Author: geotrickster

True Paleoconservative Communism Has Sometimes Been Tried

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“Guten tag kameradens. Haff you met meine daughter, Rapunzel Bustilda-Honecker?”

I just finished Katja Hoyer’s book “Beyond the Wall” recently. The book attracted an insane amount of criticism for telling the 40 year history of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR) in a remarkably unbiased and even handed way. Neither laudatory nor condemning, the book gave a history that understood the context of both why the little state had so many defectors it had to build a wall to keep people in, as well as why there were many people who were intensely loyal to it and still have fond memories of it to this day. This, apparently, was controversial. Because nuance is the enemy of the contemporary commentariat, be they right, center, or left.

I personally have often been historically attracted to the DDR because of its awful reputation in the west and its very real (though heavily frontloaded) achievements. It was a state that was outnumbered and outsized by its West German rival, had to pay enormous reparations to the Soviet Union, including in the form of its own surviving postwar industry, and occupied the most resource-poor sections of the former singular Germany. Stalin didn’t even want it, preferring to see a unified and neutral buffer state between the victors of World War II. Even its geography on the North European Plain was the opposite of defensible. Then there was American-aligned West Berlin right in the middle of it. By all rights the state should have failed immediately. And yet despite everything and the inevitable garrison paranoia that took over its political culture, it still managed to deliver massive achievements in land redistribution, women’s rights, education, technical training, and mass producing the coolest modern helmet. Filled with community events and impressively low crime rates, one can see the appeal just as one can see the massive downsides of its closed off mass surveillance state. A state where you give up freedom for a kind of egalitarian stability is a good deal to many. The kind of bargain many might settle for if given the option in today’s world of perpetual capitalistic instability.

Having read previous works on other Eastern Bloc Soviet states, one thought that I always return to is how much these societies end up resembling not so much the initial Marxist dream of proletarian triumph, but rather a different version of the paleoconservative vision of society. While paleoconservatives (pre-neoconservative and restraint oriented right wingers) claim to want a small state, most of their goals under contemporary conditions would require a strong state. Their view of a pro-family, pro-community, and low crime society is simply a church goer’s version of something many communist states actually achieved, at least compared to their capitalist rivals. The foreigners are kept out or to a minimum with strong border security, the avant-garde bourgeoisie are viewed with a deep suspicion, the for-profit motivation is castigated as being an attack on civil society, and the common working person is held up as an ideal. The communist experience may have been a long term failure in most countries that tried it, but it delivered this combination longer than postwar America arguably did, if at a more modest level. Probably because housing costs were, per Hoyer, 4.4 percent of the average family’s income. Compared to over 20% in the west (and think about what this would be now). No wonder some in the east want to turn back time.

Paleoconservatives, of whom I am very aligned on certain issues, especially foreign policy, miss the social forest  for the trees. They often think if only people went back to church they would find some magical answer to the problems of an out of control neoliberal modernity. But church now, as it did then, can only offer moralistic platitudes to those who do not take it seriously on its open terms. It has little to say about how power is used to deliver real material results in the actual physical world. Its use as a social connection, while very real, can be easily replaced by other institutions, as the communist experiment often proved with its pioneers, associations, and streets mostly free of crime.

You could say that the traditional (pre-neocon) conservative objectives of a particularist, anti-globalization, safe, family friendly society has come the closest to being in the last half century through communism.

I want to state for context; if this was the 1920s, I would have been the biggest anti-communist ever. Sure, I would have had problems with capitalism and liberalism, especially coming off of the horror show of Woodrow Wilson, but something with messianic claims about some mythic teleology of the human race centered around a project of building a ‘better man’ is basically custom tailored to trigger every warning bell that could possibly exist in the brain of any alternate history version of myself. The real world, regardless of what anyone thinks of it, is cyclic, amoral, unconcerned with human rights, and philosophically pagan. (I probably would have been a reluctant left-Brooks Adamsite with a mixed yet fascinated relationship with Spengler in this time). So long as Trotsky was part of the communist equation there would have been that whole fighting for the world revolution aspect to it as well. I would have been disgusted by this. It sounds like secularized slave morality.

The nice thing about history, however, is that we can look back on things with hindsight, and in so doing challenge how we think about the present. Knowing how the Euro-communist experiment turns out enables us to see it as it really was, rather than what it claimed to be. And it was ultimately not the missionary quest of world transformation that it claimed to be, but rather a rebellion against capitalist hegemony. An alternative that in the end would challenge the capitalist powers to increase their social safety nets lest they face revolt and efection. A faulty experiment in many ways, sure, but one based on the correct desire to resist global homogenization pushed both by business and ideologies. An alternative way of being. A new version of the paleoconservative dream.

Attacked relentlessly both directly and indirectly by British and American intelligence and military proxies, this way of being rapidly adjusted to competition with, rather than conversion of, the capitalists. In so doing it lasted longer than it would have under conditions of perpetual open war. It turned war-shattered and post colonial societies into divergent, rather than convergent, models of differentiated modernity (a concept with which I am fascinated in any context), and provided the space for a social solidarity that looks almost impossible under today’s unchallenged reign of neoliberal terror. 

And if this seems quixotic I would challenge you to look outside of Europe. Asia was where it really seemed to work. Uninterested in subsuming everything into some kind of nonsense ‘Hegelian Dialectic’ many Asian states easily adopted Marxism to preexisting cultural forms with no contradiction. Ancient traditions met modernization and created interesting and still successful hybrid regimes such as China and Vietnam. From at least Deng Xiaopeng onwards China disavowed the typical leftist war with the historical past for a merger of the past with the present and future. Or, as Lao Tzu might have put it, going with the flow. The Platonic and Christian societies of Europe struggled to pull this off, seeing the world as one of simple moral binaries. But outside of the Occident, people knew better. They could selectively harvest the successes and failures of the Soviet and allied experiments with a pragmatism worthy of the august term realist. Whatever alternative to global capitalism that now arises, it will not look like the experiments of the past…but it will have learned from them. 

And these new societies, like the earlier more questionable communist experiments before them, focus on different things than the clearly unstable capitalist order wants. Social mobility, clean streets, a public culture held above and beyond both the individual and the profit motive. All without insisting other countries adopt their model nor prioritizing its diplomacy around anything but national interest. I have no idea if it will succeed, and am sure that like all things success would be temporary, but right now it exists, and in doing so shows that humanity desires an alternative to neofeudal atomization.

And if this new experiment perturbs paleoconservatives, I will simply ask them this…If you think you can do better, this is your challenge. Break with the priorities of the old economic order and come up with something new and appealing. Rebuild the communities you claim to love so much by rejecting the financial globalism you claim to decry. If the communists, despite their original intentions, could do it, why can’t you. The future should learn from the past but it will not be found in simply retvrning to it. Divergence from a powerful status quo requires a future oriented effort. Once upon a time, the communists had this. They clearly do not anymore. But someone has to do it.

And communists, you failed to become the globalizers in chief. It is for the best. Nothing lies down that path but ruin, hubris, and shattered dreams. Learn from the paleoconservatives. find  your regional distinction. It was, in the end, what you ended up being good at after all. Imagine how much better the whole experiment would have been had it given up dreams of world revolution and stuck consistently to national liberation with unique and historically rooted basis, be it from the empires, the international finance, or the perpetually fruitless quest to shape the world around a singular vision. 

I often think about the late 90s anti-globalization protestors, now so often forgotten. When Pat Buchanan and Ralph Nader supported roughly the same side, and the bipartisan elite opposed them. It was a promising moment buried by the shock of the War on Terror and the congruent evangelical-vs-woke cultural battles that ensued after. It makes me wonder what opportunities could be open to the unorthodox of all types going forward. Those who, above all, are willing to seek a modus vivendi at home and abroad. 

Besides, anyone that knows liberals knows that it drives them even more nuts to own them from the left than the right.

So ist das leben.

Mothership RPG is the Haunted Void’s Sandbox Setting

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Mild spoilers for my future self-made adventure module.

It has been a long time since my formerly semi-regular tabletop rpg reviews and analysis on this site. Serendipity struck recently with my desire to acquire a new system with an explicit space-sci-fi focus coinciding with the arrival of the 25th anniversary remaster of System Shock 2, one of my favorite games of all time. This kicked off a rewatch of all the salvageable Alien movies (the first two being perfect top tier films of all time and canonical, and 3 and Romulus being the acceptable fanfiction entries, of course) and a determination to rewatch Sunshine and Event Horizon soon. Sci-fi Horror was my first true love, dating back to seeing Alien when I was only 8 years old and this no doubt leaving an impression. Its position at the pinnacle of subgenres would only become surpassed by one other, the Dying Earth subgenre, when I was in my mid-twenties.

So let’s boot up those retrotech systems and get going:

I have heard Mothership talked about for a few years now, but avoided it specifically because the primary game I both run and play in my life so far has been Call of Cthulhu. For this reason, and also because of my desire to find a space system that matches well with a preexisting setting I have made which is the one I use for much of my creative writing, I was holding out for something without so much of a horror focus. The problem was that none of those systems ever grabbed me in terms of mechanics. When I finally got around to looking at Mothership though, inspired by the confluence of factors above, I found that it was everything I wanted, and, being culturally adjacent to the Old School Renaissance type of gameplay style I so like, was easily modifiable to fit different setting-style beats. This is something I always look for when shopping for a new mechanical system as I almost never use pre-made material for adventure and setting.

Though Mothership does not count as one of the D20s-centric retro D&D clones, it shares the design philosophy of the OSR movement more broadly. Rolls are asked for in only the most contested of situations. Player cleverness and advantage-seeking is encouraged, and the deadliness of the game is accentuated by a quick and dirty pace with often decisive outcomes.  Its system is kind of a simplified Call of Cthulhu for base mechanics, with a roll-under D100 for skill checks and saves, and a roll-over D20 for less common panic table outcome checks. This panic table comes into play when either something truly shocking happens or a critical fail is rolled on another check, and has one roll against accumulated stress. Stress accumulates with every failed skill check, so these rolls become progressively more dangerous over the course of a session, providing a mechanic for heightening tension. Most will average against the player, whose skills, with the exception of one or two specialties, end up below the halfway threshold in most cases. This brings the stress mechanic and panic check element in with relative rapidity. 

Mothership’s character building is so simple the very character sheet can explain to new players how to do it. If one has not done it before it would take five minutes. If one has, two or three. It has a three-tiered tree of advancing skills whose primary mechanical effect is adding bonuses to stat checks. There are only four starting classes in the base game, though each player is given a large amount of leeway in how to allocate skills.

Ship combat is just as simple as ground combat, with range/position and skills determining phases and equipment determining skillsets. The difference is that crew members serve as adding bonuses to different checks and the whole party acts as the ship itself in a singular form. I have seen a lot of criticism of this aspect of the game online, but to me it retains the OSR feel in a way that feels distinct for a space setting and so I personally like it.

Rather than get to into the weeds on mechanics, as this particular game has become quite popular recently and so multitudes of deep dives on it can be found, I am more interested in turning now towards its immaculate rendition as a horror sci-fi toolset. I have (and am only reviewing) the core set. This is made up of multiple small booklets that come in one box break. They include the players guide (really the only thing that is necessary to run), a Warden’s (GM) guide which is possibly the best example of that often superfluous book I have ever seen, especially for new game masters, a ship guide (personal favorite of mine for the retro-jank designs), a de facto monster manual, and a single adventure module. Taken together, the quality of all of them is excellent and leads me to believe this would be one of the best first-time games for someone new to the hobby. The format is well-organized and concise. There is one of the better screens I have come across included in this pack, as well as cut out figurines for ships and characters.

As it comes to the setting, it is as minimal as possible, once again drawing from OSR sensibilities. I see this as an advantage, allowing whatever influences you wish to graft on flowing with the simple and easily modified rules. The overall influences on the game are included in a sidebar in the Warden’s Operation Manual and they are pretty much exactly what I suspected as I had been reading up to that point. Interestingly, they mention Alastair Reynolds’s book Diamond Dogs (reminding me I still had yet to read that one) only and not Chasm City or Revelation Space, which I would have thought of as strong examples for this kind of game. The aesthetics are Alien, especially in the kind of hazard pay working class used universe vibe, but the overall tone, especially in its equivalent of the monster manual, is definitely more on an arc that stretches from the grounded Ad Astra to the Hellraiser in space that is Event Horizon. 

This adaptability around a fun mechanic is exactly what I wanted. But, as I mentioned earlier, my intention is to graft it onto my own pre-existing setting, which is not quite a horror-first focused one. To show the adaptability of the game, all that is required for me to make them compatible with my more Jack Vance inspired view of humanity’s anthropological and cultural potential in space is to make the panic check table less foreboding in outcome (proportionally speaking, not in the absolute) as well as add a +1 to the amount of wounds characters or ships can tank before dying. The biggest change in addition to this is a new custom class that fits the primary theme of my pre-existing and quite Machiavellian setting, that of the diplomatic agent.* This did not require adding any new skills, as the linguistics->psychology-> sophontology and art->mysticism trees already exists in the game, but it did require making different starting bonuses for this fifth new class that effectively gives a large boost to intellect, a minor one to speed, a slightly improved sanity save, and a mandatory starting skill in linguistics/psychology plus one optional trained skill of the players choice. I am also considering adding a kind of ‘ethnicity’ element to my currently under construction campaign module, given my setting’s focus on cultural and biological divergence on different worlds after human settlement, but any stat changes here would be very minor. After more playtesting we can look into that further. Who knows, I might end up posting the finished module here when its done and tested.

My overall impression is this: I went looking for a system to compliment my regular rotation games with a space sci-fi element. Mothership is both adaptable and worthy. It further adds value to one’s shelf if one is interested in collecting the art of the OSR aesthetic. It will now join the ranks of Call of Cthulhu, Shadow of the Demon Lord, Pelgrane’s The Dying Earth, and Old School Essentials as a regular and recurring element in my game running.

And remember: if something catastrophic happens to a ship or station while you are running a game, you are obligated to suddenly and without warning whip this out and have it play in the background at the critical moment for all of your players:

*Technically I need to add two, with assassin/bounty hunter being the other, but a very interesting game expansion is coming that deals with this so I am leaving it out of this post for now. I may jerry-rig my own though in the meantime, but I have yet to do so as of the time of this writing.

Independence Can Only Be Declared by Places, Not Ideas

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I have a chapter in an edited book coming out this week about how structural reform works best in national and localized contexts, rather than internationalist or teleological contexts. Additionally, next year I will have another book chapter about the evolution of early American neutrality in foreign policy. Because of this I feel only a short and informal July 4th thought is necessary for the moment.

I was a kid during the fever pitch of American exceptionalist ideology in the 90s. We were told that America was not so much a place as a global aspiration. A future direction for the world. A mission, in the very religious sense of the term. This idea become so pervasive that its opponents even adopted it, finding all things American to be uniquely evil. The conservative dad vs the rebellious teenager dynamic.

A certain Anglophillic subset of liberals even adopted a strange pro-British Empire world view where the American colonists rebelled to steal land from Natives and keep their slaves (things the British Empire was already doing and would continue to do later elsewhere if under different guises- their abolitionist movement only starting to take off when they no longer had the Carolinas, their land theft never abated until the empire collapsed). The tragic history of European invasions of the Americas were already a done deal however, the demographic balance had already shifted into European triumph as an inevitability by the early 18th Century. It has always been telling to me that affluent white liberals will often gurn about July 4th while Mexican immigrants will set off firecrackers and party all day. They come from places with independence days too, they know what was really at stake.

So the war should really be seen as a struggle within the English speaking world between global empire and global markets based around London versus a unique Western Hemisphere direction for people in North America. This is the same dynamic that would later be replicated in Latin America a few decades down the line. While there are obvious differences between Anglo-Western Hemisphere and Latin-Western Hemisphere, they both chose to divorce themselves from Europe and seek a new path. In this way I regard them as more historically related to each other than any of them are to their once-mother countries. Only Canada stuck with its mother country through today, and that is more from fear of being swamped by its larger and more successful southern neighbor than anything else.

For all of these younger states this was an undeniably good thing. If one is not a specific place with specific interests around that place one is a slave. Be it to an faraway colonial master or to some unrooted ideology.

America is not and never was this thing I was sold it as when I was a child. It is a place that decided to go its own way and do its own thing. First this was political and economic independence from Britain, then it was diplomatic independence from the European alliance system which caused a massive rupture with France whose significance, future publications of mine will make the case, is almost as important as the Revolutionary War itself.

The United States had a bold new and, yes, for its time, revolutionary government. But this was not meant for export nor world-transformation. It was meant for itself. Its first formal relations were with countries like Morocco, where George Washington ensured the government there that while the U.S. wished no kings of its own, it held no hostility towards foreign kings or religions. America was a self-improvement project, not a missionary. Other countries would have to have their own distinct self-improvement projects.

So long as some element of this governing philosophy held sway, the United States was at the forefront of the world in human development and economic growth. But then the worst thing happened, after a score of rivals had self-immolated on their own incompetence, clearing the field for unprecedented American influence, the enlightenment and particularist founding of the nation gave way to its older, darker, pre-revolutionary past. The Puritans returned, and they had a mission not just at home but abroad. In alliance with them, arguably funding them, were the forces of rapacious capital and the military industrial complex. Development would no longer be at home, it would be solely in defense and abroad. Things were no longer to be made locally, but made abroad and purchased to create a global network of independence that was loyal to no place or people but shareholders. The American Republic had become the British Empire after all. And with that change came all the delusions of hubris and dreams of Making the Whole World England/America.

It failed of course, as these things always do. The further empires go from their core base territory the more strained their logistics, the more hostile their neighbors, the less enthusiastic the population for more expansion.

Now the empire the Americans must declare independence from in order to thrive is their own.

Whatever your feelings are on the United States, and mine certainly are complex, it is a real thing as of the time of this writing. A specific place with topography, history, and a civil compact. You can ask someone to invest in a real thing because it is tangible and they interact with it on a regular basis. The same thing does not apply for such intangible and downright mythical concepts such as “The Liberal International Order”, “Western Civilization”, “Christendom”, “The Free World”, “The Global Market”, or “Progressive Society”. None of those things have a specific place really, most of them disavow it in favor of treating the entire Earth as a cosmic battlefield for Platonic ideals.

Perhaps I am the outlier here but I would never ask someone to show loyalty to an abstract concept. Only a place can declare independence from the actors who insist the whole world must be remade around their interests. Only a place can cultivate a nuanced sense of tragedy to help guide a rational path forward.

Happy Fourth.

If I were an Iranian Strategist…

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The one and only downside about leaving academia for first the policy and then the policy analysis community is that almost everything has to be framed as in the American interest. Now, since I wish to change my own country’s policies, this is hardly a bad thing on the whole. But boy does it ever make me long for times when I studied other countries’ strategies on wholly their own terms.

I wish to do that now, in what I am sure will be a scandalous exercise to centrists and journalists everywhere. Good thing its just my personal site and I will also be writing about concepts indecipherable to those still stuck at a 5th grade reading level.

Though many years have passed and the differences in details are now many, I have made the case before that Iran would most likely be a tough nut to crack for the U.S. and especially Israel. This is no half-failed Arab state with arbitrary borders drawn from a colonial office in Europe. At the same time, I want to acknowledge that the government is deeply unpopular with young people, is a ridiculous theocracy, and the government subordinating so much of its own national interest to the cause of Palestinian liberation has been a disaster for its own self-interest. I also don’t think (edit: more on this here) the toppling or weakening of a single government could knock a proud civilizational state out of commission for more than the short term. A better government would probably end up an even more potent regional rival to Tel Aviv in the end.

That aside, let us look at the short term. We now exist in a situation where either Israel will continue striking Iran unilaterally (no doubt with American assistance in intelligence and logistics) or will bring in America either partially or full force on Israel’s side. With the exception of some logistical support across the Caspian, I do not expect Russia or China to meaningfully intervene. China is happy to stay out of the region and let its rivals bury themselves in loser-wars. Russia is bogged down due to its own over-extension. So let us assume that Iran has to do this basically on its own.

Israel on its own can be stalemated, hence Tel Aviv’s desperate quest to ensnare Washington.

A full-blown U.S. intervention on Israel’s behalf represents the worst possible scenario for Tehran. There will be no choice but to withdrawal to extreme defense as a national war of survival. Though Iran’s networks would enable it to offensively unleash indirect chaos elsewhere, especially in Iraq and Yemen. These could exacerbate population migration pressures and alienate Europe. Inevitable casualties and cost for fighting such a turtled foe would grind down the American public and its low-morale military which has seen nothing but ruin in the Middle East. This would be a repeat of North Vietnamese strategy in a sense, though with a far less robust home front. Iran would itself be in danger the longer the war went on, as its own popular support would be strictly relegated to that of national defense. Either way, the only winner of this exchange is Turkey, who would gain in the region at everyone else’s expense and possibly even up as the peacemaker to the conflict.

Nothing too interesting yet, but lets turn to what might be the most likely scenario…a primarily Israeli war with US supporting air and naval assets in direct action but no ground war. Here is where Tehran’s opportunity lies.

Israel launched this war either knowing the US would be in on it, or assuming it could be forced into it by seizing the initiative. Tensions now exist within the alliance. The majority of the US public is opposed to military action. This might tick up as populations are fickle when bombs fly, but overall skepticism reigns. Israel seeks to lure Iran into attacking US forces in order to ensure greater American involvement. Iran would be foolish to fall for this trap. It should so thoroughly avoid doing this that should anything happen to US forces, many will suspect Israeli false flag operations or a repeat of the USS Liberty incident.

Most importantly, if the US strikes Fordow or any other target with its air force, Hypothetical Iranian Strategist Me would take the no doubt internally unpopular position not to retaliate…on the US. But there would be retaliation…on Israel.

This would be the crux of the plan: Every US attack invites a massive missile barrage on Israel as well as increased Hezbollah activity against the Israelis. The more the US acts, the more Israel is punished. The messaging would be that Israel had started the war and was trying to dogwalk the US into it. It would resonate with many parts of the public because it would be self-evidently true. If Fordow goes, so goes Haifa. If Isfahan is hit, so will Tel Aviv.

US logistics would still be strained by this as Israel ran out of interceptors and other equipment. The lack of American casualties would increase the antiwar voices in American media at the expense of the pro-war ones when discussing the threat Iran poses to the US. The Houthis, after all, already do a form of this with Israeli ships but not most other people’s traffic. Discontentment with Netanyahu would grow at home and abroad. He would have failed to bait the US to go fully in. His cities would be under attack, the economy of the country suffering. The Israelis will demand more from the US, ever more histrionically, and the US may often refuse them. Questions will arise, third parties will demand a negotiation. The Israeli elite would have to rethink the present government, whose justification for continuity is entirely based on Netanyahu’s proven record at manipulating America. If he has that, he has nothing. Domestic antics ensue. And then the Israeli public figures it out…more American support means more attacks on them.

In a scenario where Israelis die but not Americans, the rest of the world will shrug and point to Gaza when confronted with Israeli Exceptionalism/Chosen People Syndrome. It is at this point the Iranians state that they will allow their nuclear program to be observed by a neutral international commission if given full security guarantees against Israeli attack by international agreement, with the caveat being that they will fully reactivate nuclear development if Israel attacks them again. Trump, ever mercurial, might just want to claim a win and move on at this point. Israel, running low on supplies, would at least need a breather.

Such would be my strategy anyway. I don’t envy Iran’s position though. Attacked by some of the most duplicitous actors abroad and governed by some of the wackiest boomers on Earth at home, they have to navigate this security dilemma on the backfoot.

The Worst Number of Parties is Two

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Tim Kreider, 2002. Some things never change.

Despite the sometimes intense instability of coalition governments, I generally have a view that the more political parties there are in a system the better. While it is true that there are often broad and predictable coalitions, the mere possibility of surprise single-issue or bloc based re-alignments can do a lot to combat complacency. To imagine how this would work in the current American system picture a world where the Greens and Libertarians have enough pull in Congress to sway close votes. They might side with one big party or another in a predictable fashion on economic or regulatory policy, sure, but both would likely throw their weight behind whoever was the opposition when issues related to foreign policy or surveillance came up. Trump’s current attack on Due Process would be opposed by both, for example, tipping the scales away from the Republican government. Likewise, Democratic efforts to sabotage diplomacy (a la Cuck Schemer on Iran or Adam Schiff on Russia) would also see both Greens and Libertarians ally with Republicans to overturn such knee jerk platitudes.

This does not mean, however, that more is always better. I can think of one arrangement where less parties is better than more: And that is that one Party is probably better than two. At least in times of intense partisanship in the media.

This seems a strange position to take. I do not take it in defense of one party states, which I generally oppose unless a state is newly founded (see Kemalist Turkey or post-unification Vietnam). I take this position because two parties is just so unrelentingly awful.

The reason two can become worse than one is that it effectively functions as a single party state in that the broad consensus keeps ticking on unchallenged while the pantomime of free choice is pushed front and center. Picked up by a media both pliant and partisan, the most inconsequential of differences are held up as vital decision points. This has the bizarre effect, as we see all around us today, of radicalizing the ignorant in ways where their radicalization actually supports the establishment of both parties. Any cultural flashpoint or nakedly partisan example of corruption is held up to be the end all be all, while the machine of private contractor grifting and surveillance creep expands at an ever growing clip. The relatively minor differences between the parties creates a yawning cavern of difference between voters too dumb to see they have more in common with the opposite-party rubes than they do with their own leadership.

Reverse partisanship is another bizarre aspect of this phenomenon. In just the past decade (and ignoring all the many examples prior to that) we have seen two party systems across the world basically reverse entire positions almost overnight simply because an upset in the other party triggered their oppositional defiance disorder. The focus of the neoconservative movement went from Republican to Democrat in about two years as preparation for what they saw as an inevitable Hillary Clinton Presidency. Choosing negotiation over reflexive war and sanctions was once a strongly Democrat coded position, but now that Trump exploited the neoconservative realignment to take over the GOP it is the Democrats who come across as the party of Freedom Fries. Meanwhile, the Democratic embrace of Clintonian neoliberal economics led to a (utterly false) GOP pivot towards claiming the mantle of populism…but now that The Big Beautiful Bill is passed and that claim is exposed as utterly hollow, one expects another reversal for both parties around austerity. The tariff issue has really driven this home for both parties recently, with people contradicting their views on trade multiple times in the same month.

As mentioned before, these pivots do nothing to challenge the bipartisan establishment, but they do make the populace more stupid. How many extended family members or second tier friends do you have that parrot talking points they would have been adamantly opposed to just a few years ago simply because their party-coded media has reversed position? In most instances they seem incapable of even acknowledging this if it is pointed out, with uncomfortable silence standing in for their utterly hollow engagement with the pantomime of partisanship. It is a confession of nonsentience. The regime rules through the endless dance, the dittohead serves as its thuggish yet cowardly enforcer in the public sphere.

One of the weirder things you will notice when traveling to a state that bans parties or has only one is that, in general, the average person is much more in touch with reality. There may be things they cannot say in public, and they may long for a viable opposition, but there is a certain honest cynicism from the government supporters that they back the regime because they personally benefit from it. Likewise, the opposition to it shares a kind of inclusiveness and solidarity that they are all in this together. Distrust of canned media narratives are, I find, far higher in these societies than in my own. There is almost a reflexive private trend to disbelieve all official sources. Though this obviously comes with its downside, it is a preferable state of being for the cultivation of critical thought than those who mindlessly parrot the media of who they imagine to be their co-ideologues. That they imagine themselves as free and rational while doing so makes it all the more galling.

Compared to two party states, one party states are total amateurs when it comes to nullifying opposition and setting unquestioned media narratives.

Maybe a slight lyrical revision to Three Dog Night’s hit is in order.

A Postmortem on the Postmodern

/ geotrickster / 4 Comments
Satoshi Kon’s Paranoia Agent is still the best send up to postmodern correlationism ever made.

Sure, everyone hates postmodernism now. But that wasn’t always the case. From the 80s until just a few years ago, the ultimate experiment in German Idealist philosophy merging with French pretension and Anglo-Protestant moralism was regarded as not only serious, but became the dominant intellectual framework in numerous parts of the world’s academic establishments. This percolated down via midwit linguistic turns to indirectly influence media discourse. It became fashionable to state that the world could not exist outside of human perception and that relativity ruled over all. It made one seem worldly.

The key word here is “seem”.

Those rooted in materialism, from actual Marxism to speculative realism and everything in between, we stood strong against this. But our internally diverse camp was the outlier. The unfashionable. The heretics. This could be heard in universities themselves, with postmodernists dismissing ideas for being old, rather than on their merits or lack thereof, as if longevity was a net negative. An ironic position for anyone young enough to have missed the Summer of 68, considering the specifically Boomer roots of postmodernism, but I digress.

Postmodernism, despite its many pretensions to radicalism, was anything but. It was the left wing of neoliberalism. Its cultural posturing against the liberal hegemony was, like their view of culture itself, entirely performative and superficial. They, like the CIA-backed modern art projects of the Cold War, were effectively an anti-establishment coded pro-establishment movement. A quest to give the illusion of radicalism to something that would never challenge financial or political power and would always, ultimately, serve as cover for the actual lack of choice on offer. A grand show to defang and disarm actual radicalism by betting, correctly, that many reformers were just as dumb and easily distracted by culture war as the conservatives they criticized. 

It claimed to break old meta-narratives and to question archaic values, but in practice it was always a new form of Protestantism: strident, moralist, and, ironically, obsessed with building the very monoculture it claimed to be combatting. So-called punks demanded censorship to protect the feelings of the aggrieved, diversity impact statements became humiliation rituals to enforce group loyalty, all while diversity of thought was cast out in favor of a missionary project. Christian slave morality reborn under a rubric of cutting edge social justice. A post-structuralist inquisition charged with rooting out heresy.

Postmodernism did its job. It destroyed the capacity of recovery for an already structurally crippled opposition be it the left, scholarship, protest movements, journalism, the antiwar movement, and it did so under the guise of bringing about a bold new future. It did bring a future, but  for Silicon Valley Neofeudalists. The Man could hardly have asked for a better ally. This was entirely predictable to those of us who were not postmodernists, but missed by its true believers so eager to call us unfashionable old timers. Neoliberalism believes that the human race is made up of autonomous individual units as its most important component, as does postmodernism. But this claim has never, ever been true. It can only be believed by ignoring all of archeology, anthropology, and history. The community has always ruled, and communities are divergent based not on ‘social construction’, which comes as an after the fact justification rather than a primary mover, but by geography, ecology, and historical circumstance. Things no individual, and often even no group, have control over.

If more scholars had been open to ignoring anthropocentrism and studying humanity more like we do other animals, they would have skipped this awkward phase of correlationism (the goofball belief that human consciousness is the ultimate arbiter of reality) and instead treated us like the very real biological species that we are. As John Gray stated: 

“In denying that the natural world exists independently of our beliefs about it, postmodernists are implicitly rejecting any limit on human ambitions. By making human beliefs the final arbiter of reality, they are in effect claiming that nothing exists unless it appears in human consciousness.”

This is anti-nature and anti-reality. It is, ironically, a resurrection of the moralism and protagonist syndrome-fueled pathos of the Abrahamic religions. The world is nothing but a playground for our moral journey, the correlationists claimed. It is positively evangelical.

It should be obvious this is a weird and contradictory position for a relativist to take. And this brings me to my key point: Postmodernism got almost everything wrong, from politics to education to how power works, but the thing it is most criticized for now that it is no longer popular- its cultural relativism- was actually the one thing it got right.

Or perhaps more accurately, would have gotten right had they been consistent about it. 

Once you accept that humanity’s strength is adaptability, and this is what has fueled the species’ expansion, it becomes obvious that it is because we are adapting to new places as much if not more than adapting them to us. Ecology and geography rule the day. Those things are not universal. Migrating peoples, be they conquerors or refugees, are more likely to be assimilated by a new home than to make the new home a perfect copy of the old, even as they change it. The impact of physical reality is absolute and real, but the ways in which people adapt to its differing variables is divergent and will remain so going forward. Culture, as the outgrowth of this adaptation, is by necessity relativistic. They are all moving and changing, yes, but along different paths. Sometimes some merge with others or split from others, but the process is Taoistic, of eb and flow, not one of linear progress. Physical reality, which exists regardless of our opinions about it, is not one Platonic unified whole but rather a sea of churning probabilistic chaos which is in a cultural sense polycentric. It has truth, but that truth contains no universal moral values.

Postmodernism, ironically, claimed to uphold this but in actuality hated it. Seeking to suppress any heresy from its quest to serve the neoliberal drive of the autonomous global individual, it came to advocate hostility towards any non-liberal order or view that would make those trained by the professional managerial class’ values ‘feel unsafe’. It ended up rejecting the only thing it ever was right about- moral relativism. All while doubling down on solipsism as a world view. 

Meanwhile, the equally stupid backlash to the recession of the postmodern era, that of the (in denial) postmodern right has also got everything backwards, possibly in an even more terrible way. To the right (in Abrahamic cultures anyway) morality is absolute and unwavering, but real life is relativistic. The assumption is that the real world can be bent around morality. Similar in practice to the postmodern left’s obsession with culture forming, this version does not even admit the fungibility of values. In other words they will try to shape a real world that exists independently of human thought around non-material concepts that exist only in their mind.

Spoiler alert: It will fail, just as it has all the previous times it has been tried. For every push of the needle towards something they want, there will be an equal or greater pushback building continuously in reaction. A society may fall to theocracy only to see its people leave religion in droves (like Iran or post-reformation Europe) or racial or imperial chauvinism only to see its neighbors bandwagon against a drive to supremacy, leaving it contained (Spain, the Axis). 

This is because for all the yearning for an unreal ideal that marks the greatest flaw of humanity, there will always be a yearning to escape other people’s ideals. The problem is ultimately self-correcting.

So if there can be some primary takeaways from the intellectual dark age of the past few decades I see it as this: relativism only works with culture, and to be consistent and useful it must have limits, specifically geographic limits but also an understanding that cultures can and often should change themselves- but in doing so they will not merge with others but rather add to the medley of an ever-expanding natural selection. Relativism should be a partner, and not a foe, to the sciences, and it should never fall into the correlationist trap of claiming variable perceptions can shape material reality on their own. After all if there is one thing, aside from correlationist fantasies themselves that truly seems to unite all forms of idealist thinking, it is that of being useful idiots to whatever fad Silicon Valley and financial elites are dreaming up at the moment. And it is the rule of the nerds that must end, regardless of if they are fashionable nerds or not.

So postmodernism joins the ranks of all the other idealist philosophies it claimed to be breaking from: its obsession with critiquing power ignored that the actual root of power is material. It is force and it is logistics deployed to defend or increase one’s control over material factors. People and eras may have preferences one way or the other as to the purpose to which it is used but It is ultimately an amoral process with no universal model nor basis in the ideal. So in the end what really matters is not ideas, but hard physical reality. Realism wins again.

Which is good, because the last place one ever wants to be trapped is inside the mind of middling Oberlin professor with a writing style designed to obfuscate rather than elucidate.

Vietnam Conquered the Cold War Itself

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Today is the 50th Anniversary of the Liberation of Saigon and the reunification of Vietnam after almost a century of colonial and great power meddling. It was the first full blown American military defeat since Red Cloud’s War over a century before and the culmination of wise long term strategy on the part of the Vietnamese. The human cost was immense and the danger was not yet over, as the Sino-Soviet Split was about to go hot in Southeast Asia. Within almost no time at all Vietnamese forces would be ejecting the Khmer Rogue from power in neighboring Cambodia, toppling what had to have been the worst (adjusted for population and size) government of the 20th Century in the process, and incurring a retaliatory and ultimately ineffective limited invasion by the Chinese in 1979 (tacitly backed by a bitter US).

The Sino-Soviet Split preceded these events by about a decade, and Nixon and Mao’s diplomacy was basically a sealant on the end of the Cold War’s ideological phase. Vietnam, fighting what was always first and foremost an anti-colonial struggle, already knew this. The proximity and domineering attitude of the Chinese always meant that the USSR was a superior partner (this was the reverse of most communist states’ interests, showing the importance of geographic proximity), and that the security concerns of Chinese power projection could not be ignored. First was driving out the French and the Americans, then came dealing with a diplomatic assertion of independence in the near abroad. Sovereignty is not just ejecting foreign dominion, but asserting a ‘clear field’ over ones autonomy of action in diplomacy, similar to the difference between an actual planet and a dwarf planet, one isn’t all the way there if the baycenter of its orbit with a moon lies outside the primary central mass.

So Vietnam served as an obvious example of small state realpolitik in action. Less by actively seeking to be part of the preexisting Sino-Soviet Split and more by ignoring it entirely as it focused on more pressing matters. The world responded accordingly after Vietnam took action. More importantly, this was not just a part of the war of independence, but rather a hint of what was to come. Both Vietnamese and Chinese diplomacy dropped all pretense of being anything but national interest-based after this. Vietnam sought diplomatic connections with many abroad regardless of regime type, while China focused on anti-Soviet activities for the remainder of the Cold War. This even included support of the Afghan Mujahedeen. With the loss of its great power patron in the fall of the USSR in 1991, Vietnam immediately began to pivot to normalizing relations with the United States, something that would occur at the end of the decade. Since that time, maudlin Boomer tears for the doomed mafia-like client state of South Vietnam aside, the two countries have largely had positive relations. The U.S. has even worked to redirect offshoring away from China and towards Vietnam for reasons of obvious mutual benefit.

This has not meant that Vietnam has pursued hostile relations with the Chinese. Far from it, it attempts a kind of cautious neutrality and guarded openness to its giant neighbor. Something currently paying dividends as Hanoi becomes targeted by an erratic and undirected US trade policy. The true lesson of the Cold War, something the Vietnamese learned that the Americans and Russians often did not, is that globally-focused ideology in foreign policy is a leash. The smaller the country, the shorter the leash.

Despite having the formative events of its modern state tied up with the Cold War almost like no other state around today, Vietnam serves as an example of keeping grand political projects localized and non-universal. The freedom and security of their nation and their diplomatic autonomy always came first. They would have their own path to sovereignty, divergent from others. This is, after all, the point of independence and national unity.

Ho Chi Minh was scorned at Versailles by the imperious universalist Woodrow Wilson, but maintained an admiration for George Washington, one of the preeminent examples of turning an independence war into a diplomatic posture of non-alignment. This was the correct path as the war that Americans were told was necessary to maintain world order, which they were willing to kill millions to keep going, ultimately didn’t matter. The two countries live with each other and have largely constructive relations. Vietnam had no global capacity or ambitions, and the United States, so used to both itself and the Soviets, had to be reminded that sometimes all politics really are just local. And yet if you go to Vietnam in person in the 21rst Century, as I have, you’ll find nothing but water under the bridge. The world moved on. Geopolitics is always in flux. And in a world where constant rebalancing, entropy, and changing circumstances reign supreme there can be no universal principle save adaptability. Those who embrace this reality can outperform those who refuse to.

Vietnam didn’t just beat France and America, it beat the idea of a Cold War itself. In doing so it ensured its own success. This is worth remembering today when modern people try to tell us we live in a world of ‘freedom vs authoritarianism’ or ‘a new Cold War’. Any state that engages with the rest of the world as part of some kind of Platonic/existential struggle will meet only disaster, while the agility of the practical and situationally positioned states will run rings around them.

But lest you think I have only negative things to mention about the failed experiment of South Vietnam, check this out:

Geotrickster’s 10 Year Anniversary

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Raven Steals the Sun by Preston Singletary

On the fourth of April it will officially be the 10 year anniversary of this blog. If it was another 10 years older backdated in time it would have been called part of the ‘Blogosphere’. Thankfully, that did not happen. I will be traveling on the fourth of this month, however. So instead I am going to upload this at a time when much of the world is in April Fool’s Day. It seems fitting. In that 10 years there have been 223 posts, well, now 224 I suppose. Not a bad clip.

My original purpose with this site was to serve the following purposes:

  1. Practice for policy idea writing.
  2. Working through issues I wasn’t sure about yet. A first testing ground so to speak.
  3. An online resume of sorts (see publications tag).
  4. To provide a repository for all the articles I either did not want to publish through someone else due to needing a custom tone or could not get published elsewhere (a formerly much more common arrangement).
  5. To be funny and casual about stuff treated with way too much seriousness elsewhere.

Once I began publishing externally much more frequently, the amount of analysis on foreign policy decreased massively, with domestic and philosophical posts growing, and even a few fiction pieces too. Aside from this though, the original 5 points seem to have largely stayed intact.

A lot has changed since Spring of 2015. Otherkin no longer rule the internet, replaced by a medley of domestic terror-coded ideological otherkin. A global pandemic ran rampant and unleashed the contradictions of late neoliberal breakdown. A carnival barker became President twice in a nonconsecutive manner, the first since Grover Cleveland to do so. In the interregnum between these terms a vegetative fossil held the presidency, but since much of the media liked him there was a coordinated conspiracy to pretend that this was not so. Greater multipolarity in world affairs, something that was basically inevitable from the Great Recession onwards, went from the primary world issue in the background to very much the forefront. The failure to establish a left populism, undone by postmodern moralism and puritanism and tied to the rotting corpse of a liberal establishment, led to the rise of a right populism which is far dumber than the left that should have been born from Occupy but wasn’t.

And then came signalgate to really ram home one consistent theme I have always hammered on this site: it is not primarily malicious competence that is responsible for so much of what you see, but a kind of autopilot incompetence. Notice too how a scandal that should be overwhelmingly directed against Mike Waltz in particular seems to be intentionally obscured by the very media that broke the story, likely because they find his uber-hawk establishment positioning the most palatable of anyone in the government and fear his replacement. Freedom of will? Human consciousness directing the species through rationality? These are the most overrated concepts in all of the humanities. We do not assign this special status to other species, and it makes our observations of their behavior far more objective.

So on the surface everything changed. But if you were paying attention nothing really unexpected happened at the macro scale. The empire was in decline when I started, it still is now. The planet is suffering under incredible loss of biodiversity and conditions of accelerating climate destabilization, same as it was then. Neoliberalism was a discredited force everywhere but finance and the media 10 years ago, and now its often even discredited there too. These things were always going to happen no matter what individuals or even specific countries were wielding the most power, though the rate of the change might differ between variables. Trump is an accelerant.

But just because real life is fatalistic doesn’t mean its predictable! Far from it. This site has the name it has because of my fascination with trickster figures in mythology. They remind us that the murky reality of moral ambiguity that we live in is random and fun in at least equal proportions to its more dire and tragic elements. To quote Dasha Nekrasova from before her podcast went fully unbearable: “Stay alive- something retarded might happen.” These are words to live by.

I would like to think that in these 10 years I have been consistent. Always willing to admit when I make a bad call (Russia won’t invade Ukraine outside of the Donbass/Crimea areas, Hillary will pull out a squeaker in 2016, Syria won’t fall to foreign states-*though in my defense I always carved out a Turkish exception to that one as a hedge, which sadly turned out to be correct). Want to dunk on me, those predictions are all still here. You can search for them. But I have had a greater number of correct calls too in the same time frame (A second Karabakh War with advantage this time for Azerbaijan, the always lingering dangers of the Israel Lobby on crafting viable foreign policy, US recognizing Moroccan rule over Western Sahara, the increased importance of Panama and the Arctic for geostrategy, other countries invoking their own form of R2P to justify war-no longer leaving this as an Atlantic only causus belli, and the missionary/military uses of social progressivism, to name just a few).

If there is one criticism anyone can rightly lob at me which I will proudly accept as true it is that I am a geographic determinist. I am. And if I am doing my job, other people will see why this apparently reductionist position is the pinnacle of material philosophical rigor and policy planning priorities. When accepting geographic determinism, people can virulently disagree on policy but still do so rationally and respectfully, knowing at least that all sides share a common physical reality. The animal is made by ecology.

So with a decade on here passed what are my favorite entries and which were the most popular?

Most popular is easy to prove as I have access to the data:

Oversocialization: An Alternative Social Media Theory, Geotrickster’s Official Rankings of DnD Editions, For Every Cheney Gained, a Million Voters Lost, seem to be the most consistent view getters, in some cases years later. I have even seen one of my lines from the most recent of these appear at random throughout the internet (the one about the party of FDR being replaced by a bunch of Patrick Batemans and the cast of The View).

Considering that there are hundreds I can choose from for my personal favorite I am just going to go with what hits the memory banks first as entries I am personally most proud of. These would be:

How to Write a Generic International Relations Article (from the first month no less and which apparently made my former doctoral advisor break out into laughter when he saw it during a meeting), Speculative Realism’s Mongolian Debut, Going Along With the Coyote Conquest, 17th Century Survival Tips for a Hysterical Age, Designing the Ideal International Relations Education, and Delving Down to Prospect (fiction!)

As for the future? I publish more often off this site than on it these days, but there will always be things that need a personal touch or that cannot be fiddled with by editors, things that fill the liminal spaces between clear cut genres and acceptable discourse, and books no one else wants to review. So long as that is the case, I will be here.

The Domestic Danger of Allies and Dittoheads

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In a poll that should surprise absolutely no one, most republicans support the right to protest- unless it is Israel. Claims from the party of Freedom Fries that they were now the defenders of free speech were obviously idiotic of course, but the clash of the idea of American First with the reality of Israel First has to be the most jarring, if hardly unexpected.

While the neo-McCarthyism of Russiagate was the most famous aspect of that odious and deeply stupid era, I think the worst aspect about it is that there was in fact a foreign nation that pupeteered the GOP all along- it just wasn’t Russia. But the Democrats are almost as compromised by the Israel Lobby as the Republicans are, meaning they could not have brought this up without facing a similar scrutiny themselves.

Strategic rivals have very little influence over a (powerful) states’ domestic politics. Recognized as a threat, their agents are monitored and tracked. This is not so with allied states, who are the true media savvy juggernauts of foreign policy discourse. Rivals may spend as much or more, but their payoff is far less. Closely interlinked nations on the other hand get away with almost anything. Alliances themselves become lucrative intuitions and develop a certain existence independent of their constituent countries. One of the reasons that George Washington warned against overly close attachments with foreign nations is because people tend to romanticize and become too invested in their destinies to the point where it overrides their interest in their own country, creating dangerous commitments and contradictions.

This brings us to another and seemingly unrelated phenomenon of the post-Cold War Era: the Dittoheads. The term is now hopelessly archaic, to the point where I’m surprised I even know of it. It was on the way out before I was even conscious of anything on the news that wasn’t related to Joe Lieberman trying to cancel my beloved games. It described the average Rush Limbaugh listener. A mindless compliant who would call in to agree with everything The Pig and his previous callers had spouted out beforehand. Limbaugh was a product, and his audience mindlessly consumed it.

I think one of the reasons we no longer use the term ‘dittohead’ is because it is so specifically linked with Limbaugh, but he really was a pioneer for the entire media’s eventual fate in the 21st Century. This style of mindless repetition in service of narrative creation rather than critical thought went mainstream with Fox News, and then was copied by the other cable news networks and even what was once (painfully) called the ‘blog-o-sphere’ until it became the messaging apparatus of a two party system in general. The explosion of social media’s popularity in the 2010s at first broke this partisan monopoly but then would go on to reaffirm it in stranger and more unhinged ways. This would culminate in nakedly gamed and astroturfed platforms such as reddit and increasingly ””””””’X””””””’.

Now we live in the postmodern utopia all of the most naïve people I went to grad school with so badly wanted to come true. People choose their own truth out of brand loyalty rather than critical thought. Its called being a good fucking person, you Islamosexual Communazi. It basically doesn’t even matter anymore which of these self-contained echo chambers someone is in, they are all dittoheads. They signal group loyalty and wear their inability to engage in nuanced thought as a point of pride. If you disagree with them, you are assumed to be a diametric opposite of all they hold dear, even if that is far from true.

These are the easiest people in the world to manipulate. Now, who do you think realizes that aside from the usual suspects of political culture warriors and profit maximizing corporations?

I would hazard to guess foreign lobbies. Specifically allied foreign lobbies with media connections and cultural cache. Israel is the big one, but I also (to bring it back to Russiagate) suspect Britain, and possibly in the future a South African diaspora trying to pull a Miami Cuba 2.0. And this isn’t even to bring up the entire mess that is the western-based Ukraine fanboys.

This isn’t new. The pro-France contingent of American politics in the 1790s was so strong it took a major diplomatic incident, an undeclared naval war, and an invasion scare to remove their influence from policy. But I will refrain from talking too much about that now as I will have multiple future publications that go into great detail into the topic, both in book chapter and article form, so stay tuned.

The dittoheads are waiting to be sent their instructions, and as many foreign as domestic actors know of their pliability and narrative shaping abilities. They will advocate against civil liberties at home to protect their beloved proxy-countries abroad. They are fools who vicariously fight battles for a sense of meaning in their little plebian lives. If they are catered to they will drag us all down with them.

Never say ‘ditto’.

A Subcontinent of Toddlers

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You do not have to be the biggest fan of how the Trump Administration negotiates. You can, like myself, see the blustering towards Canada and Mexico in particular as extremely counter-productive, to say nothing of the clownish (and possibly dangerous) Gaza proposal. But the Europe stuff…come on, that’s fucking hilarious.

Vance scolding them in both just and right ways as well as ways reminiscent of the liberal internationalists he rightly despises served as a wakeup call that the End of History was over. It had never really begun, of course, but certain parts of the planet (Canada, Northern Europe, American media liberals) had bought into this self-flattering fiction because it centered the deindustrializing parts of the world as still, somehow, the primary drivers- perhaps even protagonists- of history. But when someone finally said this was not true out loud, the self-vassalized classes of Europe publicly wept. The American elite may be a cynical, fractious, and even ignorant bunch, but they have a theory of governance and diplomacy. Europe, so used to being a satrapy, has seen its once more accomplished elite become complete colonial recruit subalterns. Their best and brightest, the people allowed into power, genuinely believe this post-power politics shit. They weep when the mirage crumbles.

Frankly, its pathetic.

Were I European I would find this both funny and disturbing. I would immediately demand people who actually know about how the world works represent me, and appoint people to the foreign policy apparatus accordingly. I would castigate all the trendy postmodernists (closet liberal ideologues) and hard-constructivists (also closet liberal ideologues) for what dogs to America they really are and their role is gutting training for actual honest and forthright policy makers. The failure to prioritize a regional Europe over global ideological crusades has harmed EU countries at least as much as it has the US. Arguably more considering the backwash of the refugee crisis from Libya, Iraq, and Syria.

But since I am not European I merely need to sit back and watch, appraising how fast a society high on 30 years of pure ideology goes through the stages of withdrawal and grief.

I previously mentioned how (northern) Europeans in particular have a strange smug entitlement and unearned sense of self-importance when their only real impact on the 21rst Century seems to be outliers of enshittification to domestic political realignments. This might be worse than that, though. The pathetic Chamberlain-at-Munich analogies and blind faith in a bill of goods the US is (thankfully) no longer selling reflects an inability to even think of a future, only a romanticized and ahistorical past. Statecraft isn’t about bringing into being the hideous undulating many-tentacled beast of German Idealist philosophy, where human thought creates reality through a mystical immaterial process yet to be explained, it is about medium term solutions to immediate problems while understanding permanency is fleeting. It cannot be a playground for navel gazing. People have clashing interests. Always have, always will.

The Age of Discovery and the subsequent Age of Victorian imperialism is long since over. Coasting along as ducklings in America’s wake somehow enabled many in Europe to believe that they had transcended history and were still vital global actors. But the unlearning of statecraft actually meant they were stumbling in to being its victims.

The world today resembles not the dreams of the 90s, but the pre-Discovery balance of power. The great civilization-states of the east are back and growing their influence. Europe, meanwhile, has reverted to its older position of being the western peninsula of Asia. The faster the Europeans can grow up, the faster they can adapt to this new reality.