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Why did England lose the Hundred Years War?
Aside from Joan of Arc, their tough and vigorous king Henry V died and was replaced by his infant son, Henry VI. The whole system relied on having a strong king to keep the powerful nobles organized and on-mission (conquering France). A child can't do that. A regency council couldn't do that. Nor could a soft, weak, peaceloving king like Henry VI. And that was before he had a mental breakdown. Civil war broke out in the 1450s as various cliques and nobles struggled for power.
The US is not a medieval kingdom. But it does have powerful actors, the military-industrial complex, the intelligence agencies, the State department, the Democratic Party and so on. There are surely people who want to preserve the regency, so to speak. They want to act freely and advance their agendas while there's nobody in full control (or while the Presidency is ruled by the last person to brief or whoever's closest to Jill and Hunter). There are people who want their own candidate on the throne. You have factional strife and plotting, none of this is good for the country.
Just from following the news, I have felt a sense of, I dunno, listlessness in this administration in the last couple years. There have been a lot of mixed messages, which makes it feel like either they're steering the entire ship on the basis of which way the
windspublic opinion polls are blowing, or it's the unchecked infighting of a royal court's competing fiefdoms without a strong executive to force high-level alignment. And honestly, it feels pretty depressing that "running almost exclusively on opinion polls" is the charitable option.We saw executive orders on immigration from the first week of the administration get mostly rescinded recently after claiming congressional action was necessary. The administration came out opposing transgender surgeries for minors within the last week, but its appointed members were advocating to remove age limits from the professional guidance just a couple years ago. Nobody is stepping forward to give speeches giving us a bigger picture and answering hard questions on the changing directions. It works for a while, but it seems like the wheels are starting to come off.
We've definitely seen feudal infighting and unpredictable positioning based on who could control the administration best in the financial sector. The SEC's behavior in particular has been completely incoherent. And that's not just according to crypto people who rag against it all the time (who ironically parlayed the chaos into lobbying gains), but literally everybody that interacts with the financial aspects of the Biden administration is unhappy. Even bond traders are fed up at this point.
Biden even seems to have lost a powerful stronghold of Democrats in the Silicon Valley VC universe. Techies with money are following Thiel's lead, holding their nose and going with Trump, which is a small revolution in such a solidly blue demographic.
I mostly blame Elizabeth Warren for this. It's an open secret that she loomed large over the economic policy and I wouldn't be surprised if she personally was behind most of this electoral poison (such as unrealized income taxes).
This is all to say that it speaks to a regency situation: Biden is a weak king and all his dukes are too busy fighting for control to maintain a united front against external enemies.
Let’s be real though, it also speaks to the widespread belief among liberal centrists (and even Thiel is ultimately a gay libertarian) that Trump isn’t actually going to do anything socially conservative. On immigration he might tighten the border a little beyond what Biden just did, but he’s not going to deport 15 million illegal immigrants. On abortion the Roe reversal is as far as he will go given his personal ambivalence on the issue. On guns he’ll leave it to SCOTUS which seems much less aggressive than many pro gun copium addicts were predicting 5 years ago. On China the candidates are largely indistinguishable. On Ukraine even the Europeans are pushing for some kind of ceasefire now, if quietly. Trump isn’t going to pull back the military from overseas while the evangelicals are champing at the bit to unleash the USAF on Hezbollah and China rhetoric heats up. He’s smart enough to know that cutting back medicare doesn’t play well with the millions of geriatric whites who comprise many of his most dedicated supporters. What is left that is radical?
The weird period of explosive promise in 2016 and early 2017 is over. Trump is going to govern as a center-right president except when it comes to hunting down his personal political opponents, who will face the full weight of a new Paxton-led justice but who will probably just leave the US and chill for a few years while the vast, vast majority of the establishment remains in place.
The one exception is probably the ME where I imagine a Trump administration will act very differently from Biden's.
What of the Ukraine? Trump's constant boasting that he'd put an end to it may not ultimately change much as the country seems spent, but I would expect a democrat to keep antagonizing Russia to a higher degree.
In fact this alone may be why Trump's no longer that repellent to the establishment. He can be the cleanup crew for their long telegraphed pivot to China.
I'm not sure I understand your question? I didn't mention Ukraine.
I'm just asking in general, but I guess I missed that you're upthread neighbor already mentionned it.
Ah I see. Unfortunately I don't have much to add to what you already said (which I largely agree with) as I just don't have a great sense of the dynamics at play, beyond the most basic ones that most people are aware of.
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