4 Comments
Mar 9, 2023Liked by Second City Bureaucrat

This really reads as more U.S. imperial ideology circa 2010 and seems to avoid the question of the Great Awokening that started around 2014. What accounts for the peculiar intensity and fervor of CRT, gender ideology, climate ideology etc. since then? How much is about the pressure of Trump and how much is something genuinely different from the more bland globalist universalism that came before? Was it the failure of globalism demonstrated in lost wars and the GFC?

Expand full comment
author

Sailer seems to think it started with Obama's second term. The leftists point solely to the increase in money dumped into identity politics after Occupy Wallstreet. I personally didn't notice a qualitative change (all of these ideas were at the forefront of culture wars in the late '80s and '90s). However, it does seem to have become more intense and more integrated into foreign policy since 2010.

I think there was more old-liberal, old-progressive opposition to the extreme version of identity politics back in the '90s. Most of those people are dying off and retiring now so a new equilibrium must be established.

Expand full comment
author

I should add -- and this is something I'll put in the final part of this series -- that nobody talks about global government anymore, at least not in the way Strobe Talbott did in '92. At the same time, climate change as an alternative to global nuclear war has become a new catastrophe that justifies a sort of necessary coordination among nations.

Is our leadership afraid of alienating someone with global government talk?

Expand full comment

We’re still trying to make global government happen but it’s just the US-EU-Japan-Australia, the countries the US is confident it can control. Nothing that requires sharing power with China

Expand full comment