Oh those idiotic "cycles of history,' yet again!

 A 'rightward shift'? Only if our confidence is destroyed!  Which both MAGA and Hollywood seem bent on achieving.

I quote below a passage from interesting book -- The Aftermath: The last days of the baby boom and the future of power in America, by Philip Bump. Indeed, as far as it goes (see below) the passage and the article/book make some supportable assertions. Certainly my own kids mutter “boomers!” pretty often, sometimes without a smile!

And yet, this obsession is also misleading. For one thing, U.S. boomers aren't French. They like to work and have politically allowed the retirement age to keep incrementing upward, in order to maintain Social Security solvency as lifespans rise. (A further increment is on the table, refused by Republicans, who dread an end to one of their top complaints.)

So far, Boomers are still paying their way.

Are there many of the generational problems that Mr. Bump cites? Sure. For one thing, a substantial minority of boomers are Trumpers, resentful toward America's ongoing, 200 year project of ever-expanding inclusiveness. That large minority of boomers is also biliously hate-drenched toward all of the fact and knowledge castes - those nerds & professionals who seem to understand a world that MAGAs find bewildering. 

(Name an exception to this near-uniform resentment, from science, teaching, journalism, law and medicine to the FBI/Intel/military officer corps who won the Cold War and the War on Terror, all now MAGA-hated. That resentment of achievers is far stronger than their racism or sexism.)

On the other hand, a larger segment of that boomer generation are members of - or associates with - the fact and knowledge castes! The greatest and most creative such clade of humans the world ever saw, leading to heaps of very good news seldom mentioned in exploitive media.

 Moreover, those fact-and-progress-oriented boomers are (for the most part) eager mentors and enablers of their coming replacements. And there's another fact that’s seldom mentioned - that boomers will leave to their heirs the greatest tsunami of middle class wealth the world ever saw. Though – as described below – it could have even even bigger.

No, all this 'boomer' talk is - to some extent - deliberate distraction! Generation-fixation is a cult, especially among rightist intelligencia, desperate to divert attention from the real story - the real divide - which is (as both Adam Smith and Karl Marx told us) about CLASS…

… especially after 40 years of 'supply-side' scams transferred at least $10 trillions from the U.S. middle class into the open maws of a top 0.001% that never, ever invested any substantial amount of it into the promised productive uses. A lordly aristocracy whose bloated wealth disparities are now surpassing French Revolution levels! 

Fully aware that those chickens may come to roost, the rightist mystical-obsession is with CYCLICAL HISTORY. Raving notions of fore-ordained generational cycles like those clutched by Nazis, Confederates and other romantics... 

...and that now propel a desperate fantasy called prepper-ism, as many of the uber-rich build luxury bunker-redoubts and mountain refuges to ride out a coming "Event," or fall of civilization. As if we spurned survivors - especially the nerds who know cyber, bio, nano, and nuclear stuff - won't trivially know where to find those who betrayed and abandoned us.

== A Quasi-Religious Cult to Justify Neo-Feudalism ==

Among the core scriptures of this cyclic-history mysticism that obsesses conservatives, there is a tome called The Fourth Turning, a pile of jibbering hogwash by authors Strauss & Howe, whose apophenia/pareidolia incantations are so easily disproved that obsessives can only double down, obsessively - and religiously - averting their gaze from any doubts.  (I know plenty of these guys - and not one will wager over the testable falsifiability of these cult 'historical cycle' cult assertions.)

That is the undercurrent, beneath all this 'generational shift' blather. A desperate drive to distract from real problems and divides. Or how foolish the sycophancy-lobotomized oligarchy truly is, for rejecting the great benefits they gained from the New Deal and the Great Society. Or their plunge back down the path that old Karl ordained. Dreaming of harems and consigning themselves to tumbrels.

But fine. Now here's that promised quotation from The Aftermath. Read it both for how right it is... and how there are other, unmentioned layers. 

"The Baby Boomers... were a cohort of historically unprecedented size, whose basic need to be clothed, fed, housed and educated was a decades-long jobs creator and economy stimulator. And they were a cohort whose massive size and timing — not just in the immediate aftermath of World War II, but decades into a postindustrial era of growth, government investment and a strong middle class — meant cultural and economic dominance for much of their lives. As teenagers, boomers saw their desires met by marketers who had only just discovered that teenagers with few obligations and a little disposable cash were a huge potential consumer group. Now, as older adults and retirees with waning obligations and a lot of disposable cash, boomers continue to hold a significant chunk of American wealth and the consumer power that goes with it — and in turn, products and services for boomers have proliferated, a trend that will no doubt continue as they enter their sunset years. The government adjusted, too, smoothing boomers’ entrance into the world with significant investments in infrastructure and education, and now smoothing their exit with significant entitlement expenditures."

Statements and assertions that are true – in themselves – can also add up to distraction and bullshit.

== "Caesarism" - the latest treason ==

Let's go past all the headlines and spume. The Mad Right’s neo-feudalism fetish is its only priority. All supposed “policies’ boil down to it, leading at last to this inevitable end state: “For the last three years, parts of the American right have advocated a theory called Caesarism as an authoritarian solution to the claimed collapse of the US republic” (With Peter Thiel among the major subsidizers of dismally microcephalic propagandizers, pushing the same cult incantations under a different name: “neo-monarchy.”) Yeah, sure, guys. 

 

Dig it. After 6000 years of wretchedly stupid misrule by inheritance-brat kings and lords, we broke from that feudal Divine Right romantic twaddle. And in so doing, we have accomplished vastly more - in every conceivable category - during the last 250 years of gradually improving constitutionalism – and especially during the post- Rooseveltean era – than all other human cultures… combined. And I include the neolithic. 

 

Yes, I mean combined. Put up wager stakes. Anything that is consensus Good and factually verifiable. Like the percentage of human beings who have been able to raise healthy children in conditions of light and peace. Or science. Or production, economics or entrepreneurship. Or far-sighted literature. Or a burgeoning ecological movement that just might save our children's world... 

... or the thing that Adam Smith promoted, but that these hypocrites now openly hate -- flat-fair-creative competition.

 

Faced with a looming demographic collapse of U.S. conservatism (the mad Bush/Trumpian version) -– and the fact that all fact-using professions have turned against them --  these bozos surround themselves with lobotomizing flatterers who only prove my case! They have replaced politics - the high art of negotiating positive sum solutions to a wide variety of problems, ambitions and interests - with a tiresome litany of rationalizations toward one goal. A goal that is pathetically predictable, rooted in male reproduction reflexes…

 

…that of restored feudal rule by inheritance brats, yearning to restore the practice of kingly harems.  

 

Oh, it’s an insane-masturbatory goal. One chased by incel yammerers. But sure, you guys will try, and if 2024 elections aren’t going your way, you will unleash on us waves of McVeighs. 

 

(Prediction: the caesarites won’t let the ’24 election be about Donald Trump. Especially if he's either self-torching or going full brownshirt. Desperate, the oligarchs will find some way to push their beloved asset aside, either gently or (preferably) in some "Howard Beale Option" designed to incite the base. Think not? Then give me odds? 1:3 it’ll be Nikki Haley or one of her clones. And God bless the US Secret Service.)

 

== A Canticle for Rich Idiots ==

And so, let's explore the logical path they have chosen. 

Hey, feudalist cultists, have you considered what-if - just maybe - we (especially all the nerds you despise) are far more ready than you think? Exactly how do you believe this is gonna go, when you are waging war vs. all fact-using professions? From science and teaching, medicine and law and civil service to the heroes of the FBI/Intel/Military officer corps who won the Cold War and the War on terror?  

Open war against the nerds who know cyber, bio, nuclear, chemistry and all the rest? Those who have the exact location and every feature of every single Prepper compound?

 

I know some of the suckers falling for this prepper/aristocracy stuff. They used to be science fiction fans. Today, they think any "Event" will follow a course portrayed in one of the classics - Walter Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz.  Alas, they put too much masturbatory faith in ego-pleasing sci fi. 

Oh, it’s a great novel, written in a bygone age. But is it an accurate model of some post-Event future, when survivors will throw themselves at the feet of prepper lords, emerging from sanctums and bunkers? When the inevitable blame backlash gets turned against all nerds? 

Are you guys really so sure the blame won't fall upon those 'lords,' whose active or passive sabotage undermined our institutions of resilience?

 

Want a model for what'll actually happen, if those would-be caesars do trigger an "Event?"

Paris, 1789. 

== They know no history. And hence no future ==

 

Okay, just one more thing.

 

Yeah, bad – tho sometimes well-written – science fiction has played a role in forming caesarism. Foremost among those pushing this rejection of the American Experiment? Take Orson Scott Card – a writer of unquestionable persuasive genius and psychological manipulativeness. Scott spent his entire career relentlessly inveighing that democracy is futile and no institution can be trusted. Certainly, the very notion of self-rule via negotiated, positive-sum politics, thrashed out openly by several hundred million citizens, is ridiculed and dismissed at every turn.

 

Instead, we all should throw ourselves at the feet of some super-uber-demigod-Caesar, hoping (in fact praying) that he’ll be as nice as Ender Wiggin. Only he should also have an all-chastising whip – and maybe cattle cars and smokestacks – to back up his unquestioned (unquestionable) wisdom.  

While this lesson is pushed in all Card tales, including the dangerously misunderstood Ender's Game, the anti-democracy propaganda gets explicit in Card’s EMPIRE, the author's wish fantasy novel that is clutched and extolled as a keystone document of this Caesarist/neo-monarchist ‘movement’ that bodes for the rest of us…

... nothing but pain. I promise though. If that happens, you fellows will share in it.

 

The obsession with historical "cycles - and the coming 'hero generation!'

Again and again, I keep encountering time fetishes that correlate with political ones.

For example, traditional Marxists tended toward teleology, belief that civilization has an inevitable course, propelledtoward inevitable outcomes by class war and by ever-increasing industrial production. Though today's 'leftists' wouldn't know anything about that - I have yet to meet one - even one - who could describe old Karl's historical patterns or future extrapolations. Or what he actually said about capitalism. Nor, indeed, do they ever put any of today's passions in a context of 6000 years. (A very badly needed context!)

On the other hand, they are positive geniuses compared to today's Mad Right. And I mean all of it, from the world oligarchy of casino mafiosi, hedge squires, oil sheiks, Kremlin "ex"-commissars, techie preppers, mandarins and inheritance brats, all the way down to your frenzied MAGA uncle, who dreams that wreaking McVeigh-ngeance on nerds will somehow make him superior to all those smartypants 'fact' users. Nearly all members of that reactionary cult wallow in the same macro-delusion...

...cyclical history.  WIthout actually knowing anything about those 6000+ years, they cling to fantasies that "We've all been here before. And this phase will bring my decadent foes crashing down, just like..."

... just like, what? Well, there's the rub.

== Let's get into those patterns and 'cycles' ==

 While there is zero evidence for  'cycles,' history does show some basic 'attractor states'... above all a tendency for human males to do many of the same tiresome things that almost ALL other males do, in nature...

... which is take advantage of any opportunity to monopolize reproductive success at the expense of other males. (Pick almost any animal type; that is the most visible and garish intra-species struggle, though taking a wide variety of competitive modes, from violence to 'gaudy plumage.')

 In humans, this Darwinian tendency manifested - with the arrival of agriculture and towns - in 8000 years of varied forms of feudalism, wherein gangs of bullies smashed all potential competitors, while taking other men's women and wheat. (8000 years ago especially, there was a huge event, a 'Y-chromosome bottleneck when - as told by DNA - for a few centuries only about 15% of male humans reproduced! Look it up.)

A strong argument can be made that feudalism - in the varied types that dominated 99% of those 80 centuries - is the most 'natural' human governance mode. Certainly every generation features SOBs trying hard to re-impose it! (Including each phase of the U.S. Civil War; we're now in phase #8.)

Alas, while it may be the 'natural attractor state' - (we're all descended from those cruel harems, folks) - it's also true that feudalism has proved always to be crappy at governance! 

Look at that awful litany of horrors called... history!  Even good kings - and there were some! - barely budged the needle, seldom encouraged real progress, and almost always left things to idiot sons or grandsons to f___ up.  This happened - always - because autocratic rule suppresses the one thing that allows discovery and correction of leader delusions and errors...

That one thing was - and remains - reciprocally accountable criticism. The ability of critics to point out leadership errors, before they become lethal, and then argue out alternative, based on facts.

That trait - suppression of error-discovery criticism -is why almost all feudal regimes governed terribly! Leading to that litany of horrors called history.

== Is there a way out? ==

Humans did find an alternative to this trap! A rare one! Indeed, one that was perhaps so unlikely that we may be the only ones in the galaxy to stumble into it! (One of my top five theories for the Fermi Paradox!)  

That alternative mode of governance - the Enlightenment Experiment - is very good at fostering corrective, fact-using criticism! And it works. Flattened societies that allow free-fair-open competition always do better - by orders of magnitude - discovering errors and exploiting opportunities. 

These 'enlightenment' departures from kingship/lordship were starkly rare!  One experiment in ancient times - Periclean Athens - stunned all the surrounding kingdoms and oligarchies... till those surrounding, macho-lordly realms swarmed in to crush it. 

- Renaissance Florence fell the same way, after its burst of glory drew savage response from terrified autarchies. 

- Amsterdam barely survived the same feudal attacks... but endured to spread seeds leading to 3 centuries of spectacular successes! 

Success that oligarchies have since tried to destroy every generation, including a major attempted putsch as we speak.

== Qualifying my praise of Enlightenment Society ==

I go into a lot of this - and especially the role played by modern mythic systems - in Vivid Tomorrows: Science Fiction and Hollywood. 

But still, for honesty's sake: let me stipulate two flaws to the prodigiously more fair, scientific, progressive, creative, free and fun enlightenment approach - flaws that we have yet to solve:

1. The criticism habit can metastasize! It can become cancerous to society - as it did in post Periclean Athens - when sanctimony becomes a drug abused by all sides, robbing criticism of its corrective value, devolving it into rituals of hate.

2. Much of that enlightenment progress - correcting countless past injustices, for example - came at an incremental pace we now view as appallingly, horrifically slow! 

Though far faster than any other, recalcitrant human society.

== Can we get back to those cycles of history? ==

Why did I just go into that? Because all of it is ignored by the simplistic political cults out there... 'Marxists' who know nothing about Marx... the non-Marxist left, who believe their (mostly laudable!) liberal reformist demands somehow erupted from their own brows, instead of from hard increments, won by ten preceding generations... 

...and especially today's flaming-rightists whose uber-favorite book, nowadays, is called The Fourth Turning, by Strauss & Howe -- an exercise in mesmerizing pareidolia that's especially alluring for folks on that side of the aisle. 

And yes, 4T is a pile of historical/teleological nonsense, utter hogwqash that caters - like porn - to the desperate need of conservatives for 'cycles'. (Confederates, Nazis, you name the fascist cult; they all throw themselves at cycle-fetishism in one form or another.)

It's always lurked there on the right.  But The Fourth Turning cult is part of a final phase, toxic frenzy. It has so many former Goldwater conservatives - now fervent or uncomfortable Trumpists - salivating for a coming Grand Crisis.  Worse, many are eagerly helping to bring one about!

Carumba, I don't have time to describe this quasi-religious tract that uses Bible-style incantations plus pseudo-sci mumbo jumbo to cram American history - somehow in isolation from the world(!) - into a perfect 80 year pattern of four generational personalities: each cycle or 'turning' concluding with an admirable 'hero generation' of the US Revolution, the Civil War, WWII... 

...and now the millennials + Gen-Z'ers are gonna have to step up to fulfill that ordained heroic role!

I know more history than most folks - (it's typical of sci fi authors, actually) - and I fail to see any correlation between The Fourth Turning (4T) BS and any aspect of American life!  Howe's fabulations are based upon stories about vast and varied, borderless populations of individuals, stereotyping them as monotone 'generations.'  Even the Boomers - who might be said to have some recognizable 'generational' demographics - overlap with these traits of Howe's only if you squint hard, after pouring lemon juice in your eyes.

Take young people, in their twenties. The ones I've met certainly do seem generally nicer than most boomers were, I'll avow. Much less sex-frantic and more diversity comfortable... 

...but so now are half of those same boomers! Half of the Boomers you know, in fact, are nicer than they used to be! Those millions laid the groundwork for every 'heroic' thing the the 4T cultists expect from my poor kids. So... maybe we grew up a bit together?

== Okay, let me conclude by giving into grouchy temptation! ==

In fact, if I may be indulged a brief, old-fart-grumble? The one trait that I see -- pan-spectrum -- among young people -- a quality that does seem somewhat 'generational' -- is a wee bit of a cult belief in fragility. That mere words might wound someone so deeply that there's no recovery, no walking it off, no chance of toughing out the 'verbal trauma' and moving on.

 Hey, this trend is rooted in a good impulse!  Because it can happen! People are vulnerable and resilient across a vast range. I'd say 10% of folks were never able to 'tough it out and move on' after mere verbal triggers - not in olden times and not now.  We should change our ways, every year, to be more kind! 

We should move toward a diversity that includes allowances that some folks don't benefit from 'walking it off'!  

But a majority? Of... the toughest species the world ever saw?

 No, no, girls and boys and others. That person you see in the mirror is likely a whole LOT more resilient than this generational fragility-incantation encourages you to believe! (And yes, and it correlates with video-playing physical passivity.)

Kids, you are descended from all those heroes of history who had things far worse than you do. Every generation overflowed with 'heroes' who picked themselves up, brushed themselves off and then strove to make the world better. 

Not perfect! But better-enough for you to now improve it, further-still!

Especially if... according to all that Fourth Turning cycles blather... YOU are gonna have to be the scheduled Hero Generation!  

If that is your destiny - because idiots deliberately incite a 'crisis' to fit their cult incantations - then sure. You be heroes! 

I know you've got it in you.

So do I.

Economics and investment gurus abandoning the GOP... and John Roberts's agenda... and again with this "Fourth Turning" voodoo?

Starting with economics: How are my investment-pundit friends reacting to these insane times? Here's one denouncing a second round of ripoffs.

"$1,000,000,000,000. Or a TRILLION dollars. That's enough to give all 1,000 Billionaires in the World another Billion. Wait, we did that already. Well it's enough to give a Million Millionaires another Million. We did that too? Well it's enough to buy 3,000 masks for each American so we wouldn't need to spend Trillions propping up the economy or to accelerate money velocity by giving $600 to 30M people for a year."

"ROFL!!! Who are we kidding, this is America, we're going to give it to the rich people again!" ---

-- And that from a stock investment guru... one of those who love markets, but who get that driving average folks toward revolution may not be good for values.

"The funny thing is the rich people are pissed that they are only getting $1Tn this time (got $6.7Tn last time) ...The biggest stimulus issue will hit us on Friday, it's the end of the $600 weekly unemployment bonus and the Democrats in the House wanted to extend it through Christmas while the Scrooges in the Senate said not only do they want it dropped to $200 now but they want all unemployment capped at 70% of wages AFTER it's combined with any State Benefits people are receiving."

There's more. But you get it. The rich are swiftly dividing into two camps: the unsapient and insatiably greedy that I depicted in Existence... versus those who understand what ol' Joe Kennedy did, when that SOB mogul shocked his peers and backed Roosevelt: 

"I'd rather have half my wealth taken to foster a happy middle class than lose it all to revolution."

And again, I know a dozen ways that some sub-billionaire could make a huge difference, the next two months. And go down in history.

Meanwhile... continuing with economics...

The FCC has approved a petition from Cumulus Media to permit more than 25% foreign ownership of US media, up to and including 100%. Yep. Part of the steady effort to give puppetmasters all the strings.

The best online zine about economics in the modern context – and the top venue that discusses the deeply compassionate and moral ways that Adam Smith first broached the stunning advantages of flat-fair-open-transparent competitiveness – is the EVONOMICS site.  Highly recommended.  And yes, I have one of the channels there, talking about Smith… and why advertising can no longer carry the weight of supporting the Web. 

And see their piece on the economic effects of the pandemic.

== Roberts the "moderate" or "liberal"? ==

Again and again. The top oligarchs don't care about race or gender or abortion, except as dog whistles to rile up red-heads and confeds. John Roberts will side with the Court's liberals on those topics, in order to get balance cred. But he will never side with the people or precedent, or the Constitution, or honesty, when it comes to power. 

And now someone else is pointing at the emperor's nakedness:

"Conservatives really aren't paying good attention to [chief justice] Roberts. He knows what is important and what is not. He knows that LGBTQ rights and religion get lots of media coverage, but what really matters to him is keeping Republicans in power via gerrymandering, voter suppression etc. On the latter kind of cases, he is an unwavering supporter of the Republican Party. 

"To mask that, he votes with the four liberals from time to time in the hopes that everyone is distracted by bright shiny objects and fails to notice that what he really cares about is keeping Republicans in power. With this mix of rulings, he can claim he is just calling balls and strikes (even if baseball itself is in trouble, as described below). Conservatives seem to be unable to comprehend that he is on their side on the stuff that really matters long term."

At last. A pundit who isn't denser than lead.

== Again with this garbage? ==

One of the most-absurd pieces of pattern-seeking nonsense is "The Fourth Turning" by Strauss & Howe, a fable about American "generations" that both ignores the rest of the world and all the rest of human history... plus biology, evolution and almost any inconvenient facts... but has become a touchstone catechism for the US right, feeding into a conservative proclivity toward CYCLICAL HISTORY.

As some kind of cause-effect predictor, it is nonsense... though as a metaphor for what we are going through, the fable does have some charms. It does seem as if millennials will be forced into "hero generation" status akin to the World War II clade. Not because of some teleological 'cycles,' but because imbecile believers in such nonsense, like Steve Bannon, have circled the globe hell bent on helping the enemies of our Great Experiment to provoke such a crisis, where none had been necessary at all. Ironically, they are doing it for evil reasons that the millennials themselves utterly reject. And those millennials will hunt them down, if this gets really dark.

I go into these cycles & such in an earlier posting as well as here and here.

==  The mumbo gets more Jumbo... ==

This interesting piece surveys the notions of William Strauss and Neil Howe that led to their famous prediction of a Great Crisis around the year 2020. I am much less impressed… in fact I have a chapter in Polemical Judo about "patterns of history" - or "teleology" - dissecting how mystical-minded folks on the left view such patterns quite differently from the way folks on the right generally adore "cyclical" incantations about nations going "decadent" and "falling" in rhythmic fatal sequences. (The Nazis believed in cyclical-history crap, proving decisively that they were a phenomenon of the right.)

Ironically, Strauss and Howe... authors of Generations and The Fourth Turning were actually quite upset over how fervently their thesis -- that US history obeys prim 80 year cycles -- was embraced by the radical right. Excuse some repetition, but Howe repeatedly stressed that the asses gleefully calling for a 2020 era crisis - many of whom, like Steve Bannon, helped artificially to cause it -- are exactly the sort of boomer dogmatists whom the new, millennial "hero generation" utterly despise!

  If millennials swing any way politically, it will be to emulate the previous "hero clade," the so-called Greatest Generation who adored one living human above all others... Franklin Roosevelt.

Oh, but now comes a "paper" that takes this nonsense to the nth degree, using Sciencey-jabber and impressive looking "charts" and inapropos 'citations.' There's hardy a sentence in this scroll of dreck that isn't easily disproved babble and confabulation with tables and graphs that are outright LSD fantasies... but wow what an incantation!

Again. In this link I point out the both leftists and rightists tend to desperately seek patterns of teleological ordained history. The left often sees this as heading inexorably in a particular direction, while the right nearly always plunges into "cycles." They draw comfort from the notion that all efforts will fail.

Oh, by the way... Did you know that private banks have police - and can arrest you? Without any Congressional hearings on the matter, the USA Patriot Act in 2001 bestowed on the 12 regional Federal Reserve banks domestic policing powers. While the Federal Reserve Board of Governors in Washington, D.C. is deemed an “independent federal agency,” with its Chair and Governors appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate, the 12 regional Fed banks are private corporations owned by the member banks in their region. … The Fed’s police officers are technically known as FRLEO, short for Federal Reserve Law Enforcement Officer. The system has its own police academies for training, their own patch and badges, uniforms, pistols, rifles, police cars and the power to arrest coast to coast without a warrant.”

And finally...

See this: The most surprising revelations from Mary Trump's just-released tell-all book about the president: Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man - which joins the shelves along with Bolton's The Room Where it Happened.

Inside the luxury nuclear bunker protecting the mega-rich from the apocalypse. “While humanity is still dealing with an ongoing pandemic of disastrous proportions, some Americans are preparing for a very different doomsday scenario: waiting out a nuclear winter inside a condo complex of luxurious underground bunkers.” 

First, these jerks think they are so modernist and even science fictional, and they haven’t a hair’s breadth of logic or imagination among them… like remembering that we nerds know where every single one of these hidey holes are, including those in Patagonia, the Urals and under the sea. And in the event of a calamity, if we feel betrayed or even just abandoned by oligarchs whose actions or negligence contributed to that fall, then we who know nuclear physics, cyber, bio and genetics will seek out those holes, pry out the soft nuts and turn them into peasants in the new order that they made.

Talk of "a new civil war" goes mainstream

I despise notions of "cyclical history." But nations do often fall into traps that look similar. Twenty years ago, back when America was riding so high that folks spoke of an "end to history," I addressed folks at a DC agency - flush with victory in the Cold War - and splashed them with colder water by asking: 

"What would enemies do, in this new context, to bring down even a pre-eminent Pax Americana?"

Even in the 1990s, there were many desperately eager to find a way. Some deluded themselves with fantasies of a supposed weakness that  "Americans are all decadent, spoiled, pleasure-seeking cowards" the same canard that every U.S. generation had to disprove at great cost, since the 1770s. (On 9/11 it was easily refuted by 60 brave volunteers aboard flight UA 93.) Now that perennialy-loony nostrum is being repeated by modern confederates, claiming that educated citizens and city folk inherently have no guts. I'll get back to that slanderously stupid calumny, below.

But in the 90s I went deeper. "What clever and potentially lethal endeavors might serious - if weaker - enemies undertake, to bring down the United States?" 

Wearing my sci-fi hat, I answered: "You'd start by looking across history for mistakes that almost wrecked the American experiment. Two stand out. Foreign quagmires and civil war. If I were an enemy, I would use asymmetrical and skulldugerous methods to lure us into both."

How might an enemy accomplish this? Among the methods listed on my 1998 slide (and there are witnesses) were: 

"Incite divisions among our classes and castes," 

"Incite suspicion toward our professional protectors," 

"Suborn top levels of U.S. leadership."  

Although every one of these can be found across the annals of shattered empires, my warnings seemed far-fetched in the late 1990s. I got smirks back when I first showed that slide. 

I don't get smirks anymore. I get gasps. 

Indeed, just three years after that talk, we were mired in endless middle-eastern quagmires, in exactly the same locales where the USSR met its doom. And through innovations such as the Hastert Rule, seeds were lain for an end to all grownup political discourse within the United States -- the beginnings of phase eight of the American Civil War.

== Talk of Civil War goes Mainstream ==

Okay, what seemed far-out, back then, is now on everyone's lips. Read or listen to this NPR report about “a new civil war?” Some passages are chilling. For example: one anonymous “fake news hater" left a voicemail threat for the New York Times' Ken Vogel. 

"You are the enemy of the people. And although the pen might be mightier than the sword, the pen is not mightier than the AK-47. And just remember Ken, there's nothing civil about civil war."

Like all of the bright fools in mainstream journalism, this reporter seemed to think that just quoting such treasonous bile should be enough to put it in disrepute. In so doing, these journalists help make the right's point! That brains and knowledge do not always translate into wisdom! So let me put all of this into much harsher perspective. 

Sure, oh anonymous troll-caller, it all may go hot. Rash heads might tip us over into something as awful as sci fi author Sean Smith relates in his novel TEARS OF ABRAHAM. Indeed, nothing would make Vladimir Putin happier. 

Before our confederate neighbors leap for their AK’s, however, it might be worth remembering that:

1) The Union side is always under-rated. Educated and city folk are routinely derided as “un-manly” and lacking courage, as in 1778 and 1861 and 1941. This lazy reflex is always proved wrong. But if these twits knew any history, they would not be twits.

2) Question: why have most liberals shifted their gun control views from efforts at restricting gun ownership to simple sanities like background checks? Answer: because liberals have quietly been arming themselves since 2001. They don’t preen, or stockpile, or wave their pieces around in compensation for male performance anxiety. Still, you'd be really foolish to just assume they are unarmed.

This goes double since the Fox-Putin treason ramped up its open war against our “deep state” professionals in law, intel, and the U.S. military officer corps. The folks who fought Hitler and saved us from Stalin and Brezhnev are now being told they must spurn facts and science and ignore the threat from a blatant, world-wide mafia putsch. And they are not having it. 

Hundreds of thousands of “crewcut types” have been driven out of the GOP and (sometimes holding their noses, and sometimes running for office) into the Democratic Party. You may be surprised how many of them will stand by the Union, if push comes to shove.

3) It’s not just the Deep State. This neo-confederate cult has been waging war against every profession that deals in facts and knowledge, from science and teaching and law to civil service, journalism… name an exception! 

But let’s circle back to that first one. Science. I have to ask the guy who threatened Ken Vogel: 

“Um, sir. If the AK-47 is mightier than the pen, then is an atom bomb, or a genetic weapon, or a software worm mightier than an AK? Because your cult’s open, death-vendetta against people who know physics and biology and cybernetics and medicine and every other science does seem to… well, forgive me… fail a simple IQ test. 

"Who will treat your battle wounds, when you've told doctors they're satanic? 

“I mean seriously, you think all the folks who know stuff will be helpless, when you traitors and your oligarch-mafia masters turn this civil war hot? Seriously? You assume your penis compensating arsenal of assault rifles and McVeigh devices can stand up to what we’ll be able to throw together in days, if your klan comes at us with torches and AKs and death in your eyes?

“Seriously? We're talking millions of people, each of them dozens of times smarter than you. Slay a few dozen of them and watch them get mad. You won't like them when they get mad.”

Here's a modest suggestion. Go visit Jim Wright’s Stonekettle Station blog. He comes from a good ol’ boy background and can beat any of you at blindfolded field-cleaning an M4. Only he also passes these IQ tests. And he can tell you what will happen if the New Plantation Lords send you into battle against “the north” again. 

Maybe, instead of obeying those masters and attacking all the folks who know stuff as a hated "elite," you should give another look at the real, conniving elite of casino moguls, slumlords, inheritance brats, Wall Street parasites, petro-sheiks, coal barons, KGB agents and mafia dons. They are “enemies of the people.” 

And if I'm not here to say it, then millions will step up to shout "j'accuse!"

== It's happened before ==

This is not the first all-out effort by paranoid dinosaurs to throttle our brave experiment in democratic-tolerant-scientific progress. The Dreyfus Affair crystallized a very similar turmoil in 1890s France, between liberal and reactionary forces that led ultimately to treason in 1940 — a  struggle that goes way back, in much the same way as the American Civil War has had recurring outbreaks, all the way to 1778: 

“The Dreyfus affair was triggered in 1894, when a traitor was discovered in the French army: Somebody had been passing information to Germany, which had defeated France a quarter century earlier and occupied Alsace-Lorraine. French military intelligence blamed Captain Alfred Dreyfus - an Alsatian who spoke with a German accent, and was a Jew—and therefore, in the eyes of some, not a real Frenchman. As it would turn out, he was also innocent. But French army investigators created fake evidence and gave false testimony; as a result, Dreyfus was court-martialed, found guilty, and sent into solitary confinement on Devil’s Island."

From The Atlantic: “The ensuing controversy divided French society along now-familiar lines. Those who maintained Dreyfus’s guilt were the alt-right—or the Law and Justice Party, or the National Front—of their time. They pushed a conspiracy theory. They were backed up by screaming headlines in France’s right-wing yellow press, the 19th-century version of a far-right trolling operation. Their leaders lied ‘to uphold the honor of the army’; adherents clung to their belief in Dreyfus’s guilt—and their absolute loyalty to the nation—even when this fakery was revealed.”

 As comments Daniel Duffy: “The split still divides France. The Dreyfusards led France to victory in WW1. The anti-Dreyfusards (especially those on the French general staff) led France to defeat in WW2 and ruled the Vichy regime. In his "Collapse of the Third Republic", William Shirer (also famous for "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich") strongly implied that the anti-Dreyfusards of the French officer corp deliberately betrayed France and preferred Nazi anti-Antisemitism to "liberte, egaletre et fraternite". On paper, the French army was vastly superior to the Germans and it took more than just incompetence to cause defeat.”

Seriously. When our few experiments in a newer-better way than perpetual feudalism are so very successful, but then crushed by tsunamis of illogic and madness, you have to wonder if we are in Heinlein's "Crazy Years." 

You, yes you, might be able to make a difference during the coming week.

I hope you will.