Comments on: Reformations

By: There was no such thing as deficit spending « Danger West

There was no such thing as deficit spending « Danger West — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 04:07:16 +0000

[...] August 19, 2008 Posted by casualt in History. trackback The big difference between the current rot, and the rot of past times is that today we have all these neat financial tricks to keep things afloat. Back in the day [...]

By: Thomas Nephew

Thomas Nephew — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 02:18:30 +0000

It’s interesting how a variety of posts and analyses point to the same “fish rots from the head but the whole fish rots” (old Jim Henley title) syndrome: Your posts that we’re discussing. The Andrew Bacevich interview with Bill Moyers was particularly good — well, that’s not quite the right word… honest, bracing. The billmon post on Georgia that Nell mentioned, which cited Bacevich. My own “No more important priority,” about the Dem platform on Iran. “Pouting at Putin,” by Chazelle at “Tiny Revolution.”

Some of it’s people reading eachother and the same stuff. But I think Bacevich particularly is a national resource now; I wouldn’t mind him moving to Maryland and taking on Mikulski if no one else will.

By: mick

mick — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 00:41:17 +0000

The good news would be, then, that perhaps we’re farther along in Arran’s narrative than he thinks.

I hope so but the signs of a Reformation-style rebellion are very weak. It seems to me that our own complacency and need for denial will have the same function in moving us into decay as the Emperors had on Catholicism. (It isn’t quite true to say the Holy Roman Emperors were responsible; the “Mediterranean sect” had hundreds of churches and a well established hierachical structure 400 years before Charlemagne. It’s true that they weren’t safe from erasure until his conversion but the HRE’s were relative latecomers.) It will be long, slow, and painful. So, as you point out so deftly, why should they worry about it?

They won’t. That’s why we have to. I wouldn’t expect Nancy or Harry or Barack to take such a long-range argument seriously. I wouldn’t expect them even to read it. It wasn’t truly aimed at them, as you must know. It was an argument (sideways, I admit) for doing it ourselves and an example of the way we have to start thinking if we’re going to save our country from the authoritarians and barbarians who are already inside the gates.