The Post-Partisan Emporium

  Lords of the Fall John Michael Greer It’s been nine months now since I set aside the other preoccupations of this blog and launched a project I’d had in mind for many years—a discussion of the political and economic subtext underlying Richard Wagner’s vast operatic cycle  The Nibelung’s Ring . All things considered, nine months ago was a propitious time for such a venture, as Donald Trump’s bombastic baritone and Kamala Harris’s fingernails-on-blackboard soprano rang out over a bellowing chorus of media pundits and election officials, while billionaires George Soros and Elon Musk frantically conducted competing orchestras of braying donkeys and trumpeting elephants. The only possible word for the cacophony that resulted is “Wagnerian.” If anything, the volume’s just going to keep rising as we move to the next scene. I don’t expect things to get quieter any time soon. Nonetheless, the discussion of Wagner’s ideas finished up two weeks ago, and it’s time to move on to other th...

  Systemic Considerations “Every western society is confronted by an internal cultural conflict between those who wish to distance society from its civilizational legacy and those who wish to renew it.” —Frank Furedi on Substa James Howard Kunstler Whatever else you think is happening in our world, contraction is the reality-based order-of-the-day, and everything else is downstream of that. The world has to get by with less. Nothing is going to fix this for everybody, though any number of schemes for redistributing what’s left will preoccupy the political mojo. Right now, it’s tariffs, which are an attempt to restore industry ceded to the formerly left-behind people elsewhere in the world — taking back what we used to do. You are correct to wonder if this is even possible. The wish is surely understandable, if a bit fuzzy and over-simplified: to be again a nation of people occupied purposefully in the service of a bright future. Redemption stories are deeply appealing. Many of us a...

  Wild Boars Karen Kwiatkowski The European Zionists who created the modern state of Israel may have been cursed from the beginning, not because they were Jews, but because they were urbanites. In other words, they were not then, and are not now, farmers or ranchers, to use the American term. Not being farmers or ranchers is a big deal if you “create” a country with a self-sufficient pastoral fantasy on top of land populated by actual farmers and ranchers. Urban culture can be a blessing of cultural, artistic, and intellectual achievement, of politics and ideas, of excitement. On the other hand, urban culture is intensely uncurious about rural and farm life, not interested in the people or the culture that keeps food and fuel moving into the cities. Just recently, our own Vice President JD Vance, himself direct from rural Appalachian poverty,  caught heat from China when he said , “We borrow money from Chinese peasants to buy the things those Chinese peasants manufacture.” The...