One reading of the 20th century is that it was the concluding chapter of the great battle between aristocracy and liberal democracy that began with the English Civil War. The Great War started when the Austro-Hungarian Empire delivered a set of demands on Serbia, knowing it would provoke a wider war in Europe. At the start of the war, three major European empires governed most of Europe. By the end, all three empires were gone, and the victors were the republics, who imposed their political system on the losers.
American involvement in the Great War is usually characterized as the great coming out event for the country. The hesitant Woodrow Wilson, goaded into joining the fight by the bellicose Teddy Roosevelt, moved the country from its traditional isolationist position into a fully engaged world power. That fits the preferred narrative of our elites, as it makes it sound like they rule the world reluctantly. The Europeans could not manage their affairs, so noble America had to step in, defeat the bad guys and impose order on the West.
Another part of America’s decision to enter the war was the deep hatred Wilson and his advisers had for the European empires. Wilson thought the Kaiser was deeply immoral, but he really hated the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Wilson was influenced by Giuseppe Mazzini, who was a zealous nationalist and republican. He not only rejected the concept of empire, but he also lived it as an Italian nationalist. Mazzini also rejected materialism and class struggle, which had a natural appeal to the moralizing idealists in charge of America.
The American entry into the Great War, tipped the balance in favor of Britain and France, but it came with a price. Wilson played a prominent role in the post-war diplomacy and that meant the dismembering of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the imposition of draconian punishments on Germany. The fact that Hitler came from Austria suggests history has a sense of humor. The point though is that the extreme expression of liberal democracy conquered and destroyed the last empires of Europe and imposed its will on the West.
This conflict between democracy and monarchy is the launching pad for Hans-Herman Hoppe’s critique of democracy. Hoppe is a libertarian, so his critique is aimed at elevating his preferred social arrangements, which he calls the natural order. As a libertarian, his concern is purely on the material, but others have picked up on the idea and extended it into the cultural realm. Whatever the defects of monarchy, it provides a much more robust cultural framework than democracy, which tends to reward the worst instincts of citizens.
Another angle to this way of thinking of the 20th century is that the West struck a bargain of sorts. In exchange for accepting American imposition of liberal democracy, the West got peace and prosperity. That worked fine as long as the American ruling class accepted the fundamentals of the nation state. That is, a nation was the geographic boundary of a single people, who were ruled by people chosen from their own ranks, by the people themselves. Stable borders and stable cultures defined the modern political entity.
Like doing business with the mafia, accepting the American hegemony meant going along with the rules set by America. That was fine when America was ruled by white men with a strong attachment to the West and Western traditions. That changed toward the end of 20th century as the complexion of the American population slowly changed and the attitudes of the American ruling class began to change. America no longer believes in the nation state and has tried hard imposing that belief on the ruling classes of Europe.
Up until the last few years, it appeared that this abandonment of the old order was going to go on without much resistance. But the revolts we are seeing in Europe, with the rise of nationalist parties and growing resistance to immigration, suggests the American hegemony is beginning to unravel. More important, the rise of Trump and his push to make the Europeans stand on their own feet suggests the American retreat is not without some support in the ruling class. The Wilsonian order may finally be about to unravel.
This does not mean we will see the return of monarchy. Hoppe’s critique of democracy has merit, but his error is the same made by the Western ruling class over the last half century. That is, the assumption that political economy is the horse that pulls the cart of human society. What Muslim immigration is teaching Europe is that biology is what drives society. Get the biology right and you can make any political system work, but the only way social democracy can work is in a homogeneous population.
The unraveling of the American hegemony is the retreat of the universalism that has always animated progressivism. It is not so much that democracy failed, as Hoppe claims, but that universalism has failed. The reason Europeans have reacted so strongly to a relatively small influx of foreigners, is universalism has never been a part of continental culture. Tossing it off will be much easier for them than for Americans, but the reality of demographics will force the issue everywhere.
Any discussion of Thomas Woodrow Wilson must also include his mysterious shadow, Colonel House. Historians are still trying to figure out his role, vis-à-vis the national body politic during that period. PBS, which I do watch occasionally, had a three-part special on the Great War on my cable channel. The anti-German sentiment in the USA at that time was appalling. It proved H.L. Mencken’s point: No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.
>Get the biology right and you can make any political system work, but the only way social democracy can work is in a homogeneous population.
Not exactly. It’s more accurate to say that the ruling structure and demographics are both very important factors in a region’s cultural continuity and economic stability.
Democracy, socialism and third-worldism form a negative feedback loop of factionalism, corruption, and tribalism (AKA “identity politics”) leading to negative-IQ and high-time-preference dysgenics. A strong authoritarian government can manage a multiracial society – Singapore, for example – just as a homogenously Anglo-American population can manage representative democracy. For a while, that is. But these positions are unstable local maxima and can rapidly degenerate into multiracial universal suffrage if, for example, the government weakens or immigration spikes.
I don’t know if we’ll see a return to monarchy, but doesn’t it seem like Donald Trump has a distinctly aristocratic quality about him, much unlike the craven Bushes, the degenerate Clinton and Kennedy mafias, and the empty-suit Obamas of the world? The heart wants what it wants, and I’ll bet if you took a poll, you’d see a lot of support for making his position more… permanent.
Why did Wilson think the Kaiser deeply immoral? This was news to me, and as a German I would be interested to learn the reason.
The current German historical default attitude portrays the Kaiser as pretty much a doofus, fumbler, and half-wit, but the more I pick up anecdotally about him along the way, the more I’ve come to doubt even that. In any case German science and culture (including the contrarians) flourished under his “rule” (he was not much more than a figurehead): think Nietzsche, Planck, Thomas Mann, Einstein, for instance.
Nice article.
Universalism has indeed failed. But like Marxism and Post-Modernism, it will live on in our intellectual class and among the elite who are educated by these fanatics in the Ivies. Biology aside, humans have a near infinite capacity to hang on to dead and dangerous ideologies and ideas. Especially if they can afford to.
So what we’ll get is more of the same A bunch of lower class whites who reject the crap because they have to experience it everyday. And a bunch of detached white government professionals, feminists and upper class types wondering why those whites just don’t get with the program or just up and die off.
Eventually these people will get tired of us and simply ram through their agendas at the point of a gun or threat of prison if we complain in public.
I doubt very much the advantage of Europe. They are losing the race in relative tfr almost twice as badly as the US and have no room to avoid the fallout due to their population density. Americans are too pessimistic.
Europeans also appear to be, by and large, much more submissive in their attitudes towards government and authority. The “F-U” gene has been much more comprehensively weeded out of the culture there, than here in the U.S., IMO.
The Anti Immigrant parties have all gone from rump parties to second or even in charge (Austria and Italy) They may even have a political solution which is something the US does not have
Italy is talking deportation of half a million people or more.
Get back to me when the US gets even close to closing its border.
Also as for an FU attitude, Anders Brehvik. I won’t advocate for such conduct but it worked, it shifted Norway to the Right
You see Europeans have an idea of a collective us , an identity, history. The US population is very atomized and on average incapable of group cooperation or even seeing the value in it
Its not insurmountable, we Americans are changing into regional or political tribes but acting together is hard for us. In that sense there is no us in the US.
So Z, the (((usual suspects))) are all REEEEEing about Trump’s summit with Putin. I’d like to hear your thoughts on the matter.
I have always thought that the anti-immigration point of view easier to make in Europe where the nation-state is defined more by ethnicity, where you a people with common ancestors. The country will change in Germany for instance with the importation of non-Germans into something else. The USA though has never been an ethno-state in the same sense. The USA was founded by the English but already within 100 years of its founding was importing Irish and Germans, then in 20th century Italians, Jews and Eastern Europeans. I have always suspected that was one reason Enoch Powell had mixed feelings about the USA
OT…Old Remus is back, new woodpile report up. Tim
The People are against you
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/15/opinion/trump-russia-investigation-putin.html
We see Trump and his supporters are traitors
The NYT? Try harder, jackass. Oh, and go away, Tiny Dick.
Join the discussion…The New York Times is a well respected publication read by millions and taken by most people as truth.
How harder can I try?
Read by millions of Leftist idiots and not taken seriously by anyone with an ounce of intelligence.
Try smarter.
Those “leftist idiots” are the majority of the country and are growing because of demographic change.
Most People of Color and “leftist idiots” who take the New York Times as veritable
Unless you are a racist then you should sit down
He just dropped his hole card! The Queen Mother of all argument Enders.
I will pray for the fallen, their very souls pulped and writhing in the darkest and coldest of The Hells.
RACISTS!
Define “racist.” 95% probability that I fall within your definition.
Try to wrap your head around this: racism is not bad.
Until you allow MS 13 to gang rape your wife and daughter (your tiny dick suddenly get stiff?) and hand over your house and bank accounts to Somali “refugees” you’re a racist too. See how that works, asshole?
Stop responding to an obvious troll. I suppose Zman finds this guy amusing, the way Sailer does, but his schtick gets old quick.
I’ve found that ignoring idiots is the bets medicine.
Exactly the braying of a jackass is best ignored until he is ready for the glue factory…
You kids keep it down in there the National PBA tournament is on Wide World of Sports!
I’d be with Z then, it’s good for your self image to play dodgeball against the spec-ed class every once in while.*
*based on a real event.
Tiny is just a guy on our side who enjoys pitching softballs to hit out of the park, or he is the worlds dumbest lefty. My bet, the former. raised by lesbians and deprived of a good sense of purpose.
He admitted to being cucked by black guy so there is a lot of self loathing there.
“Mueller has the goods on Blumpf this time! He’ll be frog-marched out of the White House in cuffs any day now!” – Liberals, twice a week, every week for the past year and a half.
One amusing trick I like to play on Proggies is to ask “you think this is as bad as the “Wallace caper”. Reply is always “huh?”. You know, Henry Wallace. “Huh?”. 1948. “Huh?” You know, the year the Russians actually bought and ran their own Presidential candidate. “Huh?” Historical illiteracy is a wonder to behold. Then explain the Russkies have been doing this shit since the Third International. “What’s that?” Charles Blow, is, well, not that bright.
Aristotle taught that democracy is preferable to monarchy b/c if a monarch is wrong, you’re more-or-less stuck with him for a while. The Founders knew that pure democracy was flawed, of course, so they went with republic-democracy instead.
Republic-democracy migrated toward failure with the rise of the Deep State, established by Wilson & T.R. and given mega-vitamins by FDR and every Democrat & Republican since 1960 or so. The Deep State is the Progressive iteration of monarchy, which was realized as aristocracy. That aristocracy is now inbred through college- or family-based hiring. Naturally, ethics degraded in favor of inter-aristocratic “comity,” and since the money spigot could never close, we now have kakistocracy. (Ike’s warning about the military-industrial complex was a foreshadowing. He could not have imagined the size of the current “complex”–which now includes every Cabinet department.)
When that aristocracy became a kakistocracy, Trump happened. God smiled on the USA.
“…b/c if a monarch is wrong, you’re more-or-less stuck with him for a while.”
But in a Monarchy, for actual Change there are far fewer “targets” that need elimination, yes?
Aristotle had an elemental loathing of democracy. Other than that, good call.
>”Get the biology right and you can make any political system work, but the only way social democracy can work is in a homogeneous population.”
No, really, no. You’re mixing up cause and effect, a common error of Modernists. The west was overwhelmingly white not long ago, but we ended up here because overwhelmingly white populations made bad choices and believed stupid things. That’s nobody else’s fault but ours. Blacks, Hispanics, Muslims, and Jews didn’t do that to us – they were the effect, not the cause. And it doesn’t even take much to keep them from causing trouble – the Byzantines banned Jews from government and education, but otherwise left them alone, and had no real trouble with them for over a thousand years. But we bought into egalitarianism, which no outside force imposed on us at gunpoint, and now, well… we are where we are.
The bottom line is that yes, biology matters – but it’s not ALL that matters, and believing that it is is an indulgent delusion of the kind we can’t afford anymore.
You both have a point. Within the biology of Whites is a self destruct mechanism. Pathological altruism. Without a homogeneous pop you get factionalism and conflict. but because their biology contains this self destruct mechanism, whites, oblivious to their fatal flaw, invite in heterogeneous groups that cause chaos, disunity, factionalism, and conflict.
If this were true, the invite the world defect would have appeared long ago. There are plenty of people alive today who lived in an a world where zero immigration was the default assumption. Open borders is extremely new, which means its cause is extremely new as well. We’re talking one generation of idiocy.
Yep, but ones enough it turns out. One need only jump off a bridge once, lol!
Then again, “inviting the world” was physically impossible before safe, cheap long-distance travel became widely available to Third Worlders. That’s a very recent development, which means there’s more than one possible explanation for why this phenomenon didn’t appear before recent times. Keep in mind that I’m not necessarily saying that this explains the whole thing, either – just that we should, as Scott Adams would say, remember that we live in a multi-variable universe.
White men just recently created the technology enabling cheap and safe migration. 100 years ago it would take you months to travel and was expensive and high risk.
We still got flooded with immigrants during the steam age and enough people moved here during the age of sail to change the continent
Hell the Amerinds walked here.
Humans migrate. This is why it was common in many parts of the world and smart too to kill/adduct/ rob strangers on sight.
Strangers might be scouts for a rival tribe , do carry disease or mean you harm.
Obliviously there are limits but this conduct is very common, we see huge chunks of the Old Norse writing about how its virtuous to share hospitality which suggest to me the the norm was how shall we say less hospitable.
Perhaps the self-destruct is within our elites, moreso than within the people or within “Whites” in general. Interesting, if conventionally situated, article in this Hedgehog Review (Summer 2018) titled Privilege. A bit of gobble-gook in the language, but I pulled out the thought that our elites hate what they see in themselves, hate how it mirrors what they see in us proles and despise, and that this has lead to their injecting unconstrained madness into our culture — arts, politics, intellectual activities etc. This, coupled with the condition that their achievement of security and freedom (my interpretation) has lead to radical choice and instability has set them on a course guaranteed to destroy our civilization.
Question is: Should we let them?
(Another question is: Just who are “we”?)
Stop it with the straw man arguments. I never wrote anything you are pretending I wrote.
Calm down. “i never wrote anything you are pretending i wrote”. of course you did. you correctly wrote how important bio is, and i agree with you. and part of our bio is a form of pathological altruism that is leading to our self destruction. i did not attribute those words to you. no need to get all upset. i enjoy reading you and do not wish to cause any hard feelings.
I was not addressing you, so maybe take your own advice and calm down. As to his comment, he did not address anything I wrote. He’s just making shit up to argue against.
Okay – I’m just going to sit back and watch us win a cultural war… that is after we’ve finished debating the debate. Meanwhile, the left is assembling Molotov cocktails.
I think the “pathological altruism” is simply a white tendency to live one’s life as if the “golden rule” (treat others as you would like to be treated) is true and practiced. Whites are bumping up against the reality that the world is indeed tribal, and people vote, act, think, and identify based on blood bonds.
We are falling back into our own understanding of the need to identify tribally with our own. The irony is that the essence of “white privilege” is to live one’s daily life without even thinking about or considering one’s tribal affiliations in our actions and thoughts. Well, they are going to get their wish on that one, whitey is waking up to the whole tribal affiliation thing, and is going to think and act in accordance with tribal identity. They are going to be very glad they opened that can of worms/sarc.
It is not “pathological altruism”, it is living our lives in accordance with the ideals we had been taught and had internalized. That is all done with now. The kraken is being released.
America’s ruling class has been able to live in a consequence free bubble for a long time. That’s made them soft and not just physically. It’s made them soft intellectually. They have been free to indulge in whatever fantasies they find amusing. Exporting this to Europe has been a disaster for the European ruling class. You’ll note that countries with female leaders are having the most trouble.
The multicultural fantasy will end much sooner in Europe than in America, but it will end here eventually. That which cannot be sustained, must end eventually. The question for America is what comes after America.
1924 immigration restriction act?
“pathological altruism” and the “golden rule” ought to direct you back to American Progressivism, the now atheist remnant of the New England founding supernova. The star is dead but the gamma rays are lethal. Combine with that the extreme out breeding the Church demanded in the middle ages and you have the lone population on earth which embraces or even tolerates this particular form of bullshit.
It’s simply not true that with the right biology, we can make any political system work. Not only that, but it’s outright dangerous for us to say that it is, because it invites us to go back to making bad choices and believing stupid things once we get the biology thing sorted out. That’s a sure path to self-destruction, because there’s no lack of ways to bring down civilization through bad choices and stupid beliefs – inviting foreigners to flood in is only one of them.
“Get the biology right and you can make any political system work”
Notice there is a difference between “can” and “will” there. Getting the biology right is not a guarantee of reaching your preferred political order. It just means you have a chance to order your society in a way that is consistent with your people. Diversity leaves but one option, authoritarianism.
Certain systems objectively work well, and others objectively don’t. Whether I prefer them or not is irrelevant. And frankly, whether they’re “consistent with my people” (whatever that might mean) is irrelevant too, at least as far as evaluating whether those systems work well or not goes. Bad ideas are bad ideas. Maybe higher IQ people can make them work a little bit not-quite-as-badly as lower IQ people can, but so what? That still doesn’t make them good ideas that are workable in practice. And we should carefully warn our people away from bad ideas, because we don’t have the margin to indulge in them anymore. Telling them that they can make any political system work defeats that important task, and is therefore self-destructive.
Also, there is no difference between a system that *can* work and one that *will* work. This just seems like a rehash of the old “It works in theory but not in practice” nonsense. As Rothbard pointed out, there’s no such thing. If an idea doesn’t work in practice, then there was something wrong with the theory.
You worry about what’s for dessert. I worry about who is cooking the meal. Get the biology right and the rest is possible.
It is, of course, possible to not place enough importance on biology, and I agree that modernity not only does that, but is so swept up in ideology-based attachment to blank slate-ism that the subject is entirely taboo. But we shouldn’t allow that to make us forget that it’s also entirely possible to place too much importance on biology as well. Yes, it matters, very deeply, and I would never deny that – but again, it’s not the only thing that matters.
It is imperative that we stay realistic, and not fall into the trap of reacting to an unrealistic idea with a knee-jerk dash to the opposite extreme when that is just as unrealistic. No, “the rest” is most definitely not possible if by “the rest” you mean making a bad system based on fundamentally flawed ideas work well. Telling ourselves that the right biology can make bad ideas work well is delusional, and we can afford no delusion at this point.
Biology is necessary but not sufficient. While it is possible to overemphasize biology, we’ve been strenuously doing the opposite for 100 years. A bit of an overcorrection is understandable. I’m not too concerned if we oversimplify the necessity of a homogeneous nation in the short term.
LineIn: “I’m not too concerned if we oversimplify the necessity of a homogeneous nation in the short term.” Agree. It’s the role of thought leader/message formers like Z to put out a blunt message.
Agreed. Before the rise of the Blank Slate doctrine this was generally acknowledged. Montesquieu laid it out with great clarity. The various forms of government (Aristocracy, Kingship, Democracy, Tyranny) worked for certain populations but not others. I’m not sure Montesquieu had the science to finely parse the biology/culture interaction but the basic idea was clear.
And now our rulers are so stupid that they thought we could actually bring democracy to the middle east.
Montesquieu also sought to explain how each form of government was likely to fail. We might be field testing his theories in the here and now…
Can you hit us with a few choice Montesquieu quotes against the blank slate?
While I wouldn’t deny that biology has a lot to do with how people structure their societies, saying that politics is downstream from biology as a blanket statement is too simplistic to accurately track with observable reality. What quirk of biology explains the English living under monarchy in 1620, republicanism in 1650, and monarchy again in 1680? Or that a man born in Leipzig at the turn of the 20th century lived under monarchy, then democracy, then Nazism, then communism, then democracy again all in under a hundred years? Why did communism produce pretty much the same results (repression and impoverishment) everywhere it was tried, despite vast genetic differences in different communist countries? Why is monarchy the historical default of mankind, despite vast genetic differences in places where it was the norm for centuries? What genetic changes occurred in the 18th and 19th centuries that took monarchy (and here I mean effective monarchy – not a ceremonial position with no real power) from the norm almost everywhere to an exception practiced in only a few places? Why (as Spengler pointed out) does the American experience with democracy track so well with the Athenian and Roman experiences of it? Why does Spengler’s arc of civilizations hold up so well across different civilizations full of people with vastly different genetics?
It just isn’t that simple.
You are answering your own question. The English figured out the limitations of monarchy eight generations before the French, because the English are different people from the Franks. The English also threw off feudalism before the rest of Europe, because it was an alien system imposed on them.
Your mistake is you are struggling to understand one-to-many relationships. One people can have many types of political system, but they must always be consistent with the people. English socialism was never anything like Nordic socialism or Russian socialism. In a homogeneous society, making a political system work to its capacity is possible, because you don’t have sectarianism turning the system into a zero-sum game. Multi-ethnic societies inevitably have to have an authoritarian political system of some sort. In other wors, get the biology wrong and your options narrow to one.
“…we ended up here because overwhelmingly white populations made bad choices and believed stupid things.”
I think this is just an example of not getting the biology right.
Do you disagree that white people have a naive universalism that manifests during times of prosperity and leads to beliefs that harm the collective? A few examples are the abolitionists or the ‘telescopic philanthropist” in Dickens. These utopian campaigns occurred before the ascendancy of the (((rootless cosmopolitans))). It seems like this is a tendency in whites that we must acknowledge and manage.
https://en.metapedia.org/wiki/Telescopic_philanthropy
It may not surprise you that Bleak House is my favorite novel in all of English literature (a subject in which I hold a Master’s degree), and my second-favorite novel in any literary tradition, after only Bulgakov’s incomparable The Master and Margarita.
I enjoy hearing the stories of our smart posters. Thanks for the interesting details.
Empires – ie a small cohesive group of people dominating a much larger, inchoate, collection of groups of people via force of arms; has been the predominate form of government for humans throughout recorded history. It has arisen everywhere that civilization, even in proto forms, has existed; from the Middle East and Mediterranean , to the Indian subcontinent, the Far East to Europe, even is Southeast Asia and Mezo America.
In contrast, the concept of Nation States beginning 350 yrs or so ago, is a modern innovation. And the 1-2 hundred year old concepts of self determination and democracy are mere flashes in the pans.
The EU and Globalism more broadly are probably best seen as a reversion to the mean of humans tendencies to emperialism.
Since Russia and China have abandoned Communism, they also have retroverted to “empire”, or at least “monarch-aristocrat” governments. There is a fairly close correlation to the US “Deep State” situation in both those countries, with all the usual qualifications, of course.
Well, “go back far enough” and the norm was mobile tribes, living off the land. The nation state evolved in Europe in response to European conditions. That’s why it has not be a great fit elsewhere. It’s also why multi-ethnic empires have been unstable and violent in Europe. It is that instability, along with technological advance, that forced the innovation. When war meant armies meeting on an agreed upon location and the winner acquiring more taxable land, empire worked for the ruling elite. When war meant the obliteration of cities and the decimation of the populace, empire stopped making sense.
Indeed. The “natural’ state of man was small hunter/gatherer groups, and then somewhat larger tribal groups, for hundreds of thousands of years..The nation state was just an extension of the tribal group until recently, with empires usually being just a system of vassal states paying tribute to the conqueror….The mult-national State is extremely unnatural, and has therefore tended to disintegrate rapidly in modern times…
The social contract is a decent/workable deal provided the people make some concessions in order to receive protection from being part of a larger group (empire, city-state, etc.). The Holy Roman Empire functioned like this: we’ll take some of your cereal crops and you’ll have the freedom to chose between Lutheranism and Catholicism (no Calvinism) and in return we’ll do our best to protect you from external threats like Swiss pikemen and Danes trying to take your last Thaler and rape your wife and barbecue your local parish priest on a pyre. The offer from Merkel and the EU is: Your standard of living will decrease, you will lose fundamental rights, including speech (there’s even a big effort now to remove crosses from public buildings in Bavaria, despite the fact that “Christian” is part of the name of two of Germany’s central parties). In return for these trade-offs, we as your rulers will deliberately try to make you, the population, as unsafe as possible and subject to the dispossession and annihilation of your culture at an increasingly accelerated rate. So yeah, Sebastian Kurz and Seehofer are gaining steam while Merkel the Ferkel loses more ground every day.
But even the HRE was a bad deal for the people. In theory, the emperor provided some degree of religious tolerance, but there was nothing to prevent him from reneging on the deal. A contract does not exist unless it is enforceable. That’s true of the social contract, as well.
It is the nature of sectarian entitles for the people to look at their internal dynamics as a zero sum game. The other guy’s gain must be your loss. Inevitably, group competition leads to a looting of the public wealth. The whole becomes less than the sum of the parts.
Hell, it ended up being a bad deal for another and very simple reason. If someone taxes the hell out of you (sometimes literally to the point of starvation) and can’t keep the troops supposedly protecting you from trampling your crops, you MIGHT tolerate it if you know outsiders will treat you even worse (there are instances of cannibalism and nails being pounded in men’s urethrae during the Thirty Years’ War) but only if you know the local oppressors can defeat the outside ones, which definitely wasn’t the case in pre-unified Germany. Your uncle might pay the mob some “protection” to watch his liquor store, but if another mob comes in and beats the shit out of the guy who first extorted your uncle, that first guy’s not getting another dime from your Uncle. Most of politics throughout history was who can keep people safe and maintain order. Open Borders in Europe and America have pushed us back to this medieval model where everything else can get sorted out after safety. That’s why the Spray Tan Sun King was a much lesser evil than Hilligula. If people would rather debate ideas rather than mount battlements and pour hot oil on Saracens, then Europe has to go back to being mostly white.
So make having private arms and militias a mandate of the social contract and stop being duped into not being clannish.
I can hear the Deus Volt crowd reeee’s from here but the fundamental basis of the West ended up being its greatest weakness.
We broke organizations into smaller pieces (clans to village to extended families to nuclear families now into whatever it is we have) and its killing us off.
The only way to have a working society is families, the bigger the better, The nuclear family is barely functional, barely, You want extended families, clans, tribes all living together for their common good with enough idea of a collective good to support a state
The powers that be hate this, they find out people won’t move away from their support for crap job than whine about subsidizing more labor mobility
Labor mobility is poison, just like cheap labor.
As far as too much state the only way to resist a state is to have non state options that are strong enough to make said state have to keep its bargain. The best part of modernity is therefore the the that the tech makes this easier
Think Dune family atomics here
That state configuration won’t be as stable as one that is top down but its becoming pretty clear the old Westphalian system no longer works and that whoever embraces the new barbarian future faster, wins
Optionally and there is a high probability of this, we simply no longer have the capacity to maintain much of our technology. The US nukes are a key example, in a couple of decades or less the US will have basically no functional nukes do to an inability to make tritium .
If we weren’t in the middle of a cold civil war , we could with some effort solve this but we can’t. Our duly elected President isn’t allowed to meet with foreign leaders without cries of treason . Hell his own party interferes with his work on trade.
We need a nationalist dictatorship to fix thing but we won’t get one so the US will be a second tier power , maybe third in a few decades . If we get lucky after that it falls apart and some saner portions can claw their way back to 1st tier hopefully not over a mound of corpses
the Austro-Hungarian Empire delivered a set of demands on Serbia, knowing it would provoke a wider war in Europe.
The plan was never to provoke a European war. The plan was a quick punishment of Serbia before Russia could mobilize, easy in, easy out, and nobody really liked Serbia anyway, because they kept stirring shit in the Balkans.
Had the Austrians moved three weeks earlier – when the crisis was at its peak – it is likely they would’ve gotten away with it, but they fumbled the ball and by the time they crossed the border, Serbia was ready for them and Russia was already mobilizing.
The outbreak of WWI is a story of clusterfuck upon clusterfuck, and at multiple points along the way, a greater war could’ve been averted with just a little fingerspitzgefuehl. Laying the blame on Austria is facile, everybody fucked up.
Well said, Mr. Hochstapler.