed after the WWII, was actually being developed right after the WWI.
If we watch the documentary "Ordinary Fascism" it is clear that Hitler was looking, in Munich, throughout the beer houses, for an opportunity to better his life. He picked up the National Socialism for being the most aggressive response to the misery of the ordinary citizen in the Depression era. That misery was brought upon the population by the new bureaucratic regimes replacing the nobility. His regime was the most disastrous response the problem, worse cure than the disease. Those bureaucratic regimes from other countries won the war and continued, happily after, to create the "New Order" described so well in this article.
During the last four years we experienced the apex of the stepping stones to a national tragedy. I could understand where the country was going and it has been a scary proposition, For me, like one who lived the tragedy of the Socialism in the Eastern Block, from childhood to the adult age, it is still so hard to see, and hear, so many people, including a lot of politicians, who have no love for this country, no love for the flag, and the anthem. Our family lost a "Motherland" due to emigration, but we found this new "Motherland," and we are happy if any good soul will govern her in the future as she, and the industrious population deserve.
I have been taking up reading some Shakespeare and “Coriolanus” has some interesting parallels. Mainly, to my limited understanding, it seems the Coriolanus character is portrayed somewhat like a Musk, above the fray, going to the highest bidder of in this case not riches but adoration. But ultimately brought to his knees by his mother, familial love turns out to be the most powerful force even for such a proud and successful warrior. And strikingly when he returns to his newly adopted tribe they tear him to pieces. No love there.
Nicely done, as always, but I think here overdone. I agree with the proposition that nationalism, paradigmatically Germany under Hitler, is the key figure of the 20th century efforts -- Bretton Woods, the European project, globalization generally. But I'm more, if not entirely, sympathetic with those efforts. The World Wars, leading to nuclear standoffs, were terrible. So something had to be attempted. And I don't think it fair to say such efforts simply demonized nationalism. Many, many of the people involved had in fact fought on behalf of their countries. The post war cosmopolitan idea (like the medieval) was to avoid narrow particularities, in which territory, allegiance/passion, economy (including both employment, hence material survival, and military capacity) and strategy/ambition would all be defined coterminously. For most of European, US, and indeed world history, that had not been the case. Hence integration, i.e., the opposite of Smoot Hawley, rebuilding after wars, monetary stabilization. Maybe it got too big, too alienating, too mercantile. Late Freud.
For your purposes as a political thinker, however, I think you should give some credit to an effort to articulate a new political grammar, essentially based on trade/money. New grammars don't arise very often, but they do happen, and raise a lot of interesting questions. I tried to address all this in "City of Gold: An Apology for Global Capitalism in a Time of Discontent," (Routledge 2004) which you might enjoy. But such projects seem to have come unraveled; maybe they were never bearable. Or maybe 9/11 and the squandering of US political capital discredited our participation, along with the relative immiseration of large swathes of people in the so called advanced economies. And "Europe," which was often said to be "sui generis" form of politics, came to see itself as more like a Continental nation. I blame Delors. And monetary union/debt crisis quickly exposed how difficult it is to construct a diverse continental nation state. It will be interesting to see what emerges from the current security situation. But simply going "back" leaves me in the uncomfortable position of making an odd end of history kind of argument, in which a certain kind of polity, the modern nation state, is taken to be the terminus of political thought. That seems wrong. Anyway, as always, keep up the good work . . .
I thought along the same lines, going back isn’t necessarily a good thing. But I don’t think the argument here is entirely about going back, it seems focused more on that wherever we go we must include human love.
And with including human love I must, of course, agree.
I was a little unclear. By "going back" I meant philosophically: going back to understanding political life fundamentally in terms of the modern (patriotic) nation state. That is, the argument N.S. Lyons makes points toward the end of political thought, or at least does not suggest new forms of political life. The European Project, Bretton Woods, etc., collectively constituted an effort to come up with a new political order, and therefore was at the very least deeply interesting, whether or not one liked it or it was even possible (which I'm considering now).
'Love is the only force capable of genuinely liberating us from selfishness.' And make life worth living. Love of family is the cornerstone of the meaning in life. Freedom means being alone.
// Unsurprisingly, neither proposed mental construct landed very well with President Trump’s populist-nationalist base and Ramaswamy was soon duly shuffled off to a term of exile in Ohio. //
S and M see the root problem, too, only from the perspective of consequence instead of cause. The cultural deracination and miscegenation bring with them an apathy that extends to intense involvement in *everything*, including both family and motivation. Human widgets care deeply about *nothing*.
At it's base, this is an argument over the meaning of dignity and virtue. In Vivek and Elon's view of the world, dignity means "living in a nice house, with a nice car, with nice things, and nice people." This can all be ensured via growth in technology and material wealth. In this--essentially progressive--vision, virtue just means the self-discipline to produce excess value over time.
The Judeo-Christian view of dignity is far different. In this view, dignity is related to "doing what you are designed to do." Humans are designed for relationship, particularly relationship with God, but secondarily for relationship with family, and then with larger communities, leading to a nation.
You can see this in the Exodus account where God calls Israel "my children, my first-born child." This would have been no less shocking to the Egyptians than it is to us today. For Egypt, only "leaders" had dignity.
For the modern world, Vivek and Elon have "more dignity" (or have dignity at all) because they are successful.
Until we recover a Judeo-Christian vision of dignity, we are going to continue to chase "dignity that is not dignified." This path always leads to tyranny because the human person is ultimately always something to be manipulated for "something greater."
Well said. When I listen to the views of many "influencers" on social media they tend to value wealth, promiscuity, dominance. In other words, all the things the Lord commands we reject.
How we can recover from this glorification of pride is not within our powers, it really is something that only the Holy Spirit can do.
Part of this is connected to the recent comments of JD Vance about the hierarchy of love and responsibility.
It is pretty easy for a real conservative to oppose globalism but behind that is another problem. To be a nation, the United States must cease trying to be an empire. That was the downfall of Athens Rome, Britain, France, Russia and so on. A lot of the globalism we object to really came from the post-WW2 empire of the US.
I completely agree with the premise that our leaders have no particular affection or loyalty to their own people, and it would be ideal if that could be reversed. But I am not sure how much it can be reversed in that the US and Western Europe are now a hodgepodge of rival ethnic groups, many of which have only a transactional relationship or loyalty to the host nation itself. Any leader that emerges will have inherently stronger bonds with a subset of the population and weaker or even adversarial relationships with the rest.
The US does seem to do well with assimilation, provided we largely halt immigration for a period of time. Western Europe on the other hand does not and never will because they get a substantially lower quality of immigrant that moves in to compete with resources from the indigenous people and culture, of which they do not consider themselves a part of at all.
Oui et non. America "does better" because it's a huge country, while Western European countries are better compared to individual states. And I don't know how to define what makes a "lower quality" immigrant other than the fact Europe as had a major influx of Muslim migrants which are extremely distinct due to the fact they tend to come from a handful of countries.
What scares me about Europe (I write this as a European) is that the leadership class and a disturbing number of voters seem completely resigned to do anything about it if not actually happy to import muslims. Mainly because, as Lyons wrote, they lack any form of love for their countrymen and therefore are motivated by hatred of their countrymen.
It’s not just migration though, it’s also rule by markets and capital, exporting jobs, denigrating customs and traditions, taking responsibilities away from families and communities - and so on and so on …
The US, over time, has done a wonderful job of assimilation, as long as the immigrant population didn’t grow to rapidly. It’s only in the last 20-30 (?) years that the influx of immigrants has become overwhelming to the point that assimilation has seemed to stop.
I suspect that interrupting assimilation is actually one of the key objectives of the immigration surge of the last 30 years.
Not only has assimilation stopped, it’s actually discouraged. Immigrants are expected to be far more proud of their native country than their host country.
Europe is now a prey to their own schools of thought that were poisoning this country too.
Another great well thought out report from THE UPHEAVAL. More solution less problem. More disease less symptom.
As always, your writing is a pleasure to read, but the issue here lies in an emotional appeal that overlooks a rational understanding of our evolving reality.
You equate a nation with a family, but a nation is not a family—no matter how compelling the sentiment. A nation is an imagined community, made up of millions of strangers, most of whom we will never meet or like, and who have vastly different needs, desires, and ambitions—the current polarisation is proof of this reality.
The United States is an imagined community. Germany is an imagined community. The Muslim Ummah is an even greater imagined community. The power of such communities once lay in their ability to convince people they were in the same boat, bound by shared values, dreams, and goals.
That era is over. While this system may have functioned in the past, our radically transformed information landscape has shattered the illusion. You may long for this golden age, but my advice is to confront reality because it's far more important to face the present reality than to wish for a glorious past.
I don't agree at first blush but you made me think about it which is why I like the substack world. I think the problem is bigness. The American Empire is definitely too big as is the EU and the Ummah. The US, Russia, China, Germany, the UK are probably too big to be a real community. Japan while big is culturally coherent which may make it different.
I see the nation as one of those rings of concern shown on the heat map. Closest to the center is our immediate family, then extended family, then our community, then our nation, then our civilization, then all mankind, and so on. We work our way outward and our nation is pretty close to the center.
Also, just because times have changed doesn't mean they've changed wisely. Technology has also rendered family life very difficult but we fight to keep them together.
I don’t think anything in my message suggests that change follows wisdom, if it did, the world would look vastly different today. And how we visualise the nation is irrelevant; patterns of similarity and difference are shaped by forces other than the lines in the sand.
Actually, you are right, because we have to see what the AI development brings in the mix. The Alpha generation is wastly different even from the previous generation. They understand only pixels and buttons...
Excellent, thank you. The metaphor of the nation as a family is a striking one. What these elites fail to realize is that by being technocratic lords and treating us as mere interchangeable parts, they forego any love from us. Just as they have no loyalty to us, we have no loyalty to them. A King who loves his people is forgiven when he fails. A company that ships a bad product loses all its business. If they want grace born of love when they fail, then they must lead us in love.
Vivek found that out the hard way. No one shed a single tear when he departed the scene. The same couldn't be said of say, Ron Paul, or Massie, who show a real love and true concern for their people.
I posted the comment below this morning under a different article of this Substack, but it goes better here. EDIT: fixed broken link to Michael Lind article.
* * * * * * * *
This article reminds me of one by Michael Lind in Tablet a couple of years. Lind wrote about the top-down utopian project of the Bush administration, to democratize the world, liberate Ayn Randian free markets, and spread Protestant morality. Then we had the top-down utopian project of the Obamacrats, to green the world, impose racial quotas, and eradicate biological sex. In both cases, the true believers set about wrecking things from their institutional perch, heedless of limits or consequences, because they were so certain their project was just.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/power-mad-progressive-utopianism-must-be-stopped
Now we have the top-down utopian project of the Vance-Vought-Miller-Musk administration, to annihilate the evil managerial class and impose a new order of loving nationhood, no matter how much damage has to be done in the process, heedless of limits, consequences, suffering, order, crisis, conflict, or anything, because you can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs, and because the soulless kulak technocrats must be liquidated as a class.
Great. Thanks.
Thank you for the link! It seems that it is a clash between the established WEF doctrine, the core of the Agenda 21, and the New Order of Economics where the transactions matter the most, versus the theories that should be left for experiments, first on rats.
Beautifully written. I would love to return to the Shire, to CS Lewis's Britain of pubs and walks and strong loves *even if* it did increase the likelihood of war, though he and also I do not believe that is true. I think Vivek does share the worldview of Trudeau, but actually I don't think Elon does. Elon is a man of strong loves, he loves his British heritage, he loves America. Yes he sometimes seem to have lost his mind, but he is a man of strong loves: Like those WW1 aristocrats he has risked everything to try to drag America back. Not only has he risked his money and his peace and quiet, but his chance of assassination is very real.
Remember that the real reason the Left hates Elon isn't DOGE, it's free speech.
My mind and gratitude is full this morning after reading yet another fine piece from N.S.
"It is a modern conceit that those with power are kept restrained, uncorrupted, and ordered to justice and the common good primarily by lifeless structural guardrails, by the abstract checks and balances of constitutions and laws. The ancients would have maintained that it is far more important that a king be virtuous, and that he love his people."
I had a gorgeous large Modesto Ash tree growing in my front yard. It was the envy of the neighborhood. The shape of the trunk and branches appeared to be designed by a landscape artist... almost too perfect. It attracted a diverse population of bird life... so much that I sometimes would see people across the street on a walk with binoculars and pointing at the canopy.
A few year ago we had to remove the tree. We noticed a crack in the trunk and some of the branches and leaves were showing signs of some disease. The arborist we hired, a local talent known for his tendency to help save trees in stress rather than earn more money from a removal. The arborist explained that it was the wrong tree for the land around it. He said that all the paving from driveways and even the recent work they did to rip up and repave the road was impacting root health.
I think of this tree as an analogy to the theme of this article... that the post WWII western world has failed to consider the importance of maintaining the health of societal foundational roots... and as a result the tree is sick and the people of the US have rebelled to elect an arborist to help save it.
Musk's and Ramaswamy's perspective, I think, is one of more balance than their X posts would indicate. But both of them are recent immigrants from other places. It is understandable how their perspective and patriotism would be of a slightly different flavor... as evident by the point of this article that people should have an emotional connection to their country of origin. To break with that... divorce from your country of origin and live somewhere else... I think it takes more than one generation for the emotional connection to shift 100% to that new home. I think both understand the importance of patriotism, but also note that the country cannot care for the people without the tenants of capitalism that rely on merit.
But there is a disconnect with respect to what capitalism is and is not. Capitalism is NOT a justification for corporations to pursue profit by any means. The idea of capitalism and the invisible hand is that the returns of domestic capital be shared by domestic labor. The exporting of working class economic opportunity while importing other country's people of poverty to compete for the declining number of available working class jobs has caused a level of economic devastation that has contributed to the decline of our foundational roots. This may be by design from our ruling managerial elites that clearly want the bottom 80% more dependent on the global corporate and administrative oligarchy. And understanding this and the comments from Musk and Ramaswamy it demonstrates that they understand this importance of working class economic vitality as a key component to restoring our foundational roots.
My last thought is the problem with the definition of nationalism being assigned to Hitler. A nationalist is a isolationist. Hitler had more in common with communists and the managerial globalists in their pursuit of world domination. Any American patriotic libertarian that today would be labeled a nationalist has no interest in continued US hegemony, war and globalism. Everyone is supportive of global trade as long as it is fair and it isn't the trade of labor only. Musk and Ramaswamy understand this... they are advocating raising the merit of Americans to power our nation's economy and ending the practice of the globalist managerial class to give all of our industrial and technological assets to other countries for the influence power and Wall Street wealth it derives.
Frank, useful commentary to add to NS Lyon’s post. Personally, I don’t see Vivek Ramaswamy’s comments as either elitist or counter to our national interests. It is not difficult to see that global trade has led to massive consumer benefits but also to global competitiveness - and the attendant demons from that box cannot easily be closed. For the US to maintain its standing in the world, and for the direct benefit of the country, why should it not be to all of our interests to understand that an emphasis on learning, study, practice and intelligence might better serve the nation than a focus on being an “influencer”, a sports jock, or a gender studies major.
Thank you Stuart. I agree with you.
I really do think that the perspective of these two would be to have preference over science, math and technology talent that is home grown rather than imported. However, to help maintain the US lead in industrialism, because the education system has failed to keep up, importing talent is required and it benefits all as the US maintains its industrial lead.
Nice commentary. It is refreshing to at least know what our current administrative elites (Musk, Ramaswamy and Trump) believe, unlike the former elites. We had no idea what they truly believed, they were like windsocks.
To paraphrase your comment It is better to import the talent to this country than to export the job.
Love that last line. Exactly!
“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”
― Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
Adam Smith had little love for capitalists but depended on the invisible hand to lead them to enhance the common interest almost in spite of themselves. But we need competition to make that work.
I always like you comments, well developed and on point.
Thank you Dan SG. N.S. Lyons is inspirational for me... he gets my brain working at a higher level!
Love is indeed the answer. But love that looks backwards to often arbitrary lines on the map and abstract nationalistic distinctions is quite obviously part of the problem not the solution. As fanciful as it may seem to many, we need to move towards a universal sense of love based on respecting the intrinsic uniqueness of each human and their sameness as one of us. Radical hope, as philosopher Jonathan Lear defines it, transcends our current understanding by being directed toward a future goodness that we lack the concepts to fully grasp, anticipating a good that is beyond our current comprehension. That applies to our current inadequate definition of love as a human emotion rather than a universal force.
I hold out very little hope: they deeply hate us. School teaches them to hate us and it is rooted in an unbelievable self loathing. This is the fruit of the social sciences.
Arrogant little shitheads, we are, as all previous generations were, doomed to learn the hard way. This is why Christ’s sales pitch is so good, Love, no matter what. It’s all we have because we can’t help ourselves. That’s why his love spread to us, unequivocally, and without reservation , no matter what : it’s a proper evaluation of what we are.
Remember the origin of the Christian story : God sent his son to Earth, God incarnate, truth literally bestrode the Earth and we did what we do, true to form, we killed him, we are truth killers:lol.
From my populist manifesto, A Part-time Job in the Country, here are seven planks in a political platform designed to maximize the welfare of America's working- and middle-class families:
First, a wage-price equalization tax on all imported goods and services that are produced in low-wage countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, this being the only way to level the playing field on which American workers are expected to compete.
Second, an across-the-board moratorium (pause, time-out) on Third World immigration until we can prove that we know how to assimilate and integrate the more than seventy-five million first- and second-generation Third World immigrants who are already here, the vast majority from cultures with no, or very weak, democratic traditions.
Third, a biometric Social Security card as the only realistic way to enforce our nation’s immigration laws.
Fourth, a family-friendly six-hour day and thirty-hour work week, including triple pay for overtime to show we mean business.
Fifth, treaties with our major allies and trading partners (all OECD countries) outlawing shell corporations and unregistered bank and brokerage accounts in overseas tax havens, this being an essential requirement for fully enforcing our federal tax laws.
Sixth, a graduated expenditure tax (which is like a graduated income tax but with savings tax-exempt) as the only fair and efficient way to finance a whole-scale redistribution of income from capital to labor that does not simultaneously reduce the incentives to save and invest.
Seventh, an improved and vastly expanded version of the earned income tax credit on a scale sufficient to fully compensate American workers for the wages they have lost over the course of the past thirty years as a consequence of our current trade and immigration policies.
Interesting ideas, though I would out of hand reject a decrease in the work week to European levels. Can you expand a bit on how the Earned Income Tax Credit system would be modified / expanded?
Sure. It would be the second paper in this two part proposal: https://shorturl.at/IADtQ
Yep!!
If we go way back to 1848 we can perceive the first attempt to get a crude version of the EU started. It did not go well but the sociopolitical ideas were brewing throughout the West.
The WWI has demolished the empires and kingdoms in order to create a New Order. This new socioeconomic thinking, Socialist in nature, and theory, without loyalty to the population, that is described in the article as being developed after the WWII, was actually being developed right after the WWI.
If we watch the documentary "Ordinary Fascism" it is clear that Hitler was looking, in Munich, throughout the beer houses, for an opportunity to better his life. He picked up the National Socialism for being the most aggressive response to the misery of the ordinary citizen in the Depression era. That misery was brought upon the population by the new bureaucratic regimes replacing the nobility. His regime was the most disastrous response the problem, worse cure than the disease. Those bureaucratic regimes from other countries won the war and continued, happily after, to create the "New Order" described so well in this article.
During the last four years we experienced the apex of the stepping stones to a national tragedy. I could understand where the country was going and it has been a scary proposition, For me, like one who lived the tragedy of the Socialism in the Eastern Block, from childhood to the adult age, it is still so hard to see, and hear, so many people, including a lot of politicians, who have no love for this country, no love for the flag, and the anthem. Our family lost a "Motherland" due to emigration, but we found this new "Motherland," and we are happy if any good soul will govern her in the future as she, and the industrious population deserve.
I have been taking up reading some Shakespeare and “Coriolanus” has some interesting parallels. Mainly, to my limited understanding, it seems the Coriolanus character is portrayed somewhat like a Musk, above the fray, going to the highest bidder of in this case not riches but adoration. But ultimately brought to his knees by his mother, familial love turns out to be the most powerful force even for such a proud and successful warrior. And strikingly when he returns to his newly adopted tribe they tear him to pieces. No love there.
Nicely done, as always, but I think here overdone. I agree with the proposition that nationalism, paradigmatically Germany under Hitler, is the key figure of the 20th century efforts -- Bretton Woods, the European project, globalization generally. But I'm more, if not entirely, sympathetic with those efforts. The World Wars, leading to nuclear standoffs, were terrible. So something had to be attempted. And I don't think it fair to say such efforts simply demonized nationalism. Many, many of the people involved had in fact fought on behalf of their countries. The post war cosmopolitan idea (like the medieval) was to avoid narrow particularities, in which territory, allegiance/passion, economy (including both employment, hence material survival, and military capacity) and strategy/ambition would all be defined coterminously. For most of European, US, and indeed world history, that had not been the case. Hence integration, i.e., the opposite of Smoot Hawley, rebuilding after wars, monetary stabilization. Maybe it got too big, too alienating, too mercantile. Late Freud.
For your purposes as a political thinker, however, I think you should give some credit to an effort to articulate a new political grammar, essentially based on trade/money. New grammars don't arise very often, but they do happen, and raise a lot of interesting questions. I tried to address all this in "City of Gold: An Apology for Global Capitalism in a Time of Discontent," (Routledge 2004) which you might enjoy. But such projects seem to have come unraveled; maybe they were never bearable. Or maybe 9/11 and the squandering of US political capital discredited our participation, along with the relative immiseration of large swathes of people in the so called advanced economies. And "Europe," which was often said to be "sui generis" form of politics, came to see itself as more like a Continental nation. I blame Delors. And monetary union/debt crisis quickly exposed how difficult it is to construct a diverse continental nation state. It will be interesting to see what emerges from the current security situation. But simply going "back" leaves me in the uncomfortable position of making an odd end of history kind of argument, in which a certain kind of polity, the modern nation state, is taken to be the terminus of political thought. That seems wrong. Anyway, as always, keep up the good work . . .
https://www.davidawestbrook.com/city-of-gold.html
I thought along the same lines, going back isn’t necessarily a good thing. But I don’t think the argument here is entirely about going back, it seems focused more on that wherever we go we must include human love.
And with including human love I must, of course, agree.
I was a little unclear. By "going back" I meant philosophically: going back to understanding political life fundamentally in terms of the modern (patriotic) nation state. That is, the argument N.S. Lyons makes points toward the end of political thought, or at least does not suggest new forms of political life. The European Project, Bretton Woods, etc., collectively constituted an effort to come up with a new political order, and therefore was at the very least deeply interesting, whether or not one liked it or it was even possible (which I'm considering now).
Ahhh, understand now. Thanks for the clarification.
'Love is the only force capable of genuinely liberating us from selfishness.' And make life worth living. Love of family is the cornerstone of the meaning in life. Freedom means being alone.
// Unsurprisingly, neither proposed mental construct landed very well with President Trump’s populist-nationalist base and Ramaswamy was soon duly shuffled off to a term of exile in Ohio. //
S and M see the root problem, too, only from the perspective of consequence instead of cause. The cultural deracination and miscegenation bring with them an apathy that extends to intense involvement in *everything*, including both family and motivation. Human widgets care deeply about *nothing*.