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President-Elect Trump is starting things off with a major bang, announcing his intention to honor the 250th anniversary of America’s independence by sponsoring a new wave of World’s Fairs.
I’ve been very critical of certain aspects of Trump’s first administration, his personality, his leadership style, his viability as a long-term political force, etc. My support for him has always been qualified and half-hearted. So, I have to acknowledge that he’s hitting pretty much exactly the right button to get me genuinely excited and inspired less than one full day into his budding second regime. Just a few months ago I lamented the ways that the Online Right™️ was disappointing and alienating me. I expressed a desire for a new political coalition that would revivify the sort of ideology and political culture which produced the World’s Fairs of the 1890s.
Well, I’m still far from convinced that Trump’s larger coalition is worthy to carry forth that vision; between liberal states openly defying or subverting the vision and purpose of the project on the one hand, and tasteless red-state hobbits serving up mediocre chintzy slop on the other, there are plenty of potential pitfalls facing this project. (It’s also not exactly unlikely that the United States will be embroiled in a serious shooting war by this point, which would render the whole thing fairly moot.) However, I want to give him very sincere and vociferous credit for this idea; between this and the fact that he (or possibly, by that point, his Vice President) will preside over the next Summer Olympics, Trump will have the opportunity to genuinely glorify this country and contribute to a cultural renaissance. Whether or not he makes the most of such an opportunity is anyone’s guess, but there’s no part of me that can even entertain the idea that a Kamala Harris administration would have been a more capable steward of such a momentous occasion.
I'm only now just reading this post, but I think you misinterpret the Nietzchean pole of the Online Right, which is dedicated toward reforming Morality in a eugenic direction. This does manifest as a glorification of paganism, Aryan conquerors and the like, which (correctly) regard that thumos as fundamentally eugenic in nature. It was violent, and it was eugenic.
And there's a big difference between pirates and barbarian warlords! With the latter representing an undeniably violent but Civilizing force of nature, and the former actually representing a slave morality, or slave revolt in opposition to Civilization. I can't say I've ever seen the Online Right glorify pirates, as much as relate them to a force, if anything, Semitic in nature- in contest against civilized behavior. This dynamic is exuded by any Hollywood production which is careful to contrast, i.e. the Pirate culture with that of the British Empire. There's a conflict there, and Nietzsche is not on the side of the pirates. Nietzsche is on the side of the British Empire, and Hollywood is on the side of the Pirates.
So I think you misinterpret the Nietzchean perspective. The Nietzchean perspective is- how do we reform Morality to orient Civilization in a eugenic direction? And you seem pretty aligned with that being the operative question of the day. You say you don't want to live under the Ubermensch, but the Ubermensch is the man/men who accomplish that task of reforming Morality, or as you acknowledge, casting off the slave morality that rules over us.
Nietzsche also directly compares Merchant Morality to Pirate Morality, calling the former a refinement of the latter:
I just found that part of your comment interesting because in my experience the Nietzschean Right are the only ones who interpret pirates in popular culture as a symbolic glorification of counter-civilizational slave morality.
I think this difference is absolutely fake. Both are anti-civilization.
This is also nonsense. Mercantile trade is a vital part of actual civilization.
Ultimately this comes down to the fact that I do not believe that our society had become so rotten and degenerate that we need violent men to conquer and remake it. I believe that the current institutions we have are quite sufficiently well-equipped to accomplish eugenic ends without extreme violence and predation - hallmarks of all barbarian warlords - being necessary at all.
I'm really curious as to what exactly you think the Roman Empire was except tribal warlords that conquered the Italian Peninsula and then put pen to paper formalizing their rule? Ditto for literally any Empire you would regard as civilization? Especially the United States of America?
Certainly that is the primordial beginning of Rome. The Roman conquest of most of Italy took place several centuries before the blossoming of Rome into a proper empire, though. So yes, one can point to any empire as having its roots in barbarian warlords, if one chooses an arbitrarily long time frame. The Anglo-Saxons who conquered the post-Roman Britons were textbook barbarians, but that doesn’t mean that the refined and mature imperial civilization of Britain was equally barbaric.
I think Nietzsche and the Online Right are correct to point to a profound difference, a moral and even genealogical difference between the Anglo-Saxons who conquered a continent and Pirates who harrassed the forces of civilization out of bitterness and desperation owing to their low status. Nietzsche is correct to identify the former, as it percolates into Civilization, as a Master Morality and rote piracy as a Slave morality.
As a Nietzschean I find it abhorrent to compare the Anglo-Saxons to Pirates. One was building civilization, the other was trying to undermine it.
What aspects of pre-1066 Anglo-Saxon culture do you find particularly impressive or admirable? They strike me as no better or more civilized than any of the other mystery-meat Germanic tribes who kicked around the ruins of post-Roman Europe for a few hundred years before they figured out how to do Civilization again. The Normans were at least a more refined and literary people given their great level of integration with the continent.
And the Lombards and Ostrogoths didn’t? I mean, what are we talking about here? The armies of illiterate savages who sacked Rome were actually a civilizing force, but the pirate captains and their crew who harried the Caribbean were anti-civilization? What is the difference between these classes of people, other than the boats?
King Alfred passed a law for universal (free male) literacy in about 800: https://cpercy.artsci.utoronto.ca/courses/1001Guthrie.htm and Old English was the second vulgar (of the common people) European language used in widespread writing after the fall of Rome (the first was Old Irish).
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The fundamental disconnect is that you don't see what Nietzsche interprets as a continuity between the ancient barbarian conquerors and noble classes of civilization. You play the game of "oh I love the United States but I disavow the Anglo-Saxon conquest of the Indians, sorry we were sooo barbaric for doing that!" Nietzsche related the future aristocracy with barbarian conquerors. The Pirates were not a "future aristocracy" they were a bitter underclass! The Romans, the Greeks, the Anglo-Saxons, they were Noble and the pirates were not Noble. Simple as.
The word "Aryan" denoted and was synonymous with "Noble", pointing towards an ethnic self-conception of these barbarian conquerors as Noble. The point being, the "barbarian conquerors" should be viewed as proto-Aristocrats, because they were across everything we regard as Civilization: the Romans, the Anglo-Saxons, the Aryans, etc. They actually became the upper and ruling classes of the civilization you hold in high regard.
Not so much a civilizing force as a cleansing force of a civilization that decayed under dysgenic forces. And yes, those barbarians warlords did become the future aristocracy, particularly in Northern Italy.
The entire idea of a Pirate is as an inversion or ressentiment towards The Aristocract. The Anglo-Saxon, Viking, Greek, Roman, etc. is the aspirational aristocrat. Their genealogy actually composed the forces of civilization.
I absolutely do not say this, and in fact I have said the opposite numerous times on this very website. The society which conquered the Indians was at a significantly higher level of development than the tribes it subjugated. Thats the opposite of barbarism. More importantly though, it would be nonsensical for me to say such a thing anyway, because the Anglo-Saxons didn’t conquer the Indians. The English did! The Anglo-Saxons were a bunch of disunited, barely-literate savages. I note that you did not answer my question about which elements of their society you find impressive.
It took many intervening centuries of savagery before the English were anything like a real Civilization. The Wars of the Roses are every bit as pointlessly brutish and uncivilized as anything we see in war-torn Africa today. The “continuity” between the 6th-century dirt-farming tribespeople whom we call “the Anglo-Saxons” and the British who created the first globe-spanning Empire is so tenuous as to be entirely a matter of academic debate. Duke Wellington is as far away from the Anglo-Saxons as the Anglo-Saxons were from the early Iron Age.
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It's a great legacy building opportunity for Trump. My advice: go as big as possible, to the point of even building an entirely new city. It would also be a great time to announce a manned mission to Mars.
Historical nugget: Philip the Arab, emperor of Rome, will always be remembered for his celebrations of the 1000 year anniversary of Rome in 248 AD.
First I've heard of him. That you described it as a "historical nugget" somewhat gives away that it's not very significant.
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None of the barracks emperors of the 3rd century (with the possible exception of Aurelian) are notable enough that the average classically educated liberal elite (ipse dixit) can remember their names, and even among the ones who can remember Philip the Arab, his foreign policy is more notable than his millennium celebration. 3rd century Roman history is sufficiently remote from the culture war that I would consider Wikipedia trustworthy, and it gives the celebrations one line in Philip's article.
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Donald Trump did rejoin the Bureau International des Expositions (the governing body for worlds fairs) after Obama left, but they will have to be heartily bribed to allow him a world’s fair in 2026 given their calendar. He can of course host one without them, but that tends to result in other countries not showing up, which is a big part of the fun.
He doesn't want the World's Fair, he wants an American exposition similar to some of the great World's Fairs, with the states showcasing themselves instead of countries.
I do think it’s cool when each country has a pavilion, though. Would be great to have China, India, etc there.
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The Twitter duped you. This video is a year and a half old.
Goddammit! This is is what I get for posting right before bed. Well, I still want to give Trump credit for this, since I had not seen this proposal previously, and I hope that he sticks with it now that he will be in power to do so.
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Is it an AI video? If so, it's the best I've seen (well, subject to the 'how do you know elephants are good at hiding in trees?' problem). I can't find a single off frame or weird verbal cadence.
It’s not AI, he just said it a while ago.
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