A return to Romanticism. Please - what does that even mean, when you push it. The likely creative and cultural and political and social future should be glaringly obvious by now. Very likely to be, and already partially is, progressive populist. I continue to write about it in detail at Liberation Lit, and it has been running and forerunning in a number of works, with some breaking through and others basically underground still: https://fictiongutted.substack.com/
Thanks for the shoutout Mo. As always, I admire your commitment to finding past analogues (and obviously I'm just as much obsessed with the Sixties, to the point of recapitulation). I'm less and less convinced of the Romanticism thing--but like you I see it more akin to the Sixties: a way of sourcing fellow-travelers out of the collective past to help us out. I think I'd be even more convinced of the Sixties (and Fifties) analogue if we could just find more examples of people then, saying something like what we've been saying. If more writers in the Fifties and Sixties were saying, "This is just like the fin-de-siecle!" or, "This is just like motion pictures and radio and the October Revolution!" except that even with that I feel the creep of a locked-in commitment to regular technologically-derived cycles, and that makes me nervous, since the whole point is to make something new? Forgive the exorbitant comment but you get me thinking with this shit.
I'm not here to shill for the Xi Jinping regime or the CPC. I loathe totalitarian surveillance regimes. But I know how to make logical inferences from data, and the facts indicate that for the last 25 years, while US administrations were stoking expensive military crusades halfway around the world, American business has been cashing in on a massive mortgage recession by doing stock buybacks and buying up foreclosed houses, and the American public has been out shopping on credit, China has been quietly eating our lunch.
This is a very recent conclusion on my part, given that the American news media would rather report practically anything other than comparisons of American and Chinese infrastructure, energy production, and industrial base. I had to find the data on the Internet, notably on some of the Substack pages devoted to those topics.
To be sure, the Chinese are known to cheat (although I think one day a hefty chunk of US patent protection and intellectual copyright will be viewed as the saturation affluence impeding rake-off that it is, underneath all the legal-like paperwork.) But more importantly, the Chinese have been building. A lot. They took over shipbuilding and heavy industrial manufacture long ago. They're at the forefront of robotics, advanced energy production technologies, EV vehicle production, infrastructure development in nations with large resource reserves.
(Meanwhile, what's the big new advance in the US economy? Cybercurrency speculation. )
Meanwhile, the material end of the US economy continues to revolve around that sector of Globalists known as the Oil & Gas Bidness. A particularly Trump-friendly group of Business Elites. Interesting, isn't it? The American Petroleum Institute is easily as big a pack of "Globalists" as
theWEF; the Extraction Economy of Oil and Gas is a Global Business. Most of it just happens to be
headquartered in the US and run by Americans (if not exclusively owned by Americans.) Run by Americans who sneer at even the most trivial amount of US government long-term planning and investment in national infrastructure development as a Scam. The US happens to be one of a number of National Extraction Economies run by a Globalist Oil and Gas Bidness with no vision at all, entirely for their own private ends. So while China is run by a symbiosis between private factory enterprises and long-term public planning and development, US material production consists largely of natural gas, petrochemicals, and the farming industry. More like an extraction economy than a value-added manufactured goods export economy. The US economy now largely consists of a fractious coalition of the "Globalist" (for the last half-century US Petrodollar-dominated; subject to change) Finance Industry, Global Oil and Gas energy production, Global Digital Vaporware (superduping data AI something something), and Globally-sourced Retail Imports Shopping.
Donald Trump's radical innovation in economic policy consists of ordering a massive amount of tariff protectionism on that last feature: the currently booming Retail Imports Consumption economy in overseas goods. Trump is initiating this new trade regime by fiat, like a king. The result--if Trump's imperious whims ever land on a final, stable regime that actual hardworking American business owners can use for planning--will be a massive price increase on most retail purchases by American consumers. This isn't just a "luxury tax", like what Germany has--this will be everything made overseas. Because American consumers are at this point a captive market for many goods, there's bound to be some impressive number like hundreds of billions annually to be gleaned, even if overall demand declines. Trump can use that to help pay the creditors to whom the US currently owes around 20% of annual tax revenues. In return for the Federal government keeping current with its annual debt service, our creditors will loan us more money.
If the US economy eventually capsizes as a result of the economic policies now pending, ask yourselves whether Donald Trump--or anyone in his Cabinet--will be impoverished in consequence.
Was glad to talk, Mo. Another time soon!
A return to Romanticism. Please - what does that even mean, when you push it. The likely creative and cultural and political and social future should be glaringly obvious by now. Very likely to be, and already partially is, progressive populist. I continue to write about it in detail at Liberation Lit, and it has been running and forerunning in a number of works, with some breaking through and others basically underground still: https://fictiongutted.substack.com/
Thanks for the shoutout Mo. As always, I admire your commitment to finding past analogues (and obviously I'm just as much obsessed with the Sixties, to the point of recapitulation). I'm less and less convinced of the Romanticism thing--but like you I see it more akin to the Sixties: a way of sourcing fellow-travelers out of the collective past to help us out. I think I'd be even more convinced of the Sixties (and Fifties) analogue if we could just find more examples of people then, saying something like what we've been saying. If more writers in the Fifties and Sixties were saying, "This is just like the fin-de-siecle!" or, "This is just like motion pictures and radio and the October Revolution!" except that even with that I feel the creep of a locked-in commitment to regular technologically-derived cycles, and that makes me nervous, since the whole point is to make something new? Forgive the exorbitant comment but you get me thinking with this shit.
Yeah I hope for a true return to romanticism but my next piece will delve into a major obstacle. Don't worry it's not (completely) tech related
I'm not here to shill for the Xi Jinping regime or the CPC. I loathe totalitarian surveillance regimes. But I know how to make logical inferences from data, and the facts indicate that for the last 25 years, while US administrations were stoking expensive military crusades halfway around the world, American business has been cashing in on a massive mortgage recession by doing stock buybacks and buying up foreclosed houses, and the American public has been out shopping on credit, China has been quietly eating our lunch.
This is a very recent conclusion on my part, given that the American news media would rather report practically anything other than comparisons of American and Chinese infrastructure, energy production, and industrial base. I had to find the data on the Internet, notably on some of the Substack pages devoted to those topics.
To be sure, the Chinese are known to cheat (although I think one day a hefty chunk of US patent protection and intellectual copyright will be viewed as the saturation affluence impeding rake-off that it is, underneath all the legal-like paperwork.) But more importantly, the Chinese have been building. A lot. They took over shipbuilding and heavy industrial manufacture long ago. They're at the forefront of robotics, advanced energy production technologies, EV vehicle production, infrastructure development in nations with large resource reserves.
(Meanwhile, what's the big new advance in the US economy? Cybercurrency speculation. )
Meanwhile, the material end of the US economy continues to revolve around that sector of Globalists known as the Oil & Gas Bidness. A particularly Trump-friendly group of Business Elites. Interesting, isn't it? The American Petroleum Institute is easily as big a pack of "Globalists" as
theWEF; the Extraction Economy of Oil and Gas is a Global Business. Most of it just happens to be
headquartered in the US and run by Americans (if not exclusively owned by Americans.) Run by Americans who sneer at even the most trivial amount of US government long-term planning and investment in national infrastructure development as a Scam. The US happens to be one of a number of National Extraction Economies run by a Globalist Oil and Gas Bidness with no vision at all, entirely for their own private ends. So while China is run by a symbiosis between private factory enterprises and long-term public planning and development, US material production consists largely of natural gas, petrochemicals, and the farming industry. More like an extraction economy than a value-added manufactured goods export economy. The US economy now largely consists of a fractious coalition of the "Globalist" (for the last half-century US Petrodollar-dominated; subject to change) Finance Industry, Global Oil and Gas energy production, Global Digital Vaporware (superduping data AI something something), and Globally-sourced Retail Imports Shopping.
Donald Trump's radical innovation in economic policy consists of ordering a massive amount of tariff protectionism on that last feature: the currently booming Retail Imports Consumption economy in overseas goods. Trump is initiating this new trade regime by fiat, like a king. The result--if Trump's imperious whims ever land on a final, stable regime that actual hardworking American business owners can use for planning--will be a massive price increase on most retail purchases by American consumers. This isn't just a "luxury tax", like what Germany has--this will be everything made overseas. Because American consumers are at this point a captive market for many goods, there's bound to be some impressive number like hundreds of billions annually to be gleaned, even if overall demand declines. Trump can use that to help pay the creditors to whom the US currently owes around 20% of annual tax revenues. In return for the Federal government keeping current with its annual debt service, our creditors will loan us more money.
If the US economy eventually capsizes as a result of the economic policies now pending, ask yourselves whether Donald Trump--or anyone in his Cabinet--will be impoverished in consequence.