The Beginning of the End

In the Year of our Lord, two thousand twenty-four, I find myself once again taking up the mantle of this sporadic publication and dreaming of piercing the heart of the Western world with sharpened words. I am jaded again, but this time under different circumstances. When I began writing these articles, I had just watched the American people (or clandestine realpolitik machine if you are so inclined) oust a president who seemed to improve the quality of life for most of the developed world and much of the undeveloped world.

That such an unlikely president was elected at all demonstrates the popular frustration with the American government. In my opinion, he was ousted because he or his group had not taken care to properly tap the collective unconscious. Regardless, you are either already familiar with Trump's presidential epoch, or you have chosen to distance yourself from politics out of a sense of moral obligation. I beat the dead horse because when I began writing, his departure from office seemed to mark the beginning of what I interpreted as a dark age. In most ways, it was. The economy stagnated, and the cost of living increased while wages decreased. Territorial conflicts abroad were sponsored by the military-industrial complex, while Americans at home continued to steer their society toward polarization.

It is commonplace today for the losing side of the election to lament the following four years as the next dark age of humanity yet data suggests that the overall American satisfaction with the 2020-2024 presidential cycle was diabolically low. American wallets and hearts hurt for four years, but only in recent months could they do anything about it.

Why remain jaded after one of the biggest upsets in recent history? While the political struggle has taken another turn, the culture war in America has been on the same course for decades. I do not believe this election will make a long-term difference in the trajectory of the West. Ten years of economic prosperity, perhaps, but the trend will continue downwards over time. The problem is that politics indeed sits downstream from culture, and a president hasn't moved the needle in our culture for a very long time, maybe since Reagan. The Bushes and Clinton were culturally sterile, and Obama was the last president who embodied the sort of 'corporate presidentialism' that one would expect from entrenched politicians. Practically speaking, he pushed the needle toward neoliberal radicalism. Both Trump and Biden further polarized American culture without significantly enriching it.

Perhaps it is not the presidents who are to blame; societies do not often suffer ideological chasms as wide as the American sociopolitical and moral divide. It is a wonder that we have gone so long without a large upheaval. I consider the American ideological divide to be as significant as those behind the Armenian Genocide and the civil wars in Yugoslavia, Lebanon, and Sudan.

Two groups of people who believe so differently do not often cohabitate peacefully, this is a credit to the American experiment. Nevertheless, there must come an end to the experiment eventually, and it seems that if the divide between Americans gets any larger the whole thing will fall apart.

At the very least, President Trump's re-election signals a change in how American politics work. The Department of Government Efficiency is a great example of this. The idea that the executive branch would form a department with such lateral power, staffed by two titans of economy, but give it a predetermined life span and a cannibalistic agenda is unique.

We have left the era of classical big politics, and the whole masquerade has been thrust into the cultural spotlight. Now the movements of the political underworld are tangible and real to those who wish to see them, and the battle for control of American power is unappetizingly obvious. Every passing day seems to lift the veil of intrigue and esoterism, revealing that behind the intrigue of the past decades has been a disappointingly banal power struggle. Certainly, some terrible people are doing depraved things, but that's par for the course in politics.

What makes this moment so uncannily strange is that the veil of political intrigue has even been lifted at all. Somehow the entire public has been ushered behind the sacred curtain of politics. The owner of the largest social media company is also going to be the executioner who beheads a fifth of our government. The sheer degree of transparency promised by this administration is, if true, what signals the end of an age. The esoteric nature of politics, the arm's length distance between man and government that once existed is gone, and we are entering a new age of realpolitik which is primed to be even more direct and turbulent than the last, even if it sits in the hands of conservatives.

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, an emergent political class, populated by Bushes, Clintons, Kennedys, and now Trumps, reveals that we are moving towards a new form of aristocracy. The power of the aristocracy is increased by the fact that the common man cannot manage to cast enough votes for good things. Those among us who do wish for good things to happen are forced to trust in politicians and executive powers to make good things happen by force.

What remains is but to follow this course to its eventual conclusion: the Spenglerian age of Caesars, the full transition from a society into an unproductive civilization, and in a few generations, the collapse of the West. I have become Jaded again because I have realized that to take back the power of the American government from the communists requires a tactic that will usher the beginning of the end of the American experiment. The best thing that we real conservatives can do is to create a new class of conservatives, who understand conservatism as more than a reaction to liberalism, as Russell Kirk would have wanted it, minus the lack of central philosophy. Ideologies must be fought with ideologies; that is why Marxism has somehow survived and managed to infiltrate every one of our institutions even though the USSR collapsed.

I am happy that we won the battle, but I think this war will end when the two divergent American cultures can no longer coexist. In anticipation of that day, I have decided to renew my writing for anyone who might read it.

May God be with us.