Thanks for highlighting the link to Vlahos’ piece on the “church of woke”. A lot of it was over my head/out of my intellectual wheelhouse (not a new experience with Vlahos–see below), but I think I got the gist of it. James Lindsay has also argued that wokeness is a new religion:

https://areomagazine.com/2018/12/18/postmodern-religion-and-the-faith-of-social-justice/

Full disclosure: Vlahos was one of my profs at JHU SAIS in D.C. almost forty years ago. He was an entertaining and original lecturer but he did seem to be on a different frequency band than our other profs. IOW, he was intellectually eclectic. I remember reading his book on the development of U.S. Navy warfighting doctrine during the first three decades of the 20th century–“The Blue Sword”, also available from Mr. Bezos’ cozy little shoppe–and making heavy weather of some of the prose. Even then, Vlahos had a knack for investing seemingly straightforward natsec topics with high historical drama and unexpected cultural correspondences. I could usually follow along, but sometimes he lost me as he tore off down this or that rabbit-hole. Some things don’t change.

Had to look up Hypatia and Iain Pears’ “The Dream of Scipio”. The latter sounds like a darn good read. More ka-ching for Mr. Bezos, unless I can get it used through AbeBooks.

It’s been said before (more or less) but Trump’s policies are essentially little different front from those of JFKs or any other Henry Jackson Democrat.

True, that was 50-60 years back and things do change (of course); but the Overton Window now looks out over a radically different, and—if this persists—bleak panorama.

P.S. Thanks for the great comments….

Thanks too for the Michael Vlahos blog recommendation.

We could all benefit from reading this one:

https://css.cua.edu/humanitas_journal/church-of-woke/

I’d never thought of it this way, despite having bolted through Gibbon before. Much to digest and another angle from which to study the Elephant.

Funny thing is the Woke made a movie sanctifying Hypatia a few years back. Irony of Ironies.

To go off on a real tangent, the Hypatia thing reminds me I should go back and re-read The Dream of Scipio by Iain Pears and see if time passed and life lived have made me like this more or less now.

Trump’s approval ratings among Republicans (94% currently per Gallup) have been similar to those registered by Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George Bush the Younger. They’re noticeably higher than those registered by Gerald Ford and George Bush the Elder. The ‘some Republicans’ are shills employed by liberal media outlets, shills on the patronage of Pierre Omidyar, and a clown car full of vain fools who are incensed that Republican voters paid them no mind in 2016. These people have no analogue at ground level. They are all people who lobby for a living, people who write for a living, and people who’ve held public office. Over time, the Republicans antagonistic to Trump in 2016 have generally come around when they realized his policy prescriptions and appointments were in line with what they preferred; they’ve also come ’round in reaction to the grossly abusive behavior of the Democratic Party, the press, and the permanent government. The people who didn’t come around were those who were bought and paid for and those for whom their nasty little egos are their motor.

This is an absurd statement. Trump’s program was quite conventional: enforce the immigration laws, adopt a more contentious stance in trade negotiations, and reduce troop levels in the Near East, Central Asia, and North Africa. He also acceded to some Republican standards of a sort that every Republican president since 1980 has favored: reductions in marginal income tax rates, the appointment of originalists to the federal bench, the repeal of a structurally unsound medical insurance scheme, and tearing out a few pages from the voluminous Code of Federal Regulations. You’re suffering because of your adolescent entitlement mentality. You think the government is yours and it’s just intolerable that you suffer even temporary losses in policy disputes. Our political life might be passably congenial if people like you just stopped being head cases and jerks.

Hope you enjoy the book. It’s hard to avoid doing business with Mr. Bezos.

The mood of disquiet that Neo posted about a few days ago is a sign that many people are are already transitioning mentally from Yesterday Mode to Today Mode. Hope for the best but prepare for the worst seems like a prudent rule.

He’s using ‘anti-semite’ as a term of art. I’d be amused to see his reaction if you asked him to define ‘anti semite’.

I feel like a failure. It’s not that she voted Biden. It’s the absolute lack of critical thinking.

Twenty years ago, the distribution of political opinions among the young was similar to that of the general population. You had this large cultural shift between about 2000 and about 2008. My job at the time brought me in contact with college students daily, but I had no clue it was happening while it was happening.

You make valid points. And that’s a good book recommendation. Right up my alley interests-wise. Thanks!

Off to buy it now, even the cost of making one of the most obnoxious of Oligarchs a bit richer.

The trick is going to be knowing to flip as fast as the speed of light from Yesterday Mode to Today Mode. Not doing so was the death of many a Spaniard.

To get an idea of how rapidly a situation can develop, see here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1936_in_the_Spanish_Civil_War#Detailed_chronology:_1936

And things had been at a low boil for years leading up to this. How tempting it must have been for many normal relatively decent people to hope that things would just carry on. And then they were up against a wall and game over.

True enough, if it comes to that. We’re not there yet. In the meantime, no harm in talking.

In “Double-Edged Secrets: U.S. Naval Intelligence Operations in the Pacific During World War II” (great book), Jasper Holmes wrote that the most effective USN intelligence officers were those who had old friends on the other side.

“I am not arguing “in favor” of armed confrontation. I simply see it as highly probable.”

Thanks for clarifying. Thanks too for the reference to the Free Republic piece on Trump cleaning house at DoD. More on that from J.E. Dyer:

https://libertyunyielding.com/2020/11/11/ghosts-of-spygate-force-shift-in-washington-continues-as-more-defense-officials-leave/

On your point about access to the coasts: wouldn’t your former service be able to interdict interference by sea, as it did in the Atlantic during our first and I hope only hot civil war? Those are a couple of big-ass oceans, the Pacific especially. Not easy to sneak an invasion force across without being spotted. And the red states do have some major ports of their own (Galveston, Houston, New Orleans, Mobile, Pensacola, Tampa, Jacksonville, Savannah, and Charleston). You might want to check out Michael Vlahos’ blog at:

https://www.anewcivilwar.com/vlahos-blog

He’s a professor at JHU and a naval strategist by training. Might be worth asking him, especially since he seems to be thinking along the same lines you are.