Political Theory – The Scholar's Stage

American Nightmares: Wang Huning and Alexis de Tocqueville’s Dark Visions of the Future

28 March, 2024Culture, Futuristics, History, On Liberty, Political Theory, Possessions For All Time, The Middle Kingdom

There is a passage in Democracy in America that has appeared in many of my essays.” In the United States,” Tocqueville reports, “there is nothing the human will despairs of attaining through the free action of the combined power of individuals.” Tocqueville contrasts his vision of the American yeoman with the stereotypical “inhabitant of some European nations,” who “sees himself as a kind of settler, indifferent to the fate of the place he inhabits… enjoying what he has as a tenant, without any feeling of ownership or thought of possible improvement.”

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Christmas Day as Judgement Day

01 January, 2024Community, Political Theory, Possessions For All Time, Small and Simple Things, Things I Do Other Than Blogging

To write of Christmas after December 25th is neither a sin nor a crime, but there is something untoward in my tardiness. We meet the overdue Christmas missive with the same misgiving we reserve for the rooftop that twinkles through February. Even small children know—however much they may deny it—that the Christmas season cheers because it only lasts a season. The magical must be momentary. Thus we treat Christmas lights that last too long and Christmas tales that come too late with the same ill humor we greet a joke repeated one time too often. We do not smile on those who try to prolong a mood past its moment.

This essay risks pushing the holiday past its healthful limits. My excuse is only that it began as a series of tweets published on Christmas itself. My tweets auto-delete: if their message is to be preserved, they must be published here after Christmas Day.

The thesis I preserve is simple: the Christmas season is a sort of measuring stick. What is good in bourgeois civilization is concentrated in this season of beauty and merriment. Against this bar all creeds, all claimed paths to excellence, all cults of eudaimonia, may be measured. Against this bar most are found wanting.

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Lessons from the 19th Century

03 April, 2023By The People, Community, History, Political Theory

Readers of the Scholar’s Stage will be familiar with a thesis I have pursued in multiple essays and posts over the last half decade: America was once a place where institutional capacity was very high. Americans were a people with an extraordinary sense of agency. This is one of the central reasons they transformed the material, cultural, institutional, and political framework of not only the North American continent, but the entire world. That people is gone. The social conditions that gave the Americans their competence and confidence have passed away. Where Americans once asked “how do we solve this?” they now query “how do we get management on my side?”

Different pieces have investigated different aspects of this thesis.

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Watch Xi Jinping Slowly Strangle the Dengist Economic Paradigm

11 March, 2023History, Monied Interests, Political Theory, The Middle Kingdom

Xi Jinping’s decision to openly label the United States the source of China’s ills rolled through the newsletters, wire services, and commentators on China this week. Much has been written about this already; I have nothing to add. Here I call attention to something else that occurred at the National People’s Congress, an incident whose significance is perhaps not properly appreciated. Here is Nikkei’s description of the incident in question:

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Of Sanctions and Strategic Bombers

31 May, 2022Bargaining and Balancing, Diplomacy, Monied Interests, Political Theory, Russia

In the aftermath of the First World War, military theorists across the West were desperate to fashion a path around the next war’s trenches. Engineers and tacticians spent that war tinkering away on machines that promised an escape from attrition: the gas shell, the U-boat, and the armored tank were all deployed with these hopes. All were found wanting. The aeroplane was not expected to have quite the same impact. The flying contraptions of the First World War were feather-like: they were both too light for heavy ordinance and too slim for bulky fuel storage. Few of these biplanes and triplanes could penetrate deep behind enemy lines. None carried a payload capable of making a serious dent in the nearer trench works. Thus the incipient air forces of the First World War were chiefly used to reconnoiter the static defense works of the enemy—or to shoot down the enemy’s reconnoiterers. But the airmen flying and dying in Europe’s gray skies dreamed of something more.

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Generational Churn and the CPC

30 April, 2022Political Theory, The Middle Kingdom

You may remember a piece I wrote last summer. It was a review of Vladislav Zubok’s book, A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War From Stalin to Gorbachev. Zubok contends that the collapse of the Soviet Union should be understood as a consequence of generational turnover. I was attracted to the idea; generational turnover is the very mechanism I had identify as the key to American history in my essay “Culture Wars are Long Wars.”

A few weeks ago I came across an infographic that illustrates why the policies of the modern Chinese Communist Party are even more generationally bound than either the old CPSU or the current U.S. federal government:

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Learning From Our Defeat: the Madrassas and the Modern

20 April, 2022Bactria, Culture, Dogs of War, Entangling Alliances, History, Narrative, Political Theory

In all of my reading on Afghanistan, two books stand out. Both were highlighted in my list of the best 10 books I read in 2021: Carter Malkasian’s The American War in Afghanistan: A History and David Edwards’ Caravan of Martyrs: Sacrifice and Suicide Bombing in Afghanistan. Both authors are fluent in Pashto. Both draw plentifully from Taliban primary sources. Both have had hundreds of conversations with Afghans of all classes. Together they provide a powerful picture of the way the war has changed Afghan—especially Pashtun—society. The war in Afghanistan was first and foremost a war within that society. America chose to back one side of this civil war. These books lay out exactly what each side of this war was fighting for.

Or so I write in an essay published this weekend in Palladium. To understand the Taliban’s victory, I argue, you must understand what made the Taliban different from the wider Pashtun society from which they sprang.

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Thoughts on “Post Liberalism” (I)

27 January, 2022Community, History, Political Theory, Romans and Grecians

The political project of the “post liberals” is not my own. Many of their critiques of contemporary American life and politics mirror what I have written; many of their suggestions for the future of the American right I easily endorse. θBut the grander their essays, the broader their harangues, the less convincing they become. I suspect our most important divide concerns our understanding of history.

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The Rise and Fall of Civilizations: A Reader Course

13 January, 2022Arabia, Bactria, Bharat, Books and Literature, Complex Systems, Culture, Diplomacy, Dogs of War, Europa Regina, History, Narrative, Near East, On Humanity, Political Theory, Romans and Grecians, Small and Simple Things, Southeast Asia, Steppe and Sown, The Middle Kingdom, Wealth

A Scholar’s Stage forum member reports that he and a friend recently finished reading John Darwin’s After Tamerlane. Enraptured by Darwin’s account of flourish and fall, they ask what else they might read to understand the rise and decline of peoples and powers over the course of human history.

In my mind there are four central parts to this tale:

25 Comments

Yale and the Education of Governing Elites

07 October, 2021Diplomacy, Dogs of War, Education, History, Monied Interests, Political Theory, Possessions For All Time

The resignation of Beverly Gage, professor of history at Yale and director of the Brady-Johnson Grand Strategy Program, is the great brouhaha of the last weekend.

I am not a graduate of the grand strategy course, but have followed its development over the last decade and a half.

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Category Archives: Political Theory

American Nightmares: Wang Huning and Alexis de Tocqueville’s Dark Visions of the Future

Christmas Day as Judgement Day

Lessons from the 19th Century

Watch Xi Jinping Slowly Strangle the Dengist Economic Paradigm

Of Sanctions and Strategic Bombers

Generational Churn and the CPC

Learning From Our Defeat: the Madrassas and the Modern

Thoughts on “Post Liberalism” (I)

The Rise and Fall of Civilizations: A Reader Course

Yale and the Education of Governing Elites

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