After the State: The Coming of Neo-Medievalism and the Great Decentralization
Hey! You!
Join Us at the Anarchonomicon Discord Server!
The tendency toward political centralization that has characterized the western world for many centuries, first under monarchical rule and then under democratic auspices, must be reversed.
-Hans Herman Hoppe
Every time the subject of a possible US civil war or national divorce comes up I hear the same micron deep takes. America couldn’t break up because the division isn’t by state, its Urban Vs. Rural. Or that Urban vs. Rural isn’t the divide, even then people of different politics are mixed up together. Or that for every clear red or blue state there’s a purple state. None of which is in any way relevant to anything until you recognize the naïve mental model many of these people are working on...
These takes betray a belief that a second civil war would be some kind of conflict between coherent independent states who’ve started identifying with/against the idea of union such as happened in the 1860s… or that somehow there’d be a series of tidy Quebec style referendums resulting in a clean division such as exists in so many meme maps:
The truth is any post-breakup map of America would not resemble an electoral map following state lines, nor even a redrawing of state boundaries, such that the fantastical greater Idaho or Free State of Jefferson might exist as part of a wider Confederation of Constitutional Republics, or a Breakaway Philadelphia city-State join a Union of Progressive Democracies…
No. It’d be nothing so comprehensible or easily mapped to modern politics.
A post breakup America would probably look closer to this:
If you’re a sane person and your immediate reaction is: WHAT THE HELL AM I LOOKING AT!?
….Well that’s kinda the point.
(I really do apologize for all I’m going to have to digress)
For our purposes we can broadly divide history into 2 types of period… Periods of Centralizing trends, and periods of Decentralizing trends.
Centralizing Eras
You almost certainly know the history of Centralizing trends: The Macedonian Empire, The Punic Wars, The Roman Civil Wars, 7 years war, the French Revolution and Following wars, All the stories and heroes of the British and other Colonial empires , The American Civil War, WW1, WW2….
Centralizing Eras are consistently defined by big Heroic (classical sense of the word) figures that lead great armies or great nations and either win and centralize control under themselves or lose and get centralized under another. Alexander, Hannibal, Scipio Africanus, Julius Caesar, Agustus, Wolfe, Horatio Nelson, Napoleon, the Duke of Wellington, Lincoln, Robert E. Lee, Grant, Lenin, Trotsky, Woodrow Wilson, Mussolini, Hitler, Rommel, Churchill, Montgomery, FDR, MacArthur, Stalin, Zukav, Mao… On and on we could list the names.
Even relatively unimportant Generals or political figures in centralizing Eras, People who rank closer to 10th or 20th in the list of influential/powerful people within an Alliance, themselves wind up defining entire nations and eras. Figures such as Charles De Gaul or Ptolemy who really were not mission critical at all to their respective wars (very little would have changed if either had died suddenly at 20, they’d have just been replaced) and wielded relatively little power within their alliances, they become amongst the most important people in the history of entire nations… France and Egypt respectively.
What you may have noticed is there’s really just two great centralizing eras in the history of western civilization… the 300-350 years from the start of Alexander’s conquests til the final centralization of the Roman empire under the Caesars… And the 250-300 year history of modern empire: From approximately 1700-1945.
There are mini centralizing eras: the Spanish conquest of the new world, Cyrus the Great’s founding of the Persian empire, the Mongol Conquests, the Qin Dynasty and the first Chinese empire, the rise of the Tokugawa Shogunate… But the fact I’m giving individual dynasties or empires as “the era” kinda tells you how much these were one offs… indeed the largest of these conquests in terms of territory and cultural impact wasn’t really the effect of the Spanish but rather disease.
Mind you the importance of these “lesser” stupendous conquest takes a hit not from any stature of their own, but just the scale of the latest one. Nothing in history approaches the total all 7 continent conquests of the imperial era and world wars, and a great part of the Significance of the Mediterranean Conquests 2000 years ago is due to the import they held in the imagination of these global conquerors.
Yet these periods are anomalous.
The reason the great ancient states, and the 8th to 20th century empires were able to conquer so much wasn’t because of some natural course of human nature and civilization, it was because in those periods great technological and social gaps had opened to allow for conquest.
Why Centralizing Eras Exist
The least efficient, worst, and slowest way to do anything is also the most technologically simple: Just throw bodies at it.
As Napoleon famously observed “Quantity has a Quality all its own”. One can simply do things with vast numbers of people that would be otherwise impossible for a smaller group to do…
Alexander beseiged the City of Tyre, an Island city, by having his tens of thousands of men build a kilometer long bridge made of earth out into the sea and turn the Island into a peninsula. Today it’d take dozens or hundreds of men months to achieve this with modern diesel earth movers… but with 10s of thousands you can do it with buckets:
For thousands of years of history this was something that a force of 10s of thousands could do if they felt the need to but smaller forces could not. It was a inherent qualitative difference in the power and capability of scale that really only closed in the past 100 years… now a few dozen guys with dump trucks could do it.
But most of these “quality of quantity” type dynamics close far quicker.
The telegraph was an incredible military and political game changer.
Sure it was a mere wire that needed a chain of people in stations constantly listening, receiving messages, processing those messages, and then transmitting them on to wherever they needed to go. It took hundreds if not thousands of full time employees to maintain a telegraph connection between England and India or DC and the Frontier… but if you could achieve and maintain that connection you’d cut down an information transfer gap of months to mere hours… and most of that was the human processing and end foot delivery.
Likewise the roman roads or later European train networks gave them logistical capability along the avenues they wanted that simply couldn’t be matched by any smaller force…
The thing is all these unilateral advantages of centralized power eventually dilute and become multilateral, before finally becoming universal. The Roman roads were decisive for controlling Gaul and the frontier… but once you’ve got an entire network for trade and communication, and are fighting rebellious roman generals or Germanic mercenaries those roads weren’t specifically designed to defeat, they just become part of the geography usable by either side. Likewise once the telegraph was everywhere for consumer use or replaced by radio and later cell phones the massive unilateral advantage they gave disappeared and now the Arabs the British so easily kept down in the 19th century blow up their soldiers with IEDs detonated by cell phones.
The very act of making technology more efficient, less cumbersome, and more useful for day to day economic activity destroys most of its military and governing potential. Once its common then everyone has it, and once everyone has it then it isn’t a unilateral or even a multilateral advantage.
This is why it can be difficult to actually pin down the decisive technologies of centralizing eras or what technologies will and won’t lead to it.
You’d think airplanes, jets and bombers would lead to centralization… they’re expensive, impressive pieces of hardware that nations pour billions into and they let you literally fly around out of reach of those who can’t afford them… but if anything airpower’s been a wash for centralization vs. decentralization. There were only 62 nominally sovereign countries in 1914 when planes started first being used for combat… and now there are 150-200 depending on what you want to qualify as sovereign. Countries without home aerospace industries simply buy them from other countries... thus in the 1980s Argentina, a middle income country of 44 million, could go toe to toe with Britain who once ruled the waves, in an air and sea war… and have the entire thing be close.
the big impact of the introduction of Airplanes has been to decay the power of Navies absent them and to force First rate powers to spend inordinate amounts of money on new airplane designs every decade. The F-35’s development budget… if planes were a static tech you didn’t have to update, would have bought close to 100 of the Gerald R. Ford Aircraft Carriers they fly from. But that’s what you have to spend because advancements in missile tech and radar will destroy your airpower advantage if you don’t, even if your enemy can’t match you plane for plane. Meanwhile things like the F-16 or Su-27 are so “good enough” that they’re still being used 50 years later in militaries the world over. Sure the US can easily defeat them, but not so easily the investment to do so doesn’t devour US military budgets.
Fighter Jets, nuclear submarines, and Aircraft Carriers are actually far more analogous to a knights horse and armour or castle… capital intensive expensive assets that can be operated by what are historically very small groups of people. The thing currently stopping someone like Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk or El Chapo from owning a Aircraft Carrier or two + airfleet, or a few Nuclear Submarines + cruise missiles, and carving out a network of private enclaves isn’t capital cost or expense (on paper any of the 3 could afford the 10-20 Billion expense + 2-5b annual cost)… It is just that the US is currently maintaining its monopoly.
Centralizing tech tends to be the opposite of these capital intensive individually empowering superweapons, and instead tend to be draining in just the raw number of people needed to make them work at the immediate point of combat.
By contrast really unimpressive technologies like the Macedonian phalanx (guys standing together with extra long spears) can be decisive precisely because of how finicky, and unwieldy they are… you need to specifically have tens of thousands of men uniformly specialize in that for it to work, then lug the bloody things all the way to the desert… but if you do that and your enemy just calls up non-uniform, non-phalanx levies… well you win the infantry fight. A very good trick for an era when it might take 13 years for your enemies to get the memo.
This is why in the information age technological advantages are disappearing faster and faster.
In the 1940s Bletchley Park employed 10,000 people either directly as code breakers, clerks processing all the information going in and out, or other support staff. Now basically everything they did and achieved is replicable by one person on a laptop with some coding experience and a sufficiently complex excel spreadsheet. And what’s more everyone’s aware of it and sharing stories.
Before a cryptographic coup like that was inconceivable for the Germans. They went years without realizing Enigma had been broken… now there are entire subcultures built around speculative crypto assets who follow every speculative change in cryptographic science and make endless videos and arguments about it.
The NSA has gone from an effective 10 year lead on the private sector to maybe 1-3 months if they aren’t already behind.
This is why the information age has been so corrosive to centralization. Most people expected everyone having a camera in their laptop and a microphone in their pocket would create an inescapable panopticon of state surveillance… and yet little has materially changed for the average person on that front: You were somehow more likely to get caught for an actual murder in the 80s than now when everyone carries a GPS tracker in their pocket. Instead the big shift has been how much politicians and the security state itself is surveilled. The state always had the power to bug your phone, put tails on you, install hidden cameras, extort your neighbors or loved ones to name names, etc. The big shift has been how everyone having a camera or being encouraged to post about their lives has turned once unaccountable state actors into clowns always in the camera.
.
I’m still not fully sure why centralizing eras exist, how they persist for seemingly so long, or what ends them… even if you can identity the technologies that make an individual one, which will be hard since they’re invariably more likely to be a social institution than a physical gadget, its very hard to tell why those types of technologies came about then or in such abundance.
Why the 4th/3rd century bc to 3rd/5th century AD? What changed to cause the dark ages? Did it just take that long for the military advances to become universal? What did the Vietcong and Taliban have to defeat Westerners that the Plains Indians, Zulus, and Boxer Rebellion didn’t?
Centralizing eras are strange beasts… and part of that strangeness is rarity, but What are far stranger and yet far more common in the history of the world are:
Decentralizing Eras
The total number of autonomous Greek city states, which prevailed from the Bronze age collapse to the first conquests of Alexander, and only truly ended with the final roman conquest of all of Greece, numbered over 1000.
And even that undercounts, because outside the Greek corner of the Mediterranean there were the various Phoenicians, Latins, Semitics, Gauls, Celts, Iberians, Anatolians, Scythian, Egyptians, Numidians, and various basically independent Persian Satraps… The total number of fully or practically autonomous polities, cities, Kingdoms, and Tribes which may have their own gods, cultures, system of governments, sexual mores, crafts, arts, and geostrategic concerns could have easily numbered into the 10s of thousands.
This was the state of Greater European politics for close to 1000 years. Likewise once Roman Centralization began to falter with the division of the eastern and western empire in 283 ad… it wouldn’t be until 1945 that its former extent could be said to be “Unified” under the Aegis of Allied Victory… and a very short lived unity at that.
In the past 3200 years we’ve had only 600-800 years of truly centralizing eras where power concentrated, or merely continued without disintegration, when power didn’t dilute… But 2400-2600 years of Decentralizing eras where polities where shrinking and the ability to exert power across distance was eternally shrinking. eras where the average layman would struggle to name any great generals or kings… and when even the greatest kings and conquerors ruled and conquered remarkably little.
Normandy and England’s William “The Conqueror” captured England (but not Wales, Scotland or Ireland) creating a unified kingdom on both sides of the English channel…in a feat every English schoolboy has memorized ever since (1066 and all that)… And William’s total Domain was less than 1/20th what Alexander had achieved 1300 years before.
Likewise Shakespeare immortalized Henry the 5th as the very avatar of Mars…Achieving the English dream and conquering France! Only to die of dysentery within the year and have his territorial gain be entirely lost within a generation.
Likewise Charlemange’s 8th and 9th century unified empire of France and Germany broke apart within a generation. And as late as 1718 Charles XII’s extraordinary military victories and revolutionary tactics couldn’t save the Swedish empire’s decline from great power status.
In decentralizing eras, even when you have leaders and generals who by all accounts are just as impressive as many from the Great eras of conquerors… none of the victories really stick or create lasting polities. They can take the money and run, like Vikings or the sea people, they can carve out small kingdoms… but empires and large central states are just beyond the realm of possibility.
Why decentralizing Eras Exist
Centralizing eras are marked by finicky, barely technological, advances that A) are not evenly distributed and allow the powers which have them to dominate the powers that don’t, and B) require vast numbers of hierarchically organized people working together in sophisticated coordination to make it work at all, often with extensive infrastructure than can only be worked by such a bureaucracy.
Napoleonic Divisions, 5000 man Aircraft Carriers, trans-Continental railway or telegraphs, and massive continent severing canal systems (Suez/Panama) are prime examples.
Decentralizing eras are the opposite. Decentralizing eras are defined by sophisticated capital and skill intensive weapons that can be utilized by relatively few people, and which are widely distributed (it being far easier to get even ridiculous amounts of money to invest in tools or skills, than it is to get 10,000+ all obeying at once you).
We “sea” this with the very first decentralizing era: The bronze age collapse.
Whilst still mysterious, the ancient Greek dark ages and subsequent city states period began with the first great die off of empires.
The Mycenaean (pre-Greek) palace economies collapsed as the old empire/empires (no documents survived to tell us which) died, the Hittite empire died, and the Assyrian empire and Egyptian kingdom were vastly reduced in wealth and influence. In one of the fastest geopolitical restructurings in human history. In a mere 50ish years from 1200-1150bc empires and dynamics which had lasted thousands of years in some cases came suddenly crashing down.
Its still contested exactly all the factors that contributed, but the Egyptian records point to a culprit, “The Sea People”.
The ancient near eastern civilizations were able to centralize to an impressive degree thanks to 2 impressive technical innovations. First the titular bronze of the bronze age required an elaborate supply line of trade, the tin and copper necessary for bronze came from as far away Spain, Britain, and modern Pakistan (and according to some esoteric theories, Michigan) this combined with the specialized knowledge required to make bronze, which invariably was closely guarded, allowed regimes to maintain a monopoly over their smaller rivals… the raw pain and infeasibility of making bronze turning it from a capital intensive technology to a human intensive technology. The second centralizing invention was the invention and spread of writing, which was concentrated in the priestly and courtly class, thus allowing them to organize and regulate their early agricultural societies on a level beyond what any illiterate upstarts could compete with.
This natural dominance fell apart with the arrival of the sea people.
Quoting an inscription by Ramses II:
“the unruly Sherden [one of the sea tribes] whom no one had ever known how to combat, they came boldly sailing in their warships from the midst of the sea, none being able to withstand them.”1
The monopoly on bronze and early iron had diluted by the 12th century BC (Accumulated bronze weapons had diluted the bronze monopoly; whilst Iron is a common ore, requiring skill and knowledge of appropriate kilns to make useful, not elaborate supply chains; both weakening the weapons monopoly), but The sea people were defined by an inherently decentralizing technology: the use of private seafaring wooden boats… Costly capital intensive investments, but ones that can be made by teams of under 50 men using resources largely local to an appropriately forested area.
Once possessed in large enough numbers, by skilled enough warriors, these boats allowed highly profitable and relatively risk free raids on more “civilized” and centralized empires (the time for a land force to learn what’s happened and deploy being measured in days or weeks), first on peripheral settlements, then closer to the cores as the raiding warlords become wealthier, more powerful, and their alliances stronger.
Notably the sea peoples never seemed to have themselves centralized, their own tech empowering warlords to resist submission, and attack any would be kings who made themselves wealthy targets, but instead maintained loose confederations of war and profit.
Ramses again:
"The foreign countries made a conspiracy in their islands, All at once the lands were removed and scattered in the fray. No land could stand before their arms: from Hatti, Qode, Carchemish, Arzawa and Alashiya on, being cut off [i.e. destroyed] at one time. A camp was set up in Amurru. They desolated its people, and its land was like that which has never come into being. They were coming forward toward Egypt, while the flame was prepared before them. Their confederation was the Peleset, Tjeker, Shekelesh, Denyen and Weshesh, lands united. They laid their hands upon the land as far as the circuit of the earth, their hearts confident and trusting: 'Our plans will succeed!'2
We see this dynamic play out in the memories represented in the Odyssey and Iliad, a mythological account from 3 centuries later… The Achaeans (Greeks) are an alliance of small warlords with no obedience to each other… (the Iliad revolving around one warlord, Achilles, refusing to fight and his indecision as to whether he should just leave). Indeed Odysseus is treated as a highly important leader and king in this coalition because he leads 12 ships… out of a canonical 1000. At 1.2% of the total coalition he’s a respected king and player, despite ruling an Island that even today has a total population of only 3000 and would have been in the hundreds in 1200bc.
The Capital and skill intensive technology of early seafaring warfare, and the shockingly little required to make it work in terms of manpower and hierarchical organization, made it one of the most decentralizing technologies in history.
Just as the mythical Achaean coalition of raiding bands, minor “kings” and warlords brought down the mythical City and regional kingdom of Troy. So did the wider sea peoples bring down the Hittites, Egyptians, Mycenaeans, Assyrians, and the Archeological Troy (it was a real place).
.
The second great decentralization occurred around and after the fall of the western Roman empire.
The Roman empire and the imperial era of the Mediterranean was built around masses of heavy infantry in tight formation numbering into the thousands and tens of thousands.
With proper organization and drilling these forces could exploit Lanchester’s Square law to defeat any smaller without taking proportionate casualties. A dynamic that would replicate in the early modern centralizing era of musketry and cannon. Both eras saw sophisticated advances the raw formation and drilling of men to get them in out and out of those formations, and their success or failure, and clever tricks to trip up enemies could define the fate of entire nations… (think the changing formation of Hannibal’s troops at Cannae, or the Square formations at Waterloo)… And both eras saw the advancement of the siegecraft that could be done with sufficiently large numbers of people.
Alexander’s earthworks at Tyre, but also the earlier walls and counter-walls during the Athenian siege of Syracuse, Caesar’s double wall at Alesia, and the earthen ramp that defeated Masada were all examples of the incredible power masses of organized men could achieve… indeed the Romans threw themselves into seigecraft, making it regulation for a new Castra (camp fort) to be constructed every evening to regulation standards, including leveling of the ground, building of walls, etc. all to regulation standards and layout. Such that their mass of organized men would always have a defensive advantage even in enemy territory….
This was the advantage that organized and centralized heavy infantry wielded on the battlefields of Europe… but during and after the fall of the western Roman Empire things quickly reverse.
the medieval era is defined by 3 iconic technologies:
Heavy warhorses with advanced stirrups, castle/keeps (and the ranged weapons such as crossbows that lose most of their effectiveness when not defending them), and the Knights armor.
This is the iconic image of the medieval period. All three are capital intensive technologies wielded by small numbers of wealthy men.
Later Castles could be held against a force of hundreds by a mere dozen men, warhorses and advancing armor made knights sometimes 10-20 to 1 more effective than ordinary footmen.
Within the span of 500 years major historical battles went from 100s of thousands of people in great migratory armies crashing against empires of millions, to 20-60 incredibly wealthy men, all named in the record, facing off against a similar force. Hell individual duels often decided the fates of vast swathes of country side.
This is how totally heavy cavalry, armor, and castles just destroyed the very possibility of large complex states and the attendant armies.
Now ask yourself… Which type of era are we in?
Where are we in this picture?
Alexander’s conquests of multiple empires lasted 13 years. It took only 15 years for Caesar to go from a young general entering Gaul to being assassinated as a feared ruler of all Rome. it took only 10 years from the women’s march on Versailles for Napoleon to become consul of France… and only 5 years after that officially Emperor.
Lincoln and the Union conquered the South in 4 years… The Bolsheviks went from an obscure faction in the February revolution to winning the Russian civil war in 4 years. Hitler conquered France in under a year from the Declaration of War… And likewise it took the combined might of the British Empire, US and Soviet Union only 4 years to crush the German and Japanese empires.
do we live in an era like that? An era of great generals and conquerors whose names will be remembered through all of history? Or have we recently seen the equivalent of the Peloponnesian Wars Or some failed chapter of the 100 years war? Decades long affairs that seem to end only in things declining back into some semblance of what they were pre-war if not some even more chaotic quagmire.
Think of Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, or Afghanistan again, or Iraq again, or Iraq again with ISIS… Think of the shit-show in Ukraine, hundreds of thousands dead, and the only territorial difference from 2015 being a few hundred kilometers of land connecting the Rebel Republics to Crimea.
Do we live in a centralizing era? Are Generals Westmoreland, Petraeus, Mattis and Miley going to be ranked up there with Hannibal, Wellington, Eisenhower, Zhukov, and Rommel? Are LBJ, Nixon, McNamara, Kissinger, GHWB, GWB, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Obama going to be remembered as comparable to Alexander’s generals, the Caesars, the Attendant’s of Napoleon, or the Early Bolsheviks?
Would you say Hillary Clinton and her role in the Libya intervention is more like Marshall Ney, Antipater, Scipio Africanus, Mark Antony, Churchill, Admiral Yamamoto, or General Sherman?
Well I mean obviously Scipio… But the very question is absurd.
None of our leaders are analogous to the great conquerors. Rather they are like the Persian and Lydian kings and courtiers of the Pre-Alexandrian period, or the late Roman Emperors and generals, or the thousands of European kings and Courtiers, endlessly fighting grinding wars that achieve remarkably little. Their ultimate achievement being that they might be mostly forgotten as merely mediocre… instead of screwing up monumentally and going down in history like Varus, or Commodus, or Croesus of Lydia whom the oracle told he’d “destroy a great empire”… but whose wars only destroyed his own.
These are the kinds of people our elite are doomed to be remembered as… if they’re remembered. McNamara’s tenancy as Secretary of Defence isn’t remembered for him creating a fighting force to rival the Myrmidons or Napoleon’s old Guard, he’s remembered for McNamara’s Morons (Decent Review).
.
If current trends continue we’re on a fast track to eventually hit the apex of decentralization: Neo-Medievalism.
A long time ago in a country far, far, away
The above is a map of the Holy Roman Empire, one of the Successors to Charlemagne’s empire which, depending on the dating, lasted from about 800ad-956ad (its very debatable when you date the “start” of the empire) to its final dissolution by Napoleon in 1806. Meaning it lasted longer than the original Roman Empire…
Naively we might think this empire is a great counter example to my “decentralizing eras” thesis… Except for one thing: This was never “THE MAP” of the Holy Roman Empire.
The above map comprises every territory that was ever part of the “Empire” none of which were ever all in it at the same time… And none of which were ever really part of the same political unit… Its really hard to know if there was even a single year every polity nominally within the empire recognized each other, or were even meaningfully at peace. Indeed the “Holy” in the name was a source of countless wars and conflicts, given It was adopted and maintained (grossly simplifying) as part of a double play, the Emperor at various points wanting to use his title as “Holy” Emperor of Rome to annex the Papal States and assume authority over the Catholic Church, and various Popes aspiring to use their religious authority to place their chosen allies in control of the “Empire”. The Emperor bounced back and forth between being God’s appointed supreme ruler on earth, literally crowned by the Pope, and being the Supreme enemy of the Pope in turn.
Its a mess.
At various points there were multiple popes each of which had excommunicated the other and declared the other Antipopes with one Pope backed by the Emperor and one backed by other factions. On another occasion the Pope declared that Frederick II, the Holy Roman Emperor, was literally the AntiChrist (this is still on the books super secret Catholic dogma. Revelations happened 800 years ago), and in other instances Popes sided with various warring claimants to the imperial crown… Oh and then, in the middle of all this, Protestantism was born and wars of religion occurred, and the armies of the Holy Roman Empire assaulted Rome itself and would have captured the Pope except the swiss guard smuggled him out as the city was falling. (yes this was the subject of a Sabaton Song)
For long stretches the Holy Roman Emperor wasn’t even an Emperor as we conceive one… He was an elected figure!
Not of course by any popular elections, but by huge councils of appointed representative of the various semi-sovereign Duchies, principalities, free cities, counties, Diocese, and armed universities and merchant guilds that made up the actual political units of the empire…(The Prequels was George Lucas’s germanic blood memory)
You know how everyone gets confused by the electoral college or how American senators worked before they were elected… imagine that confusing mess x100, and the results determined who’d be civil waring with who, whether you’d be going to war with the Pope under the banner of the Antichrist, and later whether Protestants or Catholics would be going under the boot.
So Voltaire’s quip that the Holy Roman Empire was “neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire” was very bitingly true… it often warred with the Popes, far from being Roman on at least one occasion it invaded and sacked Rome, and far from being an empire it was more a loose federation that elected its “Emperors”…
But even that’s a simplification because at various points the pope was literally crowning the emperor, Rome was part of the empire, and the Crown was hereditary!
It simultaneously was and wasn’t Holy, was and wasn’t Roman, and was and wasn’t an Empire.
Seriously, this is the map without any simplifications:
Now tell me, is there another 3 word national title that’s hotly debated?
To what extent is the USA really United? States? or America?
The meaning of all 3 have shifted massively since the founding… the Union is unrecognizable from what the founders envisioned: becoming a Nation after the civil war, instead of the loose federation they set out to create. The states have gone from being almost fully sovereign republics to interchangeable imperial provinces, and are now again asserting increasing amounts of that lost sovereignty. And of course “America” neither comprises the whole of the Americas.. nor is it wholly within the Americas. ( we cannot forget Hawaii)
Might there come a day we quip the USA is/was neither United, nor States, nor America?
Hold that thought.
.
Medievalism
The reason the HRE is so confusing and the reason most Medieval and early modern history is so confusing, is Medieval states… really aren’t states.
Fans of Game of Thrones or Shakespeare understand the concept of feudalism and the military hierarchy of Knights answering to lords answering to kings, and Hollywood has taught most people to appreciate how that chain of command can become very conflicted and prone to rebellion or schemes, especially around a succession crisis (do you support the old King’s son, brother, or cousin to succeed him? Well who’s going to give you the better deal?) These stories make great hour and half dramas…
But even as all these dynamics did happen, the actual medieval system was vastly VASTLY more complex.
As opposed to “Feudalism” which is a caste system of vassalage that held in some countries but not others; The primary attribute of “Medievalism”, which was basically universal across Europe and beyond during the period, is how dilute and hard to define sovereignty is.
Multiple factions and entities within the same very small stretch of land might all wield some form of sovereignty and ability to make laws or rules, formal and informal, and enforce them with violence… all commanding some version of legitimacy. An individual town might have:
a Mayor or sheriff elected by some fraction of the propertied townspeople able to pass laws and have them enforced, even to the point of violence or death sentences;
An ecclesiastical order empowered to enforce its own laws upon the members of its order, maintaining armed retainers, and empowered (depending on the era) to root out and deal with heretics, (also at various points they owned and/or regulated brothels and vice crime);
local lodges of various guilds that variably are empowered to enforce their monopolies, collect debts, and deal with thieves, fraudsters and embezzlers in their midst, possibly including networked merchant guilds that across their various lodges might have more armed men than all but the largest individual towns;
Noble families that maintain arms and loyal retainers, with ancient rights and customs, including discretionary power to deal out violence to those who intrude, insult, or otherwise conflict with them… including dueling with their equals, or just brutalizing members of the lower class who insult them (imagine the brawl that starts off Romeo and Juliet, or the internecine fighting throughout, and how restricted The Prince is in setting any consequences for the Capulets and Montagues for their semi-open warfare);
A Knightly Order that maintains oaths, loyalties, obligations and interests distinct and separate form the nominal official chain of military command (think Templars, Hospitallers, Teutons);
An individual ward which a powerful alderman runs as a fiefdom/racket with a very reliable collection of thugs at his call;
All of the Above all over again multiple times, because we’re talking about a city that’s a conglomeration of smaller towns such as London, and the whole thing’s still organized as if it were 7 distinct entities.
The actual lord or governor who “rules” the town and answers to the king… on days he feels like it, and all the retainers and support people he uses to “govern” the place.
There is no coherent unified monopoly on violence like we imagine the state to hold in this situation. Instead various factions and institutions have all amassed various forms of legitimacy: cultural, political, and practical…and have all carved out their little niche in which they can deal their own version of law, violence and justice.
If you are a lawyer or have to deal with politics or government, or regulation, you might already be starting to see why I’m predicting this for the future but for those who are less versed in American governance:
America’s Practical Mess
I’ve tried to theorize why Centralizing eras come about and why they end, and how it can be predicted… But if you want to crudely summarize why they end: Smaller entities just learn how to fight back.
The Roman empire ended when all of its tech advantages were adopted by the Germanic tribes its was fighting… because those Germanic tribes had been trained in them while employed as roman mercenaries. Likewise the age of imperialism ended shortly after WW2 ended, because at that point every colony had a generation of young men who’d just been trained in western fighting styles. A process that began with the Irish declaring independence after WW1 and reached a fever pitch after WW2 when even the colonial white settler states set up by the British (who you’d think would be the apex of dependence, what with minority rule) declared independence.
Before the World Wars the European empires’ colonial foes looked like this:
After the world wars Nationalist Independence fighters looked like this:
Through the course of mobilization and great power conflict the Europeans had trained generations of their colonial subjects how to fight Europeans, but more than that they’d trained their upper classes and nascent middle-classes how to organize like the Europeans. Mahatma Ghandi worked as a lawyer in British South Africa, Ho Chi Minh was fluent in French, English, Russian, Cantonese, Mandarin, and Esperanto (of all thing) and had spent over a decade between France, the US, Britain, Russia, and China working and educating himself.
Whatever organizational, technological or methodological factors one uses to explain European dominance in the age of empires, by the 1950s the colonial subjects had learnt it just like the Germanic mercenaries 1500 years earlier.
What’s not appreciated however, is how at the intra-national level a similar dynamic plays out. The process of political organization, ideological formation, and political machine maintenance has likewise been massively decentralized.
In the late 18th century and into the 19th Century the formation of political ideologies was an incredibly centralized affair both in terms of class, proximity to power, and just raw physical proximity.
Just as there was a very hard cultural, technological, social, and organizational division between the European administrators and their colonial subjects, there was an equally large gap between the interests at the center of Imperial governance and their citizenry.
The tale of early modern governance is that of interests of the central government crushing regional interests. All those duchies, free cities and principalities that made up the Holy Roman empire were crushed, first by the ascendant royal families of Europe, then Napoleon, and finally by the nationalists who finished off the last duchies and city states to form the modern German, Italian, and Austrian states in the late 19th century (again simplifying).
The French and English states saw low level civil wars by the crown against regional and rival sovereign interests… Henry VIII and his descendants converted to Protestantism and crushed the monasteries and lords who wouldn’t go along with their national restructuring… The French Crown waged low level war on regional rivals often literally ripping the walls down around lesser cities so they could never rebel or assert rivalled sovereignty again, and then concentrating all the most important lords in Versailles… thus the ideals of absolutism were established in both countries: that only the central government (embodied by the crown) would exercise sovereignty. (Watch the excellent Ken Russell horror film The Devils for a dramatization of the French experience)
But they were both of them deceived. For neither the English or French monarchies truly understood the power they had wielded, nor whom had granted it to them: It was not the Crown itself that wielded absolute power, but rather the central government, and the central government was not a collection of neat hierarchically delegated power… the lawyers and bureaucrats were not gaining their power from the crown, the crown was gaining its power from the lawyers and bureaucrats. And as soon as the crown was impeding the Lawyers and bureaucrats centralization and concentration of power in their class, the bureaucrats and upstarts rebelled… Thus the English and French revolutions.
Thus the state consumed the sovereign, great men were still able to wield the state like Napoleon or later Hitler, Stalin, FDR, Churchill and Moa… But the leaders now needed to appease the state, not the paper pushers the other way… then by the 1960s it had become basically impossible for even great men to control the bureaucracies beneath them. Stalin may have been killed, Kennedy was killed, Kruschev and Nixon soft couped… And no nation has had a great man leader since… the most successful leaders have been those who most effectively surrendered the last rememenants of their executive power… The executive branch and the “office of the president” is more powerful than it has ever been. The executive branch has never employed more people, nor the Whitehouse. The PERSON of the president though has never been weaker.
Trump was besieged unable to fire any of his “executive” branch “employees” and now Biden physically embodies the state of things… The man who sits in the oval office is puppeted by the Whitehouse, and the Whitehouse by the executive branch… a complete inversion of how the organization is supposed to work.
Now the bureaucracies that enabled then parasitized then consumed the centralized state, killing off first the absolutists monarchs then the republics that succeeded them, those bureaucracies are killing off the core organs of the state itself.
They have turned cancerous, divorced from any higher functionality and committed only to their own growth… Now that neither kings, nor presidents, nor parliaments wield power to check or fire bureaucrats, the unchecked mazes of middle-management, the hundreds of thousands of pages directing tax dollars to departments, departments to specialty bodies, those bodies to “non-governmental” organs, think tanks, and private companies and coffers, and those 3rd hand bodies to superPACs, campaigns, and media companies… There is no one more than cursorily in charge of more than a segment of this… Even people like the Clintons could not cut away this waste if they achieved supreme power and felt a sudden divine revelation of the necessity of good governance.
The only logic is the growth of these bureaucracies, and the core functions that they once enable, and which only they could enable (think of the late 19th early 20th century marvels of organization that were once enabled)… they’re now cannibalizing those invaluable functional institutions so that a handful of bureaucrats might hire more employees and justify a greater salary for themselves, or might turn a once disciplined military or governing department into a woke DEI hellscape, that they might use their success at “Diversifying” to gain further promotion or lateral recruitment into corporate or NGO power.
In this mess America’s old federal republican institutions are reasserting themselves… not from the center but from the periphery.
Pre-Medievalism: America’s Contemporary Quagmire
America’s Formal Mess
America is a Governance mess.
Whilst there have been many unitary states in history for whom any and all power and authority, at least officially, formally, came from one centralized institution and myth, Whether that be absolute monarchism, where it is concentrated in one person, or Unitary Republics where the “voice of the people” is 100% and only concentrated in one single assembly, The US is slightly more… sophisticated.
First the very simple:
The US federal government has 3 entities under very little obligation to respect or even Acknowledge each other.
Sure congress and the presidency treat supreme court judgements as law… but there isn’t actually a mechanism for SCOTUS to enforce its rulings. There’s little aside from the opinion of the public and key players to prevent a president or congress from following Jackson or Lincoln’s example and just ignore the courts.
Then there’s congress which nominally can impeach and remove presidents and Supreme Court justices… but never has due to the political hurdles and natural dynamics of politics (the length of senate terms ensuring a political formation can never really form in the relevant time span), and very possibly never will.
Then there’s the president which can’t remove or impeach either congressmen, senators, or justices.
Then you have the “Fourth branch of government” all the executive branch agencies which the president is not empowered to effectively control or fire with any discretion that will seriously affect policy ( as we’ve established all the “Civil Servants” “containing” Trump nominally were his subordinates in the org chart… but he had no means to actually make them subordinate)… Thus most agencies and departments become de facto fiefdoms for various permanent civil servants.
This balance of powers is not dissimilar to how hard it was for a duke to control or discipline a petulant lord... Sure there was some hypothetical mechanism to remove him or wage war… but the incredible effort required means you’d rarely if ever do it for any except the worst offender.
But all this becomes fractally more complicated when we zoom out.
The US federal government receives its authority officially from the constitution… where does the constitution receive its authority?
In an absolutist monarchy or French/Russian style revolutionary “republic” the origin of political power would be simple. The king or Director would answer to “God” or “The People” and it would be understood that the government’s continued existence meant God and “the People” were pleased and not to be consulted further on the matter.
But when the American Constitution says “We the people” it actually refers to bodies and organizations entitled to represent them and give consultation. Namely the states, who all have their own assemblies, governors, courts and constitutions.
This chain of subordination is very rare. in most national entities post 1700ish the provinces are subordinate and subject to review by the central government, not the other way around, in America the formal structure and philosophy is the exact opposite.
Indeed this was the essence of America’s civil war, and the soft civil war waged in the 50s 60s and 70s around “Desegregation”, 1860s republicans and 1950s progressives were absolute white supremacists by any standard we’d recognize today… so why did they risk the country twice over blacks? well because it was the easiest issue by which they could reverse the constitutional chain of subordination and let the Federal government assert power over the states (this is why it’s a misnomer to say either was fought over “states rights”, when the impetuous for all action in both conflicts was the quest for centralized power, the civil war did not start over a plantation dispute, or attempt to free slaves there located, but the attempt to maintain federal forts (Sumpter notably) in states that did not want them).
But even this only scratches the surface because there are also hundreds of territory holding recognized sovereign nations within the US. Namely the 326 federally recognized Tribal Indian reservations each of which have their own treaties establishing rights and semi-sovereign powers derived not from the constitution, but from their own pre-existing sovereignty (if they didn’t have this congress wouldn’t have made treaties with them… they’d have just unilaterally passed a law). And these are real powers… they have armed native police, perhaps 10s of thousands of armed men collectively, who answer to the Band Councils alone.
So this is what the map of US power and legitimacy is formally…Just to answer the Academic grade school question “From where does US government derive its sovereignty and power” this is the map you have to draw of 377 officially recognized governments and ~750 different top level entities, and DOZENS of books can be written on every individual item in this map and how much power is really there, and how the conflicts around that power with other elements of this map have been resolved (and indeed they HAVE been written). This is how complicated the mere formal myth of American government is…
Is it any wonder the bureaucrats have been able to carve out such scrutiny free power for themselves?
but of course informally for most of its history the map of real power looked nothing like this.
For most of US history the federal government warred against the natives, held them incredibly subordinate or worse, and imposed treaties basically as ways of taking whatever they wanted from them… then of course reneging on any promised reciprocal exchanges that were supposed to happen.
Likewise the US states have never held a constitutional convention under the rules proposed by the current constitution nor ever meaningfully attempted to hold the federal government to account with any of the mechanisms available… rather the past 150 years have seen the federal government deploy troops, reinterpret its commerce powers to include the regulation of all economic activity (even growing food on your own land to feed to your own animals is defined as “Interstate commerce”), and of course waging a literal war on several states.
Yet you’ll notice as soon as we leave the most recent Centralizing era of world history around Korea and the Vietnam war suddenly these formal relations of subordination no one had cared about in 100 years, becomes very VERY important
Lawsuits by Native tribes against the federal government start to gain teeth… States have slowly discovered that they can basically ignore federal law by just refusing to enforce it!
The federal government likewise has had increasing conflicts with the states, whether it be Governor Greg Abbott’s assumption of border control in Texas, or the now standard flaunting of federal drug law in blue states which have “Legalized” marijuana and other drugs, despite them remaining federal crimes… Indeed these states now tax many of these drugs now sold through dispensaries, and, according to federal law, are very nakedly running drug cartels on American soil with their state governors as nominal cartel boss (this is what a plain application of federal drug law would demand: DEA agents arresting governors), Likewise various “Sanctuary” states and cities now provide what, federally, are illegal fake IDs and fraudulent documents to illegal aliens in their state… making it illegal to ask for legitimate proofs and documents, whilst handing out these federally non-compliant documents that allow them to daisy chain up to real documents, and even government employment.
How does all of this work out with federal tax law and the enforcement of the income tax? Who knows… it probably doesn’t.
The Collapsing American Elite
Federal Authority, legitimacy, and even Seeing Like a State style legibility and intelligibility to the central government is collapsing in real time before our eyes… and far from panicking and trying to rescue their control over the body of the American Nation… the US Federal Government is accelerating the collapse of their own power through petty bureaucratic interests and short term political considerations.
The Bureaucrats are making the military woke and non-effective, with already catastrophic and embarrassing results. See my piece on the burning of the USS Bonhomme Richards
This degrades their own ability to enforce their globe spanning empire… But it will damage their empire in 5 years whereas the bureaucrats careers will be advanced for going woke in 2-3.
Likewise Biden is letting in Millions of illegal migrants who will degrade the welfare state, the tax systems ability to enforce itself, the social cohesion that would allow America to fight a war, and the federal government’s own perceived legitimacy… All things the Federal government and the Democrats as the party of the federal government would rationally be concerned about as a threat to their long term interests, if they were rational or capable of long term thinking… But they don’t care, because it might just tip the 2024 election if enough of those migrants receive mail in ballots that can be harvested.
Biden will be dead by the time the federal government collapses; the value of the US federal government for various forms of plunder are going to run out as federal entitlements programs and debt servicing consume more, then all, then more than all federal spending in rapid succession over the next few years; and most interestingly, the Trumpian coalition to “drain the swamp” and crush this system of federal plunder has gone from farce to threatening…as factions like banking private equity (who need the dollar and US financial system intact), “the Paypal Mafia” of prominent tech investors and billionaires who are intimately tied into the Military industrial complex (famously Elon Musk and Peter Thiel), a significant factions of Senior military leaders horrified at the state of US readiness, and the far right Netanyahu “revisionist zionist” faction of Israeli politics (who have had most Israeli interests turn on them just waiting to remove “Bibi” from power); they are all latching onto Trump to rescue their interests and the US system which they need to survive to maintain those interests, from what, on the other side of the arena, is a “globalist” (read: Democrat/EU/China aligned) desire to collapse the US dollar and thus rescue all their financial schemes through a manufactured crisis in which they can print infinite fake paper, institute a central bank digital currency, and get out of the fact they can neither sustain the US, EU, nor Chinese economies, nor Demographics whilst maintaining their bloated bureaucracies, by implementing a “Green”/Maoist massive reduction in living standards, and increasingly naked social credit totalitarianism…
Basically the two factions are those who need the current system to keep functioning in a somewhat normal manner lest they lose all their power and relevance (Finance billionaires, skilled military officers, tech billionaires involved in real invention, Euro-populists, Vladimir Putin (vaguely), and Benjamin Netanyahu (for entirely unrelated internal Israeli reasons that are their own essay)) people of some competence and importance vs. the hive mind of bureaucrats and the mediocrities like Clinton, Biden, Clauss Swchabb, Xi Jinping (vaguely), and the majority of International Israeli life, who have been elevated by that hive mind, and who need to reorganize the system for the sole function of crushing all dissent due to the fact that the modern world is dying, and it is dying for no other reason than these bureaucrats need to keep hiring bureaucrats and expanding regulation to keep themselves going forward… And who actually quite like the Idea of the entire world turning into Brazil (the Dystopian Terry Gilliam movie, but also sort of the country), because then none of their corrupt deals can even be unwound, and no consequences will ever find them in the maze of paperwork.
I’m restating most of this from StormyWaters, @NormanDodd_knew on Twitter, who is a Genius on this stuff and whose exceptional appearance (sadly paywalled due to overwhelming basedness) on The Meta Prime Project with
helped me piece a lot of this stuff together.Now don’t get me wrong, the increasingly well funded and quite competent Trumpian faction of Private Equity, Private fortunes, and personal competence (and Netanyahu) is still almost entirely crooked Ghouls. None of these people made their fortunes in anything resembling non-corrupt free market activity, and all of them would have been considered either cronyists or deep staters in 2016. And the few who you might know who were for “draining the swamp” in 2016 were people like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, who are both founders of companies that make real things instead of algorithmic manipulation, but who both have almost entirely relied on Military Industrial Complex money and various subsidies, grants, and regulatory capture (Tesla is a Green Grift (with billions in grants and point of sale credits over the years), SpaceX a military contractor, Palantir a spy software) Ie. Their businesses depend on your tax dollars and the regulatory state. Musk and Theil just happened to be far-sighted enough to see where things were headed so as to not back Hillary in 2016.
But the significance of all of this is:
The American Elite is Genuinely divided right now.
For real, unbridgeable, mortal interests conflicting, DIVIDED.
And they won’t go back together.
I’ve seen hot-mic moments and interviews of people like Hillary Clinton saying stuff to the effect that if they lose 2024 “we’re all dead”… You might think this is usual “dictator” Trump derangement, but the ones I’ve seen have been addresses to people like donors and senior people, indeed she doesn’t use this rhetoric during regular addresses.
Between the dirty tricks they pulled in 2020 and with charging Trump, and their increasing hard interest conflict with a wide swath of American Institutional money and power… it seems they perceive a real threat that Trump might suddenly use all the Epstein stuff, or all the Ukraine money laundering, bribery and corruption, or their China ties, or the blatant Treason at the Border to have a Red Scare style purge and trials of US leadership.
This would have been unthinkable a few years back… but given the horrible state of US finances after the Covid response, the decaying state of US military preeminence (and the military in general)… it’s becoming increasingly likely that one faction of the American elite looks at another and decides to kill them off to save themselves. This is what every group of cornered animals do when they start running out of food and there isn’t enough for all of them to survive, one or more factions start scapegoating the others, then kill them off til it’s manageable.
The Unfunded Liability Death Trap
(I’ve already published this section, so if you’ve already read it skip to the next segment, but if you haven’t… Read:
Libertarians Economists have been predicting this collapse of the federal system would happen “By About 2030” since before 2008. I remember in high school in the early 2010s listening to Ron Paul lectures and visiting USDebtClock.com, this was a hot button issue after 2008… (then of course there was no political will to do anything and everyone just stopped talking about it)
I honestly forget that everyone around me doesn’t already know this, this is so common and accepted in libertarian and economic circles, and everyone who knows it got bored of eyes glossing over when they tried to explain it (in an autistic panic) decades ago.
US Unfunded liabilities:
Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, US Debt, and Federal employee benefits and pensions, are all basically intergenerational ponzi schemes that require constant 1950s level population growth amongst the productive tax paying middle-class to maintain By 2000 it was obvious this population growth was not happening, that population was beginning to age and collapse, and NO, the illegals at the border weren’t adequate replacements…(they weren’t adequate to prop up federal expenses in 2000 when they were still Mexican, now that they’re Guatemalan, Haitian, and Senegalese they’re almost certainly a net drain)
The Spector of Mass Boomer retirements with few to no children and grandchildren to replace them and pay for all the costs of their retirements and healthcare was maybe the slowest but most assured crisis ever to be seen in human history… Demographics is destiny.
This was a foreseen problem in 2000 when US Debt to GDP (just the portion that’s already been spent and interest has to be paid on) was 59% of GDP. Today the US Debt to GDP ratio is 122% of GDP whilst just in the past 24 years Absolute US Federal Debt (not including state or local) has grown from 5.6 trillion dollars to 34 trillion dollars (102k per citizen: man, woman, and child). just the interest that has to be paid out of your tax dollars on that debt is set to eclipse ALL US Military spending sometime this year… And by 2028 Debt to GDP will be 150% (46.4 Trillion, 132k per citizen, 12 trillion more in 4 years, with no additional spending bills) and the Interest (at current estimates) will be over 2.5 trillion dollars, over a third of all Tax Dollars brought in will be spent on just interest, because dollar confidence has collapsed and the only way to keep inflation from destroying the dollar has been to radically raise the interest rates the Federal Reserve offers.
Now all that, That catastrophic state of things, is just the debt, the money that’s been spent… The real crisis is the Unfunded liabilities, all the promises the US has made to Boomers (who dominate the vote) and others about money they’re GOING to spend.
As of now total Unfunded liabilities stand at 213 trillion dollars, $633,000 per US Citizen (Man woman, and newborn babe)… These are all dollars the US has promised to pay to someone somewhere at some point: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Federal pensions, VA Benefits, etc. And cannot in any politically feasible way restructure or get out of.
If no one ever contributed another dime to social security, and in so doing was promised in turn significantly more than that dime (it’s a ponzi scheme, it loses money in proportion to and at a greater rate than the money being contributed to it (every dollar you contribute you’re promised multiple dollars in return, and your dollar is not invested, it just pays off previous contributors))… If everything froze and every young person was locked out of ever receiving Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid, the Unfunded Liability would be $633k per every man, woman, and child… that’d be the debt a newborn American would be born with.
However because it is NOT frozen and it will not be, by 2028 that number will Rise to $837k and an ordinary household of 4 will have seen their, politically unavoidable, family obligation in future tax payments to the federal government increase by $804,000 in just 4 years.
If your response is that your family doesn’t even make 804k in 4 years and there’s no way you could ever pay that much in 4 years given its just going to increase at a faster rate the next 4 years… CONGRATULATIONS! 90% of families don’t make that much, and less than 1% of families could ever afford to pay that much in taxes in a 4 year time.
This has been slowly growing for decades, and in the late 2000s and 2010s Ron Paul types were screaming that those Benefits needed to be reformed NOW (in 2008) or they’d drown America. But of course, cutting benefits is political Anathema to boomers, so nothing was done…
Now in the next 4-8 years, there is almost certainly going to be a recession, tax receipts will collapse, and all of this will go Asymptotic. Likely these numbers are understating it because they assume good economic performance and no additional massive spending bills. And you can bet as soon as things start to go the market will crash and congress will pass a 5 trillion dollar spending bill to “Help Americans” with the crisis. And no! Passing a massive SPENDING bill to deal with a SPENDING crisis is not beyond them, they did the exact same thing during COVID, when their ruinous economic lockdown was papered over with debt spending the economy was being prevented from affording because of their lockdowns.
Sometime soon, the economic weight will become non-viable, like a broke gambler doubling his bet each time he loses, the debts will go exponential then asymptotic… and instead of a a lifetime to find a way to squeeze all that money out, there will be a crisis, and the American, probably “provisional” government at that point, will have to decide:
What is to be done…
By 2030 approximately 1 million dollars per American man, woman, and child will be promised to someone somewhere in America, that cannot be paid, and with the system collapsing they will have to be told will not be paid. Every American Man, Woman, and Child will be 1 million dollars poorer than they think… And then very suddenly they will be aware of that fact.
And basically no other country in the west, or indeed most of the world, is any better, indeed some are worse. (this is the system FDR and Truman and all your postwar progressives built and replaced pre-war Capitalism with, the “greatest generation” was indeed the worst)
Around 2030 all Americans are going to have to turn on eachother and carve that missing million out of their fellow citizen… This might be millennials becoming even greater debt slaves, this might be boomers kicked out of nursing homes to beg in the streets, this might be ethnic conflict to either make the white middle-class pay 2x the income tax forever, or a violent assault on the black inner-city to destroy the millstone of welfare America once and for all and free up millions in real estate in now usafe cities… This might take the form of a communist revolution, the confiscation of all real estate, and the forcing of Americans into work camps, this might take the form of the mass slaughter of Federal employees and IRS agents so that no federal insurance schemes can ever be paid out and no pensions because the government employees are dead… This might take the form of mass Euthanasia of cancer patients, drug addicts, and the non-working… Everyone who shows up at hospital and isn’t expected to be net profitable, axe em.
But one way or another when it gets so high that the economy has a downturn or crash: 1 or even 2 million dollars (depending on the spending bills they pass on the way down) per man, woman, and child will have to be carved out of some American somewhere… Even if you say “Just End Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, and the VA” that’s millions individual Americans, and veterans, are owed and depending on.
Alex Kaschuta
who’s podcast is here on substack (follow her on twitter) has talked about how the Wars in the former Yugoslavia continued because Milosevich promised, and other politicians promised, their followers the old communists pensions would be honored and paid… And even at the height of the wars they won every election because of that base of aging pensioners… but of course, if they were to afford those pensions, someone else had to lose something equivalent whether it be the confiscation of lands, or ethnic minority populations responcible for more crime/welfare costs being purged.
This is why competition between factions of the elite suddenly seems way more high stakes… They’re the ones with money and fortune, and are obviously responcible for this state of affairs, it is them who are obviously going to be scapegoated and crushed… unless of course they can grasp power and make some other faction of the elite pay an even more horrible price.
But either way, “Liberal Democracy” the modern progressive welfare state? It’s not going to survive. By 2030 the Crisis will be very apparent, and nothing resembling the current governments will survive past 2040.
Like the Bourbon Monarchy in France or the British and French Empires after Suez they will very quickly die of their pocket books, and unlike the British Empire none of these governments have high cost imperial possessions they can just jettison and accepts a few lost decades at home. The centers of expense they can’t maintain aren’t in their far flung colonies, they’re in their capital cities, their nursing homes, their hospitals, their retirement communities, and their wounded veterans. The French and British could ditch Indochina, Algeria, Pakistan, India, and all their other expense centers to “independence”… The US and western welfare states can’t just say they’re recognizing the “independence” of their wounded veterans and elderly and cut them off…
It’s much more like the France before the revolution, where everyone who’s demanding something has to fight each other.
America’s Informal Mess
Of course in a Centralizing era the solution would be simple: centralize tyrannical power in the government and enact a brutal terror to crush both rivalled elites and any disfavoured segments of the populace who might resist having their fortunes and standards of living destroyed.
Whether it be the French Revolutionary Terror and the War in the Vendee, the Red Terror and the liquidation of the Kulaks, or the Night of Long knives, the Purge of Jewish Officials and the Confiscation of Jewish Wealth; or the various reactionary terrors by old regimes that retain control… in a centralizing era a brutal Elite is always ready and able to make someone else pay a terrible price.
But of course we are not in one.
Remember those 377 officially recognized top level governments with constitutional sovereignty in America alone?
Forget that, that’s a fiction… The real number that exercise violent power, Ie. Real Political Power, is somewhere in the thousands if not tens of thousands.
The City of New York is not included on that list (officially it is answerable and dissolvable by the state of New York, LOL)… and the city of New York has 36,000 armed and ready police officers at it’s beck and call (as many as Napoleon had when he invaded Italy). Likewise every dinky little city and county has its own police departments, often with elected sheriffs who functionally have independence that rivals state governments, and are only really removable by a process of impeachment at the state level.
And this is before we get into the Cartels, militias, ideological movements, and collections of friends who are all shockingly armed and in many cases better trained and versed in infantry and low intensity warfare than about 90% of military personnel or police.
.
America and by extension all the states which imitated it’s welfare bureaucracy (the Anglosphere, the EU, Even the Russian Federation thought it’s a slightly different story ) simultaneously have decaying centralized governing structures, and reasserting legacy entities whether that be the European Nation States, the American States, the Canadian provinces…
People predict civil wars regularly throughout North America and Europe, but most likely when one comes none of the pieces will go back together into one coherent whole.
Our Decentralizing Technological Paradigm: Decaying States
At the moment almost all the technological and organizational marvels which maintain the current military/political paradigm are either decaying physically, institutionally, financially, industrially or militarily.
The US Surface fleet has seen a massive decay in readiness from wokeness, missed recruitment goals, and a culture of incompetence. Again the USS Bonhomme Richards burnt to the point it was unsalvageable, IN US PORT, under repairs… And this is reflective of wider military problems you hear about regularly, along with a general collapse in morale both amongst soldiers and military families telling their sons not to join.
The US Military has decayed financially with increasingly obscene amounts of money needing to be spent for technologies that often do not work and take decades and countless more dollars to get up to a usable level… notably US top tier fighters and other tech just devour budgets in ways that really won’t be sustainable over any prolonged financial crisis.
The US military has decayed industrially: unable to produce artillery shells and weapons at anywhere near the rate Ukraine has consumed them, and with seemingly ZERO reindustrialization to increase that productive capacity which could be vital for any upcoming war since it is not just the US depending on those rusting plants in Pennsylvania, but most of NATO and America’s mid-east Allies.
And finally a shocking amount of US military Capacity has decayed physically sitting around over the past 50-30 years with maintenance but almost no replacement. Not a month goes by I don’t see speculation on which percentage of the ICMBs would reliably fire in Thermonuclear war scenario… it is likely far more than 10% of them would fail to fire at the decisive moment, and Russia is in the same boat. This might actually be what saves up from nuclear war at some point, that neither side is 100% sure their nukes actually work (there’s something like a 1-3% chance over 50% of the US or Russian stockpile has some flaw that would just make them fail at the decicive moment, either fail to launch, fail to follow the target path, or fail to detonate… these were largely all manufactured and will decay the same way, an uncorrected flaw in how one element ages will be replicated across everything that was made that way)
Many military technicians have described their roles as that of Tech Priests in the 40k universe, superstitiously observing rituals many of them no longer know the purpose of in case failure to do so might result in technical calamity.
.
Almost all of these problems will result in massive financial and operational burdens at the point of the next war… and if/when those burdens grow too great and there isn’t money or competent people to fill the gap, institutions will degrade and collapse.
As I’ve written about before most backend US civil institutions cannot function in the presence of even mild civil strife. In any combined US or EU Civil War/External War (which the next great war would almost certainly be) US military and governing capability will almost certainly collapse as dissident faction target Taxation, recruitment, industrial, logistical, and other infrastructure necessary to maintain the complex full spectrum suite of US military tech.
The Brittle American empire would just collapse under the weight of its own scale, expenses and cumulative awful internal policies… Increasing having to expend more manpower and money to maintain internal security, recruitment, taxation and logistics than it gets out in warfighting capability.
The US security state, if it didn’t turn on itself in an internal conflict between the Generals would quickly degrade into a legacy force far more similar to its competitors in the new environment that it’s august predecessor.
Our Decentralizing Technological Paradigm: Rising Post-States
By contrast the technologies that increasingly define the modern battlefield:
Technicals (Modified consumer pickup trucks), FPV Drones, fortified bombardment resistant tunnel networks (see Avdiivka Mariupol, Gaza), and long range rocketry (both guerilla homebrew, artillery, and hypersonic)…
All of these serve the function of empowering weaker forces to make attacking them more costly, or enabling those weaker forces to make nibbling raids which degrade the enemy’s organization.
The Tunnels turn anywhere worth defending into horrible costly urban fights, the long range rocketry makes standoff enforcements highly costly and dangerous to what were once technologically impervious first world forces (the discussions I’ve seen around the risk of Hezzbollah’s bombardment of Israel, or Iran or China, or even the Houthis potentially sinking a US Aircraft carrier would fill many books)
And of course the Technical, really just the consumer pickup truck, is a logistical marvel and world changing invention for warfare on a par with the warhorse itself. The fact that any ordinary person can transport 1 ton of equipment and themselves 2000 kms in under 24 hrs… RELIABLY, with equipment many already own. Is a world changing fact people STILL have not internalized the extraordinary relevance of.
The World wars were fought before this was the case (the Germans were still mostly using horses in WW2) and for most of the Cold War the majority of the world was too poor for this to be relevant… The reality of this massive shift in speed and logistical flexibility to light unarmored forces has by no means stopped revolutionizing the battlefield.
In Conclusion: What Can’t Continue Forever Will Not:
The State will End, and the Post State Era will Begin
I’ve by no means covered everything I want to on this topic. Mapping out the future of what a Neo-Medieval post national regime, and how we’d get from here to there is likely to be my life’s work. Both in that I’m going to be writing about it for the rest of my life and that we’re going to be living it.
But one of the thing’s I want to emphasize as it would be a mistake to think of these developments as merely the rise of a “Mad Max” warlord driven world. Far from it, whatever successor institutions, aristocracies, and duchies devour the modern welfare states in a orgy of map redrawing and private fortune making will probably find that there is a great deal of economic and technological low hanging fruit just lying about.
I doubt it will offset the scale of the disruption globally, but things like Cheap automobiles, cheap bush planes, cheap housing construction, low taxes, no DEI mandates, and a whole host of other things now criminalized by “Democracy” will suddenly be opened up and we’ll probably see a massive change in settlement patterns and ways of living as a result.
Probably the very nature of sovereignty will change as traditional liberties, property, sovereignty, the ability to commit violence, and the legal standing to do justice, increasingly become one and the same such as they were in the medieval and well into the 19th century.
As the state monopoly on violence decays and collapses expect that liberty, manhood, and citizenship/nobility will become far closer to what it was in the founding era than anything we’ve seen in the past 100 years.
We are seeing the inevitable conclusion and failure of the “Liberal Democracy” born into the world around the French Revolution. “Democracy” has expanded to the point where more people have a hypothetical right to vote than exist in the country and governments import them to vote which way the state likes, whilst “Liberal” civil rights have expanded to the point where everything is a right: Healthcare, Schooling, to get hired for jobs, to have your feelings defended… Everything is a right… Except for any of the liberties actually established in and of the founding documents or revolutions of the 18th century. Those are now forms of hate and terrorism.
To speak your mind is no longer a protected right, but to be protected from someone speaking their mind about you demands the full armed response of the state.
Obviously such an inversion would portend collapse without anything else we’ve discussed. But given it, it is merely the most apparent manifestation of the decay and rot that has infected every institution in western centralized governments.
.
This is an introductory essay. A justification for my ideological projects to come. What is going to happen is largely inevitable but how long we live through the chaos of the fall or how quickly we settle on the equilibriums that will hold with the new balance of powers will be a matter that could take a 30 or 100 years war… or it could wrap up into a stable equilibrium in 5-15.
I hope by digging deeper we can shorten that window, speedrun the new order, and limit the damage these abominations of governments can do on the way out.
Tip:
BITCOIN: bc1qdhj7637sgcssxgxygjaa3ddljwy8tzg5mzw325
MONERO: 8AhA3g9hbtDcAJE5MPmeQsFwwGsf3H9fq9tC6giQ4a6vKnTXv4J4MivKXrPKDpXyEeNc9mfFejbq84kSWkC8pjuj18rAEij
Follow me on Twitter: @FromKulak
Kenneth Kitchen, Pharaoh Triumphant: The Life and Times of Ramesses II, King of Egypt, Aris & Phillips, 1982. pp.40–41
Translation by John A. Wilson in Pritchard, J.B. (ed.) Ancient Near Eastern Texts relating to the Old Testament, 3rd edition, Princeton 1969, p. 262.
Kulak, you have a more thorough understanding of history than any of the court historians paraded in the mainstream media. (VDH I'm talking about you)
The Foundation novels come to mind on your last point. "Dissolution is inevitable, the goal is to minimize the time between then and the equally inevitable rise of the next order".