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PaperclipPerfector  14hr ago (text post)   2760 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 24, 2025

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Great piece. I especially liked this section:

Mary Harrington recently observed that the Trumpian revolution seems as much archetypal as political, noting that the generally “exultant male response to recent work by Elon Musk and his ‘warband’ of young tech-bros” in dismantling the entrenched bureaucracy is a reflection of what can be “understood archetypally as [their] doing battle against a vast, miasmic foe whose aim is the destruction of masculine heroism as such.” This masculine-inflected spirit of thumotic vitalism was suppressed throughout the Long Twentieth Century, but now it’s back. And it wasn’t, she notes, “as though a proceduralist, managerial civilization affords no scope for horrors of its own.” Thus now “we’re watching in real time as figures such as the hero, the king, the warrior, and the pirate; or indeed various types of antihero, all make their return to the public sphere.”

I very much agree that most of the energy Trump and his supporters thrive on is archetypal, or "vibes" as is it less formally called. Generally just the idea that there is a band of courageous heroes fighting stagnation that makes it seem as if nothing is possible, that heroism is dead, and that everything in our lives is managed. I am very much a part of this energetic movement even if I am sometimes a bit concerned at where it will end up.

200-300 years of Caesarism says Spengler.

Though that's supposed to be gradual, so we probably are some decades into it now.

We’re seemingly at the first Triumvirate- Trump, Musk, Vance.

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