Although the resurgence of realism in mainstream discourse has been a welcome development for advocates of pragmatism in foreign policy, it remains inchoate and incomplete. This is because many self-described realists routinely overlook a foundational principle of the realist worldview: that diplomacy must remain indifferent and agnostic toward foreign states’ domestic affairs and internal political arrangements.

This principle underpins the idea of modus vivendi—the recognition that different forms of life, political systems, and economic models can coexist peacefully without succumbing to perpetual or exaggerated existential hostility. Realism, properly understood, cannot function without the conscious affirmation of this disposition.

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The so-called ‘Liberal International Order’—anchored in international law, Enlightenment ideals, and the belief in democratic peace theory—has historically shown an aversion to multipolarity, let alone true polycentrism. This order emerged as an ideological artifact of the postwar settlement and achieved dominance only under the conditions of unipolarity. Its decline was inevitable once the distribution of global power that sustained it began to erode.

As the U.S. share of global economic and industrial power contracted, multipolarity and regionalism—historically the default conditions of international affairs—have reasserted themselves. Efforts to artificially prolong liberal internationalism, such as the repeatedly failing neoconservative project, have only hastened the order’s decline by overextending American power and drawing rival states like China, Russia, and Iran closer together. Moreover, the global resurgence of sovereignty and national autonomy among major powers reflects a deeper desire for communities to chart their own course, free from universal ideological prescriptions.

Owing to the Anglo-American political tradition’s proclivity for moral universalism and its desire for messianic empire, we should not be surprised that even self-styled realists in the West often resort to the language of human rights and democracy promotion. Rather than fortifying realism, these inherited rhetorical and ontological habits undermine it by implicitly conceding that political evangelism is a noble—if occasionally impractical—endeavor.

Yet realism’s distinctive strength lies in positively distinguishing foreign from domestic affairs, allowing states to prioritize national interest over ideological mission. This sharp delineation enables a sober assessment of interests in an anarchic international system and reduces needless conflict by acknowledging that states—like the societies they represent—differ fundamentally.

Such acknowledgment is foundational to the principle of sovereignty. In a multipolar world lacking a hegemon to enforce shared normative values, modus vivendi becomes not just useful but essential to preserving reciprocal diplomatic relations.

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History repeatedly affirms this necessity. From seventeenth-century France forming strategic ties with the Islamic Ottoman Empire and Protestant Sweden against the Catholic Habsburgs, to the U.S.–Soviet alliance in World War II, to Nixon’s landmark opening to Maoist China, realism has consistently required situational tolerance and strategic acuity that liberalism finds unsavory and uncomfortable.

One contemporary thinker who articulates this case against the melioristic and utopian disposition of liberal modernity with particular vigor is John Gray. In Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, his critique of ideological world-remaking projects, Gray writes:

“The myth of The End has caused untold suffering and is now as dangerous as it ever has been. In becoming a site for projects of world-transformation, political life became a battleground. The secular religions of the last two centuries, which imagined that the cycle of anarchy and tyranny could be ended, succeeded only in making it more violent. At its best, politics is not a vehicle for universal projects but the art of responding to a flux of circumstances.”

This builds on Gray’s earlier argument in Two Faces of Liberalism, where he contends that genuine liberalism entails affirming plurality—not just of cultures, but of political and economic regimes. Indeed, he argues that historically the emergence of sovereign states was meant to reduce sectarianism and enable authentic cultural pluralism to flourish globally.

In a system comprised of sovereign states, values-diversity is not a glitch—it is the operating logic. Relearning how statesmen—and thinkers like Hobbes and Spinoza—navigated the aftermath of the Thirty Years’ War through strategic realism and toleration offers valuable lessons for today. As Gray notes:

“One of the paradoxes that comes with accepting that there are incommensurate values is that tragic conflicts of value can sometimes melt away. If there are many incommensurable ways in which humans can flourish, choices among them need not be tragic.”

Accordingly, realism must be defined not merely as a utilitarian calculation or in terms of offshore balancing, much less a zero-sum global quest for power. Rather, genuine realism must provide an explicit repudiation of ideology and value-universalism in international affairs.

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History dictates that alliances and rivalries are transient; what endures are the localized interests and geopolitical realities that shape state behavior. Yet the global West’s discourse remains stubbornly saturated with rhetorical clichés about a “democratic world” facing down an “axis of authoritarianism” in some existential, cathartic contest. Nevertheless, the recentering of geopolitics and interest-based realpolitik has already exploded this self-righteous moralism, as rising regional and middle powers assert their autonomy and reshape the global landscape.

In a polycentric system where the primary imperative of states is survival and using the balance of power to maximize security, nothing is more necessary than a return to modus vivendi—a commitment to coexistence without consensus. Rather than downplaying this fact, realists should embrace modus vivendi as a core element of their tradition: an acknowledgment of multiplicity and difference as the natural global condition is not weakness, but a mark of wisdom.

The affirmation of modus vivendi—and the legitimacy of divergent political systems—is therefore essential not only for stabilizing a multiplex world in flux, but also for preserving the future of human life on the planet.

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Abstract: The 19th century’s Concert of Europe, an informal agreement amongst victors of the Napoleonic Wars, offers valuable insights for a potential future global order. This article examines the Concert's successes and shortcomings, exploring the potential for a 21st-century “Concert of Powers” adapted to address contemporary challenges unleashed by the unraveling of the postwar order.

Introduction

The tumultuous 19th century witnessed a period of relative peace under the diplomatic framework created by the Concert of Europe. This informal pact, forged by the victors of the Napoleonic Wars, aimed to maintain a balance of power and prevent further large-scale conflict. While not without limitations, the Concert offers valuable lessons for a world grappling with new global challenges. This article examines the Concert of Europe, its successes and shortcomings, and explores the potential for a revitalized global order through a 21st-century “Concert of Powers” adapted to the polycentric realities of our time.

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The Concert of Europe: Order Through a Precarious Balance

Following Napoleon Bonaparte’s final defeat in 1815, the victors of the Napoleonic Wars convened in Vienna. This grand gathering, known as the Congress of Vienna, aimed to reshape Europe’s shattered political landscape and prevent the continent from descending back into the chaos that had marked the previous decades. The outcome of this congress wasn't a formal treaty but a tacit understanding — the Concert of Europe.

This Concert lacked the rigidity of a traditional alliance system. It functioned more like a club of the great powers — Austria, Prussia, Russia, Great Britain, and a cautiously reintegrated France. The glue that held this club together was not a formal document but a shared interest: preserving the territorial and political status quo established at Vienna. The resulting balance of power wasn’t static. The Concert envisioned a dynamic system where the great powers actively monitored and adjusted the distribution of power to prevent any single nation from achieving a dominant position that could threaten the peace of Europe.

The Concert of Europe relied on two foundational principles to maintain this delicate balance. The first was the concept of legitimacy. The upheavals of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars had overthrown many hereditary monarchies. The Concert championed the restoration of these dynasties, viewing them as pillars of stability and a bulwark against the spread of revolutionary ideals. This principle, however, proved to be a double-edged sword. Not only did it justify intervention against revolutionary movements, but it also contained the seeds of future tensions as the rise of new ideologies — namely nationalism and liberalism — challenged the legitimacy of the restored order.

The second pillar of the Concert was the principle of collective security. Here, the great powers agreed to intervene — both diplomatically and, if necessary, militarily — to suppress revolutionary movements and uprisings that threatened to upset the established order. This collective security mechanism aimed to prevent localized conflicts and civil wars from escalating into wider European wars. However, the question of which uprisings constituted a legitimate threat and which were simply expressions of national aspirations remained a point of contention within the Concert, leading to inconsistencies in its application.

In essence, the Concert of Europe was a complex and sometimes contradictory system. It sought to maintain stability through a balance of power, but this balance was inherently precarious. Its emphasis on (traditional) legitimacy clashed with the rising tide of nationalism, and its application of collective security lacked clear guidelines. Despite its limitations, however, the Concert ushered in a period of relative peace in Europe for several decades — a testament to the effectiveness of a shared interest in maintaining a stable order, even if the methods employed were not always without their drawbacks.

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The Concert’s Legacy: A Balancing Act Between Order and Change

The Concert of Europe’s early decades provided a semblance of peace on the continent. While conflicts on the continent did not completely disappear, there was a significant decrease in the scale and frequency of warfare compared to the preceding Napoleonic era. The Concert’s success in quelling revolutionary uprisings in Italy and Spain, such as the Carbonari revolts in the 1820s, underscored the European powers’ strong commitment to collective action. Their swift intervention through diplomatic pressure and, in some cases, military force, effectively stamped out these challenges to the established order.

Nevertheless, as the 19th century progressed, cracks began to appear in the facade of stability. The Concert's legitimacy-based approach, heavily invested in restoring hereditary monarchies, increasingly clashed with the rising tide of nationalism and liberalism. These ideologies — emphasizing national self-determination, popular sovereignty, and individual freedoms — fundamentally challenged the core tenets of the Vienna settlement, which had imposed a political map that often disregarded popular aspirations.

The revolutions of 1848 across Europe served as a stark wake-up call for the Concert. Revolutionary fervor swept across the continent, from France to the German Confederation, threatening to topple the very order the Concert had aimed to preserve. Faced with this unprecedented wave of unrest, the great powers were forced to prioritize stability over strict adherence to the principle of legitimacy. While they initially intervened to suppress these uprisings, the sheer scale and intensity of the revolutionary fervor became undeniable. In such a context, a rigid insistence on the status quo could have plunged Europe back into widespread conflict.

This critical juncture revealed the crucial element of adaptability within the Concert. While initially steadfast in suppressing nationalist movements, the Concert ultimately recognized the futility of resisting powerful historical forces. In the case of Italian and German unification, the great powers displayed a degree of pragmatism by facilitating these unifications and even countenancing territorial swaps, such as with the Plombières Agreement in 1858, albeit with certain conditions attached. This shift in approach highlighted the importance of the Concert's second foundational principle — a sound understanding of the balance of power. As the distribution of power in Europe shifted, marked by Prussia’s rise and Austria’s relative decline, the Concert adapted its strategy to maintain a semblance of equilibrium. This adaptability, even if motivated by realpolitik considerations, proved to be a key factor in the Concert’s relative longevity.

Ultimately, the Concert’s legacy remains a mixed one. It ushered in a period of relative peace in Europe, but this stability came at the cost of suppressing popular movements for change. Yet, as the limitations of its legitimacy-based approach became evident, the Concert’s adaptability and understanding of the balance of power allowed it to navigate a complex period in European history.

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Building a 21st Century Concert of Powers

The legacy of the Concert of Europe offers valuable insights into constructing a sustainable global order for the 21st century. The first lesson lies in the necessity of grounding such an arrangement in today’s global distribution of power. Only major powers, with significant economic and military capabilities, can provide the leadership and resources needed to maintain a global balance. However, defining “great powers” in the 21st century requires a more nuanced understanding.

Unlike the relatively homogenous Europe of the 19th century, today’s global stage features a heterogeneous array of powerful states. Rising civilizational powers such as China and India challenge the traditional dominance of the West, while regionally focused middle powers — including Turkey, Brazil, and South Africa — play increasingly influential roles.

Beyond recognizing the shifting balance of power, a successful 21st-century Concert of Powers would require shared, “value-neutral” norms to advance its overarching goals. In a world lacking a hegemon, the core objective of preserving peace and stability would undoubtedly remain paramount. However, the emphasis must shift from the 19th century’s focus on maintaining the status quo to a more adaptive and multifaceted approach.

This new approach would prioritize mechanisms for peaceful conflict resolution. Recentering diplomacy and developing robust systems for mediation, arbitration, and conflict prevention would be crucial to defusing disputes before they escalate into violence.

The Concert would also need to grapple with the fundamental challenge of managing a multipolar, multi-civilizational order. Where the original Concert of Europe focused primarily on stabilizing a post-revolutionary Europe ravaged by continental war, the new Concert of Powers would be concerned with creating and sustaining a post-unipolar global order to prevent great power war.

Procedural norms are equally important. The Concert of Europe, with its reliance on informal conferences, demonstrated the value of agile diplomacy. Regular communication and a commitment to finding consensus through open dialogue would be essential for a 21st-century Concert. Moreover, the Concert’s history also shows the importance of restraint: intervention should be a last resort, employed only when diplomatic efforts fail and the Concert decides unanimously to defend the global equilibrium from a truculent power seeking global hegemony.

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Notably, the UN Security Council, as currently constituted, is poorly placed to serve as the institutional manifestation of a new Concert of Powers. A product of the post–World War II liberal international order, the Security Council lacks the agility and, increasingly, the legitimacy of the historical Concert of Europe. Its cumbersome, legalistic structure and exclusionary nature —limiting its permanent members to the so-called victors of World War Two— is ill-suited to the rapidly evolving realities of a polycentric world.

A new Concert of Powers would require a more informal arrangement combined with a more flexible institutional framework — one that allows for the inclusion of emerging powers and fosters a more dynamic process of consultation and decision-making. The success of this new Concert would hinge on the ability of the system’s superior powers — the U.S., China, India, France, Turkey, Japan, Iran, and Russia — to find common ground on a core set of principles. These principles could include respect for territorial integrity, domestic non-interference, the peaceful resolution of disputes, and collective action on global challenges and opportunities.

Challenges and Opportunities: A Concert for Our Times

The original Concert of Europe was built on two pressing concerns: preventing the devastation of another large-scale war and suppressing the revolutionary movements that had led to the chaos of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars. Any effort to create a 21st-century Concert of Powers must similarly rest on a shared sense of urgency in the face of intensifying global threats.

Addressing Pressing Global Concerns

The agenda of a modern Concert would extend beyond managing historical rivalries to confronting the most urgent challenges of our multiplex world. Preventing interstate war remains a foundational goal — even if total war between major powers appears less imminent. The Concert could serve as a platform for preventive diplomacy, mediating disputes before they escalate. It could also help institutionalize arms control norms and confidence-building measures to reduce tensions and prevent accidental escalation.

Among today’s most destabilizing threats is the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. From North Korea’s nuclear brinkmanship to Iran’s ambiguous ambitions, WMD proliferation risks eroding already fragile regional balances. A 21st-century Concert could reinvigorate coordination among major powers to enforce nonproliferation regimes and establish collective red lines — not through unilateralism or ad hoc coalitions, but through sustained dialogue and strategic empathy. On the flip side, the development and deployment of environmentally-friendly, civilian nuclear technologies could be a key area for global cooperation among Concert powers.

Another looming security concern is water scarcity. Exacerbated by global dependence on large-scale industrial agriculture and an overreliance on fossil fuels and dams, the politics of water is increasingly linked to instability and conflict. As climate stress and droughts intensify, competition over transboundary water sources — from the Nile Basin to the Indus River — threatens regional cohesion and heightens geopolitical risk. The Concert could act as a forum for developing shared water governance frameworks and conflict-prevention mechanisms, particularly in vulnerable regions. Here, pooling resources and expertise could accelerate research and development timelines, potentially saving countless lives.

Finally, establishing rapid response mechanisms to deploy medical supplies, personnel, and logistical capabilities to affected regions during future pandemics would require a dedicated emergency response force, ready for rapid deployment.

Impediments to a Concert of Powers

The path to a new Concert is fraught with obstacles. Chief among them is the persistent mistrust between great powers. Historical grievances, ideological divergences, and competition for strategic advantage all contribute to a climate of suspicion. Overcoming this will require sustained dialogue and a willingness to define overlapping interests.

A second impediment is the global resurgence of nationalism and populism. Leaders who emphasize national sovereignty above all may either discount the regional, spatial, and civilizational character of the new global system to advance a narrow nationalism or define their sphere of interest in globalist, maximalistic terms. Myopia, presentism, and overconfidence fueled by domestic political pressures can also dull imagination and make it difficult to commit to long-term strategic frameworks, particularly when electorates demand short-term results.

Third, the diffusion of power in today’s world presents an intrinsic challenge. Unlike the relatively cohesive 19th-century Europe, the current international system is polycentric, encompassing states with diverging priorities, worldviews, and civilizational identities. Achieving consensus in such a diverse environment will be more difficult — but ensuring all major powers feel represented and heard is vital to the Concert’s legitimacy and efficacy.

Despite these challenges, the potential benefits remain compelling. By fostering open dialogue, promoting peaceful coexistence and value-neutral norms, and enabling coordinated action on systemic threats, a Concert of Powers could help build a more stable and resilient world order — particularly by constraining the ambitions of revisionist great powers.

Taming Revisionism: A Concert for a Stable Order

The existing postwar international order faces mounting pressure from revisionist powers such as Russia and China, which seek to reshape global norms and reestablish their spheres of influence. A 21st-century Concert could offer a framework for moderating these ambitions through a mix of diplomatic engagement, deterrence, and strategic empathy.

At its core, the Concert would reaffirm collective security. Presenting a united front against unilateral aggression could deter revisionist behavior. If states know that attempts to redraw borders by force will trigger a concerted response, the risk calculus shifts.

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In parallel, the Concert could offer inclusion as an incentive. Granting revisionist states a legitimate stake in shaping the rules of the game could reduce their incentive to act outside them. Engagement need not mean acquiescence, but participation in rule-making can temper confrontation.

The Concert also has a role in addressing the root causes of revisionism. Revisionist rhetoric often taps into real grievances, such as historical injustices or economic inequalities. The Concert could serve as a forum for open dialogue and a fair deliberation of these legitimate concerns. By fostering a spirit of change and common understanding, the Concert could blunt the appeal of revisionist narratives in the post-unipolar era.

Flexibility and pragmatism remain critical. Unlike rigid Cold War alliances, a 21st-century Concert must be adaptive and adopt an interest-based approach — calibrating responses based on context and avoiding ideological postures. Such agility would enhance both credibility and restraint.

A Concert of Powers reflects the reality of geopolitics: it will not eliminate geopolitical rivalry nor be a reconstituted UN. But it could offer a vital mechanism for channeling competition, discouraging unilateralism, and reinforcing regional stability worldwide. For the polycentric world of today, it may prove the most realistic path toward cultivating coexistence and minimizing the risk of internecine global wars involving nuclear states.

The Path Forward: Building a Concert for the 21st Century

The first step toward establishing a Concert of Powers is fostering a shared understanding among the world’s great and middle powers. This requires sustained high-level diplomatic engagement aimed at identifying common strategic interests and testing practical areas of cooperation. Existing platforms such as the G20 or BRICS+ could serve as preliminary venues for these conversations, but the long-term goal must be to create a separate forum grounded in geopolitical realism.

Second, the Concert will need a flexible but coherent framework for coordination. Unlike the informal consultations of 19th-century Europe, a modern Concert may benefit from some regularized structure — periodic leadership summits or ministerial meetings — without succumbing to institutional rigidity. A hybrid format, balancing structure with strategic agility, offers the best chance of success.

Third, a credible mechanism for agenda-setting and issue prioritization is essential. This could involve a rotating chairmanship, allowing each major power to highlight specific concerns, or the creation of a small secretariat tasked with preparing discussion materials and proposing joint initiatives based on shared strategic interests. Such mechanisms would help prevent dominance by any one state while ensuring focus on issues of global consequence.

Fourth, and most critically, the Concert’s success depends on the willingness of its members to commit to a basic code of conduct: mutual restraint, non-interference, and collective crisis management. This represents a shift from a narrow-minded diplomacy to a holistic one rooted in a shared interest in stability. To preserve credibility, the Concert must have means — whether diplomatic pressure, reputational consequences, or suspension — to respond to violations of these norms.

America’s Role

As the leading architect of the post–World War II order and still the most globally capable power, the United States is uniquely positioned to initiate the conceptual and diplomatic groundwork for a 21st-century Concert. This will require a deliberate shift from hegemonic globalism toward strategic coordination among major powers.

Washington should begin by convening exploratory discussions with other major powers — particularly China, India, Brazil, Russia, France, Turkey, Iran, Germany, and Japan — to assess the feasibility of a more focused geopolitical dialogue. Rather than seeking universal rules or global norms, the U.S. should frame the Concert as a pragmatic mechanism for managing rivalries, preventing regional or global war, and coordinating on select issues of mutual concern.

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In parallel, the United States should advocate for a lean, principles-based framework centered on peaceful dispute resolution, collective security, and reciprocal restraint. These foundational understandings would define the Concert’s strategic ethos, without attempting to remake the world in any one power’s image.

Crucially, the Concert must be viewed not as a successor to liberal institutions, but as a corrective to their limitations — a geopolitical forum for great-power diplomacy in a more pluralistic and regionally anchored world. Success will depend not on idealism, proceduralism, or institutional proliferation, but on a shared recognition that peace among major powers is the irreducible core of international stability.

Conclusion: A Concert for a More Stable and Secure World

The United States can help shape a post-unipolar world by promoting a 21st-century Concert of Powers — not as a vehicle for universal values or world government, but as a necessary framework for managing complexity, rivalry, and interdependence in an international system that is increasingly regional and pluralistic, as it was for much of history.

The obstacles are significant: deep mistrust, divergent worldviews, competing ideologies, and contested spheres of influence. Yet the rewards — a disciplined system of major-power coexistence, a mechanism for defusing escalation, and a way to constrain global hegemonic ambition without war — are even greater.

The Concert model is not utopian; it is adaptive, pluralistic, and rooted in realism. It accepts that consensus may be limited and that cooperation will be partial, but it insists that stability can emerge from dialogue, strategic empathy, and systematic engagement among the world’s principal powers.

In a shifting world that is returning to familiar patterns of regional power and civilizational variety while remaining deeply interlinked, such a framework offers not a return to the past but a viable path forward.

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Earlier this month, the Belgian offshoot of Antifa—with the backing of the local mayors of Brussels—attempted to shut down a gathering of National Conservatives (NatCon), whose views in support of Israel and against mass migration it considered outside the ever-nebulous “Overton Window”. This week Texas Governor Greg Abbott unleashed the might of Texas State Troopers to crack down on and arrest student protestors at the University of Texas Austin, whose anti-Israel views he similarly deems outside acceptable political discourse, namely because they contradict his stance on the Gaza War.

These two seemingly disparate episodes occurring days apart on both sides of the Atlantic are both revealing and especially alarming as they show how the Woke Left and liberal Establishment politicians like Greg Abbott and Adam Schiff are unwitting allies against free speech, ostensible opponents engaged in a multi-front assault against our civil liberties and part of the same Schmittian dialectic that characterizes our zeitgeist.

They represent competing factions in the same elite power structure and subscribe to a similar exclusionary political ideology and authoritarian tendencies: reward friends and punish enemies. Their shared goal is the erosion of Free Speech protections in Western societies, and they are all too willing to use force and intimidation to achieve it.

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Antifa’s False Consciousness

Antifa is a strange phenomenon because it represents itself as the antithesis of something that, if it even exists, lacks actual political power. It is not as if organized paramilitary units sporting brown shirts are stalking the streets of Europe and America. On the contrary, this self-claiming anti-fascist movement operates in an environment where such ostensibly anti-establishment, regime-threatening “fascists” are conspicuously absent.

As pro-Antifa academic Jonathan Arlow has observed, Antifa can function “in the absence of effective extreme right forces”, because “anti-fascism acts as a form of prophylactic action” to prevent or preempt the emergence of a potentially “far-right movement” in the future. As such, the purpose of Antifa activism would be “to deny political space to extreme right micro-groups before they become a popular force or a more serious political threat,” or so goes the rationale.

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Preventing the mutation of a non-existent political movement into one that exists as a “popular force” is a performative exercise. Its righteousness is communicated through the hysterical practice of a politics of fear that is driven to raise the alarm constantly. Like superstitious societies that adopt rituals to ward off evil, the international Antifa movement continually insists that its intimidatory practices are designed to prevent the emergence of a malevolent political force.

As it happens the activism of Antifa does not require the presence of genuine fascists. Yet Antifa continually conveys the impression that fascism constitutes a clear and present danger. This is because it has arrogated to itself the authority to expand the meaning of “fascism” and “the far right” to cover anyone and any movements that it dislikes—from protesting farmers fighting for their livelihood to gender-critical feminists concerned about the future status of women. In this respect, it benefits from a cultural climate in which political and social movements that question the cultural and political outlook of the ruling elites are invariably assigned the label of far-right or fascist.

It is therefore not surprising that scaremongering about fascists and the far right has become a normal feature of the political and cultural landscape of the Western world. Such labels are not only routinely applied to describe conservative parties but also to pathologize any group that challenges the normative assumptions and the general worldview of the ruling elites.

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Antifa and its supporters justify their crude rhetoric and incitements on the basis that anti-fascists supposedly possess the moral high ground, allowing them to do whatever it takes to crush their enemies. Earlier this month, their contempt for democracy was on open display during their collective campaign to prevent the National Conservative (NatCon) conference in Brussels from taking place. As the Belgian League of Human Rights, an organization that worked hand-in-glove with Antifa, stated:

Freedom of speech may indeed apply to everyone, within the limits of the law, but that does not mean we have to open our home to the far-right.

For those who apply the concept of “human rights” selectively, the mere reference to the “far-right” serves as a justification for denying people the freedom of assembly.

Liberal Authoritarianism and the American Uniparty

A similar phenomenon can be observed by the liberal establishment politicians seeking to protect the bipartisan status quo in the United States—only here the specter of the “far-right” is replaced by “hate speech” and “anti-Semitism”. Similar to the dishonest tactics employed by Antifa International or the BLM to demonize all their opponents as the “far-right” or “white supremacist”, U.S. establishment politicians justify their violent crackdowns against peaceful student protestors on the grounds of the alleged “anti-Semitism” or “racism” of dissidents.

The Establishment's push to create a false equivalency between any criticism of the state of Israel and advocating violence against America’s Jewish citizens is not a new development. It also marks the further entrenchment of Diversity and Inclusion policies usually associated with the woke progressive Left—as evidenced by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ decree that created a special category for Jewish students which parallels the Left’s penchant for conferring privileged status on the People of Color or non-heterosexuals. This is the Conservative Inc.-liberal corollary to the victimist narratives generally perpetuated by Left-liberals.

In instrumentalizing the specter of “anti-Semitism” or even “anti-Zionism” for more administrative controls, the woke Right has thus found a more mainstream form of identitarianism (in contradistinction with White racialism brewing on its online fringe) with which to justify its censorship regime, matching the woke Left’s gender and race-fueled cancel culture. Supposedly this charge alone is enough to strip them of their rights as American citizens, permitting state administrators to deny them the right to free speech and free assembly, recalling the brutal crackdowns against anti-Vietnam War campus protests of 1968. By weaponizing language in this way, the ruling elite (from both parties) thus dehumanizes its opponents, rejects all dissension as hateful insurrection, engages in Schmittian politics of us and them, and explicitly violates the founding principles of democratic politics.

Sadly, the ruling class’s contempt for freedom and democracy mirrors not only Antifa’s but that of the historical totalitarians of the 1930s. As the academic and defender of Antifa Mark Bray recently wrote: “Antifascists and fascists have one thing in common: an illiberal disdain for the confines of mainstream politics”. In practice, however, the woke elites’ and the liberal political establishment’s true aim is to exercise total control over language and the boundaries of mainstream politics, to the exclusion of dissenting opinions. As such, both movements fundamentally despise republican constitutional principles and regard its minority protections, a pillar of democratic decision-making, with contempt.

To put it more plainly, both movements are as one in possessing a contemptuous attitude toward democratic politics, something they share with totalitarian movements of the 20th century. They are hostile to the liberal ideal of tolerance and free speech. The crux of this anti-democratic attitude is the rejection of historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall’s line (often misattributed to Voltaire): I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. From this perspective, opponents are perceived as enemies who must be crushed and stripped of the rights enjoyed by their compatriots in a democratic polity.

The woke progressive and liberal establishment’s contempt for free speech and tolerance also echoes the sentiments expressed by Herbert Marcuse, the quasi-Marxist philosopher of the 1960s Counter-revolution. In his critique of what he characterized as “repressive tolerance”, Marcuse leaped effortlessly from denouncing capitalist cultural domination to advocating the suppression of views that he found objectionable. Indeed, he explicitly called for “the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements” that spread “aggressive policies” or “discrimination on the grounds of race and religion”. It is plain to see how the pro-Antifa Bray and the Uniparty-champion Abbott both promote the authoritarian ideals of Marcuse.

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Unfortunately, Antifa’s rejection of the ideal of tolerance and free speech is widely shared by many of the dominant cultural and political institutions in America, including establishment politicians like Republican Greg Abbott and Democratic Congressmen Adam Smith and Adam Schiff. Policing speech has become common and widely institutionalized, and it is increasingly normal to censor dissenting opinions—using the pretext that they are “offensive”, constitute “hate speech”, or mask foreign propaganda. Both the supporters of Antifa and liberal establishment politicians now regularly reject our constitutionally-protected speech based on the recurrent paranoia that such discourse helps to hide hate speech, foreign election interference, or fascism.

The widespread influence of such intolerant sentiments has created a climate where anti-democratic attitudes enjoy formidable support, represented both by establishment politicians and their woke challengers. That is why contrary to appearances Antifa lacks the genuine radicalism usually associated with anti-establishment political movements. On the contrary, the existence of Antifa and Woke politics depends on the present Establishment itself—one that either overtly supports the former’s overarching ideology or engages in similar tactics to silence free expression, thereby creating an ersatz or performative cultural and political dialectic within which the status quo is sustained and genuine challengers are either silenced or excluded entirely.

Fascisto-liberals: Antifa’s True Other

While Antifa serves as the cultural stormtroopers of the progressive elites, the liberal political establishment has openly abandoned its customary lip service to free speech and endorsed full crackdowns on dissenting protestors under the garb of fighting “hate speech”, “anti-Semitism”, “disinformation” or even Vladimir Putin. In doing so, liberal administrative elites from New York to Los Angeles to Austin have revealed their affinity for and symbiotic relationship with the woke, progressive elites, even as they are engaged in a public struggle against them over the level and nature of American support for Israel.

But lurking beneath the fight over the ceasefire in Gaza is an internal power struggle within the professional-managerial class to control the machinery of the state and over the correct (progressive or conservative) interpretation of liberal ideology.

Almost a century ago, British author H.G. Wells dreamed of a totalitarian form of liberalism that could be as ruthless as fascism in rejecting the “dilatory indecisiveness” of democracy for effective organization, but retain the utopian and melioristic elements of liberalism and its desire for the full transformation of society—utilizing the modern state to cultivate its new man:

I am asking for a Liberal Fascisti, for enlightened Nazis…They must begin as a disciplined sect, but they must end as the sustaining organization of a reconstituted mankind.

The nationwide crackdown on student protests led and supported by many members of America’s bipartisan Establishment, or the Uniparty, to suppress speech in clear violation of the First Amendment, indicates both that H.G. Well’s enduring aspiration for liberal fascists is nearly at hand and that the woke Antifa is finally getting its long-awaited fascistic Other.

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Antifa’s role in the current zeitgeist is to create a climate of fear to justify mobilization against the supposed threat posed by the “far-right”. In the past, Antifa’s efforts at canceling or silencing its opponents were, often ostensibly in the interest of public safety, aided and abetted by a political establishment equally fearful of hearing opposing views. The Uniparty’s reaction to these protests is indeed dangerously reminiscent of how the Neocon and internationalist establishment exploited a politics of fear to target the Left-Right anti-war voices in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.

The securitization of language and the mass mobilization of riot police against peaceful, albeit strange and performative, student sit-ins in American colleges shows that even the woke progressives can become a target of the wrath of the modern state when the liberal establishment comes to fear its future hold on power.

And here, as was the case in the Brussels mayors’ campaigns to cancel NatCon, it is the fabricated threat to safety and public order that masquerades the political project of silencing dissident views. Even when they find themselves on different sides, the Antifa and their Fascisto-liberal counterparts represent different arms of the same force that is waging total war on free expression and viewpoint diversity—both using a very similar playbook and believing it just, and even moral, to censor the dissenting voices they wish did not exist.

In Defense of Free Speech Absolutism

Defending the civil liberties of all, without compromise and to its full extent, is the only way to ensure that Western societies remain true to the ideals of constitutional government. This is only possible by cultivating tolerance of alternative viewpoints as a foundational value for Western societies. Some might use the chaos and ugliness of protests or their alleged risk to public order to rationalize shutting them down. But as Aldous Huxley observed, “The Will to Order can make tyrants out of those who merely aspire to clean up a mess. The beauty of tidiness is used as justification for despotism.”

With the eruption of student protests in the United States and the heavy-handed response from the police and state authorities, we are treated to the spectacle where Antifa’s censorship from below converges with the State’s authority from above. Some may argue that the same people who have demanded the censoring of Zionist voices and the so-called “far right” in the past are now suffering the consequences of their own intolerance against others, as the authorities block their right to voice their criticism of Israel.

But this should be a timely reminder to all sides that once civilian rights are forfeited and the power of suppression and totalitarian controls are given to the state, it will be near-impossible to rein in the state’s exercise of its new powers regardless of one’s political loyalties.

That Antifa represents a threat to our right to free speech and assembly is not in doubt. But the threat to freedom is not confined to these overzealous activists. Antifa’s playbook is based on an increasingly authoritarian script devised by intersectional theorists, legal scholars, and many elites of the Anglo-American political establishment. These folks have developed and institutionalized arguments asserting that freedom needs to be regulated to protect those groups, which at any given time, the state might deem “vulnerable”.

They invented the concept of “hate speech”—as they did “disinformation”—to allow for the systematic policing of language, narrowing the range of acceptable opinion. Now there is even talk of federally-mandated “speech monitors” at U.S. universities to combat anti-Semitism. Once the policing of speech is accepted as the new normal, it is only a matter of time before the freedom of assembly too is abridged by the forces of law and order.

If these draconian measures against our civil liberties become precedent and are placed in the hands of the state bureaucracy, we could enter a dystopian, Orwellian world of doublespeak in which free speech is “hate speech”, protest is “insurrection”, and normal democratic deliberation is “foreign disinformation”. The ultimate result will be to cast, even celebrate, our new slavery as freedom.

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The controversial Tucker Carlson interview with Vladimir Putin in February 2024 was fascinating, meaningful, and important because it revealed—unintentionally at least as far as Carlson was concerned—the deeper logic and meaning of the Ukraine War that the interview was called to discuss. While many rightly focus on the strategic dimensions and geopolitical roots of the conflict, unless and until we have grappled with that deeper meaning, the reasons for the War’s outbreak in the first place will remain obscure and the possibility of resolving this War in a lasting way and of averting a future one will be slim.

I argue that in dealing with Russia, the tools Western policymakers – and those of the analysts who inform them – have been using are inadequate, not merely in superficial but in profound, philosophical ways. Perhaps the collapse of philosophy as a discipline (or its transformation into abstract analytics) has precluded our seeing that the gap between Russia and the West is to a large extent epistemological: we in the West and the Russians conceive the world differently and talk past each other. Our different conceptions of the world—our different priors—distort our view of the conflict leaving us with conclusions that are entirely incommensurate and incompatible.

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Amid the tumult and noise of our digital distractions, a different kind of silence is falling over large parts of the world. This silence is one of futures that will never come, of pasts that are unrecalled, and presents that go unlived.

In the most “developed” parts of the world, we are living through a growing quiet: one that speaks louder than the trumpets on judgment day of our passing into a grave from which no memory or legacy will be carried forward. The shriek of children, the hum of adult life, and the murmur of the old are all slowly, almost imperceptibly, fading away. We are witnessing the apparently slow, but soon-to-be brutal, reality of demographic decline and senescence. The reality of population decline, rather than the “population bomb”, is so concerning that the United Nations has devoted resources to the study of its implications for the politics of the future.

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The Great Silence is more than just a metaphor. Over the last hundred years, around 400 languages have died out, often through the assimilation of speakers into larger linguistic populations, but mainly through demographic decline: the speakers themselves have dwindled until no one lives who can speak such words. We are witnessing the process of global homogeneity in action. The estimates are that half the world’s remaining 6,500 languages will disappear by 2100, although some estimate the likely figure as around 90%. In his book How Civilisations Die, David Goldman notes the tragedy of those indigenous people who are the last surviving members of their tribe, the last speakers of a dying tongue, no longer able to communicate and participate in the same lifeworld as others, their language now nothing more than a prison of sound, incomprehensible to those around them.

Of course, organizations like the UN adopt a materialist and abstract view of the implications of such developments. They must, owing to their high-altitude, low-resolution view of such matters. However, this is not only a tale of GDP decline, infrastructure breakdown, tax intake shrinkage, welfare state collapse, and other material results that are themselves deeply troubling. As we can see from the snowballing of language deaths, however, the demographic death of peoples must be understood and confronted also on an existential and metaphysical level.

Nations are communities that stretch across time, bound by threads linking the dead to the living and the unborn. These threads have frayed, often to a few strands. For hundreds of millions, the single strand of familial and communal life is all that ties them into the great chain of existence. For more and more people today, these links have been snapped. Most are untethered from a past they no longer remember and pay little heed to a future they do not regard as their legacy.

The UN and other such institutions will talk about this collapse as being neither unprecedented nor unexpected. To them, this is simply the latest stage in the demographic transition, from high infant mortality and fertility in premodern times to low infant mortality and low fertility in the late-modern era. The modern global population boom caused by industrialization was merely an aberration, and this is its natural course correction. But if we wish to come out the other side in one piece, we cannot take the current state of things as an edict of nature. We must explore the root causes that have severed us from our biological imperatives.

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Is the Liberal International Order a permanent condition of global politics, or is it a historical aberration destined to end? And if so, what will replace it?

Prominent Danish journalist Flemming Rose sits down with AGON’s founding editor Dr. Arta Moeini to reflect on these questions and much more. Here is the full interview in English for the readers of AGON.

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Using Nietzsche as a Guide to 21st-century Geopolitics

Note from Flemming Rose:

Dear Reader,

For this week's Free Thinking, I spoke with Dr. Arta Moeini, Research Director at the Institute for Peace & Diplomacy think tank in Washington D.C. and an expert on the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). We talked about the end of the liberal international order of the last 75 years and what order will replace the existing one. Moeini believes that we are witnessing the end of the modern period, which has lasted about 400 years, and that the wars in Ukraine and Gaza mark the West's swan song.

The modern period has been dominated by the nation-state and a certain universalism that is now incoherent and on the verge of collapse. Thinking of the future, we can look forward to a new polycentric world order consisting of multiple centers of power and regional poles rooted in different cultures and civilizations, each with its own value system and norms, and here, according to Moeini, we should listen to Nietzsche's response to the crisis of universalism at the end of the 19th century.

Enjoy.

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A life with multiple cultures

Arta Moeini makes no secret of the fact that his personal history serves as a starting point for his professional interest as an expert in foreign and security policy and the perspective he takes on the world. Born in Brussels, he grew up in Iran and the United States. Moeini is an American citizen but has Persian roots and has spent time in Europe. As a teenager, the now 36-year-old Moeini moved back to Los Angeles, where it occurred to him that he had adopted and internalized Western prejudices about life outside the West.

“I remember how I looked down on other civilizations and other people's experiences because they didn't align with my internalized understanding of ‘civilization’. I slowly realized how the West's notion of being exceptional and above others damages the Western psyche itself. It distorts reality and creates a sense of ownership of things that happen far away, which is deeply unhealthy”.

Moeini adds:

“We take our own experience and superimpose it on distant countries and cultures and turn it into a global experience. We equate our own way of life with others, measure other civilizations and countries by the same yardstick, and judge the world accordingly”.

Liberal ideology dismisses the real world!

He elaborates:

“This notion also underlies the idea of convergence in development theory, the fact that, as a result of the spread of modernity and development, all societies, cultures, and ways of life will eventually converge.”

According to Moeini, the same worldview drives American thinker Francis Fukuyama's 1989 claim of the end of history. It is, he says, a theory that pushes aside the real experiences of other cultures in favor of an ahistorical ideological presumption at the heart of the liberal order that asserts every form of life must inevitably move in the same direction and towards the same goal.

He comments: “I see this as deeply problematic”.

Moeini adds:

“The same melioristic, eschatological view of history culminating in universal ‘justice’ exists in Islamism, communism, and fascism. All are ideological reactions to liberalism and creations of Modernity. They are all alter egos of liberal modernity and operate with the notion of the end of history, but just interpret this in a different way than Fukuyama. They are all part of modernity, fundamental belief systems underpinned by the idea of ideological revolution and the desirability of systemic transformation. Even as they see themselves in opposition to the West, they use the same concepts to explain the world”.

Biden as an ideologue

According to Moeini, U.S. President Joe Biden's attempt to convince Americans of the need to intervene on behalf of both Israel and Ukraine by suggesting that these two very different countries and peoples share a common destiny as seen from the Oval Office in Washington D.C. is also an unrealistic and abstract ideologization.

Such an ideological framing was evident in Biden’s address to the nation earlier this month:

Hamas and Putin represent different threats, but they have this in common: They both want to totally eradicate a neighboring democracy—totally eradicate it.

According to Moeini, the war in Ukraine has become a holy war for a generation of Western elites steeped in the Cold War. A Russian victory, according to the establishment view in the West, would not just be Ukraine's loss. No, a Russian victory would mean the collapse of the so-called liberal international order so far as the Western ruling class is concerned.

Moeini elaborates:

“Ukraine has become existential for Western elites because a series of world events including the rise of populism and culminating in the Russo-Ukraine war has cast doubt on their worldview, suggesting their time is coming to an end. We are witnessing the swan song of the liberal order. Ukraine has become existential to them, even though the fate of Ukraine will never have a decisive impact on the national interest of the United States or the collective interest of Americans. This is because our political leaders have tied themselves to a particular worldview and the dynamics behind it. Ukraine has become a place where they can fight—if not physically then ontologically—against the disintegration of the liberal order and reap its cathartic effects”.

The ground is shaking under the West

Will the war in Gaza accelerate that process?

“Yes, both the war in Gaza and Ukraine are seismic tremors in the system. We are neither able to control what happens in Ukraine nor in Gaza, and the more resources Washington invests in distant conflicts and the more it interferes in them, the more the U.S. will be weakened. Our interference also weakens the incentive for local actors to find solutions themselves based on the reality on the ground”.

America’s universalism weakens the U.S.

Why?

“American exceptionalism is an ideology that ignores American interests. When a universalist ideology drives you, you are not concerned with the best interests of your own people. The United States has drained its resources and amassed unsustainable debt by waging wars around the world instead of focusing on strengthening our domestic institutions and local communities. It has weakened us”.

It wasn't like that to begin with during the Cold War, Moeini points out. Back then, the U.S. and the rest of the Western nations were far less ideological than today. They joined forces with non-democratic countries like Greece, Portugal, Turkey, and Spain to contain the expanding Soviet threat and didn't necessarily march in lockstep. The U.S. didn't demand that other countries behave in the same way. But that changed over time.

Moeini explains:

“Along the way, Western elites came to see themselves as better than others, and they saw their own model of society as superior to others. The funny thing is that in doing so, they adopted the Soviet way of thinking, an ideological worldview that was convinced of its own historical superiority and whose proponents saw the world as divided into good guys and bad guys, with themselves representing the good”.

He adds:

“With the collapse of the Soviet Union, one ideological pillar of Modernity collapsed, leaving only the liberal one, and there were no restrictions on it whatsoever. I think of the 1990s, which was a unique period in world history where there was only one dominant power. It happens very rarely and it was thought that you could build a just world under American supremacy. Such a centralized and globalized international system ruled from a capital city is unprecedented. But when you say that your values are universal, that they apply to all countries and cultures, and that you hold the historical truth, sooner or later others will rebel, and that's what we're seeing now”.

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Towards a new order

Today, Arta Moeini is Director of Research at the Institute for Peace & Diplomacy, a think tank in Washington D.C., where he researches the crisis of Modernity within the United States and the West and what he calls the “great transition”—the global shift currently underway from U.S.-dominated international order to a multi-centered and multi-polar order, which although feared by Western elites, could, according to Moeini, create a more stable and peaceful world.

This transition is driven by the rise of China, Russia's regained impetus for power, and new powers in the Global South that want to assert their sovereignty and independence. But it is also caused by the crisis that the US and other Western countries are experiencing internally, an extreme, late form of Modernity that rejects the concrete history, norms, and traditions of the West—the cultural forms that gave rise to Modernity itself—in favor of an abstract fixation with liberation and equality.

Rose: You see civilizational states and what you call middle powers as centers or pillars of this new global order. How do you define them?

Moeini: “These are countries that are not necessarily great powers with a global reach or force capability—currently only two great powers exist, China and the U.S.—but middle powers are geographical anchors, economically and militarily dominant in their regions, and often rooted in a civilizational tradition. Unlike the great powers, however, they cannot project power globally. They are concerned with their local area and historical spheres of interest, focusing on their vital national interests and territorial, strategic, moral, and cultural sovereignty”.

Rose: Which countries are these?

“These are countries like India, Iran, Japan, Germany, Russia, Turkey, South Africa, Brazil, and possibly even Nigeria and Ethiopia. There are a few more, but the key point is that all these states have a civilizational, cultural, and historical foundation that binds them to a region. They are more than simple by-products of nationalism operating within a nation-state system. BRICS is the epitome of this shift, with China being the only example of a civilization-state that is not a middle power, but a great power that can project power outside its immediate area, but has so far chosen not to do so militarily.”

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Nietzsche's warning to modern man

Moeini is an expert on the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, and he believes that Nietzsche speaks to our own time more than any other philosopher. This is because, Moeini believes, in the late 19th century Nietzsche delivered an uncompromising and increasingly forceful critique of the increasing décadence and self-destruction of the Modern zeitgeist that he argued would be a natural consequence of the failure to come to terms with the “death of God” and its philosophical and sociological implications.

Nietzsche understood that the collapse of universalism at the time—encompassed in his notion of the death of God and the Christian account of morality—heralded a nihilism for which he sought an alternative, and warned against the loss of meaning that came with the Modern project.

Moeini states:

“I don't know of any examples before the modern period where people committed suicide, because they saw life as meaningless or because they felt that life was not worth living. That's why I see Modernity as an enemy of life.”

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According to Moeini, there are also striking similarities between the way Nietzsche's contemporaries viewed his critique of Modernity and the established truths of his time and the way Western elites today react to the loss of their dominance and the dissolution of the liberal order—where for more than 75 years they could determine the course of the world and intervene at will anywhere on the globe.

Moeini states:

“Nietzsche addressed the crisis of universalism in the 19th century, and he provides the most profound critique of Modernity from a Western perspective. He is the most prescient thinker with respect to the problems we face today”.

Nietzsche argued by the late 19th century it had become obvious that Christianity was just one moral system among many, rejecting the a priori existence of universal values and the idea of a universal morality that applies to all cultures and civilizations at all times. Here, Moeini argues, is a guide to the principles befitting a new truly post-Modern world order that could replace our pathological Modern order that has gone into hyperdrive and is on its last legs.

Armed with Nietzsche's tragic realism, the dissolution of the liberal international order does not mean chaos, anarchy, and disorder, in Moeini’s view: “Nietzsche's ideas on culture and morality can serve as the basis for a new order that puts a novel form of multiplicity above the universalism of the past”.

All civilizations are regional, lest they be ideologies

According to Moeini, the new world order will ultimately replace the one international system, with multiple regional systems built around various historically-rooted cultural complexes and states that ostensibly function as representatives of different civilizations, instead of a nation or demos. They are all local and regional, and no one can claim universal values and principles, which means that the actors of this global order have to live with the fact that other cultures and civilizations have norms, values, and ethical systems that they may not like.

This new order would also entail an ethic, however: he calls it a “value-neutral” and instrumentalist normative system in which all the participating states must exercise tolerance, abide by non-interference, and offer mutual recognition regardless of their political orientation, worldviews, and incommensurable differences in substantive values.

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Isn't this a form of cultural relativism?

Moeini rejects the notion:

“No, because cultures are objective and constitute real worlds to their inhabitants. They are not relative to subjective whims and remain inherently or even unconsciously authoritative on the people who live in them. They are real and concrete, a form and frame of life. You can only talk about cultural relativism if you look at it on a global level.”

He clarifies:

“At the same time, Nietzsche's concept of culture is not immutable. He acknowledges that cultures can become rigid and stagnant and that their calcification is not healthy as it can uproot them and denature them into ideology, so healthful cultures are also subject to evolution with new ideas and mutations. It's not a once-and-for-all proposition. Cultures are sublime embodiments of life, and evolution also applies to cultures. For me, this is not cultural relativism, but a cultural realism that recognizes culture as the most important object of study if you want to understand human existence”.

A word of advice from Nietzsche

Rose: If you were Nietzsche and the author of his 1887 work, On the Genealogy of Morality, what advice would you give to those who wield the power of the West today and are up against the self-destructive forces of modernity?

Moeini: "I don't think Nietzsche was the type to hand out advice left and right, and the people you're talking about are not conscious of any of what you and I are discussing. That's why they're so confused by and unsympathetic to what's going on around them. But I think Nietzsche would encourage them to recultivate a pathos of distance, to not give lip service to a shallow “diversity” but show respect for fundamental differences, for having cultural and historical roots, for all those things that are hierarchical as is the nature of life itself, things that are natural and organic to human existence such as community and the family”.

He adds:

“But I doubt any modern person in a position of power and authority will heed Nietzsche’s advice because they are already profoundly decadent, as he predicted they would become as the “last man” living in late modernity and having collectively internalized its ressentimental pathologies against nature and life. On that tragic note, Nietzsche would probably remind us that everything has an end and that décadence is the last stage on the road to annihilation”.

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From late 2015 and partly as a reaction to what many in the establishment saw as the shock victory of Donald J. Trump in the 2016 presidential election, an idea spread within mainstream circles like wildfire: that the Russian government had conducted elaborate “disinformation” campaigns to manipulate Western social media and gain significant levels of influence over the U.S. political system and public discourse in order to interfere in U.S. elections and get Trump elected as the 45th American president. By 2023, this largely conspiratorial narrative—which came to be known as “Russiagate”—has collapsed. 

The release of the Durham report this past spring formally cast the last shovel of dirt over Russiagate’s grave. What began as an attempt to excuse the loss of one of the best-funded and elite-endorsed presidential campaigns in history to a political outsider and celebrity host by pinning the blame on a foreign country quickly mutated into a political “witch hunt” targeting every critic of America’s domestic and foreign policy consensus from both the Left and the Right. A thoroughly bipartisan establishment saw the specter of foreign infiltration as an opportunity to discredit all anti-establishment views of American foreign policy, projecting them as secret plots by Moscow to undermine the United States.

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Thanks to the release of the Twitter Files and dogged skepticism from some of the more non-mainstream media outlets, we now know that this establishment-led campaign was not simply a cynical attempt to score some partisan points, but rather a coordinated attack on critics of the status quo. Groups like Hamilton 68 constructed narratives about Russian “bots” and agents lurking behind every potential social media post. And they did it on the government’s dime. Such securitized rhetoric was encouraged and promoted by many in the federal government, including then-Senator Kamala Harris who stated in 2019 that most of the political furor around Colin Kaepernick’s taking a knee during the national anthem was caused by Russian actors.

Many observers, including myself, cried foul from the start. Rejecting Russiagate as an unsubstantiated conspiracy was an unpopular opinion to have in 2017 and 2018, especially for those with more left-leaning politics. Although foreign influence did impact the Trump administration's policies, other countries—such as Israel (via Jared Kushner) and Turkey (via Michael Flynn)—arguably held far more sway in the White House than did the Kremlin. Even in the run-up to the 2016 election itself, actors connected within the United Kingdom—perhaps reading the tea leaves with better foresight than the arrogant Clinton Campaign ever could—had arguably also tried to influence that election’s outcome with the mostly speculative “Steele Dossier”. One cannot help but wonder what actual evidence of foreign interference could have been uncovered if more effort had been put into scrutinizing the actions of those supposedly friendly countries.

While Russiagate itself remained primarily a media and elite fixation that would hardly match up with the everyday concerns of the average voter, it nonetheless represented a cycle of hawkish mania plaguing much of the political and commentariat classes. Its effects are with us still. The recent indictment of members of the African People’s Socialist Party for their anti-NATO activism under the pretext of them being Russian stooges is just one such example, which recalls both the FBI’s past attacks on black radical organizations as well as the fact that the federal government—which claims not to be directly involved in the Ukraine War—is seeking out “enemy agents” as if we lived during a conventional war. 

Russiagate, then, continues to have a real-world impact on those targeted for their contrarian views today; and this, unfortunately, has a long precedence in modern American history. This history teaches us that when the elite educated classes come to fear the waning of their hold and influence on the “establishment”, they often become susceptible to moral panics and display hysteria around national security and perceived threats as a means to gatekeep and prevent any major shifts to the Overton window.

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U.S. Intelligentsia and State Power

From the time of the Founding Fathers, some members of America’s high society opposed expansionism as a betrayal of the anti-imperial values of the new nation that had freed itself from the clasps of the British Empire.

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Is the Ukrainian army headed for collapse? American military historian Michael Vlahos has an outside view of the issue. He joined Danish journalist Flemming Rose to discuss the state of the war.

The following is a translation of Flemming’s write-up for AGON readers.

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For this week’s Free Thought, I spoke with U.S. military analyst Michael Vlahos, who believes that the Ukrainian army is heading for a collapse. Dr. Vlahos predicts that Russia will win the war and that Putin will sit at the border when negotiations on the future of Ukraine begin.

Does Ukraine Hold the Long End?

I don't know about you, but I think it's hard to understand the course of the war in Ukraine.

Despite the gloomy reporting from the front by major US media outlets—The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times—Western experts continue to insist that Ukraine is holding the long end.

Last week, security analyst Mark Galeotti stated in the British newspaper The Sunday Times that “Ukraine is winning the war”, even though it will continue into 2024. The same picture is painted by one of America's leading foreign affairs commentators, David Ignatius, in The Washington Post, where he predicts that this year, as a result of the ongoing offensive, Ukraine may succeed in cutting off Russia's land corridor to Crimea, thereby threatening Moscow's control of the strategically important peninsula.

In the journal Foreign Affairs, military historian Lawrence Freedman has also argued this summer that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is stronger than ever, while all trends in the conflict—military, economic and diplomatic—are going Ukraine’s way, and that Russian President Vladimir Putin is therefore under increasing pressure. He has, states Freedman, no good options left.

Finally, the American security expert Edward Luttwak acknowledges in an analysis in the digital media UnHerd that the Ukrainian offensive has probably not gone as desired, but Luttwak still believes that Ukraine with a mobilization of 2–3 million men can win the war and liberate the occupied territories.

However, Luttwak bases his prediction on Ukraine having a population of 30 million. That number comes from January 2022. In an analysis by the think tank Jamestown Foundation, which is connected to the American intelligence community, it is said that the Ukrainian population has today shrunk to just 20 million, slightly more than the Netherlands, but fewer than Taiwan. And of the 20 million, according to the Jamestown Foundation, retirees make up over half: 10.7 million.

Jamestown estimates that about 2 million Ukrainians are mobilized, which corresponds to about 10 percent of the population. This is a high number, which in other wars has had negative consequences for a country’s economy. This applies to Finland during the Second World War and South Vietnam during the Vietnam War. According to the Ukrainian parliament, there is a shortage of labor in the energy sector and in both industrial and arms production because the employees have been mobilized.

Add to this that in the past three months the Ukrainian army has only been able to recruit about half the number it had planned. This is the reason why President Zelensky has fired the heads of all the country’s recruitment offices citing corruption. And that is undoubtedly part of the explanation, but it could also be that there are simply no longer enough people left in Ukraine.

With that in mind, one may well have doubts about the realism of Luttwak’s prediction of a Ukrainian victory based on the math he presents.

Nevertheless, there is a wide range of Western experts who believe that Ukraine still stands to win the war. And maybe they are right.

Predicting Ukrainian Collapse

American military historian Michael Vlahos is of a different opinion. He predicts a collapse of the Ukrainian army and believes that it is in a situation that in many ways can be compared to the fate of the Southern states in the American Civil War. At the same time, he assumes that the Russian army will emerge from this war as perhaps the strongest in the world.

Vlahos—as the radical assessment above indicates—is not one of those who like to march in time. He once left his job at a higher education institution because he got tired of people saying one thing and doing the opposite.

Dr. Vlahos elaborates:

“Everyone kept talking about critical thinking. The teachers and management said to the students: We are here to teach you critical thinking. And although ‘critical thinking’ was mentioned a total of 24 times in the syllabus, the aim of a detailed syllabus of 186 pages, where the ‘correct’ answers are on every other page, is not to teach the students to think critically. The ‘correct’ answers were hammered into the students’ heads again and again. Everything followed a strict manual and all the correct answers were known in advance. It became an intellectual awakening for me, and eventually I couldn't stand it”.

Can you give an example?

“The syllabus said that democracies are better at waging war than tyrannies. There is no empirical and historical basis for this. It is part of America’s religious doctrine, which does not care about reality”.

Wanted to Penetrate the Mystery of War

We will come back to that with the US’s civil religion and dogmatic view of the world, but first we need to hear a little more about Michael Vlahos’ background.

Vlahos has a long career behind him, during which he has taught war and strategy at Johns Hopkins University in Washington and at the US Navy’s university, The Naval War College in Rhode Island. Vlahos has also been employed by the CIA, and in the late 1980s he was head of research in the US State Department. In recent years, he has been associated with the Institute for Peace & Diplomacy in Washington, and he is the author of the book Fighting Identity: Sacred War and World Change. Vlahos traces his interest in war history back to his earliest childhood, when his parents gave him an illustrated history of the world, and at that time war filled much of history. He explains:

“I have spent most of my professional life understanding the mystery of war and why war is so central to the life and death of civilizations and how war has served as a positive and negative force in human evolution”.

Three Decisive Factors

In early August, Vlahos published a sensational essay in the conservative Compact magazine under the dramatic heading “The Ukrainian Army is Breaking”.

According to Vlahos, it is the interaction of three factors that can cause an army to break. First, when the initial optimism and belief in victory turns to a perception that the war cannot be won. Just such a change of mood, says Vlahos, can be traced in Ukrainian society and at the front, where several express that the stated goal of victory—re-establishment of Ukraine’s borders from 1991—is no longer realistic.

Second, Vlahos points out, a critical tipping point occurs if external support from allies begins to slip. No Western allies are saying it out loud, but Ukrainian politicians acknowledge that they are under heavy pressure from several Western countries to begin negotiations to end the war, and this week one of Ukraine’s strongest supporters in Congress, Republican Andy Harris who is chairman of a Ukrainian support group in the House of Representatives, noted that this summer’s offensive has failed and that Ukraine is unlikely to win the war, and that it is therefore time to reduce American support. At the same time, The Wall Street Journal noted in a sensational article a few weeks ago that Western military decision-makers knew in advance that Kyiv had neither the necessary training nor the weapons—from grenades to fighter jets—to push back the Russian forces.

Third, an army’s will to fight approaches a critical turning point, according to Michael Vlahos, when the attitude towards those who at the beginning of the war have shown the way to victory and triumph, and who have been hailed as heroes, who become the object of criticism and in the end are branded as liars and frauds.

Comparison With the First World War

In Ukraine, that trend can manifest itself in a split between army chief Valery Zaluzhny on the one hand and President Zelensky and his inner circle on the other. Observers point out that Zaluzhny was against this summer’s offensive, while Zelensky, as a result of pressure from the United States in particular, insisted on launching it. If the offensive ends in failure with such heavy losses that Ukraine will not be able to rebuild its forces, the war-torn country risks being plunged into a domestic political showdown over responsibility and blame, it says.

As I said, Michael Vlahos believes that all three factors are now at play in Ukraine, and that this weakens morale.

He draws comparisons to the First World War 1914–1918, when six out of seven great power armies collapsed. It led to surrender, mutiny and revolutions. Over the four years, Germany lost 3.1 percent of its population and France 3.6 percent. Vlahos estimates that in just one and a half years Ukraine has lost 2.5 percent of its current population in the form of killed and wounded who cannot return to the battlefield. This corresponds to 250,000 people. Vlahos suspects that the numbers may be higher, but for the sake of the morale of the Ukrainian population, they are a state secret. According to the American intelligence documents, which were leaked in the spring, the Ukrainian military at that time had lost around 130,000 killed and wounded. Vlahos also insists that it recently emerged that up to 50,000 Ukrainians have lost at least one body part, an arm, a leg or something else. That figure for Germany in the First World War was 67,000—a war in which Germany suffered a loss of 1.7 million dead at the front and 450,000 civilians out of a population of 65 million.

Ukraine’s Losses Are Greater Than the Russians’

But, Vlahos points out, casualty figures are not, when it comes down to it, decisive for whether an army can continue the fight. Even worn out armies will fight on if they believe in the cause. The British Army lost 60,000 men in the first day at the Somme in July 1916, while Italy lost 350,000 in 17 days at Caporetto in the autumn of 1917. But both armies continued the war.

In contrast to a widespread belief in the West, Vlahos believes that Ukraine has suffered significantly greater losses than the Russians, if you ignore the first phase of the war. The background to his calculation is the strength ratio in artillery guns and shells, where the Russians are believed to have a preponderance somewhere between 5:1 and 10:1. Precisely that type of weapon has been the most deadly in this war, so unless the Russian army has mostly shot out of the blue, this difference will be in their favor, says Vlahos. During World War I, casualties from artillery fire accounted for 70 percent of all casualties, and Vlahos believes that is also an excellent guideline for understanding casualty figures in the current war. Furthermore, he believes that the Russians have been better at adapting to developments on the battlefield.

No Frozen Conflict

Vlahos does not believe that the war will end as a frozen conflict. Instead, he predicts a Russian victory, in which Ukraine and the West will be forced to accept demands for a neutral Ukraine without a significant defense. Ukraine risks becoming the size of Belarus, both in territory and population, and just like Belarus without access to the sea.

If you had to point to an example from the history of war, which is similar to what we see in Ukraine, what would it be?
“The American Civil War had a similar dynamic in many ways. Ukraine is similar to the Southern states. They, like Ukraine, also had great powers that supported them. They kept the Southern States going. The British presented the Confederate States with 1 million rifles. It was the British who were secretly behind attacks on the trading ships of the northern states. They were in effect waging a proxy war against the Northern States. The British also sent their fleet to Bermuda, where it protected Confederate blockaderunners. The way Britain acted in the American Civil War is exactly what the US is doing to Russia today in relation to the war in Ukraine”.

The Southern States Had the Same Goal as Ukraine

And you think that the result will be the same in Ukraine as in the civil war? “The North was several times larger than the South, just as Russia is several times larger than the Ukraine. The northern states were much richer than the southern states and had most of the industry, the same applies in the relationship between Russia and Ukraine”. Vlahos points to the enormous losses the Southern states suffered in the American Civil War. One million men served in the Confederate army, of which 350,000 died and about 200,000 were wounded.

“It is incredible that the Southern States could continue for so long. They lost about the same number of men as the Northern States, but the Northern States had a population more than twice as large. The southern states could have lasted longer if they had invested more in defense, but instead they attacked and invaded the northern states four times. They suffered huge losses”.

Why did they do it then?
“They wanted to get Britain and France to enter the war on their side and believed that this could happen if they won a spectacular victory. So General Robert E. Lee fought in many ways the same war that Ukraine is now forced into. But it only helped to accelerate the collapse of the Southern states. They were totally destroyed and it took them 100 years to recover. It is the same tragic development we are now witnessing in Ukraine”.

The Northern States Also Got off to a Bad Start

And just like Russia in Ukraine, the Northern states also did badly at the beginning of the civil war?
“Yes, despite preponderance in population, prosperity and industrial capacity, the army of the Northern States was not very capable at the beginning. They lost a lot of battles and several generals went over to the Confederate side, but during four years of war the North learned to fight and in the end it was a superb army that turned the tide of the battle”.

Do you think the same is happening to the Russian army?
“Yes. It is an element of all wars. Of course you can lose and then it’s over, but if a war lasts long enough, you learn and get better at fighting. We saw the same thing during the Napoleonic Wars in the early 1800s. In the first years, Napoleon ran over one European army after another, but over time the others learned to fight, and it ended, as is well known, with Napoleon’s fall. It took 10 years, but the Russians’ learning curve is much faster in Ukraine. They have adapted and innovated, and they have ramped up their production of weapons and ammunition. The Russians may now be producing 3-6 million shells a year, while the US can deliver 24,000 a month”.

The Battle for the Narrative

I hear a very different story when President Biden and his ministers, top advisers and intelligence chiefs speak out. They all say with one voice that Russia has already lost the war. How should we make sense of it?
“They are waging war with a focus on controlling the narrative, and they can because most of the American population has never been interested in finding out what is really going on. The mainstream media follow the government’s narrative in the same way that Pravda did in the Soviet Union. At the beginning of the war, it was assumed that the Russian economy would collapse as a result of a strict sanctions regime. And because the Russians’ initial venture failed, it was said that they were primitive, savage, and hopelessly incompetent, and that they could never learn because they were stuck in their Soviet mentality and military doctrine”.

Vlahos continues:
“When reality started to change, there was no adaptation on our part, and when you are so focused on winning the battle for control of the narrative, regardless of what happens in reality, you end up believing it yourself. And the risk of promoting a narrative that is at odds with reality is that it not only creates unrealistic expectations. It also ends up exploding in your face and undermining any faith and trust in those who propagated it”.

America’s Apocalyptic Vision

And then we come to America's civil religion, i.e. the religious doctrine that, according to Michael Vlahos, drives the United States, and whose fingerprints he also sees in Ukraine.

He says:
“America is the home of the most successful and most extreme nationalism, which is borne of a universalism and the belief that one has been given a divine task by the creator to bring humanity to the right path and to punish and eradicate all evil in the world. This sacred narrative runs through American history like a common thread”.

How does it play out in Ukraine?
“Here we see the reenactment of a narrative that has been passed down from the 20th century, two world wars and a cold war, but it actually goes all the way back to the Civil War and the American Revolution. It is about the fact that there is some evil in the world that must be fought, and that America must save the world from all evil. During the civil war it was the slaves who needed to be saved from evil, today it is the Ukrainians who need to be saved from the evil Russia, even though the basis of the US view of Russia as the epitome of evil, communism, is gone. All our coups and attempts to overthrow governments around the world by military means were driven by the same narrative. We had to save all the unhappy people, but of course it became more difficult as you could see that it was not going as preached”.

It’s Not About Ukraine

And do you think that is also happening in Ukraine?
“The goal in this war is not about Ukraine, about Ukrainian needs and interests. It's about America’s apocalyptic view of the world. It is our task to transform the whole world into democracy and create a new world order. According to this sacred narrative, America cannot lose because we are driven by a divine providence, we have God or Righteousness on our side, and even when things go wrong time and time again, we keep going. This is because our strategy is dominated by the notion of who we are. We do not act rationally, we are driven by a religious impulse. This war is going to end with the opposite of what America wanted”.

What will President Biden do if things go as you predict?
After all, he risks having to deal with a defeat in the middle of an election campaign. “It will be a hard blow. We can already see approaches to how Washington will spin the story. You want to say: ‘We did what we could for Ukraine, we gave them everything they asked for and we trained them, but they were not up to the task.’ They can also choose to throw Zelensky under the bus and point to the huge corruption which has been fatal to Ukraine's warfare. It will sound a bit like Afghanistan, but a Ukrainian collapse will be something completely different, and sooner or later the casualty figures will come out. They are gigantic, so at some point it will be clear that the US blocked Kyiv’s negotiations with the Russians and sacrificed an entire country for the sake of our vanity, narcissism and far-reaching ambitions”.

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America is a Religion. On July 4, 1776, the United States was baptized with these words: “We mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor”. By this oath, a nation was born and launched on its mythic passage of becoming. The Founders—our “creators”—had imagined more than a nation, however. They had also drafted the story arc of a divinely heroic journey, centering the United States as the culmination (to be) of History.

This is America’s sacred narrative. Since its founding, the United States has pursued, with burning religious fervor, a higher calling to redeem humanity, punish the wicked, and christen a golden millennium on earth. While France, Britain, Germany, and Russia stalked the world in search of new colonies and conquests, America has steadfastly hewed to its unique vision of divine mission as “God’s New Israel”. Whereas the mythical narratives of other great powers were cruelly self-centered, American scripture was—and remains today—“To Serve Man”. 

Thus, among all the revolutions unleashed by Modernity, the United States declares itself—in its own scripture—to be the trailblazer and pathfinder of humanity. America is the exceptional nation—the singular, the pure-of-heart, the baptizer, and redeemer of all peoples despised and downtrodden: The “last, best hope of earth”.

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This is the catechism of the American Civil Religion. In the world’s eyes, all this may seem like a ritual of self-serving vanity, yet the Civil Religion is the national article of faith for Americans. It is Holy Writ, which takes rhetorical form through what Americans take to be History. Yet this vision of history is better understood as a body of sacred literature, in many ways comparable to Islam. 

In place of the Qur’an, America has its Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Instead of the Sira (السيرة النبوية), Hadith (حديث), and Tafsir (تفسير), America has the Federalist Papers, presidential homilies beginning with Washington’s Farewell Address, and traditions, stories, and sayings of the Founders—all the way to modern-day interpretations offered by successor “great Americans”. Instead of Fiqh (فقه) and its Madhhab (مذهب) system, America has its own schools of jurisprudence to interpret and translate—in a sort of Ijtihad (اجتهاد)—its scripture into the proper “way to act” (cf. Madhhab).

We can only truly apprehend American thought and action today through the lens of religion. Indeed, America is a religion as uncompromising as Islam. For instance, one may assume that Americans lack Shahada (ٱلشَّهَادَةُ), or “the testimony” to the faith—but it was not so long ago that students in all American public schools would recite The Pledge of Allegiance (“the oath”) daily. Not only is America’s national anthem a pure hymn, but its sacred words—Freedom and Democracy—are also chanted ritually by its people just asʾIn shāʾ Allāh is by Muslims.

Our sacred literature defines who we are, where we come from, and where we are going—and as they do for the Islamic Ummah (أُمّة), they form the riverbed of our national self. Moreover, like Islam, America’s mission is also “rightly” guided, to be fulfilled only when all humanity is gathered in its “democratic” embrace. Just as Dar-al-Islam, in its heyday, relentlessly pushed for a global community “by fire and sword”, the United States has sought a no less relentless universalism in its apogee century.

Our sacred literature defines American identity as a grand narrative arc endowed by God—to be realized through a recurring series of ever-ascending epiphanic stories: a historical cycle of ecstatic struggles shaping America’s mythic passage of becoming and culminating in an apocalypse—“revelation” or “unveiling” (Ancient Greek apokálupsis). Within these apocalyptic cycles, the hidden meaning of the American sacred story arc is revealed only through the realization of universal democracy. As with Islam, the American religion too culminates in an apocalypse.

As such, the American story arc can only be fulfilled through battle. Every “peak life” moment in the American sacred narrative has been realized through mutual sacrifice and the transcendental power of victory in battle. From its founding moment to today, war has been the anvil of America, and blood its divine annealing.

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Not only is each major American war regarded as a benchmark of progress toward a millenarian Grail, but each American generation has been encouraged to move the yardstick forward. While not every struggle succeeded, each drive built a launchpad for the next big push. So all-consuming, so all-powerful is the American sacred narrative that, in over 250 years, there has been no significant historical break in the unyielding American drive for Jihad.

Sacred narrative rules Americans: it rules what they think, say, and do. The question is, who controls this sacred narrative? Of course, the American Gospel is the creation of the American people. However much we believe—if often figuratively—in its divine inspiration, America’s “good news” is of our own making. And just as with the Constitution itself, we theoretically have the power to amend it. Yet, given that the imperative for exegesis is carved into the Ur-tablets of American Civil Religion, sectarianism becomes inevitable. 

American Civil Religion is inextricably linked with the Reformation, Calvinist Christianity, and the bloody history of Protestantism, with America’s sacred narrative shaped and christened through the country’s first and second Great Awakenings. Although its scriptural reading became secular in the Progressive era, the American religion still remained tethered to its formative roots. Indeed, even our contemporary “Church of Woke” cannot escape its original Calvinist Christian tubers.

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Time and again in American history, autochthonous native sects have tried to “revise” the sacred narrative, perhaps even transfiguring it. What is more—given the Jihadi messianism that frames America’s national scripture—this revisionist path must pass through the valley of kin bloodletting and civil war.

The apocalypse that brings the promised Millennium to Mankind must necessarily reflect the apocalyptic yearning in the American Gospel itself: if fallen into corruption, we must be purified and made worthy again to act as the World Redeemer. For its sins, a corrupted sacred narrative cannot find expiation. Rather, a New Testament that is stainless must replace a corroded Old Testament. Rebirth thus requires passage through the cleansing fires of war. Indeed, obsession with the purifying, consecrating potential of the trials—and terrors—inherent in war is the demon that lurks hidden in the warren of our sacred literature.

This demonic possession with war has been hard-wired into America’s very birth as a nation. The American Revolution compelled the new nation to cast out its own brothers and cast off its ancient kinship with Britain. The very source code of America’s sacred narrative—the Declaration—was predicated on the transfiguration of our (former) kin into (henceforth) alien outsiders—if not enemies. Independence required metamorphosis. The passage to “revelation” lay through the fire of existential, internecine war.

The Declaration also foreshadowed America’s second demonic possession. The American Civil War evolved from a pronounced sectarian split that raced increasingly out of control after 1815. Two wildly different, and yet eerily similar evangelizing, neo-Christian sects drove a schism in the Civil Religion that took on the passionate intensity of Europe’s religious wars (1545-1648).

America’s third possession with holy war swelled into nothing less than a global apocalypse. Here the United States had to confront not rival sects within the American Civil Religion, but rather the (gnostic) Demiurge itself in a series of dark manifestations—Fascism, Nazism, Communism—which could only be defeated by the Light.

Since 1945, the United States has often conflated the neo-sectarian battles it has faced at home with its universal jihad to uplift and redeem humanity abroad. The core of America’s sacred narrative—its self-understanding as divinely-ordained, universalist, and apocalyptic—is, in its intense religiosity, troubling. That Americans are wholly oblivious to such religious zeal is disturbing. Nevertheless, this sacred narrative has driven Americans in every generation, urging them to recreate and relive their original story arc—an eternal recurrence that now has global ramifications.

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This brings us to our current predicament. Since 2014, a rapidly-growing new sect—“The Church of Woke”—has sought to transform and fully possess the American civil religion, to reign as the successor faith. Ironically, the fervor of its evangelism channels the post-millennialism of the First Great Awakening, whose messianism was codified in Novus Ordo Seclorum (New Order of the Ages). 

How did the American civil religion take shape? What is the lineage of the critical moment in which we find ourselves today?

The Four Pillars of American Righteousness

American Civil Religion is driven by four underlying beliefs and attitudes: 1) missionarianism, 2) messianism, 3) Manichaeism, and 4) millenarianism. First, it is believed that the United States is on a mission from God, as Elwood Blues reminds us. America is charged by God (or Providence) and thus carries with it His authority, the American people serving as divine agents. With America’s founding, this divine voice—above and outside, yet rising also within—becomes immanent in America’s Founders and its “elect”. 

The second driver of American theology is its messianic idealism, which is rooted in an eschatological view of existence. America, it is believed, has been chosen—as the “exceptional nation”—to raise up the downtrodden and succor the oppressed. America is the Redeemer Nation par excellence. The world’s “salvation” rests on America, and the nation must take it upon itself to overthrow and punish the wicked, to seek out and cast down Evil itself. This surety in their anointed role in a “last judgment” makes Americans especially prone to adopting a black-or-white mentality. America represents the Light, fighting against the eternal “Dark Side”—this is the third pillar and the foundation of America’s Manichaeism. 

Finally, as the shining city on a hill, America represents God’s chosen nation—its people having the holy charge of delivering on the postmillennial promise of the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. America will thus shepherd Humanity through a mythic passage to the blessed “broad, sunlit uplands”. These four mental frames are inextricable from our very being as Americans and form the crux of our worldview even today.

Before examining these pillars of American Civil Religion in more detail, a word of caution. All nations have foundational myths and—whether heavily or more lightly—they are all ruled by them. America is not unique among nations. Yet its sacred narrative is truly distinct, and a powerful force in its national psyche. This sacred narrative cannot fully capture the richness and diversity of an original ethos once rooted in ancient traditions. American culture remains a loam of intertwining folkways and worldviews that still recalls its historical antecedents. Some have called these “Albion’s Seed”. 

Yet time and again, overzealous elites, driven by extreme and utopian agendas, have successfully appropriated the Civil Religion and bent it to their faith and universalist worldview, however at odds with contrasting normative traditions in the American way of life.  

Nevertheless, every American generation from the founding forward has been ruled by an embracing civil religion. If America's sacred narrative has been viewed and interpreted through the prism of a dominant strain of thought—owing more to Thomas Jefferson than to George Washington—it nonetheless has captured the American identity, body and soul. How did a menagerie of colonial folkways, habits, and heritage homogenize into the uncompromising and absolutist American Civil Religion we know today?

The passion of America’s birth—the Revolutionary upheaval felt by every citizen—offered a fanatical minority the perfect setting for capturing the American imagination with the promise of a “project” everlasting, a perfect cauldron for effecting a national metamorphosis.

Then, out of the chaotic possibility of this milieu, a new religion and its sacred narrative were able to crystallize, while also creating the conditions for proselytizing a more passive and politically-agnostic colonial society. A minority of zealots—cherished in generations to come, like “The Sons of Liberty”—became the masked coachmen of the Revolution.

From late-colonial America to our time, true believers have “driven” every American apocalyptic story arc. As with most revolutions in history, the firebrand few are the evangelists shaping the mayhem of change, injecting their righteousness into the spiritual arteries of the many.

I. Missionary America

The American Mission flows from a divine spring. Over time, the Puritan community’s original covenant with God was transformed into America’s prime directive. America thus became “a city upon a hill, where the eyes of all people”—not only in America but around the world—gaze in wonder upon it. The resulting Missionary state has only one inner yearning: to bathe all peoples in the baptismal water of democracy, freedom, and equality. 

This American Mission has been awakened and rechristened four times. The so-called First and Second “Great Awakenings” were dramatic national events galvanized by the spiritual fires of Christian revivalism. Preceding the American Revolution, the First Great Awakening electrified the cry of “Liberty” with an evangelical edge, which echoed the ringing prophecy of Jonathan Edwards.

The Second Great Awakening birthed new American sects—like Christian Science, the Shakers, and the Church of Latter-day Saints—and led both pro- and anti-slavery movements toward sectarian evangelism, with the full expectation of an apocalyptic struggle ahead. The period of Reconstruction that followed was aimed at fulfilling a salvational narrative that would not simply redeem the enslaved, but also wash away the sins of America itself—a second national baptism.

Christian national epiphanies were then succeeded by a different kind of third great awakening, although it was never formally called that. Yet out of the corruption of the Gilded Age and the purgatory of industrial life, a movement called the Social Gospel rose up to help Americans discover a new promise of salvation in this life. This movement in turn animated an emerging Progressive cause: to be as midwives, so that old Christianity might give birth to a new, secular vision that would still remain true to its former self. Wholly-secular Progressives gladly accepted Christian blessings on an enterprise that had no interest in old Christian roots.

Despite ostensibly rejecting all Christian ancestry, however, the ritual and doctrine of this new incarnation of Civil Religion would still hew to the original, sacred Calvinist form. Only, all future American apocalypses could henceforth command and entrance us with a secular voice.

American Mission thus mixes redemption with conversion. Protestations about making the world “safe”—as claimed by Woodrow Wilson in his Declaration of War speech, or Samatha Power’s Responsibility to Protect (R2P) in our time—are misleading. In fact, the rhetorical invocation of a “safe and secure world” represents a divine American dispensation for its true goal: converting all nations and peoples to the American Religion.

This story arc began with the Second Great Awakening when Christian missionaries “proceeded out of the United States to the four corners of the earth”. By the 1890s, when the nation-state was flung onto the world, the state had unfurled new mission banners and catechisms in a secular voice, such as: “conversion through instruction”, “education in democracy”, and “American Civilization”. 

In fact, the Taft Commission, setting the cultural compass of American rule over the Philippines, made education in democracy and American Civilization the nation-building project of the day. Hundreds of American teachers (the “Thomasites”) were shipped in, and the US Army built thousands of schools. Thus, school-building became the heroic trope of democracy-building, an official “word made flesh” to inspire later “nation-building" missions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Hence, the neon call of the American Mission evolved from self-redemption to world redemption. Initially driven by Christian revivalism, America’s missionary zeal soon pivoted to accommodate a secular, yet still-sacred covenant (Wilson’s 14 Points made explicit use of this word) with the world as such. The authority of this implicit covenant is still in full force today. No other world religion has proselytized its doctrines more aggressively.

II. Messianic America

American Messianism channels the power of theological legacies steeped in Calvin’s vision of predestination. It reflects a collective embrace of predestination, enfolding both nation and citizen. In 1765, John Adams declared that the American People were guided by “benign providence”, and that their Mission had messianic dimensions:

I always consider the settlement of America with reverence and wonder, as the opening of a grand scene and design in providence, for the illumination of the ignorant and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.

Hence, America is not only “messianic” in character—as in, “possessed by passion and zeal”—but manifests an implicitly biblical vision proclaiming its faith in the predestined nature of its passage. A “chosen nation” divinely elected to act in the name of Providence as the world’s Redeemer, the grand arc of the American sacred narrative marches on forever forward—with America as the arm of God—toward the “blessed” millennium. Reveling in the rapture of this messianic zeitgeist, Walt Whitman could thus exclaim in 1860:

I am the chanter — I chant aloud over the pageant; …

I chant the new empire, grander than any before — As in a vision it comes to me;

I chant America, the Mistress — I chant a greater supremacy; …

And you, Libertad of the world!

Or as Herman Melville sang in 1850:

We are the pioneers of the world; the advance-guard, sent on through the wilderness of untried things, to break a new path in the New World that is ours. In our youth is our strength…our deep voice is heard afar. Long enough have we been skeptics with regard to ourselves, and doubted whether, indeed, the political Messiah had come. But he has come in us.

By the mid-19th century, America’s ether of Mission was fully infused with “Young Libertad” messianism, in a dimorphic smelting of Testaments Old and New. Indeed Edwards’ legacy managed to create an authentic American-Christian voice however removed this may seem from the realities of mid-19th-century American political life.

III. Manichaen America

The idea of an eternal struggle of good against evil goes back to ancient Persia and the gnostic, dualistic religion of the prophet Mani (آیینِ مانی). This is an enduring theme whose deep current flows into Christianity and its many heresies (i.e., Albigensians, Bogomils, and Paulicians). American Manichaeism assumes a Demiurge—and having conjured him proclaims him as its own. Once America claims the entire power of the Good and makes it wholly inherent in its Self-conception, the Alien, the Stranger, and the denominated Other can then all at once—through the performance of national liturgy—be transubstantiated into pure Evil.

In this reflexive act, othering thus precedes ultimate, official vilification. Religious faith creates a dispensation whereby the Other can be transformed into world-corrupting evil. It is with this sacred injunction that America’s gatekeepers of public opinion regularly accuse and ostracize dissenting American voices. 

The original icon of American evil emerged with the American Revolution with which it remains forever synced. During this primal American Apocalypse, the Revolutionaries cast out former brothers as the alleged agents of the primeval tyrant, George III. The hot Freudian allure of turning Brother into Other reached its peak in America’s Second Apocalypse. During the Civil War, “Brother against Brother” became the war’s everyday motto. Compared to the Revolutionary War, American apostasy had matured. In the Civil War, expiation and atonement—rejoining the body of the (American) Church—became the Union’s most urgent task.

Moving into the 20th century, a working reconciliation was needed through which the former enemy might find atonement and be welcomed—on bended knee—into the true faith guaranteed by American prophecy. This is wholly in keeping with America’s original formula for dealing with the prototypical Other, whereby the Tory—unforgiven perpetrators of (our) original sin—were cast out and exiled from the City on a Hill for eternity: banished to the wintry fastness beyond America’s firmament, known today as Canada. Thus, the first two apocalypses of America set up a dualistic pathology in the American sacred narrative: ostracism or redemption.

America’s novel 20th-century solution was to transform the enemy by distilling all evil and sin onto a “satanic” individual to be the new personification of evil. Hence, America’s primordial enemy was not Germans, but Hitler; not Soviets, but Stalin; not Russians, but Putin. Evil personified as Antichrist—has been the holy-of-holies in America’s redemption formula for close to a century.

IV. Millenarian America

Although this is not the common sense of the word today, “apocalypse”, as discussed earlier, means revelation—lifting the veil on God’s Word and His Plan. “Apocalypse”, then, does not signify the end of the world but rather its culmination: “All history is finally apocalyptic”. 

A particular apocalyptic outcome—postmillennialism—is embedded in the American sacred narrative. It can be traced, again, to Jonathan Edwards. Historians have accused Edwards of “catalyzing this unique strain of eschatology”, thereby steering America in the direction of “manifest destiny”.

The sudden fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 ushered in a false dawn. America’s ruling class was simply not prepared for such a serendipitous apocalypse.

Today, no “rightly guided” American may consider, let alone accept, a lesser eschaton. For example, given the dogmas of the American Civil Religion, a “realism” that dares to question the divine power of democracy, instantly becomes anathema. A vision of the “national interest” that is unmoored from our sacred plan amounts to apostasy. Let us consult our American scriptures. First, Revelation 14:19:

And the angel thrust in his sickle into the earth, and gathered the vine of the earth, and cast it into the great winepress of the wrath of God.

Compare it to this verse from the liturgy of the Civil War—The Battle Hymn of the Republic:

He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored; He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword.

Thus, in the wake of its second apocalyptic war, in 1865, with the polity purified and evil cast down, a new America could be born.

Each one of America’s national crises, Americans believed, could imminently usher in a millennial age—a “Novus Ordo Seclorum”, as prefigured and prophesied in Washington’s words. The apocalypse and its revelatory power thus always point to the predestined end of our story arc—a heavenly mimesis in which the divine world is reflected on earth.

Hence, in 1945, some eighty years after the Civil War, the third American apocalypse was regarded as yet another providential opportunity to fulfill America’s ordained prophecy. Even as the promise of a final judgment was left frozen by the Cold War and deferred for posterity to claim, the U.S. establishment began to flog a Millennium-in-Waiting: that there was still an impending “Free World” to be realized someday in a holy liberal international order. 

The sudden fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 ushered in a false dawn. America’s ruling class was simply not prepared for such a serendipitous apocalypse. They spasmodically declared a “New World Order” and celebrated the “end of history”—as though all mankind would simply bow down to America’s great seal.

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Of course, the promised Millennium remains elusive still. But that has not stopped the U.S. foreign policy establishment from attaching existential stakes to every new war it wages, lashing onto them the divinely-sanctioned dreams embedded in America’s mythic quest—always tantalizing—for spiritual fulfillment. Remarkably, the depth and breadth of America’s civil religion rival any world faith—not only in the enormity of its theology, the power of its dogma, and the grip of its sacred literature, but also in its manically beneficent yet still brutal impact on humanity and history.

To better understand the American sacred narrative, it can be helpful to evaluate America’s national story arc as one would do a TV series. As such, the American hit series has already been renewed for a number of seasons—even if ours is a sacred story organized around apocalypses.

As a universalist religion rooted from birth in apocalypse, America’s 250-year lifecycle is wholly captured by its sacred apocalyptic arc, punctuated by three astonishing “revelations”: its birth with the American Revolution, a baptism or purification in the Civil War, and a world redemption during the two World Wars—nearly fulfilled, yet forestalled. 

So what might be in store in the new, possibly final, season? Where, in fact, are we heading in this operatic ordeal?

The Fourth American Apocalypse?

Americans still deny that their national ideology amounts to a civil religion. Arguably, Robert Bellah’s big insight on the topic has had standing since 1973, cited intermittently in American mainstream media. Yet such acknowledgment is occluded and rare, and popular awareness is almost non-existent. Americans resolutely stonewall their civil religion for three reasons.

First, the United States was born in the fires of Enlightenment thought, where religion—especially the Roman Church—equaled superstition. Edward Gibbon—whose own epiphany came in the Roman Forum in 1775—pinned Rome’s “Decline and Fall” squarely on the forces of “barbarism and religion”.

Yet the Founders inhabited a milieu shaped by a Protestant zeitgeist, which ruled their lives. If Americans were to be champions of Reason—where “Science is real” and (in almost any dispute) “settled”—that Temple of Reason had to have its roots entangled in Calvinist Predestination. Of course, any “rightly-guided” American knows that his country is synonymous with Progress—America can never be Medieval. Hence, within an attitude entirely lacking in self-awareness, any regnant state religion—with its harsh religious law—would appear backward, primitive, or, as it is often said of Islamic fundamentalism, tantamount to “returning to the 14th century”. 

Furthermore, Americans—almost without exception—cannot conceive of religion in the absence of a formal, confessional “Church”. Thus, even at the height of the Cold War, the evils of Communism were not identified as the sins of an alternate church. The Marxist-Leninist canon could not possibly be theology: instead, it had to be “ideology”. After all, how could “godless commies” be religious? Add to this the fact that many on the Americans Left actually sympathized with the “idea” of Socialism and found it appealing for the United States if it was “done right”. In other words, they believed that a healthy dose of American democracy and freedom would surely cleanse Marxism of its ills and distill its otherwise noble ideals. Socialism failed in Russia because it was not anointed by America’s “good news”—an American version would have thrived.

Finally, an American confession of faith—the open enunciation that a national civil religion indeed does exist—would appear to void the Constitution’s establishment clause. However, can the original American civil religion—as conceived by the Founders—credibly be called an established church? They would almost certainly say, No. After all, a civil religion is not a church—at least not in the way the Enlightenment understood religion. In the 18th century, “religion” meant an established state church. Canon law and common law were thus both within the prerogatives of the state, which the Founders understood as Parliament and the King. Owning the Church of England meant that the British state could—and did—tell people how to live and think, as evidenced by the Act of Uniformity, the Test Acts, and the penal laws. 

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These are some of the reasons that some might resist framing the latest faith movement emerging from today’s Fourth Great Awakening as another familiar, even classic, sectarian challenge to the civil religion. In fact, the “Awokening” is comparable to those aggressively-opposed evangelical sects embodied in the North and the South that thrust America into (internal) combat in the 1850s after the Second Great Awakening. And its provenance can even be traced back directly to the secular-socialist themes of the Progressive Era that were reflected in the Social Gospel.

Yet the growth of this virulent, new American sect goes much further, signaling the emergence of a putative new American church for real. Here, “Church of Woke” refers to a prospective legal edifice, which seeks to fundamentally revise and transform America’s constitutional compact through semi-sacred, state-sponsored doctrines including “Critical Race Theory” (CRT), “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI), “Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance” (ESG).

In the 20th century, state protection and privilege created a political proscenium over a coalition of three separate, secular-spiritual identity groups: Feminists, People of Color, and LGBT. Each of these sects has within them a gaggle of restive factions and denominations. This alliance of sects has merged into an “intersectional” political coalition that could be sustained so long as its shared agenda remains within reach.

Under the new Wokeist religion, the boundaries between the global and the local, the domestic and the foreign wither away, to be replaced by a proselytizing, totalizing, and imperial Americanism.

If their joint agenda were to be constitutionally implemented however, the Church of Woke would be able to transform American life: not only would it establish an apparatus of control over how ordinary citizens think and behave, but it would also ordain a new ruling elite as the new clerics of the Church.

The Church of Woke’s efforts to consecrate the American ruling class—through an anointed corps of true believers—are less about breeding a new aristocracy but rather to preserve elite control over wealth and power in American life. In this respect, the Church does not simply seek to reinterpret (ijtihād) the doctrine, law, and scripture of the original civil religion like other sects in American history. It also represents a pathway for the ruling class to consolidate power and maintain the status quo. “Woke radicalism” is, perhaps, not so radical after all—but its extremism portends sectarian autos-da-fé and existential wars of civil religion like those characterizing late antebellum America.

In another sense, the rising and flexing Church of Woke more formally resembles—in its successful subversion of the state and its ruling elites—insurgent Christianity at the end of the 3rd century CE. What might alarm is that this faith movement has managed to capture the “Commanding Heights” of American Life in a little more than a decade. Yet this too points to a symbiotic relationship between church and state that is as timeless as ever. Just as the early Church captured the Roman aristocracy, so did those noble Romans seize the Church to reclaim their hold on power. The civil religion is as much a venal, as it is a sacred, tool of power.

The Church of Woke has, for the moment, captured the U.S. Federal State and the dominant institutions in American Life. Many historical antecedents of the Woke faith movement today, namely the pre-Civil War evangelical American Calvinist sects such as Slave Power and Abolitionists, also tried to appropriate the foundational American civil religion and transfigure it into an established state church in their image. Neither of these fanatical sects was ultimately successful. Yet in equating its movement theology and dogma to what should be (U.S.) law, Woke doctrine is indeed unleashing an American Sharia and demanding the establishment of a truly new American state religion—as understood by our 18th-century Founders—more forcefully than any other sectarian movement in American history.

How is all this relevant to America’s engagement in the world, and more directly, to America’s primacist foreign policy as evidenced by the war in Ukraine? Under the new Wokeist religion, the boundaries between the global and the local, the domestic and the foreign wither away, to be replaced by a proselytizing, totalizing, and imperial Americanism.

As an ersatz of the old American civil religion, the Church of Woke wields universalism with a vengeance, prosecuting its ideology at home and abroad in equal measure. Raising high the banner of Woke globalism, America’s original “good news” is thus seamlessly replaced with a more virtuous successor vision. “Nationalism” and love of country will henceforth be judged as backward and primitive forces. “Populism” and agency of the people, so long celebrated as the soul of the American nation, becomes tantamount to autocracy, a medieval evil to be purged from the United States.

America’s (domestic) “corruption” under such “reactionary” forces becomes linked to the heinous influence of foreign states and maligned international actors, such as Hungary or Russia infecting the American Body. Such Woke hysteria closely resembles the deadly bacillus of Red Scare Communism in the early Cold War, with Russia serving as the “Great Satan” in the liberal American establishment’s global culture wars.

To the evil of a reactionary, barbaric, and Rainbow-phobic Russia—and to the larger looming threat posed to the liberal international order by a global autocratic axis—we must also add the apocalyptic terror the Church of Woke feels about climate change. Climate apocalypse is perhaps the greatest blanket dispensation ever devised by American universalism to justify U.S. global hegemony. In the cause of saving the planet, every American intervention can appear righteous. Notice how Dark-Side-of-the-Force autocrats are also fossil-fuel-using climate polluters, in league with the gas-guzzling killers (i.e., oil companies) in our own midst. In this light, foreign threats appear to only mirror the deeper threat at home.

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Ultimately, the strategy of the Church of Woke and its clerical class is to exploit an intersectional crusade against pagan backwardness, evil anti-genderism, and climate apostasy abroad—Russia, Hungary, Saudi Arabia, Iran, China, etc.—to justify a domestic jihad at home. Moreover, as it pushes its brand of Girl Boss Militarism, its parishioner group “tilts more female”. In time, America’s new “Woke Imperium” will forcibly bring all Americans—and the world—into the fold of the new Church, or so the believers hope.

It is this convenient symbiosis or identity between enemies foreign and domestic that is most troubling. In its fundamentally global quest for a fourth apocalypse—wherein converting all humanity means ensuring total American conversion as well—the Church of Woke rejects the old, original American civil religion and its central concern: America. While its U.S.-centeredness reveals a degree of historical continuity, its aspiration to globalize Americanism in order to create a homogeneous world state based on its ideology and universal values betrays and subverts the old civil religion.

The unfolding fourth apocalypse brought on by the “awokening” has always been different from earlier renditions (or seasons) of the American apocalypse in our national series. Apocalypse Deferred (1945-1950)—a sequel to Third Apocalypse—drove the United States into 60 years (1963-2023) of repeated and unrequited battlefield débâcles. Each episode culminated in a sacred war (Vietnam, the Afghan proxy war, Desert Storm, the 20-year Global War on Terrorism, and now the Ukraine proxy war) waged to fulfill the prophecy of a global democratic millennium—and each time the dream has slipped away. In turn, the fourth cycle in our narrative arc has been marked by apocalyptic desperation.

Consequently, American messianism has become a Manichaean caricature of itself, in which American “good news” has been replaced by the ever-present specter of Evil and the threat of force. The holy words, Freedom and Democracy, while still chanted, have become a hollow mantra. The American “gospel” no longer preaches about bringing redemption and expiation: it is now concerned with enforcement and punishment. The volte-face came in an instant, on 9/11 and with Guantanamo. The Third Apocalypse ethos of the Nuremberg trials and their majestic public display of democratic judicial review were discarded for summary justice. Almost overnight, America ditched “international rules” and “civilized norms”—and instead built out an archipelago of torture and arbitrary incarceration, without oversight or appeal. 

We no longer seek guidance from a higher, forgiving authority, but from the wrathful Old Testament voice within ourselves. In the Woke iteration of American Manichaeism, Evil takes precedence over Good and is fervently personalized. With Milošević, Ghaddafi, Osama Bin Ladin, Saddam, and now Putin, evil can now be artisanally—if not always ethically—sourced. Hence, fighting evil as the antichrist becomes the pulsing rhetorical trope of this fourth season of America’s sacred narrative. Without irony, the 20th anniversary of America’s invasion of Iraq has, astonishingly, revived its most infamous meme— “The Axis of Evil”—without blush or shame. NATO’s proxy war against Russia now sees it as a moniker of its virtue to embrace the rhetorical mantle of what was so recently adjudged America’s greatest strategic débâcle.

If we, as Americans, are ritually caught up in a grand narrative beyond our capacity to apprehend, let alone control, what awaits us? Can we nudge this final story arc so as to avoid total calamity? Do we have any say or agency in our descending destiny?

Last Judgment(s)?

The United States is ruled by its civil religion, not ideology. Americans are driven by a sacred narrative. Yet the drivers are always a small band of fanatical elites—driving a story that can only be fulfilled in war.

Put differently, America is a hit series with a martial story arc punctuated by flares and fireworks. From launch to perigee to apogee, the “American Story” is now in its fourth season. The first three were lit by the fire of apocalyptic battles. Those ecstatic moments of victory and sacrifice were made sacred, and they are treasured as America’s “peak life”. Yet now, as the story arc descends, we have seemingly entered another great battle. Will this prove a new Revelation —our fourth apocalypse—or become Our Series’ finale?  

American Story: The Hit Series [Warning: graphic religious content] has a universal audience, and each season is anchored in an apocalyptic climax. Moreover, every single episode is marked by battle—which always defaults to the standard storyline—as programmed by our divinely-anointed Hollywood Producer. Each “Next Generation” episode has its very own sacred and transcendental, if often destructive, war. Each season’s arc pushes the boundaries of Revelation toward a predestined series finale. The first three seasons were exhilarating, even ecstatic when reaching those sacred, “peak life” heights of victory and sacrifice.

But then, during the fourth season opener, around 1962, the grand story arc declined one or more degrees from its apogee, and by 1968, the descent was clear. True, in one episode—1981-88—retro-rockets decelerated its descent. Yet the downward path resumed. The story arc is not about American wealth or the pursuit of happiness. It concerns Revelation and Predestination and fulfilling America’s Mission. The earlier episodes of the fourth season show how the apocalypse opportunity was abused (Vietnam), aborted (Soviet Fall), betrayed (Iraq), and squandered (Afghanistan).

Yet such lost opportunities pale before the battle now enjoined. What are mere strikes, small wars, counterinsurgencies, and coups d'états in the face of the reality that the United States now aggressively challenges the two largest and most dangerous of great powers, Russia and China? Moreover, from their “Commanding Heights”, America’s rulers have made this an existential confrontation: either Democracy and its “rules-based order” will dominate the world, or the “autocracies” will win. One hears the tocsin of an apocalypse. Is this episode to be the season’s finale, or perhaps, the series finale? Questions abound.

Can Global War Drive America to Civil War?

America is today waging two wars simultaneously, one at home, the other abroad. By connecting the aims of the inner war (converting the nation to the Church of Woke) with the outer war (triumphing in the proxy war on Russia as proof of righteousness), the establishment now depends on victory in a foreign war to strengthen its political leverage to push their domestic agenda and maintain its power. So their thinking goes. 

Yet, the United States has never before tried to escalate a global clash when consumed by an existential struggle within. On the contrary, during the American Civil War, Washington acted with extreme caution, even as Britain and France engaged in a proxy war against it. 

Western audiences preen and squeal in delight over amazing Ukrainian triumphs of the Will, while narcissistically taking full credit for their victories, as if they were their own.

The duality of inner and outer war creates a mutually-destructive dynamic. If it prevails in Ukraine, so this logic goes, then the Woke Imperium will also be victorious at home. However, a negative dynamic could also occur. Defeat in the Ukraine war would mean political failure at home. Hence, NATO must win, and Ukraine cannot be allowed to lose.

If losing is unthinkable, in the face of defeat NATO has but one option: to escalate. Yet escalation, for a nation divided, also entails turning the dial on domestic conflict.

Can a Vicarious Apocalypse Lead To Real Armageddon?

There is a yet-unconfessed suspension of disbelief in America’s fourth apocalypse.

For over a year, NATO has made war on Russia, cheered on this war, and demanded Russia’s fall. Indeed, many in the war party go further than to exclaim, “For God's sake, this man cannot remain in power”, and cry out for the Russian Federation’s humiliation and even destruction. Yet at the same time, and often in the same breath, the war party insists that the West is not at war with Russia since there are no U.S. or NATO forces deployed in Ukraine: rather, we are only supplying arms to Kiyv. Many still strenuously deny that this is even a proxy war.

At the same time, however, the true boosters and tub-thumpers of the Ukraine war have loudly proclaimed it to be a bargain. Russia is to be brought down without a single NATO casualty. We drain our evil foe with the blood of willing Ukrainians. A deal! A steal! Moreover, thousands of Americans have bravely enlisted—as purely vicarious participants—to fight alongside Ukraine in the trenches of social media. These heroes of the 195th Keyboard Brigade—North Atlantic Fellas Organization (NAFO — check out their merchandise too!)—do daily battle against the American 5th Column of Putin Stooges and Russia Lovers.

All the while, Western audiences preen and squeal in delight over amazing Ukrainian triumphs of the Will, while narcissistically taking full credit for their victories, as if they were their own. If this indeed is the fourth American apocalypse, then it is truly a remarkable achievement. This is our expiation for all the head-pounding frustration and endless and for-naught blood sacrifice in those failed dirty war episodes we watched earlier in Season Four (“Apocalypse Deferred”). After the terrors of Tet, Khe Sahn, Desert One, Contras, Mogadishu, and Fallujah, the series now offers a bloodless epiphany. Hence, our hoped-for season finale is simply awe-inspiring: not a drop of GI blood is spilled!

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The United States can now fight its “greatest geopolitical foe”—but no Americans will die—only willing, sacrificial Ukrainians. Meanwhile, the great American virtual audience, insatiably snared in CGI games and addicted to “hot takes” on social media, bathes in the glory of imminent victory: cheering on every Ukrainian propaganda video, and every depiction of Ukrainians in a Fellowship of the Ring fighting Russian Mordor-Orc darkness.

As the winds of war began shifting toward the end of 2022, NATO’s early, “easy war” strategic options to amp up aid—powerful weapons, Allied command and control, NATO C4ISR, top-shelf training—led Kyiv to rather magical mystery “wins” in autumn of 2022. Yet, by spring 2023, the weapons’ cupboards have turned bare, and the Ukrainian army is bleeding out as the real Ukrainian hoplites are being shredded in a bloodletting exercise that recalls the tragic trenches of the First World War’s battle of Verdun. Escalation options have narrowed.

Ahead, there are only more neon redlines for NATO recklessly to cross—even if they risk another World War. This is the downside of fighting a war on media adrenaline, defined by the infinite ecstasy of “vicarity”. Yet this is no video game. When one is killed in real life there is no automatic respawning.

Series Finale: Impact Crater?

At the end of Season 3 (1961), the United States stood astride the world like a Colossus. “Ike” Eisenhower, General of the Armies of our third American Apocalypse, presided over a “Free World” imperium—over all that mattered. 

Yet when he passed from the scene, his more youthful successors embarked on a series of corrosive, endless wars. Throwing off all ancient precepts against military intervention and foreign entanglements from their antecedents, the new men departed from hallowed American tradition. After decades of this, instead of palace courtiers playing at counterinsurgency—ignoring the communities whose sons were dying in their game—the wars of Season 4’s final episodes are now crafted by an executive branch that believes it is given a carte blanche so long as it be parsimonious with the lives of its volunteer force.

The United States began and completed its fateful passage as the embodiment of (divine) Orders: from a “New Order for the Ages” to the “United Nations” to a “New World Order”, and finally to a liberal “Rules-based Order”. But these so-called Orders are a simulacrum for the demon that hides deep within the American sacred narrative and within us all: a fixation with the cleansing fires of war that has driven us to overreach and on the brink of downfall.

Ours indeed is a remarkable metamorphosis: from once-exceptional American “good news”—Humanity’s redemption!—to the Unveiling of global tyranny.

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Claes Ryn is Emeritus Professor of Government at the Catholic University of America, founding director of the Center for the Study of Statesmanship, and writer of many books—most notably, The New Jacobinism: America as Revolutionary State and Will, Imagination, and Reason. He is also the editorial director at AGON.

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During their 75-min exchange, they discuss Ryn’s powerful critique of the postwar “movement conservatism” in the United States, the richness of America’s constitutional tradition, the dangers of American exceptionalism, the Jacobin penetration of American politics which begets the global American empire, and much more (including J.R.R. Tolkien!).

In the course of the discussion, Ryn offers a provocative account of the devolution of conservatism as temperament—focused on character—into Conservatism as ideology—fixated on political power. The latter, he claims, was philosophically unsophisticated, easily transformed into dogma, and prone to both “hubris” and “dreaminess”.

To overcome the pathologies of the age, Ryn calls for a radical realism that affirms the world as it is and “explodes” the dangerous illusions undergirding the ahistorical idealism and ideologies of both the Left and the Right.

A short sample from the book is available here.

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Modern virtue is insufferable. “Virtue” now means almost the exact opposite of the older Christian or classical idea. A person can now regard himself as virtuous simply for emoting, “standing with”, or making the right consumer choices. This virtuosity, achieved with ease, is broadcast to the world in the form of lawn signs, bumper stickers, t-shirts, and social media posts. 

The older Christian ethic holds that our interactions with our neighbors (the people near us), however tedious or burdensome, and our own personal conduct constitute the real measure of our virtue. Our neighbors are often not of our choosing, and it is with those people—the curmudgeon next-door, the overly talkative parishioner, the underperforming coworker—that genuine virtue is cultivated.

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The struggle to overcome our lower selves in mundane, day-to-day interactions and labors forms our characters through habit—an idea that predates Christianity and extends back to Aristotle. This morality cannot be branded and sold. There is no allure of visiting exotic places with the pretext of “helping others”, no Teslas or expensive “sustainable” clothing to aid our effort, and no chorus of Tik Tok videos to sing our praises. Instead, this older Christian understanding of the ethical life is a quiet, humble, and sometimes difficult existence at the same time that it can be supremely joyous, peaceful, and meaningful.

The moral-spiritual ethos of modernity, what Harvard professor Irving Babbitt (1866-1933) called sentimental humanitarianism, is the heart and soul of modern secular progressivism, giving what would otherwise appear to be a cold and materialistic philosophy the veneer of “compassion” and the appearance of having humane motives. 

Sentimental humanitarianism arose as a serious competitor to Christianity around the time of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. While its ascent has been gradual, in the last half-century it has arguably become dominant even within Christianity, its erstwhile adversary, and of course in the mainstream secular culture. It can be detected in almost every aspect of life in the West: children’s television shows, product packaging labels, advertisements, corporate training modules, the mission statements of colleges and universities, academic research agendas, journal publications, homilies, papal encyclicals, the framing of the news by the corporate media, political campaign platforms, state of the union speeches, all the way to U.S. foreign policy. It touches the intimate and the quotidian and is the default imaginative framework through which Western man views himself and the world.

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Sentimental humanitarianism is one of the most sinister products of the romantic imagination. Babbitt is indispensable for understanding this cast of mind and imagination that has to a great degree governed the modern world. Sentimental humanitarianism, Babbitt contends in Democracy and Leadership, presents as a “fraternal feeling” for mankind and a desire to help the downtrodden, but lurking beneath these feelings of pity, benevolence, and brotherhood is the will to power and a desire to control. Here my focus is on the more prosaic and merely “theoretical”—if not theatrical—side of sentimental humanitarianism, but the end result of adopting such a worldview in practice is a dystopian and totalitarian nightmare. “What Carlyle wrote of the [French] Revolution,” Babbitt says, “has not ceased to be applicable: ‘Beneath this rose-colored veil of universal benevolence is a dark, contentious, hell-on-earth.’”

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A civilization is not worthy of the name if it has not refused something, if it has not renounced something.

Fernand Braudel

Three great competing paradigms confront each other at the present time to determine the nature of the nomos of the Earth, that is to say…

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Vlahos and Macgregor discuss the paradigm shift in modern warfare, as has been underscored by the war in Ukraine. They also discuss the need for strategic adaptability from the U.S. military, the current state of military leadership, and the need for fundamental reforms in U.S. command structure and force posture.

This episode is available exclusively to paid subscribers. The first installment is available for free here.

AGON

A Sit Down With Douglas Macgregor: Part I

Watch now (51 min) | This interview is part one in a three-part series hosted by Dr. Michael Vlahos, a senior editor at AGON, and Douglas Macgregor, a U.S. Army colonel (ret.), former senior advisor to the Acting U.S. Secretary of Defense, and the author of five books, including…

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3 years ago · 11 likes · Douglas Macgregor and Michael Vlahos

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In this episode, Vlahos and Macgregor discuss the trajectory of NATO and the future of European security. In particular, they touch on NATO’s enlargement, its impact on heightening tensions abroad, and its role in the ongoing proxy war between the U.S. and Russia in Ukraine.

This episode and the final episode will be available exclusively to paid subscribers. The first installment is available for free here.

AGON

A Sit Down With Douglas Macgregor: Part I

Watch now (51 min) | This interview is part one in a three-part series hosted by Dr. Michael Vlahos, a senior editor at AGON, and Douglas Macgregor, a U.S. Army colonel (ret.), former senior advisor to the Acting U.S. Secretary of Defense, and the author of five books, including…

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3 years ago · 8 likes · Douglas Macgregor and Michael Vlahos

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Vlahos and Macgregor trace the origins of the Ukraine War and discuss whether the conflict is reaching its decisive phase and the prospects for a negotiated settlement.

The next episodes in this series will be made available exclusively to paid subscribers.

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Advanced industrialized democracies are experiencing frightful and strange times characterized by seemingly unending crises, mass hysteria, and a succession of emergencies—all amplified by the state and the nominally independent institutions of social propaganda with which it has developed a symbiotic relationship.

The analysis offered by most critics of our current predicament—those rightly alarmed by the excesses of securitization, centralization, globalism, and statism—goes something like this: that modern liberalism or the neoliberal order represent a perversion of classical or early liberalism and that only by restoring them and returning to their original principles could the good liberals of the West right the ship and remedy the situation. Such claims are not entirely incorrect, but they are superficial.

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The ballooning of the liberal managerial state into a totalistic and globe-spanning Leviathan is in part the result of the very successes of the liberal worldview—what we may call the “modern project”—as well as the natural culmination of three antinomies foundational to liberalism.

How We Got Here?

The current dystopian storm has been gathering strength for some time, at least since the start of the 21st century. Not only did the 9/11 terrorist attack actuate the U.S. war machine into a series of endless wars in a Global War on Terror, but the George W. Bush administration exploited that tragedy and the threat of Al-Qaeda to further consolidate and rationalize a surveillance regime that dramatically expanded and abused the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Three Democrat and Republican presidents later, U.S. intelligence—with the complicity of Big Tech—continues to engage in mass surveillance of Americans on U.S. soil with little transparency and oversight.

The specter of Covid-19 only accelerated this alarming trend and broadened the scope of securitization and politics of fear onto public health. Overnight, many Western governments metastasized into bio-security states, mandating vaccine passports, restricting travel, and locking down their citizens in the name of public safety. It was always doubtful whether such draconian measures were necessary or even conducive to “slowing the spread” of a highly transmissible virus (as shown by the Delta and Omicron variants). Nevertheless, the war-like handling of the virus by the U.S., Canada, Australia, the U.K., and many European countries created a martial climate in which it was essentially acceptable to treat “the unvaccinated” as second-class citizens, even as a dangerous threat—while showing minimal regard for either bodily sovereignty or scientific skepticism.

By 2022, Carl Schmitt’s famous notion of a “state of exception” had become an ordinary feature of life in many parts of the world. A situation in which the sovereign transcends its political and constitutional authority ostensibly to protect the public from an emergency of some form in an increasingly polarized society seems to have become the new normal in the Western world.

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A year ago, in February 2022, two separate, seemingly unrelated, events captured the despotic, dystopian condition of our zeitgeist. First, generally peaceful protests organized by Canadian truckers against the excesses of the Covid rules, known as the Freedom Convoy, were crushed by the full mobilization of the Canadian state, with the U.S. government's and multinational corporations' explicit backing. Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau declared a state of emergency, allowing his government to ignore and trample the civil liberties of Canadians in the name of security.

At the time, renowned American journalist Matt Taibbi compared it to the actions of the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu. An official inquiry into the episode released this month, however, found that the emergency order had met the “very high threshold” of a national emergency. Despite his “reluctance” in siding with the Trudeau government, commissioner Justice Paul Rouleau wrote, “freedom cannot exist without order.” The implication is that it’s the government that can decide what constitutes “freedom” as well as the limits to it.

Second, the foreign policy Blob and its allies in the mainstream media blew the sirens of a holy war to defend the fledgling Ukrainian “democracy”—and, apparently, the Western way of life—from the villainous, authoritarian Vladimir Putin. Galvanized by many in the Biden administration, the hawks in the North Atlantic took a two-pronged approach to their interventionist agenda, playing on the moralism of their peer groups and the heartstrings of the masses to propagate their dubious— highly ideological—claim as to the geopolitical vitality of Ukraine and its importance for the Western alliance.

With Western victory realistically impossible, the wishful thinking, Manichaean exhortations, and willful interjections of Western leaders have only resulted in prolonging the war, freezing the conflict, impeding a diplomatic settlement, and deepening Europe’s dependency on the United States and NATO. The policy has taken a huge toll on Ukrainian civilians and saddled Western economies and populations with unprecedented inflation and energy shortages. Not to mention, it dramatically increases the risk of military escalation and the specter of a nuclear apocalypse. But punishing Russia, is presumably, worth all this and more.

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These episodes also point to the systemic and selective propagation of information and securitization of discourse around the ever-regenerated “current thing” as the “emergency” crisis of the moment—without which the politics of fear and exception are difficult to maintain and justify. For establishing a baseline account of the crisis suitable for threat inflation, shaping and influencing the public’s perception of it in moralistic ways, and manufacturing consent around the desired course of action are fundamental to achieving the psychological and sociological controls—and the temporary paradigm of consensus—necessary for invoking emergency powers.

In the post-Covid world, the West faces the dreadful prospect that it could become the standard-bearer of a new regime type: a socially totalizing, surveilling, information-monopolizing, biopolitical, and martial regime disguised in the feel-good casing of liberal democracy.

What are the philosophical pathos and sociological underpinnings of a system that has reacted and overreacted so unsettlingly and extremely as to co-opt and weaponize crisis as an instrument of political legitimation and power maximization?

Unpacking this uncanny phenomenon requires journeying into the history of ideas and conducting a critical genealogy of Modernity—the paradigmatic worldview and historical complex that was born in the wake of the European wars of religion and the Enlightenment. We must identify the ideological codes underlying our current societal matrix and perform a diagnosis of or autopsy on the paradigm and zeitgeist which we inhabit.

Liberalism’s Intrinsic Discontents

Today, especially in the West and increasingly globally, we are all bred into liberal modernity. One way to try to capture and systematize the basis of the modern condition is by understanding it as the liberal “form of life” or Weltanschauung, in which life becomes inseparably bound to the political. I contend that the cultural décadence, the loss of meaning, the existential angst, and the political and social dislocations debilitating the West are triggered by a crisis of legitimacy at the heart of the liberal worldview and the extant regime’s effort to consolidate and preserve its authority and the existing power structure (at a time when the authority of authority is increasingly questioned).

But what is distinctive to Modernity as a philosophical pathos and how does it relate to liberalism?

Modernity is certainly an ambiguous and elusive concept: in one sense, it reflects temporality, meaning simply what is current, presential, or new. However, it also has a philosophical and substantive definition: a particular cast of mind and paradigm that comes to dominate the Western constellation of values starting in the 16^th century with the Protestant Reformation and then the Enlightenment. Its features are summed up in the familiar phrase, the “modern project”.

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As an orientation to life, Modernity represents the sublimation of what German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche calls the Apollonian drive, characterized by the human desire or instinct to dominate and subjugate matter and nature, the will to create order out of the tragic disorder of life. Some of the most influential theoretical and epistemological constructs of the modern era have been attempts to encapsulate and express this Apollonian compulsion—from rationalism and scientism to utilitarianism and even Marxism.

If Modernity is the form, liberalism is the original substance: the set of principal rationalizations, the theoretical or philosophical schema, needed to drive the Modern project forward and which can also be used to make sense of the modern zeitgeist and its sui generis, largely secular “sacred canopy” and social imaginaries.

As the liberal paradigm matured into a zeitgeist that first shaped the lived experience and the horizon of imagination for Western man and then consolidated its triumph over alternative worldviews with Modernity’s globalization, its very success made its inherent contradictions more pronounced and explicit. This development, in turn, spawned a crisis of legitimacy for liberalism, where disbelief, doubt, and nihilism set in, and belief in the original premises became increasingly unbelievable.

Liberalism suffers from at least three original antinomies:

1.      Domination vs. Autonomy. Liberalism captures the Modern will to mastery by affirming man’s control over matter and nature. It sets up the human agent as the ultimate source of authority taken from God, History, Tradition, or Nature. Accordingly, it demands a clean break from the past and traditional social structures that are seen as limiting and constraining man. Human “freedom”, it is believed, requires a project of systemic liberation from the encumbering or oppressive hierarchies and norms of the past so that a new order based on the autonomy and agency of the individual can be created.

This is the raison d’être of liberalism in its early phase. The French Revolution and the Reign of Terror and mass executions it unleashed under the Jacobin leader Maximilien Robespierre best illustrates the connection between a desire for liberation and a desire to dominate. The persistent appeal of violent revolution and social activism in the Western psyche across generations embodies this paradoxical disposition.

2.      Universalism vs. Subjectivism. Liberalism professes belief in certain unchanging and universal principles (self-evident Truths) derived from a fixed conception of human nature. They are fundamental to (natural) rights theory. At the heart of this philosophical anthropology—i.e., the liberal conception of human nature—lies man’s possession of reason and rational will, in which everyone, as human, shares equally.

While it affirms the “ethos of sameness” however, liberalism also marks the turn toward individuating morality—inviting ethical and epistemological subjectivism. This leads to a form of solipsism in which values, knowledge, and even reality are only true or objective to the extent that the individual human agent believes them to be so. This view is buttressed by the conviction that man’s rational will has an a priori existence, independent of society, culture, history, and hierarchies of value and power. Both modern identitarianism and the modern fixation with unqualified equality find here their original justifications.

3.      Perennialism vs. Perfectibility of Man (the Myth of Progress). Given its commitment to a fixed and universal human nature, liberalism is presential and dismissive of, even hostile to, history and becoming, which it views as a force external to man’s essential nature as an autonomous agent (homo liber) and thus finds disruptive to his freedom. Liberalism’s abstract and reified formulations uproot man from his concrete historical existence and transcend the complexities of communal life. In its philosophical idealism, liberalism thus privileges the perenniality of man as a nominal, ideational, and unchanging category over man in real life, as homo cultus firmly rooted in an extended network of family and other social relations, embedded in historical communities, and bred within particular nations or cultures.

At the same time, perhaps influenced by its Protestant lineage and impulse, liberalism holds that man’s potentiality, powers, and dignity have not been fully realized—his apotheosis disrupted—because of the structural constraints placed on man that separate him from his universal telos. This animus against inherited order entrenches in liberal thought a desire for change that is in tension with what liberalism regards as changeless—i.e., its essentialist view of man as homo liber. As it finds given reality—the world as it is—unpalatable, liberalism must develop an apposite theory of history that can accommodate social change.

The goal of history must be human progress toward a society, wherein all are completely equal and man is fully rational, entirely free, and perfectly productive. Man is a teleological agent actualizing humanity’s almost super-human mastery of nature and matter. In privileging linearity over the old (chiefly pagan) cyclicality of time, liberalism adopts an apocalyptic, if ahistorical, view of history directed at realizing Utopia or the City of God on Earth—a “just” society fully realizing universal egalitarian principles, eradicating all difference, distinction, and linkages. A “new” society where liberalism’s fixed philosophical anthropology and its idealistic notion of human freedom are effectuated and attained through leveling and massification of people (and the flattening of higher culture and its hierarchical imperatives).

These tensions were never easy to reconcile. The rise of utilitarianism, Hegelianism, and Marxism in the 19th century may be understood in part as the West’s early attempt to confront and resolve the above antinomies in favor of progress, universalism, and control—which Bentham, Hegel, and Marx saw as embodied potentialities in the modern state or the historical dialectic that could be used to advance and achieve freedom.

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In its most influential form, Romanticism, with its lionization of the common man, sentimentalism, subjectivism, and democratism, was yet another offshoot. Its most important exponent, Jean Jacques Rousseau, reacted against the Enlightenment interpretation of freedom by reconceiving man as originally and naturally perfect and focusing his interpretation on man’s autonomy and emancipation from societal “chains”. In Rousseau’s account, freedom would be synonymous with, and impossible to achieve without, equality, a move that provoked the politically revolutionary tendencies inherent in liberalism—soon to be epitomized by the Jacobins—and which has since become an inescapable aspect of liberal modernity.

In contrast to the push for homogeneity, historical convergence, and global uniformity of standard liberalism, a liberalism that privileged personal and intellectual freedom and retained some of the hierarchical and aristocratic sensibilities of the old Western world, was represented by the likes of Alexis de Tocqueville, Jacob Burckhardt, and John Stuart Mill. Stressing private autonomy over domination (cf. the first antinomy), these thinkers placed greater emphasis on individuality, free-mindedness, and limited government.

It should be noted that stressing human freedom as a defining cultural value is not the exclusive domain of liberal modernity as that term is used here. Homo liber is formative in the development of Renaissance humanism as embodied in the thought of Montaigne and Machiavelli, who preceded liberalism and were suggestive of an alternative modernity. Perhaps influenced by the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment, Edmund Burke was a proto-liberal, or a hesitant liberal, who—by privileging religion, virtue, and ancestral and traditionalist elements—attempted to forge a synthesis between whiggish liberalism and late 18th-century European conservatism, hoping to show the way to a revitalization of the calcifying older Western heritage.

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Burke’s syncretic approach found little conflict between an appreciation for individuality and diversity and a stress on community and hereditary monarchy. A defender of aristocracy and social diversification, he was strongly anti-egalitarian and championed a kind of organic unity. Burke attached great importance to culture, hierarchy, and imagination as the glue of society and remained a sharp critic of abstract idealism and rationalistic individualism. He abhorred a failure to understand the historical nature of human existence, including humanity’s great dependence on ancestral forms. The social atomism and abstract individual rights of a John Locke were wholly alien to him. Burke offered a more gradualist interpretation of progress that clashed fundamentally with the dominant strain of liberalism of his time which gave rise to liberal Modernity.

Despite the primary thrusts of liberal Modernity then, liberal thought itself was never wholly univocal. It did not offer a single interpretation of Liberty, nor was there uniform agreement on the instrument or mechanism of its attainment. What unifies the disparate orientations that have together shaped liberal modernity, however, is a deep philosophical idealism. Lurking beneath various interpretations of Liberty is a common philosophical anthropology fixated on the universality and indivisibility of the idea of man as a free agent, homo liber as an absolute category that towers above all other contesting human values that conduce to human flourishing.

According to this idealistic and reductionist view of man, all humans are innately liberal and would be so in real life barring the external or societal impediments that corrupt their inner liberal constitution. As philosopher John Gray rightly observes, such a belief makes the missionary desire to continuously overpower and eliminate the dark and disruptive forces which are deemed antiliberal—a new form of “evil”—an inherent part of the liberal agenda.  

In subtle ways, the above paradoxes animate the current conflicts in Western societies, showing them to be symptoms of the general philosophical—ultimately psychological and even physiological—sickness at the heart of liberal modernity.

Liberalism’s Totalitarian Second Coming

Since all systems tend to resist their unraveling and descent into disorder, liberalism was driven to resolve its inherent contradictions into a new unity, which it did by favoring the more totalistic or ordering element in each antinomy. This explains the evolution of liberalism in the 20th century. One early consequence of liberalism’s internal battle to achieve a new more sustainable form was the dawn of the “neoliberal” order and the ascendency of the (late-modern) liberalism that is now our zeitgeist. This transformation is more fated, more the product of a wish for survival, than it is a perversion or betrayal of its ideals—which is the conventional conservative/classical “liberal” interpretation of contemporary developments.

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Given the crisis of legitimacy confronting late liberal modernity, the internal tensions of the liberal schema are being resolved in ever more authoritarian and totalistic ways. As alluded to in the discussion of the third antinomy earlier, Modernity was inspired by the surge of a new form of imagination that conjured up a vision of the world transformed. That dreamy and missionary longing for a better world, which justified and widened the scope for active human intervention, reinforced the totalitarian potentialities of rationalistic meliorism, giving Modernity a quasi-spiritual dimension.

Since World War II, modern liberalism has effectively resolved the first tension—domination vs. autonomy—by having recourse to “hegemony”, whereby cultural and intellectual domination is disguised and presented as liberating, with the Other giving spontaneous or reflexive consent. The second tension—universalism vs. subjectivism—was resolved through “ideology”, whereby everyone is conditioned and propagandized to believe the same things. The universality proviso is upheld by establishing the identity of “man”, as understood by liberalism, with the “universal”.

The third and final tension—perennialism vs. meliorism—finds resolution in “technocracy” and the new “cult of expertise”. A new class of mandarins is socialized (especially through the modern university) and installed in positions of power and influence in the culture at large. In turn, this class indoctrinates the public and serves as the “vanguard” of the new regime. This professional-managerial class is tasked with shepherding herds of men to the promised land—which it attempts to do through the selective use of “science” (the secular faith), “ideology” (the new scriptures), and technology (a shepherd’s crook) for control, messaging, monitoring, and manipulation. 

Undergirding this resolution is the growing confidence that Control is both necessary and a source of the Good. Properly employed, it will ultimately create a social justice utopia. The myth of progress solidifies into the idea that, in theory, all can be known, and that human knowledge can be limitless (cf. epistemological certainty); that the application of available knowledge (scientism/positivism) to the material and societal world, the very definition of technology, guides mankind to perfectibility; and that this process will achieve the improvement of the material and moral condition of all mankind.

While the quest to dominate initially masquerades as liberation from the old structures and hierarchies that were maintained by tradition, the aristocracy, or patriarchal institutions, the quest to dominate nature and then society demands, in time, the takeover and subversion of society itself, a comprehensive engineering project. The quest requires the eventual indoctrination of experts who view themselves self-righteously as modern-age oracles divining the march of History. This trend is perfectly exemplified by John Stuart Mill, for whom unhindered debate destroys traditional beliefs and institutions and sets the stage for the rule of enlightened experts, who are animated by what Mill calls, with Auguste Comte, the “religion of humanity”.

Interestingly, given its quasi-Christian roots, early liberalism’s altruistic and morally egalitarian inclination is triggered and problematized already during the 19^th century when the ordinary living conditions for many people in urban areas worsened with the rise of industrialization and the accompanying massification. In Marxism, an ideational and utilitarian offspring of Modernity and liberalism, one finds a recognition of, and perhaps the first systematic reaction to, the complexities and problems unleashed by the continued presence of socio-economic inequality and the profound anxiety that this reality contradicted the myth of progress.

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It was concluded by many—utilitarians, Marxist revolutionaries in an extreme way, and (later) leaders of the Progressive Movement—that “progress” might not come to pass absent human intervention. The realization that progress will require active shaping and channeling drew attention to the importance of leadership and elites. To guide the people, a new order of rank, presumably based on merit and credentials, had to be justified and endowed with authority. Pre-war (conservative) liberalism tried to resist these beliefs, but post-war liberalism (inspired by FDR’s New Deal) combined them and the ideals of social progress and comprehensive equality into Neoliberalism. The state would now acquire a more central role and collaborate with Big Business to deliver public goods and social and economic justice. Modern liberalism thereby identified liberation with a progressive egalitarianism whose achievement entailed increasing social and political controls.

Liberalism and Marxism here revealed themselves as merely different expressions of the same Modern Janus, i.e., as different schemas looking to formalize and rationalize the Modern “being-in-the-world” or “self”. This Modern Janus champions equality and progress as hallmarks of human freedom and professes to break down the old hierarchies to deliver them; and yet, it enslaves man to ever new forms of unnatural hierarchy and subterranean control, sacrificing human greatness and cultural flourishing on the altar of mediocrity and homogeneity.

Modernity is a Western creation, but its effects are not limited to the Western world. Wherever it is introduced and whatever form it eventually takes, this Proteus of many shapes and faces leeches off and eats away at the host civilization, leaving but a hollow shell teetering on the precipice—perhaps nowhere more so than in the West. Around the world, this transmigrated god manically flattens society and disfigures or destroys inherited institutions, while, at the same time, it raises new structures of repression and total subordination. It embodies the anti-life and anti-culture force par excellence.

So, what explains the remarkable success and endurance of the neoliberal world order and the attraction of its life-negating program?   

The Sources of Liberalism’s Power (and Demise?)

Central to contemporary liberalism’s overwhelming success in Western societies is its effective use of what may be termed the Hegemony-Prestige feedback loop. “Hegemony” is the process by which a dominant class establishes socio-cultural control over subordinated groups by espousing and signaling moral and intellectual leadership over them in such a way that the lower classes effectively consent to their own domination by the ruling classes. The compliance of the inferiors is secured by means of elite signaling, in which the upper classes use their social capital or “prestige” to indicate correct behaviors for the public to emulate, as well as by leveraging their position within the socio-political establishment to harness the power of modern propaganda.

In this process, the elite narrative, which conveys the benevolence of the elites and a vision of a better society for all, is internalized by the masses and transformed into a “sacred” narrative, conditioning them to act as desired, so that there is little need to force or coerce them. Implanted in their imaginations is a belief that with their rulers they are participating, ritually and symbolically, in righteous and cosmopolitan, even holy, causes.

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Modern technology and social media have only furthered the elites’ reach and monopoly on “truth”, deviating accounts being actively dismissed as disinformation. Securing compliance is a multi-layered process that uses securitization and weaponization of “crisis” as vehicles through which the elites achieve class solidarity, the dissenters are further marginalized, and the public at large undergoes “mass formation”.

This homogenizing process reinforces group identities across class lines and ossifies social standings, all the while protecting, reaffirming, and empowering the status quo. The homo liber thus begets its inevitable other as what the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben astutely calls homo sacer—the “cursed” or “banished” man living in a sort of purgatory between citizenship and state control, at once a member of a political community and living outside of it because of his refusal to conform to the newly established norms.

This process extends beyond the West. Across different societies, the upper castes—who identify themselves with Western ideals of liberal progress—form a decentralized and informal liberal ideational bloc that serves to advance, as the ideal life-form, the neoliberal world order and its apposite universalist ideology. The global imprinting of liberal ideology among international elites from different civilizations, who use it as their currency of power and status, globalizes the cultural hegemony of liberalism and empowers those Western institutions and NGOs that perpetuate the ideology. This dynamic strengthens the existing neoliberal world system as well as the international organizations that defend it through the power of semiotics and rhetoric and with their willful, tedious, and arcane rulemaking.

The result is the proliferation of soft or internalized totalitarianism and the unleashing of homogeneity and conformity in the name of freedom and democracy—not just in the West but globally. This soft totalitarianism is even more pernicious than coercive tyranny or hard totalitarianism, which are achieved through violence, for it kills criticality, dissent, and free thinking, diminishing the spiritual or intellectual energy that is needed for a healthy society to endure. Soft totalitarianism is, partly through its appeals to dreamy imagination and utopian quests, also much subtler than outwardly coercive tyranny. And it is more difficult to detect, let alone resist.

Soft totalitarianism is also more socialized, encouraging the citizenry to vilify, ostracize, and cancel dissident voices believed to have violated an implicit sacred bond—resulting in an us-against-them dynamic, in which collective identity is forged in a Manichaean opposition to the Other. This form of totalitarianism’s war on the mind rewards dogma and tired clichés over impartiality and common sense. It promotes groupthink as a means of monopolizing thought, indeed, the very perception of reality. The objective is clear: to secure the status quo against any radical disruption and overcoming.

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One important factor that both reveals and contributes to the ascent of soft totalitarianism is that the original border between State and Civil Society, between public and private—a divide that was emphasized in early liberalism—is today increasingly blurred and withering away. A profound epistemological crisis regarding what is knowledge, which is exacerbated by the accelerated politicization of all aspects of life, also compounds the totalizing dynamic. The growing disintegration of societal boundaries and distinctions in late liberal Modernity, and the resulting confusion and meaninglessness, presage a crisis of authority of the highest order, in which both the political class (government and state bureaucracy) as well as the experts and even the knowledge they profess (“science”) are gradually repudiated. All this portends increased estrangement, polarization, future conflict, and even sociopolitical revolution. It also raises the stakes further for liberal Modernity: wielding power becomes an existential problem.

The establishment’s natural response to this ultimate crisis of legitimacy is to slowly consolidate and combine the apparatus of social control and culture-formation (i.e., media, Big Business, and academia), historically the domain of civil society, with the mechanisms of political command and legal authority already at its disposal. Effectively, it creates a massive, complex structure of control and compliance—an integrated regime that can be called, the liberal imperium.

The Impending War Against the Imperium

The still-consolidating liberal imperium is a Hobbesian monstrosity. Influenced by the English Civil War, Hobbes had in mind an Erastian state with absolute political control but with the limited purpose of maintaining order. The new Leviathan aspires to comprehensive—socio-cultural and ontological—control that targets reality itself. It appears decentralized, but it is integrated across class and ideology with a clear in-group and out-group and the apathetic masses (cf. the “last man”) in between. The deep resentment of the out-group coupled with the general lack of agency of the populace render this epoch in history particularly prone to conspiracy thinking, which we must identify as yet another symptom of the general pathology of the late-modern paradigm.

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Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci presciently noted almost a hundred years ago, “When the State trembled, a sturdy structure of civil society was at once revealed. The State was only an outer ditch, behind which there stood a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks.” The sturdy structure of which Gramsci speaks—perhaps the underbelly of the modern Leviathan—has been continuously revealed and weaponized by the Establishment in its framing of our many endless wars, COVID, ESG, and, most recently, the war in Ukraine.

In all these instances, the mechanisms of social control and domestication are regularly employed to achieve the almost spontaneous consent of the public through “mass formation” and to turn them by means of psychological mobilization into unwitting—if not willing—collaborators of the regime and its desired ends. These ends are disguised as preconditions for Freedom and even masquerade as Moral and Right but amount to an appalling subversion of liberty and common sense.

The ascent of the integral regime may appear to promise the ruling class a kind of stability but is more than likely a transitional stage. The current state of affairs is unlikely to be sustainable over decades and could degenerate into full-on totalitarianism with all of its oppressive and dangerous political dimensions.

It remains to be seen whether the still inchoate, if vigorous, awakening to the apparatus of liberal control will generate a radical and tragic desire for “overcoming” (décadence) among the rising number of (prestige-)marginalized groups in the West, the people who have freed themselves from the liberal cave and see through its false construct, or those from other civilizations whose Weltanschauung conflicts with the liberal Modern paradigm. It seems that a backlash, although still mostly embryonic, has begun, and if it gains strength, one can expect the liberal imperium to seize every opportunity to further securitize and weaponize crises in order to terminate such dissenting newborns before they ever come of age.

Man was the subject in the Modern project, but increasingly this subject has been transformed into Modernity’s favorite object—been treated as a blank canvas on which to imprint the new order. Hence, just as the regime attempts to in-form us, we need to un-form ourselves in a radical struggle against our very own conformed selves. It is in such a spirit that we must try and understand Nietzsche’s famous notion of “the will to power”. The German exhorts us to move beyond the political and its trivialities and partisanship to dismantle and sublate the complex systems of cultural power and social prestige that the ideological hegemony of liberal modernity has imposed.

Such spiritual and intellectual radicalism is the first step in cultivating a “Dionysian” counter-elite that actively spurns modern idealism and liberal ideological illusions, such as “progress” or “happiness”, in favor of a historically-rooted and concrete realism that consecrates life, nature, organic society, and cultural health.

In this fateful hour, what we need is a tragic and radical realism that roars a hard No to life-negating décadence and a hard Yes to the regenerative bonds and bounds placed on man by the imperatives of organic unity and human evolution. 

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Abu Zayd Abd al-Rahman ibn Muhammad ibn Khaldun al-Hadrami (commonly known as Ibn Khaldun) was born in 14th Century North Africa, in what today is known as Tunisia. He dedicated his life to teaching, scholarship, and synthesizing a grand theory of history from the knowledge he acquired in his travels. He would end up in the employ of imperial courts and universities throughout North Africa, Al-Andalus, and the Middle East. Today, he is regarded by many as the founder of the modern field of historiography. Internationally, he is most well known for his cyclic theory of history, the idea that civilizations decline due to continuously inherited inertia and a breakdown in social and communal bonds.

Ibn Khaldun posited that, eventually, these declining states come under pressure from foreign actors, who succeed in replacing the endogenous elites of these static civilizations with their own (often nomadic peoples from the Sahara or Eurasian steppe). Despite their much smaller numbers, the greater social solidarity (asabiyyah) of these external actors, based on personal loyalty and proven communal bonds of the tribe rather than the impersonal and bureaucratic structures of the state, offered these so-called “barbarians” superior vitality and tangible military and diplomatic advantages relative to the more established, but calcified, civilizations.

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Once these outside groups become insiders and members of the civilizational establishment, however, the process repeats anew. Civilizational wealth and status creates a force of irresistible entropy whose powers only increase in time until a new outsider group rejuvenates society again. One critical extrapolation of this worldview is that no two societies are necessarily at the same stage in their lifecycle. The rise and fall of civilizations entails many staggered cycles, not a unified or linear one.

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International conflict cries out for statesmanship. It calls for the kind of leadership that rises above the passions of the moment, takes the long view, considers the legitimate interests of all, and looks for creative solutions. The temperament of statesmanship is prudence and restraint. This type of leadership requires not only relevant experience bu…

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We live in an age characterized by accelerating global convergence and homogeneity, rampant politicization of life, the disappearance of historically-evolved independent domains of authority, and a moralistic, largely rhetorical commitment to egalitarianism.

Contemptuous of all old, concrete hierarchies and personal distinctions, this order and its reigning elites espouse an equality that, in practice, constructs new unrooted, rigid, and impersonal structures of subordination. Behind a veneer of universal rights and appeals to skin-deep forms of diversity and equity, the late-modern zeitgeist promotes across the globe an absolutism that, in the name of Progress, eviscerates genuine pluralism, rooted particularity, and difference. The intended result is sameness, leveling, and deracination—everywhere.

Ours is a moment of civilizational crisis. Yet the intellectual response to our cultural decline has been rather feeble, if not feigned. Nostalgic and reactionary traditionalism as well as postmodernist deconstructionism have proved to be dead ends and steeped in the same kind of dreamy idealism and pathological continuities that produced our malaise.

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With its utopian disposition, modernity has spawned a plethora of dehumanizing phenomena—from war and centralized state control to the routinization of life, destruction of meaning, and deaths of despair. Its various ideologies and epistemologies—rationalism, scientism, utilitarianism, positivism, abstract universalism, individual rights, egalitarianism, identitarianism, and so on—have generated a destructive paradigm that we may call the ‘modern matrix’. It is the source of the lifeform that is wholly dominant in the Western world today and keeps expanding to other parts of the world. Combating this matrix requires a proper diagnosis of the many discontents that it has unleashed in their many representations and forms.

We need a full genealogy and a radical and heroic scrutiny and contestation of the fundamental assumptions behind this matrix while recognizing that modernity is not univocal. Modernity contains elements that are less known but of enduring value to human creativity and critical thinking. Such discriminating contestation, our intellectual ‘agon’, must move beyond the quotidian and the trendy and actively differentiate the systemic from the symptomatic.

In ancient Greece, the term ‘agon’ was often used to highlight the conflict at the heart of Greek tragedy. It was an apt name for a magazine which endeavors to contest our modern conceptions, challenge groupthink, and overcome tired orthodoxies. AGON’s mission is to expose the epistemological biases that have infiltrated and corrupted our thinking and language and structured our very ‘reality’. Recovering healthy conditions for the affirmation of human life and culture necessitates not only a new politics but new philosophy, new language, new ethics, and new art that can orient and limit the role of politics.

AGON exists to give voice to such radical contestation. It is dedicated to holistically challenging the modern matrix as a philosophical paradigm and a form of life, and, in turn, to restoring connections with the deeper, more enduring sources of a life worth living. In our era, this must be done in acute awareness that, given the aggressive universalism of the modern matrix, the coming intellectual wars must have a global dimension and scope.

Our international cohort of authors aspires to a radical realism that shuns not only the modern idealism that drives conservatives, liberals, and progressives but also the modern pseudo-realism of materialism, romanticism, and cynicism. We seek to contend with and eventually defeat the socio-political manifestations of the modern matrix and the noumenal idealism that ultimately fuels it.

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Pieces published by AGON will seek to reveal and refute the basic underpinnings and systemic structures of life governed by the modern matrix and to critique the idealistic philosophical anthropology and progressive view of history that premise and pervade the modern worldview. AGON will disclose and critically analyze the tensions and contradictions that have arisen from modernity’s ultimately nihilistic rejection of rootedness, particularity, and natural and concrete hierarchies in the world’s great civilizations.

AGON responds to an era in which utopian and reckless idealism competes with lazy and tired traditionalism on the one hand and extreme subjectivism on the other. AGON contests uncritically held assumptions and their socio-political and cultural manifestations—such as those considered ‘left’, ‘right’, ‘modern’, ‘post-modern’, ‘conservative’, ‘liberal’, ‘Marxist’, ‘Fascist’, ‘Islamist’ or ‘Woke’.

While AGON resists the facile classifications fostered by the modern matrix, it is alert to and protective of other, very different potentialities of modernity—including its original skepticism of dogmatism and courageous attempt at disrupting and subverting the pathological continuities that result in static civilization. AGON looks for fruitful syntheses among seemingly antagonistic ideas in the present that let us discern and creatively revive the deeper roots and processes that keep human cultures from calcifying.

AGON identifies and contests pseudo-solutions to modernity's crisis. It identifies and rejects idols whose cramped, abstract, anti-realist, anti-culture, anti-life, anti-body fangs threaten human vitality. In particular, AGON challenges cheap ‘progress’ and ‘liberation’ that, in practice, mask and unleash totalitarian drives and deliberately evade the need for realism, historical grounding, cultural and communal rootedness, and personal, perhaps even heroic, effort.

A proper etiology has been elusive partly because we have not confronted the theological and absolutist dimensions of the globalist and planetary penchant for domination that modernity has fostered. Demanding monopoly, these motivations foreshadow an unprecedented form of tyranny but also force on humanity a chronic state of conflict and war.

In order for this imperial drive to be overcome and a more restrained attitude to be established, it is necessary to expose modernity’s narcissistic and exceptionalist temperament, but it is also necessary to advance a radically different modus vivendi that recognizes and affirms an authentic global cultural pluralism. What is needed is an intellectual, normative, and cultural frame of mind and imagination that genuinely appreciates multiplicity and that combines respect for local, regional, national, and civilizational diversity with sensitivity to the shared higher purposes of communal flourishing and cultural health.

We are an independent publication, championing bold and original thinking that is not aligned with any one camp, tradition, or political party. We hope that you support our work and join us in this world-historical agon toward cultural renewal and midwifing a new age.