Are We On the Brink of Revolt?

Survival
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I’m going to give the article a go myself, my comment wasn’t intended as a criticism of you posting it, I’m not numbered with those that considers the Atlantic to be fake news. It’s all news with a twist, to me there’s no such thing as fake news.

But if you’re going to take the position that the future is unknowable, as you have repeatedly, and as I largely agree with, then you can’t dismiss a future that I present as plausible, if you too are going to offer up conjectures about the future.

IMO, what happens to America in the end has far more to do with China and other countries that are fed up with America, than it does with what’s going on domestically. However, the nastiest divisions that I’ve ever witnessed in my adult life over social and political trends, seem to come at a very convenient time for a rising China.

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Monte sleeps under a bridge, and taxes people who try to cross.

Sometimes he is out and about. If you get an answer with more than 50 words it shows that (s)he has thought about it.

I will try to make a hole in my life to read the article…

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You will enjoy the article, I predict. Lots of facts.
I think we’re getting tangled up in semantics with respect to ‘predicting the future’.
I can’t predict the future, but I do ‘predict’ that, unless we have a catastrophic war, human lifespan will be increased significantly by the middle of the century. ‘Significantly’ is my weasel-word.

I happen to agree with you about what happens in America will depend a lot on China. I’ve gone out on a limb elsewhere and predicted that the rise of China is inevitable, and that we are going to be pushed into second place, not just economically, but militarily, and that this could cause HUGE internal problems. It’s one of the stressors, along with developments in the world economy that affect the US, that make me pessimistic about the continuation of the US as a united entity.

It’s one of the reasons we need to throw off the chains of empire. Let the good people of the Middle East and on eastwards, enjoy the fruits of their Religion of Peace. We need to leave. If our troops need combat experience, let them patrol South Chicago.

But even here, of course, things are unpredictable. China has big internal contradictions, and could undergo some massive shift, or collapse … who knows? Plus some big development in genetic engineering could influence things dramatically. Or the advance of AI. I can’t see how the Left in America can get any more insane than it is now, but they’ll probably find a way. Choose-your-own-species? Lowering the age of consent to 12?

Anyway, prudent patriots will prepare, keeping in mind old Bismarck’s observation that all the great questions facing mankind have been settled not by majorities in parliaments but by blood and iron.

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You’ll find the article of great interest, although if you’re like me, it won’t make you happy. But the author is remarkably free of cant.

I think Monte is, from the point of view of this board, a great asset. If he didn’t exist, you’d have to invent him. He’s invariably courteous, so far as I can see. And though his interventions are not long – I’m partial to long posts – they aren’t just “Nya nya, you bunch of Nazi Trump lovers!” What more do you want? He makes it interesting here. I’ve seen boards which are just conservative echo chambers, and they’re not very interesting. We all like a good fight! And … if we are patient, and cunning … we might even win him to the Dark Side. Then we can reveal our true goals!

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Buckly wasn’t always right on every subject but he was always the smartest guy in the room and the calming voice of reason.

We have some conservatives in his class today but unfortunately they aren’t outspoken leading national voices like Buckley was.

Thomas Sowell gets very close though.

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Doug, it’s not going out on a limb to acknowledge the rise of China or the decline of the United States.

It’s already fact, and when a country projects itself as the US has, you can expect a response somewhere.

If you’re as widely read as you claim to be, then you should know that since the collapse of the Soviet Union, both Russia and China have been proclaiming their concerns over a US dominated unipolar world, and the threat that that posses to global security.

They have opposed us at the UN, prevented regime change in Syria, and have declared their support for Iran.

Have you paid any attention to the Pentagons annual reports to Congress about the growing threat to the US from China, because congress hasn’t…

IMO, while all you people are complaining about the social order and how you think that America is dying because gay people want equal rights and mothers want guns put up, CHINA’S GOING TO KICK OUR ASS, and none of that will matter.

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:rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

Very clever! You made my day!

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I don’t necessarily see a problem with any of this. It’s true, no one knows the future as you are keen to point out.

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That’s true Doug, but not a good thing in my opinion…:thinking:

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I lived in the old Soviet Union for a few months during 1985, returned there several times afterwards, even gave a series of lectures there in the late 80s, and have several good Russian friends. I know a fair amount about Russian history, especially its 20th Century history. I can ask for the way to the toilet in Russian. I think we missed a huge chance to get Russia onto the right path in the 90s. I basically agree with Christopher Caldwell on this: https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/how-to-think-about-vladimir-putin/

As for China, I know a lot less, although every night I say a prayer for the soul of Richard Nixon, who helped put them on the road to capitalism and … I hope … ultimately the road to democracy. It took an intelligent, amoral man like him to turn American foreign policy around 180 degrees and do the smart thing. Would he had him back again today. I hope his shade is advising Trump now. In the meantime I agree with Henry Kissinger – our strategic aim should be to make a partner of China. I’m currently trying to make up for my ignorance about China by reading a few books but so far I’m at Wikipedia level. I did enjoy visiting the Great Wall, and buying antique spearheads, made in someone’s basement a month earlier, at the ‘Dust Market’ outside Beijing, only paying five times the Chinese price. They will be the leading nation of humanity by the end of the century.

I don’t understand how liberals have gone from being pro-co-existence, etc. and have now stolen the clothes of the most hardline pro-war conservatives. Plus you guys now love the FBI and CIA. Next you’ll be demanding a return to segregated schools. The world turned upside down.

China’s rise is inevitable. We have to prepare to be Number Two: that’s not a bad place to be, if we do it right. And there are disadvantages to being Number One. We can destroy the whole planet in half an hour if we want, no one is going to attack us. Why do we have to continue to be the world’s (hated) policeman anyway? I have no animosity towards either the Chinese or the Russians, but if I did … I’d try to trick the Russians into taking our place in Afghanistan, and the Chinese, to doing the same in the Middle East snakepit. But they are not so stupid as to slam their fists into those tar-babies. Well … maybe the Russians in the Middle East. Lots of luck, tovarischee.

Let’s shake off the chains of empire, bring our troops home, put them on the Mexican border manning lots of Claymore mines, and then move on towards our final American destiny, each side achieving its heartfelt goals here on the North American continent. I think this will require peaceful separation, but we’ll have to see. As Napoleon is supposed to have said, you plan as best you can, you make all your dispositions, and then … one engages, and then one sees.

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You’re lumping me in with the whole of liberals. My social leanings are very much liberal. But when it comes to the issues of war and peace and economics, I’m isolated from both liberals and conservatives.

I believe in balanced budgets and minimal debt and I don’t care how it’s achieved, spending cuts, tax increases, a combination of the two and elimination of waste fraud and abuse.

Two of several things that I looked forward to if trump won the 2016 election we’re implementation of his promises to pay off the national debt and run balanced budgets. He bragged, as he is inclined to do, that it was easy…

The reality is expanded national debt and RECORD budget deficits…

I’m always more critical of republicans in this regard because they are the ones claiming to be fiscal conservatives, and they are anything but.

Which is worse, tax and spend, or borrow and spend?

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That’s what I’ve been arguing for the better part of 40 years, and it’s a lonely position.

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Aha! You’re really one of us. (Sorry to say that, it must not be a pleasant feeling.) Lots of conservatives are not too agitated about what people do to/with each other in the privacy of their own bedrooms. It’s being forced to say “Isn’t it wonderful!” that we don’t like. And if you see how eager conservatives are to welcome non-whites into their ranks, you can see that diversity doesn’t really bother us either.

It’s the economics that are going to be tricky. Most conservatives just accept, abstractly, the free market libertarian line – well, not the auctioning off of the National Parks, but all the no-big-government-except-for-the-military-industrial-complex part. But many of them don’t really think about the implications of that.

My relatives in Texas are mainly church-going socially-conservative Republicans. (Now – up until the 70s we were all Democrats.) But I was surprised to find, on a visit home, that they also believe in the minimum wage. And I believe that this de facto acceptance of large aspects of the welfare state is in fact quite common among the conservative base. Thomas Frank wrote a whole book on this, with a title like What’s the Matter with Kansas? I remember reading that book and feeling a bit uncomfortable … because he was right. Except that the conservative base instinctively realizes that if you trade a sound culture for a bit more pro-the-bottom-half social policy, you’ve made a bad choice.

It’s what FH Buckley is getting at in his book on The Republican Workers Party. It is – I hope --going to be the next big barney within the conservative movement. Life itself has taught the conservative base – who are reflexively patriotic and would normally just automatically enthuse for any war the government decided to fight, anywhere in the world for any reason or none at all – that we don’t need to be extended all over the world any more. Communism is dead. And trying to bring tolerance and civilization to warring tribes of savages is a fools’ errand. So that’s a fight that’s pretty much won. But the social/economic one is yet to come. I’m disappointed in Trump on this, but not surprised.

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I can’t imagine how you came to that conclusion based upon what I actually said.

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Well, it sounds like you’re suggesting that the republicans have had a change of heart about war and peace. The republicans, as in the whole of or majority of the party??? If so, I’ll heartily disagree with that. There may be some, a few of them are here. But I’ve seen mostly support here for Trump’s escalations in the Middle East.

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The Republicans who have had a change of heart about war and peace are the Republicans who actually have to fight in the wars. People like my relatives in Texas. Not the pundits in New York City and Washington DC.

But first of all, it’s a change of “heart”, not yet of “mind”. They don’t have a coherent equivalent of the “grand strategy” that the foreign policy intelligentsia wish that the US had. It’s equivalent to their support of the “conservative welfare state” – a kind of feeling, a set of assumptions, but not a worked-out ideology.

Second of all, it’s a change with respect to the normalcy and desirability of our having to intervene everywhere in the world – the 82nd Airborne as bringers of liberal democracy. I think they’ve come to see the wisdom of Robespierre’s observation that people do not love missionaries with bayonets. As regards the abstract issue of ‘war’ and ‘peace’, I’m sure they haven’t changed at all: they don’t see the world as made up of nice people who will be kind to us if we’re kind to them, and this has implications for, for example, how well-armed as a nation we should remain. I’ve invented a phrase to describe what I think their intuitive policy would be: “Speak softly and carry a big stick.”

However, politics is made by an elite, not by masses of ordinary people. A new, or transformed, leadership of the Republican Party has yet to emerge to capture this mood and give it expression. And of course another war – say, if Iran takes the bait – could drive this mood backwards. My side are not flag-burners.

But … it could happen. I was very pleased to see that the bug-bears of the Right and Left, the remaining Koch Brother, and George Soros, have united to fund a think-tank for a sensible foreign policy:
https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2019/06/30/soros-and-koch-brothers-team-end-forever-war-policy/
Think tanks are good and necessary, but now they need to start funding primary campaigns of Republican candidates who embody those views. It would actually be a return by the Republicans to their pre-WWII foreign policy views, wrongly labelled as “isolationism”.

One problem is that in the conservative mind, a non-interventionist foreign policy can be associated, by its opponents, with the custard-headed kum-bai-yah peaceniky you-can’t-hug-your-kids-with-nuclear-arms of a certain kind of soft-headed if not treasonous liberal. Jane Fonda, for example. And my side doesn’t like to be seen as sissies. But since reality is on our side – when WILL those darned Afghans embrace liberal democracy and open a Lesbian Outreach Center in Kandahar? – I am optimistic.

If I were the Republican National Committee, and could do such a thing, I wouldn’t allow anyone to stand as a Republican unless they were veterans. (In fact, in my utopia, you wouldn’t even be allowed to vote unless you were a veteran. And whenever there was a war, all members of Congress would be required to serve in the most exposed positions, so long as Congress wasn’t sitting. That might give us adequate funding for the VA, if nothing else.)

You may be interested to know that among some conservatives, Major Tulsi Gabbard has a lot of respect. I don’t think it’s beyond possibility, that we may see some sort of profound re-alignment in American politics in the future. The two major parties reflect a former reality, one that is rapidly dying – so we may see evolution by radical mutation, Gouldian punctuated equilibrium applied to politics, instead of by gradual insensible change.

Such a development might have the power to alter America’s current journey towards the vortex of the whirlpool. I certainly hope so. But in the mean time: conservatives: join a militia, and/or the National Guard!

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Isolationism, strictly referring to military adventurism is a positive. I don’t believe that the old guard Republican Party believed that the US should close all its embassies, recall our diplomats, and close our eyes to the world. Nor is it my position today.

But you know well that the constitutional requirement for declaring war hasn’t been followed since WW2, and yet the US has been in near continual war since. The profits that were made by US manufacturing during WW2 were addictive, and led to the all too familiar dire warning by exiting president Eisenhower concerning a conglomerate of manufacturers that would have undo influence on Washington and foreign policy, and unfortunately, his warning was summarily dismissed. However, looking at the days since, he was somewhat of a prophet.

The “War Department” apparently too aggressive sounding was changed to the more innocuous Department of Defence and a permanent war economy was somewhat adopted. I’ll return the favor and recommend a book for your reading.

Even Donald Trump made the observation that the US has “wasted 7 trillion dollars in the ME”. Although another trillion has been wasted there since he’s held office. But Seymour’s book is a fantastic read on the subject.

Led astray by Marxist and Keynesian dogma, the literature on the origins of the permanent war economy has overlooked a leading cause of the elevated levels of U.S. military spending since the end of World War II: the economic rents created by the federal government’s monopoly on national defense, and the pursuit of those rents by the labor, industry, and military lobbies. Although the permanent war economy benefits powerful special interest groups, it generates a significant negative externality by diverting resources from other, private uses.

Unfortunately Americans have an odd knack of uniting around the CIC when he takes us to war and the opposition is always a slim minority. Bush who wasn’t liked by so many saw his approval soar to 80% following 9/11 and his invasion of Afghanistan. He even declared in an interview while running for president that to be seen as a strong president you need to be a wartime president.

So much needs to change in America in order for us to get out of the business of killing people and destroying infrastructure. In contrast you can look at rising China which doesn’t have the burden of military bases all over the world to force its agenda, instead, its spending money all over building relationships and infrastructure and influence.

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Oh shit, the Russians did it.

The sky is falling, the sky is fully help us.

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I’m missing the point here, assuming there is one. But …Небо не падает!

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I remember reading Melman’s book when it came out.
I first learned about the Permanent War Economy theory about fifteen years before his book, though. It was popular among serious Marxists in the 1950s, who were trying to explain post-war prosperity. (After WWII ended, everyone assumed the US would re-enter a depression – even the first edition of the classical economics text, by Samuelson, assumed this.) Probably true.
The Republican Workers Party will need to do some substitution if we find we need to close down some defense industries, but … I suspect we’ll keep pretty well armed. The Chinese are smart people, and I doubt very much they’ll be sending their boys into any oveseas snakepits. But they are rapidly modernizing their military. I still want us to be big and frightening and capable of destroying the world if anyone tries to shove us around… which may require keeping a fair amount of defense industries working. To be honest, I’m pretty ignorant in this area. There was a debate a couple of years ago in National Review on whether aircraft carriers were still useful pieces of equipment – I was convinced by the ‘No’ side. (So expensive and vulnerable that we won’t deploy them.) And I’ve also been convinced by the people who think the F35 is pointless – and not just because it’s ugly.
The problem with ‘anti-militarist’ people on the Left is that you sound naive. Most people know that other people are as selfish and nasty as they are themselves, and so they don’t want to live in a country that relies on the kindness of strangers. It’s a shame, as it’s a tremendous waste of human resources, when we ought to be co operating on all the marvelous breakthroughs that are just ahead in genetic engineering and AI, and maybe working on our first international colony on the Moon … but this is the reality we have to deal with right now, until China develops a large enough middle class and evolves into some sort of liberal democracy, sometime deep into the century.