Bharat Rakshak

At the start of World War I, Admiral Charles Fitzgerald, who was a strong advocate of conscription, wanted to increase the number of those enlisting in the armed forces. Therefore he organized on 30 August 1914 a group of thirty women in his home town of Folkestone to hand out white feathers to any men that were not in uniform. Fitzgerald believed using women to shame the men into enlisting would be the most effective method of encouraging enlistment.[5][6] The group that he founded (with prominent members being Emma Orczy and the prominent author Mary Augusta Ward) was known as the White Feather Brigade or the Order of the White Feather.[7]

Although the draft would conscript both sexes, only males would be on the front lines.[8][9][10][check quotation syntax] While the true effectiveness of the campaign is impossible to judge, it spread throughout several other nations in the empire. In Britain, it started to cause problems for the government when public servants and men in essential occupations came under pressure to enlist.

Anecdotes from the time indicate that the campaign was unpopular among soldiers, not least because soldiers who were home on leave could find themselves presented with feathers.

Supporters of the campaign were not easily put off. A woman who confronted a young man in a London park demanded to know why he was not in the army. "Because I am a German", he replied. He received a white feather anyway.[13]

Occasionally injured veterans were mistakenly targeted, such as Reuben W. Farrow who after being aggressively asked by a woman on a tram why he would not do his duty, turned around and showed his missing hand causing her to apologize.[7]

Perhaps the most misplaced use of a white feather was when one was presented to Seaman George Samson, who was on his way in civilian clothes to a public reception being held in his honour for having been awarded the Victoria Cross for gallantry in the Gallipoli campaign.[14]


The writer Compton Mackenzie, then a serving soldier, complained about the activities of the Order of the White Feather. He argued that "idiotic young women were using white feathers to get rid of boyfriends of whom they were tired".[16] The pacifist Fenner Brockway said he received so many white feathers that he had enough to make a fan.[17]

ricky_v wrote:even under the ambiguous title of the thread, this post would probably not pass muster, but i think it is an important piece of history and an insight into free will, societal pressures and mass manipulation by the govt for their own gain; in certain quarters, there is an apprehension that something akin to the below will be surreptitiously introduced to force the younger male generation to join the armed forces and boost record-low numbers

Haresh wrote:...

The son believed in conscription, because of the "danger" of Russia, he was very much in favour of it.
BUT ........he made it clear that he would leave rather than do it himself.

The problem with nations that have professional armies is that the common man thinks that war is some sort of camping expedition with nerf guns thrown in. When soldiers die the response is "well he chose to join!!"

Western militaries are in a recruitment crisis, because of all their previous wars and the utter incompetence of politicians they have ended in disaster. The list is long. It is all well and to talk about it, all you have to do nowadays to show how patriotic and gungho you are is to make war like comments on newspaper website comments sections. They dying and suffering is done by others.

ricky_v wrote:
very intriguing image, highly dynamic with many options delineated on the matrix:

1) what future do you chose and why
2) what future do you think is the most probable and why
2) do we have an indic verison of this?

RoyG wrote: Waste of time

The similar destinies of the United States and Rome can at times seem eerie. The three Punic Wars fought between the middle of the third century BC and the middle of the second century BC, constituted the great world wars of ancient Mediterranean civilisation, and ended with Rome’s complete destruction of Carthage. More recently, the two world wars of the 20th century ended with the complete destruction and defeat of Germany and Japan, and with the United States in a position of global dominance. In both conflicts, an empire’s supremacy reached its peak at the moment of victory.

Like the United States during the Second World War, Rome in the course of the Punic Wars became an empire. The First and Second Punic Wars saw Roman power established over Sicily, Sardinia and a good part of Spain — all former areas of Carthaginian influence. Rome also gradually extended its sway over greater Greece and Numidia, the latter coinciding with modern Algeria, to the west of Carthage on the North African coast.

Again, somewhat like the United States, imperialism helped lead to a dramatic increase in wealth in Rome itself, as a class of nouveau riche in the capital benefited from war booty, overseas trade, money lending and the like, according to the late British classicist S. A. Handford. Eventually, the Roman legions would evolve from a mass conscription military to a more professional, volunteer fighting force in order to regulate the vast territories under its influence as an imperial behemoth. The rough parallel with the development of the United States as a great power is hard to ignore, given how Washington itself has developed into a money-culture of well-heeled think tanks and flashy lobbyists, even as the mass conscription army that fought Second World War and Vietnam has morphed into a highly professional volunteer force of working-class youth, culturally divorced from the well-bred policy nomenklatura in the capital.

But the comparison becomes especially eerie when one considers that following the Punic Wars and Rome’s becoming an empire, it immersed itself in small wars against tribes and other chieftains that brought little glory and much political complications to Rome, and were a factor in its gradual decline.

In the oft-quoted words of the mid-20th century American theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr:

“The same strength which has extended our power beyond a continent has also interwoven our destiny with the destiny of many peoples and brought us into a vast web of history in which other wills, running in oblique or contrasting directions to our own, inevitably hinder or contradict what we most fervently desire.”

The young Winston Churchill was reading into the worst nightmare of Niebuhr’s and America’s imperial future when, in 1897, he described Afghanistan in The Story of the Malakand Field Force: “a roadless, broken and underdeveloped country; an absence of any strategic points; a well-armed enemy with great mobility and modern rifles, who adopts guerrilla tactics. The result… [is] that the troops can march anywhere, and do anything, except catch the enemy….

Subsidies and small expeditions? Now we are at a point of concision that defines the ancient Roman imperial past and the modern American one. Arguably the signature Roman imperial expedition, which vexed Rome and contributed to much political turmoil in the capital, was the so-called Jugurthine War, which lasted for seven years near the end of the second century BC. We owe our account of it to Sallust, who was born a few decades later in the first century BC, a time when this war fought by the Romans in Numidia against its king, Jugurtha, was still recent and presumably hotly debated. The geopolitics of the Jugurthine War were straightforward. Numidia, to the west of Carthage, had been an ally of Rome and their common hostility to Carthage had cemented their alliance. Yet, following Rome’s destruction of Carthage, Numidia suddenly no longer required Roman protection. That set the context for Numidia’s efforts at erasing Roman influence from its sprawling and difficult geography.

Jugurtha was a brilliant and devious king who fought against his adopted siblings over the spoils of Numidia, and bribed his way to victory time after time by his intrigues with Rome. He corrupted Rome and concomitantly gained power in Numidia. At first he was Rome’s ally. Then he became Rome’s enemy. By the time the Roman power structure realised he had to be destroyed it was too late to avoid a major war in a faraway territory. Sallust describes the war as “a hard-fought and bloody contest in which victories alternated with defeats”. The struggle, he goes on, “played havoc with all our institutions… For Jugurtha was so crafty, so well acquainted with the country, and so experienced in warfare, that one never knew what was the most deadly — his presence or his absence, his offers of peace or his threats of hostilities.”

There are shades of Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, and Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in Jugurtha, in terms of the unconventional threat posed to Rome and the United States. In some cases the imperial power was ultimately victorious, as was Rome against Jugurtha; in some cases not. But the overall effect over time was to subtly and not so subtly weaken the empire.

The problem is compounded by the nature of the foreign policy establishment in Washington, often disparaged as the “Blob”, because it often thinks according to a single, well-rehearsed mindset. The Blob wants to do great things in this world, because its heroes — those it particularly wants to emulate — were “present at the creation”, as the saying goes. I refer to the American inventors of the post-war order: men such as George Kennan, John McCloy, Averell Harriman, Dean Acheson and so on. The alliance structure that these men built would eventually, over the course of the decades, win the Cold War. The Blob wants to do something similar: create a new and long-lasting American order.

There is a pattern in all of this: great power wars strengthen a nation and relatively smaller expeditionary wars dissipate it. In our age, a small war means a professional military in fierce combat and a nation at the shopping mall, oblivious to what is going on overseas. When the population at home cannot relate to the fighting overseas, it is probably best if possible not to do it.


And yet, the Biden Administration is going beyond merely defending Ukraine and Taiwan with arms shipments. It is actually demanding that all countries in the world become democracies, something that the great secretaries of state of the late-Cold War Era, Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, and James Baker III, never would have done. Those diplomats were more interested in reconciliations than with issuing ultimatums. Issuing ideological ultimatums is a sign of decadence, that befits a country that is splitting at the seams politically and with an out-of-control national debt.

The Jugurthine War helped presage the end of the Roman Republic. Will America recover from the stain of its Middle East adventures? It’s an open question. Yet, great power rivalry that will likely continue for years, by engaging the whole society and economy, may change America in unpredictable ways, possibly leading to more political and social cohesion.

ricky_v wrote:https://unherd.com/2023/06/will-america ... omes-fate/

The similar destinies of the United States and Rome can at times seem eerie. The three Punic Wars fought between the middle of the third century BC and the middle of the second century BC, constituted the great world wars of ancient Mediterranean civilisation, and ended with Rome’s complete destruction of Carthage. More recently, the two world wars of the 20th century ended with the complete destruction and defeat of Germany and Japan, and with the United States in a position of global dominance. In both conflicts, an empire’s supremacy reached its peak at the moment of victory.

...........

Subsidies and small expeditions? Now we are at a point of concision that defines the ancient Roman imperial past and the modern American one. Arguably the signature Roman imperial expedition, which vexed Rome and contributed to much political turmoil in the capital, was the so-called Jugurthine War, which lasted for seven years near the end of the second century BC. We owe our account of it to Sallust, who was born a few decades later in the first century BC, a time when this war fought by the Romans in Numidia against its king, Jugurtha, was still recent and presumably hotly debated. The geopolitics of the Jugurthine War were straightforward. Numidia, to the west of Carthage, had been an ally of Rome and their common hostility to Carthage had cemented their alliance. Yet, following Rome’s destruction of Carthage, Numidia suddenly no longer required Roman protection. That set the context for Numidia’s efforts at erasing Roman influence from its sprawling and difficult geography.

Jugurtha was a brilliant and devious king who fought against his adopted siblings over the spoils of Numidia, and bribed his way to victory time after time by his intrigues with Rome. He corrupted Rome and concomitantly gained power in Numidia. At first he was Rome’s ally. Then he became Rome’s enemy. By the time the Roman power structure realised he had to be destroyed it was too late to avoid a major war in a faraway territory. Sallust describes the war as “a hard-fought and bloody contest in which victories alternated with defeats”. The struggle, he goes on, “played havoc with all our institutions… For Jugurtha was so crafty, so well acquainted with the country, and so experienced in warfare, that one never knew what was the most deadly — his presence or his absence, his offers of peace or his threats of hostilities.”

There are shades of Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, and Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in Jugurtha, in terms of the unconventional threat posed to Rome and the United States. In some cases the imperial power was ultimately victorious, as was Rome against Jugurtha; in some cases not. But the overall effect over time was to subtly and not so subtly weaken the empire.

There is a pattern in all of this: great power wars strengthen a nation and relatively smaller expeditionary wars dissipate it. In our age, a small war means a professional military in fierce combat and a nation at the shopping mall, oblivious to what is going on overseas. When the population at home cannot relate to the fighting overseas, it is probably best if possible not to do it.


And yet, the Biden Administration is going beyond merely defending Ukraine and Taiwan with arms shipments. It is actually demanding that all countries in the world become democracies, something that the great secretaries of state of the late-Cold War Era, Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, and James Baker III, never would have done. Those diplomats were more interested in reconciliations than with issuing ultimatums. Issuing ideological ultimatums is a sign of decadence, that befits a country that is splitting at the seams politically and with an out-of-control national debt.

The Jugurthine War helped presage the end of the Roman Republic. Will America recover from the stain of its Middle East adventures? It’s an open question. Yet, great power rivalry that will likely continue for years, by engaging the whole society and economy, may change America in unpredictable ways, possibly leading to more political and social cohesion.

disha wrote:

It is inline with my expectation that US-India relations "are not just bullet points on a page". I posit that the global order has changed already and only two countries are capable to lead the world. US and India.

World is helped if both US and India work together for a better world future. Of course, for this US has to do more to get out of its self-centered Pax America policy and India (in general) has to be more confident about its role and responsibility. China does not matter, being a 1000lb self-centered gorilla, it has nothing to offer to the world other than strife, disease and cheap electronics.

Here is a thought exercise for the forum members, I state with complete confidence that the entire Asian identity, spanning from west Asia (not the middle-east/africa) and all the way to Japan is the result of Indic philosophy. What Asia thinks and behaves, except the colonial, islamic and the communist imprints, is basically rooted in Indic philosophy.

So if India is now responsible (uttardayitva) and rightful nation (uttaradhikari) to lead the world, the dayitva and adhikar has been handed to us by our ancestors tying us to the only unbroken human civilization on this Earth.*

Sullivan is in India this week for meetings with top Indian officials ahead of the Modi visit.

Modi’s visit comes as the Biden administration is working to deepen its relationship with countries that are crucial to counter what it sees as China’s growing threat. In deepening its ties with India the US has also appeared willing to overlook its democratic backsliding as it seeks to pull the South Asian nation away from Russia’s sphere of influence.

1. US needs allies against China threat. Or does it need a frontline ally? Yes, China did a cardinal and strategic mistake of attacking its neighbour in the south twice and losing complete trust and respect. No different than the neighbour in north-west which is always tactically brilliant and strategically stupid.

2. And it is interesting an article from a banana republic (US) is putting out "overlook its (India's) democratic backsliding" as if the later needs any approval card! Is the assertion a common edit from the editorial board of bloomberg?

Ties between US and India have grown stronger as concerns over China have increased despite significant differences “in the fields of values and vision,” said Sushant Singh, a senior fellow at New the Centre of Policy Research, a New Delhi-based think tank. “Those are currently being overridden by interests.”

The jet engine agreement, which would require technology transfer from America, will need approval from the US Congress, where India is banking on the general upswing in ties and bipartisan support to clear remaining hurdles.

Bengaluru-based Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd. and India’s Ministry of External Affairs didn’t immediately reply to requests for comment. The US National Security Council had no comment, and GE declined to comment.

The jet engine agreement would fit in with Modi’s wider push to boost defense manufacturing locally but with technology partnerships with nations that are keen to draw New Delhi into their orbit as Russia’s war in Ukraine drags on into a second year. Earlier this month Germany’s Thyssenkrupp AG’s marine arm and India’s Mazagon Dock Shipbuilders Ltd. signed an initial agreement to jointly build submarines for the Indian navy.

Russia remains India’s largest supplier of military hardware, though purchases have slowed by 19% in the last five years due to sanctions and increased competition from other manufacturing countries. Russian deliveries of military supplies to India have ground to a halt as the countries struggle to find a payment mechanism that doesn’t violate Western sanctions.

The domestic production of the GE engines will strengthen India’s fighter jet program and its air force, whose fleet of rapidly aging Russian fighters need to be replaced. It will also boost Modi’s image as he looks at a third term in office in national elections next year.

India and the US will also likely inch closer to agreements on other defense issues, including India’s purchase of over a dozen armed drones that could exponentially boost its sea and land defense capabilities.
...
--With assistance from Jennifer Jacobs and Ryan Beene.

One outcome that I am rooting for is for India to get enough cooperation from US to bolster its security, including defense & energy security and economy and deepening trade ties.

* PS: If mods permit, I want to gather articles, information and evidences in a thread under "Indian Philosophy and how it molds the Asian identity". This thought was triggered by one-off statement by an ASI historian in a vlog and my visits to museums and seeing art & sculpture from Mongolia, S. Korea and Japan. And of course, the PM of Papua New-Guinea touching the feet of PM of India.

ricky_v wrote:

disha wrote: China does not matter, being a 1000lb self-centered gorilla, it has nothing to offer to the world other than strife, disease and cheap electronics.

apologies if off-topic

imo, this view is incorrect, i have been looking at some of the videos of african and latin leaders with western broadcasters / officials, the view is always the same "you (the collective west) can only give lectures, china gives us infrastructure", that china gains through exorbitant rates and chinese companies is another matter, at the end of the day, these deprived nations get some much needed infra, whether it be power plants, dams, roads, bridges, airports, city infra ityadi, china, thus has heft and it would be unwise to broadly dismiss this outreach. These nations are also realising that though the west gave a lot of aid to them, this mostly went to chieftains, warlords who kept their nation in disarray for easier access to rare earths, the rest went to the ngos which very neatly operate out of any government jurisdiction (the assertion is not far-fetched, we all remember the halcyon days of the maino-led vaunted NAC). So, when the chinese show up and actually build something on the ground, it goes a long way in trust.

Here is a thought exercise for the forum members, I state with complete confidence that the entire Asian identity, spanning from west Asia (not the middle-east/africa) and all the way to Japan is the result of Indic philosophy. What Asia thinks and behaves, except the colonial, islamic and the communist imprints, is basically rooted in Indic philosophy.

i disagree with assertion for you have not included the elephant.. or the lion in the room, persia / iran. Islam was spread by the arabic sword, yes, but it was nurtured and maintained by the persian philosophy / outlook and more chiefly by its bureaucrats / officials / vizier, i beleive there are many accounts of core arabs lamenting the persian involvement in governance during their "golden ages", also nowroz (inb4 navratri)

added later



; the prthus and parsus have been alien and distant ever since the days of the Dasarajanaya Yudhha and we have drifted apart much, persia was more molded by its conflicts with the Hellenistic worldview and the mideast including well into the balkans has a bedrock of both persian and hellenistic influences topped up by arabic, med, orthodox, turkic in varying proportions.

Now, the indic civilisation has also been influenced by the hellenstic outlook, yavanas have been a common feature in antiquity, and once their bloodlines intermingled with the hunas, sakas and kushanas, they were also major players in indic politics for some time, though this time the bedrock was indic...iow, if there are similarities, then it is a combination of outlook of pre-schism india and greek influence... and later with the mughals, but the layering is superficial, the meat of our philosophies are very different

World is helped if both US and India work together for a better world future. Of course, for this US has to do more to get out of its self-centered Pax America policy and India (in general) has to be more confident about its role and responsibility.

all major civilisations have this 3-power phase , india (rashtrakutas, chalukyas, pala-pratihara), china (most of its history has this 3 power), europe and then the west, and this is the phase that the world is entering currently, imo, china supplies the hardware for the world (infra building), us supplies the software (institution building) as it wishes, india supplies it as it is (the rules based), there are always chances of a conflict in this matter

again, apologies for this ot post

RoyG wrote: Ricky_V,

I enjoyed reading your post. You’re going into territory which should be in Islam post.

One thing that is relevant to the this thread is the issue of servility which seems to have its origins in pre-Islamic beginnings of degeneration of Indian culture which later solidified with the persianized Islamic colonialism and reinforced with the British.

While we are chipping away at the colonized psyche, we still face an uphill battle with the more substantive issues. The Indo- US at first glance seems to be driven by China but I think it’s more than this. We have a problem with policymakers being tied to America through family, forced adoption of French enlightenment ideals and the democratic setup, the English apartheid state, and an anglicized civil service which largely escapes accountability by law. Despite cosmetic feel good symbolic gestures, these things remain intact.

My view is that China has been a mostly positive force for the world and India and has given us possibilities to piggyback partially on an emerging non-western framework. I think the time has come to rethink the state itself and whether it should be based on any sort of “ideals” which has been a western fashion for the past millennia. We perhaps start with the question - What comes naturally to us Indians?

RoyG wrote:
Haven’t researched as much into Persians apart from the basic structure of its court but Hellenic civilizations collapsed because they couldn’t pick a dominant configuration of learning (plato vs bards).

RoyG wrote:
One thing that is relevant to the thread is the issue of servility which seems to have its origins in pre-Islamic beginnings of degeneration of Indian culture which later solidified with the persianized Islamic colonialism and reinforced with the British.

We have a problem with policymakers being tied to America through family, forced adoption of French enlightenment ideals and the democratic setup, the English apartheid state, and an anglicized civil service which largely escapes accountability by law. Despite cosmetic feel good symbolic gestures, these things remain intact.

This thread is ironic in the sense that everyone swears there is an alternative to western universalism, but there is no model which survives today to replace it.

I think the time has come to rethink the state itself and whether it should be based on any sort of “ideals” which has been a western fashion for the past millennia. We perhaps start with the question - What comes naturally to us Indians?

More worrisome is that when you point out their logical inconsistencies and show how they are semites masquerading as Indians they become defensive and try to show how we indeed had things like democracy, human rights, feminism, etc since ancient times.

What does it take to found a new state? The abstract thought experiments of social theorizing tend to suggest a collective choice: a people deliberates, agrees on a social contract that best embodies its values, and then instantiates the appropriate social and institutional forms.


How exactly do people become “a people,” and what does it mean for them to choose together? How should they begin formal deliberations, given they are creating something new rather than operating under previously accepted rules? Why should the members of the group accept a particular leader to organize or preside over such deliberations?


Such questions create what Cornell political scientist Richard Bensel calls the “opening dilemma.” From a logical or legalistic perspective, Bensel argues that there can be no satisfactory answers to these conundrums. And yet, nation-states are founded. Leaders find ways to assume the mantle of the general will and simultaneously supply the people with an identity and a new state that will serve a “transcendent social purpose” integral to that identity. If they succeed at this task, which generally requires harnessing the masses’ emotions rather than satisfying any rigorous demands for reason or coherence, the leaders of the new state will simply bypass the practical difficulties that might otherwise be insurmountable. But to do this, they must use the cultural materials at hand. If the people lack a sense of unity, it is unlikely they can be talked into it. Offering an alien, artificial, or simply uninspiring purpose will leave them hopelessly mired in the opening dilemma.

Foundings are tightly tied up with revolutions—but Bensel makes it very clear that they are not simply two sides of the same coin. As he puts it, “A revolution decisively rejects the legitimacy of the ruling regime in the name of an alternative transcendent social purpose; a founding melds that purpose with a new state’s right to rule.”

Instead, the English people and the English constitutional monarchy grew up together, with moments like the adoption of Magna Carta simply affirming rights Englishmen regarded (even in 1215) as enduring from “time out of mind.” Even the Glorious Revolution emphasized continuity despite decisively establishing Parliament as the supreme authority in the state (with the concept of “the King-in-Parliament” smoothing over the conceptual disruption), so much so that that body “now sits as a constitutional convention whenever it convenes as a legislative body.” Parliament’s possession of overbearing formal authority, coupled with the English state’s dedication to protecting the historically-constituted rights of Englishmen, has peculiarly “elevated history to the position of guarantor” in English politics.

In each of these cases, the opponents of the old regime quickly discover that successfully toppling the old regime does not amount to establishing a legitimate state to take its place. Doing that requires grappling with who “the people” really are, and how the new government will live up to their aspirations. Bensel persuasively demonstrates that this next stage is not about aggregating values or polling the public to discern their wishes, because the very question of whose preferences should be treated as worthy is open to redefinition.

Both democratic and authoritarian states may rely on post-facto public ratification of founding decisions, but such events can make only a modest contribution to the essential ingredient: “a mythological conception of the will of the people, including a belief that that will can be revealed only through a properly conceived and performed political practice.” Any founding must be careful in how the public is asked to manifest its consent for the new regime, since agenda-setting and the determination of electoral qualifications are likely to predetermine the outcome. Both democrats and budding totalitarians want to harness the real will of the real people, as opposed to some counterfeit produced by misunderstanding or subversion, and both realize that voters, left to their own devices, will not arrive at satisfying institutional solutions.

What differentiates the two types of states, in Bensel’s view, is “the degree to which they insist on refining that will after the state has been founded.” The choice for ongoing democracy is, in part, an admission of imperfection on the part of democratic founders, who concede that the will of the people cannot be distilled so perfectly as to settle the important questions for all time. Consequently, the state must seek periodic direction from the people through elections, as imperfect as those may themselves be. Non-democratic founders, on the other hand, offer their people a truly transcendent vision of their place in history, which can only be realized by deference to the newly established authority, uniquely capable of serving the people’s true interests and fulfilling their destiny. Bensel claims that for both kinds of founders, the people’s imperfections necessitate a certain amount of benign manipulation. Going further, he rather startling observes, “It is just that some of these manipulations grate more harshly on our own Western sensibilities than others.”

Put another way: Bensel teaches us how the belief in a people’s “historic mission” can generate enough enthusiasm to get a founding over the hump, but he doesn’t much consider whether a sincere belief in such a mission will inevitably bring down states founded on this basis over the long run. He does give us a hint that this could be the case, observing that founders who espouse a world-historical mission are likely to see the states they are creating as inherently too modest vessels for the fulfillment of the people’s destiny, and therefore put a need for international expansion into the DNA of the new state.

Notwithstanding this downside of non-democratic foundings, in the book’s final paragraph Bensel raises a disturbing possibility: perhaps, in the contemporary world, it is only non-democratic founders who arm themselves with myths potent enough to overcome the opening dilemma. In democracies, meanwhile, “the entire apparatus of intellectual and scientific culture seems to be dedicated to exposing [myths and abstract beliefs] as fantasies,” which may mean that “we have exhausted this paradigm” in the modern world.

By closing with this foreboding, Bensel finally lets the normative camel get its nose under the tent. Perhaps democracies need to take the requirement of crafting their own mythologies more seriously—but our very reverence for the social scientific mindset and its demythologizing tendency could render that impossible. Given our limited ability to give our hearts over to new organizing principles, we ought to face up to the precariousness of democratic societies in the contemporary world—to realize that we need to conserve what we have, rather than fantasizing about modern refoundings of some sort. There is the disturbing possibility that, unlike our forebears, we would never make it out of the starting gate.

Whether we like it or not, we all live in the world the US has made.
Now, suffering from buyer’s remorse, it has decided to remake it. Janet Yellen, US Treasury secretary, outlined the economic aspects of the new US vision in a speech delivered on April 20. Seven days later, Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser to Joe Biden, gave an even broader, albeit complementary, speech on “Renewing American Economic Leadership”. It represented a repudiation of past policy.


More narrowly, the administration sees itself as confronting four huge challenges: the hollowing out of the industrial base; the rise of a geopolitical and security competitor; the accelerating climate crisis; and the impact of rising inequality on democracy itself.

In a key phrase, the response is to be “a foreign policy for the middle class”. What, then, is this supposed to mean?
First, a “modern American industrial strategy”, which supports sectors deemed “foundational to economic growth” and also “strategic from a national security perspective”. Second, co-operation “with our partners to ensure they are building capacity, resilience, and inclusiveness, too”. Third, “moving beyond traditional trade deals to innovative new international economic partnerships focused on the core challenges of our time”. This includes creating diversified and resilient supply chains, mobilising public and private investment for “the clean energy transition”, ensuring “trust, safety, and openness in our digital infrastructure”, stopping a race to the bottom in corporate taxation, enhancing protections for labour and the environment and tackling corruption.

Fourth, “mobilising trillions in investment into emerging economies”. Fifth, a plan to protect “foundational technologies with a small yard and high fence”. Thus: “We’ve implemented carefully tailored restrictions on the most advanced semiconductor technology exports to China. Those restrictions are premised on straightforward national security concerns. Key allies and partners have followed suit.” It also includes “enhancing the screening of foreign investments in critical areas relevant to national security”. These, Sullivan insists, are “tailored measures”, not a “technology blockade”.

This is the simple and easy narrative of our present moment. In some ways it is accurate: a geopolitical competition really is in the process of boiling over into open confrontation. But it’s also fundamentally shallow and misleading: when it comes to the most fundamental political questions, China and the United States are not diverging but converging to become more alike.

This elite obsession with control is accelerated by a belief in “scientific management,” or the ability to understand, organize, and run all the complex systems of society like a machine, through scientific principles and technologies. The expert knowledge of how to do so is considered the unique and proprietary possession of the elite vanguard.

Ideologically, this elite is deeply materialist, and openly hostile to organized religion, which inhibits and resists state control. They view human beings themselves as machines to be programmed, and, believing the common man to be an unpredictable creature too stupid, irrational, and violent to rule himself, they endeavor to steadily condition and replace him with a better model through engineering, whether social or biological.

Complex systems of surveillance, propaganda, and coercion are implemented to help firmly nudge (or shove) the common man into line. Communities and cultural traditions that resist this project are dismantled. Harmfully contrary ideas are systematically censored, lest they lead to dangerous exposure. Governing power has been steadily elevated, centralized, and distributed to a technocratic bureaucracy unconstrained by any accountability to the public.

The relentless political messaging and ideological narrative has come to suffuse every sphere of life, and dissent is policed. Culture is largely stagnant. Uprooted, corralled, and hounded, the people are atomized, and social trust is very low. Reality itself often feels obscured and uncertain. Demoralized, some gratefully accept any security offered by the state as a blessing. At the same time, many citizens automatically assume everything the regime says is a lie. Officialdom in general is a Kafkaesque tragi-comedy of the absurd, something only to be stoically endured by normal people. Yet year by year the pressure to conform only continues to be ratcheted higher…

And yet, I’m going to argue that commonalities are indeed growing, and that this is no illusion, coincidence, or conspiracy, but the product of the same deep systemic forces and underlying ideological roots. To claim that we’re the same as China, or even just that we’re turning into China (as I’ve admittedly implied with the title) would really just be political clickbait.

The reality is more complicated, but no less unsettling: both China and the West, in their own ways and at their own pace, but for the same reasons, are converging from different directions on the same point – the same not-yet-fully-realized system of totalizing techno-administrative governance. Though they remain different, theirs is no longer a difference of kind, only of degree. China is just already a bit further down the path towards the same future.

But how should we describe this form of government that has already begun to wrap its tentacles around the world today, including here in the United States? Many of us recognize by now that whatever it is we now live under, it sure isn’t “liberal democracy.” So what is it? To begin answering that, and to really explain the China Convergence, we’re going to need to start with a crash course on the rise and nature of the technocratic managerial regime in the West.

Part I: The Managerial Regime

Rapidly accelerating in the 20th century, the managerial revolution soon began to instigate another transformation of society in the West: it gave birth to a new managerial elite. A new social class had arisen out of the growing scale and complexity of mass organizations as those organizations began to find that, in order to function, they had to rely on large numbers of people who possessed the necessary highly technical and specialized cognitive skills and knowledge, including new techniques of organizational planning and management at scale. Such people became the professional managerial class, which quickly expanded to meet the growing demand for their services.


This did not mean, however, that the expansion of the new managerial order faced no resistance at all from the old order that it strangled. That previous order, which has been referred to by scholars of the managerial revolution as the bourgeois order, was represented not so much by the grande bourgeoisie (wealthy landed aristocrats and early capitalist industrialists) but by the petite bourgeoisie, or what could be described as the independent middle class.[2] The entrepreneurial small business owner, the multi-generational family shop owners, the small-scale farmer or landlord; the community religious or private educator; even the relatively well-to-do local doctor: these and others like them formed the backbone of a large social and economic class that found itself existentially at odds with the interests of the managerial revolution.


The animosity of this class struggle was accentuated by the particularly antagonistic ideology that coalesced as a unifying force for the managerial elite. While this managerial ideology, in its various flavors, presents itself in the lofty language of moral values, philosophical principles, and social goods, it just so happens to rationalize and justify the continual expansion of managerial control into all areas of state, economy, and culture, while elevating the managerial class to a position of not only utilitarian but moral superiority over the rest of society – and in particular over the middle and working classes. This helps serve as a rationale for the managerial elite’s legitimacy to rule, as well as an invaluable means to differentiate, unify, and coordinate the various branches of that elite.

But, in contrast to what was originally predicted by Marxists, these bourgeoisie came to be mortally threatened not from below by the laboring, landless proletariat, but from above, by the new order of the managerial elite and their expanding legions of paper-pushing professional revolutionaries. The clash between these classes, as the managerial order steadily encroached on, dismantled, and subsumed more and more of the middle class bourgeois order and its traditional culture, and the increasingly desperate backlash this process generated from its remnants, would come to define much of the political drama of the West. That drama continues in various forms to this day.


The animosity of this class struggle was accentuated by the particularly antagonistic ideology that coalesced as a unifying force for the managerial elite. While this managerial ideology, in its various flavors, presents itself in the lofty language of moral values, philosophical principles, and social goods, it just so happens to rationalize and justify the continual expansion of managerial control into all areas of state, economy, and culture, while elevating the managerial class to a position of not only utilitarian but moral superiority over the rest of society – and in particular over the middle and working classes. This helps serve as a rationale for the managerial elite’s legitimacy to rule, as well as an invaluable means to differentiate, unify, and coordinate the various branches of that elite.

Managerial ideology, a relatively straightforward descendant of the Enlightenment liberal-modernist project, is a formula that consists of several core beliefs, or what could be called core managerial values. At least in the West, these can be distilled into:

1. Technocratic Scientism: The belief that everything, including society and human nature, can and should be fully understood and controlled through scientific and technical means. In this view everything consists of systems, which operate, as in a machine, on the basis of scientific laws that can be rationally derived through reason. Humans and their behavior are the product of the systems in which they are embedded.


2. Utopianism: The belief that a perfect society is possible – in this case through the perfect application of perfect scientific and technical knowledge. The machine can ultimately be tuned to run flawlessly. At that point all will be completely provided for and therefore completely equal, and man himself will be entirely rational, fully free, and perfectly productive.


This state of perfection is the telos, or pre-destined end point, of human development (through science, physical and social). This creates the idea of progress, or of moving closer to this final end. Consequently history has a teleology: it bends towards utopia. This also means the future is necessarily always better than the past, as it is closer to utopia. History now takes on moral valence; to “go backwards” is immoral. Indeed even actively conserving the status quo is immoral; governance is only moral in so far as it affects change, thus moving us ever forwards, towards utopia.


3. Meliorism: The belief that all the flaws and conflicts of human society, and of human beings themselves, are problems that can and should be directly ameliorated by sufficient managerial technique. Poverty, war, disease, criminality, ignorance, suffering, unhappiness, death… none are examples of the human condition that will always be with us, but are all problems to be solved.

It is the role of the managerial elite to identify and solve such problems by applying their expert knowledge to improve human institutions and relationships, as well as the natural world. In the end there are no tradeoffs, only solutions.

4. Liberationism: The belief that individuals and society are held back from progress by the rules, restraints, relational bonds, historical communities, inherited traditions, and limiting institutions of the past, all of which are the chains of false authority from which we must be liberated so as to move forwards.

Old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits must all be dismantled in order to ameliorate human problems, as old systems and ways of life are necessarily ignorant, flawed, and oppressive. Newer – and therefore superior – scientific knowledge can re-design, from the ground up, new systems and ways of life that will function more efficiently and morally.

5. Hedonistic Materialism: The belief that complete human happiness and well-being fundamentally consists of and is achievable through the fulfillment of a sufficient number of material needs and psychological desires. The presence of any unfulfilled desire or discomfort indicates the systemic inefficiency of an un-provided good that can and should be met in order to move the human being closer to a perfected state.

Scientific management can and should therefore to the greatest extent possible maximize the fulfillment of desires. For the individual, consumption that alleviates desire is a moral act. In contrast, repression (including self-repression) of desires and their fulfillment stands in the way of human progress, and is immoral, signaling a need for managerial liberation.

6. Homogenizing Cosmopolitan Universalism: The belief that:
a) all human beings are fundamentally interchangeable and members of a single universal community;

b) that the systemic “best practices” discovered by scientific management are universally applicable in all places and for all people in all times, and that therefore the same optimal system should rationally prevail everywhere;

c) that, while perhaps quaint and entertaining, any non-superficial particularity or diversity of place, culture, custom, nation, or government structure anywhere is evidence of an inefficient failure to successfully converge on the ideal system; and

d) that any form of localism, particularism, or federalism is therefore not only inefficient and backwards but an obstacle to human progress and so is dangerous and immoral. Progress will always naturally entail centralization and homogenization.

7. Abstraction and Dematerialization: The belief, or more often the instinct, that abstract and virtual things are better than physical things, because the less tied to the messy physical world humans and their activities are, the more liberated and capable of pure intellectual rationality and uninhibited morality they will become.

Practically, dematerialization, such as through digitalization or financialization, is a potent solvent that can help burn away the repressive barriers created by attachments to the particularities of place and people, replacing them with the fluidity and universality of the cosmopolitan. Dematerialization makes property more easily tradable, and can more effectively produce homogenization and fulfill desires at scale. Indeed in theory dematerialization could allow almost everything to take on and be managed at vastly greater, even infinite, mass and scale, holding out the hope of total efficiency: a state of pure frictionlessness, in which change (progress) will be effortless and limitless. Finally, dematerialization also most broadly represents an ideological belief that it is the world that should conform to abstract theory, not theory that must conform to the world.

This managerial system developed into several overlapping, interlinked sectors that can be roughly divided into and categorized as: the managerial state, the managerial economy, the managerial intelligentsia, the managerial mass media, and managerial philanthropy. Each of these five sectors features its own slightly unique species of managerial elite, each with its own roles and interests. But each commonly acts out of its own interest to reinforce and protect the interests of the other sectors, and the system as a whole. All of the sectors are bound together by a shared interest in the expansion of technical and mass organizations, the proliferation of managers, and the marginalization of non-managerial elements.


The managerial state, characterized by its proliferating administrative bureaucracies and thirst for centralized technocratic control, has a strong incentive to launch utopian and meliorist schemes to “liberate” and reorganize more and more portions of society (the theoretical bases for which are pumped out by the managerial intelligentsia), necessitating entire new layers of bureaucratic management (and whole new categories of “experts”).


Meanwhile the managerial corporation also has a great deal to gain from the project of mass homogenization, which allows for greater scale and efficiencies (a Walmart in every town, a Starbucks on every corner, Netflix and Amazon accessible on the iPhone in every pocket) by breaking down the differentiations of the old order. The state, which fears and despises above all else the local control justified by differentiation, is happy to assist. The managerial economy also gains directly from the stimulation of greater consumer demand produced by the liberation of the masses from the repressive norms of the old bourgeois moral code and the encouragement of hedonistic alternatives – as thought up by the intelligentsia, advertised by the mass media, and legally facilitated by the state.


Mass media, too, has an interest in homogenization, allowing the entertainments and narratives it sells to scale and reach a larger and more uniform audience. Mass media, already an outgrowth of journalism’s integration with the mass corporation, also has an incentive to integrate itself with both the intelligentsia and the state in order to gain privileged access to information; the intelligentsia meanwhile relies of the media to affirm their prestige, while naturally the state has an incentive to fuse with the media to effectively distribute the chosen information and narratives it wants to reach the masses.

As the old bottom-up network of extended families, social associations, religious congregations, neighborhood charities, and other institutions of grass-roots bourgeois community life are broken down by the managerial system, managerial philanthropy – funded by the wealth produced by the managerial economy and offering the elite a means to transform that wealth into social power tax free – is eager to fill the void with a crude simulacrum, offering top-down philanthropic initiatives, managerial non-profit grifts, and astroturfed activist movements in their place.

These inevitably work to spread managerial ideology and the utopian social engineering campaigns of the state, further disrupting the bourgeois order. The breakdown of that order then inevitably only produces more social problems, which in turn provide new opportunities for managerial philanthropy to offer “solutions.”


The ideological pronouncements of the intelligentsia, transmitted to the public as revealed truth (e.g. “the Science”) by the managerial mass media, serve to normalize and justify the schemes of the state, which in turn gratefully supports the intelligentsia with public money and programs of mass public education, which funnel demand into the intelligentsia’s institutions and also help to fund the research and development of new technologies and organizational techniques that can further expand managerial control.

This served a straightforward purpose. Political theorists since Aristotle have recognized that “a numerous middle class which stands between the rich and the poor” is the natural bedrock of any stable republican system of government, resisting both domination by a plutocratic oligarchy and tyrannical revolutionary demands by the poorest. By eliminating this class, which had been the powerbase of his Nationalist rivals, Mao paved the way for his intelligentsia-led Marxist-Leninist revolution to dismantle every remaining vestige of republican government, replace the old elite with a new one, and take total control of Chinese society.

And yet – if you’ve been following along so far – China, with its vast techno-bureaucratic socialist state, is still recognizably a managerial regime. More precisely, China is a hard managerial regime.


Ever since the political philosopher James Burnham published his seminal book The Managerial Revolution in 1941, theorists of the managerial regime have noted strong underlying similarities between all of the major modern state systems that emerged in the 20th century, including the system of liberal-progressive administration as represented at the time by FDR’s America, the fascist system pioneered by Mussolini, and the communist system that first appeared in Russia and then spread to China and elsewhere. The thrust of all of these systems was fundamentally managerial in character. And yet each also immediately displayed some, uh, quite different behavior. This difference can, however, be largely explained if we distinguish between what the political theorist Sam Francis classified as soft and hard managerial regimes.

The character of the soft managerial regime is that described in the previous section. In contrast, a hard managerial regime differs somewhat in its mix of values. Hard managerial regimes tend to reject two of the seven values of the (soft) managerial ideology described above, discarding hedonism and cosmopolitanism (though homogenization and centralization remain a priority). Instead they tend to emphasize managing the unity of the collective (e.g. the volk, or “the people”) and the value that individual loyalty, strength, and self-sacrifice provides to that collective.[4]

Most importantly, hard and soft managerial regimes differ in their approach to control. Hard managerial regimes default to the use of force, and are adept at using the threat of force to coerce stability and obedience. The state also tends to play a much more open role in the direction of the economy and society in hard systems, establishing state-owned corporations and taking direct control of mass media, for example, in addition to maintaining large security services. This can, however, reduce popular trust in the state and its organs.

In contrast, soft managerial regimes are largely inept and uncomfortable with the open use of force, and much prefer to instead maintain control through narrative management, manipulation, and hegemonic control of culture and ideas. The managerial state also downplays its power by outsourcing certain roles to other sectors of the managerial regime, which claim to be independent. Indeed they are independent, in the sense that they are not directly controlled by the state and can do what they want – but, being managerial institutions, staffed by managerial elites, and therefore stakeholders in the managerial imperative, they nonetheless operate in almost complete sync with the state. Such diffusion helps effectively conceal the scale, unity, and power of the soft managerial regime, as well as deflect and defuse any accountability. This softer approach to maintaining managerial regime dominance may lead to more day-to-day disorder (e.g. crime), but is no less politically stable than the hard variety (and arguably has to date proved more stable).

After the uprising of the 17th June
The Secretary of the Writers Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?
– Bertolt Brecht, “The Solution” (1953)



“In the great debate of the past two decades about freedom versus control of the network, China was largely right and the United States was largely wrong.” So declared neoconservative lawyer and former Bush administration Assistant Attorney General Jack Goldsmith in a high-profile 2020 essay on democracy and the future of free speech for The Atlantic magazine. “Significant monitoring and speech control are inevitable components of a mature and flourishing internet, and governments must play a large role in these practices to ensure that the internet is compatible with a society’s norms and values,” he explained. “The private sector’s collaboration with the government in these efforts, are a historic and very public experiment about how our constitutional culture will adjust to our digital future.”

Back in the year 2000, President Bill Clinton had mocked the Chinese government’s early attempts to censor free speech on the internet, suggesting that doing so would be “like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.” By the time Goldsmith’s take was published in the flagship salon of the American ruling class two decades later, such scorn had been roundly replaced by open admiration. Beginning immediately after the 2016 election of Donald Trump, and then accelerating exponentially in 2020, America’s elite class began regularly arguing, as did The New York Times Emily Bazelon, that the country was “in the midst of an information crisis” producing “catastrophic” risks of harm, and that actually, “Free speech threatens democracy as much as it also provides for its flourishing.” The American people would have to accept their free speech rights being curtailed for their own good.



Thousands of American intellectuals became “disinformation” experts overnight. In coordination with these academics and NGOs, mass media leapt to set up “fact checking” operations to arbitrarily declare what was and was not true, selling the public a tall-tale of foreign meddling and dark tides of online “hate” that conveniently justified having their burgeoning independent competition deplatformed from the internet.

The advent of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 was then seized upon as a reason to double-down on this attack on the public. As Jacob Siegel recently documented in a magisterial account of the origins of the “war on disinformation,” the managerial state quickly re-oriented all the tools, techniques, and swollen bureaucratic automatons it had developed to fight the “Global War on Terror” in order to begin waging a counterinsurgency campaign against its own citizens.

Something had changed in the calculus of America’s elites. Traditionally at least vaguely liberal, their seemingly abrupt U-turn on the value of free speech and deliberative democracy represents a paradigmatic example of a process enacting a final replacement of old order classical liberalism with an open embrace of total technocratic managerialism – one that we will explore in more detail soon. But what exactly prompted this sudden shift?

Former CIA analyst Martin Gurri has coined the term “revolt of the public” to describe the ongoing phenomenon in which, around the world, the authority and legitimacy of elite institutions has collapsed as the digital revolution has undermined traditional elite gatekeepers’ ability to fully control access to information and monopolize public narratives. This decline of hierarchical gatekeepers (such as legacy media) has helped to expose elite personal, institutional, and policy failures, as well as widespread corruption and the broader reality that the managerial system itself functions with little-to-no real public input or accountability. This has helped fuel public frustration and anger with the endemic and mounting problems of the status quo, mobilizing insurgent political movements to present democratic challenges to the establishment.

But, for the managerial elite, the character of this revolt is even more threatening than Gurri’s summation implies. In the West, this underdog public rebellion is not only directed against the ruling managerial technocracy, but, critically, has been conducted by precisely the managerial elite’s historic class enemies: the remnants of the old bourgeois middle class.


For the managerial elite this was the apparition of a terrifying nightmare. They thought they’d broken and cast down the old order forever. Now it seemed to be trying to climb out of the grave of history, where it belonged, to take its revenge and drag them all back to the dark ages before enlightened managerial rule had brought the word of progress to the world. The prospect of real power returning to the hands of their traditional enemies appeared to be a mortal threat to the future of the managerial class.

Across the West, the managerial elite therefore immediately went into a frenzy over the danger allegedly presented by “populism” and launched their own revolt, declaring a Schmittian state of exception in which all the standard rules and norms of democratic politics could be suspended in order to respond to this existential “crisis.” In fact, some began to question whether democracy itself might have to be suspended in order to save it.

“It’s Time for the Elites to Rise Up Against the Ignorant Masses,” New York Time Magazine journalist James Traub thundered with an iconic 2016 piece in Foreign Policy magazine. This quickly became a view openly and proudly embraced among the managerial elite, who no longer hesitated to express their frustration with democracy and its voters. (“Did I say ‘ignorant’? Yes, I did. It is necessary to say that people are deluded and that the task of leadership is to un-delude them,” Traub declared.) “Too Much Democracy is Killing Democracy,” is how a 2019 article published by neocon rag The Bulwark put it, arguing for Western nations to take their “bitter technocratic medicine” and establish “a political, social, and cultural compact that makes participation by many unnecessary.”

This elite revolt against democracy cannot be fully understood as a reaction only to proximate events, however – no matter how outrageously orange and crude their apparition. Rather, the populist revolts that emerged in 2016 sparked such an intense, openly anti-democratic reaction because they played directly into a much deeper complex of managerial anxieties, dreams, and obsessions that has roots stretching back more than a century.

Democracy and “Democracy”

It was 1887 and Woodrow Wilson thought America had a problem: too much democracy. What it needed instead was the “science of administration.” “The democratic state has yet to be equipped for carrying those enormous burdens of administration which the needs of this industrial and trading age are so fast accumulating,” the then-young professor of political science wrote in what would become his most influential academic work, “The Study of Administration.”

Deeply influenced by Social Darwinism and eugenics,[5] vocal in his contempt for the idea of being “bound to the doctrines held by the signers of the Declaration of Independence” (“a lot of nonsense… about the inalienable rights of the individual”), and especially impatient with the Constitution’s insistence on the idea of “checks and balances,” Wilson believed the American state needed to evolve or die. For too long it had been “saddled with the habits” of constitutionalism and deliberative politics; now the complexity of the world was growing too great for such antiquated principles, which were “no longer of more immediate practical moment than questions of administration.”

Asserting the urgent need for “comparative studies in government,” he urged America’s leadership class to look around the world and see that, “Administration is everywhere putting its hands to new undertakings,” and, “The idea of the state and the consequent ideal of its duty are undergoing noteworthy change.” America had to change too. “Seeing every day new things which the state ought to do, the next thing is to see clearly how it ought to do them,” he wrote. Simple as.

But what did Wilson mean by “administration” anyway? “Administration lies outside the proper sphere of politics,” he wrote. “Administrative questions are not political questions.” By this he meant that all the affairs of the modern state, all the “new things the state ought to do,” should be placed above any vulgar interference from the political – that is, above any democratic debate, choice, or accountability – and instead turned over to an elevated class of educated men whose full-time “profession” would be governing the rabble. What Wilson explicitly proposed was rule by the “universal class” described by Hegel: an all-knowing, all-beneficent class of expert “civil servants,” who, using their big brains and operating on universal principles derived from Reason, could uniquely determine and act in the universal interest of society with far more accuracy than the ignorant, unrefined masses.


For Wilson, the Prussian system represented the best possible model for maximizing the march of progress. Parliamentary yet authoritarian, it combined the most enlightened economic and social advances of the time – the first welfare state, mass education programs, and a state-led Kulturkampf (“Culture War”) against the Catholic Church and all the backwards forces of reaction – with political certainty, stability, and efficiency. Most importantly, it had developed a professional bureaucracy (i.e. an “administration”) of managers handed the power and leeway to guide the country’s development along rational, “scientific” lines. Wilson would, two decades later, have the opportunity to begin imposing something like this model on America.

Campaigning in part on a promise to employ the power of government on behalf of what he advertised as the “New Freedom” of universal social justice, Wilson wormed his way into power in 1912 as the first and fortunately only political science professor ever elected President of the United States.[6] He fittingly rode to office on the back of the new American Progressive Movement, which had eagerly modeled itself on the then fashionable Progressive Party of Germany. An innovative political alliance, the new party had cunningly brought Germany’s corporate power-players together with state bureaucrats and academic intelligentsia (together nicknamed the Kathedersozialisten, or “socialists of the endowed chair”), uniting them to push forward the kind of top-down social and economic reforms they all stood to benefit from. Wilson’s hope for America to look to the German model for inspiration was thus fulfilled.

Over the course of his presidency (1913-1921), and seizing in particular on the opportunity provided by the crisis of WWI, Wilson would oversee the first great centralizing wave of America’s managerial revolution, establishing much of the initial basis for the country’s modern administrative bureaucracy, including imposing the first federal income tax and creating the Federal Reserve System, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Department of Labor.[7]

He also ruled as perhaps the most authoritarian executive in American history, criminalizing speech through his Espionage and Sedition acts, implementing mass censorship through the Post Office, setting up a dedicated propaganda ministry (The Committee on Public Information), and using his Attorney General to widely prosecute and jail his political opponents. More dissidents were arrested or jailed in two years of war under Wilson than in Italy under Mussolini during the entirety of the 1920s.

But Wilson’s most important legacy was to begin the process to “organize democracy” in America just as he’d dreamed of doing as an academic: a “universal class” of managers would henceforth determine and govern on behalf of the people’s true will; democracy would no longer to be messy, but made steadily more managed, predictable, and scientific. From this point forward the definition of democracy itself would begin to change: “democracy” no longer meant self-government by the demos – the people – exercised through voting and elections; instead it would come to mean the institutions, processes, and progressive objectives of the managerial civil service itself. In turn, actual democracy became “populism.” Protecting the sanctity of “democracy” now required protecting the managerial state from the demos by making governance less democratic.

Today this vision of “managed democracy” (also known as “guided democracy”), is a form of government much lusted after by elites around the world, having succeeded (in its more benevolent incarnations) in establishing orderly regimes in countries like Singapore and Germany, where the people still get to vote but real opposition to the steamroller of the state’s agenda isn’t tolerated. In such a system the people are offered the satisfaction of their views having been “listened” to by their political-administrative class, but said views can always be noted and dispensed with if they are a danger to “democracy” and its interests. Here Wilson’s old question of how “to make public opinion efficient without suffering it to be meddlesome” seems to have found a solution.

The People’s Republic of China has already taken this logic to its fullest conclusion. Popular voting may have been done away with all-together in China, but it too is still a democracy (it says so right in its constitution!). Instead of elections, the Party (which exists solely to represent the people, forever), rigorously assesses the will and interests of the masses through a process of internal consultation and deliberation it calls “people’s whole-process democracy” – also known as “consultative democracy,” for short.

Or as The New York Times’ elite-whisperer Thomas Friedman once put it, if we could even just be “China for a day” then the state could, “you know, authorize the right solutions… on everything from the economy to environment.” Overall, being more like China for at least a while would be super convenient because, as Friedman obligingly elaborated in his book Hot, Flat, and Crowded, “once the directions are given from above, we would be overcoming the worst part of our democracy (the inability to make big decisions in peacetime), and the very next day we would be able to enjoy the best part of our democracy (the power of our civic society to make government rules stick and the power of our markets to take advantage of them).”


Consultative democracy has serious advantages over the traditional kind in terms of maximizing managerial efficiency, which is why it has long been so admired by Western elites. “There is a level of admiration I actually have for China because their basic dictatorship is allowing them to actually turn their economy around on a dime and say we need to go green,” Canada’s Justin Trudeau has for instance explained (though typically stumbling over his words and forgetting to label China a democracy instead of a dictatorship).

The power of big-brain decision-makers to advance progress by forcing through big changes; “civic society” able to entrench and enforce state directives from above; markets able to symbiotically make a tidy profit on top-down change: as Friedman indicates, consultative democracy offers all the best parts of “democracy” without the hassle. No risk of the populist rubes ever getting to fondle any delicate machinery here! It should be no wonder that Western managerial elites have been smitten by this vision and the many advantages its offers (to themselves), and have thus everywhere rushed with growing fervor to adapt and implement it at home as fast and to the greatest extent that they can get away with. Wilson would be proud.


They also understand, however, that even this structural organizing will ultimately never be enough to protect “democracy” on its own. Having again and again run into the intractability of the people’s obstinate nature, they long ago reached another implicit conclusion: the root challenge to “democracy” is not the structures of government, but the demos – the common man himself. He is a problem that requires a solution on an entirely deeper level. Making the demos safe for “democracy” would necessitate his replacement by a wholly new and safer man.

Psychologist, instrumentalist philosopher, and foremost American progressive educationalist John Dewey landed in China on May 1, 1919. It was three days before the outbreak of the May Fourth Movement, an anti-traditionalist wave that would grow out of student protests in Beijing and become a crusade to radically transform the nation. It would give birth to the Chinese Communist Party two years later, in 1921. The student movement’s slogan called for China to embrace “Mr. Science” and “Mr. Democracy,” and with Dewey’s appearance it seemed Mr. Science had arrived.

Chen Duxiu, co-founder of the CCP, said he thought Dewey embodied the whole spirit of the movement. Mao Zedong thought his educational theory “well worth studying.”[8] Adored as a progressive and modernizing hero, Dewey would remain in China for a tour that lasted more than two years, delivering over two hundred lectures to crowds of thousands of adoring fans. Many of those lectures were then translated into best-selling books distributed across the country. He was lauded as a “second Confucius” and nicknamed Dewey Du Wei, or Dewey the Great.

But of course Dewey and his likeminded colleagues did want to shape the character of America’s children, just in a different way from the old order. For Dewey, who believed that democracy was not a form of government but an ethical project, fusing governance to the scientific method was the only possible path to achieving political and human progress. But doing that would require first changing democracy’s voters.

Dewey believed public education was “the fundamental method of social progress and reform” precisely because it was, he wrote, “the only sure method of social reconstruction.” Social reconstruction meant reengineering society. Frank Lester Ward, Dewey’s teacher and mentor (and the first president of the American Sociological Association) was even less bashful: the purpose of formal education, he said, was now to be “a systemic process for the manufacture of correct opinions” in the public mind. (It should, he added, therefore be brought under the exclusive control of government, since “the result desired by the state is a wholly different one from that desired by parents, guardians, and pupils.”)


This he set out to accomplish through a process he called “Thought Reform.” First trialed in the isolated communist basecamp of Yan’an in 1942-43 and then forced on the whole of China in the 1950s following the CCP’s takeover of the country, Thought Reform was a process of using indoctrination, public pressure, and terror to produce completely submissive and easily controlled individuals. Explicitly based on new theories of Pavlovian psychological conditioning imported from the USSR and much admired by Mao, it always followed the same distinct method: endless hours of “study” and “discussion” groups where silence was not an option; repeated “self-criticism” and writing of confessions, allegedly to “lay one’s heart on the table” in the name of benevolent collective self-improvement and education; encouragement of neighbors and colleagues to report each other’s alleged harmful faults, wrongdoings, and wrong ideas; separation of people into “good” and “bad” classes or groups; isolation of one target at a time and the “persuasion” of former friends and allies to join in a simultaneous attack; mass “struggle” meetings designed to overwhelm and humiliate the target, and to turn a purge into public spectacle and object lesson; forced groveling apologies, followed by “magnanimous” temporary mercy and redemption or rejection and destruction of the individual as a warning to others; cyclical repetition with persecution of new targets.

This process of total ideological indoctrination and control – also colloquially known as xinao (洗脑, literally: to “wash brains”) – would be made most famous during China’s later Cultural Revolution, but was in fact the whole foundation of Maoism from the start. This was because it worked. Foreign journalists permitted to visit Yan’an in 1944 noted that an “air of nervous intensity” was constant and “stifling,” and that while “most people had very earnest faces and serious expressions” no one but top leaders like Mao ever cracked a joke. “If you ask the same question to twenty or thirty people, from intellectuals to workers, their replies are always more or less the same,” one marveled. “Even questions about love, there seems to be a point of view that has been decided by meetings.”[10] In time the whole country would be reduced to the same state of stifling conformity.

Germany and Japan surrendered in 1945, but World War II didn’t end. Managerial liberalism had engaged in its first global ideological war, and once the shooting had stopped the ideological struggle was just getting started. Europe and even the American homeland itself still had yet to be truly liberated. The problem was: fascism continued to lurk in minds everywhere. Eradicating it would require nothing less than the psychological transformation of entire populations.

That at least was the conclusion of the politico-psychoanalytic movement led by German self-described Freudo-Marxist Wilhelm Reich, who became convinced that working class Germans were susceptible to authoritarianism because of their unhealthily “repressed” sexuality and attachment to traditional gender roles. Only by liberating them from sexual restraint (Reich coined the phrase “sexual revolution”) and especially by destroying forever the rigid structure of the family and the authority of its patriarchal father figure – i.e. the Fuhrer – could they be reformed and their psyches made safe for liberal democracy.


During the war, Reich’s ideas gained significant traction among the educated liberal managerial elite that populated the upper ranks of the American security services, especially within the OSS (the precursor to the CIA). His Freudian political-therapeutic project was soon taken up by the US-led Allied High Commission as a core part of the all-powerful military government’s expansive “denazification” of occupied Germany. The psychology and sociology departments of German universities were staffed with returning emigre scholars, often selected from among the Freudo-Marxists and the intellectually adjacent critical theorists of the Frankfurt School, and transformed into vehicles for promoting the mass reeducation of Germans. The goal was nothing less than “the mental transformation of the German human being,” as plans drawn up by Frankfurt School leader Max Horkheimer proposed.

This project was then immediately re-imported to America as well. Before the war was even over, the US government began to fund and facilitate a new wave of psychological research, guided by refugee European psychoanalysts. The War Department, for instance, conducted studies on discharged soldiers, outsourcing this research to psychanalysts who blamed psychological breakdowns in combat not on acute stress but on the repressions of their conservative childhood family life. By far the most influential work, however, would be conducted by the Frankfurt School’s Theodore Adorno, who produced a new model for psychological assessment called the “F-Scale” (the F stands for Fascist).


The F-Scale, which Adorno pulled straight out of his ass, was a questionnaire that evaluated subjects’ agreement with standard conservative or right-wing beliefs and traits (such as religiousness, belief in inherent gender differences, or overall “conventionalism,” i.e. “conformity to the traditional societal norms and values of the middle class”) and chalked these up as evidence of latent fascist sympathies. Since Adorno and his disciples were Marxists, the survey originally ranked subjects on an authoritarian vs. revolutionary axis (opposition to revolution being “authoritarianism”), but in order to better play to their American sponsors this was re-labeled to read as an authoritarian vs. “democratic” axis.

This “research” would later form the basis for The Authoritarian Personality (1950), a volume that became one of the most influential works of psychology ever produced, structuring the whole direction of decades’ worth of psychological research in the United States and going on to inform the beliefs of the left-wing counter-culture movements of the 1960s (and beyond). Most importantly, it accomplished a spectacular feat of political-linguistic jujitsu: successfully redefining public understanding of fascism – in reality the very essence of a hard technocratic managerial regime, obsessed with leveraging state-corporate fusion to promote collective strength, homogenous efficiency, and scientific progress from the top down – as synonymous with conservative democratic populism.

With this new definition in hand, evidence of fascist sympathies could then be discovered all over the United States. As Martin Bergmann, a US Army psychoanalyst from 1943 to 1945, recounted in a 2002 BBC documentary The Century of the Self, government psychologists’ assessment tours of middle America, conducted to find out “what goes on in all those little towns” between the civilized coasts, revealed “a much more problematic country” than they’d ever imagined, filled as it apparently was with normie middle-class families raising budding little Fuhrer-lovers.

The US government leapt into action to ask the experts how to control this dangerous enemy within. The answer, as Bergmann tells it, was that, “What is needed is a human being that can internalize democratic values.” A New Liberal-Democratic Man. “Psychoanalysis carried in it the promise that it can be done,” he recounts. “It opened up new vistas as to how the inner structure of the human being can be changed so that he becomes a more vital, free supporter and maintainer of democracy.”


In 1946, President Truman declared a mental health crisis in the United States and the Congress passed the National Mental Health Act, empowering an arm of the administrative state – the National Institutes of Health – with a mission to manage Americans’ psychological state. Hundreds of new psychoanalysts were trained and dispersed to set up “psychological guidance centers” in towns across America. Therapists, counselors, and social workers began to nose their way into every aspect of family, school, and working life.

The therapeutic state had been born.

From now on managing the mental and emotional lives of Americans would be a duty of the state and its “civil society,” not just the individual and his or her immediate social community. Dewey’s project of conditioning had expanded from the child to the whole adult population. This of course fitted perfectly into the core imperative of the managerial regime, which seeks constantly to draw more and more aspects of existence into the tender embrace of its fussing expertise. But the development of the therapeutic state also conveniently allowed the managerial elite to further marginalize, and indeed pathologize, their middle-American class enemies. Now the rubes weren’t only backwards, they were mentally broken and unstable. Only by washing their psyches and adopting all the same thoughts, beliefs, and liberal ways of living as the professional managerial class could they possibly hope to be cured.

As Christopher Lasch noted in his 1991 book on progressivism, The True and Only Heaven, Adorno and his therapeutic legacy thus “substituted a medical for a political idiom and relegated a broad range of controversial issues to the clinic – to ‘scientific’ study as opposed to philosophical and political debate. This procedure had the effect of making it unnecessary to discuss moral and political questions on their merits.” Only the irrationality of the insane could now possibly explain disagreement with the progressive managerial project. Much as under communism in China and the Soviet Union, dissent became dismissible as deviance.

And deviance meant fascism. So, with the bourgeoisie clearly in danger of exploding into the goose step at any moment, a friend-enemy distinction could be established: one was either rationally for progressive managerialism – aka “liberal democracy” – or against it, and therefore automatically an irrational ally of authoritarianism and a dangerous threat to society. “Anti-fascism” could now take on the same meaning and function as under Mao: tarring any opponent of the managerial regime’s revolutionary project as someone necessary to preemptively destroy, not debate.

For if “the whole post-fascist period is one of clear and present danger,” as the Frankfurt School’s Herbert Marcuse (who worked directly for the OSS from 1943-50) asserted in his landmark essay “Repressive Tolerance,” then America’s tradition of civil liberties and liberal neutrality could justifiably be revised to head off the threat of fascism’s resurgence. A truly “liberating tolerance” would then come to entail “withdrawal of tolerance from regressive movements, and discriminatory tolerance in favor of progressive tendencies.” Progress and justice would in fact presuppose “the withdrawal of civil rights from those who prevent their exercise” (i.e. “movements from the Right”). Meanwhile “true pacification [of pre-fascists] requires the withdrawal of tolerance before the deed, at the stage of communication in word, print, and picture.” Such an envisioned censorship regime, aimed at “breaking the tyranny of public opinion,” would be a first step towards fostering an enlightened “democratic educational dictatorship” guided by those few who have “learned to think rationally and autonomously.”

While such an “extreme suspension of the right of free speech and free assembly” would be “indeed justified only if the whole of society is in extreme danger,” Marcuse, like the rest of the intelligentsia, could point to his colleague Adorno’s redefinition of fascism to maintain “that our society is in such an emergency situation, and that it has become the normal state of affairs.” Only a few decades later Marcuse’s intellectual descendants would get their chance to begin fully capitalizing on this state of exception in the name of anti-fascism.

The opposite of managerialism is self-governance.

As Philip Rieff noted in The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966), the promotion of consumerism through the incessant conversion of wants into needs helped convince the majority that comfort and entertainment of the self and its desires was the “highest good.” Meanwhile the therapeutic state vilified any repression of the self (i.e. self-control) as something harmful and ideologically dangerous. Managerial liberationism thus worked hand-in-hand with the market to progressively strip away norms and traditions that encouraged self-restraint. Freedom and liberty were reduced to pleasures made available for consumption by what Rieff described as “an eternal interim ethic of release” from social discipline and moral prohibitions. More and more such restraints would have to be found and torn apart so as to enjoy further release.

But as Lasch once pointed out, “the atrophy of informal controls leads irresistibly to the expansion of bureaucratic controls.” The less the people are willing and able to practice self-governance individually and collectively, the more formal rules and systems of external authority will step in to micromanage what they want and how they behave. Greater moral and social anarchy tends to produce more, not less, state control.


Not surprisingly, the 1960s produced a great explosion of bureaucratic administration in America, with the state happily taking on a series of grand social management projects, including the War on Poverty, the Great Society, and Civil Rights law. These not only turbocharged the growth of the administrative apparatus, but also proved fundamental to propelling the managerial system’s expansion beyond the confines of the state, greatly enhancing the managerial role of non-profit organizations and compelling the creation of such innovates as the modern Human Resources department, which now serves essentially as a compliance arms of the managerial state within nearly every private sector firm.

A new de facto social contract had been established: the people would offer compliance to being managed, and in return the managerial regime would provide them with ever greater comfort and safety, not only physical but psychological.

As Professor Neil Ferguson, who directed Britain’s early COVID response, admitted in a 2020 interview, public health bureaucrats wanted to adopt China’s “innovative intervention” but initially dismissed it as something Western people simply wouldn’t tolerate. But they were mistaken: “It’s a communist one-party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought… and then Italy did it. And we realized we could,” Ferguson gloated. A majority of the British people in fact clamored for the security of managed life under lockdown (and still do). And so the “sense of what is possible in terms of control changed quite dramatically” in the West, Ferguson explained. Soon countries across the Western world had adopted and imposed the Chinese model.


This should not have been a surprise. Safetyism is utterly typological of managerial societies everywhere, soft or hard, in Sacramento or Shanghai. At the top, a managerial elite is naturally obsessed with total control – with running society like their envisioned machine – and with stamping out any unpredictability, unsurveilled activity, or willful resistance. For the professional managerial middle, doubting or deviating from the rules and procedures of the bureaucratic machine is not so much inconceivable as unimaginably immoral and déclassé: for the pious apparatchik, conforming to the machine and its expert models is the core of good citizenship and personal advancement, while independent decision-making is fraught with risk; “computer says no” is practically a deferral to sacred law.[13]

From below, the social atomization, empty relativistic nihilism, and learned helplessness produced by managerialism cultivates in the masses a constant state of anxiety; in an attempt to relieve this anxiety many among them then themselves demand greater and greater managerial control over life be exercised from above. A cycle of co-dependency is created, which accelerates as the managerial regime discovers it can constantly prop up new objects of fear from which to generously protect the public. The regime becomes a devouring mother, projecting weakness onto her children in order to keep them attached and under her sway.

The “New Man” desired by managerialism is not a man at all, but an infant: dependent and incapable of self-governance; needy and consumptive; a blank slate, malleable and suggestible; loving and trusting of the caretakers it assumes to be omnipotent and compassionate – the perfect managerial subject. Preserving such a state of immaturity makes possible a historically new, all-consuming kind of regime.

After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

What Tocqueville had uniquely intimated in his time was the character of the soft managerial regime, whose first seeds had already been planted in America. Rather than brutalizing and terrorizing the public into compliance as would a hard regime, this “mild” (yet “absolute”) power would find it far easier to sedate, seduce, and propagandize them. But the desired end result would be the same: a population demoralized and conditioned to accept management of all things under heaven.

Nonetheless, the managerial regime is capable of only one response to the emergence of such instability, which is to double down: more top-down control; more layers of management; more insistent claims to expert knowledge; more efforts to spare the people “all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living”; more clearing away of any perceived resistance to utopia.

To assume that any given regime is weak or on the verge of collapse would be a mistake; the mass-scale managerial regime is mostly a modern phenomenon, and so far only one (the USSR) has collapsed absent military intervention. So we do not really know how long an especially clever managerial system can endure, even if we know it won’t be forever. What we can assume is that any regime will act automatically to defend itself and its interests against proliferating threats. It will likely not hesitate to evolve and adopt new methods in order to do so, just as it has evolved repeatedly in the past. New means of everyday repression, or what the CCP regime likes to call “stability maintenance,” will quickly be found and trialed.

Today this imperative of stability maintenance is driving a rapid and mutually productive convergence between the world’s hard and soft managerial regimes, with the hard becoming softer (that is to say, more subtle and clever, not less cruel) and the soft becoming harder (more forceful, coercive, and unabashed).

The first step towards stability is to break things. For the managerial regime, stability of course means unquestioning public compliance with managerial authority. Blocking such complete managerial power is, as always, all those spheres of authority that could possibly compete with the regime: i.e. any remaining stable institutions, communities, independent economic networks, religions, norms, traditions, and ways of life that make possible and encourage self-governance – or at least organization and decision-making outside and independent of the managerial Borg. These obstacles, these recalcitrant remains of the old order, stand in the way of change, of consolidation, of reconstruction, of progress… so they must go; they must be smashed!

As the French political philosopher Bertrand de Jouvenel explained in his timeless work on the rise of managerial nation-states, On Power: The Natural History of Its Growth (1948), Power (the regime) finds that, by its very nature, it cannot but seek to relentlessly break down all separations and barriers in its way and gather together all other possible nodes and sources of power into itself, or destroy them. “All command other than its own, that is what irks Power,” as he wrote. Meanwhile, “All [human productive] energy, wherever it may be found, that is what nourishes it.” The regime “finds itself impelled” to break open established and independent communities in order to consume their power in “as natural a tendency as that which causes a bear in search of honey to break the cells of the hive.”

To adapt Marx: the managerial class is either revolutionary or it is nothing. Indeed the managerial regime inherently subscribes to Hegel and Mao’s program of “continuous” or “permanent revolution.”


Each of these periods of revolution has been followed by a quieter, illusory “conservative” period of consolidation, only for revolution to explode again a couple of decades later.

Which brings us to the fifth and most ambitious wave of managerial revolution, which we are living through today in the 2010s-20s: the Great Awokening.

“Wokeism” is a Marxism-derived ideology/radical religious cult that seeks to establish heaven on earth (the utopia of universal “social justice”) through the simultaneous and total liberation of all those who are “oppressed.” This is to be accomplished through the creation of a New Woke Man (they/them) awakened through a process of reeducation into a new consciousness of their oppression, the subsequent seizure and redistribution of all power from “oppressor” groups, and the sweeping away or inversion of all established hierarchies, moral norms, and other “social constructs” of the past that place any limits on infinite self-creation of identity and broader reality. It is absolutely revolutionary to its core.


Then there are the Black Categories, the reactionary bourgeoisie, the fascists of the working and middle class, who can now also be branded as white supremacists and all other manner of ‘phobes, and then be righteously beaten down and tormented and isolated and surveilled and dispossessed anew for their deplorable bigotry and hatred. Oh, how the tired old class struggle has been reinvigorated to provide such delicious new moral delights!

The regime views this ideology as providing a convenient new source of legitimacy at a time when that legitimacy has been threatened: now every sector of the regime is necessary to ensure “equity” (equality of outcomes) between individuals in all respects (social justice), and to protect them from evil (opposition to social justice, i.e. the regime). Moreover, this morally justifies the complete abandonment of official institutional neutrality towards the regime’s opposition, and their political rights, at least the appearance of which was previously required by the now superseded philosophy of liberalism.

Yes, this angers the opposition, but the opposition is weak and timid and their actions can always be twisted to fit the chosen narrative and used to further isolate them. Combined with the opportunity to advance its core revolutionary drive, these benefits have made Wokeism potentially the single most useful conceptual evolution ever adopted by Western managerialism.

And the structure of the new unity that Woke managerialism intends to establish, if successful in this phase of the revolution, is quite clear. Its outlines are obvious, for example, in the proposal by one of America’s most celebrated Woke theoreticians, Ibram X. Kendi, for the passage of “an anti-racist constitutional amendment” that would make unconstitutional “racial inequity” and “racist ideas by public officials,” and “establish and permanently fund [a] Department of Anti-racism (DOA) comprised of formally trained experts on racism and no political appointees.” This DOA would be “responsible for preclearing all local, state and federal public policies to ensure they won’t yield racial inequity, monitor those policies, investigate private racist policies when racial inequity surfaces, and monitor public officials for expressions of racist ideas. The DOA would be empowered with disciplinary tools to wield over and against policymakers and public officials who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas.” In other words: a sweeping new order of total managerial control, policing even our most intimate affairs and the most private wrongthink, and overseen by a permanent unelected and unaccountable superstructure of “formally trained experts.”

Where will it end? In the destruction of all other command for the benefit of one alone – that of the state. In each man's absolute freedom from every family and social authority, a freedom the price of which is complete submission to the state. In the complete equality as between themselves of all citizens, paid for by their equal abasement before the power of their absolute master – the state. In the disappearance of every constraint which does not emanate from the state, and in the denial of every pre-eminence which is not approved by the state. In a word, it ends in the atomization of society, and in the rupture of every private tie linking man and man, whose only bond is now their common bondage to the state. The extremes of individualism and socialism meet: that was their predestined course.

Fortunately this project has not yet fully succeeded. It has encountered some unexpected democratic resistance from middle-class “populism,” which has at least somewhat slowed its transformational march. Nor can it yet openly operate outside the framework of the old democratic order and the lingering moral legitimacy that moldy shroud still provides. The regime must continue to advance mainly through existing mechanisms of legal and civic authority. Hence the upside-down world of our present transitional period, in which the new order constantly and loudly insists its mission is to defend the old order even as it dismantles it.

The “extreme center” is therefore potentially a useful descriptive term here. The term identifies the concentration of power into a single “establishment” or ruling class that is united by shared interests (no matter how many formal political parties this may include), and which portrays itself as the dispassionate voice of moderation and reason facing off against the “extremes” (any opposition outside this bloc). In this situation politics becomes a struggle not between two or more parties or factions debating which specific policies of government to implement, but a defense of the inner against the outer, of the center vs. the periphery.[16] The center defines the window of “normal,” “legitimate,” or acceptable policies and opinions, while the periphery and its views are painted as dangerous, illegitimate, and unacceptable for consideration or compromise (no matter how much popular support they may embody). Ideological clarity or constancy is of little importance here; the only unifying goal of the center’s bloc is to protect its comfortable monopolization of decision-making and status by excluding or subjugating anyone who might challenge its collective interests.

The center, having thus transformed politics into a psychodrama of its civilized struggle against surrounding barbarians, becomes willing to take radical action to maintain the stability of its control, no matter how much it disrupts and destroys in the process. This includes actively anti-democratic, extra-constitutional, or otherwise norm-breaking actions that are justified as necessary to defend norms (read: the norm of establishment control). Like a body with an autoimmune disorder, over time the center becomes extreme in its self-protective behavior, potentially undermining its own legitimacy and societal stability in the process. This of course only makes it more paranoid about the need to maintain strict control of power.[17]

Now also ruled by an extreme center, the United States has unsurprisingly begun to develop its own milder case of this “securitization of everything” in recent decades. This started in earnest after 9/11 and accelerated after 2016 with the manufactured panic over “foreign” election interference and “disinformation.” (China is also notably quick to accuse “hostile foreign forces” of being behind every embarrassment and setback for the regime.) Then came the Great Awokening, the 2020 election year, and COVID. Securitization began reaching more “total” levels.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), a new government body so besotted with security that its name includes the word twice, has for example embraced as its mission the need to use mass censorship of public and private communications to secure not only America’s network infrastructure but also its “political infrastructure” and even its “cognitive infrastructure” – i.e. the minds of every American. The therapeutic state has begun to merge with the security state.

Most importantly, the securitization of everything by the extreme center has eased America’s ongoing transition to a rule by law system. Not to be confused with rule of law, rule by law is another useful CCP concept. On one level, rule by law is simply a recognition that in order to maintain stability and a “harmonious” (compliant) society, there need to be laws on the books, and people generally need to be made to follow them.


So, in a rule by law America, laws (a great jungle of them) would still be on the books, but their interpretation and application would inevitably vary extensively in order to best suit the managerial regime in any given situation. Since, just like in China, their purpose would be to “ensure the effective implementation of the Party’s line, principles, and policies through rule by law,” when and to whom laws are applied would be largely determined on the same inside vs. outside basis that defines the extreme center.

Subjective interpretation of the law – as meaning one thing one day, another the next – would be not only acceptable but absolutely necessary so long as the purpose of the law (to protect the center and progress its managerial project) were to remain fixed as the guiding principle. Building vague and expansive language into the law to facilitate this would become the norm, much as the Chinese regime regularly makes use of laws against such ill-defined crimes as “spreading rumors” or “stirring up trouble” to flexibly do away with problematic people as needed. And selective use of the law as a factional weapon (aka “lawfare”) to undermine or destroy outsider political and class enemies, while sheltering insider allies, would become not only ethically permissible, but practically the civic responsibility of the center’s ruling elite.

But what is the nature of a one-party state, really? Grasping that requires understanding not just the one-party but the party-state. The party-state, a spontaneous feature of nearly every revolutionary regime in history, is a unique form of government. It is sometimes described as a system in which one dominant political group functions as a “state within a state.” But in the case of a fully mature party-state like China’s this description would be misleading, since the Chinese regime is more like a political party with a state attached.


The Party has also set up a vast network of non-Party “civil society” groups and social organizations that operate “independently” beyond the state. These are GONGOs, or “Government-Organized Non-Governmental Organizations.” The CCP loves GONGOs, because they make the Party seem closer to and more representative of the “grassroots” of “the people.” GONGOs are also used to advance CCP objectives beyond China’s borders while retaining some plausible deniability that this is really the work of the Chinese government.

Coordinating all the “civil society” GONGOs, “independent” political parties, minority ethnic groups and religious authorities, public and private corporations, intellectual institutions, media outlets, etc. to keep them aligned and in lock-step with the Party is known as “united front work.” Due to a few recent political scandals in places like Australia and Canada, the “united front” has broken into Western awareness as a thing, but largely only in the form of some shadowy intelligence organization running global influence operations to infiltrate and surveil populations of overseas ethnic Chinese and subvert democratic politics. This is absolutely something the united front does, but it’s also much more than that.

That is to say that, while the CCP is very hierarchical (nobody crosses Xi Jinping or disobeys his orders), it is also remarkably quick in its ability to synchronize as a horizontal network. China is a huge country, so while Xi may want to be an emperor, he can’t even know about, let alone micromanage, everything going on in the system. And yet, the whole party-state system can pivot almost instantaneously to focus on – often to the point of unhealthy fixation – and massively mobilize around new priorities as if it were a single hive mind. If the Party Center decides that the current thing is, say, food security, then suddenly almost every local Party boss, newspaper, school principal, or corporate office hall monitor is going to spend at least the next month talking endlessly about the dire menace of food waste and the critical national security contribution of composting – even without being specifically directed to do so.


So, does the United States, or the broader West, have its own united front? Inquiring minds doubtless want to know. At this point it is impossible not to notice the strong tendency of Western elite media, in particular, to move in near absolute synchronicity. It is no longer unusual for a dozen different articles from different outlets to appear touting exactly the same narrative on the same topic in the same week, or even the same day. In fact this is now the norm. For the glassy-eyed talking heads on television to all repeat, with identical phraseology, exactly the same talking points in unison hundreds of times within days is now the industry standard. The sudden adoption of the same linguistic taboos, redefinitions, and fads. The same claims to absolute truth, along with the moral necessity of “debunking” the “misinformation” of any alternative views, followed by the sudden, simultaneous, and wholly unacknowledged and unexplained shift to some different version of absolute truth. The simultaneous identification of the same enemies and pressing threats to the public. The same individual targets singled out for simultaneous hit pieces. The same niche objects of obsessive, swooning coverage. And the same topics of great public interest mysteriously left entirely uncovered by every outlet, as if an official blackout on even the acknowledgement of their existence had been suddenly enforced from above. This is all now standard for the media.

But of course it’s not only the media. The experience of having politicians, academics, major corporations, internet platforms, advertisers, entertainment companies, and all the neighbors you run into at Wholefoods all suddenly pivot to adopt the same weekly conception of facts, echo the same shibboleths, and hang the same flags of allegiance is now simply a normal, if bewildering, part of everyday life in the West. This mass, synchronistic adherence to the constantly shifting “current thing” naturally gives rise to suspicion that there must be some top-down coordination occurring. Is this the work of a united front?

Even the limited glimpse of the iceberg we’ve been afforded so far reveals a vast operational cartel of public and private managerial organizations that, in its direct coordination, far more closely resembles the CCP’s united front network than whatever more vague agglomeration based on shared interests and narratives may have existed in the past.

As Jacob Siegel astutely notes in his deep dive into the development of the Censorship-Industrial Complex, “countering disinformation” (the Western euphemism for “political security”) has since 2016 been regularly described as requiring the development of a “whole of society” strategy. “Only a whole-of-society approach – one that engages government, private companies and civil society alike – can effectively combat and build resilience to disinformation,” is how FBI Director Christopher Wray put it in 2020. Such an approach has, he said, become “central to how we work with both the public and private sectors, from other government agencies, to companies of all sizes, to universities, to NGOs.” Indeed the “whole of society” framing can now be found in use just about everywhere you look across the Western world, serving as an excuse for directly fusing state power with a single extensive and unified international network of managerial technocrats, effectively circumventing and shielding it from any democratic control whatsoever.

This is deliberate. In such a system keeping up with the party line – or maintaining what in Russia after the revolution of 1917 came to be known as “political correctness” – is itself the true test of an individual’s reliability and loyalty to the regime.[19] As a result, most people begin to no longer speak unless they can be sure they are expressing the correct views, utilizing careful ambiguity and avoiding “dangerous” topics altogether. Society then inevitably experiences a conquest by what under communism has been called “wooden language” (“la langue de bois”), or what Orwell satirized as “Newspeak”: a sort of incomprehensible zombie dialect that is simultaneously dead, saying nothing real, yet able to be contorted to mean whatever it needs to mean whenever it needs to mean it. CCP officials and other undead reliably master this language.



Pondering the Censorship-Industrial Complex, Matt Taibbi remarked in a July 2023 podcast with the writer Walter Kirnthat all the assorted “experts” involved have, by “devising digital mechanisms by which they can turn down the volume on different ideas” on the internet – through tools like “deamplification” (shadow banning), search manipulation, and the selective addition of “friction” (such as spurious content warnings) – in effect appointed themselves as “unelected masters of the universe messing around with reality itself.”

Kirn then followed up with an evocative metaphor:

They’re mixing a record, Matt. They’re sitting there at a soundboard mixing a record. A little more cowbell. Let’s bring down the bass. Let’s bring up the treble, and they use words like friction and other mechanical metaphors for what they do to actual people. And we’re all just kind of bytes and digits in this musical production they call society. And it does sound crazy because it sounds so arrogant, so effortlessly arrogant as though social processes are computer processes and as though the thoughts, feelings, and opinions of a society are different instruments in a recording studio to be brought up in intensity or pushed out.

The true force of totalitarian regimes, Hannah Arendt once reflected, was that, even “before the movement has the power to drop the iron curtains to prevent anyone from disturbing, by the slightest reality, the gruesome quiet of an entirely imaginary world,” their propaganda machines possessed the “ability to shut the masses off from the real world.” Today, much as virtual reality devices now already allow for “augmented reality” (the addition of the virtual superimposed onto perception of reality), a vast reality distortion field threatens to settle itself in between the public and the true world.

Xi Jinping and his officials like to muse wistfully about the pleasures of the “Fengqiao experience” (枫桥经验) and sharing them with all of China. Fengqiao (“Maple Bridge”) is, or was, a picturesque little township in Zhejiang province, but I’m afraid the Fengqiao experience is not a tourism package. Rather, back in the 1960s Fengqiao distinguished itself as a model town in the eyes of Mao. While usually Party thugs had to go around identifying and rounding up “reactionary elements,” in Fengqiao the people handled it themselves: “not one person [had to be] rounded up, and still the vast majority of enemies were dealt with.” Brilliant!

Fengqiao so impressed Mao because, by constantly monitoring and snitching on each other, and engaging in “on-site rectification” (mob struggle sessions) and “rehabilitation” (thought reform) to collectively enforce conformity, the people there successfully policed themselves without being told. Here at last was a true example of the “dictatorship of the masses” that Mao hoped to establish. With sufficient mobilization by the Party’s leadership, the “mass line” of the public could successfully exert immense social control over itself on the Party’s behalf. Mao encouraged the party to learn from the experience of Fengqiao, and in doing so planted a seed that would take root and grow in the hard soil of the CCP imagination: a dream of a population so thoroughly conditioned by Chinese socialism that someday it would practically manage itself.

But for all past speculation that the 21st century would be defined by a “clash of civilizations,” today there is only one, smothering form of modern civilization that has stretched itself across the face of the globe, its multiple personalities vying amongst themselves for imperial supremacy. In the West, progressive managerialism softly strangled democracy to death over a century of manipulation, hollowed it out, and now wears its skin. In the East, the imported virus of communist managerialism wiped out a once-great civilization in a river of blood, then crystalized into the cold, hard machine that now rules the lands of China. Fascist managerialism, killed off by its fratricidal siblings, lives on in their genes.

The rejection of universal papal authority by the Protestant Reformers necessarily limited the scope of church and state to national boundaries. Little recognized by modern American Protestants is that the recovery of the Constantinian ideal—the duty of the magistrate to look after the bodies and souls of those under his care—was an indispensable feature of the Reformation, emphasized repeatedly by 16th- and 17th-century Protestants like Peter Martyr Vermigli, Heinrich Bullinger, Franciscus Junius, Wolfgang Musculus, and Richard Baxter, but now shunned by their theological progeny.

Alexander Hamilton published a lengthy commentary on the Quebec Act, characterizing its “dark designs” as “permanent support of Popery,” effectively transitioning the “Romish Church” from a “state of toleration” in English territories to one of establishment—“an atrocious infraction on the rights of Englishmen.” No true Protestants of “common sense” could support such a measure. Samuel Adams encouraged colonists to zealously guard their religious rights against “POPERY,” and Jonathan Mayhew warned of incursions of “popish idolatry.”

On both sides of the Atlantic, George III was denounced as a “popish king” in the wake of the Quebec Act; imagery of the Gunpowder Plot (1605) was regularly invoked. The act was “high treason,” and some colonial papers even insinuated that it would usher in a “Gallican constitution” that would replace colonial charters. Popery was made synonymous with tyranny and arbitrary rule, and antithetical to the English constitution wherein the monarch was head of the Protestant church. Indeed, the late Forrest McDonald suggested in his Novus Ordo Seclorum that at the popular level, fear of widespread anti-Catholic conspiracies, of which the Quebec Act was supposedly part, was perhaps the animating factor in the American revolt.

What was this but, to paraphrase Wolfe, a particular Christian people acting self-consciously as Christians for both their “earthly and heavenly good”? What explains this fear and prejudice but a Protestant land conditioned by Protestant sensibilities, stigmas, and conspiracies? Where else would “Pope Night” (i.e., Guy Fawkes Day) be celebrated for centuries other than an English Protestant country?

Yet colonial Protestant outrage was not motivated simply by anti-papal animus, but rather a deeper conception and expectation of Protestant kingship, of the relationship between the magistrate and the ministers, between state and church—political assumptions imbedded deep in the colonial psyche that would leave a deep impression on the later United States, which have been too often ignored by modern interpreters of the pre-revolutionary period.

One of the most controversial aspects of Wolfe’s book is his chapter on the Christian prince. Protestants and non-Protestants alike have instinctively recoiled from it.

As I’ve shown elsewhere, the ideal of the reformist Christian magistrate, the “nursing father,” is entirely indigenous to the Protestant tradition.

Throughout the tradition, and until very recently, the Christian ruler was expected to exercise a religious interest, to punish notorious public sins like blasphemy—and to protect, indeed encourage, true religion. Franciscus Junius charges the magistrate to assist “his society in aspiring to the gate of eternal salvation.”

And yet, again, the question is, what of America? For a more indigenous example, see the Cambridge Platform—the confession that would have governed the churches where Franklin, Adams, Hancock, and anyone else from Congregationalist New England grew up—which casts the magistrate as Nehemiah. It teaches that “Magistrates are nursing fathers and nursing mothers, and stand charged with the custody of both Tables [of the Decalogue].” The Platform adds that civil authority is not only concerned with providing “the quiet and peaceable life of the subject in matters of righteousness and honesty, but also in matters of godliness.”

On this topic, as Sabo knows, we find in the historical record decidedly Protestant states composing the American nation—a federalist, pan-Protestant ecumenism, something more than the mid-20th-century sophistry that erected that famous “wall of separation” out of hollow dicta. These little colonial nations, strung together in a sort of new Augsburg Peace (1555), featured laws for office holding, public decency and worship, blasphemy, and the Sabbath. The necessity of a shared public moral orthodoxy to inform law and policy, and indeed the national ethos, was an assumption that governed both Tidewater Virginia as well as mountainous New Hampshire.

You will hear of the Lockean founding, or of the more general Enlightenment founding, and, for the more bold, the Christian-influenced founding. Rarely do you hear of any explicitly Protestant founding. Protestantism has been sidelined as the socio-political glue of early America.



True enough, many learned elite theorists cited Locke, Montesquieu, Burlamaqui, and so forth. But none were engrained in the American mind, none weaved sinews across ideological divides as Protestantism did. Dalton’s Country Justice and Blackstone’s Commentaries were common, to be sure, but more thoroughly influential texts on the American mind were Calvin’s Institutes, Rutherford’s Lex Rex, the Westminster Catechism, and the King James Bible, not to mention the mountain of local sermons preached by Congregationalist and Presbyterian ministers. These saturated colonial American households wherein, per John Adams, the American revolution predated war and formal codification. And what unites the various key figures of the founding, from Roger Sherman to Samuel Adams to James Wilson to John Witherspoon, is the theological-intellectual-cultural conditioning of Protestantism, which is true even of the less devout founders like Benjamin Franklin, the more private like George Washington, the late bloomers like Alexander Hamilton, and the more heterodox like John Adams.

sanman wrote: ↑16 Apr 2024 15:33 'Western Universalism' on full display

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/N3Z27PxpxSo

Aditya_V wrote: ↑16 Apr 2024 16:57 That's going down a slippery slope, then Russia has every right to kill any NATO leader in Ukraine or we can bump off any Paki general or Chinese general anytime.

He'll any country can bump off anyone planning any action.

Pratyush wrote: ↑16 Apr 2024 17:09 Cough, Cough, the killing of Yamamoto.

The USA has already set the precident.

Second, was Israel at war with Iran?

If the answer to the question was No. Then what were these people doing in Damascus?

hgupta wrote: ↑16 Apr 2024 18:18
Then explain the mossad linked killings and bombings in Iran then. Israel has been poking into the eyes of Iran a lot lately. Poked too often the meekest dog will bite. Face it israel has been itching for a fight with Iran and Iran may oblige this time.

Pratyush wrote: ↑16 Apr 2024 17:09 Cough, Cough, the killing of Yamamoto.

The USA has already set the precident.

Second, was Israel at war with Iran?

If the answer to the question was No. Then what were these people doing in Damascus?

Beware the copula “and.” Politics and religion. Church and state. What does it mean to bring these into relationship? Are they immiscible? Soluble? In certain respects, but not others? At certain times, but not others? A host of questions to be considered anew. How did conservatives get here? What prompts them today to wonder aloud if they need to rethink the relationship between church and state, between politics and religion?

First, conservatives have witnessed the appallingly rapid takeover of nearly every American institution by that constellation of phenomena called CRT, wokeness, DEI, cancel culture, and what has been called virtue-signaling, but which is better understood as innocence-signaling. Unable to name the genus to which these species belong, unable to see the underlying logic that gathers all of these phenomena together, they have been unable to fight back against them, save for a minor victory here or there. To win the war, conservatives must first name the enemy. That enemy is identity politics.

Second, conservatives have been unwilling to abandon terms for the enemy that have brought coherence to the conservative movement since the 1950s. The terms “cultural Marxism” and “progressivism” are hopelessly out of date and analytically inadequate to the current crisis, yet they are invoked at every like-minded gathering or convention. We are engaged in a monstrous twenty-first-century struggle. The Cold War is over. We must jettison terms that were fitting seventy years ago.


Regarding cultural Marxism, the “long slow march through the institutions” never happened. Instead, we have witnessed the breathtakingly rapid sprint of identity politics through our institutions. Bernie Sanders is a Marxist; his thinking has been thrown into the dustbin of history by the identitarians who now rule the left. What about progressivism—the belief that the “expert competence” of elites who have been trained in our best universities can redeem the American regime from the founders’ illusions that citizen competence is enough? That movement has been terminated by the left itself. Today, our best colleges and universities do not teach “expert competence.” Students there are taught identity politics instead. They are taught to think in terms of innocent victimhood and transgressive stain. Why do conservatives acquiesce to the “progressive” self-description coming from the left today, which seeks to link a new and destructive movement to a tradition of thought that, even if mistaken, sought to strengthen America? The left today is not progressive; it is identitarian. It does not want experts to rule; it wants innocent victims to rule. It does not wish to strengthen America; it wishes to destroy it.

Conservatives dare to raise questions about church and state because identity politics has so completely overrun our institutions that they now wonder if the constitutional regime set up by the founders was either faulty from the beginning, or is unfixable now even if initially well-established—hence the emergence of serious thinking about Christian nationalism, a post-liberal order, and pre-modern integralism. Conservatives dare think down these paths because they intimate that America is on the verge of a regime change—the new regime being based on innocent victimhood rather than citizen competence, as the one established by the founders was. We should be under no illusion: that is the project of the left today.

In the beginning was debt. That’s not the biblical formulation, but debt has been a central consideration from the very beginning of human civilization, so this claim is not far off the mark. Among the oldest written civilizational records is the Code of Hammurabi, which stipulates what payments—debts—are due for what transgressions. No agreed understanding of debt, no civilization. The most important work by mortal hands in Western civilization—Plato’s Republic—begins with the seemingly random claim by Cephalus that justice involves “paying our debts,” and ends with the mysterious claim that “justice is beyond price.” Does Plato introduce this idea of justice at the very beginning of the Republic because he understands that debt is the most primordial experience of man, and that the primitive way of understanding it—every debt must be repaid—does not grasp the deeper mystery of justice? I think he does. What of the great breakthrough of the Hebrews and Christians? Genesis 3 does indeed make a claim about the primordiality of debt. Christians since Paul and Athanasius have understood this chapter to have established that man cannot pay the price to liberate himself from his slavery to sin—hence the “divine ransom” Christ paid, to adopt fallen man and bring him, as an adopted son, into the household of God.

The left in America today is consumed by the primordiality of debt in human life, while conservatives have little to say about it. Or, rather, conservatives have had little to say about the deeper, more mysterious understanding of debt toward which Plato seems to be pointing, or the understanding of debt that underwrites the central Christian claim about unpayable debt. Since the 1950s, American conservatives have, of course, focused on two more immediately obvious kinds of debt: economic debt, the commercial balance sheet of costs and benefit; and tradition, the debt we owe our fathers. Indeed, it could be said that these have been the two pillars of conservatism, aligned in some measure but never exactly pointing in the same direction.

To begin to understand the place of this deeper, third kind of debt and economy, which we must grasp if we are to understand the sort of debt that identity politics has in mind, consider Tocqueville’s thinking about religion and its deformation. In 1835, in Democracy in America, he had written the following: “Eighteenth century thinkers believed that religion would die out as enlightenment and freedom spread. It is tiresome that the facts do not fit the theory.” The age of enlightenment would not blot out Christianity. In 1851, in The Old Regime, he added a new twist to his theory: The French Revolution, he wrote, was an “incomplete religion.” Christianity would weaken, and into its place would step one incomplete religion after another. After Christendom would not come “secularism,” but rather the age of incomplete religions.

In Christianity, man is universally stained and, through a vertical irruption into history, he is saved from his stain and transgression. But in an incomplete religion, the vertical relation between man and God is reconceived as a horizontal relation between pure, mortal, innocent victim groups and impure, mortal transgressor groups. God does not “save” the world, man does, by expunging the impure groups (and the filthy things they have done, like invent capitalism and fuel industry with “dirty” petro-chemicals), so that the body-social may be cleansed. The impure groups have a debt they cannot repay, and so must be eliminated from the body-social.


Second, an idea that follows from the first: The innocent victim is justified (to use not irrelevant theological terms), so that his revolutionary acts—say, guillotining landed aristocrats and churchmen during The Terror;

The legal status of what the incomplete religionists do may be criminal, but the legal debt they might owe is discounted or canceled because their act is justified in the third, higher, trans-legal economy of debt within which incomplete religions operate. Whether we are considering the French Revolution, communism, the ghastly simplifications of “post-colonial studies,” or the raging fire of identity politics in America and Western Europe today, the so-called innocent victim is never guilty, no matter how many laws he or she breaks.

The incomplete religions that have overshadowed the so-called secular enlightened West for two-and-a-half centuries operate, like Christianity, in a third economy, in which the moneyed economy that conservatives know so well counts as nothing. Judas, the Apostle, received his silver coins for his betrayal, yet took his life because his betrayal could not be atoned for in the moneyed economy. The money of the landed aristocracy and the priests could not buy their pardon during The Terror. The richest members of the bourgeoisie could not cleanse their ledger with gold, and so they were extinguished.


Like Christianity, all of the incomplete religions operate within a third, spiritual economy, and assert that the transgressor has an unpayable debt. In Christianity, the transgressor is every member of mankind—and his unpayable debt is canceled by the divine innocent victim, Christ. In all the incomplete religions, the transgressors, too, have an unpayable debt, which they can discharge only by being purged—hence the ongoing cancellation, traceable to the French Revolution, of all those who believe, not in cosmopolitan man and globalism, but their particular nation; hence the hatred of our bourgeois institutions of family and church by the Frankfurt School in the mid-twentieth century, and the project of destroying them; hence the current hatred of Israel because it is simply and unequivocally a “colonizer” who must be eradicated “from the river to the sea”; hence the hatred of “whiteness,” and the language of “toxicity,” applied especially to young white men who have dutifully stayed in the lane afforded them within the identity politics regime—drugs, online gaming, *****, effeminacy, and so forth.

The categories of these incomplete religions—universalist vs. particularist, oppressed vs. oppressor, colonized vs. colonizer, innocent victim vs. “white straight man”— establish a sharp line of demarcation between the pure and the damned, as does Christianity. But in the case of incomplete religions, there is no repentance, atonement, or forgiveness. The debt accumulates and can only be discharged via violence against the stained transgressor. The innocent victim does not, as in Christianity, “take away the sins of the world.” Rather, only by purging the impure group can the world be made pure again. The purportedly pure innocent victim assures himself that his very survival depends on purging the toxicity he beholds, which is “out there,” but never “in here.” Regarding the upcoming election, identitarians declare that we must “save our democracy” from the deplorables. So goes this dangerous line of thinking, which can be satisfied only with the shedding of blood. Never a thought about the poison that lies within them.

I recently eavesdropped on a conversation between two artsy-looking types in a pub in my hometown of Budapest. They discussed postmodernism, populism and other things that are fashionable to fear. They also discussed the widely held view that the global, liberal consensus ended on 9/11, when ‘history came crashing back’ and they ‘realised that global politics still has its bloody underbelly of death and destruction’.

Following the implosion of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, the ‘bloody underbelly of destruction’ was still very visible in the former Eastern Bloc. In the Balkans, a bloody decade-long war followed the disintegration of Yugoslavia. Russian troops intervened in Transnistria, a breakaway state in Moldova, and many are still there today. In the Caucasus, what became known as the First Chechen War erupted. For those of us in the eastern periphery of Europe, history never ended.

During the 1990s, the Western intelligentsia spent untold emotional labour developing a ‘postcolonial’ worldview so as to reckon with the imperial past. But the countries in Europe that were neither colonies nor colonisers remained entirely outside of the scope of Western thinking. Europe, in the minds of Western Europeans, was just that: the Western part.

Today Western European elites look down on Eastern Europe. They blame the East for the division besetting the European Union, indeed for the failure of the project of European unification. This was all too visible in the shrillness of the Western media’s coverage of the recent Slovakian and Polish elections, in which Eurosceptic populists faced off against pro-Brussels technocrats. The message from assorted outlets was clear: Eastern Europeans are not behaving as they should.

In response to this failure, many among Eastern Europe’s elites have become hysterical. Their near religious desire to be ‘part of the West’ has become difficult to take seriously. As a result of their pursuit of this ‘one true path’ of EU integration, they have lost their ability to represent the people. Yet they continue to exert an increasing influence on a powerful minority.

There are significant differences in public opinion between East and West around global political events, from Ukraine to Israel. These differences reflect people’s different historical experiences. It is much easier to believe that the elites are lying to you, when you spent 50 years under a totalitarian system in which elites were indeed lying to you. This is one reason why the pro-Palestine movement, towards which Western elites are increasingly sympathetic, is markedly less popular in Eastern Europe. Many in the east regard elite moral posturing over the war in Gaza as just that – posturing.

This growing division is not helped by the fact that the West is riddled with guilt regarding its own imperialist history. Western elites, like self-flagellating monks, use this guilt to signal their moral superiority to those in other nations who seem to lack a sense of shame about the past. Hence the West views Easterners’ displays of national pride with suspicion.

Today, the differing imperial histories of Europe stand in the way of any mutual understanding between East and West. Some parts of Europe were subjugated under empires. Sometimes Christian peoples were subjugated by non-Christian imperialists. And sometimes people were subjugated by those who spoke very similar languages and held very similar beliefs.

All of these different experiences of empire are obscured by the West’s view of Europe as a homogenous bloc. Globalisation has meant that those of us in the grayscale of imperialism are invisible. European elites’ project of EU integration, their commitment to the one and only true, Western ‘path’, has rendered the entirety of Eastern Europe silent.

Based on the search results, there isn't a single universally agreed upon list of countries that comprise "The West". However, here are the countries most commonly included in definitions of the Western world:

Core countries almost always included:
- United States
- Canada
- Countries in Western Europe (UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Netherlands, Belgium, etc.)
- Australia
- New Zealand

Often included:
- Central and Eastern European countries (especially those in the EU/NATO)
- Latin American countries

Sometimes included:
- Japan
- South Korea
- Israel

The broadest definition from the sources includes 36 countries:

Andorra, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Monaco, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, San Marino, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, United States, Vatican City

Key factors in defining the West include:
- European cultural heritage
- Christian religious tradition
- Use of Indo-European languages
- Democratic political systems
- Developed economies

However, the exact list can vary based on context (political, cultural, economic, etc.) and time period. There's no single authoritative definition of which countries comprise "The West".

Citations:
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAnAmerican/ ... rt_of_the/
[2] https://cod.pressbooks.pub/westernworld ... chapter-1/
[3] https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_world
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_world
[5] https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/lis ... tries.html
[6] https://2009-2017.state.gov/p/wha/ci/
[7] https://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/he ... /countries
[8] https://oldmanmountain.com/product/divide-bike-rack/