Sublime

The last and most important thing is that this is a rough inversion of the 20th century, as the formerly communist/socialist countries are on the ethnocultural right, while the capitalist bloc is on the ethnocultural left.

Russian threat to Europe has reemerged. This might have been inevitable given that the Soviet Union lost the Cold War, saw its external empire in Eastern Europe break free, and then experienced its own internal breakup. Russia accounts for roughly half the population and three-fourths of the land area of the former Soviet Union. It has retained a

Putin commands a large military establishment that includes a nuclear arsenal. He can dispose of the wealth generated by Russian oil. He is, beyond question, a cunning and manipulative man, and he does not wish the US, Europe, or liberal democracy well. But I ask you, good reader, to maintain a sense of scale on the subject.

This ungovernable “post-sovereign” world, in the words of the political scientist Wendy Brown, will go far beyond a sense of near-term fragility; it will be instead a long-term macro-trend toward deep instability grinding away over decades. The first result will be massive new concentrations of power and wealth that reorder society.

The ideals of the Enlightenment are products of human reason, but they always struggle with other strands of human nature: loyalty to tribe, deference to authority, magical thinking, the blaming of misfortune on evildoers. The second decade of the 21st century has seen the rise of political movements that depict their countries as being pulled into