This idea comes from Strauss & Howe generations theory1. The gist of it is that it is helpful for understanding a social era to appreciate how the generations alive at the time have brought their unique characteristics to their current life phases. Life phase examples include middle age or young adulthood.

When a generation of people ages into a new life phase (grows older, in other words), they replace the people that came before them who were previously in that phase of life. This contributes to a shift in the zeitgeist of the social era, because this new generation has different priorities and attitudes than the previous one that had been in that phase of life.

In this planned series, I will examine the current zeitgeist by looking at today’s living American generations in their stages of life. I’m going to work my way down the age ladder, so that means starting with the generation currently in old age or elderhood.

The Boomer in the Room

The current old age generation would be the Baby Boomers, born right after World War II, who are now all in their late sixties or older. That’s past retirement age, though obviously a lot of Boomers are still working and still in positions of great power in government (such as our esteemed President), media (there’s a new Spielberg movie out!), and business (Bill Gates is still relevant, right?). They obviously still influence us all and affect the tenor of the times.

Boomers as a whole don’t have the greatest reputation with the younger crowd. They are resented for having had it relatively easy their whole lives, benefiting from the prosperity that came from the sacrifices of older generations who came before them, but being politically unwilling to pass that prosperity on to younger generations coming after them.

On social media, they tend to be the butt of jokes. I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase “OK Boomer,” meant to dismiss the opinions or concerns of an older person who is out of touch with the times. And did you know there is a Facebook group dedicated to making fun of Boomers?2

In pop culture, the term “Boomer” has come to mean any older person, not necessarily accurately pegging their generation. Many older individuals such as myself, technically a Gen Xer, get lumped into the category.

I’ve even heard the term used in TV and film coming out Japan and South Korea, again referring to an older person or older ways. Strictly speaking, “Baby Boomers” designates an American generation. This just shows how pervasive the terminology has become.

The stereotypical American Boomer in younger eyes is a MAGA loyalist, brainwashed by Fox News, comically unaware that woke culture pervades society, as they cling pathetically to outdated mores. But did you know that both the MAGA and the woke cultural elements in our society emerged out of the Boomer life story?

To fully appreciate how, we need to take a look back at this generation’s journey along the generational diagonal.

Culture Warriors

In the post introducing the generational diagonal, I had this to say about the Baby Boomers:

when they were young back in the 1960s, they were the original disruptors, who challenged “the establishment.” They were the counterculture rebels, and also the reactionaries who opposed the counterculture. In middle age, their moralizing fomented the “Culture Wars” that are still being fought today.

This basic narrative of a young generation upending the social order and transforming the culture, then dragging the country into a partisan conflict over values as they aged, should track pretty well with your life experience, if you are an American old enough to remember the late 1900s. If you are a younger American, you might not know the back story, but you are surely aware of the cultural split and it surely impacts your life. You are also no doubt aware of the long shadow that Boomers cast over the arts and entertainment.

Boomers stormed onto the national scene in their coming of age experience, the 1960s Consciousness Revolution, and ever since then have been disruptive and values-obsessed, questioning authority and institutions and insisting on going their own way.

When they reached middle age, Boomers - rebels and reactionaries alike - flocked to knowledge worker professions such as law, media, and academia, where they could focus on influencing public opinion and shaping public life. They split roughly into two factions, a left-leaning one that dominated mainstream media and universities, and a right-leaning one that took over talk radio and established numerous “think tanks” for crafting public policies outside of the sphere of actual public policymaking.

Boomers swarmed into government during the 1994 “Gingrich Revolution,”3 after which our system became gridlocked. The whole strategy of the GOP, instigated by Boomer Newt Gingrich (b. 1943), was one of of confrontation and disruption, and of questioning the legitimacy of government.

After the Boomer takeover, our governing institutions became increasingly partisan and conflict-oriented rather than coalitional and achievement-oriented. Boomers were more interested in arguing than in governing. Our Constitutional system of checks and balances could easily be exploited to essentially paralyze government4.

This was the state until the right-wing Boomer-led faction was able to successfully seize control of the Federal government, thanks in large part to their superior efforts to spread their ideology using the new media formats of the Internet.

Following their victory in the information wars, the Red State is now busily attempting to enact its think tank incubated vision of restoring America’s “heritage,” a vision that seeks a future that lies in the past. It is a vision that, to my mind, shrouds us in darkness, combining an ethos of religious and ethnic exclusion with an aggressive assertion of military and corporate power5.

But the Blue State vision won’t go away. A large swath of the American people embraces the “woke” ideals of equal rights for women and queer folk, and the separation of Church and State, and respecting the civil rights of migrants even if they are undocumented. MAGA may have taken over the summit of government power, but the conflict over values hasn’t ended yet. It is still being waged in our social media feeds and on the streets, in our hearts and in our minds.

I get that most people caught up in these arguments over what values America should embody aren’t Boomers. Most of them, honestly, are from my generation, Generation X. Growing up in the wake of the revolutionary 1960s, we thoroughly internalized the principle of individualistic moral autonomy.

But it was the generation that came before us that instigated the values-driven questioning of the then established order, and brought us at last to this state of irreconcilable moral differences.

The factional divide over values today is at the depths you would expect from religious differences, which is why the Culture Wars remind me of the Religious Wars from a bygone age.

Being cancelled and having your career destroyed may not be as bad as being burned alive at the stake, but these are both actions intended to eradicate an opposing perspective or line of reasoning that is deemed unacceptable. Each age has its own heresies and its own punishments. Who gets burned at the stake depends on who has the power to decide what is orthodox and what is heretical.

Now that the Boomers are the elders, there is no older generation to constrain them or mediate their conflicts with one another. So we have all become hostages in their Culture Wars, which will now have to be fought to the finish.

A Legacy of Destruction

The Boomers have had it all during their lifetimes. The grew up in postwar prosperity, when America was decidedly great, a superpower striding the globe. They were free to criticize the institutions established by the Greatest Generation, then worked their whole lives to undermine their legitimacy. They did this even while benefitting from the affluence these institutions still produced.

Boomers burned down the college campuses as youth in the 1960s, and now they’re burning down the halls of Congress as elders in the 2020s. It’s a chain of destruction that has led to one of the worst of their generation, the feckless Boomer-in-Chief, being irresponsibly elevated to the nation’s highest office.

We should not be surprised, then, at the destruction of the international liberal trade order. Or the destruction of the United States Constitution.

These are simply the culmination of a generation’s lifelong legacy of subverting faith in institutions, and then dismantling them.

We are in the Boomer apotheosis, and the destruction of the old order is nearly complete.

And what new order will take its place? To paraphrase Yeats, what rough beast waits to be born?

I’ve painted a picture of ascendant Boomer MAGA-dom, but also noted that the Resistance faction is still alive and kicking. It even has its own Boomer generation visionaries6.

Until this generation’s conflicts finally flare out and the last of them fade away, we can’t be certain what vision will prevail.

We can be certain, though, that this age belongs to the Boomers.

While I like historical cycle theories a lot, I didn’t want to make Darkest Hour specifically about cycles. It’s more about how we are in dark times, and it’s difficult to get our bearings or see where we are going, but here are some insights that might help make sense of it. To that end, cycle theories can shed some light, so they are bound to come up in my writing.

This specific article is about a way of thinking about generations that is used in the Strauss-Howe model, and that could be one of those insights that helps shed some light. I like to call it “thinking along the generational diagonal.” Here’s a diagram I made that helps explain it, if you’ll forgive my crudely drawn arrow.

The vertical axis there is age brackets, roughly 20 years in length. So young adult means twentysomethings and thirtysomethings. Forties and fifties makes you middle aged, and sixty plus is the old folks. The horizontal axis is historical time, chopped up into different eras, also roughly 20 years in length.

The labeled and colored blocks are the generations: all the people born in a particular era. My generation, Generation X, was born during the culturally revolutionary era of the 1960s into the 1980s - we were children then. The Baby Boomers, born earlier, were the young adults of the same time period. So people in those two generations experienced that era from different perspectives, based on their age bracket.

For young adult Baby Boomers, it was a liberating time of experimentation, when everything felt wide open and anything was possible. For us Gen X latchkey kids, it was a time when our parents raised us hands-off, often to the point of utter neglect, and we learned to fend for ourselves.

Based on these shared historical experiences by age bracket, the members of a generation develop certain shared characteristics. The key insight of the generational diagonal is that, as time passes, each generation ages into a new bracket, replacing the generation that came before it, and bringing its characteristics to a new phase of life.

So, for example, the young adults of the 1980s era were more like the children of the earlier era than they were like the young adults of the earlier era. Make sense?

If you were alive then, you might remember that in the 1980s into the 1990s, there was talk of how the young people had changed. They had lost the idealism of the 1960s. All they cared about was money and getting ahead. It wasn’t so much that the young people had changed, as that a new group of people were now “the young people.”

This change was generally portrayed as a negative development2, but it was really a logical outcome of first raising a batch of kids neglectfully, then tossing them into a newly deregulated market economy that had been energized by a cultural revolution. We weren’t purely materialistic so much as focused on the bottom line and survival, as we tried to make our way in a new social order, so much unlike what recent generations before us had experienced.

Fast forward to now, and my generation isn’t the young one any more. We’ve been replaced in the young adult age bracket by Millennials, and I’m sure you’ve heard all the whining about how they are different than we were growing up. They’re entitled. They won’t take the risks and make the sacrifices needed to strike out on their own. They just don’t have that survivalist mentality!

But take a look at that diagram. It should make it clear why this isn’t a surprise. How could a cohort of young people who were raised starting in the 1980s, in a more protective environment than Generation X was raised in, now trying to make their way in today’s punishing new social order, have ended up like Generation X?

Do you see how the diagonal works?

My generation is now middle aged. We’re at the peak of our careers, in key leadership positions in government (example: Russell Vought) and business (example: Jeff Bezos). Consider the implications when you think along the diagonal. This same group of people who are survivalists, more focused on the bottom line than expansive ideals, are now the ones in charge.

Think of the slogans linked to my generation when we were young. “No Fear.” “Just Do It.” We were associated with risk-taking and extreme behavior. And now we’re running the show. No wonder everything’s turned upside down, and the rules don’t matter any more!

And what about the Baby Boomers? Well, when they were young back in the 1960s, they were the original disruptors, who challenged “the establishment.” They were the counterculture rebels, and also the reactionaries who opposed the counterculture. In middle age, their moralizing fomented the “Culture Wars”3 that are still being fought today.

Now they’re the old folks, and while the young generation might make fun of them for being out of touch, Boomers sit squarely on top of the very institutions they challenged in their youth. They have become the establishment, while retaining the same appetite for destruction they have had since the 1960s. Doesn’t that help explain the behavior of the Boomer-in-chief who is in command right now?

In their generational theory, Strauss and Howe call the arrangement of generations by age bracket the “generational constellation” of a social era. It’s a concept I’ve brought up on this publication before.

Within a social era, the characteristics of the generations in each age bracket contribute to defining the priorities of the time, as well as the overall social mood. What is called the zeitgeist, or spirit of the age. In current parlance, the “vibe.”

In today’s era, we have a generation of elders who are completely certain of the moral correctness of their viewpoint, and a generation of mid-lifers who are prone to rule-breaking and not particularly sensitive to what anyone thinks about it.4 That helps to explain why there is so much ongoing destruction of our institutions, amidst a struggle to determine how they should be rebuilt. It helps to explain the darkness of our time, the hardness to the social mood, and the compelling sense of emergency.

We didn’t have much choice about getting to this stage of history. The march along the generational diagonal is inexorable, because no one can alter either 1) the generation into which they are born or 2) the fact that they will grow older with time.

If it helps to know, the march will continue. The generations will all get older, and the social mood will eventually shift again, when the constellation changes and we enter yet another new social era.

Meanwhile, I plan more posts in the coming weeks that leverage the power of the generational diagonal to explain, for each of today’s living generations, where they are and how they got there.

For example, the United States currently has a deep partisan political divide - could that mean we’re going to repeat the American Civil War? Or, perhaps a more hopeful scenario: today looks a lot like the Gilded Age, with massive wealth inequality and entrenched business monopolies served by corrupt politicians - could that mean that a repeat of the Progressive Era is around the corner?

I don’t believe that we would ever exactly repeat those historical events, but identifying similarities with the past the exist today could help us better prepare for our future. These similarities might arise because of consistencies in human nature that make certain patterns inevitable - we tend to form tribes that conflict with one another, we tend to form elite classes that cling to wealth and power at the expense of the common masses, and so forth.

In my final post in the series (unless I think of more patterns from the past that we are repeating), I wanted to look at an historical era that, like today’s, was characterized by a troubled economy, a middle class in jeopardy, and authoritarian governments on the rampage. I refer, of course, to the time of the Great Depression in the United States, leading into the Second World War.

The Great Depression is generally understood to have begun with the stock market crash of 1929. This was followed by a banking crisis and high rates of unemployment. The President at the time, Herbert Hoover, was unsuccessful at remedying these problems. His best known contribution to the era was lending his name to the camps of homeless people that sprang up in cities, which were called “Hoovervilles.”

Hoover’s failure paved the way for a new political coalition to take power in the United States, led by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. This coalition established a transformative set of policies that became known as the “New Deal.”

Is this the 1930s all over again?

The parallel in our time is fairly obvious. In 2007-08, we had our own financial earthquake, connected to the collapse of a housing bubble in the United States, that had global repercussions. It is sometimes called the Global Financial Crisis. The resulting economic downturn became known as the Great Recession1, and also featured high unemployment rates, and people losing their homes, though it wasn’t as severe as in the 1930s.

There was likewise a shift in political control of the government, with a discredited Republican administration replaced by a Democrat promising “hope and change.” This time, though, there wasn’t much change. There were some new regulations, and some corporate bailouts, but no fundamental restructuring of the systems already in place, which continued to operate as they had before the crisis.

Why was the response to the late 2000s crisis not as strong as the one to the 1930s crisis? Perhaps because the impact wasn’t as great, and perhaps because the systems in place were still functioning, more or less.

This chart of U.S. GDP growth which I found online, and then annotated, might help with answering the question.

I like this graph because it emphasizes the relative severity of the change in GDP in different time periods. Clearly, the decline in GDP was more precipitous following the crash of 1929 than it was following the GFC in 2008. Likewise the rise in GDP when the economy recovered. This only makes sense; the farther you fall, the more room you have to rise.

Also, note the ups and downs in the years between the Civil War and the Great Depression, compared to more steady growth in the post-WWII era. This is likely a consequence of increased government regulation of the economy and the monetary system - so-called Keynesian economics - as part of the New Deal.

The goal of this regulation is to dampen the effect of the “boom and bust” business cycles, where fluctuations in demand for goods and services lead to recessions and/or inflation. Not that the business cycles aren’t there, just that they’re a gentler ride for everyone involved.

So maybe the system wasn’t as broken by the crisis in 2008 as it had been in 1929, which explains the absence of a political movement powerful enough to alter it significantly. There was a movement in our timeline - remember Occupy Wall Street? It just didn’t go anywhere.

Still, a cloud of pessimism about the economy continues to hang over us. An extended period of inflation, exacerbated by supply chain disruptions caused by pandemic and war, hasn’t helped. Older generations have retreated into their financial assets, propping up the values of stocks and real estate, pricing younger generations out of a future. Young adults bemoan the hopelessness of “late stage capitalism” and wait for economic collapse, always coming just around the corner.

Back in 2014, demographer and generations theorist Neil Howe (who is also here on Substack) wrote an article comparing the recession of the time to the 1930s. He reached a similar conclusion: that the Great Depression was more disruptive, spawning “social restlessness and political radicalism.” But our current downturn has actually lasted longer - he even suggests calling it the “Long Recession,” and writes that we have “entered an era of grinding economic crisis since 2008.”

A chart tracking GDP change alone doesn’t tell the whole story. The chart shown above even has a big dip in GDP taking place at the end of WWII (which I labeled “Uh Oh”), presumably a hangover from demobilization. But this was followed by a socially stable period, the postwar American High - an era that was upbeat, not downbeat.

If it’s not a Depression, maybe We’re Just Depressed

Perhaps we’re simply inclined to be pessimistic about things in some eras, and this is one of those. We do have many outstanding social and economic problems that have been vexing us for a long time, as long as the younger generations have been alive.

Was it like that in the 1930s as well? Certainly the decade is remembered for its bleak aesthetic, and for the hardships people living through it experienced. Familiar historical images include “breadlines” of hungry people waiting to be fed, and the grimy faces of migrant workers fleeing the drought-stricken midwest.

American author Caroline Bird grew up during the Great Depression, and wrote an excellent book about it titled The Invisible Scar2, which includes revealing personal memories of the time period. Overall, her narrative is one of spiralling economic despair and stagnation. In her words, "[D]uring those long...years of standstill everybody and everything marked time."

When I read the book, I was struck by the many parallels with our current experience in the 2010s into the 2020s. In the 1930s, there was a new class consciousness and concern for inequality, anxiety over the cost of raising a family, and disillusionment about the value of a college education. Then, as now, young adults were deferring marriage and childbirth. Sound familiar?

Lowered fertility rates is another commonality between that era and ours, as this chart demonstrates:

It’s not at all suprising to see fertility rates go down during economic decline. Reasonably, young people would prefer to start families during prosperous times as opposed to austere times.

That chart doesn’t cover most of the current era, but as this article shows, fertiliy rates have declined steadily since 2008, and are now at historic lows. The real troubling aspect is that they are below replacement rate - meaning that, without immigration, we will experience population decline.

Housing precarity is another thing we have in common with the 1930s. One of the iconic features of that past era is the large family house where multiple generations live under the same roof. Grandparents sharing the space with grandchildren. Think Frank Capra movies like You Can’t Take It with You, or the Depression-era family depicted in the 1970s TV show The Waltons.

Sure enough, the multigenerational family is on the rise today as well. Millennials get a hard time for being less independent as young adults than previous generations were, but it’s only a natural consequence of the rising cost of living and the additional hurdles young people face trying to strike it out on their own. Would older generations prefer to see their children living in our era’s equivalent of a Hooverville - the ubiquitous tent city?

Along with the new class consciousness of the 1930s came the rise of populist political movements. This included both right-wingers who were sympathetic with Hitler’s Germany, and left-wingers who were sympathetic with Stalin’s Soviet Union. There were a surprising number of young members of the Greatest Generation who were openly Communist - you may have seen this portrayed in the recent movie Oppenheimer3. It’s not how that generation is usually remembered, but that’s because we entered a global war and ultimately the Soviet Union became our chief adversary, and being a Communist made you a pariah.

There was a left-wing populist politician who challenged the Democratic party leadership, who might be considered the 1930s version of today’s Bernie Sanders. His name was Huey Long, and like Sanders he ultimately failed, but that’s because he was assassinated in 1935. And if that possible alternate timeline is intriguing, consider that around that time there was an attempted fascist coup called the Business Plot, a conspiracy to replace President Roosevelt with a dictator. It didn’t work out, because the man chosen to be dictator wouldn’t play along.

Back then it was Fascism vs. Communism, today it’s MAGA vs. woke, but the source of these undercurrents is the same. It’s a rising discontent coming from the mass of common people, who feel that the social order doesn’t meet their needs, and that elites don’t care. The economic numbers alone don’t explain the dark social mood, and politicians who ignore that will pay a price, as the Democrats found out in 2024.

Round and Round We Go

The aforementioned Neil Howe, who has written multiple books on generational theory, along with coauthor William Strauss4, would say that our time and the period of the Great Depression and Second World War belong to the same phase of a generations-driven cycle. Strauss and Howe called this phase a Crisis Era, and characterize it as a time of demand for order amidst a perception of chaos and disorder. Hence the popularity of authoritarian government - the people want change, and want leaders who cut through the bullshit and do things. Never mind if its bad things sometimes.

Authoritarianism is on the rise worldwide, as it was in the 1930s. Back then, the United States ended up in a catastrophic global war and ultimately defeated other authoritarian powers. We rejected both Fascism and Communism, and came up with our own slightly-more-collectivist-than-before version of Capitalism. The massive industrial effort of the war revived the American economy (see the GDP chart above) and propeled the nation to superpower status in the postwar era.

In her book The Invisible Scar, Caroline Bird acknowledges that there was a collective sense of guilt that the war, with all its carnage, is what ultimately rescued America from the Depression. She writes that we buried this guilt in our collective unconsciousness, which is how the scar of the Depression became invisible. But it was still there, influencing the politics of the following decades.

This time around, it seems more like the U.S. is the out-of-control authoritarian power that the world needs to deal with, as we go off on our wars that aren’t wars, blowing up the global economy in the process.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean we’re going to end up in a World War III that looks like a bigger, uglier version of World War II, with the U.S. in the center5. We don’t live in the same kind of industrial age as one hundred years ago. We live in a post-industrial information age, and the global economy is much larger and more diverse. There are more Great Powers now that are at or close to our level of development, and they have nuclear arsenals to keep one another at bay.

It’s hard to predict how global conflict will play out in the years to come, though many people (right here on Substack, even) will try. What’s certain is that the old alliance system has collapsed and is no longer relevant, and a new alignment is underway. There are also new factors in play that will influence any conflict to come, such as climate change and A.I. computer systems.

Finally, there is the huge question of whether or not the United States can get its internal affairs in order, and return to some semblance of a lawful democracy.

In the 1940s, the U.S. put aside its internal conflict to deal with a much greater external conflict. Arguably, Japan did us a huge favor by attacking Pearl Harbor in 1941.6 Nothing like that has happened in our time, so we are focused on our own problems, and honestly I think it’s hard to see a way out of our economic stagnation, given how rancid our system has become.

This era has to end, though. History won’t have it any other way. There’s no guarantee that we’ll come out of it stronger, just that the conflict will continue until it is resolved, one way or another.

We’ll see how bad the scars are afterward, and if we can stand to look at them.

I bring this up not to showcase my charitable nature, but to point out that even though this person was only an acquaintance on social media, I felt connected enough to want to help his family in need. Arguably, by being supportive on social media, simply by liking my posts, this man had created enough of a bond between us that I felt a social obligation to him. One might cynically say that he had “bought” my support cheaply, with a few clicks and some brief comments. Alternately, you could say that, by being a decent guy and following the etiquette of social media, he was building “social capital.”

“Social capital” is a concept that was popularized by political scientist and author Robert D. Putnam in his book Bowling Alone, perhaps one of the best known popular works of sociology.1 Putnam defines social capital as the value of social networks in providing “generalized reciprocity.” His book’s thesis is that, in the second half of the twentieth century, the United States experienced a rapid decline in community and civic involvement, resulting in a loss of social capital. Putnam supports this thesis with ample data on group participation, social habits and attitudes, all presented in a plethora of graphs and tables. In fact, the book is worth checking out just to see all the data laid out decade by decade, even if you care to interpret it differently.

As Putnam sees it, the loss of community in the country and the depletion of social capital is a serious problem. He describes a “fraying civil society” and laments “the erosion of America’s social connectedness and community.” He upholds a pessimistic interpretation of the trend by presenting strong correlations between the loss of social capital and measures such as educational attainment, crime rates, and mortality.

In addition to defining social capital, and demonstrating its correlations, Putnam attempts to isolate what factors are associated with its decline at the end of the twentieth century. He does this with multiple regression analysis (explained in the Appendices – his study is very thorough and data driven), and basically concludes that the primary factor is generational change, accounting for half of the decline. Other important factors include television, changing work patterns, and sprawl – in a word, suburbia.

The idea that the decline of civic engagement is connected to generational change certainly tracks with my outlook on how society works, a point which I won’t elaborate on too much in this post. Suffice it to say that with the passing of older generations and the arrival of today’s adult generations in charge, we have transformed from a civil society to a market society2, where our relationships are less communal and more transactional.

But here’s the thing. I think the example I gave above, where I donated online to a family in need just because I knew them from social media, is undeniably a case of social capital acting as a source of generalized reciprocity. Is it going too far to say that all cases of crowdfunding to help those in need are signs that online social networks are helping to reknit our society and forge the bonds of social capital?

It was recently reported that one third of GoFundMe campaigns are to cover medical bills. Arguably, GoFundMe has become one of the nation’s major health insurance companies (although crowdfunding doesn’t work quite like insurance, of course). These kinds of chartiable campaigns might not be the progressive ideal of a social safety net, but at least they are something.

That we don’t have universal health care in the United States could be considered one of the many failures of our new “system” of government, with its gridlocked legislature in the thrall of special interests. If we are governed more by informational markets now, then substituting a mutual aid network easily enabled by the Internet for a fully functional healthcare system could just be the wave of the future.

It doesn’t seem adequate, granted. But I think it clearly reflects a social drive to form community. Institutions have broken down to the point that we can’t rely on them. So we rely on one another. We do it online, because today’s generations have gone digital. The youngest are even called “digital natives.”

The loose associations of people online are acting like the kinds of civic organizations that past generations joined, but that then fell off in membership, as Putnam documented.

Is that giving too much credit to online connections? I mean, it’s not the same as congregating in physical space when people meet in digital space. But then, who’s to say that when older generations gathered in meeting halls and clubhouses, they necessarily felt a stronger connection than when people interact today on social media? People can meet IRL, but fake the actual social bond they feel, as we all know.

It’s something I’ve wondered about for a long time now3, as our lives have moved online, even as our older institutions are failing all around us. If people feel the need for community, they will find it where they can, and participate as much as they are allowed.

Truly better civic institutions, that serve the people instead of special interests, requires functioning democratic government. But even without that, we can rebuild the social capital that was lost in the past, via our social networks online.

The idea being that liberals will make easy efforts to uphold freedom and equality and all that good stuff, but balk at upsetting the status quo or making meaningful personal sacrifices. The song has been covered by other artists (Ochs died at a young age in 1976), usually with updated lyrics to reflect the fact that, while the names have changed, the pattern remains the same. For example, I first encountered the song in its 1994 Jello Biafra/Mojo Nixon version, which has lyrics that replace boring, safe Democratic Presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey with boring, safe Democratic Presidential candidate Bill Clinton.

You can probably see where I’m going with this. As late as 2024, the Democratic Presidential candidate was, frankly, boring and safe. Joe Biden was one of the most unremarkable politicians in U.S. history to run for President, and yet remarkably also became President, and holds the record for most popular votes ever earned by a Presidential nominee. He is the only one ever to get over 80 million.

Kamala Harris was groundbreaking as a major party Presidential nominee in a DEI sense, being only the second female, second non-white, and first to fit into both of those categories. Yet she was also mainstream in her political positions - practically painstakingly centrist, despite being painted otherwise by the opposition.

What were we liberals thinking? The Democratic party even had a popular leftist to run with: Bernie Sanders, who was gathering the same charged populist energy as the GOP nominee, and might even have beat him, in 2016. How different our timeline would be if that had happened!

But no, we had to go with the safe bet. As Ochs puts it:

But don't talk about revolution
That's going a little bit too far

I self-consciously say '“we,” because when I step back and examine my beliefs, I have to admit I am a liberal.

(ducks at this point)

Honestly, I’m a classic Centrist Dad. This admittedly fuzzy term originated in the UK a decade or so ago, referring to a middle-aged (probably white) guy with moderate political beliefs and basic cultural preferences. The term was meant to be condescending; the centrist Dad is from an older generation, struggles with wokeness though he would never admit to being racist or sexist, and impedes the pace of social progress.

It’s easy enough to see a throughline from Ochs’s hypocritical liberal demanding social recognition for virtue signaling (yep, a thing in the 1960s, listen to the song), to the modern day centrist Dad, making cringy comments on the Internet.

The term “centrist Dad” has stuck around, and, dare I say it, gained some respectability. The centrist Dad (now including Moms) is the voice of reason, practical rather than ideological, the steady thinker the country needs. Yes, they are pedestrian in their cultural tastes, but so what?

I want sensible government that works and peace of mind to enjoy a craft IPA and some indie rock or a big budget sci-fi action movie.

What the heck is wrong with that?

When I examine the core tenets of what is usually called “classical liberalism,” a philosophy we inherited from the Enlightenment Era that birthed the United States of America, they makes sense to me. People should have freedom of conscience to form their own view of the world according to their powers of reason, and should all be protected equally under the law. The law should limit the ability of both other people and of the government itself to infringe on people’s rights.

So yes, there should be law and order, but no, there should not be a state-sanctioned religion or enforced culture code. We are each free to pursue our own happiness, so long as we respect the freedom of others. Liberalism understood like this has faith that we can figure out how to get along despite our differences, and there is no need to panic over demographic shifts or changing social mores, the way the MAGA movement is right now.

This simple conception of liberalism has sat well throughout my adult life with a cultural shift away from the public sector and toward the private sector, and with the Democratic party’s embrace of corporate centrism and free-market capitalism. These trends are generally considered to be part and parcel of the rise of a dominant “neoliberal” regime.

This has sat well for me, because I have done OK under neoliberalism. But then, I have a college degree and an email laptop job. I am a straight white cisgender male who works from home. I’ve got it good. I’m not wealthy, and I understand that my middle class status is in perpetual jeopardy since the U.S. has little in the way of a social safety net, but I’m doing fine.

This is fine.

It’s probably fine for a lot of folks in the United States, which is where that meme comes from, and why nothing ever gets done to fix the problems that have mounted under neoliberalism.

Lately I’ve been exposing myself to more leftist ideas on social media (there’s plenty here on Substack, and on other sites as well). From a left-leaning perspective, problems arising from neoliberalism, such as rising inequality and the immiseration of the working class, emerge from the very structural foundations of the economy and can only be fixed with a deep, structural overhaul. You know, the kind of revolution that Ochs says liberals will never support.

I don’t consume much right-wing stuff online, but I see its effects around me in the obvious appeal of MAGA to a significant percentage of voters, and the subsequent policies of our current right-wing government. From a right-leaning perspective, the big problem with liberalism is that it undermines the social order, disintegrating the communal bonds that make civil society possible at all. So forget about freedom of conscience - only groupthink can ensure peace and prosperity. Orwell figured that out long ago.

Author Seth David Radwell breaks down some of the arguments against liberalism in a recent post. For all the back and forth, what it comes down to is how to resolve a fundamental tension.

The debate ultimately turns on a deeper question: can a society organized around individual freedom sustain the communal bonds it depends on?

So the whole problem with liberalism is that it offers you personal autonomy, but can’t guarantee you a society in which you can thrive with that autonomy. A liberal like me can only suggest that you have to find your own community by making use of your autonomy. But for a growing number of people in this country, that might be easier said than done. Hence, rising alienation leading to a surge of populism. Liberalism is a dirty word now.

Tensions such as the one Radwell describes in his essay on the critique of liberalism are a natural outcome of social evolution, in my opinion. History is just the polarities of these tensions endlessly thrashing at one another.

We’ve reached one of those historical eras when, in the words of William Butler Yeats, “the centre cannot hold.” Only the political extremes can gain any traction with a populace that is increasingly unsatisfied with philosophies based on abstractions attempting to justify an unworkable system, and wants to tear it all down and start over.

As a basic liberal, let me offer this advice from a previous such era, as we prepare for the hell the populists plan to rain down upon us:

The idea of the market state is basically that, with Great Power war rendered obsolete by weapons of mass destruction, and with the planetwide adoption of powerful computer networks, government’s role in society has changed. It no longer exists to marshall the energy of the people in a vast ideological struggle, as during the World War and Cold War eras. Now its role is to provide just enough security and stability to ensure that markets function, and that the people can thrive in a ever more intricate and opportunity-filled hi-tech market economy.1

As you know from the history of your life, the promise of thriving in a world of opportunity hasn’t really come to pass for most of the unfortunate citizens of the market state. Some have done very well, granted, but overall, at least here in the United States, we have experienced a shaky economy and a shrinking middle class. Consequently, our politics has become populist, resentment-driven, and filled with strife.

I think that the question of what our national identity should be is a crucial element of the political struggle in the United States today, and so arguably we are evolving into a different kind of “nation state.” But I still like the idea that we are a “market state” that doesn’t work very well, and mostly sucks to live in - that is, a “market state dystopia.”

I even came up with a set of slogans, imitating the ones from George Orwell’s 1984, that define this dystopia:

• More is Less: as the economy has expanded and complexified as the market state has grown, our options have shrunk and our outcomes have worsened.

• Bad is Good: confronted with the difficulties and dangers for which the market state can provide no respite, we have come to accept them as the new normal.

• Future is Past: the only way forward for the market state is to somehow get back to the past.

I started tagging posts with these slogans, and there are now pages (linked above) listing all articles whose themes relate to each one. If you check out the pages, you will see that one slogan in particular has more articles than the rest:

The market state simply doesn’t work, but we have come to accept its many failures as the “new normal.” There’s nothing that can be done about climate change, or gun violence, or the oligarchy taking over, or the inability of democratic elections to actually change anything for the better…so we just live with these problems.

Let’s explore this idea further.

Let’s look at the many ways the market state has failed us in our lives, and why we can’t or won’t do anything about it.

COVID-19

I start with the COVID pandemic, because that event and the government response to it gets to the heart of the flaw in the market state premise.

By conventional understanding, the state’s primary purpose is to ensure an orderly society. It has an overarching, uncontestable authority and a monopoly on the use of force, as defined and limited by a legal system. In other words, actors other than the state are allowed to challenge the state’s authority and even to use force, so long as they act within legally defined limits.

Supposedly, the market state has a mandate to permit and sustain a free market economy, while also protecting society’s perimeters from dangers which might infiltrate its physical boundaries or its infrastructure. It doesn’t have to defend against a conventional military attack, since that is deterred by strategic weapons (nukes), but it does have to defend against sneaky infiltrators like terrorists (9/11 was an early test), or cyber-attackers, or infectious diseases.

The SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 was just such an infiltrator. It was impossible to keep it out of the population completely, since it spreads very easily. What could be done was to limit its spread by enforcing mitigation protocols such as masking, avoiding large gatherings, and testing. Eventually, vaccination.

This is where the state steps in with its uncontestable authority, right?

Oh dear.

The problem that the market state of 2020 faced was that it had a mandate to protect its citizens from an infiltrating virus, and also one to provide them with opportunity to participate in a market economy. These two mandates were at odds with one another. A population under lockdown can not function as a free market capitalist society.

The stopgap solution was to provide temporary financial relief, including a moratarium on evictions, until vaccines could be rolled out. Loans were provided for businesses so they could make payroll. There was even a direct payment to all taxpayers (signed by the President, do you remember getting it?).

Ultimately, though, the contradiction inherent in the market state mandate proved too much to bear for the United States. I’m sure you remember this well. The public response collapsed, and the U.S. had the worst pandemic outcome among its peer states.

Misinformation

A major factor in the collapse of the public response to COVID-19 in the United States was the spread of misinformation.

I’m sure you recall all the “discussion” on social media about the mitigation efforts.

For example, I remember people actually arguing that since a virus is microscopic, face masks were useless. There had to be memes explaining that the virus travels in a respiratory droplet, and demonstrating how masking achieves a reduction in transmission rates. But so what - if people can believe anything, they could believe that was all made up.

We value freedom of speech and the free flow of information in our society. But it’s certainly a problem when falsehoods spread as readily as truths, and consumers of information - the citizens of the market state - can’t tell which is which.

Unfortunately, what’s turned out is that information doesn’t just spread within our communication networks - it coalesces within informational ecosystems favored by one or another of our political factions. That’s how the pandemic response became politicized, and so ultimately failed.

We call these informational ecosystems media “bubbles” or “echo chambers.” Inside them, you only consume information that supports your world view. This makes it hard to comprehend the viewpoint of people in the opposing faction. They seem to be insane.

Let’s face it: with information a commodity purveyed on open markets, we have reached a state where the different political factions live in different realities. The market state can offer us our choice of what to believe, but no guarantee that what we believe is true. I fully believe that MAGA is wrong when they claim that the 2020 election was stolen, and that the January 6 mob assault on the Capitol Building was therefore justified. But if the election really was stolen by corrupt politicians…

Truth is elusive, of course, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t real. In a perfect world, our powers of reasoning would guide us to the truth as we participated in the open exchange of ideas, and we could all more or less agree on the best course of action to achieve our objectives.

But our two political factions don’t even agree on objectives, and so within each one it makes sense to maintain the beliefs that support its particular point of view. The “free market of ideas” is only happy to oblige. The MAGA faction, in my opinion, has embraced this Orwellian strategy more thoroughly than the Resisters, which is why they are on top politically.

This kind of “doublethink” is all well and good for maintaining solidarity as a group so that a policy agenda can be enacted. But when it also leads to turning a blind eye to criminal wrongdoing and thus allowing criminals to hold office, or denying scientifically validated methods like vaccination, then much harm is done to society.

Climate Change

Climate change is kind of the “mother of all problems” in that it is both pervasive, affecting our whole environment, and also very, very long term. At this point it is locked in, and there’s no preventing or reversing global warming. All we can do is adapt to it.

I’m no climate expert, but I have an easy way to think about global warming. With average temperatures higher, even by a bit, more of the Earth’s water stays in the atmosphere. You know from personal experience that humidity is worse during the warm part of the year; it’s the same principle. With more moisture in the atmosphere you get two main effects: drought leading to crop failure, and more extreme storms.

Here in the U.S., we will be impacted more by the second effect. Drought affects equatorial latitudes more than temperate ones, and North America is storm-prone. We already have a record in recent memory of extremely destructive storms which were followed by haphazard emergency responses that generated political controversy. Katrina. Sandy. Helene. Weather disaster response is just as politicized as was the pandemic response.

Why can’t we get our act together and do something about these sorts of long term problems? The answer isn’t hard to see - no one is really invested enough in the solutions to put in a massive effort to push for them. Everyone can just take a chance that they won’t be among the ones that are greatly impacted.

There’s a theory that I’ve heard described as Olson’s Law2, which basically states that in a democracy, smaller groups have a huge advantage over larger groups in pushing policy in the direction that benefits them. That’s because, for a larger group, the payoff is spread out among a greater number stakeholders. We experience the effect in the form of highly paid lobbyists having sway over legislatures, so that laws are tilted in favor of interest groups instead of the population at large. The fossil fuel industry gets the breaks, and we the people have to suffer the consequences.

Olson’s Law is the reason so much about our system sucks, and everything is stacked against the little guy in favor of entrenched profit-making interests. The little guy just doesn’t have the resources to effect change, and motivating all the little guys to act as a collective - well, you know how likely that is to happen. We’ve been waiting for that “blue wave” for a long time.

But don’t you worry, climate change will proceed unrelentingly. Mother nature doesn’t care what we want. The risks it raises will be priced into markets. That’s the best “solution” our system can come up with.

Gun Violence

Mass shootings are a horrifying social phenomenon that we have come to accept, or been forced to accept, as part of the “new normal.” They no longer shock us when they happen, even when the targets are very young children in their classrooms at school. Perhaps they are a manifestation of some deep sickness in our society - of its inability to provide either a meaningful moral framework, or a safe physcial environment, for living.

As awful as mass shootings are, they are not frequent enough to account for a substantial percentage of the total gun deaths in the the United States, which has one of the highest rates of death by firearm in the world. The majority of these deaths are suicides (about 60%), not homicides. These sad statistics3 are connected to the prevalence of firearms in our society. It’s just a simple fact that having a ton of guns around raises the risk of a gun being used.

Good luck convincing a Republican of that fact, though. The problems already mentioned - the information echo chambers that allow our political factions to live in separate realities, the advantage the gun lobby has shaping legislation in its interests - mean we are stuck with this deadly and, frankly, absurdly unnecessary risk.

Appeals to the 2nd Amendment only underscore that simplistic ideology is insufficient grounds for formulating effective public policy. But hey, in the “free market of ideas” even dumb ideas get to participate, no matter how high their price tag might be.

Inequality and Economic Precarity

You can’t have a proper dystopia without an obscenely wealthy elite living at the expense of the immiserated masses; it’s practically in the definition. (Un)luckily, that’s exactly what we have here in America!

As the post above argues, inequality tends to grow on its own, no matter what “the state” is up to. It’s a consequence of human nature in a time of relative peace and prosperity. The only thing historically that has reversed inequality is widespread catastrophe.4

That doesn’t mean there’s nothing that government can do to mitigate inequality. Problem is, if government operates under the premise that markets will take care of the people’s needs - well, not much will get done. Markets are amoral; even Adam Smith knew that5. Left to their own devices, they make no guarantee that prosperity will come to all.

Sadly, with a government that doesn’t work toward the welfare of the people, here in the U.S. we have reached the point where a growing number of citizens live in financial precarity. Our inadequate healthcare system puts as at risk of incurring burdensome medical debt, possibly even leading to bankruptcy. The high cost of housing has contributed to a rise in homelessness, and means owning a home is out of reach for the younger generation, delaying or preventing family formation.

The ordinary citizen in the United States is often priced out of the essentials that form the bedrock of stable, middle class life: housing, healthcare, and education. One consequence of this, undoubtedly, is that Americans are having fewer children, and total fertility rate in the U.S. is now at a record low.

If you drill down to that article, you will see that not only is overall fertility down, there is also a trend toward older Moms. There’s one positive aspect to that: there are fewer teen pregnancies, reflecting more wholesome habits in the youngest generation. The trend toward older Moms also suggests that Americans are delaying family formation in their lifecycle, a rational response to the growing cost of living.

The price of the essential bedrocks of middle class participation have risen in part because of a phenomenon known as Baumol's cost disease6. This is a problem where productivity gains are nearly impossible to achieve in labor-intensive service sectors such as healthcare and education, and so price inflation concentrates in those sectors as productivity rises in other sectors and the economy grows overall.

The only way to fix the economic precarity that Americans face is through fundamental structural change in the health insurance system, the educational system, and the tax code. Stop allowing the very wealthy to continue accumulating the profits of the economy, and provide much needed social services for the bulk of ordinary people. Markets that don’t work should be altered by government fiat. Continuing the “supply-side economics” of the Reagan era, while also restoring patriarchy to bring back the family (this is my understanding of the MAGA plan), isn’t going to cut it.

Justice Reform

I’m sure you recall the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020, following the murder of George Floyd by a police officer. That was at the height of COVID, and there were a lot of people with time on their hands. There was a spirit of righteous anger in the air, and the protests were much more intense than the recent No Kings rallies (though those have had record levels of participation7).

In a democracy, the people take to the streets when they feel that their government no longer represents them, and that there is no recourse via the ballot box. The injustice of racially motivated police violence is a long-standing problem in the United States, and anger at its persistence is completely understandable. We have yet to embody the ideal, expressed in the Civil Rights Era, of true equality under the law.

During Trump 1.0, the Resistance was more heated than it is now, and people, I believe, had a stronger sense of their power. So you saw significant protests, as well as violent pushback from law enforcement. In this country, law enforcement has white supremacist elements. In that last year of the first Trump administration, police often seemed like they weren’t at protests to support law and order, so much as to participate as counter-protesters. The partisan lines were drawn, and the cops were not on the side of justice reform.

In 2021 the Trump coup was thwarted, and in the Biden interlude, it seemed like there was a chance to steer the country on the course to justice again8. I remember thinking that MAGA was sidelined and that the White Christian Nationalist movement was in its death throes. That seems hopelessly naïve, now that we are in Trump 2.0 and everything has just gotten worse.

Violence by law enforcement has escalated, aided by a massive budget influx, and legitimized by a recent Supreme Court decision. It’s not just the police who have made their partisan position clear; so has the highest court in the land. In another even more recent decision, SCOTUS has enabled White Nationalists seeking to disenfranshise minority voters. Reactionary forces are attacking not only equal protection under the law, but also the very right to participate in making law.

The erasure of the gains of the Civil Rights Era is underway.

Reform of our justice system seems more far away than ever.

Final Hopeful Thoughts

Well, that was a long list of very bad stuff. Is there any way to make America good again?

One throughline connecting the items in the list is the idea that the ordinary American has very little power to effect change. Entrenched interests hold all the cards. Immersed in a marketplace of competing ideas, mostly bad, the common people can’t even agree on basic facts, let alone act on them.

Some folks might not think these problems are even problems. If climate change isn’t a thing, vaccination doesn’t work, mass shootings are the price of freedom, and poverty is caused by moral failing rather than systemic flaws, then what’s the big deal? Proceed with the roundups of illegal immigrants, the only real problem we have!

My point is, a substantial number of Americans have internalized what I believe to be bad ideas. But trying to change their minds through moral posturing, which is the current “market state” approach, isn’t going to work. That’s the whole living in to two different media bubble realities problem, that has us split into partisan groups that can’t see eye to eye.

At the root of the paralysis that makes hope and change impossible is the belief, held particularly by people in older generations, that virtue resides in the individual, not the collective. This is a legacy of the cultural revolution of the 1960s, which itself was an understandable reaction to the events of the middle part of the 20th century. Collectivism led first to a horrendous global war that killed tens of millions, followed next by a period that, while relatively prosperous, was culturally bland and spiritually stagnant.

But if activity that changes society is only permissible at the personal level, by individuals guided by their own internal moral principles, how could we ever achieve fundamental structural change to our socioeconomic systems? We would need everyone (or almost everyone) aligned in their personal moral belief system, and the fact that we cannot achieve this is why our politics is so dysfunctional. We are trapped in an endless and pointless information war where everyone is based and no one is actually willing to change their mind.

There was this essay that was published, almost ten years ago, by a conservative political writer, that critiqued the politics of the time coming from both the Left and the Right: The Three Fusions. It’s long and a bit overwrought, but it reaches a conclusion that gets at the fundamental problem that arises when politics is about individual morality: the democratic process has no way to subordinate individual interests for the sake of the collective good.

Many do feel powerless and victimized, but political problems are almost always attributed to the moral failings of other individuals. Every political issue is viewed through the lens of individual morality, and moral condemnation is the means by which every political conflict is waged. And like the social media outrage now associated with it, this moralism is almost always hypocritical and counterproductive.

When every problem is attributed to bad will—and every policy choice perceived as a reflection of personal morality—ordinary political compromise around private interests becomes impossible. Democracy becomes a grotesque spectacle of (mostly) virtual show trials and inquisitions, staged against individuals as well as symbols such as “capitalism” and “socialism.” Meanwhile, collective interests and responsibilities recede. The major systemic problems which have nothing to do with individual morality are obscured, and the collective action required to address them is made impossible.

Indeed, as long as individual morality remains the principal criterion upon which political action is judged, neither good nor competent government is possible. It is precisely this moralism, and the attendant inability to comprehend or address structural problems, that makes people feel powerless—by depriving them of collective agency.

The author of the essay is from the Millennial generation (born in 1986), and clearly yearns for a more practical, functioning mode of politics. One that acknowledges differences in belief about morality while still allowing for collective decision-making.

At this point in time (2026), that substantial portion of Americans I referred to - let’s call them the MAGA faction - has simply decided to run roughshod over democratic processes and make their own collective decision about what is best for America. They have it all wrong, in my opinion, an opinion shared by many others - let’s call us the Resister faction.

If Resisters want to stop the MAGA White Nationalist project, and reverse all the bad trends listed in this article, we need our own movement that acknowledges and incorporates the upswell of populist resentment against entrenched elites. We need a leader along the lines of FDR, who headed a kind of leftist populism the last time around, and managed to thread a line between Fascism and Communism to come up with a tempered version of Capitalism that worked for most Americans.

This movement needs to bury ideological purity tests and the quest for the shining Truth, in favor of broad-based actions that work, however imperfectly, in the aggregate. Yes, that means being less woke - in the sense of focusing less on the culture, more on the economics.

We can do this while still remaining faithful to liberal conceptions of human rights.

I don’t see any other way out of this dystopia that preserves our democracy, and the promise of the American dream.

The truth is, I am mostly through the road map of posts I had planned for this publication anyway.

In order to keep up the cadence, I am republishing a post that originally appeared on my blog in December 20211. Thanks for reading, and stay safe out there.

Rights vs. Responsibilities in the COVID Era

Take a look at the remarkable chart below, which shows death rates from COVID-19 for six different groups of United States counties. What distinguishes the groups of counties is the partisan voting rate, and what is remarkable is how much higher death rates are in Republican leaning counties than they are in Democratic leaning counties, after the first big wave, which hit primarily coastal megacities.

It’s not hard to draw the conclusion that this reflects the politicization of the pandemic, and how, in Republican-leaning parts of the country, there are lower vaccination rates and lower levels of compliance with mitigation rules such as wearing face masks and avoiding indoor gatherings. I’ve complained before about how insane this is, but here I want to give a little more thought as to why people might be motivated so differently in their behavior that they experience such disparate outcomes.

Here, I want to comment on how data like the above relate to two different ways of looking at the world. One is to see it from the standpoint of the individual, and their unique perspective. And the other is to see it from the standpoint of the collective of all people, which is what graphs like the above are doing. Graphs like the above are created by aggregating data – each week, a certain number of people die from COVID-19. Each individual death is a tragedy, and some deaths are unavoidable no matter how much we as a society try to mitigate against the spread of the virus. But looking at the aggregate data makes it plain how mitigation efforts do reduce overall suffering and death. That’s why we ask, as a society, for everyone to participate collectively in this effort.

The problem is, large numbers of people don’t want to see the world from this collective perspective. Their preference is to focus on the individual, and the rights of the individual. It’s like they see the dots on the graph, but not the curve. But one dot alone doesn’t give you any information, when you are trying to determine good policy. The curve, the collection of dots, is what lets you make an informed choice. The dots themselves just give you individual stories, what we call “anecdotal evidence,” which could be used to justify any policy. For example, as the graph above clearly indicates, some people in the counties with the lowest death rates do die from COVID-19. No place has a 0% rate. You’ll always be able to point to a case of a breakthrough infection in someone who was vaxxed and boosted and still got sick and died. But that one case alone is not enough to justify giving up on vaccination. To decide what overall policy is the most sensible based on one case and not the entirety of cases is foolish.

The same applies in other areas, like gun control. Simply put, firearms are a hazard and making them easier to access and carry around increases the risk to everyone of injury or death from firearms. It’s why we have this idea of sensible gun laws to regulate the use of firearms, making everyone safer, just as we regulate so much else in life. But a sizeable minority is obsessed with the individual right to bear arms, stymying lawmakers’ efforts to enact such legislation. This minority probably thinks that their arsenals will make a difference in upcoming political struggles. But however violently future political conflicts are resolved, what easy access to firearms will mostly do is increase the rates of suicide and homicide by firearm. I’m not even talking about mass shootings, I mean just ordinary incidents involving firearms.

Gun rights advocates will argue that it is unfair to deny them their individual rights just because of the negative consequences of other people’s choices. They are looking at the dots – you can’t take what’s mine based on someone else’s actions. For gun control advocates, the argument is that restricting gun rights will benefit the public in the aggregate. They are looking at the curve – overall suffering and death will go down if you change the rules. This is the same logic that goes into determining rules for the mitigating against the spread of the coronavirus. Restricting some rights, like the right to congregate indoors in large groups, will benefit public health, in the context of a highly transmissible and potentially fatal virus in circulation.

The zealous prioritizing of individual rights over collective good is what leads to memes like the one above, found on Twitter. It’s what leads to freedom derisively being called “freedumb,” when taken to the point of needlessly endangering lives. But those who won’t comply with mandates for the collective good aren’t really dumb, they are just prioritizing their rights as individuals over what is best for society as a whole. To them, compliance with authority smacks of submission to tyranny. They even have narratives based on historical occurrences to justify their resistance, even though the context is completely different now.

Maybe it would help for people to think in terms of both individual rights and individual responsibilities. Then you can keep your personal autonomy, but also recognize that your personal choices have consequences. Then you can see how you as a dot fits into the bigger picture of everyone else as a curve. Look again at the graph. It’s clear that for any one given individual, your chances of dying from COVID-19 are small. Not even half a percent of the country has. But if you are careless about transmitting the virus, you will help to kill some people. And that’s on you.

As I note in the post above, it’s unclear what the outcome of this revolution will ultimately be, but for now there are two primary forces at work behind it. The first is the force of oligarchic control, driven both by criminal conspirators such as the President2, and by the top executive tier of corporate America, who were quick to bend the knee when they saw that the throne was captured indisputably. The second is the force of the Project 2025 agenda, driven by right wing conservatives attempting to steer the course of the revolution; their agenda is to renege on the New Deal and to restore the White Christian supremacy of America’s Golden Past, with the aid of a lean, mean, executively-powered new version of the Federal government.

Trump’s 2.0 ascendancy could be seen as a deal made between the drivers of these two forces: the theocrats get their project to remake America along the lines of The Handmaid’s Tale, with Trump as their “imperfect vessel” of executive dominion, while the President and his criminal pals get to loot the U.S. treasury of its billions of dollars and to keep getting away with their crimes, and the tech oligarchs get to have free rein to plot their super-villainesque takeover of society.

What does the ordinary MAGA voter get out of this deal? If there’s any left who don’t regret their choice3, they get the vicarious thrill of watching brown people get the shit kicked out of them, both at home and abroad. That and owning the libs.

OK, that’s a bit of a bitter and cynical take there, I won’t deny it.

Now that it’s out of the way, let’s take a closer look at one of key agenda items in the MAGA program to restore America’s glorious past: ridding the country of Hispanics illegal immigrants.

A cursory look at Deparment of Homeland Security web pages4, which are really just MAGA-GOP campaign material, gives the impression that the agency is targeting criminals who fell through the law enforcement net, the “worst of the worst” who just happen to be mostly men of Hispanic heritage. The statistics show otherwise - most people detained by DHS have no criminal record, and those who do are often guilty of only minor violations, hardly making them “the worst” or a danger to society.

A massive surge in detentions followed the infusion of $160 billion into the Immigration and Customs Enforcement budget for deportations, which happened in 2025. This is in keeping with the demands of the Republican electorate that put Trump in power. As I stated, it’s part of the deal with the MAGA base.

Seriously, what is their problem?

Personally, I’m fine with recent waves of immigrants; they’ve done me no harm. A more diverse society is a more interesting and enriching society.

I know darn well there is no crisis of immigrant-driven crime, that in fact crime rates are much lower than they were in my youth, and that immigrants are less crime-prone than native born Americans anyway.

I know that immigrant labor is essential to numerous industries in this country, particularly labor-intensive ones such as agriculture and construction, among others.

In 2024, the foreign born accounted for 19.2 percent of the U.S. civilian labor force, up
   from 18.6 percent in 2023.

Why would we want to deport one-fifth of our labor force?

MAGA apologists typing away in comments sections will state that the goal is to deport illegal immigrants. Don’t break the law if you don’t want to face the consequences. But as already noted, most of the people being detained have no criminal record. Many turn out to be legal immigrants or even U.S. citizens.

The zealousness of ICE agents this past year can be attributed to the sudden influx of new hires with rushed training, to the loosening of restrictions that came from new leadership encouraging ethnic profiling5, and to a sense of justification coming from the massive budget increase and the regime’s mass deportation mandate. It all adds up to a war by the Trump administration against (some) of the people on behalf of the administration’s supporters (though many people who support(ed) Trump surely get caught in the net).

There is really no way to see the mass deportation project as making any sense, unless the ulterior goal is not to enforce immigration law, but to reshape society.

Reshaping society is, in fact, the goal of Project 2025. This is a very real plan that came out of a think tank called The Heritage Foundation, which exists to promote conservative values in public policy.

There are numerous Project 2025 architects working in the Trump administration. The key lieutenant is undoubtedly Russell Vought, one of the top architects and currently director of the Office of Management and Budget. He’s the guy who decides where all the taxpayer money goes, now that all oversight has been removed from the federal government.

And apparently a lot of it is going to go into rounding people up into warehouses.

Is this really necessary?

Again, I don’t think so, but no one asked me. Or I guess they did when I voted in 2024, and I got voted down.

America’s Destiny

A social media post last year from the Department of Homeland Security featured John Gast’s 1872 painting American Progress, understood to be an allegory for Manifest Destiny - the idea that nothing could stop the westward expansion of American settlements in the 19th century. Nothing could stop the United States from reaching from sea to shining sea.

Note the indigenous people in the lower right fleeing from the giant floating white lady.

Folks were quick to pick up on this as coded white supremacy. The homeland being defended belongs to the descendants of the Americans of the past, it’s saying. These are the so-called “heritage Americans” whom the GOP now claims to represent. Recent immigrants who are not connected to older bloodlines can’t be considered Americans and must be removed.

The term “manifest destiny” was coined in the 1840s, and is inextricably linked to the westward expansion of slavery that utlimately precipitated civil war, as well as to the dispossession of the many tribes of indigenous Americans who had the temerity to live where the pioneers were going. It is also linked to war between the United States and Mexico, which became independent of Spain in the 1820s - one of many nations in the Americas (meaning the Western hemisphere) to arise following the example set by the English colonists in the late 1700s. After Mexico ceded what are now the southwestern states to the U.S., many Hispanics were similarly dispossessed of their land, despite the guarantees made by the treaty that ended the war.

With all this history, it’s easy enough to associate manifest destiny not only with a belief in the inevitability of the spread of American empire (the lands governed under the U.S. Constitution), but also with a belief in the inevitability of the dominion of the white man over the colored man. A litany of events testifies to the prevalence of white supremacist ideology in American history.

• The Trail of Tears: the forced displacement westward of tens of thousands of Native Americans between 1830 and 1850, to make room for white settlers. Only one of many examples of ethnic cleansing in U.S. history.

• The plantation system and the slave trade: the great shame of the American past, standing in stark contrast to the ideals of liberty and equality supposedly enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, which actually has a proviso to account for the existence of slaves: the infamous 3/5 rule.

• The treatment of African-Americans after slavery was semi-outlawed.6 The history is long and familiar: the Jim Crow South, the 1921 Tulsa massacre, the many incarnations of the KKK, lynchings in the South that continued into our time and may still be happening.

This just scratches the surface. These are simply prominent events burned into the national consciousness as representations of that terrible historical force.

A force which is still alive, and expressing itself now through the actions of ICE Troopers as they rampage through American cities, rounding up suspiciously non-heritage people.

I like how this social media post put it (sorry, I don’t have a link or other attribution):

Yes, we have our own unique American brand of fascism here.

I know that ICE isn’t only targetting Hispanics, it’s just that since the majority of immigrants in the past several decades have been from Latin America, they are also the majority of those caught up in the immigration enforcement dragnet. So it’s really hard not to see this administration’s project as an attempt to de-Hispanicize the United States. It’s been tried before, in an earlier time of economic hardship, presumably also to improve the ground for white heritage Americans.

It’s a project that can’t succeed, of course. The real force of history, the real decider of destiny, is demographics, and the numbers are baked in for the forseeable future. The United States will become less Anglo, and more Hispanic.

MAGA can’t stop that with all the money in the world.

There is always the prospect that the administration knows this. The real project here is to appease the base with visible activity, while intimidating the opposition with the threat of violence.

Consider that in the case of the killing of Alex Pretti, a white protester was slain by two ICE agents with Hispanic surnames. How exactly does this jibe with the white supremecist narrative?

One easy answer is that this is an example of one way minorities become assimilated into the American mainstream and become accepted as “heritage Americans” - by working as enforcers for the ruling class. These ICE guys are the 21st century version of the 20th century Irish beat cop.

Never mind that Latin Americans with surnames like those of the ICE guys have actually been in the United States since, well, before it was the United States.7

Who’s a heritage American now?

Maybe it’s just a case of the regime keeping us divided in order to keep itself in power. As was allegedly said by a robber baron of the late 19th century Gilded Age, when asked if he was worried about labor unrest: “I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.”

Ominously, there’s also the possibility that the regime has more plans for the warehouses they are building than detaining only “immigrants” during their roundups. Trump has already ordered the FBI to investigate Americans as potential “terrorists” based simply on disagreeing with MAGA ideology. The Trumpian logic is plain: if migrants are invaders and therefore a threat to be rounded up, then so are Resisters who undermine the MAGA way of life. So they should be rounded up and warehoused as well.

What better way to secure the destiny of the real Americans?

Substacker (and ex-cult leader?!) Sean Prophet argues that it doesn’t make sense to focus on the inconsistencies in MAGA logic. What the regime is doing is separating the country into two groups of people: those for whom the law works, and those for whom it doesn’t. There’s no hypocrisy at work, just plain fascism.

The first stage of the American fascist takeover involved the separation of the population between those who belong—the “Real White Americans” or “Heritage Citizens”—and those who don’t, including immigrants, outsiders, or people often described as coming from "shithole countries."

Those who belong will continue to be protected by the rule of law while not being bound by it, and those who don't belong will continue to be bound by the law while not being protected by it.

We know there is a long history in the United States of non-whites being outside of the protection of the rule of law. That could be extended to include anyone not in line with and loyal to the MAGA regime.

Final Thoughts

So as not to end this post with such a dark conclusion, let me go back to an article I linked above, by Seattle writer Wendy Liu, about JD Vance’s 2024 nomination speech. She writes:

“You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman… But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.” Those were the words of President Reagan at a Medal of Freedom presentation ceremony in January 1989.

Reagan continued, “We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our people — our strength — from every country and every corner of the world. And by doing so we continuously renew and enrich our nation.”

This is a much different vision than the one Vance espouses. The GOP has long abandoned Reagan’s open-minded embrace of individual liberty, even if they have kept his tax cuts for the rich. Their closed vision is reactionary and fear-based, and seeks to restore a lost destiny they believe should be manifested again.

This is a paltry excuse of an America that should be rejected wholeheartedly. Previous generations have reimagined this country, and we can as well. We can live up to the ideal expressed by Reagan, and allow our society to be enriched by the people living within it, no matter their heritage. We can live up to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous statement that people should “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

That is our true destiny, as hard as the road has been that takes us there.

With the crazy shit the Commander in Chief is doing costing him popularity, and people wondering about his mental capacity, on top of which the midterms are coming up soon and the GOP is desperately trying every voter suppression tactic they can think of, this might be the year.

I noted in that post that Civil War II might not look exactly like Civil War I, still technically called “The American Civil War” since there’s only been one so far. Unlike then, today it’s harder to find a geographic boundary separating the partisan divide into two contiguous groups of States. Where would the front lines be?

That might not be a meaningful question, since we are in era of “hybrid warfare” fought not only in physical space but in digital space as well. War these days isn’t just lobbing missiles and sending drones back and forth, it’s also cyberattacks and social media propaganda campaigns and election interference.

Propaganda - as in the dissemination of information supporting or undermining a cause - has always been a part of war, of course, even before the term came into use.1 But now we deal with it in the context of the global information network known as the Internet, which everyone accesses with a pocket device, except in some countries that have governments far enough removed from any pretense of democracy that they can get away with erecting firewalls.

Even if the Cold Civil War is being fought all around us now (in our pockets!), we can still speculate on how it might look on the ground if it gets Hot. We can examine how the country has been partitioned in the past as a guide.

As a starting point, here is an American Civil War map I found on the global information network:

At this point in U.S. history (1860s), the North and the South were practically two different societies, in part because the South was dependent for its economy on a huge labor force of enslaved Africans and their descendants, while the North had mostly outlawed slavery. The South was culturally and religiously distinct from the North, an aristocratic plantation society in opposition to the North’s merchant and industrialist society. It was still less than 100 years since the Colonial Era, before the Articles of Confederation and later Constitution “united” the States under one government, and it was easier for States to conceive of themselves as independent entities. All of this added up to the possibility of a clean breakaway of a cluster of States from the rest of the Union, as depicted in the map above.

Writer and political strategist Kevin Phillips wrote a fascinating book called The Cousins’ Wars2 in which he traced the sectarian conflict of the American Civil War back through time and matched its factions to those that fought two other wars: The American Revolutionary War of the late 1700s and the English Civil War of the mid-1600s. He argued that all three were essentially Anglo-American Civil Wars. Yes, even the one in the 1600s: colonists in Puritan New England went back to the home country to fight for Parliament at the outset of war, and Royalists in England fled to the colonies after Charles I was deposed and executed. The English Civil War was in many ways a culmination of the English Reformation, and there was Protestant vs. Catholic conflict in the American colonies as part of it.

The American Revolutionary War was instigated by the descendants of the Puritan New Englanders who had been on the Parliamentary or “Roundhead” side of the English Civil War. Those who stayed loyal to the British Crown tended to be from the Anglican Church, descendants of the Royalist “Cavaliers”. There were echoes of this partisanship back in England, with England’s middling classes in London and East Anglia (the fountainhead of Puritanism) tending to sympathize with the colonists.

These same divisions persisted into the 1860s, so that the Roundheads of the English Civil War who became the Patriots of the Revolutionary War were the ancestors of the Union elites in the American Civil War, while the Cavaliers who became the Loyalists were the ancestors of the Confederate elites.

This is an oversimplification of Phillips’s work, I’m sure - it’s 600 pages long and it’s been ages since I read it. But the question is, could this division between feuding sets of cousins still be a thing? Could it inform us as to how the country would split up today?

One obvious problem with that idea is that Anglo-America ain’t so much of a thing any more - America is a lot less Anglo- now, despite the MAGA regime’s best efforts. Heck, even MAGA has accepted the expanded definition of “whiteness” that now includes non-Anglos from Europe who were assimilated into the “melting pot” in the past century. They just got a problem with brown people and muslims.

Perhaps modern electoral politics could help resolve this - it’s not a stretch to say that the current Democratic party are the inheritors of the Roundhead to Patriot to Union line, while the GOP get the line from Cavalier to Loyalist to Confederate. This actually reverses where the parties had been strongest from the time of Lincoln through the New Deal, but this is a well known realignment that took place in the 1960s and 70s. The GOP became ascendant thanks to a “Southern Strategy” of playing on racism in the Deep South to flip the tables on Democrats, who used to hold that area as a solid base of support.3

Based on the electoral votes of this century’s Presidential elections, you get a New England-West Coast faction with some support in the Upper Midwest and MidAtlantic (Blue States) against everybody else (Red States). Notably, Minnesota and Illinois have been solidly Blue State since the Clinton Era, which explains why Trump invaded them with ICE Troopers last year.

But those other Upper Midwest States, and the MidAtlantic ones, are really quite purple - that is, they have enough voters on either side to swing back and forth. And truly, all States are “purple” because the partisan split is not so much by State as it is an urban-rural divide. This map of 2024 election results by precinct makes this clear:

So where are the lines if it’s an urban-rural split? Do the rural hordes sweep into the cities from the plains, a pattern of warfare that goes back to ancient times?

Something like that is already happening, in the way that the Cold Civil War has actually become Hot: fighting in the city streets. We’ve seen clashes between antifa and Proud Boys, MAGA regime forces attacking protesters, surges of ICE Troopers invading Blue cities and being confronted by angry crowds. It’s not so much that rural America is descending on the cities as that the MAGA elements within and around the cities are coming out or being brought to bear by the power of the State.

If the blue tsunami ever comes - that promissory salvation of liberalism in the United States - MAGA elements will remain to wreak havoc, in the manner that right wingers have been since at least the 1990s. The State might be brought to bear against them, in another turning of the tables. But still the American Troubles will continue.

Models of how the United States is really composed of different ethnocultural subnations, such as Colin Woodward’s American Nations model, don’t give us much guidance. It would just be too hard for any kind of fracture to form along the lines of sprawling “nations” that span portions of multiple States. Where would the new governmental forms come into being? All the political infrastructure is embodied in long-standing States, counties, and municipalities.

What if the U.S. Government, weakened by inept leadership, were to catastrophically fail, leaving a power vacuum at the top? I don’t think this is such a farfetched scenario. Maybe then the States would consider re-federating along different lines. I could see that maybe happening with New England, a pretty tight group of aligned States. Might they be happier being a part of Canada?

Problem is, any State can see the benefit of being included under the U.S. nuclear umbrella. Any kind of fundamental rearrangement of the U.S. Federal Republic, including possible secession of groups of States, would require very clear agreements regarding strategic weapons of mass destruction. Just ask Ukraine about that.

So no, the country splitting up along clear dividing lines like it did in Civil War I is not in the cards for Civil War II.4 It’s gonna keep being this slow burn that is already underway.

It will, eventually, burn out, but it’s hard to say what will be left.

We are getting along nicely here in the second quarter of the second year of the TACO administration.

By which I mean we are not on the receiving end of any missile or drone attacks, unlike those poor people in far off lands whose civilizations are threatened with annihilation.

It saddens us to see their plight, but as part of our program of “strategic sociopathy” we must carry on with our lives.

Have you called your Congress-person to demand action, and attended your No Kings rally? Perhaps this will absolve you a little of your complicity in mass murder.

Are you worried about your country committing war crimes?

All war is a crime, silly. There are no good wars, they only look that way sometimes when we win.

Are you worried about your country getting stuck in a Forever War? Weren’t we getting out of that game?

Don’t you know that history itself is a Forever War?

So shop as usual. Enjoy your streaming video. You can’t escape the trap you’re in anyway. Take comfort in knowing the rest of us are trapped here with you.

This is fine.

Are we winning the war? Are we losing the war? It’s so hard to know; you can easily find commentary online arguing for either conclusion.

Don’t you know that it doesn’t matter? Don’t you know that war is a racket1, and we simply need your tax dollars to keep it going?

The United States is at war.

The United States has always been at war.

The United States has vast resources and capital, and we can always create money for any desired purpose. You job is to keep the debt machine in gear.

Maybe you are in on the racket. More likely, you are simply paying your taxes like a good citizen, giving the insiders the leverage they need.

Shop as usual.

Enjoy your streaming video.

I linked to an opinion piece by writer and historian L.D. Burnett, in which she argues “there is no such thing as ‘cancel culture’ — there is only culture.” Meaning that this phenomenon of “cancelling” people who transgress from certain cultural norms is simply the enforcement of those norms. She opens her argument with a scene from a movie in which a scheming noblewoman is publicly shamed when her schemes are exposed. The same thing, presumably, was what was happening to appointees of the recently departed Presidential administration, not exactly enjoying a moment of glory at the time.

Back then, “cancel culture” was associated with the political left. It was a phenomenon where the left was attempting to assert control over conversation online by silencing dissenting voices. At least, that’s what folks on the political right were claiming. The political right was finding itself “deplatformed.” Their President had even been kicked off of Twitter for inciting violence!

I had long been describing “cancel culture” on my blog as this era’s approach to building a social values consensus. I referenced the generational theory of William Strauss and Neil Howe, which describes a social cycle spanning four generations.2 In that cycle there is an era called an “Awakening,” which is a period when values are challenged and the social mood encourages moral transgression. Those who violate social norms are celebrated as visionaries. The last time we had such an era was during the “Consciousness Revolution” that started in the 1960s.

But we’re now at the other end of the cycle, in the “Crisis” era. Values are not being challenged but rather implanted, to guide the establishment of a new order. Those who violate the new social norms are condemned for backward thinking. That is what was happening to people who found themselves getting “cancelled” when they expressed views or engagee in behaviors which went against the grain of the new values consensus. They could complain about “political correctness” all that they wanted; they were nonetheless going to run into the simple fact that violating social norms, in this social era, means being shunned by society.

Truly, most targets of cancel culture don’t have their lives ruined, assuming they haven’t committed any crime. They simply face the scrutiny of the public when in the public space, which is to be expected. I linked to a video from the channel “The Take” that goes into all the angles of the phenomenon.

The video brings up a “letter on open debate” which was published in Harper’s magazine in 2020, and signed by numerous writers and opinion makers. In it, the authors condemn “a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity.” Again, it’s understandable that, as purveyors of ideas, this would concern them.

But they were missing the zeitgeist.

In the social cycle, we’ve been turning away from openness and debate and towards resolution and conformity. This is needed to address the vast political and economic problems that our society has failed to address over the past several decades.

Older generations might find this disconcerting after a long, free-wheeling period of everyone thinking for themselves. But to get any traction on achieving real world change, we need agreement. So younger generations are more likely to believe, “get with the program or shut the hell up.” Not to deny anyone freedom of conscience, it’s just that a polity that lacks a cohesive worldview isn’t going to effectively get anything done.3

To a great degree, this push for a common, understood set of social norms is driven by the young adult Millennial generation. Strauss and Howe had predicted that in the Crisis era, Millennials as a group would enforce a code of good conduct. And what is “cancel culture” if not that?

The problem with this argument, of course, is the question of who gets to decide what is considered good conduct. It seemed to me, back in early 2021, that the liberal/Democratic/Blue State values - tempered with some values from the conservative/Republican/Red State side - were on their way to becoming the majoritarian perspective.

I even made the list - gay rights accepted, women’s reproductive rights sustained, but also 2nd amendment rights, so mass shootings not going away. We were settling in on the Purple State values consensus.

Later events would disabuse me of my notions.

In 2022, tech oligarch and sci-fi villain Elon Musk took control of Twitter. I don’t think extreme right wing views will get you cancelled there any more.4 Right-wing online influencers helped to keep the MAGA movement alive and to resurrect Trump’s political career, eventually catapulting him back into the White House. A more pervasive online media ecosystem with greater reach may well be a key advantage that MAGA has in electoral politics, and may have been a deciding factor in the 2024 election.

If “cancel culture” was the political left trying to deny the political right a voice, it certainly didn’t work.

It seems the Red Staters easily defeated cancel culture, using their digital discourse savvy, and the deep pockets of the wealthiest man on Earth. You don’t hear much about it any more.

It may simply be that cancel culture isn’t a thing now because there’s nowhere left to go to be cancelled. In 2008, authors William Allen Bishop and Robert Cushing wrote a book called The Big Sort5, about how Americans were self-segrating into like-minded communities. Americans were choosing to live, congregate, and share information only with those other Americans who shared their lifestyle and beliefs.

It could be that this process is complete, especially in the digital space. Everyone knows where they belong online based on their partisan tribe. Red Staters go to Truth Social; Blue Staters go to Bluesky. There’s no fear of being deplatformed, because you’re on a platform where everyone agrees with you.

To borrow an Internet slang term, everyone is “based” now - certain of their beliefs, not interested in having their mind changed. We’re past the arguing over what our values should be phase of the social cycle. It’s time to institutionalize those values now.

Of course, since we’re still sorted into conflicting groups, who can’t agree on what those values should be, we’re now faced with ceaseless lawfare. We’re two polities, not one, each with its own worldview. The Red State dominates mainly because they are willing to ignore the law.

Really, at this stage of the game, being cancelled online is the least of anyone’s worries.

If you are reading this, you are one of the millions who has survived the first quarter of the second year of the Presidency of a malignant narcissist who is destorying everything this country stands for.

Or is he…?

I mean, hasn’t America always stood for racial exclusion? And bombing other countries? Trump is simply upholding American tradition. If his policies are so heinous, perhaps we should be examining our own past before pointing fingers.

I saw an interview with a guy who was at one of the March 28 No Kings protest rallies.1 He was an old white-haired Boomer, and he was protesting an illegal war (meaning the current Iran War) just as he had protested an illegal war in his youth (meaning the Vietnam War).

The political left has long expressed a censorious view of U.S. imperial power, going back to the antiwar protests of the Vietnam era, and even before.2 It is a view of American military power as a force of mass murder and oppression for the purposes of capitalist exploitation. The American military as simply a tool for spreading the empire of Western capitalism.

I’ve already written about how the U.S. used to pursue its aggression beneath the mantle of the so-called “international rules-based order” (as during Desert Storm), but under Trump now nakedly grabs the oil (as in Absolute Resolve, the recent attack on Venezuela).

It was possible - at one time, not too long ago, perhaps - to think of American empire as a force for good, and many strategists took that line. The United States was “exporting security” in an effort to stabilize the regions of the world that are riddled with “failed states.” The United States’ glowing period of global hegemony following the collapse of the Soviet Union kept chaos at bay, and the presence of its “benevolent empire” made it “indispensable.”

The United States emerged from the massively destructive Second World War as not only a victor, but as something of a sole survivor. Given the extremely vicious nature of the defeated Axis regimes, it was not a stretch to think of the Allied powers as having fought a fight that was morally good and necessary.3 War sometimes had to be fought; this is just a cold hard reality.

But at least the United States was something of a good guy, a Captain America bursting in on the scene to fight the Nazis. Looming over the ruins of the world in the aftermath of the defeat of Fascism, the U.S. attempted to keep alive this all-American, patriotic avatar in the fight against Communism. The Captain America reputation was badly damaged by Vietnam, but U.S. political leaders still attempted to bank on it in the post-Vietnam wars in the “failed state” regions of the world. They would always frame U.S. military adventures as fights for freedom and democracy against dangerous authoritarians4.

No more, it would seem.

Trump the deranged just went and started a war without so much as a “Mother, may I” to Congress, and neither he nor his clownish minions can explain why or what their objectives are.

But if we’ve ceded the moral high ground, do we even need an excuse? If we’re the dangerous authoritairans now, and our model is tyrannical states like Russia and China, can’t we just war all we want?

That seems to be the Trump line, and here’s the thing. If we take a harsh, materialistic look, from the perspective that Western capitalism simply seeks to extend its empire, the objective of the Iran War is clear: it is to destroy Iran. If not annihilate the country, at least degrade it to the point that Iran is no longer a power of any significance.

The nation that has the highest stakes in seeing this happen is Israel, which is why this is a joint Israel-US effort. But the destruction of Iran serves all of the Western capitalist powers, as well as the allied oil states in the region. That is why, even though they disavow the war in words, they still offer material support.

That is why, even though they are ostensibly an opposition party, Democratic politicians in the U.S. limit their pushback on the Iran War to complaints about the process that got us into it. The Senate Minority Leader is, after all, a friend of Israel. It’s not that Democrats are, for moral reasons or whatever, fundamentally against bombing the crap out of Iran - it’s just that when the decisions are made, they want to be in the room where it happens.

There is a ruthless, amoral logic that leads to the conclusion that Persia delenda est.5 Iran is the last significant power to resist the triumph of Western civilization, the final boss at the End of History, the remaining component of Bush’s Axis of Evil that became the post-Cold War enemy.

Well, OK, there’s still North Korea, but they have nukes so we’d better not mess with them, but that just underscores the logic of attacking Iran before they acquire nuclear weapons.

Substacker Matt Stoller puts it starkly: Iran is being attacked because Iranians are not part of the transnational Davos elite, the billionaire oligarchs in charge of the New World Order. These elites, Western and Arab alike, have given up on the diplomatic charade used in previous efforts to secure control of the Middle East for the enrichment of the capitalist class. As Stoller puts it:

Western elites have dropped any pretense they care about human rights, and Arab elites have dropped any pretense they care about nationalism or Islam. It’s now one giant Davos blob.

We use to flatten the world using trade and diplomacy, but we’ve reached the limits of what could be done with those tools. So now we’ll just flatten the world with bombs.6

Since the U.S. has fully ceded power to transnational criminal oligarchs, I think the “Davos man” moniker needs an upgrade. Let’s be honest with ourselves and name these elites after the new center of transational power: Mar-a-Lago man is now in charge.

This is a harsh judgment, I know. But the lack of any serious resistance to Trump’s Iran War, No Kings marches notwithstanding, betrays an unspoken desire to see it carried through. Leftists have been telling us for ages that this was the playbook all along. The rest of us are just now waking up to reality.

It’s like we all secretly knew we couldn’t crack this last post-Cold War nut without putting a bad guy in charge.

So here we are.

Obviously there is no way to know how this will all work out. This war could politically ruin Trump.7 It could concievably expand beyond the region into a true World War III.

Embracing our bad selves opens up new awful possibilties. Atrocities ramped up as conflict spreads. Nuclear lines crossed.

The future looks dark, and Captain America is long gone.

Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer has voiced his opposition to the bill, calling it “a dagger to the heart of our democracy.” Senate Republican Leader John Thune is under pressure from the powerful MAGA wing of his party to force a vote, but he resists, arguing that “the votes aren’t there…to nuke the filibuster.” Meanwhile, the MAGA King President only muddies the waters further, stirring up shit in his usual way.

That Senator Thune insists on respecting the fillibuster rules perhaps reflects his concern that Republicans could lose control of the Senate in the midterms, and it would be best to have that safeguard in place to use against a potential thin Democratic majority in the future. I also think he wants to uphold what relevance the Senate still has in this era of the “unitary executive,” to let MAGA know Trump isn’t 100% in charge.

I have written on this Substack before that the trappings of Republican government have been demolished and a modern version of Caesarism established.

The Senate might be the last dangling bit of the old Constitution still in place, propping up some semblance of a Republic, if we can keep it.

Of course, the sort of obstructionism that the Senators are practicing is exactly what has led to widespread disillusionment among U.S. voters about the utility of democracy. It’s how the GOP was able to erode trust in government to the point that they could institute one-man rule.

For many eligible voters, the impression that a democratic government is unable to function might mean they don’t really care about sticking a dagger in its heart. Maybe a mercy killing is what’s best for it.

So What Are We SAVEing, Exactly?

No one’s saying anything as cynical as that, of course.

Supporters of the SAVE act - and they abound on my social media feeds - argue that proving citizenship to register and showing ID to vote only makes sense. You need ID for so many other things in life, so it should be the same for exercising your right to vote. I see memes supporting the assertion that there is broad support for voter ID across the political spectrum. I will just post one screenshot from a reputable polling organization as evidence to back this up:

Notably, there is much more support among Republicans than among Democrats. Republicans are more law-and-order-y, I suppose. Alternately, Democrats are warier about voter ID requirements because they see it as potentially disenfranchising, as denying people a lawful right, given that the there is a cost to acquiring identification. It would disproportionately affect the poor and out of touch, undoubtedly. This would be the “poll tax” argument against the SAVE act.

Opponents of the SAVE act - and they are also all over my social media feeds - will point out that the devil is in the details. The SAVE act lays down the law, but it doesn’t make any provision for funding the effort required. States are on their own as far as figuring out how to comply. A mandate to submit voter rolls to DHS for the purpose of purging known noncitizens surrenders power to an already too powerful and constitutionally questionable Federal agency.

If we’re going to have a Federal Voter ID law, Democrats might say, then let’s do it right. Let’s establish a clear standard and ensure that there is money to back up getting everyone an ID. Let’s ensure that States retain control over their voter rolls. It’s not like there is any emergency here, as voter fraud is an insignificant problem.

But of course, framing voter fraud as a problem is exactly how MAGA is raising support for the law. Trump insists it is needed to “SAVE America.” He also insists that the 2020 election was stolen from him, and surely there are Trump supporters out there who believe this. They don’t trust our elections.

But Democrats don’t trust MAGA pushing for this law, which claims to uphold election integrity but feels more like voter suppression. Republicans have to fall back on voter suppression, after all, since their positions are unpopular.

As always in our political era, the lack of trust is a big problem.

Keeping Us in Line

One common criticism of the SAVE act I see is that will disporportionately affect women, since women are much more likely than men to have a last name that differs form the one on their birth certificate. It’s another step in the Project 2025 program to take us to world of The Handmaid’s Tale, in line with defunding childcare, restricting abortion access and more. Keep women at home, making babies.

It’s no wonder, then, that women might be suspicious of the intentions behind the SAVE act.

And it seems to me that conservatives and Republicans, supposedly against big, intrusive government, are championing adding more layers of bureaucracy to our lives. Don’t they know they are pushing us towards a state where we have to walk around with our papers in order, or risk arrest and imprisonment? You know, a police state?

They also might consider that stricter Voter ID laws might actually cost them more votes than they cost the opposition party. That’s because there has been a shift in the membership of the coalitions that make up the two parties, as I have already covered in an earlier post.

Basically, the Republican coalition of today’s MAGA era looks a lot like the coalition that elected recent Democatic Presidents, as this chart indicates:

Note: low education, low income. Those are precisely the folks that are least likely to have their paperwork in order already, or to have the means and motivation to go through all the hoops and pay all the fees needed to meet new ID requirements. High education, high income folks - that is, Democratic voters - probably already have their Real IDs and passports and so forth.

So the SAVE act might suppress the MAGA vote, is what I’m saying.

Believe it or not, I don’t really want that. I would like to preserve democracy.

Maybe having a national ID of some kind is a good idea, in the long run. It would help us with resolving our struggle over the identity of the nation itself. But unfortunately it’s going to be hard to get that done transparently and fairly, given the deep distrust that poisons our politics. That’s what we truly need to be saved from.

The country was introduced to the broligarchs, insanely wealthy men at the tippity-tippity-top of the economic pyramid, who had all been quick to bend the knee to the overlord of the new regime.

The moniker “broligarch” implies that these oligarchs are kinda cool, maybe, but also kinda douchebags? It’s an amusing term, and a fitting one considering that these guys are mostly from my generation, Generation X. We’re the generation that was criticized in our youth for being crass and ignorant1, and is now mocked in our middle-age for being insignifcant and easily forgotten.

If you doubt me, I made a short list of the broligarchs, defined as the tech oligarchs who either attended/helped bankroll the inauguration in 2025, and/or were part of the DOGE process of ransacking the Federal government immediately afterward. As you can see, they are indeed almost all Gen Xers, with that one android-like Millennial guy standing out as an exception, as he does in the picture above.

• BOOMER
  Tim Cook (b. 1960)<-on the cusp!

• GENERATION X
  Jeff Bezos (b. 1964)
  Peter Thiel (b. 1967)
  Elon Musk (b. 1971)
  Marc Andreessen (b. 1971)
  Sundar Pichai (b. 1972)

• MILLENNIAL
  Mark Zuckerburg (b. 1984)<-wannabe; he tries so hard to be cool!

My generation, growing up, embraced a market-oriented, transactional approach to life, focused on making money and having fun. Our best and most successful leaders emerged either in business or in entertainment (I mean, just look at how piss-poor our leaders in government are).

The broligarchs are those of us Gen Xers who came to dominate the tech industry. A tiny elite that are the ultimate winners of the digital revolution, with its profound transformation of media and the marketplace in our lifetimes.2

This revolution unfolded during our youth, back when the Internet was more free-wheeling and chaotic, more of a place for individual expression. As Generation X aged into mid-life, the Internet matured and the key market players in the new forms of information consumption consolidated their power and control. This was only natural, as consumers value the convenience and reliability that comes from big, successful brands.

So now we’re in the “Big Tech” era, and we’re all familiar with the technology giants that dominate our digital lives. Apple. Google. Meta. Amazon. The companies that are run by the Gen X broligarchs.

This is hardly an unexpected pattern. Previous infotech revolutions have featured disruptive new technologies that shake up existing modes of communication, are developed in a fiercely competitive marketplace of conflicting standards, and then congeal into monopolies of one or a few dominant corporations.3 It happened with the telegraph, which was a chaotic mess as inititally developed, and eventually came to be controlled by Western Union. It happened with radio and television, which for a good while were dominated in the United States by the “Big Three” networks.

It’s happened again with the Internet.

Now that the broligarchy is in control, they are ready to transform the civic order in accord with their techno-utopian fantasies.

Marc Andreessen (not at the inauguration, but involved with DOGE) has a manifesto that spells it out. This is an excerpt that I found here on substack:

Our enemy is bureaucracy, vetocracy, gerontocracy, blind deference to tradition…Our enemy is institutions that in their youth were vital and energetic and truth-seeking, but are now compromised and corroded and collapsing – blocking progress in increasingly desperate bids for continued relevance, frantically trying to justify their ongoing funding despite spiraling dysfunction and escalating ineptness. Our enemy is the ivory tower, the know-it-all credentialed expert worldview, indulging in abstract theories, luxury beliefs, social engineering, disconnected from the real world, delusional, unelected, and unaccountable – playing God with everyone else’s lives, with total insulation from the consequences.

-from Marc Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto

It’s so very Gen X to oppose credentialism and expertise. We are the DIY generation, that believes that any savvy person can figure things out for themselves. That is, after all, what we had to do growing up as neglected kids. You might say we’re the poster children for the Dunning-Kruger effect.

It’s also very Gen X for the ultimate winners of the previous competitive age to now impose their will with an all-or-nothing authoritarianism. And under the banner of a stupidly named pseudo-government agency, no less. Suck it up, snowflakes!

The ruthlessness of what DOGE did was shocking, but hardly suprising. It looks exactly like what the broligarch in charge did when he took over a major social media company, as this substack post points out.

The broligarchy lining up before the MAGA boss suggests a marriage of the new regime and the digital revolution, the end game that began with Elon Musk’s maneuvering to take over Twitter. Fascism on the digital march. In lockstep, The Washington Post, owned by broligarch Jeff Bezos, is currently beating the drum for Trump’s Iran War.

It embarasses me that my generation’s preeminent members are acting this way, but it doesn’t surprise me. Gen Xers aren’t principled moralists; they are nimble opportunitsts, and the broligarchs nimbly obeyed in advance as soon as they saw the MAGA writing on the wall.

It’s all about the bottom line with these guys.

By which I simply mean that the United States of America is undergoing a profound transformation of our institutions of government and our political alignments. Some obvious ways this happening now:

• The Constitutional system of checks and balances is no longer in effect and the Executive branch has been unleashed by an ineffective/complicit Congress and a Supreme Court that has granted the Executive criminal immunity. We are essentially a one-party dictatorship now, as the Republican party is under Trump’s thumb and letting him run the show.

• The Federal bureacracy has been gutted, with a reduction in force, elimination of programs, and the departure of a significant number of competent, independent civil servants as the Executive branch attempts to establish a Federal workforce consisting of regime loyalists. At the same time, unprecedented amounts of resources are shunted into an inhumane immigration enforcement project that is really ethnic cleansing and farming for the prison industry in disguise. The New Deal/Great Society bureaucracy and the gains of the civil rights era, both anathema to the MAGA project, have been smashed.

• We have abrogated long-standing global alliances as we adjust from the postwar order that featured a West vs. East system into a new multipolar order which includes additional rising powers. We have also completely turned our backs on the “international rules-based order” and accepted the “might makes right” principle of power. Not that the U.N. rules were ever that strictly adhered to, just that we aren’t even pretending any more.

I say “we” but not everyone in the United States supports this version of the Revolution. An alternate version, in which we balance out the tax structure by forcing the wealthy to pay a greater share, and institute stronger labor organizations and more social welfare programs, has been expressed by the Democratic Socialist wing of the Democratic party.

But the Democratic Socialists are not the party’s leaders. The leaders continue to complain about process and seem intent on somehow restoring the status quo ante of the years before 2016.

This cannot be done.

For me, the harshest pill to swallow is knowing that the quality of the current revolutionary leadership is so atrociously poor. This happened because the right wing populist movement that took over used a political outsider to leverage the popular perception that the establishment is entrenched and corrupt, but then picked one who is also corrupt and entrenched in a criminal network1, and is pathological to boot.

So now we’re ruled by basically a supervillain, whose criminal enterprise is managed by sycophantic subordinates selected not for experience and competence, but for personal loyalty to their boss. We ended up with the worst possible form of government.

So we have the spectacle of cabinet meetings that are nothing but spineless groveling before the Dear Leader. Grown men wearing shoes they don’t want for fear of offending their boss. That they are oversized shoes just emphasizes how out of their league these officials are.

And then They Started a War

Of course they did.

It’s the American way.

From what I can tell, Trump decidered to make war on Iran after being pushed by Israel and Saudi Arabia, Iran’s two big enemies in the region. Trump probably thought, stupidly, that he would replicate his success in Venezuela - a quick regime decapitation, followed by bullying a compliant new Iranian leader to his advantage.

As Substacker Mike Alexander points out, that was not going to happen, since the Middle East is not Latin America. We set ourselves up for another protracted “Forever War” like the Iraq War. Exactly what Trump promised he wouldn’t do, but whatever, he is full of shit, as most of us have figured out.

Even discounting the idiocracy effect, there is a kind of inexorable logic that led us to this war, like it was bound to happen sooner or later, and Trump’s Presidency was simply a fortuitous circumstance that ushered in this inevitability. We’ve had military bases and forces in theater ever since we started building up our capability with the establishment of USCENTCOM in the 1980s, with strategic goals of ensuring that the oil flows and that terrorism is contained.

Journalist Ken Klippenstein reports that his military sources tell him that attacking Iran was too easy an opportunity to pass up. Never mind that diplomacy was probably the better option for preventing a nuclear-armed Iran, presumably the primary objective here. There was just this tremendous institutional pressure from a military machine that was poised to strike, and then along came a President with an itchy trigger finger2.

That President blundered into a war, and now we have the spectacle of the leader of the United States begging former allies, now estranged and wary, to come and rescue the country from a quagmire of its own making.

War Crimes of the Mafia State

Aside from the embarassment of the strategic blunder, there is also the shame of the conduct of U.S. forces.

Even before the Iran War started, we’ve had Operation Southern Spear committing murder on the high seas. Even if we accept the argument that drug runners are enemy combatants, acts such as killing the survivors of a shipwreck violate U.S. military law and international law.

Another egregious act was the sinking of an Iranian ship in that was returning from an exhibition hosted by India. As Arnaud Bertrand points out in this Substack note:

Probably the most abject part here is that the warship had many survivors - 32 to be precise (apnews.com/article/sri-…) - and the U.S. made zero effort to rescue them, despite it being required by the laws of naval warfare and simply being the honorable thing to do.

It took little Sri-Lanka, with its very modest means - especially compared to the $1 trillion US defense budget - to do the honorable thing and launch a (successful) rescue operation.

Even the literal Nazis, during WW2, rescued the survivors of ships their U-boats sank. It was considered a matter of basic honor.

Yes, that’s right. We’re worse than the Nazis now.

The comparison was bound to come up, given the nature of our leader, who rose to power much like a certain other leader did, and is similarly fighting a war while disconnected from the reality of it, surrounded by lickspittles who are afraid to tell him the truth.

The parody meme writes itself. In fact, it’s already been made:

It disturbs me to know that our military is willing to obey some of these orders that for all intents and purposes seem beyond what is acceptable or honorable in war.

The State rots from the head down, I suppose. This is what you get when you put stupid and evil in charge.

Leaving aside the question if any act of war could be considered honorable, and not a crime, military leaders are obviously obligated to conduct themselves professionally. The recent U.S. bombing of a school, killing scores of young girls, could be considered an unfortunate accident, though I’ve yet to read about an apology. And I must admit that when I first heard of it, I thought the bombing may well have been deliberate.

It’s not hard to believe that a war machine controlled by the Epstein class would be willing to do such a thing.

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof urges us to consider what U.S. conduct looks like from the other side: Does Trump Risk Turning America Into a Rogue State? Kristoff is careful with his language, but he gets to an important point: we used to try to make war less deadly for civilians3, if it was too much to ask to prevent it altogether. But the current Pentagon leadership has scrapped that idea.

That is to the detriment of the collective future of all humanity.

Our institutions, such as they are, are now dominated by Boomers - notoriously willful and self-centered. My way or the highway. Trump, vain and narcisstic, epitomizes the worst of his generation. Under them is my generation, Generation X, who are the most Trump-leaning of the current generations. We value results, the bottom-line - not following the rules.

Thinking of generations as having an archetypal character comes from the generational theory of William Strauss and Neil Howe1. I do think the idea goes a long way to explaining our current state of affairs.

Baby Boomers were raised indulgently in a time of relative prosperity, the Golden Age of the 1950s and Camelot. They developed an egocentric mentality and a principled sense of moral purpose. A generation down the road, Generation X (which includes me) was raised negligently in a time of cultural upheaval, during the riots of the 1960s and the malaise of the 1970s. We developed an opportunistic mentality and a fearful sense of self-preservation.

People from these two generations now make up everyone aged from their mid-40s on up. That is, the ones in charge.

There are some folks in leadership positions who are older than Boomers, granted, since more people are living and staying active for longer these days. These older folks would be members of the Silent Generation, and they still hold power in Congress (for example, Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi) and in the world of business (for example, Warren Buffett). But this generation’s influence will only continue to wane as its members retire and pass away.

Note that Boomers are the oldest of the “postwar” generations - that is, the ones with no memory of World War II and its immediate aftermath. The United States of America is now led by people who have no investment in maintaining the postwar order that was established by the “war” generations to prevent the world from descending into the chaos that they had to live through.

See what I’m getting at?

That’s why the chaos of war has returned. Statements about the end of the international rules-based order or an emerging new multipolarity where Great Powers fend for themselves recognize that the postwar order is over. For a new order to emerge, first we must get through the chaos, with all of its conflict and destruction.

According to the Strauss-Howe generational model, the Boomer generation leaders should be providing the moral vision that guides the formation of the new order, while the Gen X leaders do the practical management work of making it so. This would be from the U.S. perspective - other nations have their own generations, though we do tend to conflate them using the names of the American generations.

Look, I don’t like what Trump is doing at all, but his revolutionary regime does fit that bill. He has assumed the mantle of supreme moral arbiter, and his loyal lieutenants, incompetent sycophants though they are, are doing his bidding.

The Trumpian MAGA vision, as far as I can tell, is to restore a legendary American greatness by turning back the clock 50 or 100 years, while elevating whiteness and Christianity to their rightful place as marks of privilege. It’s hard to tell exactly how implementing this is going to work, what with the administration being so unpredictable.

But that’s beside the point, since a substantial portion of voters have bought into it. Certain directives, particularly the crackdown on migrants that is enabled by the Supreme Court’s decison permitting so-called “Kavanaugh stops,” are clearly in line with this vision.

Any real opposition to this regime must have its own competing vision. The Democratic party has an alternate future narrative, but it comes from an economic populist wing on the left, not its mainstream leadership. Hence their reduction to minority status.

As mentioned in the previous post on our cruel age, Boomers and Gen Xers in leadership form a generational constellation.

Strauss and Howe called the arrangement of living generations that define a social era the “generational constellation.” This era’s constellation has Boomers and Gen Xers in the oldest age brackets, in charge of institutions they are radically and recklessly transforming.

With the current faction in charge, we have a particularly cruel constellation. It’s top leader is a domineering sociopath who thinks he can do no wrong, and it’s followers are callous and impervious to humanitarian appeals. Just check your social media feeds if you doubt me.

Even more disturbing is the evidence that the moral vision driving this administration’s actions has an apocalyptic bent. Military commanders have framed the war with Iran in Millenarian terms, as if they are ushering in the End Times. Presumably this is seen in relation to our alliance with Israel.

In fact, the U.S. ambassador to Israel is an evangelical Christian who believes in the Zionist tenet that Israel must take over Palestine to bring on Christ’s second coming. And the Secretary of Defense War certainly seems to be aligned with these beliefs.

As journalist Sarah Kendzior puts it, they are not building The New World Order, but rather The No World Order. She writes:

The Iran War is being fought for Greater Israel — and for annihilation. The doctrine of annihilation is not unitary. Christian fanatics, Jewish fanatics, secular accelerationalists, and technofascists seeking depopulation all have their own agendas.

Yes, even the broligarchs are down with it. With all their billions of dollars, the wealthy eilites can build themselves luxury survival bunkers to hide away in while the world burns around them. Since the broligarchy, at least at the very top, is primarily Gen X2, this is in keeping with our generation’s survival instinct and “every man for himself” ethos.

Even more perverse than simply retreating from the Apocalypse (instead of trying to prevent it) is the trend of using online betting sites to make money off of the end of the world. Conceivably, some of the people making these bets are the same ones making decisions about military operations - the ultimate in barbaric cynicism. It’s not hard to believe this could happen, given how morally corrosive rule by Trump is.

There was even, briefly, the ability to bet on nuclear war on the gambling site Polymarket. Kicked off, presumably, by the Israel-U.S. attack on Iran. That particular bet has been taken down, but Dave Sirota here on Substack did grab a screenshot first:

This marriage of a Boomer Millenarian vision of the Second Coming with Gen X gamesmanship of the end of the world is apparently the best we could get now that we have established a Red State dictatorship. It’s a regime that has thrown its hands up and given up on civilization.

In an article last year, Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor called this “end times fascism.”

Alive to our era of genuine existential danger – from climate breakdown to nuclear war to sky-rocketing inequality and unregulated AI – but financially and ideologically committed to deepening those threats, contemporary far-right movements lack any credible vision for a hopeful future. The average voter is offered only remixes of a bygone past, alongside the sadistic pleasures of dominance over an ever-expanding assemblage of dehumanized others.

What they write matches much of what I’ve written here about our new dystopia, which demands that we accept a dangerous world as the new normal, and offers us no way forward except a return to the past.

Apparently we won’t even get that, with the fate of civilization now in the hands of our deranged Mad King, who you know is just dying to use nuclear weapons. As stated in The Fourth Turning:

It’s a profoundly depressing thought, but unfortunately it fits the zeitgeist, as those Polymarket betters might have intuited.

As for how bringing on the End Times could possibly make America great again?

C’mon, we all knew MAGA was always a scam.

Like everyone else, I’m trying to process the latest Madness of King Don: full scale, completely unauthorized by Congress air war against the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Is he trying to start World War III? Are we finally going down that path?

I’m going to say no, memes to the contrary notwithstanding. This is a regional conflict, which sucks for you if you are in the region, no doubt. Spillover to the rest of us will come in the form of higher gas prices and unfortunate casualties of stationed military personnel.

But we’ve been through this before - remember? 20 years ago, we were in the same region with an actual occupying force, spreading death and destruction with the same cavalier attitude. What’s different now is that, as the King has promised, this will not be a “forever war.”

What he means by that is there will not be any commitment to “post-conflict stabilization” as was attempted in the era of pretending to follow the rules. We’re just going to bomb the bejeezus out of Iran until they cry uncle. If they get a regime change, it’s up to them to pull their shit together, we are not getting involved.

As for how he can get away with this, it’s because we are effectively a one party dictatorship. The Constitution has been set aside and this guy is going to keep doing whatever he wants unless some of these other “branches of government,” if that’s what they think they are, assert themselves.

Maybe there will be a “midterms” to change everything. I can’t be certain, I don’t have a crystal ball. Until then, King Don is the decider, and as he has made clear, his only constraint is his own sense of morality. God help us.

As to why he decidered on this war, I can give you my immediate thoughts on learning of the start of the campaign. That was that it was probably done at the behest of Israel, and that Trump hoped it would distract from the Epstein files scandal. He’s been trying to memory hole that whole thing for a while now.

There is some credibility to the idea of Trump acting as Netanyahu’s puppet. It’s been reported by the Washington Post that he was lobbied by both Israel and Saudi Arabia in recent weeks, who claimed that the moment was right for an attack on Iran. Trump has a reputation for being suggestible, and has a thing for the authoritarian leaders of other countries.

Both Israel and Saudi Arabia have a huge stake in defeating the Iranian regime, which has been a thorn in their sides for decades. And Iran is a pariah state, with no significant allies. At best, China needs their oil badly enough to help them in a pinch on the logistics or financial side - but certainly not enough to risk a confrontation with the U.S.

What I’m saying is, Iran is easy pickings. And Israel and Saudi Arabia, like it or not, are our longstanding allies.

Ken Klippenstein puts it even more succinctly in a recent article:

We attacked Iran because the target was simply too tempting to pass up, military sources tell me.

Let’s face it: we’ve been in a hostile relationship with Iran since the 1979 revolution and the hostage crisis. I remember those days; I was a teenager at the time. The hatred that Americans felt for Iran was palpable in the public space. There was even a popular song that played on the radio about bombing Iran.

Trump’s Boomer generation was infected with this fever, as was my generation (Generation X). We were teens then, but today we are the 40 and 50-somethings forming the largest age group of Trump supporters.

I can’t help but see this war as a generational reckoning that has been a long time coming.

It’s not surprising that it came from this U.S. administration, which does not follow the law, domestic or international, and which might have calculated, in the face of its unpopularity at home, that it was now or never. Getting to a showdown with Iran according to the rules of the U.N. charter or the U.S. Constitution was never going to happen, and Israel and Saudi Arabia saw the gift they were given in the form of a U.S. President who is unbounded by the rules.

The operation also aligns with Trump’s understanding of power and of the purpose of the military. He has sent in his goon squad to rattle some heads.

As a generational reckoning is exactly how the administration is framing the attacks.

“Calling this ‘starting a war’ is a Democratic talking point,” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said today, adding: “This is the elimination of a threat that has existed since 1979.”

In other words, we’ve always been at war with Iran. If you voted for Trump because he promised not to go get us into any more wars, this one doesn’t count, right?

In any event, these are “major combat operations,” not war.

Orwell would be proud.

It’s a doomy meme that captures the danger of the moment, and raises the dreadful possibility of a second American Civil War. This is something that has been on the public’s mind for quite some time. You’ve surely encountered claims that we are already in Civil War II, or perhaps that we are in Cold Civil War II, which suggests that any day now it could turn Hot. Which would obviously really suck.

One of the throughlines on this publication is examining how what we are going through today resembles what we have experienced in the past, so naturally a post looking back at Civil War I is in order.

The Road to Civil War

I can see some very obvious parallels between the decade preceding Civil War I and now.

First, the country before the American Civil War was, as it is now, split into two irreconcilable camps. The issue that divided the nation then was slavery, with States partitioned between “slave” and “free” and the Federal government managing a balancing act to prevent either faction from overwhelming the other. This couldn’t be kept up indefinitely, and the tension broke when a President was elected from a party that included many fervent abolitionists. The slave States then decided to secede, and you know the rest.

Today’s camps are split by the Culture Wars, with States divided between “red” (conservative right) and “blue” (liberal left). The issues in this cultural conflict are myriad, with some in particular - gun control, abortion access, transgender rights - being where the factions draw a hard line. The Federal government, control of which seesaws back and forth between the political parties, has not been able to assert a definitive legal position on Culture Wars issues. This responsibility has devolved to the States, leading to great uncertainty for individuals living in the country.

In its current incarnation, the Federal government has initiatied an authoritarian crackdown on immigration, putting the issue of migrants’ rights front and center in the ongoing Culture Wars. A major Constitutional Crisis pivot point right now is the assimilation of the latest waves of migrants - the ones taking our country away from the majority white status that MAGA defines as “great.”

The fear that old white America is losing ground is what’s behind House Speaker Mike Johnson’s argument that immigration is only permissible when the migrants don’t “change society.”1 The countering view is that America’s promise applies to all who come here, that all who live here are afforded the rights and protections of our Constitution. The size and energy of the Resistance against the administration’s crackdown suggests another irreconcilable difference between MAGA and woke.

Second, in the 1850s, as in the late 2010s to early 2020s, the dominant national political parties fell apart, as the political party system underwent a realignment. In the 1850s, it was the Whig party and the Democratic party that disintegrated. The 1860 election featured four candidates, all of whom had a significant percentage of the popular vote, and none a majority. Lincoln, representing the upstart Republican party, won thanks to the electoral college, and became the first of a long line of Republican Presidents.

Similarly today, while the two parties that make up our system remain the same in name, they are both transforming as politics realigns, yet again. Increasingly, the Republican party is becoming the party of the working class, while the Democratic party is the party of the educated elite, reversing their previous roles. This has been an ongoing process for years, coming to a head in the past decade, as explained in this interview with GOP pollster Patrick Ruffini:

So What

Meet the guy who nailed the 2024 election

In November 2023, Patrick Ruffini wrote a book titled: “Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP…

Listen now

a year ago · 37 likes · 6 comments · Chris Cillizza and Patrick Ruffini

The following graph, taken from the post above, makes clear the shift in party coalitions. It also explains the Obama to Trump voter path, as Obama had a coalition closer to Trump’s than either Biden or Harris did.2

Ruffini argues that the GOP’s electoral success is due to a multiracial populist coalition. How to reconcile this idea with the party’s racist immigration policies and its service to wealthy oligarchs? Don’t these voters realize that they are being conned?

I think the answer is, yes, voters do understand the weaknesses of the Republican party. But they see the Democrats as even weaker. The populist upswell demands radical change to remake an economy seen as unfair and unworkable. The MAGA message resonates with that need better than the woke message does, even if the MAGA policies aren’t actually helping.

On the course of political realignment, the Republican Party’s transformation is complete - they have become the MAGA party, and there’s no going back. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party is struggling to find its own populist economic vision suitable for the new era. It has made some traction with the popularity of more left-leaning, socialist politicians like Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Zohran Mamdani - but they are not the mainstream leaders of the party.3

A final commonality between today and the period leading up to Civil War I is a breakdown of civility between the opposing factions - even to the point of violence. In the 1850s there was an infamous incident in Congress in which a Representative beat a Senator unconscious (yes, in the Capitol Building). There were other acts of violence involving politicians in that era, and many would go to work armed (yes, in the Capitol Building).

Today, as well, there has been an uptick in political violence in the U.S. Recent politically motivated attacks include an assault on the husband of the Speaker of the House, and the murder of a Minnesota lawmaker and her husband. In 2020 there was a plot by a militia group to kidnap the governor of Michigan. Fortunately, it was thwarted, and most of the plotters are now incarcerated. Unfortunately, politicians today must face the threat of violence as an everyday part of their job now.4

The breakdown of civility extends to broad public reaction to events, as well. I’m sure you’ve seen plenty of mean-spirited memes coming from both sides of the partisan divide. Laughing emojis on posts lamenting the treatment of migrants by ICE are particularly appalling to me - to these people really think it’s funny that helpless people are being brutalized and terrorized? I can only hope that at least some of the reactions are from programmed bots.

Lest you think I am implying that only the MAGA faction is cruel, please watch this video in which a YouTuber has compiled shots of wokesters celebrating the murder of a right-wing influencer. A cruel world, indeed. Perhaps some of the hundreds of thousands of likes she reports were from bots. But surely many or most were from real people. As she puts it, “if it’s now normal to murder people who disagree with you, we don’t have a society.”

The erosion of standards of civility and the normalization of political violence is what makes it possible to conceive that we are headed to a state of war. That is exactly what you are in when two in-groups each perceive the other as an out-group that has forfeited its legal right to life. That is the definition of war.

The American Troubles

A partisan split between two irreconcilable factions, a political party realignment, and increasing incivility - we share all of these in common today with the 1850s, the decade that led to the American Civil War. Does that mean we are going down the same path? What might be different between then and now?

An obvious difference is that the factional split in the mid 1800s was along geographic lines. The free States and the slave States formed two distinct blocs of contiguous States, separated by a continuous if not exactly well defined border. That opened up the possibility of one bloc being able defend itself militarily from the other, and thus take a chance at separation and the formation of an independent government. Thus, for a few years there, there was a United States of America and a Confederate States of America.

The Northern and Southern States in the early decades of the Republic were practically two separate societies, and it was a miracle that they had successfully formed a Federation at all after the Revolutionary War. The American Civil War could be considered a final(?) test of their ability to stay together as a Union, and passing(?) that test was a step in the country’s evolution into a true nation state.

MAGA and woke might be considered two different subcultures or subsocieties within America today, but how are they geographically separated? We speak of Red and Blue States, but really the split is more rural-urban. The Red States contain large cities whose populations lean toward Blue partisanship (for example, St. Louis, Missouri) and the Blue States have large swaths of rural land populated by Red partisans (for example, upstate New York). Where would the front lines be in a war like that?

If the current Cold Civil War were to get any Hotter, it would probably develop into what is called a low-intensity conflict, with militias fighting against government forces, and guerilla warfare - it would be a mess. Think of the fighting in Iraq during the American occupation in the 2000s. It would be ironic for history to turn the tables on us like that, and give us a taste of what we have brought to other countries.

Perhaps Hot Civil War II would resemble the war over Northern Ireland’s sovereignty that was fought in the late 1900s between paramilitary forces seeking independence from the UK, and the British army. Our own version of The Troubles.5

I don’t mean to jinx this into happening, it would be a terrible thing. The way to avoid that outcome, I think, is to eliminate the razor thin margin separating the political factions. One side or the other needs to get its shit together and capture enough of an electoral majority to enact policy with a clear mandate. That takes us to a situation more like what FDR had in the 1930s6 than what Lincoln had in the 1860s.

Conflict in the Crisis Era

My meme showing two paths for the U.S. in the Crisis Era leaves out a third path, where we have both Civil War II and World War III.7

As explained in my introductory post, this is what historian Neil Howe states in his book The Fourth Turning is Here8, and in his current writing and interviews - that the struggle we are in today could involve conflict within our society, or conflict with other societies, or both.

That is what happened in the Revolutionary War, in which there was fighting between loyalist and patriot forces at home as well as war with Great Britain (and eventually a crucial alliance with France). During the American Civil War, the Confederacy sought recognition from major powers like Britain and France, and had they acquired it, might have brought them into the war as allies. Even in the 1930s there was internal conflict, and had the Business Plot succeeded we might have ended up on the Axis side of World War II.

My point is, we can’t necessarily see internal conflict and external conflict as two separate paths. The fate of both are intertwined.

Consider this scenario: Trump invades Greenland.9 In response, the European Union and Canada sanction the United States. Canada makes overtures to join the EU, while Trump foments secessionist movements within Canada. Meanwihle, the anti-Trump Resistance in the US takes to the streets, only to be brutally repressed by Trump regime forces. As the violence intensifies, each faction within the US works closely with its allies outside the US, exchanging money, arms, and logistical support.

You see what I’m getting at? In an era in which political struggle is marked by fractured loyalties and shifting alliances, the conflict within a society and its potential conflict with other societies are inextricably connected. That is the scenario the United States faces today - as a major superpower, our troubles affect the whole world.

Just browse through today’s headlines and this will be clear.

Anything like a second American Civil War would be fought along the lines defined by today’s MAGA vs. woke partisan conflict, or more likely simply amount to a resistance war against a military crackdown instigated by the Trump administration, if that would even be possible. It probably wouldn’t resemble the first American Civil War, with its marching armies and front lines, a war that looked like any other war between distinct nation states.

We are in our own unique location in history, fated to resolve our conflict in our own unique way.

It’s either harrowing, desperate drama, or mean and sarcastic comedy. Personally, I like harrowing, but my partner would like to find entertainment with a positive message – something uplifting - but where is it, outside of kids’ programming?

With everything so dark and despondent, it’s like we’re in a new age of film noir. Why this obsession with the dark side?

Simply put, it is the zeitgeist, or spirit of the age. We live in a deeply pessimistic time, and our society is preoccupied with exploring human failure, at both the individual and institutional levels.

We are in a fin de siècle phase of history – the American century has come to a close, the Pax Americana has ended, and there’s no telling what comes next. Our apocalyptic mood, our deep sense of foreboding, comes out in our exploration of dark elements in entertainment.

At the heart of it is the peer personality of my generation – Generation X1 – which, as the current era’s middle-aged folks, dominates television and film on the creative side, as well as being a large segment of consumers.

Gen X likes fiction that is raw and uncompromising, exposing the rotten side of the human psyche. Stuff like Black Mirror. We like fraying and corrupted settings populated by wandering anti-heros.

We also have very low expectations about the ability of human society to hold itself together, based on our experience growing up during cultural upheaval, and aging through a long period of social breakdown. Gen X has been waiting its whole life for civilizational collapse, after being told since childhood that the world is doomed.

This helps to account for the popularity of end of the world shows like The Walking Dead and its spin-offs. They are a manifestation of my generation’s yearning to see everything go to hell.

I’ve seen bumper stickers like the one above. You may have, too. Gen X would like to stand on the sidelines and watch the world burn. Let it all come crashing down, and let’s see how we handle it. The ultimate test of our survival skills.

On the Walking Dead shows, the main characters are almost entirely from my generation, or from the Millennial generation. The Gen Xers are always in charge of the different groups, and have to become ruthless enforcers and daring opportunists, thinking on their feet and doing whatever it takes for the group to survive. The Millennials meanwhile are the hopeful and idealistic ones, whom the Gen Xer leaders are protecting.

It’s a perfect mirror of the real world generational constellation.2

New Noir by the Generations

The Boomer generation deserves credit, I believe, for inaugurating today’s Age of Noir. A precursor television series was The Sopranos, normalizing treating organized crime like any other regular job. A later series, Dexter, starred a sympathetic serial killer. In these shows, Boomer creators invited us to tolerate or even celebrate transgressive behavior, and to accept sociopathic protagonists as central characters.

Since then, Boomers and Gen Xers have collaborated on many other successful and acclaimed TV shows of a darker nature. Breaking Bad and its sequel, Better Call Saul, take place in a world of drug crime and grift, and feature Boomers destructively pursusing their obsessions, while the Gen Xers around them navigate the dangerous milieu thus created, desperately searching for any angle to find a way out.

Peaky Blinders, an historical crime drama set in the early 1900s, is British and therefore technically not made by the American generations I have mentioned. But it is a perfect example of noir television - dark and brooding, ruthlessly violent, and bristling with attitude - peak Gen X.

The principal actors in Peaky Blinders, the ones who make the show so tough and gritty, and so cool, are in my age group, portraying characters that are stylish and brash, with a hard shell of bravado that disguises a vulnerable soul. The characters, gangsters who are also World War I vets, are from the British equivalent of America’s Lost generation, one that shares an archetype with my own.

Millennials have their own noir sub-genre: film franchises based on young adult sci-fi dystopia novels, the touchstone being The Hunger Games. Other examples include Maze Runner and Divergent. All of these feature young people banding together against a hostile externally imposed system that categorizes, tests, and judges them. They clearly reflect the Millennial experience being raised in the zeitgeist.

I realize that this run down reflects my personal bias, and that there are plenty of not-so-dark shows available to watch. The most popular entertainment remains sports, reality TV, and basic crime drama where there are always identifiable good guys.

Not only that, film noir has been with us every decade since the genre got its name in the 1940s. It’s nothing new. But I do like how the current installments clearly reflect the experiences of today’s living generations and the spirit of the age.

In our time, politics has become vicious, resentment-driven partisan conflict fueled by racism and corruption. Long festering problems of economic insecurity and environmental degradation have grown to the point of seeming insolubility. A world that has become a real life dystopian hell invites a dark escapism into the hells of fictional dystopias.

Meanwhile, nothing is done. It might be that the only way out of our current mess is cataclysmic and violent change. To cut the Gordian Knot you need the sharp edge of a sword. Or a zombie apocalypse. There are so many end of the world stories coming out, because it’s where we assume we are headed.

But remember, it is the cycle that is coming to an end, not the world. Zombies are a fantasy. War, plague, climate change – those are real but of course we can survive them all. As we have before. History is inexorable and will take us into the next cycle whether we’re ready for it or not. We don’t get an escape hatch in the form of utter destruction. The craving for the end of the world is a cop out.

Consider the Greek roots of the word apocalypse: apo- ‘un-’ + kaluptein ‘to cover’. To uncover, to reveal. As in Revelations. The apocalypse is not a violent end, it is a moment of truth. It is the moment when the facade is swept away and the stark reality underneath is exposed, and we have to finally face the problems we have been putting off. It is happening now, shaking up and realigning our politics, pitting group against group.

Generation X can help lead us through this conflict. It won’t be the sci-fi extravaganza we have spent our lives fantasizing about. It will be a messy, mundane effort to reconstruct our teetering old political institutions to deal with life in the new century.

And I hope that what prevails is a stronger sense of community, built on the principles of one of the good groups from The Walking Dead – one that is fair and kind and inclusive. One that taps into, to quote Abraham Lincoln, “the better angels of our nature.”

Meanwhile, with my generation at the peak of life and in charge of creative content, you’ll just have to live with the new noir age while we work out our issues. Once we get through these dark times, some other generation can create celebratory epics of our triumphant passage through the gates of history.3

Well worn, as they have been there since presumably 2020, trod on by countless bargain hunters ever since.

Remember the pandemic, and that for a brief period we took social distancing seriously, and everyone (mostly) wore face masks in public, people working together to protect one another’s health? I remember being impressed by how resilient everyone was, quickly adapting to new behaviors like standing in line a few feet apart, or picking up items curbside. I remember taking inventory when I went out to the grocery store early in the pandemic - we got to over 90% of people masking in public.

There were always a few die hards who refused to comply with the simple public safety mandate of wearing a face mask. I suppose they imagined themselves to be resisters of tyranny, but with everyone else masking what they really were was free riders, benefiting from a safer environment by taking advantage of other people’s willingness to make a small sacrifice.

It didn’t take too long for even that short burst of cooperative spirit to come to an end. The pandemic got pulled into the partisan conflict that roils our nation, exacerbated no doubt by the Trump administration’s feckless response to the disaster. Willingness to follow mitigation behaviors such as masking fell off pretty fast where I live in MAGA-land.

But it still sticks with me that even here in MAGA-land, for a brief period, there was solidarity among the people. We were willing to work together, to follow a consensus of what needed to be done. We were united against a common threat, experiencing the coming together in the face of danger that forges a sense of community.

As I stood in line at the thrift store, looking down at the worn stickers on the floor, I actually felt nostalgic for the pandemic era.

Of course, I did have it better than others back then. As a stay-at-home nonessential worker (computer job, in other words), I benefited in many ways from the lockdown - lowered cost of living, more free time. I’m sure other people who didn’t have it so lucky are very glad the lockdown era is behind us.

But consider the following. There was a 2024 election post-mortem article in The Guardian that offered its own explanation for Trump's victory. It argued that voters ditched Biden-Harris in favor of Trump because of the shock of having the benefits of the pandemic welfare state pulled out from under them.

I propose a different explanation than inflation qua inflation: the Covid welfare state and its collapse. The massive, almost overnight expansion of the social safety net and its rapid, almost overnight rollback are materially one of the biggest policy changes in American history. For a brief period, and for the first time in history, Americans had a robust safety net: strong protections for workers and tenants, extremely generous unemployment benefits, rent control and direct cash transfers from the American government.

Trump may have bungled the pandemic in 2020, but then Biden bungled the post-pandemic during his term! People were finally enjoying having a government that looked out for them, and then that all ended and it was back to “normal,” Democrats having apparently forgotten that for a great many Americans, “normal” sucked.

How to get back to big, interventionist government taking actions that are broadly popular? How to restore that sense of solidarity, that feeling of being a people united to a common purpose? It's clear to me from the initial pandemic response that we are primed as a society for this to happen.

Our current Mad King is not a good leader for inspiring public consensus. He is only sowing more disunity and chaos with his authoritarian crackdown.

Could the Resistance fight against him be that Solidarity movement? I get that sense - the energy is there. The people have risen up in response to the brutality and lawlessness of the ICE Troopers in Minneapolis.

I have been heartened by the sense of hope uplifting folks who share my cause, and by Democrats in the Senate who have drawn a line against further ICE funding. But there is still not a movement at the national level to stop the administration from ignoring the U.S. Constitution. Can you imagine a nation-wide general strike, possibly the only option left to save democracy? It seems so unlikely, given that this country is vast and disorganized, assailed by powerful forces working against the people.

There is too much apathy, too many heads in the sand. The Mad King still has his loyalists - I see their laughing emojis in my Facebook feed all the time. They actually think what ICE Troopers are doing is justified. We are a fractured nation, with large swaths of people living in different realities.

Ex uno plures.

We are still waiting for a common cause, and for leaders who can bring us together.