“Why—to pick just one example—has every President since January 1993 been a thorough mediocrity? Is that normal, to have five mediocre (or worse!) Presidents in a row across nearly thirty years? Has that ever happened … outside of the run-up to the Civil War?”
As an acolyte of Strauss and Howe, I agree that there is an analogy to the 1850s, and of course to the “low dishonest decade” of the 1930s. The Boomer Presidents have underperformed because that’s what Idealist generation Presidents do until one of them does the heavy lifting to resolve a Crisis Era.
To explain the relevant facet of the Strauss/Howe model: Crisis Eras do not begin overnight or at exact intervals. As the population turns over, survivors of the previous one pass on and are replaced by people too young to have acquired the almost instinctive, visceral ability to manage such situations—including the purely emotional coping skills of the youngest survivors with long-term memories. The simple, terrible reality is that no one born in the US from about 1943 on has the crisis-management ability of those who preceded us. No amount of raw talent, education, and prior accomplishment can substitute for their irreplaceable experience. We were bound to sink below some critical threshold eventually; judging by events, that threshold was reached more than a decade ago.
Pressure does not build up, but its containment fails. The youngest cohort of the Silent Generation, born 1925-42, is now nearly 80 years old. Biden, Pelosi, and Leahy notwithstanding, few remain in positions to influence policy. Like the sandpile, earthquake, and forest fire models of “self-organized criticality,” American society drifts relentlessly toward a cascade of institutional failure and reconfiguration. This is not numerology, but the typical interval between troughs of Crisis Eras is 80-90 years. It’s ultimately a straightforward matter of demographic turnover.
Strauss and Howe predicted a “Crisis of 2020,” by which they meant neither a crisis starting in nor confined to that year, but rather roughly centered on it. Had a book like GENERATIONS been published circa 1910, it would have predicted a “Crisis of 1940” which encompassed both the Great Depression and World War II. If this Crisis follows that pattern, it will someday be seen to have comprised a domestic-economic phase, presumably beginning with the onset of the “Great Recession” in December 2007, and a later geopolitical-military phase, exact dates very much to be determined … but which I expect everyone reading this would agree is either already underway or very near.
I sense Claire to be deeply, culturally horrified by disorder and dysfunction. Without meaning to merely stereotype or pigeonhole her, my reading of Kenneth Stow’s “Alienated Minority: the Jews of Medieval Latin Europe” is that Ashkenazi Jewish community survival correlated strongly with more effective state (or sometimes, ironically, ecclesiastical) organization. The only Western European Jewish community that made it all the way through the Middle Ages without violent interruption was in Rome. Deadly mobs were at least an occasional threat everywhere until suppressed by authorities.
My perception is that this in turn imposed massive cultural selection pressure favoring political centralization, and largely explains majority Jewish political leanings in the US today. Of course, state-tolerated or directly-sponsored action itself became the greater threat to Jewish communities from the early 1880s onward in the Russian Empire, and an existential threat in Germany half a century later. This side of those events, any apparently chaotic episode, even something as silly as costumed conspiracy theorists taking selfies of themselves in the US Capitol, may appear as a harbinger of ultimate disaster.
I’m not going to tell you everything is fine. My own sense of institutional wobbliness in America is acute, especially in the behavior of churches and schools over the past eighteen months. But I happen to be writing this on the 76th anniversary of the formal Japanese surrender. Americans’ latent abilities, to employ a dreadfully overused word, are awesome. And I guarantee you that a road trip around the US will cheer you up; it will be a reminder of how well almost all of American society functions almost all the time. Nearly everyone you meet will come across as content, optimistic, and polite. They are predisposed to kindness and practical assistance; it’s not just a Midwestern thing.
To quote Gandalf, “I do not bid you despair … but to ponder the truth in these words.”
This is nothing new. In the interwar period (1919-39) Britain suffered a collapse of national morale akin to the one afflicting America today. The country emerged victorious from the greatest war in its history—conscious of being a lesser power than it had been going in. To some extent, of course, this sense of diminishment was based on hard-power realities. But I think that the psychological damage inflicted between August 1914 and November 1918 was even greater.
What the United States has done to Afghanistan is approximately what Britain did to Czechoslovakia: kicked it to the curb with the excuse that the affairs of a far-away people of whom we know nothing are unimportant. It was not a spur-of-the moment decision. On the contrary it was hard-wired into American politics and foreign policy over a fifty-year period. In the 1960s the lessons of the previous fifty years were first discarded and then forgotten. The silly concept of "smart power," so highly touted by Barack Obama & Co., was bequeathed to them by men like Robert McNamara, JFK and LBJ's disastrous Secretary of Defense. H.R. McMaster's "Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam" tells the story in detail. And here we are again.
Vietnam, indeed, left America with a psychological scar. Also, its long-range political impact was severe. To the extent that one had ever existed, the Cold War foreign-policy consensus was shattered. As the Democratic Party moved left, it gradually shed its commitment to national security, adopting in its place a policy of illusion and wishful thinking. Foreign and defense policy became a strictly partisan issue, and the debate gradually devolved into the brain-dead shouting match we witness today. And 9/11? It merely arrested the decline for a time—but soon enough the war against Islamofasist terror became as partisan as any other political issue.
At the top, our leaders—presidents and senior officials—failed in their fundamental duty, which was to craft and articulate a definition of victory based on specific objectives. As Henry Kissinger once quipped, if you don't know where you're going, all roads will get you there. That's been the situation for a long time now, and it's no wonder that the campaign in Afghanistan has ended in ignominious defeat. Memo to the American people: There's worse to follow.
So what is the effect of the Afghanistan debacle on the PRC's plans for Taiwan? What If China's figuring Biden won't walk the walk, and they're wrong? War by miscalculation?
People keep comparing this to Vietnam. Almost fifty years later, and after much suffering, what’s the situation in Vietnam today? I’m not saying that there’s any inevitability to it, but Afghanistan’s long term destination may not be an unending area of chaos.
Claire and The Last Man are both right, with respect to 'who is responsible', the elite or the electorate.
They shape each other ... it's a dialectical relationship, as I would have said in my Marxist youth. The American population as a whole -- from the waitress in a small Iowa town to the Harvard foreign-policy graduate -- have both been shaped by the American post-war experience. And this is reflected, albeit somewhat differently, in the political parties they support, and in the advisors they hire.
I don't claim to understand fully -- or even mainly -- the details of that, but surely some relevant facts are:
(1) Except for the rather abstract threat of nuclear annhiliation, America was -- as it has always been -- secure, in a way that nations bordering on or within Panzer/T72-driving distance of other nations are not.
(2) Although it is blessed with ethnic diversity -- which is of course a source of great strength! --like Northern Ireland, Yugoslavia, Cyprus, Sri Lanka etc etc etc etc ... this diversity has not, yet, been strong enough to provoke serious pogroms in the last seventy years. Stay out of the wrong neighborhoods and you're reasonably safe. And even earlier than 70 years ago, the ethnic violence didn't threaten the white majority: they either tsked-tsked about it, or exulted in it.
(3) The intelligentsia and its children have had it pretty good: no conscription for the last fifty years, so no involuntary involvement in our wars of choice; a college education has meant secure and well-paid employment, and technology has brought bread and circuses right to your iPhone.
Not so good for the bottom half, since the 1970s, of course [https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/], and not quite so good for the middle half and especially for their college-bound children for the last 20 years. Surely this has shaped the popular/elite perception of what America can do in the world, as it experiences what it cannot do -- or does not do -- at home.
(4) And "Events, dear boy, events". 9/11 during the Presidency of George Bush was a confluence of historical accidents -- just like the personalities of Hitler and Churchill were. We tried "draining the swamp". And although you can argue that if only we had persisted in Iraq or Vietnam or Afghanistan -- and I recall that "real men want to exit Iraq via Tehran" ... what's another 2500 or 50 000 casualties, the Chinese wouldn't blink at those numbers -- the fact is, the American voters had had enough. We stopped speaking softly and used our Big Stick. And it broke. Should have stuck to Panamas and Grenadas.
(5) This is rather vague, but -- the decline of faith, not just in organized religion but in 'official' narratives (or is the word "meta-narratives"? -- I guess I should run this post through the Post-modernism Generator [ https://m8y.org/postmodern.html ]).
When I was a kid (stamps cane angrily) belief in God was taken for granted, pornography now casually viewed by 10-year olds was only a dream among certain elements in New York City and San Francisco (I grew up in Houston) and American patriotism was reflexive. This is no longer true, although it's arguable whether the post-60s's intelligentsia's domination of the cultural apparatus is cause, or effect. Whoops, I forgot: it's dialectical. I
n any case, the 'doxa' of acceptance of certain standards of behavior has begun to evaporate. People who are guided mainly by pursuit of self-gratification hedged in with a vague committment to 'being nice' and 'being inclusive' are not going to support national crusades.
So where are we going? It's anybody's guess. Two thoughts.
A pottle of potassium iodide will, if we repeat the history of big-power conflicts yet again with our wonderfully-advanced technology, allow your thyroid gland to grab benign Iodine-128 instead of Russian or Chinese (or American or Israeli or Pakistani or Indian or ...) radioactive cancer-causing Iodine-131 as it floats down and gets into the food chain. Not so important for the wrinklies, but a very good idea for those still adding cells to their body. And it's only a few dollars, or should be when it becomes available again. Your children/grandchildren will thank you.
And: bold Constitutional scholars should start thinking about some form of thorough-going federalism for the US -- I offer "The Federalist Papers - Part Two" as a title, for free -- which would allow the deeply divided population of the US (now far far more divided than we were on the eve of the first Civil War) to support a common nuclear deterrent, but to live according to its own cultural norms in areas where the great majority of the population supports them.
Mississippi can outlaw homosexuality and California can make it compulsory, and those who don't like it can emigrate.
I know, this sounds crazy, but ... you got a better idea?
Well, it ain’t like Tulsi Gabbard’s the answer to American decline. She’s a left libertarian populist herself, the Democratic equivalent of the Liberty!tm Movement Teahadists who’ve driven the GOP into isolationism and neo-fascism.
The Last Mans claim that the US Army failed to reform post VN is not supported by facts. A professional voluntary force was established, a huge change in itself, and it was restructured as were new war fighting doctrines combining air, land, and sea forces plus training. The officer corps that remained, including Powell, Schwarzkopf, Clark, Mattis, knew first hand the lessons of VN. Gulf War I was a huge success that applied overwhelming force with limited goals, e.g., win and get out. The Balkan peace keeping mission was also a successful civil intervention that could never have been executed by the old Army.
The Iraqi invasion was a very quick tactical success as a conventional war and the initial Afghan operation was perhaps the best executed special operations take down ever. These were not indicative of an unreformed, incompetent military force. And lest we forget, strategic missions & goals are established by civilian political leaders and not the officer Corp.
In Iraq the decision to disband the Baathist police and military forces led to chaos but who made it? Also who choose a total Iraq pull out to pursue a pivot to the good war in Afghanistan? ISIS obviously did not fail to notice. The mission creep in Afghanistan may have been encouraged by military commanders but the decision to rearrange all the political furniture and establish a little Norway was not.
I happen to agree with LM that we have a largely incompetent foreign policy meritocracy both elected and in the appointed bureaucracy. One of their functions is to select the military high command. Still they are selecting from a better fishing pond than we find our political leaders swimming in.
I don’t know how much blame the military should get for this abject tactical failure in Kabul. Once the facts change dramatically on the ground you might think to revise the plan. Did Joe resist any revision? We may find out later but for now I don’t see how we or the Taliban avoid hostage taking, runway rocketing or much worse as this evacuation winds down. Hope I am wrong.
Such a crisis of betrayal to Afghanis and Americans was inevitable given the Democrats’ embracement of identity politics ideology during the past election, which horrified me. And yes I know- our presidential election choices have become Poison Type A or Poison Type B. And yes I know that Trump did invite the Taliban to Camp David (without my consent). What Trump would have done or not done at the moment of departure from Afghanistan (again without my consent) is unknown. That Biden’s military has dedicated itself to using the “right pronoun” did escalate my fear level. At least with Trump, the bad guys were afraid of provoking “that mad man” in the White House.
"Here’s a predictive experience: the loss in Vietnam sure didn’t. Not in the way you might think."
This isn't true. It may not have improved how politicians use the military and military campaigns as political footballs, but it sure as hell changed the Army for the better. The problem is that the senior officers and NCOs who learned from Vietnam and set about to make the future Army better are all gone. And now we teach Critical Race Theory...
As long as Last Man Standing is quoting Solzhenitsyn, another story from the Russian dissident comes to mind; this one is from the “Gulag Archipelago.” It goes like this,
“At the conclusion of the conference, a tribute to Comrade Stalin was called for. Of course, everyone stood up (just as everyone had leaped to his feet during the conference at every mention of his name). ... For three minutes, four minutes, five minutes, the stormy applause, rising to an ovation, continued. But palms were getting sore and raised arms were already aching. And the older people were panting from exhaustion. It was becoming insufferably silly even to those who really adored Stalin.
However, who would dare to be the first to stop? … After all, NKVD men were standing in the hall applauding and watching to see who would quit first! And in the obscure, small hall, unknown to the leader, the applause went on – six, seven, eight minutes! They were done for! Their goose was cooked! They couldn’t stop now till they collapsed with heart attacks! At the rear of the hall, which was crowded, they could of course cheat a bit, clap less frequently, less vigorously, not so eagerly – but up there with the presidium where everyone could see them?
The director of the local paper factory, an independent and strong-minded man, stood with the presidium. Aware of all the falsity and all the impossibility of the situation, he still kept on applauding! Nine minutes! Ten! In anguish he watched the secretary of the District Party Committee, but the latter dared not stop. Insanity! To the last man! With make-believe enthusiasm on their faces, looking at each other with faint hope, the district leaders were just going to go on and on applauding till they fell where they stood, till they were carried out of the hall on stretchers! And even then those who were left would not falter…
Then, after eleven minutes, the director of the paper factory assumed a businesslike expression and sat down in his seat. And, oh, a miracle took place! Where had the universal, uninhibited, indescribable enthusiasm gone? To a man, everyone else stopped dead and sat down. They had been saved!
The squirrel had been smart enough to jump off his revolving wheel. That, however, was how they discovered who the independent people were. And that was how they went about eliminating them. That same night the factory director was arrested. They easily pasted ten years on him on the pretext of something quite different. But after he had signed Form 206, the final document of the interrogation, his interrogator reminded him: ‘Don’t ever be the first to stop applauding.’”
Solzhenitsyn could just as easily been referring to the woke mobsters who currently rule the American roost as Stalin’s henchmen.
The fact that American elites genuflect before woke shibboleths is both a cause and a symptom of American collapse.
As for root causes, let me ask a simple question. Is there any historical evidence that a secular society can long survive?
A question I keep on asking is what is the "elite" in America. Is it the Albert Bourla the CEO of Pfizer who successfully oversaw the development, production, and distribution of one the greatest vaccines every invented in one of the shortest time periods ever? Or is it Stephane Bancel the CEO of Moderna who lives just down the street from John Kerry in Beacon Hill. Is the management of NBC Television under GE's ownership and now Comcast who covered up sexual misconduct allegations for decades regarding on air talent as diverse as Bill Cosby, Donald Trump, Don Imus and Matt Lauer futhermore whose networks were at the center of every populist movement from the 1990s tech bubble to the early 2000s bust i.e. Enron, Worldcom, to firing Phil Donahue and letting Don Imus spread anti vax nonesense on air for much of the 2000s.
Is the elite the moderate but multi millionaire relatively competent current Governor of Massachusetts Charlie Baker? Is the elite Keith Rupert Murdoch and his sycophantic sons? Hence my point that the American elite is a very nebulous being.
“Why—to pick just one example—has every President since January 1993 been a thorough mediocrity? Is that normal, to have five mediocre (or worse!) Presidents in a row across nearly thirty years? Has that ever happened … outside of the run-up to the Civil War?”
As an acolyte of Strauss and Howe, I agree that there is an analogy to the 1850s, and of course to the “low dishonest decade” of the 1930s. The Boomer Presidents have underperformed because that’s what Idealist generation Presidents do until one of them does the heavy lifting to resolve a Crisis Era.
To explain the relevant facet of the Strauss/Howe model: Crisis Eras do not begin overnight or at exact intervals. As the population turns over, survivors of the previous one pass on and are replaced by people too young to have acquired the almost instinctive, visceral ability to manage such situations—including the purely emotional coping skills of the youngest survivors with long-term memories. The simple, terrible reality is that no one born in the US from about 1943 on has the crisis-management ability of those who preceded us. No amount of raw talent, education, and prior accomplishment can substitute for their irreplaceable experience. We were bound to sink below some critical threshold eventually; judging by events, that threshold was reached more than a decade ago.
Pressure does not build up, but its containment fails. The youngest cohort of the Silent Generation, born 1925-42, is now nearly 80 years old. Biden, Pelosi, and Leahy notwithstanding, few remain in positions to influence policy. Like the sandpile, earthquake, and forest fire models of “self-organized criticality,” American society drifts relentlessly toward a cascade of institutional failure and reconfiguration. This is not numerology, but the typical interval between troughs of Crisis Eras is 80-90 years. It’s ultimately a straightforward matter of demographic turnover.
Strauss and Howe predicted a “Crisis of 2020,” by which they meant neither a crisis starting in nor confined to that year, but rather roughly centered on it. Had a book like GENERATIONS been published circa 1910, it would have predicted a “Crisis of 1940” which encompassed both the Great Depression and World War II. If this Crisis follows that pattern, it will someday be seen to have comprised a domestic-economic phase, presumably beginning with the onset of the “Great Recession” in December 2007, and a later geopolitical-military phase, exact dates very much to be determined … but which I expect everyone reading this would agree is either already underway or very near.
I sense Claire to be deeply, culturally horrified by disorder and dysfunction. Without meaning to merely stereotype or pigeonhole her, my reading of Kenneth Stow’s “Alienated Minority: the Jews of Medieval Latin Europe” is that Ashkenazi Jewish community survival correlated strongly with more effective state (or sometimes, ironically, ecclesiastical) organization. The only Western European Jewish community that made it all the way through the Middle Ages without violent interruption was in Rome. Deadly mobs were at least an occasional threat everywhere until suppressed by authorities.
My perception is that this in turn imposed massive cultural selection pressure favoring political centralization, and largely explains majority Jewish political leanings in the US today. Of course, state-tolerated or directly-sponsored action itself became the greater threat to Jewish communities from the early 1880s onward in the Russian Empire, and an existential threat in Germany half a century later. This side of those events, any apparently chaotic episode, even something as silly as costumed conspiracy theorists taking selfies of themselves in the US Capitol, may appear as a harbinger of ultimate disaster.
I’m not going to tell you everything is fine. My own sense of institutional wobbliness in America is acute, especially in the behavior of churches and schools over the past eighteen months. But I happen to be writing this on the 76th anniversary of the formal Japanese surrender. Americans’ latent abilities, to employ a dreadfully overused word, are awesome. And I guarantee you that a road trip around the US will cheer you up; it will be a reminder of how well almost all of American society functions almost all the time. Nearly everyone you meet will come across as content, optimistic, and polite. They are predisposed to kindness and practical assistance; it’s not just a Midwestern thing.
To quote Gandalf, “I do not bid you despair … but to ponder the truth in these words.”
This is nothing new. In the interwar period (1919-39) Britain suffered a collapse of national morale akin to the one afflicting America today. The country emerged victorious from the greatest war in its history—conscious of being a lesser power than it had been going in. To some extent, of course, this sense of diminishment was based on hard-power realities. But I think that the psychological damage inflicted between August 1914 and November 1918 was even greater.
What the United States has done to Afghanistan is approximately what Britain did to Czechoslovakia: kicked it to the curb with the excuse that the affairs of a far-away people of whom we know nothing are unimportant. It was not a spur-of-the moment decision. On the contrary it was hard-wired into American politics and foreign policy over a fifty-year period. In the 1960s the lessons of the previous fifty years were first discarded and then forgotten. The silly concept of "smart power," so highly touted by Barack Obama & Co., was bequeathed to them by men like Robert McNamara, JFK and LBJ's disastrous Secretary of Defense. H.R. McMaster's "Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam" tells the story in detail. And here we are again.
Vietnam, indeed, left America with a psychological scar. Also, its long-range political impact was severe. To the extent that one had ever existed, the Cold War foreign-policy consensus was shattered. As the Democratic Party moved left, it gradually shed its commitment to national security, adopting in its place a policy of illusion and wishful thinking. Foreign and defense policy became a strictly partisan issue, and the debate gradually devolved into the brain-dead shouting match we witness today. And 9/11? It merely arrested the decline for a time—but soon enough the war against Islamofasist terror became as partisan as any other political issue.
At the top, our leaders—presidents and senior officials—failed in their fundamental duty, which was to craft and articulate a definition of victory based on specific objectives. As Henry Kissinger once quipped, if you don't know where you're going, all roads will get you there. That's been the situation for a long time now, and it's no wonder that the campaign in Afghanistan has ended in ignominious defeat. Memo to the American people: There's worse to follow.
So what is the effect of the Afghanistan debacle on the PRC's plans for Taiwan? What If China's figuring Biden won't walk the walk, and they're wrong? War by miscalculation?
People keep comparing this to Vietnam. Almost fifty years later, and after much suffering, what’s the situation in Vietnam today? I’m not saying that there’s any inevitability to it, but Afghanistan’s long term destination may not be an unending area of chaos.
Claire and The Last Man are both right, with respect to 'who is responsible', the elite or the electorate.
They shape each other ... it's a dialectical relationship, as I would have said in my Marxist youth. The American population as a whole -- from the waitress in a small Iowa town to the Harvard foreign-policy graduate -- have both been shaped by the American post-war experience. And this is reflected, albeit somewhat differently, in the political parties they support, and in the advisors they hire.
I don't claim to understand fully -- or even mainly -- the details of that, but surely some relevant facts are:
(1) Except for the rather abstract threat of nuclear annhiliation, America was -- as it has always been -- secure, in a way that nations bordering on or within Panzer/T72-driving distance of other nations are not.
(2) Although it is blessed with ethnic diversity -- which is of course a source of great strength! --like Northern Ireland, Yugoslavia, Cyprus, Sri Lanka etc etc etc etc ... this diversity has not, yet, been strong enough to provoke serious pogroms in the last seventy years. Stay out of the wrong neighborhoods and you're reasonably safe. And even earlier than 70 years ago, the ethnic violence didn't threaten the white majority: they either tsked-tsked about it, or exulted in it.
(3) The intelligentsia and its children have had it pretty good: no conscription for the last fifty years, so no involuntary involvement in our wars of choice; a college education has meant secure and well-paid employment, and technology has brought bread and circuses right to your iPhone.
Not so good for the bottom half, since the 1970s, of course [https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/], and not quite so good for the middle half and especially for their college-bound children for the last 20 years. Surely this has shaped the popular/elite perception of what America can do in the world, as it experiences what it cannot do -- or does not do -- at home.
(4) And "Events, dear boy, events". 9/11 during the Presidency of George Bush was a confluence of historical accidents -- just like the personalities of Hitler and Churchill were. We tried "draining the swamp". And although you can argue that if only we had persisted in Iraq or Vietnam or Afghanistan -- and I recall that "real men want to exit Iraq via Tehran" ... what's another 2500 or 50 000 casualties, the Chinese wouldn't blink at those numbers -- the fact is, the American voters had had enough. We stopped speaking softly and used our Big Stick. And it broke. Should have stuck to Panamas and Grenadas.
(5) This is rather vague, but -- the decline of faith, not just in organized religion but in 'official' narratives (or is the word "meta-narratives"? -- I guess I should run this post through the Post-modernism Generator [ https://m8y.org/postmodern.html ]).
When I was a kid (stamps cane angrily) belief in God was taken for granted, pornography now casually viewed by 10-year olds was only a dream among certain elements in New York City and San Francisco (I grew up in Houston) and American patriotism was reflexive. This is no longer true, although it's arguable whether the post-60s's intelligentsia's domination of the cultural apparatus is cause, or effect. Whoops, I forgot: it's dialectical. I
n any case, the 'doxa' of acceptance of certain standards of behavior has begun to evaporate. People who are guided mainly by pursuit of self-gratification hedged in with a vague committment to 'being nice' and 'being inclusive' are not going to support national crusades.
So where are we going? It's anybody's guess. Two thoughts.
A pottle of potassium iodide will, if we repeat the history of big-power conflicts yet again with our wonderfully-advanced technology, allow your thyroid gland to grab benign Iodine-128 instead of Russian or Chinese (or American or Israeli or Pakistani or Indian or ...) radioactive cancer-causing Iodine-131 as it floats down and gets into the food chain. Not so important for the wrinklies, but a very good idea for those still adding cells to their body. And it's only a few dollars, or should be when it becomes available again. Your children/grandchildren will thank you.
And: bold Constitutional scholars should start thinking about some form of thorough-going federalism for the US -- I offer "The Federalist Papers - Part Two" as a title, for free -- which would allow the deeply divided population of the US (now far far more divided than we were on the eve of the first Civil War) to support a common nuclear deterrent, but to live according to its own cultural norms in areas where the great majority of the population supports them.
Mississippi can outlaw homosexuality and California can make it compulsory, and those who don't like it can emigrate.
I know, this sounds crazy, but ... you got a better idea?
Well, it ain’t like Tulsi Gabbard’s the answer to American decline. She’s a left libertarian populist herself, the Democratic equivalent of the Liberty!tm Movement Teahadists who’ve driven the GOP into isolationism and neo-fascism.
The Last Mans claim that the US Army failed to reform post VN is not supported by facts. A professional voluntary force was established, a huge change in itself, and it was restructured as were new war fighting doctrines combining air, land, and sea forces plus training. The officer corps that remained, including Powell, Schwarzkopf, Clark, Mattis, knew first hand the lessons of VN. Gulf War I was a huge success that applied overwhelming force with limited goals, e.g., win and get out. The Balkan peace keeping mission was also a successful civil intervention that could never have been executed by the old Army.
The Iraqi invasion was a very quick tactical success as a conventional war and the initial Afghan operation was perhaps the best executed special operations take down ever. These were not indicative of an unreformed, incompetent military force. And lest we forget, strategic missions & goals are established by civilian political leaders and not the officer Corp.
In Iraq the decision to disband the Baathist police and military forces led to chaos but who made it? Also who choose a total Iraq pull out to pursue a pivot to the good war in Afghanistan? ISIS obviously did not fail to notice. The mission creep in Afghanistan may have been encouraged by military commanders but the decision to rearrange all the political furniture and establish a little Norway was not.
I happen to agree with LM that we have a largely incompetent foreign policy meritocracy both elected and in the appointed bureaucracy. One of their functions is to select the military high command. Still they are selecting from a better fishing pond than we find our political leaders swimming in.
I don’t know how much blame the military should get for this abject tactical failure in Kabul. Once the facts change dramatically on the ground you might think to revise the plan. Did Joe resist any revision? We may find out later but for now I don’t see how we or the Taliban avoid hostage taking, runway rocketing or much worse as this evacuation winds down. Hope I am wrong.
Such a crisis of betrayal to Afghanis and Americans was inevitable given the Democrats’ embracement of identity politics ideology during the past election, which horrified me. And yes I know- our presidential election choices have become Poison Type A or Poison Type B. And yes I know that Trump did invite the Taliban to Camp David (without my consent). What Trump would have done or not done at the moment of departure from Afghanistan (again without my consent) is unknown. That Biden’s military has dedicated itself to using the “right pronoun” did escalate my fear level. At least with Trump, the bad guys were afraid of provoking “that mad man” in the White House.
"Here’s a predictive experience: the loss in Vietnam sure didn’t. Not in the way you might think."
This isn't true. It may not have improved how politicians use the military and military campaigns as political footballs, but it sure as hell changed the Army for the better. The problem is that the senior officers and NCOs who learned from Vietnam and set about to make the future Army better are all gone. And now we teach Critical Race Theory...
"How many war-winning generals does the Army have these days? "
Wrong question. The real question: how many war winning Presidents have we had? War winning presidents hire war winning generals.
Want to understand the collapse of the West? If so, go here,
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/assabiya-lee-smith
and here,
https://www.amazon.com/Decline-Nations-Joseph-Johnston-Jr/dp/1645720071/ref=asc_df_1645720071/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=509032833991&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=12558710159125201870&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=m&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9004590&hvtargid=pla-1297767606643&psc=1
As long as Last Man Standing is quoting Solzhenitsyn, another story from the Russian dissident comes to mind; this one is from the “Gulag Archipelago.” It goes like this,
“At the conclusion of the conference, a tribute to Comrade Stalin was called for. Of course, everyone stood up (just as everyone had leaped to his feet during the conference at every mention of his name). ... For three minutes, four minutes, five minutes, the stormy applause, rising to an ovation, continued. But palms were getting sore and raised arms were already aching. And the older people were panting from exhaustion. It was becoming insufferably silly even to those who really adored Stalin.
However, who would dare to be the first to stop? … After all, NKVD men were standing in the hall applauding and watching to see who would quit first! And in the obscure, small hall, unknown to the leader, the applause went on – six, seven, eight minutes! They were done for! Their goose was cooked! They couldn’t stop now till they collapsed with heart attacks! At the rear of the hall, which was crowded, they could of course cheat a bit, clap less frequently, less vigorously, not so eagerly – but up there with the presidium where everyone could see them?
The director of the local paper factory, an independent and strong-minded man, stood with the presidium. Aware of all the falsity and all the impossibility of the situation, he still kept on applauding! Nine minutes! Ten! In anguish he watched the secretary of the District Party Committee, but the latter dared not stop. Insanity! To the last man! With make-believe enthusiasm on their faces, looking at each other with faint hope, the district leaders were just going to go on and on applauding till they fell where they stood, till they were carried out of the hall on stretchers! And even then those who were left would not falter…
Then, after eleven minutes, the director of the paper factory assumed a businesslike expression and sat down in his seat. And, oh, a miracle took place! Where had the universal, uninhibited, indescribable enthusiasm gone? To a man, everyone else stopped dead and sat down. They had been saved!
The squirrel had been smart enough to jump off his revolving wheel. That, however, was how they discovered who the independent people were. And that was how they went about eliminating them. That same night the factory director was arrested. They easily pasted ten years on him on the pretext of something quite different. But after he had signed Form 206, the final document of the interrogation, his interrogator reminded him: ‘Don’t ever be the first to stop applauding.’”
Solzhenitsyn could just as easily been referring to the woke mobsters who currently rule the American roost as Stalin’s henchmen.
The fact that American elites genuflect before woke shibboleths is both a cause and a symptom of American collapse.
As for root causes, let me ask a simple question. Is there any historical evidence that a secular society can long survive?
A question I keep on asking is what is the "elite" in America. Is it the Albert Bourla the CEO of Pfizer who successfully oversaw the development, production, and distribution of one the greatest vaccines every invented in one of the shortest time periods ever? Or is it Stephane Bancel the CEO of Moderna who lives just down the street from John Kerry in Beacon Hill. Is the management of NBC Television under GE's ownership and now Comcast who covered up sexual misconduct allegations for decades regarding on air talent as diverse as Bill Cosby, Donald Trump, Don Imus and Matt Lauer futhermore whose networks were at the center of every populist movement from the 1990s tech bubble to the early 2000s bust i.e. Enron, Worldcom, to firing Phil Donahue and letting Don Imus spread anti vax nonesense on air for much of the 2000s.
Is the elite the moderate but multi millionaire relatively competent current Governor of Massachusetts Charlie Baker? Is the elite Keith Rupert Murdoch and his sycophantic sons? Hence my point that the American elite is a very nebulous being.