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I can say it with a straight face because I pay attention to this stuff. In the 1990s Russia was struggling to maintain territorial cohesion. In 2002 they failed to maintain a continuous at-sea deterrence. They didn't field an active radar-guided air-to-air missile until 2015. (For reference the US had those since the 1970s). Now they sling them at Ukrainians all day long. You think Russia looks weak because it can only slice off small parts of the largest European military power, backed by the largest military power and the world's two largest economies; in the 1990s it couldn't even hold Grozney.
Sure.
Well, because Russia was toothless, the US slashed military spending dramatically, shuttering the US defense industrial base, consolidating the remaining portions into a few primes, and leading to the procurement of cheaper, less capable systems. Then it spent two decades of time, blood, money and attention fighting insurgencies in the Middle East, repeatedly cannibalizing big ticket procurement programs intended to replace Cold War era military technology. Why do you think we still use Cold War kit?
Right. I won't be very surprised if the same thing happens to China. But a big difference between China and Japan is that China is actually very militarily powerful, and if they suffer economic decline it may make them less stable and more hostile. The Japanese military was never a rival to ours, and they were our ally in the 1980s, despite the concerns about their economic growth.
I'm happy to agree that might not be what is causing the "malaise vibes" from the bottom up, but I think that populist thought-leaders are very well aware of China. Some of them receive security briefings on it.
It's their job for things not to go wrong, though. I agree with your point about the status quo catching strays but presumably the point of elections is to vote people who mismanage things out, right? And I while I think it's fair to question whether or not certain decision were foreseeably bad, some of them certainly were - to go back to my 9/11 example, for instance, we know it was foreseeably bad to ignore because people at the time were warning about the dangers of ignoring it - just as how people were pointing out that actually defending the police is a foreseeably bad idea.
I think that if the people who had goofed up stuff had fallen on their sword (figuratively) then populism wouldn't have nearly the purchase it does today, but generally speaking they were not punished and they were sometimes rewarded. For instance, I'm not saying that we should have passed an unconstitutional ex-post-facto law to crucify Wall Street financiers after the 2008 financial crisis, but I am saying that the banks that received US bailout money should have of their own volition not given out billions in bonuses.
I mean, is it that cut and dry? There are a lot of people think that the Democrats cheated and won in 1960, but I'm not really sure that (if true) means our democracy is dissolved. I guess that's a tangent but an interesting one.
If I came up with a statistically solid domestic decline theory, would you buy it? I can whip up a very statistically solid if somewhat undercooked decline narrative, as an example: the cost of college education has risen, and college enrollment has grown to tilt disproportionately female. Despite the fact that women prefer for men to make more money than they do, young women now out-earn men or at least reach parity in Washington, D.C., New York City, and Los Angeles. This effect is particularly pronounced with young, unmarried women. This leads to tension between the sexes, widespread dissatisfaction, and lower marriage rates. Lower marriage rates in turn make housing less affordable. But because it's not politically correct to discuss, people instead blame their economic dissatisfaction on things like "the evil elites." Thus it can be true that there can be a cultural or even localized economic decline without it necessarily showing up in broader statistics.
Rhetoric is not necessarily irrational, but I think that writing well forces a reader to exercise different skills than a charismatic orator. You can't read your audience, which makes a big difference.
I agree with this.
I am very interested in seeing how this turns out. I am curious if the legacy of AI will be rolling this back.
I think that you and I are probably worried about a lot of the same things. Where we differ is probably that I think that the gatekeepers made genuinely bad decisions in the Cold War and especially in the post-Cold War era. This makes me more sympathetic to populists looking forward even if I have important differences with them. Whereas the populists now make you, looking backwards, more sympathetic to the gatekeepers than (imho) they deserve. I don't really think your distrust of populists is ill-founded. But I don't think you should let that carry over into overlooking the mistakes of the gatekeepers.
Sure, that seems mostly good. (Conspiracies are real, but they often don't take the shape that conspiracies theorists think that they do.)
I realize that calling someone a cynical actor, sociopath, and politician is less inflammatory than calling them a demonic pedophile but is this a bit?
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