[…] Of course some of that is just wishcasting by folks like me, who long for the end of the GAE — that’s “Global American Empire” (someone asked this the other day), and is of course pronounced “Gay”.
Not for sentimental reasons, I hasten to add. What am I, a Liberal, and / or a girl? I’m an Historian; I have no problem with Empires.
What I do have a problem with — an enormous problem, yuuuuuge, the biggest — is empires that don’t acknowledge themselves as such. A LOT of the 20th century would’ve gone very, very differently had the USA either acknowledged herself to be an Empire starting in 1898, or stuck to her anti-Imperial rhetoric and bowed out of the international power game. But — as we always do — we tried to have it both ways, acting like the most bellicose Empire on the planet while deliberately undermining the Imperial policies of everyone else. Woodrow Wilson, for example, tried to run the entire Western Hemisphere as an American satrapy while promising any micro-group with their own goulash recipe in the Balkans a State of their very own.
Consider what all our Middle Eastern adventures, 1948-present, would look like if the American Empire declared itself to be such. We might still be bombing Iran, but the “exit strategy” is simple: They’ve made sufficient obeisance to the Imperial standard; we’ll be sailing away now. “Air policing” is still retarded — it’s the kind of idea only your best Old School Tie toff could come up with, over tea and crumpets at Eton — but it works ok as a publicity stunt. Things get fuzzy out there on The Fringes of Empire, and while you occasionally have to slap the wogs around, just to remind them that you can, it doesn’t have to be anything more than that.
But alas.
Severian, “Friday Mailbag”, Founding Questions, 2026-04-03.
July 20, 2026
QotD: The real, but unacknowledged, Global American Empire
July 14, 2026
QotD: Subaltern Studies
You can come at this in a few different ways. In the History biz, a big buzzword used to be “agency”. Not as in “three letter”, but as in “ability to meaningfully affect your environment”. One has “agency” insofar as one is able to get one’s way. It’s a big deal in the ivory tower, because if the grand sweep of History since the Middle Ages tells us anything, it’s that White guys tend to get their way, while brown guys do not. There are entire continents (and Subcontinents) full of millions of people, run by a handful of honkies.
Obviously that’s very very bad for them … but very very good for you if you want tenure, providing you can find some way to prove that the honkies weren’t really in charge. Subaltern Studies, for instance, is a field where, at its worst, literally anything a brown person does, or doesn’t do, is an example of “agency”, because it’s an example of “resistance” — doing exactly what Whitey says is really sticking it to Whitey, because extremely dense polysyllabic theory-laden reasons.
The stated goal of all this being, to give “agency” to the subaltern. But that’s the funny thing: While explaining at enormous length why “doing exactly what Whitey says” is somehow “resistance”, these folks were in fact acknowledging the massive agency — no quotation marks — of the British. They said “Jump, frog!” and seven hundred fifty million people asked “How high?” There’s only so much jargon can do to disguise that basic power dynamic, which is why “Subaltern Studies” isn’t the hot new thing anymore.
Severian, “Externalizing”, Founding Questions, 2022-07-14.
July 8, 2026
QotD: The Wilmot Proviso
The Wilmot Proviso attempted to scotch that, which forced the Senate, at least, to come right out and say it. People always underestimate the power of words and symbols, and professional historians are among the worst offenders. With the newer generations of pros it’s ideological enstupidation that causes it, but the older folks were almost as bad. It’s a structural issue — we rely on documents, so even though “the temper of the times” is real obvious in the aggregate, unless you can pin it down to specific statements in archival sources it’s hard to make your case.
If it helps, think of the couple whose marriage is obviously on the rocks. They fight constantly, they all but live separately, everybody knows their relationship is doomed … but when one of them finally comes out and says “I want a divorce”, things often change radically. Temporarily, most often, but how many people have you seen suddenly make all-out efforts to patch things up only after somebody finally says the D-word?
You can hear the capital letters in their voices. Before, all that stuff — romantic weekend getaways and the like — were attempts to “get back on track” or “spice things back up” or whatever. As soon as someone says Divorce, though, all those things become capitalized — we’re Saving Our Marriage.
The Wilmot Proviso was like that. Somebody finally said the D word.
Severian, “1846-1861”, Founding Questions, 2022-06-25.
July 2, 2026
QotD: The US federal election of 1848 and the resulting inevitability of the US Civil War
The Democrats’ candidate, Lewis Cass, pushed the idea of “popular sovereignty” in the territories. It wasn’t a bad move — since California was the only soon-to-be-state up for grabs, and since some parts of California are above the Missouri Compromise line, let them decide the terms on which they want to enter the Union. The problem with that, obviously, is that the Senate could become radically unbalanced very quickly, depending on how fast the rapidly-expanding population of the territories got their act together. Iowa and Wisconsin had just entered the Union (1846 and 1848, respectively), as free states under the Compromise. They were counterbalanced by Florida and Texas (both 1845), but obviously the balance was very delicate.
Cass was of course defeated (by Mexican War hero Zachary Taylor), so wrangling over California continued. Taylor wasn’t the greatest leader anyway, and when he died in office he was replaced by everyone’s favorite placeholder, Millard Fillmore. Fillmore gets an undeserved rep for incompetence; in reality, he was exactly the kind of president the Second Party System was designed to produce, even though he was never elected to the office. Most real political power before the Civil War was at the state level, so the President was supposed to be the steward and figurehead of his Party, not a strong national leader. (You can still see echoes of this as late as the early 20th century — William Howard Taft supposedly said “I forgot I ever was President;” he was much more concerned with his reputation as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court).
But slavery was a federal issue, indeed THE federal issue. In the absence of strong leadership at the top — and again, in all fairness to Fillmore and the rest, the system was designed to prevent strong Presidential leadership — it fell to Congress. Which a) is where it should’ve been, under the federal system the Founders designed; but b) meant that it was guaranteed to be a cock-up, because like all debating societies Congress was dominated by Very Clever Boys.
Worse, the immediate antebellum Congresses were dominated by the Very Cleverest Boy of them all, Stephen Douglas. I don’t think there has ever been a Cleverer Boy in American politics than Stephen Douglas, which is really saying something. (A case could be made for Lyndon Johnson, I suppose, and look how that turned out). Douglas’s signature “legislation” was the Compromise of 1850, which did a lot of things, including bringing California into the Union as a free state. It’s easy to get lost in the historical weeds here, so I’m keeping this deliberately superficial. Here are the highlights:
First, it’s important to note that nobody except Stephen Douglas knew they were voting on “the Compromise of 1850”. You have to hand it to the bastard, it’s a really slick piece of politics. He put together a whole bunch of bills, horse-trading parts of each of them among the competing factions to cobble an overarching program together. Nobody would’ve voted on an omnibus bill called “The Compromise of 1850”, but when the dust settled and all the votes were tallied on a bunch of separate measures, that’s what emerged.
Second: Douglas swiped Lewis Cass’s idea of “popular sovereignty” for the new territories (New Mexico and Utah) carved out of the Mexican Cession. At the time, this looked like a band-aid, a procedural quick-fix — those territories wouldn’t be coming into the Union as states anytime soon, and since cotton doesn’t grow so well in the desert it didn’t matter that much anyway. “Popular sovereignty” was just a way to kick the can down the road. Please note, however, that now the precedent was set: The Missouri Compromise is now officially a dead letter, though nobody will come right out and say it.
Third: The Fugitive Slave Act essentially federalized slave-catching. The details aren’t important; the principle is. The US government is now officially the enforcement arm of what many folks were openly calling “the Slave Power Conspiracy”.
Fourth: What looked like a purely symbolic measure, outlawing the slave trade in Washington DC. Here again, we misunderestimate the power of symbols at our peril. The practical effect of this was nil, since DC is tiny and if you wanted to buy slaves, the big markets literally right across the road in Maryland and Virginia would be happy to sell you some. But look at the glaring contradiction — Federal marshals can (and will, and did) dragoon local law enforcement into catching runaway slaves on the planters’ behalf, but the slave trade itself is outlawed in the Capitol’s sacred precincts, because freedom.
The term “fake and gay” hadn’t been invented yet, but since the Compromise of 1850 was the product of the Very Cleverest Boy of all, it was by definition fake and gay, and you can see it clearly with the DC slave trade ban.
So Very Clever was he, that he torpedoed his own signature achievement just four short years later in order to make a buck. Some Chicago railroad boys had him on the payroll, and while the details of the Kansas-Nebraska Act don’t matter, the principle very much does. Remember “popular sovereignty?” It didn’t matter in Utah or New Mexico; it mattered very much in Kansas, where fanatics from both sides flooded into the territory in order to vote.
Think about what kind of guy would uproot his entire life to move across state lines just to vote on shit, and Bleeding Kansas suddenly makes sense.
Here again, one is tempted to blame the President for not showing leadership, and Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan have well-deserved reps as do-nothings … except again, “doing nothing” was pretty much the President’s job description back then. That’s not to let them entirely off the hook — James Buchanan was very much a Current Year Democrat, in that even though he wouldn’t actually take any action he couldn’t stop shooting his mouth off; you have to get well into the 20th century to find a major political figure who stepped on his own dick as hard and as often as James Buchanan.
Finally, the coup de grace, the Dred Scott decision. I’m going to stop with this one, because even though things like John Brown’s Raid and the Caning of Sumner are important, they follow, as it were, from the logic laid down by Dred Scott. Some kind of Really Bad Shit was inevitable after that ruling; the precise form of the Really Bad Shit was incidental (n.b. the Caning of Sumner preceded Dred Scott (May 1856 vs. March 1857), but they were very much of a piece).
Here again, it’s easy to get lost in the details, so here are the two big takeaways:
First, Dred Scott was decided correctly as a purely legal matter. The issues surrounding the case were as broad as possible, but the narrow issue at law was this: In granting Dred Scott standing to sue in a federal court, the State of Missouri had implicitly granted him United States citizenship, which is the sole prerogative of Congress. It’s in the Constitution and everything, and back then the guys on the Supreme Court actually bothered to read the fucking thing, so they ruled against Scott on those very narrow grounds (from which all else flowed, legally).
But that’s the second big takeaway: Chief Justice Roger Taney didn’t stop there. If you only got Dred Scott in school, you got the stuff Wiki spends most of its time on — the whole bit about Taney ruling that blacks aren’t, and never can be, citizens of the United States. But the truly important part is this:
Now, … the right of property in a slave is distinctly and expressly affirmed in the Constitution. … Upon these considerations, it is the opinion of the court that the act of Congress which prohibited a citizen from holding and owning property of this kind in the territory of the United States north of the [36°N 36′ latitude] line therein mentioned, is not warranted by the Constitution, and is therefore void.
In other words, not just the Missouri Compromise, but the Compromise of 1850, and indeed the very possibility of compromise over slavery, is now officially unconstitutional. Slavery is now de facto legal everywhere in the United States, because any law prohibiting it runs afoul of the 5th Amendment as interpreted by Dred Scott.
What other outcome could there be at that point? Flip the script in 1860 — let the Democrats have their shit together, and the Republicans split three ways. Stephen Douglas is now President, and while that’s a truly horrifying prospect (never, ever let a Very Clever Boy occupy the big chair), the outcome would’ve been the same, or near enough — it’d be the Yankee fanatics in the North seceding, not the Slave Power Conspiracy in the South, but somebody was calling it quits.
Severian, “1846-1861”, Founding Questions, 2022-06-25.
June 25, 2026
QotD: Division of domestic work, 1970s onward
The Women’s Liberation Movement wanted many things in 1970, but one of the most important was freedom from “unpaid domestic servitude at home”.
Again, this is Straight Outta Engels, from 1884. Even back in 1970, we could all yell “Read another book!” Someone ought to rewrite The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State with a few quidditch matches in it; it’d be on the bestseller list until the sun’s a cinder.
Half a century later, most women are still waiting for their freedom. Women still do far more domestic and care labour than men.
I find this extremely hard to believe. So I checked their source, which is a very scientific-sounding site called “The Conversation”. You’ll just have to click it for yourself, since I can’t figure out how to screenshot just the little graphic they have, but if you do, you’ll notice a couple things straight off:
First, this data is from Australia. Which is bullshit, because look, y’all, I’ve seen the Mad Max movies, and nobody’s doing any domestic labor in Australia. Their main settlement is ruled by Tina Turner, for fuck’s sake, and the Prime Minister runs around in a thong and a hockey mask. Sweet cars, though, I’ll give them that.
The other thing you’ll notice is that the “Australian Bureau of Statistics” — I’m pretty sure that’s the motorized hang glider guy — has obviously been having fun with the scalar functions in whatever post-apocalyptic version of Excel they’ve got down there. The bars for “did no unpaid domestic work” look dramatic … but they represent a mere seven point difference. (And do you see what I mean? Apparently 29% of Australian men, and 22% of Australian women, do no unpaid domestic labor whatsoever. By my math, that’s a quarter of the country stewing in its own filth. I know, I know … I’m amazed it’s that low).
The bars for “5-14 hours”, though, show a fractional difference: Women do a whopping 0.3% more. And again, this is Australia, but even if we assume that “unpaid domestic labor” is stuff like “wiping the blood from the somehow intact windshield of the last of the V-8 interceptors”, 5-14 hours is what you might call “the outer limits of normal for a working stiff”. Admittedly I live in a two-bedroom apartment, not a house, but I’m a bit of a neat freak, and “an hour a day” is about all I do. Vacuum the floors and scrub the toilets on Sunday, that’s two hours tops. I’ll be generous and say I spend another 3-4 doing the squeegee thing to my shower walls after I bathe, and loading the dishes in the washer, and giving the counters a quick wipedown once or twice a week, etc.
The real difference comes in the “15-29 hours” and “30 hours or more” categories, and you have to be very, very Smart indeed to find that “problematic”, since those are stay-at-home moms. In other words, they do that “unpaid domestic labor” by choice. Because “the care and feeding of the next generation”, not to mention “the deep, primal satisfaction one gets from seeing a little life grow that you helped create” don’t really count as pay.
Since the 1960s, more and more women have taken up paid employment, but a problem remains: how would their unpaid domestic work be replaced?
Gosh, that IS a problem! And as the Australians have shown us, the answer seems to be “just stew in your own filth”. It’s a solution America’s single gals, at least, seem to have embraced with kamikaze-level enthusiasm. Back in the days, I’d always insist on taking a girl back to my place, because condoms don’t cover the entire body and her place was always, and I do mean always, a certifiable biohazard. I’d rather do a striptease in Chernobyl’s reactor core than do anything in an American woman’s bedroom, and their bathrooms are pits of unspeakable Lovecraftian horror.
Severian, “SJWs Always Project”, Founding Questions, 2022-08-08.
June 19, 2026
QotD: The Prince is a … satire?
Let me back up. The occasion where I first heard the “it’s a satire” thesis was an “advanced placement” History class back in high school. They probably don’t have those anymore as part of the regular curriculum — dat be rayciss — so in case you’ve never endured one, it’s a bunch of mega-nerds who only care about pleasing Teacher trying to do History. For our unit on “The Renaissance”, we had to read both The Prince and More’s Utopia, and do our term paper on one or the other.
Naturally I picked The Prince, and since you all know the kind of kids who were in that kind of class, naturally everyone else picked Utopia. I might’ve been the only kid who ever did his paper on Machiavelli; certainly the teacher acted like she’d never seen one before. We didn’t have the phrase “trigger warning” back then, but that’s what it amounted to — Teacher hastened to inform everyone in the class that The Prince was really a satire, and so of course I was just kidding too, ha ha, because otherwise we were in the presence of very, very, very bad thought …
“Yes, kidding, ha ha ha,” I muttered, because while I obviously wasn’t the quickest on the uptake back then — I should’ve just done the stupid paper on goddamn Utopia like the rest of the sheep — even I could figure out that I was gonna get sent to the school counselor if I didn’t get with the program …
… and that’s when I learned the aforementioned lesson. Kidding? You think Machiavelli’s kidding? Didn’t we just do this whole unit on the Renaissance? Your main man Thomas More was burning people at the stake, for fuck’s sake! And as for the Italians, they were straight whacking people out in church, with the active connivance of the fucking Pope himself. Satire, fuhgetaboudit, that’s Godfather shit, Machiavelli’s as serious as cancer. You just don’t want to believe that people are actually the way they so obviously are, so you’ll tell yourselves he’s kidding … and Teacher will back you up on it, because she doesn’t want to believe it either.
(Meanwhile, I’ll get an A for my excellent “satire”, in exchange for which I will never ever bring it up again or I’ll fail the rest of the semester).
Severian, “End States and Inverted Incentives”, Founding Questions, 2022-06-22.
June 13, 2026
QotD: Ecce BCG
Of course BCG stands for “Basic College Girl”, and thus she can be found at any institution of “higher” “learning”, but the most Basic ones of all go to colleges you’ve never heard of. Jonah Goldberg is a good example, and while I know he’s technically male, his act is classic BCG. He famously — or infamously — went to Goucher College, which is the kind of school that likes to pretend it’s a mini-Ivy, when in fact it’s the kind of school bright-enough but directionless young nouveau riche kids go to when they just can’t kick that drug habit.
[…]
Achieving shockingly high rank right out of the gate is another tell, and I know what you’re thinking, because of course I thought it too: Mark Meadows is 63 years old, and in the world we grew up in, there’s only one way for a straight-out-of-college girl to become a “close confidante” of a 63 year old man. In my experience, though, BCGs aren’t socially savvy enough to figure that out.
Yeah yeah, I know, but y’all, as primal as that is, these BCGs are just weird. They have no social skills whatsoever. Two data points. First, from Hutchinson’s wiki page:
Identified as a “White House legislative aide”, Hutchinson was the subject of a nationally-syndicated AP photograph in which she was shown dancing to the song “Y.M.C.A.” alongside White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany at the end of Trump’s September 21, 2020, campaign rally in Swanton, Ohio.
That is not grownup behavior. No woman who ever hoped to be taken seriously in politics would be caught dead doing that, as recently as 15 years ago. They have absolutely zero idea how they come off to other people.
Second data point: I once taught a night class in one of my Flyover State tours. I had this girl there who was just dying to get to Capitol Hill. She was involved in every possible Poli Sci club, the pre-law club, the Young Legislators (or whatever FNG shit it was), and so on. She emailed me once to say she’d be coming to class late, because she was representing Student Senate (or whatever) in some big to-do the college was hosting for the Governor.
When she shows up to my class, she’s wearing this tight red cocktail dress that would’ve looked trashy on a Vegas waitress. It was slit at the sides and back. and at the midriff. It had sequins, I shit you not. It was all I could do not to bust out laughing. You went to a reception. With the Governor. Wearing that.
They have no savvy at all, y’all. None whatsoever. The invitation she got read “formal attire”, so she wore what she wore to the sorority formal. You could practically still see Chad Thundercock’s handprints on her ass.
And that’s the fourth and most diagnostic criterion: utter, complete, hilarious fucking cluelessness. About everything.
Severian, “Alt Thread: Diagnosing the BCG”, Founding Questions, 2022-06-30.
June 7, 2026
QotD: Undergrad writing
I would always tell students who genuinely wanted to improve that nobody is ever going to fail your term paper for style. Unless you really want to be a novelist — and you don’t; we wouldn’t be having this conversation if you did — pretty much all the writing you’re ever going to do is about efficient communication. Fuck literature, fuck all the tropes of rhetoric. Just lay it out there. Who cares if it’s not a page-turner?
But the few things students are taught about writing in grade school are not just useless, they’re counterproductive, because they focus – for some unfathomable reason — on style. So you end up with crap like this:
This article was very thought provoking and caused me to thoroughly evaluate the idea of gender and the role it plays in our society.
Duuuuuuude … far out!!! It’s not quite as “cosmic” as some of the intro sentences I’ve gotten over the years (one kid said something like “Throughout history, there have been many historic events”), but it’s just filler, very obvious filler, and that’s the very first thing your reader sees. Give me Militarese any day: “At 0500 hours, patrolling near Checkpoint Bravo, 1st platoon encountered an enemy force of approximately platoon strength …” But back in sophomore English, Teacher said that all papers must have a Thesis Statement, and since xzhey never bothered to define “Thesis Statement” I keep getting stuff like this.
Same way with the other crap they teach. There’s the one about never using the same word twice, so I’d get papers with half the thesaurus cut-and-pasted. There’s stuff about alliteration and parallelism and metaphors and passive voice, oh God, the passive voice. I swear, I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Passive voice on fire off the shoulder of Orion. Botched alliteration glittering in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All these moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain, after I’ve had enough beers to endure grading another batch of midterms …
Yeah, you see what I did there. It’s all so, so unnecessary. The point of writing is communication, and in this instance what you are trying to communicate, above all else, is that you have read and understood the assignment. Every sentence I have to read about how deeply thought provoking you found the article is another moment of my life gone, like tears in the rain. The funny thing is, except for the far-out intro, this girl mostly doesn’t have the “style” problem. Her sentences are short and to the point, and most of them are in that nice subject-verb-object pattern that makes me suspect AI, especially coming from a Current Year undergrad.
In my experience, the Kids These Days either give you tweets — often literal bullet points, to the point where some colleagues actually had to specify complete sentences in their essay prompts — or these long, byzantine things that look like really bad parodies of Alexander Pope. If she really does write like that, good! I can work with that. Outline your response next time, making sure that each paragraph contains at least one direct citation from the assignment, and you’ll be fine.
Severian, “Friday Mailbag”, Founding Questions, 2025-12-05.
June 1, 2026
QotD: The progressive concept of an “American”
“Cis” is “cisgender”, the radical notion that your “gender expression” has some systematic relationship to your chromosomal sex. In other words, an “idea” so uncontroversial that it has to be in quotation marks, because try explaining what “gender expression” means to even the most brilliant mind of, say, fifty years ago. He’d laugh right in your danger-haired, tattooed, multi-pierced face.
“Heterosexual” ties in with “cisgender”, in that it means “the observed sexual behavior of 99% of humanity in all times and places, because it is a biological necessity for the species to thrive”.
“Pat” means “patriarchal”, and see above, it’s the observed behavior of 100% of all human societies that have ever existed heretofore. As I like to quip to obnoxious atheists, I’m the only guy I know who really believes in evolution. Ever seen monkeys in the wild? I have. No society is more based than a chimpanzee troop. They’re so patriarchal, Iceberg Slim weeps salty tears of joy at the thought. It’s hardwired.
“White” of course means “chromosomally Caucasian”, and it’s very important to note that of the earth’s teeming billions, White folks are only a small fraction.
“Rayciss” is worth exploring, if only because they never get around to defining it. Do I believe other human subpopulations are inferior to mine? Heavens no. But see above, about being the only guy I know who really believes in evolution. It’s simply a fact that subpopulations evolve in response to environmental pressures. So are some subpopulations better adapted to their environment than others? Hell yes. Not only do I believe this, it’s a stone cold fact, one so trite that they don’t even bother putting it in the biology textbooks anymore.
Severian, “What’s an American?”, Founding Questions, 2022-07-04.
May 26, 2026
QotD: Entropy versus Revolution
They’re simply nihilists, and their nihilism is just a way station to suicide. Their “program”, such as it is, aims at absolute stasis — they want everyone and everything to be exactly one thing, now and forever, because this is the closest to annihilation they can get without being forced to admit to themselves that what they’re really longing for is the sweet release of death. The purpose of all those bespoke sexualities, for instance, clearly isn’t “to find a likeminded person to have sex with”; rather, it’s to make sure you can never have sex with anyone at all.
Ooops, sorry, you only fulfill 459 of the 462 bullet points on the checklist.
Which is weird, I realize, because the “Left” (for rhetorical convenience) are always in frantic motion. But it’s displacement activity. As I’ve written before, you can call it “permanent revolution”, but it’s Isaac Newton’s version, not Leon Trotsky’s — forever spinning in place, going nowhere. So long as they never stop spinning, they’ll never hear the vast emptiness of their own lives. They’ll never have to look their death wish straight in the eye.
The “Right” (again for rhetorical convenience) seems to be locked in a never-ending battle against entropy. That’s what it seems to boil down to. Things fall apart and pass away, and in their breakdown we are robbed of our fundamental dignity. In the end, that’s the only thing worth “conserving” — your fundamental dignity; the only “right” that matters is the right not to be a clown.
One always loses the battle against entropy eventually, but the dignity is in the fight. For the “left”, who have no dignity, the fight is just a distraction, sound and fury to distract from the nothingness that always threatens to overwhelm them … and that they secretly long for.
Severian, “Entropy vs. Revolution”, Founding Questions, 2022-06-21.
May 20, 2026
QotD: “Gilded Age” Robber Barons didn’t have access to what even working-class Americans have now
… but the robber baron knew he needed the serfs. Their relationship was purely dialectical. Without his factory hands, no robber baron. And in a strange but very real way, the higher up the food chain your Gilded Age robber baron went, the more he was dependent on his serfs for his lifestyle. J.P. Morgan is usually credited as being the first guy to become a Robber Baron purely through finance. Carnegie, Rockefeller, all those guys had most of their wealth in financial instruments, of course, but those financial instruments rested on control of a physical product — Carnegie Steel, Standard Oil.
I’m probably being unfair to Jay Cooke, the Michael Milken of his day, but since more people have heard of J.P. Morgan let’s roll with it. Even though Morgan’s wealth was entirely on paper — he was nothing but a securities trader — his lifestyle utterly depended on a battalion of servants. In a very real way, you yourself, right now, live much better than J.P. Morgan did in his heyday. And not just because you have aspirin, antibiotics, and air conditioning, three taken-for-granted things ol’ J.P. would’ve given half his kingdom for. But because you have more time. If you’re hungry, you can open the fridge or the microwave and have all the food you need in a matter of minutes.
J.P. couldn’t. J.P. had to deploy an army of servants every time he wanted a snack, and those servants were constrained by things like “availability of ice” and “when is the fishmonger at his stall”. You’re hungry at 2am, you jump in your car and get some Taco Bell. It takes ten minutes. J.P.’s hungry at 2am and it’s tough titty, J.P., your ass is going hungry. Because even though you’re the richest man in the world and have legions of manservants at your beck and call, Taco Bell just isn’t there. Even if someone had had the brilliant idea to create a Gilded Age Taco Bell, it still would’ve taken hours:
Wake up the manservant. Wake up the groom and stableboy. Hell, wake up the horse, then saddle the horse, ride to the drive thru window … which in this case means “the house of the guy who runs Gilded Age Taco Bell”. At which point he has to fire up the oven, start pounding the tortillas, send his own legion of valets and stableboys and whatnot out to get the refried beans …
And that’s the other thing, J.P. — you’d best not pull that shit too often, because those people know where you live. Not only do they know where you live, they live with you. Literally under the same roof. You want to sleep easy? You’d best not beat the servants too often, buddy.
There’s only so much “class consciousness” one can develop in that world. Oh yeah, J.P. thought of himself as one of the Masters of the Universe, there’s no denying that. But J.P. lived in what was still a brutally physical world, in a way we PoMo people really can’t grasp. If you can’t imagine what it would take to get some Gilded Age Taco Bell, maybe geography will do the trick. Ever seen Gangs of New York? Even if you haven’t, you’ve probably heard the name “Five Points”. The worst slum in America in the 19th century, and 19th century American slums were world class …
That was right down the street from Wall Street. Literally. I am not in any way joking, and if I’m exaggerating a little for effect when I say “J.P. could’ve hit Five Points with a five iron from his swanky digs on Central Park West”, I promise you I’m not exaggerating much. You can look it up for yourself. The main reason the Union rushed troops straight from the Gettysburg battlefield, and no-shit shelled parts of the city with gunboats, during the Draft Riots was because Five Points (et al) was right fucking there, and they might’ve gotten it into their heads to lynch a few Masters of the Universe. Rich man’s war, poor man’s fight, right? Let’s see how you like it, you bankster bastards …
The PoMo “information economy” removes all that. The other day I joked about colleges like Bennington and Goucher. I cracked some jokes, yeah, but I wasn’t really joking. Those places aren’t for us. Wall Street is still a physical location, but it might as well be on the dark side of the moon for all any of us have access to it. J.P. couldn’t beat the servants too hard, or too often. The modern equivalent of J.P. isn’t even aware that he has servants. He just clicks on a website, and stuff appears at his door. Like magic. Hell, it IS magic for all he knows, and he surely doesn’t care, because all that shit is his by right. He went to Bennington, after all. He has achieved full class consciousness.
All of which suggests, of course, that while Marx was wrong about the end state — the State will not, in fact, wither away — he might well have been right about the solution to the “contradictions of capitalism”, if you follow me. And if that makes me some kind of godless pinko Commie subversive, well … I’ve been called worse by better.
Anybody got the lyrics to La Marseillaise in English?
Severian, “On Losing the Cold War”, Founding Questions, 2022-07-02.
Update, 21 May: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
May 14, 2026
QotD: Marx was right about “alienation”
No shit, I’ve seen it happen. And it’s even worse than that, because they think they’re being socially savvy. “Oh, Jayden is in the middle of a conversation with Brayden; I’ll just text him, so as not to interrupt.” But since people under forty are physically incapable of not checking their phone the minute it beeps at them, it’s not just an interruption, it’s an especially obnoxious one … and they have no idea. What we used to call the “soft skills” — the ability to come up to Jayden and Brayden, assess where the conversation’s going, and steer it in such a way as to get Jayden the info he needs organically — are totally gone.
You can test this for yourself. Just don’t answer the phone. Or a text. Seriously, try it. It’s tough, isn’t it? No matter where you are, the fucking thing dings, and you immediately grab for it. It takes real physical effort not to. It’s much, much easier to simply turn it off, and while I’m all for that — indeed, I’m for dropping it overboard in the Marianas Trench, or shooting it into deep space — try leaving it on, and only checking your text messages at a set time. It’ll keep until 3pm (your designated “check message” time), I promise. Or if it won’t — if it’s the wife asking you to pick up a gallon of milk on the way home — then you’ll learn a different lesson, the one about how we use crutches for some reason when we’ve got perfectly good legs.
That’s alienation, in the broadest and most significant sense. Since you are constantly available — since your time is now a commodity, that you’re constantly selling to the lowest bidder — your personal worth is zilch. You’re a message-answerer and milk-fetcher and all-purpose Guy Friday, to everyone, all the time. Even to — make that especially to — the people who supposedly love you, and respect you. Because who cares what you’re doing right now? The important thing is that milk, no?
Severian, “On Losing the Cold War”, Founding Questions, 2022-07-02.
May 8, 2026
QotD: North Vietnamese intelligence failures in the Tet Offensive
… and it didn’t happen, because they, the North Vietnamese, had faulty intel.
The Americans suffered from the “intel to order” problem too, of course, which we in the civilian world call “telling the boss what he wants to hear”. But the NVA had it much worse, since that’s a much greater structural problem among Commies. Indeed, the Americans got at least one high-level defector during Tet — a lieutenant colonel I think — who only defected because the units he was supposed to command in the “general uprising” didn’t exist. They were purely paper fantasies, straight out of some commissar’s head.
And that’s what made [US Army military analyst Joseph] Hovey’s report so easy to dismiss. Hovey himself said it — it looks like they’re planning to do X, Y, and Z, but that would only make sense if they’re making a big mistake about the balance of forces. The US had pretty good intel on the ARVN and the political mood of South Vietnam. But they for some reason assumed that the NVA had basically the same information, so all of the NVA’s calls for a general uprising — which the NVA absolutely meant, and indeed were counting on — were easy for US analysts to dismiss as mere propaganda.
Severian, “Book Rec: Tet, Intelligence Failure”, Founding Questions, 2022-06-30.
May 2, 2026
QotD: Yes, the US Civil War was about slavery
Preliminary: Yes, the […] Civil War was about slavery. I know it’s fashionable for the Very Clever Boys […] to deny this, but that’s the difference between “a grownup’s understanding of complex events” and “being a sperg that should’ve been shoved in a lot more lockers in high school”. There’s a difference between “necessary” and “sufficient” conditions, as well as between “proximate” and “final” causes.
Slavery was the proximate cause of the First Civil War, the sufficient condition. The final cause, the necessary condition, was the same one that causes pretty much all the really nasty wars — two not-dissimilar-enough peoples living too close to each other. It’s the same reason English and Scots have never gotten along (feel free to go re-read Albion’s Seed here) — familiarity breeds contempt, as the old saying goes. They’re close enough to each other that outsiders really can’t grok what the big deal is, which is always a recipe for disaster.
Same thing between the Puritan religious fanatics of New England and the honor-obsessed planters of the Old South. Had the US developed horizontally instead of vertically — if they’d been able to put the Rocky Mountains between them, say — they’d be two separate nations, with fairly cordial relations …
Severian, “1846-1861”, Founding Questions, 2022-06-25.
April 26, 2026
QotD: College Town, USA
It’s not “change” in the sense we understand, and instinctively accept — it’s not “change” in the way the seasons change. It’s directed change — somebody decided to do it. And if it’s not immediately apparent who, or why, we are naturally suspicious. We are “based”, if you will, in the Permanent, so we are acutely aware of the deliberate aspects of the Impermanent.
City life gives you the opposite, indeed overwhelming, sense of Permanent Impermanence. Nothing stays the same; the only constant is change. I remember seeing it in College Town, which was not particularly large, population-wise, but had almost all the “amenities” you’d expect from a major metro. Bearing in mind, as always, that “College Town” is a composite of several different places … but they’re all basically the same, and that’s the point.
The first thing that struck me about College Town — that you see in every College Town, coast to coast — was how shabby it was. Even the brand-new apartment complexes (of which there were many, Higher Ed being a growth industry at that time) all looked dilapidated. The next thing I Noticed was the lack of institutions. College Town had every imaginable “amenity” — exotic cuisine, 24 hour everything — but no playgrounds, no ball fields, no churches. Hardly any schools, despite being pretty good size relative to the surrounding area, because why would there be? All that stuff is for people who actually live there, as opposed to the transients, or even the “permanent residents”, if you will, on the faculty (what an unconsciously telling phrase that is!).
Nobody’s from there, and nobody stays there. Not even the faculty — they always have one foot out the door, no matter if they’re Department Chairs with 30+ years’ seniority. It is crucial to their amour-propre to believe that they’re always about to get the call from Harvard, which in part explains the weird phenomenon of the “faculty ghetto”. They’ll spend a zillion dollars “restoring” a frankly tiny house in the “historic” district, by which is meant “gutting it, and making it as close to a Current Year McMansion as the physical infrastructure can bear”. Then they’ll spend a zillion more on yearly maintenance, when they could’ve gotten twice the house, with the latest and greatest everything, built to spec on the outskirts of town …
… which is five minutes away; it’s not like they’re facing some huge commute (and it’s not like they walk or even bike to campus, and God forbid they take the bus. No, they’d much rather gut or knock down another old building, just to have a garage in which to park the huge gas-guzzling SUV they drive the 45 linear feet to “work”, because how else would they show off how important they are, without parking in their designated space in the one fucking lot in the entire town?).
In other words, they don’t want to admit that they live there — they are, at most, “permanent residents”. There are no public playgrounds, because their one designer baby isn’t going to rub elbows with the children of the few greasy proles they grudgingly tolerate in the absolutely necessary service industries — you know, the mechanics and plumbers and snow plow drivers and such. There are no churches, just one or two Temples of the Current Thing, and only to the extent that a few of them have paraphilias involving clerical vestments. No ball fields, no Cub Scout packs or Elks Lodges or American Legion posts, because c’mon man. A town that size anywhere else would have a Walmart and a Minor League team and a big rivalry game between the local high schools; College Town has head shops and Egyptian-Thai fusion cuisine and DoorDash.
Permanent Impermanence, in other words. Deliberate impermanence. Nothing lasts, nothing can last, nothing should last. There are some people who find that attitude — which I would call straight-out, shit-flinging nihilism — deeply appealing, and … well … there it is.
Severian, “Transience”, Founding Questions, 2026-01-19.
