A Feudal Domino

"post-western, post-scarcity, post-democratic"

Elephants are dancing, and the beat may very well be coherent.

I actually have a small budget for doomscrolling now. There’s a halfway decent chance I may begin working for a homeless shelter next month. Fingers crossed. Anyway as part of that doomscrolling I witnessed Trump having a Reagan level moment in his presentation to Saudi Arabia.

“In recent years, far too many American presidents have been afflicted with the notion that it's our job to look into the souls of foreign leaders and use US policy to dispense justice for their sins.”

This is just one of the geopolitical bombshells Trump dropped. https://x.com/IterIntellectus/status/1922270201803952624

I don’t believe any of those ‘post-western’ things are going to happen soon, but it gives us a very good look at the probabilities and expectations of a new generation of leadership.

From my perspective, it is a turn towards greater state capitalism. It isn’t clear to me what the core of middle class labor is likely to be. In my last post I was just talking about the role the Levi’s jeans and Kenmore washing machines had in the 20th century consumer economy that drove the economics of the free world. But let us also remember that the giant that was Sears Roebuck and Company has dwindled to nothing. There is no more low hanging economic fruit for a literate middle class. We watch Netflix, we take Ozempic, we work in civil service jobs, with nowhere near the capacity to produce what we consume.

So there’s that.