Narrative – Page 2 – The Scholar's Stage

Learning From Our Defeat: The Skill of the Vulcans

26 October, 2021Bargaining and Balancing, Dogs of War, Narrative, Small and Simple Things, The Presidency

The national security teams of Bush 41 and Bush 43, America’s most accomplished and most reviled set of statesmen officials… were the exact same set of people. The authors of America’s Cold War victory were the architects of America’s 21st century defeats. There lies the mystery! With more collective experience under their belts than any foreign policy team since the Founding Era, with a greater list of accomplishments than any group of national security elites since the creation of the modern national security state, the statesmen-officials of the second Bush administration should have accomplished glorious deeds. They should have lived up to their track records. Instead, they delivered failure and catastrophe. How could this have happened?

19 Comments

As the Generations Churn: The Strategic Consequences of Cultural Change in Communist Russia… and China?

26 August, 2021Culture, Demographics, Diplomacy, History, Narrative, Oligarchy, Russia, Small and Simple Things, The Middle Kingdom

Vladislav M. Zubok’s A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War From Stalin to Gorbachev is a surprising counterpart to my essay, “Culture Wars are Long Wars.” That essay proposed a general theory of cultural change. Key to its thesis was the observation that most cultural change does not occur because people change their ideas, but because people with new ideas replace people with old ones. As most people form their essential political worldview by the time they are 30 and only adapt it on the edges to new circumstances, only the most earth shaking events have the power to fundamentally shift the frameworks and values that the majority filter their politics through. Large scale cultural shift is largely a story of generational churn.

While the focus of that piece was on American domestic politics, this is a general phenomena that applies across cultures and time periods. Vladislav Zubok understands this. The generational nature of political change is a recurring theme of Failed Empire, which chronicles the ups and downs of Soviet diplomacy from the end of World War II to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. While we often describe Soviet history in terms of the leader reigning at the top of the system, Zubok argues that shifts in Soviet strategic behavior reflected not only the differing leadership styles of the various CPSU General Secretaries, but broader transitions from one generation of leaders to another.

18 Comments

We Must Learn From Our Defeat

21 August, 2021Bactria, Dogs of War, Narrative, The Legislature, The Presidency

Twenty years ago a nation comfortable but aimless was thrust by violence into a new reality. “Does anybody but me feel upbeat, and guilty about it?,” asked one conservative columnist a few weeks later. “I feel upbeat because the country seems to be a better place than it was a month ago. I feel guilty about it because I should be feeling pain and horror and anger about the recent events.” But he was not the only one to feel this way.

46 Comments

Scrap the Myth of Panic

15 July, 2021By The People, Community, Media, Narrative, Nature Red in Tooth and Claw, Political Theory, The Middle Kingdom, The Presidency

If there is one lesson the world should learn from the great pandemic of 2020, it is this: we must discard the myth of panic.

Or at least this is the case I make in an essay I have just published in Palladium. Fear of mass panic was key to delayed action against the epidemic in the PRC:

9 Comments

In Favor of Bad Takes

13 July, 2021Community, Narrative, Small and Simple Things

Over at the Duck of Minerva Daniel Nexon has posted a reflective essay on the way the political science blogosphere has changed over the last two decades. Nexon’s IR-themed group blog was one of the first “political science blogs” of the aughts; at the old blogosphere’s height it was the largest academic-IR themed blog on the internet. I first encountered it around that time, when debates from the “strategy sphere” were spilling into the larger online conversation. America was debating the wisdom of the surge and our path forward in the Middle East, and blogs like Duck of Minerva dove into the controversy.

Though he couches his disappointment in diplomatic language, Nexon is bummed about the state of online poli-sci…

16 Comments

Culture Wars are Long Wars

03 July, 2021Community, Culture, Narrative

We are told that we “lost the culture war.” I dissent from this view: we never waged a culture war. Conservatives certainly fought, there is no denying that. We fought with every bit of obstruction and scandal our operatives could muster. But this was not a culture war. Rather, America’s conservatives fought a political war over culture.

107 Comments

Historians, Slaves of Fashion?

16 June, 2021History, Narrative

Daniel Gullotta’s Age of Jackson podcast is one of the few I listen to regularly. In 2021 I don’t have a lot of spare bandwidth to keep track of developments in my favorite field of American history, but I do listen to his interviews with new authors in the field to stay somewhat up to date. Listening to a book talk is not the same thing as reading a book, of course, but it is better than slowly having years of labor slip away from memory with disuse.

14 Comments

The Magic in Modernity

26 May, 2021Narrative

It is something of a commonplace that the mix of capitalist exchange and technological advance we call ‘modernity’ has stripped the world of its luster. Once we dwelt in fairy glens and dwarven vales, greeting Helios as he made his way across the sky

8 Comments

The Framers and the Framed: Notes On the Slate Star Codex Controversy

25 February, 2021Bargaining and Balancing, Community, Media, Monied Interests, Narrative

Let’s talk about the grand Slate Star Codex brouhaha. A lot of people have already written about this. Here is the original New York Times piece that started the controversy. [1] Against the Grey Lady we have Cathy Young, Robby Soave, Micah Meadowcroft, Matthew Yglesias, Freddie DeBoer, Scott Aaronson, Noah Smith, and Dan Drezner, as […]

26 Comments

Why Writers (and Think Tankers) Feud So Viciously

16 February, 2021Books and Literature, Community, Narrative

Some of the things that make “the discourse” terrible are new to social media—especially Twitter. But not all. Some other problems are very, very old. Perhaps the best guide to today’s Twitter beefs was written near three centuries ago. Listen here to one Adam Smith, theorist of moral sentiments. Our journey begins with an observation: […]

4 Comments

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