Insincere Neo-Con Mea Culpas, De Benoist's Rise of 'Civilizational-States', All the Nerds are Dead, The Greco-Roman Custom of Public Endowment, 1939 New York World's Fair
Your mention of the neo-conservative "redemption arc" is especially thought-provoking. It's remarkable how quickly political actors can shift their allegiances and be welcomed back into the fold by the very people they once opposed.
Nowhere was this more apparent than in the swift rehabilitation of George W. Bush who went from reviled 'Bushhitler' to a member in good standing of the 'Our Democracy Club' by the simple expedient of coming out against Donald Trump. Honestly, Donald Trump is like Lourdes - he washes away all sins.
First, on the progressive side, the "revealed preference" is for conformity: if the best people on the TV set tell you this is the right thing, you believe it is the right thing. David Frum (etc) is fine, the right people have welcomed him home.
Secondly, people don't really seem to grasp time (despite believing otherwise) of more than a couple of years into the past and a year or two into the future. They project "me now" back to 2003 and think that was "them then", when clearly it is not true for anyone.
".....“Exporting democracy” reminds me of the Christian heresy of “immanentizing the eschaton”....." Today's version ("Bring it ON!") reminds me of Chabad's "We want Moshiach!" (and when do we want Him? "NOW!!")
Bibi might agree in-public, but only because he knows who butters his bread (other than during Pesach... and then? DADT).
A wonderful "Weekend Commentary"; especially so, given yesterday's monumental "Orange Revolution" piece. I'm certainly getting way more than my "money's-worth" from this subscription.
us military instigated the dissolution of serbia, in the mid 1990's. this may or may not have been neocon inspired, but....
in 1993 bill clinton installed strobe talbot into the corner offices at dept of state. talbot brought up with him victoria nuland, whose married name is kagan, one of the sons and neocon icon with the senior kagan. neocon were close to the clinton policies which went after serbia using first bosnia and later kosovo separatists to impose a military solution to breaking up serbia.
nuland has been quite active since 2014!
it is an intellectual somersault to go from breaking up serbia for peace and freedom to jamming donbas and crimea back into an artificial soviet kluge for freedom and democracy!
neocon seems to be a uniparty enterprise supported by the military industry complex which is also supported by all usa political parties as long as the k street money flows!
The second follows the first with such an element of truth and accuracy that I couldn't help but draw specific attention to it... : "For those of us who opposed the war in Iraq, the regime change in Libya, the failed attempt in Syria, etc., being right is no defense."... "The truth here is that your career will suffer far more from being right in opposition to military action than in being wrong in favor of it."
i don't think i agree with much of your politics but public denunciation is the most boring and sterile form of criticism imaginable so i think you're safe on that front
I'll need to go through the Sam Kriss article more deeply but your summation made me think of a discussion I had with a friend recently. We were watching the movie 'True Romance', a 1993 film written by Quentin Tarentino, and I was laughing at the sheer silliness of the first act.
In the movie Christian Slater is a dateless loser going out alone on his birthday and he meets a beautiful girl while watching a triple feature of obscure kung fu movies(of course!). They hit it off and he invites her to his place, which is above the "chill" comic book store where he works. He shows her comic books and they talk about obscure music and movies and elope the next day.
My friend didn't understand why I was laughing at this and I explained I thought it was like bad redditor fan fiction, the nerdy guy with niche interests gets the hot girl who shares those quirky, niche interests. I doubt most redditors look like Christian Slater however! My friend pointed out that in 1993 this probably wasn't as cliché as it seems now, and this was really before "nerd culture" was a well known, and popular, thing. Decent movie overall, worth watching for the ensemble cast.
Personally I think RedLetterMedia's fake podcast they did ~5 years ago, The Nerd Crew!, was sorta the death-knell of nerd culture, they skewered it so perfectly it instantly became embarrassing to get excited about any new nerd culture "product". It's certainly been interesting watching the rise of nerd culture to it's inevitable, corporatized, cringe inducing end.
TRUE ROMANCE is great. Love that movie. The wise-talking, picaresque, black comic take on life. The cheeky little guy who seizes his chance. Adventure, romance, cash.
[Shameful disclosure: I am the stereotypical guy on the couch.]
Screwball noir. It is a crying shame Hollywood does not make that kind of film any more.
Apr 23, 2023·edited Apr 23, 2023Liked by Niccolo Soldo
I meant that I am the guy on the couch (as in "Oh man….he’s just like me!” meme) watching the entertainment and naively and improbably identifying with characters with whom I have no real resemblance.
Ready Player One is probably the peak trash, a sort of nova of the nerd revival that we're still suffering from. A similar exposition of this to The Nerd Crew is the 372 Pages podcast, which was born out of disgust for this kind of product:
I didn't read the book, I did watch the movie but all I remember is how utterly masturbatory and gross it was. I always loved MST3K so I'll have to check out Nelson's podcast. Thanks!
I shouldn't kvetch on the subject too much, my current employer is a company whose bread and butter is old film prop reproductions, nostalgic man-children pay my salary!
That article was some very heady and long-winded shit but roughly, the main takeaway for me is that hipsters are refined appreciators of art/specific esoteric subject matter and nerds are catalogers of pop stuff.
It's important to observe that what we call liberalism has emerged inside Europe, in ethnically cohesive societies, where people sought to lift up the lower classes some, which in my opinion, is a good thing. Monarchies and clergies are often incredibly corrupt and not meritocratic, and if you do care about your ethnic kin, you should want them living well.
Secondly, illiberalism means at best nothing, at worst is a threat, when divorced from the ethnic group. We are laughing all the time at the illiberal ways of African tribes, and their "chimping out" manifestations. We are often looking down upon what we consider savage, uncivilized punishments of illiberal regimes in the Middle East. Illiberalism is not sufficient in itself. It has to be bound to YOUR ethnos, so it represents your group; representing alien, foreign groups means that we should look upon it with concern, and estimate it as competition.
Not sure that I agree. IMO progressive liberalism was initially not motivated by compassion or ethnic loyalty but fear of revolution. Today it is motivated by fear of a race war.
Ethnic cohesion certainly lubricates redistributive policies and can be explained by way of evolutionary psychology. Its relative absence makes redistribution feel more like socialised theft or extortion.
Even my failing eyes founf this string of thought-goods a wortwhile slog. For one thing, of all the -isms that trampled my century, even the un-washed were gloriously sane enough to hold onto nationalism. And how the immobility of that rock infurriates the one-worlders! Yes, there is hope, even in this perishing republic.
I find the talk about liberal interventionism and neo-conservatism inadequate unless we can integrate the details of who was financing their careers and who was in contact with the various groups.
IMHO the neoliberals and neocons are just crisis actors tasked with playacting at politics. They take their marching orders from publicly unacknowledged influencers, above all in the intelligence community, industry and the plutocracy. They are sociopathic malignant narcissists who function as lightning rods for attention. Their ideologies are weak, shallow, and largely for show.
College educated people overinvest in the ideas that figure in their education. Imagining that ideologies drive geopolitics is sophomoric. In real life it is about natural resources, military technology, trade, corporate and personal profit and inter-state rivalry.
I have casually kept coming back to the question of ‘did people of past civilizations truly conceptualize themselves anywhere close to how we do today?’ Stoked to read Veyne
"Immanentizing the eschaton" is more or less the same as postmillenarianism, and there is an explicit line to be drawn from there to liberal interventionism. Thomas Leonard's Illiberal Reformers is a fantastic book on the origins of progressivism/modern liberalism in America and he goes over how the early progressives couched their reforms in Christian language and a desire to create heaven on Earth before becoming more or less secular as they actually started coming to power in the 1910s-1930s
While many of the specifics of progressivism changed radically since then, like the support for eugenics, it's instructive to see the underlying psychology, like rule by a class of experts trained in progressive thought, which is defined as a new sort of science
The neocons definitely take some influence from them, many of them admire Woodrow Wilson and FDR as much as any Republican president, but I believe their interventionism comes from the Trotsky influence of its earliest adherents, wanting global revolution on behalf of liberal democracy instead of communism. But I agree this is basically convergent now. Especially because other countries chastised America over Iraq but after Obama they rarely make a peep, so the neocons no longer need to regard the UN and co. as standing in America's way
Seeing as they do have some right wing tendencies, I think neocons might be more inclined to use hard power to force these outcomes while libtard interventionists love sanctions, color revolutions, and arming the moderate rebels so that there's some sense of it being a "people's revolution". We will see if this remains a difference for long
Veynes essay raises many interesting ideas as to how reform could ocurr in our political institutions. Now I'll acknowledge what I'm about to say is a whole lot of pie in the sky crap, but it may be a worthwhile avenue of thought nonetheless.
What would political institutions and the actions that result look like if the following criteria were a requirement for office. (Bare in mind I'm from NZ and am looking at this from a district perspective, the smallest unit of political institution in my country):
1. An annual public works project paid.
2. An annual sponsored fair/parade/ festival
Both paid for from the private funds of the person involved.
Ignoring the fact that we lack the cultural depth to generate such ideas without devolving into gay parades or climate change rallies, what kind of people would take up civic duty?
Would this act as a motivator for people who are wealthy but don't have a good outlet to give back to the community? Or would we lose all of our council members instantly?
I know that the particular ethnic group in my country who rides on the tail coats of local councils would likely fall away, but I wonder if the Europeans would stand up and take responsibility.
Interested to here thoughts, especially from Europeans back on the continent, as well as the yank perspective.
When it comes to entering the political world as a politician, my first thought is "why?" Why would you do it when the media glare is so intense, when you can simply go into finance, make 50 times the money, and have way more privacy?
Good post. Let's see some others tackle your questions.
I'll dig into this as I've taken the path of civil servant at the national level as opposed to working in the private sector.
I agree that if you enter as a politician you're under a lot of scrutiny, but within the bloated bureaucracy there are many positions that can (maybe) make meaningful change in the areas that people care about.
I remember a comment you posted a couple of weeks ago to a young gentleman who was asking what he should do at 22 and you gave a very accurate response. As I myself am in a similar position, I thought about why I hadn't done the same and what irked me about that way of thinking. I believe it was this idea that money is meaning. It was widely known in the classical world that the merchant class, and an overt focus on money, was seen as lower status and not aristocratic. Whenever I see my peers in the private sector striving for no other sake than a big pay check it elicits a slight disgust response.
Now it's possible that I'm just stroking my ego while I get paid pennies on the dollar to get barked at by menopausal communists who are thoroughly institutionalised, but I do have a genuine interoceptive experience of pleasure when I consider that I'm working for my country and my people. This is as opposed to some multinational conglomerate who will jettison me into outer space the moment the bottom dollar tells them to do so.
Again maybe I'm living in a naive idealism that died in the 80s before I was born, but I've been unable to shake this intuition that moving into the finance world is just less noble in and of itself. Well, i suppose I can take nobility to the bank when I'm trying to buy a house? I hear it fetches a fair portion of a deposit.
Good stuff aa always, sir! AGON is a great Substack; glad you are highlighting it. Neocons...as a paleocon, I cannot stand what they represent. Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and soon wider war in Ukraine or the Far East, I fear. (Arguably it all kicked off with Vietnam.) At some point that menagerie of mid-wits surely will have to understand that money, munitions, and Middle Americans willing to sign up for perpetual war are all finite and in increasingly dearer supply. I just hope it is not too late for the rest of us.
"money, munitions, and Middle Americans willing to sign up for perpetual war are all finite and in increasingly dearer supply."
I cannot speak for the second element, but so long as the first is in short (or inequitable) supply, there will always be enough of the third who opt for "three hots and a cot" (if not for skills training that translate directly to the civilian marketplace, afterward).
This one was late as I was up until midnight last night finishing off this essay - https://niccolo.substack.com/p/ukraines-orange-revolution-2004-05 (please check it out, it's good!).
Hit the like button at the very top of the page to like this entry and use the share button to share this across social media.
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Your mention of the neo-conservative "redemption arc" is especially thought-provoking. It's remarkable how quickly political actors can shift their allegiances and be welcomed back into the fold by the very people they once opposed.
I think the epithet that epitomizes this most is "two-faced"
Nowhere was this more apparent than in the swift rehabilitation of George W. Bush who went from reviled 'Bushhitler' to a member in good standing of the 'Our Democracy Club' by the simple expedient of coming out against Donald Trump. Honestly, Donald Trump is like Lourdes - he washes away all sins.
Two thoughts come to mind.
First, on the progressive side, the "revealed preference" is for conformity: if the best people on the TV set tell you this is the right thing, you believe it is the right thing. David Frum (etc) is fine, the right people have welcomed him home.
Secondly, people don't really seem to grasp time (despite believing otherwise) of more than a couple of years into the past and a year or two into the future. They project "me now" back to 2003 and think that was "them then", when clearly it is not true for anyone.
.....“Exporting democracy” reminds me of the Christian heresy of “immanentizing the eschaton”.....
A diamond mounted in the midst of all the “Colour” threads you’ve been weaving for us. 👍
".....“Exporting democracy” reminds me of the Christian heresy of “immanentizing the eschaton”....." Today's version ("Bring it ON!") reminds me of Chabad's "We want Moshiach!" (and when do we want Him? "NOW!!")
Bibi might agree in-public, but only because he knows who butters his bread (other than during Pesach... and then? DADT).
A wonderful "Weekend Commentary"; especially so, given yesterday's monumental "Orange Revolution" piece. I'm certainly getting way more than my "money's-worth" from this subscription.
Glad to be of service, JB.
us military instigated the dissolution of serbia, in the mid 1990's. this may or may not have been neocon inspired, but....
in 1993 bill clinton installed strobe talbot into the corner offices at dept of state. talbot brought up with him victoria nuland, whose married name is kagan, one of the sons and neocon icon with the senior kagan. neocon were close to the clinton policies which went after serbia using first bosnia and later kosovo separatists to impose a military solution to breaking up serbia.
nuland has been quite active since 2014!
it is an intellectual somersault to go from breaking up serbia for peace and freedom to jamming donbas and crimea back into an artificial soviet kluge for freedom and democracy!
neocon seems to be a uniparty enterprise supported by the military industry complex which is also supported by all usa political parties as long as the k street money flows!
I actually brought up Strobe Talbott (Clinton's college roommate) in the piece I wrote yesterday - https://niccolo.substack.com/p/ukraines-orange-revolution-2004-05
He had an outsized influence in creating US foreign policy towards Russia in the Post-Cold War era.
The second follows the first with such an element of truth and accuracy that I couldn't help but draw specific attention to it... : "For those of us who opposed the war in Iraq, the regime change in Libya, the failed attempt in Syria, etc., being right is no defense."... "The truth here is that your career will suffer far more from being right in opposition to military action than in being wrong in favor of it."
i don't think i agree with much of your politics but public denunciation is the most boring and sterile form of criticism imaginable so i think you're safe on that front
I enjoyed the essay, fucker.
I'll need to go through the Sam Kriss article more deeply but your summation made me think of a discussion I had with a friend recently. We were watching the movie 'True Romance', a 1993 film written by Quentin Tarentino, and I was laughing at the sheer silliness of the first act.
In the movie Christian Slater is a dateless loser going out alone on his birthday and he meets a beautiful girl while watching a triple feature of obscure kung fu movies(of course!). They hit it off and he invites her to his place, which is above the "chill" comic book store where he works. He shows her comic books and they talk about obscure music and movies and elope the next day.
My friend didn't understand why I was laughing at this and I explained I thought it was like bad redditor fan fiction, the nerdy guy with niche interests gets the hot girl who shares those quirky, niche interests. I doubt most redditors look like Christian Slater however! My friend pointed out that in 1993 this probably wasn't as cliché as it seems now, and this was really before "nerd culture" was a well known, and popular, thing. Decent movie overall, worth watching for the ensemble cast.
Personally I think RedLetterMedia's fake podcast they did ~5 years ago, The Nerd Crew!, was sorta the death-knell of nerd culture, they skewered it so perfectly it instantly became embarrassing to get excited about any new nerd culture "product". It's certainly been interesting watching the rise of nerd culture to it's inevitable, corporatized, cringe inducing end.
TRUE ROMANCE is great. Love that movie. The wise-talking, picaresque, black comic take on life. The cheeky little guy who seizes his chance. Adventure, romance, cash.
[Shameful disclosure: I am the stereotypical guy on the couch.]
Screwball noir. It is a crying shame Hollywood does not make that kind of film any more.
The roommate on the couch is a very young Brad Pitt!
I meant that I am the guy on the couch (as in "Oh man….he’s just like me!” meme) watching the entertainment and naively and improbably identifying with characters with whom I have no real resemblance.
Ready Player One is probably the peak trash, a sort of nova of the nerd revival that we're still suffering from. A similar exposition of this to The Nerd Crew is the 372 Pages podcast, which was born out of disgust for this kind of product:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/372_Pages_We%27ll_Never_Get_Back
"created by Michael J. Nelson (of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and RiffTrax fame) "
372 Pages, just like The Nerd Crew, resonates well with my disdain.
I didn't read the book, I did watch the movie but all I remember is how utterly masturbatory and gross it was. I always loved MST3K so I'll have to check out Nelson's podcast. Thanks!
I shouldn't kvetch on the subject too much, my current employer is a company whose bread and butter is old film prop reproductions, nostalgic man-children pay my salary!
Oh you can kvetch all you want and still milk the nerd. Milking the nerd is the best punishment.
I've only ever listened to 372 Pages' take, neither read the book nor saw the movie.
That article was some very heady and long-winded shit but roughly, the main takeaway for me is that hipsters are refined appreciators of art/specific esoteric subject matter and nerds are catalogers of pop stuff.
It's important to observe that what we call liberalism has emerged inside Europe, in ethnically cohesive societies, where people sought to lift up the lower classes some, which in my opinion, is a good thing. Monarchies and clergies are often incredibly corrupt and not meritocratic, and if you do care about your ethnic kin, you should want them living well.
Secondly, illiberalism means at best nothing, at worst is a threat, when divorced from the ethnic group. We are laughing all the time at the illiberal ways of African tribes, and their "chimping out" manifestations. We are often looking down upon what we consider savage, uncivilized punishments of illiberal regimes in the Middle East. Illiberalism is not sufficient in itself. It has to be bound to YOUR ethnos, so it represents your group; representing alien, foreign groups means that we should look upon it with concern, and estimate it as competition.
Not sure that I agree. IMO progressive liberalism was initially not motivated by compassion or ethnic loyalty but fear of revolution. Today it is motivated by fear of a race war.
Ethnic cohesion certainly lubricates redistributive policies and can be explained by way of evolutionary psychology. Its relative absence makes redistribution feel more like socialised theft or extortion.
Even my failing eyes founf this string of thought-goods a wortwhile slog. For one thing, of all the -isms that trampled my century, even the un-washed were gloriously sane enough to hold onto nationalism. And how the immobility of that rock infurriates the one-worlders! Yes, there is hope, even in this perishing republic.
I find the talk about liberal interventionism and neo-conservatism inadequate unless we can integrate the details of who was financing their careers and who was in contact with the various groups.
IMHO the neoliberals and neocons are just crisis actors tasked with playacting at politics. They take their marching orders from publicly unacknowledged influencers, above all in the intelligence community, industry and the plutocracy. They are sociopathic malignant narcissists who function as lightning rods for attention. Their ideologies are weak, shallow, and largely for show.
College educated people overinvest in the ideas that figure in their education. Imagining that ideologies drive geopolitics is sophomoric. In real life it is about natural resources, military technology, trade, corporate and personal profit and inter-state rivalry.
I have seen the future, and it is local.
I have casually kept coming back to the question of ‘did people of past civilizations truly conceptualize themselves anywhere close to how we do today?’ Stoked to read Veyne
I never heard of him until I read this article. It's reasons like this that I enjoy publications like Aeon.
He was a friend of Foucault, helped him with his work on antiquity.
On nerd culture: I've seen people, of my generation, who loved Fight Club, flock to see Marvel shit.
The past 15 years did something. Programmers became cool. It needs to crash and burn. It needs to be shoved back into the locker.
- a former programmer.
"Immanentizing the eschaton" is more or less the same as postmillenarianism, and there is an explicit line to be drawn from there to liberal interventionism. Thomas Leonard's Illiberal Reformers is a fantastic book on the origins of progressivism/modern liberalism in America and he goes over how the early progressives couched their reforms in Christian language and a desire to create heaven on Earth before becoming more or less secular as they actually started coming to power in the 1910s-1930s
While many of the specifics of progressivism changed radically since then, like the support for eugenics, it's instructive to see the underlying psychology, like rule by a class of experts trained in progressive thought, which is defined as a new sort of science
The neocons definitely take some influence from them, many of them admire Woodrow Wilson and FDR as much as any Republican president, but I believe their interventionism comes from the Trotsky influence of its earliest adherents, wanting global revolution on behalf of liberal democracy instead of communism. But I agree this is basically convergent now. Especially because other countries chastised America over Iraq but after Obama they rarely make a peep, so the neocons no longer need to regard the UN and co. as standing in America's way
Seeing as they do have some right wing tendencies, I think neocons might be more inclined to use hard power to force these outcomes while libtard interventionists love sanctions, color revolutions, and arming the moderate rebels so that there's some sense of it being a "people's revolution". We will see if this remains a difference for long
Thanks for bringing up this book. Never heard of it before...will grab.
Brilliant!
Veynes essay raises many interesting ideas as to how reform could ocurr in our political institutions. Now I'll acknowledge what I'm about to say is a whole lot of pie in the sky crap, but it may be a worthwhile avenue of thought nonetheless.
What would political institutions and the actions that result look like if the following criteria were a requirement for office. (Bare in mind I'm from NZ and am looking at this from a district perspective, the smallest unit of political institution in my country):
1. An annual public works project paid.
2. An annual sponsored fair/parade/ festival
Both paid for from the private funds of the person involved.
Ignoring the fact that we lack the cultural depth to generate such ideas without devolving into gay parades or climate change rallies, what kind of people would take up civic duty?
Would this act as a motivator for people who are wealthy but don't have a good outlet to give back to the community? Or would we lose all of our council members instantly?
I know that the particular ethnic group in my country who rides on the tail coats of local councils would likely fall away, but I wonder if the Europeans would stand up and take responsibility.
Interested to here thoughts, especially from Europeans back on the continent, as well as the yank perspective.
When it comes to entering the political world as a politician, my first thought is "why?" Why would you do it when the media glare is so intense, when you can simply go into finance, make 50 times the money, and have way more privacy?
Good post. Let's see some others tackle your questions.
I'll dig into this as I've taken the path of civil servant at the national level as opposed to working in the private sector.
I agree that if you enter as a politician you're under a lot of scrutiny, but within the bloated bureaucracy there are many positions that can (maybe) make meaningful change in the areas that people care about.
I remember a comment you posted a couple of weeks ago to a young gentleman who was asking what he should do at 22 and you gave a very accurate response. As I myself am in a similar position, I thought about why I hadn't done the same and what irked me about that way of thinking. I believe it was this idea that money is meaning. It was widely known in the classical world that the merchant class, and an overt focus on money, was seen as lower status and not aristocratic. Whenever I see my peers in the private sector striving for no other sake than a big pay check it elicits a slight disgust response.
Now it's possible that I'm just stroking my ego while I get paid pennies on the dollar to get barked at by menopausal communists who are thoroughly institutionalised, but I do have a genuine interoceptive experience of pleasure when I consider that I'm working for my country and my people. This is as opposed to some multinational conglomerate who will jettison me into outer space the moment the bottom dollar tells them to do so.
Again maybe I'm living in a naive idealism that died in the 80s before I was born, but I've been unable to shake this intuition that moving into the finance world is just less noble in and of itself. Well, i suppose I can take nobility to the bank when I'm trying to buy a house? I hear it fetches a fair portion of a deposit.
Good stuff aa always, sir! AGON is a great Substack; glad you are highlighting it. Neocons...as a paleocon, I cannot stand what they represent. Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and soon wider war in Ukraine or the Far East, I fear. (Arguably it all kicked off with Vietnam.) At some point that menagerie of mid-wits surely will have to understand that money, munitions, and Middle Americans willing to sign up for perpetual war are all finite and in increasingly dearer supply. I just hope it is not too late for the rest of us.
"money, munitions, and Middle Americans willing to sign up for perpetual war are all finite and in increasingly dearer supply."
I cannot speak for the second element, but so long as the first is in short (or inequitable) supply, there will always be enough of the third who opt for "three hots and a cot" (if not for skills training that translate directly to the civilian marketplace, afterward).