Subscriber Community Thread (#3)

Hello everyone,

First, a heads up that I wrote a short piece for The American Conservative last week on how US “national conservatives” have foreign policy ideals closer to what China talks up than they like to admit, and how a more clear self-understanding of “what they are for (national sovereignty and independence) and against (imperial power)” would help clarify and guide the NatCons’ genuine and justifiable wariness toward Beijing. You can read the whole thing here. The commenters on the piece completely misinterpreted the point, so please file any points of confusion in the comment thread below instead.

Separately, I see it only took Ray Dalio a matter of hours after my guarded praise of his new book to end up “beclowning himself” on television (as Bari Weiss put it) by fawning all over the Chinese regime. But what is the man to do? He did predict China is the future, and there’s still lots of money to be made...

Moving on, here are some items I read with interest over the last couple of weeks:

1. Ian Bremmer, “The Technopolar Moment: How Digital Powers Will Reshape the Global Order” (Foreign Affairs)

In a lengthy essay, Washington D.C. blob-yet-never-quite-ever-fully-accepted-by-the-blob personality Ian Bremmer argues that:

Most of the analysis of U.S.-Chinese technological competition, however, is stuck in a statist paradigm. It depicts technology companies as foot soldiers in a conflict between hostile countries. But technology companies are not mere tools in the hands of governments. None of their actions in the immediate aftermath of the Capitol insurrection, for instance, came at the behest of the government or law enforcement. These were private decisions made by for-profit companies exercising power over code, servers, and regulations under their control. These companies are increasingly shaping the global environment in which governments operate. They have huge influence over the technologies and services that will drive the next industrial revolution, determine how countries project economic and military power, shape the future of work, and redefine social contracts. It is time to start thinking of the biggest technology companies as similar to states. These companies exercise a form of sovereignty over a rapidly expanding realm that extends beyond the reach of regulators: digital space.

No, I don’t think that is right.

These companies answer to the Regime, just like everyone else these days. How did Zuck and Dorsey transform suddenly from libertarians into Lords Censor in the second half of the 2010s? Because the Regime forced them to “control harmful content” (in sync with its vision of what that means) through the combined threats of regulatory action, united-front information warfare, and instigated revolts by Regime-loyal employee cells, among other measures. Then how did they banish a sitting president of the United States, you ask? Because Trump was never part of the Regime; he was merely head of state... Meanwhile the CCP’s regime is also the state, and of course wields an iron grip in all respects – just ask Jack Ma. In both cases the tech companies have been seized as important weapons of control, not become independent states themselves.

But anyway, Bremmer goes on to argue that the future world order will look like one of three scenarios: one in which a vision of tech companies as “national champions” (like China’s) wins out and states remain the centers of power; one in which “globalist” tech companies (like Apple and Google) weaken, but not overturn, the power of states and a new balance is struck to preserve global market access and regulated-yet-free digital commerce; and one in which “techno-utopians” like Elon Musk and the blockchain-evangelists transcend the power of states whose authority has collapsed.

I think he misses the fact that the “globalist” scenario is just the vision of an American-centered international elite competing against the “national champions” vision of a Chinese-centered elite, and they might end up in about the same place. But I digress – it is in any case an interesting and thought-provoking piece you should read if you can get past the paywall.

2. “France is doing well, but feeling miserable” (The Economist); Christopher Caldwell, “France on the Verge of Civil War: The rise of Éric Zemmour” (Claremont Review of Books)

Why, the venerable liberal-minded Economist wonders, are the French so incorrectly gloomy about their country?

“Some 60% say they have no confidence in President Emmanuel Macron… Yet there is a paradox at the heart of France’s current malaise: the country is doing fairly well, and in some respects better than its neighbours… the French economy is enjoying a bounce after a deep drop in gdp last year and is expected to expand by 6% this year. Third-quarter growth, of 3% on the previous one, was particularly strong, and higher than in Germany, Italy and Spain. French gdp is now back at its pre-pandemic level.”

So why aren’t they grateful? Is it simply that the “answer may be that, as Claudia Senik, an economist at the Paris School of Economics, puts it: ‘The French have an ambivalent relationship to happiness.’”?

Some better answers might potentially be found by reading Christopher Caldwell’s essay on France’s upstart, just-declared right-wing presidential candidate Éric Zemmour. Such as:

In a wide-ranging poll last summer, Le Monde found that three quarters of the citizenry believe France is in decline. The belief is held by overwhelming majorities of every age group, and of every political party except one: Macron’s La République en Marche (LREM). That in itself is a problem. The country appears to be ruled by the wildly atypical sliver of its population that believes everything is hunky-dory. By 68 to 32, members of LREM and top executives believe globalization is good for France. Members of all other parties and people at all other income levels disagree. Only 26% of French people trust the media. Only 16% trust political parties. One element in Le Monde’s study was a departure from what French polls have tended to show over the last few decades. Suddenly, 79% of French people want a “real leader to reestablish order,” while 86% say “authority” is a concept unjustly maligned, and half want to re-institute capital punishment. Odd that Macron has chosen this very moment to enlist the United Nations in writing a ban on the death penalty into international law. If Zemmour stands for anything, it is reconnecting the French public to big decisions over the future of France, particularly when it comes to immigration.

It’s another one worth reading in full if you can get past the paywall.

3. Michael Warren Davis, “The rise of the New Stoics” (Spectator: World); Kit Wilson, “The rise of the neoclassical reactionaries: The cultural right in the post-Christian age” (Spectator: UK)

MWD argues that the weak American Christian Right, the even weaker Conservative Inc. Right, and the unruly and untoward MAGA Truck Right are now being quietly challenged by a new group that he’s “taken to calling the New Stoics.”

Most are fairly secular. In any case, they’re not motivated by a sense of moral panic — not like the old Christian right was. They’re driven by the idea of virtue, in the old Roman sense of virtus, or the qualities possessed by excellent men. They got their start reading Jordan Peterson and The Art of Manliness, and went from there.

That sounds nice. And I know many such people do exist. The problem is who he manages to identify here as representing them:

“Conservatism Ink” (as opposed to the establishment, “Conservatism Inc.”). Conservatism Ink is younger. They sport beards and tattoos. They like to lift weights and drink whisky. And they’re not thrilled about cozying up with anti-woke liberals like Bari Weiss and Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

Those still could be Stoics, sure, I dunno. But he then goes on to mention #NoFap and Gavin McInnes etc., and it comes to seem, to me at least, that he is actually talking about (or at least conflating these folks with) the Very Online Right milieu of BAP and co. So here I will leap to defend our vitalist youth from the scurrilous accusation of cold-spirited Stoicism: what they dream of is rekindling the raging fire of thumos in the hearts of men; of breaking free from the matriarchs and small bug-men of petty republics and taking to wine-dark high seas on trireme; of entering lion cave naked with only club like Heracles and returning to glorious sunlight with lion skin on head, crowned king of men!

This is basically, like, the opposite of Stoicism, the Cato/Socrates-loving philosophy designed essentially to help good men retain their sanity and pursue reason and virtue while living through a degenerate era of corrupted but nearly unchallengeable Roman state power, when the capricious and arbitrary regime could crush them at any time like it did Seneca, even as they nonetheless sought, like Cicero, to actively participate in public/political life – which certainly sounds like it could be awfully useful for people right now, but is not really the same thing as the Achilles and Alcibiades-admiring primitivist-vitalists, or even those others on the dissident right who in seeking to “exit” society and build their own enclaves of one kind or another are a bit like Epicurus.

This is all interesting though, so I think I’ll have to write about Stoicism in more depth later. Meanwhile, Kit Wilson’s near-simultaneously published piece on the Young Right is a bit more on target, I think.

4. Freddie deBoer, “The Witching Hour Approaches” and “It Could Be So Much Better Than This” (Substack)

Freddie deBoer wrote a short and somewhat unconventionally written post that got a lot of attention, on the topic of how the entropic forces of natural human rebelliousness will take down Wokeism eventually. It’s good and you should read it. But I actually most enjoyed his follow up response. In it he meets criticism of his playful, “confusing” writing style in the earlier post to make an impassioned argument for the value of breaking free from stale, formulaic writing and having a little fun:

I understand that our culture is attached to a tedious literalism and that most people aren’t used to engaging with anything that doesn’t proceed from A to B to C. But there are all manner of other ways out there, other modes and genres and moods, and we could be enjoying them all, but we aren’t. No insult to the Ezra Kleins and Matthew Yglesii of the world, but there’s something tragic about the fact that so little is published on the internet, at least in prominent places, that transcends the form of busy little facts and mundane little arguments and plodding this and then this and then this and then this that they pioneered. I am desperate for invention. I miss IOZ. There was a time when people online surprised me. Now I rely on the accidental profundity that slips out before it’s quickly deleted; I look for inspiration in error. This is a tough business but there is such opportunity to be had in sheer undiluted formal ambition. You can write takes about how that thing everyone else loves is secretly white supremacy for the rest of your life, or you could remind everyone that text has no limits, that no one ever said that you have to mimic the rhythms of a David Brooks column, that Hunter S. Thompson was a legend because his manic and uncompromising style never stopped and asked if you needed to take a break. You can escape, you can tunnel under the prison walls. All it will cost you is the approval of the kind of people who tell jokes on Twitter to distract them from everything they hate in themselves.

Hear hear. Of course ideally one can avoid sacrificing making sense while being creative at the same time, but it’s worth taking risks in order to avoid the graver sin of always being totally dull.