[Jake]

Tanner: I wonder if current events re Israel-Gaza are a test of your thesis, particularly given reporting of the internal strife regarding handling of the conflict within the Biden Administration and external strife on campuses. I give less much significance to the latter—how the White House and agencies address and discuss this conflict matters for those on the ground and in turn reveals the standing of left, center-left, and centrist staff and organizations.

I may be wrong as Israel-Gaza certainly predates ‘culture war’ debates of the past decade and as such might not be representative of such debates. Still, like your piece on the contemporary right’s analysis of the Iraq War, I think the manner in which the various elements of the progressive movement handle and discuss Israel-Gaza reflect their prognoses for domestic issues.

A final point. I dislike meta commentary that focuses on how Americans discuss this issue as I think it shrouds the great human suffering. I recognize that this dislike is hypocritical because my post discusses meta commentary, but I believe the significant scope of meta commentary is in part due to the emphasis on meta commentary regarding domestic issues over the past few years.

[Jake]

Ethan, thanks for posting. You pulled the following TR quote, “Are the great laws of righteousness once more to be fulfilled? And the answer from a strong and virile person must be ‘Yes,’ whatever the cost.”

Earlier this summer, I read ‘Wasps – The Splendors and Miseries of an American Aristocracy,” by Michael Knox Beran. A central theme is the nervous and melancholic nature of late 19th-20th century WASPs, something they referred to as “neurasthenia.”

In an interview, Beran explained the condition, “After the Civil War, there was a great Dante craze among certain elements of American life. They had all kinds of nervous breakdowns. They knew it as neurasthenia, and they all suffered. They all were sort of head cases. And Dante really spoke to them by describing their state of mind, their inner anguish, but also his belief that you could work through it and see the light.” Beran notes in the book that TR had the “characteristic WASP admiration for Dante”; TR wrote in 1911 that no modern poet could match Dante’s description of “what is elemental in the human soul.”

More on TR: several WASPs remarked on his restless, brash, and juvenile nature. They decried his rejection of any sophisticated comprehension of literature beyond statecraft and warfare. However, Beran speculates that TR’s “broad rather than deep” pool of knowledge reflected TR’s unfocused nature, which itself prevented him from ‘catching’ the lethargic neurasthenia that affected his fellow WASPs.

TR seemed to be fighting against the neurasthenia his saw in his class, and this fight was borne out in his foreign policy imbued with what he perceived to be vigor and strength. However, drawing on observations from TR’s contemporaries, Beran details that “[b]eneath the masquerade of the warrior-breeder lay a child’s exuberance that was seldom abated by the adult’s anxious preoccupations.” Henry Adams quipped that “[i]t has not the excuse of champagne, the wild talk about everything—Panama, Russia, Germany, England, and whatever else suggested itself—belong not to the bar-room but the asylum.”

Thus, I don’t think TR’s view can be summarized simply as ‘moralist.’ In fact, I don’t think it can be distinguished from the writing of the op-ed authors sampled in Tanner’s NR piece, all of whom seek self and national reinvigoration through foreign policy.

Tanner, you ask, “If part of the purpose was internal purification, and this purification did not occur, then what is the point?” I think that some of TR’s WASP acquaintances felt the same away. Ultimately, they were correct. The WASPs failed to maintain vigor even with American involvement in the World Wars and the Cold War, and they withered into relative obscurity.

As an aside, it was pleasant to read Beran alongside Walter Isaacson & Evan Thomas’ “The Wise Men – Six Friends and the World They Made.” The men profiled are arguably the pinnacle of WASP skill and influence. Yet, while Isaacson & Thomas’ portray their achievements, Beran illustrates the collapse of the social structure around them–taking care to detail the curiously common occurrences of suicide of amongst the WASP elite. Surely the Wise Men were aware of this. I wonder whether, if not for WW2 and the Cold War swallowing their effort, the WASPs steering the foreign policy ship abroad would have instead shorn up their social structure at home. Still, that seems anathema to the entire WASP project.

[Jake]

I’m skeptical of an ideological Big Civil War. I don’t think centralized, ideologically pure actors exist in the necessary form to coordinate logistics.

Blue Cities don’t have an insular supply chain, both in terms of items to run a state (food, energy, etc.) and actors needed to keep order (police in Blue cities are themselves somewhat, if not mostly, conservative. Certainly more so than other agencies and the idea of ‘liberal coastal elites’. Additionally, blue cities rely on federal funds and agencies to keep order in the more impoverished and violent areas. I

Philadelphia relies on a large police presence to keep order and safety due to violence in it’s northern areas and relies on truck supply chains which run through, at minimum, the conservative central and western areas of the state (including the memed Breezewood truck strop). This is before any analysis of these trucks going through Red States, or the fact that truckers themselves might not want to run to blue areas. Should a partition happen, how is this ‘Blue’ city supposed to coordinate as a sovereign actor, much less in coordination with other Blue areas against Red areas.

I highly doubt Blue on Red nationwide war breaks out in large campaigns. I think violence would be regionalized and localized, with Rio/cartel-esque outcomes in cities (favelas — one zone controlled by Chief of Police, another by organized/unorganized criminal rings). Its hard to think what would happen in suburban areas. I think rural areas would be hosed in terms of living standards, but would probably organize the most recognizable forms of governance. This is also discounting any DoD action, not sure what to think of that. I do think drug cartels would take charge of much of southern Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico.

[Jake]

Re Evergrande, Robert Armstrong wrote in Financial Times that “The ugliest number on Evergrande’s balance sheet is not captured in the red lines ratios at all. It is, instead, Evergrande’s Rmb951bn ($142bn) in short-term payables.”

Contrast that number with two quotes:
-“housing is for living in and not for speculation” and;
-“the [housing] sector shouldn’t be used as a short-term tool to stimulate the economy”.

These were said by Xi Jinping and Vice Premier Han Zheng (via Bloomberg), but, in the spirt of Tanner’s heuristic, could absolutely be pulled from any number of New Yorker articles, Brooklyn podcaster episodes, or r/LateStageCapitalism comment threads.

[Jake]

Should state level bans take hold, I think success in preventing teachers from teaching CRT would vary regionally. It would also probably rely on whether the principal/school administrators favor CRT. Which, again, would vary regionally. I’d be interested to see educational data on middle/high school admins. They may be some-college, not MAs, which might mean they’re likely to be more skeptical than their dual-degreed counterparts.

But! The real question is whether successfully implementing a ban would “work” at discredting CRT amongst the younger generations, right? Might that have the opposite effect from the one conservatives intend?

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