Thanks to Cosmopolitan Globalist for crossposting “The Age of Spectacle, No. 43,” and welcome to new Raspberry Patch subscribers sent hither via that crossposting.
Thanks also to my old friend David Blankenhorn, founder and President of Better Angels (now known as) Braver Angels, for reminding me of some relevant history pertaining to the “paid-only” Raspberry Patch post of February 11, “White Magic at the National Archives: Post-January 20 AoS Chronicle No. 1.” Thanks to his reminder I added on February 16 a brief but I think attention-arresting epilogue to the post. Thanks to other developments concerning mainly dramatic recent changes in U.S. foreign policy I added a second short epilogic remark on February 19. Paying subscribers might want to look at those brief remarks if the original post picqued interest.
And now, without further delay, the penultimate, 44th post of The Age of Spectacle project.
Chapter 10: Spectacle and the American Future, part 4 of 5
. . . .
The Futility of Conventional Politics
“The central conservative truth,” the selfsame Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously wrote, “is that culture, not politics, determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.” As a temperamental conservative in some but not other ways, Moynihan’s emphasis on culture strikes me as correct. But as a temperamental liberal in selected other programmatic/policy ways, I read history as showing that sometimes, at least, politics can indeed save a culture from itself.
To do that, however, a political order must recruit and elevate foresightful leaders with courage and creativity to reshape patriotism in molten times. The Great Man perspective on political history is often overblown, its popular appeal getting the better of its actual veracity. But sometimes, yes, great men (and women) change the course of history, and do so for the better. If that were not the case, at least in part, then the phenomenological premise, and the ongoing conquest of political Malthusianism presumed by it, would be false—and it isn’t false.[1]
Alas, few such foresightful, courageous, and creative leaders exist in American politics today at the national level; the political culture has become so much a casualty of the broader cultural flow that it rarely recruits the right kinds of would-be leaders. And the reason for this is not just the misanthropies of the two-party system, as some claim—it goes deeper than that. When the system does recruit real talent almost by accident the deformities of the political order make it all but impossible for those exceptions to rise to positions of authority high enough and for long enough to really make a difference.
Note the political paths of two Senators, one Democratic and one Republican, and the truth of this bad news becomes clearer. Elizabeth Warren has been the only Democratic office holder in recent years to have a synoptic theory of the case. When she ran for President in 2020 she should have called her case “The Democratization of Opportunity,” or something like that, because that was the essence of her analysis and the basis for her programmatic ideas. It echoed a similar core liberal impulse from around 1912, then championed by Theodore Roosevelt and William Allen White. Unfortunately, Warren failed to market her core understanding well and to exercise discipline in her programmatics. That enabled detractors to wound her by noting a colossal imbalance between what she proposed to do and how she proposed to pay for it. Senator Warren remains in the Senate, but her chances of ever heading the party’s ticket seem slim. That said, nothing is impossible in politics; if Joe Biden could become President, Elizabeth Warren should not be counted out.
The smartest Republican Senator in recent times has been Benjamin Sasse. A now twice-former college president with a history Ph.D. from Yale, Sasse’s grasp of the nexus between culture and politics is second to none. An anti-Trump authentic conservative, Sasse was censured by his own state party for some of the things he said about Trump, despite voting with the conservative bloc in the Senate about 85 percent of the time. Sasse resigned his Senate seat and returned to academia with two years left to serve.
Select similar examples, Democrats and Republicans, can be cited from the House of Representatives: Folks who came to Washington to legislate and serve the public good found that in the current environment they could rarely do either. The result is that the two major parties today are both idea-free zones, regardless of the clear current differences between the two in terms of relative sanity and devotion to the rule of law. They either fail to attract or spew out from their midst nearly all genuinely non-complacent creative talent.
It is not true that synoptic analyses and bold public policy ideas do not exist; they do, in abundance. But they rarely exist in the places where they can move from idea to reality. Any politician who bucks the party leadership by proposing something bold and creative, that almost by definition will rub one or more powerful vested interests the wrong way, is going to get politically defenestrated, and fast. And that is why reversing negative political trends cannot happen by dint of conventional politics as usual. All the ideas that, if implemented, really would make a positive difference have almost no chance of being taken seriously. And even if a good and bold idea were to be taken seriously by a few, the encroachment of zero-sum-sourced polarization on our politics would make agreement on moving forward all but impossible.
Example: Back in 2013 a Senatorial “Gang of Eight” made up of four Republicans and four Democrats put together a viable and construction package on immigration reform that passed the Senate 68-32; but Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner, observing the so-called Hastart Rule—nothing gets presented unless the majority of the majority party supports it—refused to bring the matter to debate in the House, and the bill expired with the end of the 113th Congress.
Whatever the issue or whatever group is engaged, the zero-sum conviction that now permeates the Congress is that general circumstances never improve from learning, conciliation, or compromise among those with differing interests. Only confrontation—by hurting one’s adversaries and forcing them to concede—ever brings progress, and in confrontation no shared rules or norms can long exist. Everything is politically weaponizable, not to exclude lies, gestures toward violence, and ultimately violence itself. It is essentially Leninist. Clausewitz famously wrote that “war is the continuation of politics by the advent of other means,” and Lenin inverted Clausewitz to wit: Politics is the continuation of war—class war—by the advent of other means. Lenin militarized politics. Steve Bannon endorsed the concept on the Right during the 2016 Trump campaign, having once admitted to an interviewer that he was a Leninist in precisely this sense. Most woke types endorse it on the Left. No clearer example of that principle in operation can be found than the first month of the second Trump term.
The main difference between the zero-sum addled Right and the zero-sum addled Left is that the anti-Enlightenment Right thinks in terms of individuals and presumes themselves to be the winners, while the anti-Enlightenment Left thinks in terms of groups and insists that their groups are the losers, the victims. On the Right, if we wish to be charitable, we have mostly pride-wounded simpletons; on the Left, masochistic victim-worshipping fools. The combined result is a near-continuous replaying of a classic Prisoners’ Dilemma game in which all sides choose the selfish alternative that leaves everyone worse off.[2] It’s a perfect match made anywhere but in heaven.
I and many others have some bold policy thoughts, and more than thoughts: actual detailed plans and proposals.[3] But operationalizing any one of them would likely be negated by barriers raised by the very problems the proposals are meant to alleviate. Consider some recent history in that light, which sums to a massive lost opportunity.
As relevant background to the now expired Biden era it is worth noting that Barack Obama’s eight years as President constituted an earlier and critical massive lost opportunity. Obama won a mandate for real change but being a relatively inexperienced one-term junior Senator he needed the political and economic establishment to get anything done in a special-interest infested environment—notably his signal health insurance legislation. Compare Obama’s clout in the White House to, say, Lyndon Johnson’s after November 22, 1963. Johnson had been majority leader; everyone owed him something; he knew where all the bodies were buried, figuratively speaking. Obama ran as the anti-K Street candidate but then, once in office, realized that no one owed him anything. So he turned his agency over to Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reed who, in turn, negotiated fat deals with all the corporate actors whose assent was needed to pass the Affordable Care Act, and so diluted and distorted it to the point that some of its consequences—like massive industry consolidation—have been counterproductive. Worse, that first act established the template for all that followed. That was not the way to lead bold change, so there was very little of it.
Obama’s lackluster eight-year tenure constituted relevant political and cultural context when, during his Inaugural of January 20, 2021, Joe Biden called for boldness. He was correct to do so but, unfortunately, he never offered a page two defining what boldness meant, except in ways that spited the promise of his own declaration. By definition, a kitchen sink full of slogans, some reshuffled Executive Branch organizational charts, and sharp new names for old ideas cannot be bold. Biden never told us what we needed to be bold about, namely: defending the core values of American political culture from not one but two illiberal movements working to destroy it. There never was any real vision in Biden’s presidency, no theory of the case comparable to Senator Warren’s, no rationale even for why Americans should still be part of a single political community.
That followed from the fact that in 42 years of Senate service not one original idea from Joe Biden turned into successful legislation leaps from memory to lips. One might think that, unlike Obama, a man who had been in the Senate since January 1973 would at least have some clout from mere seniority. Remarkably, however, Biden didn’t have much: His glad-handing, get along with everyone manner, along with his absence of ideas ever turned into law, branded him as a lightweight. Despite his seniority few took him very seriously, so the continuing absence of any real ideas struck few of his former congressional colleagues as odd.
Maybe worse, the slogan Biden chose for his health-aborted re-election campaign—“Finish the job”—was simply awful. If some aide came up with that and not Biden himself, he or she should have been sacked immediately. Kamala Harris’s slogan? Already forgotten even before January 20, 2025. Alas, the startling truth is that in recent years at least the Democratic Party does not do politics very well. Its leaders and consultants seem to have forgotten that America is at its best when it has a big job to do, when it has a pioneering mission of some kind to commute. If we grant Jefferson’s locution of an Empire of Liberty for the sake of counsel, we may note Burke: “A great Empire and little minds go ill together.” America is at its best when Americans are building something together, when the hopes for the future are granted more important than marinating in the imperfections of the past. “Finish the job” was not only uninspiring, for anything comparable to putting a man on the moon, for example, is not just a “job”—it’s a mission—but it begged the question: “What job?”
Not that Joe Biden was not a successful President in many ways; to the contrary. No one suited better the needs of the moment, except toward the very end of those moments. Biden was a normalizing and stabilizing figure in the aftermath of political disaster, rather like Gerald Ford after Watergate, but more so since after Trump the stakes were higher and the dangers greater. More important, the moment called for someone who understood that politics overweighed policy, and no one in the Democratic Party stable could have managed that constraint better than Biden, even though in the end he failed to manage it well enough. Greatness is partly defined by the character of the leader but also by the character of the times; the two need to fit together for any leadership to be truly successful.
Biden was hardly unusual for lacking vision. In neither major party amid the tenured American political class has anyone offered bold ideas to promote American progress for a long time. Even the quotidian definition of bold these days—and the word is often pressed into rhetorical service—is unboldly anemic. The reason seems to be that, again with few exceptions, neither side has a remotely serious theory of the case as to what’s wrong with the country, except to blame the other side for whatever it is. The parties have had slogans and accusations to hurl at each other, but neither has been able to think up to the level of dysfunction that any honest, serious observer can detect without strenuous effort. Why?
Democratic and Republican elites alike seem far too complacent, which reflects not just their own privileged status but the “gated” mentalities that keep them isolated from how the vast majority of Americans actually live. It also doesn’t help that most members of the political elite do not deep read anymore. They do what most everyone else does: They look at screens, and skim whatever they do read up to, but rarely longer than 700 words. Like too many others, they are cyber-sped up victims of the continuous partial attention syndrome; many, perhaps most, are addicted to distraction like so many these days.
Too many examples suggest themselves as illustration, but one stands out: the perpetual failure of the Congress to pass a fiscally responsible Federal budget, and the unwillingness of the Executive Branch to make it do so. The cumulative debt today, at one point pushing past $40 trillion, is a burden on future generations, a national security vulnerability, a source of inexorable pressure on the position of the U.S. dollar as the international exchange standard, and more besides. But the Congress, keenly illustrating the typical IBG-YBG flip-it mentality of white-collar crooks, does not care. The result has been a yearly game of chicken played with other people’s best interests as the stake.
It works like this: Everyone wants to lard up the freebies to the constituency for short-term political gain without a care for the longer-term consequences, and then come budget showdown time refuse to budge unless others do, which they generally don’t. The result is that discretionary spending excesses put pressure on non-discretionary spending and entitlements, forcing choices that need not exist were responsible adults actually working the problem. The usual result is a multi-vehicular collision from which the drivers walk away unscathed, the only casualty being the by-standing future. To claim this doesn’t bespeak of intergenerational irresponsibility, that it’s only politics as usual, is to be ignorant of American political history as well as devoid of common sense.
And that is also partly the reason why almost none of the bold ideas available to Joe Biden and his associates as of January 2021 broke the ice of the policy process to come under serious discussion. The “big” things the Administration thought it did during its first three years were not that big at all, and some, like the CHIPs bill, were not even wise. That pulse of modern infant-industry protectionism, though aimed at building a specific manufacturing base in a critical value-added field, only stimulated foreigners to up their game, and their improved game has bested ours thus far. Only one steady pulse from the Administration qualified potentially as bold reform, and that concerned its revised conception of antitrust law. Even there, however, the principles beneath the reform were both somewhat sketchy and bore non-trivial downside risk.[4]
Moreover, some fairly small reforms would have helped, too, and the Biden Administration did not even try to get them done. For example, it was and remains only common sense to want to limit if not get rid of the requirement for 60-vote supermajorities in the Senate to pass a law. This requirement, which is only a Senate rule and not itself a law, contributes hugely to the stasis in legislating much of anything nowadays, which has the effect of pushing authority away from the Legislative Branch toward both the Executive and the Judiciary. It amounts to a generically distortive and anti-democratic rule and it should be junked, particularly if there is no way to get House Republicans to junk the informal Hastart Rule.
Why isn’t it junked? Because both major parties have cared more about stopping what the other side wants to do than about advancing its own legislative program. Since only the Democrats have had a positive legislative program in recent years, paltry though it may have been, and Republicans have had only a negative one composed of regulations and related agencies they want to destroy, one would think that the Democrats would have favored getting rid of the 60-vote supermajority rule. They should have; but they exerted no effort to do so for fear of losing the Senate and then having to stand by and watch as Republicans try to burn down the entirety of the so-called administrative state.
The result has been frustrating stasis for the most part, and that exactly is why when Donald Trump came along, again, with genuinely bold if spectacularly wrongheaded ideas of how to “fix” things, like democracy itself, a lot of Americans fell back on the rationale “at least he’ll do something.” Yes, he has: Since January 20, 2025 the now re-tenured MAGA elite has been destroying the administrative state without regard for the Senate. The supermajority requirement remains a Senate rule but Senate rules stopped mattering the moment the Senate stopped mattering. That is an exemplary illustration of mediocrity in conventional American politics; it shows how something that happens at the level of the Executive Branch can render even the mediocrity unimportant—which leads to a somewhat weightier but still solvable problem: the excessive growth of presidential power.
The mediocrity and dysfunction of the Congress have contributed to the growing sway of both the Judiciary and the Executive Branch. Probably the only way for the excessive growth of presidential power to be reined in—the President’s power to pardon being a prime example—is for the Legislative Branch to make a comeback supported by the courts, including the Supreme Court. As simple as that sounds it has proved impossible to do: The power of the President has grown steadily and Presidents of both major parties have taken advantage of and extended it. They are responding, some of them anyway, to a general desire among We the People for great presidents out of belief in the aforementioned Great Man theory of history, men of boldness, insight, and courage. But as one observer, Aaron David Miller, has pointed out, the demand for greatness has always exceeded the supply, thereby priming the national heart for the next presidential savior. This, Miller argued, is unfortunate, since greatness seems to go hand in hand with dangerous crises, and more of those we do not need.[5]
Sometimes spectacular things in politics just happen, without anyone manufacturing them and without need for a mentality at work in the culture to define and recognize them. But when spectacular things happen amid that mentality, they have a tendency to seem more normal than they otherwise would. Our evoked set is now switched on to the spectacle setting full time, and the shock bar is ever rising. So what we may call “natural” political spectacle has a harder time being seen for what it actually is.
A perfect case in point was the June 26, 2024 CNN-hosted “debate” between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump. As presidential debates have gone, this one was indeed spectacular--spectacularly bad, even horrifying. It was evocative of horror when we realized again in a sudden flash that mumbled truths have no chance of refuting vigorous lies. But what happened over the next few days was in a way even worse, and just as spectacular in its own way. As Janan Ganesh put it in the Financial Times:
Soon after the debate, Biden put in a solid showing at a campaign rally. Some Democrats talked this up as though it were a missing fragment from the Gettysburg Address. This is where liberal denialism ends up: the ignominious spectacle of Biden, a proud man, who served his nation and the world by defeating Trump, being commended for getting to the end of sentences. In its own way, it is a more poignant spectacle than the botched debate ever was.[6]
The dynamics of the Age of Spectacle gave us Donald Trump. It also, in subtler ways, abetted liberal denialism by sucking the seriousness out of our politics, giving us ever less serious and more performative politicians. No one could have predicted that the deracination of our culture from reality-based to surreality-based would produce a presidential election prelude that resembled a farce. But it did.
And it did so in what history will likely judge as a pathetic failure to take the measure of the stakes at issue. The future of American politics in the Age of Spectacle arrived a tad too soon. Because of the debacle in Atlanta, Biden soon gave way to Vice President Kamala Harris who ended up Vice President because of Biden’s thoughtless remark before the 2020 election about putting a woman of color on the ticket before he had any idea of who that might be (and he said the same foolish, tokenist thing about a Supreme Court appointment). Harris’s presence did not help the Democratic ticket in November 2020 and she had little chance of beating a resurgent Donald Trump in November 2024 despite doing the best she could as an 11th-hour candidate. Thanks to Biden’s lack of genuine seriousness, and a similar lack on the part of those around him, clowns with flamethrowers now rule the American political roost.
That turn of events enabled perhaps the most cynical remark about American political values ever made: Donald Trump’s post-election assurance that there would be a peaceful transfer of power in January. This was uttered in all cynical solemnity by a man who prevented exactly that after the November 2020 election and would have done the same again had he lost in November 2024. And not one senior figure in the Democratic camp said a word, so normalized has the blatantly outrageous become, and so exhausted are nearly all of us by the process. So to repeat: Conventional politics cannot save us, and an extraordinary politics of a bottom-up social movement that can save us is not only difficult and fraught; it is also nowhere in sight.
Not for the first time in American history our politics are basically inert. As before, pressure for practical and positive reform will have to come from below, and it will have to become stronger than and arrive before techno-social trends that are destructive and regressive make things even worse. Time is neither free nor infinite. We are in a hole and we need to stop digging, now.
A Few National Security Implications
Now just some brief words here on a subject we have barely touched on: the foreign and national security policy implications of American cultural and hence political dysfunction.
The first word is that great power competitions will continue in the future as they have in the past. It seems fairly self-evident then, all else more or less equal, that a society acting as though it cannot distinguish what is real from what is surreal, that infuses its political order with short-termism to an extreme, and that is sufficiently decadent and entertainment-addled that it cannot seem to take any sort of standards seriously, will be disadvantaged in dealing with societies that can sort reality from fantasy, can think and plan beyond a week or two, and can maintain and enforce standards.
The United States has so far proved woefully inept at understanding and adjusting to the downsides of the cyberlution, up to and including how digi-gadgets affect the health and well-being of our children. Authoritarian polities like China are light years ahead of the United States on this score, and European Union countries are far ahead of us, too. Over time, these differences, if allowed to persist or widen, will have national security consequences that small-beer like the CHIPS Act will be powerless to counter.
The second word concerns the demonstration effect of bread-and-circus performative politics in the United States, and its manifest zero-sum-resonant polarization, on the assessment of other national elites as to how serious and consistent American foreign and national security policy is likely to be. Let’s look at a particularly vivid recent example.
For that “Biden-Trump” CNN-hosted debate in Atlanta I happened to be at the Braver Angels annual national meeting in Kenosha, Wisconsin. The entire convention, consisting of more than five hundred people, watched the “show” on a large screen in a building belonging to Carthage College on the western shore of Lake Michigan. Afterwards those in attendance discussed what they had seen at some length in a moderated program. Among the several dozen speakers, questioners, and commentators over the ensuing ninety minutes not a single one raised the subject of how those abroad—allies, adversaries, and neutrals alike—might interpret what they, too, saw in real time on their screens as Biden projected weakness and onset senility, Trump boisterous inanity and insanity. Not one: That is how insular most Americans are, still, today.
Having been in the foreign and national security policy business for nearly my entire professional life, it seemed vividly clear to me that the general impression this “debate” left on foreign observers harmed the reputational clout and credibility of U.S. policy abroad. As such it cheered U.S. adversaries and frightened U.S. allies.
Worse, much worse, noting the very sharp divisions in U.S. campaign rhetoric between a Democratic consensus on an America remaining active in the world and in support of its democratic allies and a MAGA Republican consensus that is plainly isolationist in body language and resolutely agnostic about the future of democratic norms abroad, many foreign observers might have concluded that the United States was deterred politically, despite its massive military capabilities, from waging any protracted war. And they would have been correct. Why?
The Biden Administration was and the Harris Administration, had there been one, would have been more reluctant to choose policies that would risk escalation and lead to a U.S. use of major force today for fear that domestic divisions would undermine the homefront in any military operation lasting more than a few weeks, and that did not appear to be a rousing success along the lines of the 1991 Gulf War. And they were and would have been justified in their caution, because the political fallout of a muddled war would likely have taken the authority to make policy away from them come next election season. (It did anyway, but that was not the point in the moment.) Caution would not have constituted an absolute limit on U.S. military action; it would not have presaged categorical self-deterrence, in other words. But it would have raised the threshold of risk-taking below the level of clearly existential, or what are usually called in colloquial language “vital,” interests.
Just as most Americans are blind to how a spectacalized U.S. politics affects the assessments of foreign leaders, so many American foreign and national security policy experts have been blind to how our U.S. domestic political instability influences security policy deliberations at the highest levels. In discussions over U.S. policy toward the Ukraine-Russia war and, less volubly Israel’s military actions in Gaza and southern Lebanon, many complained that the Biden Administration was too meek and too cautious, too afraid of escalation and of being drawn into a fight; but they almost never mentioned the tenuous domestic political situation that made that reluctance mostly reasonable. The situation was so odd that it was almost humorous: Typical Americans have been (and remain) oblivious to how foreigners calculate the likely effects of U.S. domestic politics on U.S. foreign policy, and American foreign and national security policy experts have been (and mostly remain) oblivious to how a politically conscious President—and that would be all of them—does the same. Foreign adversaries always looking to see what they can get away with without triggering a constraining American reaction, and a President is always looking to see what elbow room he has without triggering a constraining domestic political reaction.
This was the reality of the situation before November 5, 2024. Partisanship, even tactically crazy by-any-mean-necessary partisanship, will not again stop “at the water’s edge” any time soon, as the old proverbial locution reads. Any President who understands U.S. interests in the wider world prudently and properly—and for the time being that means a Democratic President—will have to expect political sabotage of his (or her) foreign and national security policies. For power-of-the-purse reasons alone, that President will have to care which party controls the Senate and the House at least an order of magnitude more than any Cold War-era President, Republican or Democrat, ever had to care. The line between U.S. foreign and domestic policy, never as distinct as most academics have imagined, has all but disappeared.
Since November 5, 2024, and especially since January 20, 2025, things have both changed and not changed. Not changed is the fact that U.S. foreign and national security policies are projections of domestic political culture and deeper culture above all. The Trump 2.0 Administration is anti-meliorist to the bone, and in all regards. Its attitude toward poor people is raw Calvinism: The poor deserve their poverty, and trying to help them is a waste of time and money. So out goes any attempt, reasonable or not, to level the playing field at home and out goes all foreign and development aid abroad. Out goes the very ideational possibility of win-win arrangements and genuine cooperative relationships in civil society, so naturally out goes all attempts, mostly made in the USA since 1945, to imbue international relations with cooperative win-win mechanisms or institutions, whether concerning trade, human rights, or security. Donald Trump, zero-sum-brained narcissistic primitive that he is, always punches down because that is what winners do to losers: He does it at home, and he does it abroad.
One also sees a connection, or a projection, between domestic and foreign policy in terms of performative, spectacular “shock and awe” methodology deployed in both theaters. There is a direct parallel between the speed of the DOGE assault on the Federal government and its Schedule A employees, on the one hand, and the ideological blitzkrieg mounted by J.D. Vance and Pete Hegseth, with a cameo role inserted for Jack Posobiec, in Europe during February 12-14, 2025 on the other. Hegseth and Vance did not hide Posobiec from the European allies, so that they would know how to read between the lines of Vance’s too-carefully worded speech, and they were either aware or were quickly made aware that in a speech to last year’s Conservative Political Action Conference Posobiec said: “Welcome to the end of democracy. We are here to overthrow it completely. We didn’t get all the way there on January 6, but we will endeavor to get rid of it.”[7]
What has changed follows from what hasn’t: everything about U.S. foreign policy as it has existed since The Truman Doctrine. At Yalta FDR was prepared to think in terms of balance-of-power spheres of influence because he lacked viable alternatives; Truman was not, at least not unless he had to in order to hold off another hegemonic war. All Republican Presidents after him recognized the utility of alliances for containment and deterrence, understood the net positive-sum benefits of allowing some allied free-riding, and recognized the moral as well as the practical dimension of anti-authoritarian precautions.
Pax Americana, or the Liberal International Order as some liked to call it, had been aging and ill for years since the end of the Cold War undermined its original raison d’être. We continued to march along as before, but it became ever harder to hear the music and so the heart largely went out of the mission. Now it is dead, and there is no resuscitating it for at least four years, and perhaps never. The oft-repeated theme of Trump Administration officials, even the clingingly normal (but marginalized and feckless) Secretary of State, is that the postwar order has shifted from being beneficial to the United States to being deleterious to it. The coin of measurement is just that: coin, trade statistics—mostly misinterpreted—and defense and intelligence community costs. No broader conception of the national interest can alight in brains without the ability to count value that isn’t mere money. The green eyeshade approach to U.S. national security policy is, as our cousins across the Pond like to put it, pennywise and pound foolish to a fare-thee-well.
We are in for a time of bloody and dangerous adjustment. Ukraine, as well as all of Eastern and Central Europe, is in the putative Russian sphere of influence. Taiwan and much of maritime Asia is in the Chinese sphere. American power will not be brought to bear to prevent or even slow any consolidation of those spheres. Indeed, it looks far more likely to actively advance at least some of that consolidation. That creates a real problem for Germany, France, and the United Kingdom, Poland, the Baltic States, Sweden, Finland and Norway, in Europe.[8]
[1] In this regard note Michael Mandelbaum’s newest book, The Titans of the Twentieth Century: How They Made History and the History They Made (Oxford University Press, 2024). Note too in passing that were political agency not real then the charge from the Marxist Left all these years—that one day the true fascist nature of American capitalism would emerge clearly for all to see and, behold, now with the second Trump Administration we see it—might be true. Once a material determinist always a material determinist. But it isn’t true. Things might have been different; what we see happening now was not inevitable, and it needn’t have taken great men to have made it different. Some merely good men in the right places at the right times would have been enough—like, for example, Mitch McConnell at the second Trump impeachment trial. Had McConnell done the right thing then he would not be the only Republican Senator now to vote against the confirmation of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard.
[2] The other game metaphor that comes to mind, a more kinetic one, is of course “chicken.” Prisoners may make poor choices but they ramify not far given the constrained agency built into the scenario. Not so with risk-takers in fast cars.
[3] For a short list, see “Ten Novel Policy ‘Commandments’ from Adam Garfinkle,” invited guest essay in Economics Matters, August 28, 2024, and the sources cited therein. For more detail see my “The Quadrivium Fix,” American Purpose, March 19, 2021, and, though partly since overtaken by unfortunate events, Broken: American Political Dysfunction How to Fix It (American Interest E-Books, March 2013).
[4] I review the bidding here in my “Hipster Antitrust Goes Big League,” Cosmopolitan Globalist, September 6, 2021.
[5] Miller, The End of Greatness (St. Martin’s, 2014). Miller argued that only three American Presidents have been great—George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt—each coinciding with wartime. In my view, judging by the scale of accomplishment measured against the size of the challenge, I would add Theodore Roosevelt to the list, precisely because he achieved very great things in peacetime.
[6] Ganesh, “Joe Biden and the tragedy of liberal denialism,” Financial Times, July 2, 2024.
[7] Quoted in Lamothe, op. cit.
[8] It is not, as many believe, a problem Europeans cannot successfully manage. See Robert Tracinski’s excellent essay, “Dear Europe: Become a Great Power—or Get Carved Up By Them,” The Tracinski Letter (Substack), February 19, 2025.