VD writes on America as propositional nation and mass immigration. He supplies his chronology of US evolution. I amend and expand as follows:
America 0.5: The Plantations 1610-1789 (Not the Colonies. White slave society.)
America 1.0: Constitutional America 1789-1865
America 2.0: American Empire 1865-1913 (post civil war)
America 3.0: Republican US 1913-1941 (Fed+PopSenate+IRS to WWI)
America 3.1: Early Imperial US 1941-1965 (ends with Civil Rights, Johnson Great Society)
America 3:2: Latter Imperial US 1965~2033 (mass immigration, Fed bubble collapse, sclerotic imperial bureaucratic Cathedral overreach, world war)
America 4.0: Post-US~2033 (dissolution, irradiated rubble, dictators, internecine war)
The disturbing thing about VD’s chronology is that it seems to argue that unlike Rome, America has compressed 2x historical Glubbian 240 year cycles into a 1x time frame. I suppose there are reasons why this would be possible, and I suspected compression, but hadn’t actually mapped it out in such detail.
Is it properly imperial though, or merely aristo-imperial? Without the debt-fuse on the nuke-bomb, I think it’d be reasonable to expect a true imperial post-America, with an emperor. Egypt survived a lot of race mixing, after all.
So, maybe the compression isn’t quite 2x, but there’s still significant compression. Maybe 1.5x.
There is nothing new under the sun, but some technology is newish. I guess it comes down to a race between MIRV ICBMs and the Internet.
Printing press vs. atom bomb. Who wins? I can’t tell. Although the last printing press certainly didn’t REDUCE war.
But wait… there IS a reason the Internet would reduce war.
The printing press supplied difficult-to-suppress heretical propaganda, but it was slow and read-only. States coordinated much faster. Thus it tended to produce chaotic conflict with muddled, moderately-better results.
The Internet is read-write, and coordination is practically instantaneous. The Internet is massively inside the state OODA loop.
Furthermore, the state tipped its hand too early. Mass immigration is training the Internet to engage in effective anti-state heresy. It can use that training to face down the coming nuclear crisis.
That is awesome! No fate!
It’s not just a hobby. What we’re doing online is actually important. It’s time to take this seriously. Winning not only matters: It is an existential imperative.
Moreover, we don’t have the luxury of the usual multi-century intellectual timeframe. We must succeed in the next generation or two, or we may very well all wind up dead of highly unnatural causes, and our children too.