Decline & Fall

I CAN neither sleep at night nor concentrate on my work by day for the sound of right-thinking people stamping their feet and shouting their protests: ‘This has to stop!’ or ‘Something must be done about that!’

But it won’t be.

It’s not as if we live in fear of a revolution. The revolution has happened, and the old order is vanquished; all our institutions are permeated by the neo-Marxist ideology. The new dogmas are set in stone.

This year, at the height of what used to be called the Christmas season, a Pew Research Center poll on religion revealed that only slightly more Americans described themselves as Roman Catholics (21 percent) than as believers in “nothing in particular” (20 percent). The millennial generation, which includes most adult Americans under 40, is the first one in which Christians are a minority.

Many Americans have a sense that their country is less religious than it used to be. But is it really? The interplay among institutions, behaviors and beliefs is notoriously hard to chart. Even if we could determine that religious sentiment was in flux, it would be hard to say whether we were talking about this year’s fad or this century’s trend.

Or perhaps we are dealing with an even deeper process. That is the argument of a much-discussed book published in Paris this fall. In it, the French political theorist Chantal Delsol contends that we are living through the end of Christian civilization — a civilization that began (roughly) with the Roman rout of pagan holdouts in the late fourth century and ended (roughly) with Pope John XXIII’s embrace of religious pluralism and the West’s legalization of abortion.

… Is it a coincidence, by the way, that four officers of the Federal Reserve have been outed for trading stocks and bonds in a pattern that looks an awful lot like front-running the Fed’s own “guidance?” Robert S. Kaplan, head of the Dallas Fed, and Eric Rosengren, head of the Boston Fed announced their “early retirements” last week over stock-trading ethics issues. Fed Vice-chair Richard Clarida’s financial disclosure statement indicated that he dumped millions of dollars in a Pimco bond fund and jammed them into a Pimco stock fund the day before Fed Chair Jerome Powell announced emergency interventions to battle the Covid-19 epidemic in early 2020. Mr. Clarida was involved in deliberations leading to the change in fed policy. And Richmond Fed president Thomas Barkin is under scrutiny for voting to bail out the corporate bond market while sitting on a portfolio of corporate bonds. In his past role as CFO of McKinsey & Co, a global consulting firm, Barkin advised Purdue Pharma L.P. on maximizing sales of its painkiller OxyContin, the infamous scourge of the US opioid epidemic.

h/t Mauser

The less moored our identities become, the louder we shout about them

There has never been a perfect human culture, and any attempt to create one has reliably led to tyranny: to the gulag or the gas chamber, the guillotine or the mass grave. Humans are fallen, or just flawed, and the world is nailed together from our crooked timber. From revolutionary France to 21st century Afghanistan, those who thought they could draw up a rational paradise once the slate was wiped clean have always been violently disabused.

No one could have imagined that we would so quickly squander the West’s mighty strategic victory in the Cold War.

In an apparently predestined and inevitable manner, as occurs when there is weak international leadership, the United States and China are drifting into a state of prickly antagonism.

During the election, Joe Biden said the Chinese were not a threat to the United States and he has still only half-heartedly acknowledged a serious rivalry between the two countries. There is plenty of evidence that the new administration has made such a poor impression in Beijing that President Xi Jinping has concluded now is the time for China to humiliate and displace the United States—a conclusion he was certainly deterred from adopting during the Trump years.