Dave's Daily Dose 2/25/2022

"Russian Warship, Go Fuck Yourself" Edition

This week, the opening shots of Cold War II were fired.

This fact is unmistakable. We are in a new geopolitical era, just like we were on September 12th, 2001.

Unlike all those years ago, it’s not as immediately clear to we Americans what we need to do. On 9/12, we “knew” we needed to retaliate, and boy did we ever.

Today, not so much. Time will tell whether this turns out to be a wake-up call to the GOP’s establishment class, which has spent all these years trying to ride the tiger of its insane base and propaganda complex. But for now, none seems to be in the offing. We are a country divided, just like we were when Germany invaded Poland. It’s easy to romanticize the accomplishments of The Greatest Generation in the fullness of hindsight, but then, as now, our grandparents and great-grandparents faced an even more virulent, more empowered version of the same hateful, odious alliance of domestic and international fascism whose pathetic-yet-dangerous successors we simper about today on Twitter.

Ironically, international communism was feeling pretty high and mighty as well back then.

But the enemy we face today isn’t communism or fascism. It’s the singular species of monster that hid behind those two diametrically-opposed names. It’s what Noah Smith this morning called “The Tamerlane Principle”. It’s the law of the jungle. It’s what we here have been calling the zero-sum nature of reality. The plain fact is, brute force can always be used to take from the weak and give to the strong. We are the ones who need to be strong enough to defeat it, while also rejecting the law of brute force. It’s not about merely protecting the weak — I’ve seen those who let this “sheepdog” mentality go to their heads, and guess what? They’re just as bad as the fascists. In fact, they’ve ended up being the ones supporting the fascists today!

The fascist — or, like Putin, the imperialist — is the one who insists they are defending the weak. The liberal democrat — small L, small D — is the one who rejects the rule of brute force to begin with. It’s not about being strong or brave enough to win the fight, it’s about being the one who has the moral courage to end the fight, and say “This is enough. The rule of brute force must stop.” The moral courage to risk losing the next round, or the battle of public opinion, to those who revel in brute force — because you know that failing to reject it makes you no better than men like Putin.

Guys, level with me here. This is the shit that our grandparents were trying to warn us about in all those comic books and sci-fi adventures they wrote. Star Trek? Star Wars? The MCU? Those were morality plays in disguise, based on their and their parents’ experiences staring directly into the face of evil, as well as looking upon the horrors of its aftermath. In happy times, I can sit here online and jokingly call Batman a wimpy little bitch for not killing the Joker from time to time, but the truth is that for Bruce Wayne, vigilante extraordinaire, it was the only thing keeping him from being the Joker¹.

Reality is zero-sum. That’s unavoidable. Even the Buddha acknowledged that in his Four Noble Truths, in a way. But reality isn’t completely² zero-sum. We can, through our words and actions — the only things that truly separate Man from Beast — make our own little bubbles of positive sums. The laws of thermodynamics say about as much — we exist in what’s merely a bubble of temporarily decreased entropy.

But, to zoom back out, this is it. It’s on us to defend liberal democracy. Officially. It’s not WW3, like the various naïve idiots on Twitter are trying to tell you right now. But it is a Cold War. Things are going to change. We are going to be put to the test. The nice, soft bubble of liberal democracy we thought we lived in will have to be defended. I said earlier this year that Donald Trump succumbing to a lifetime of shitty health habits before the 2024 GOP convention will probably be a ‘dodged bullet’ on a level which the Western world hasn’t seen since Attila did the Romans a favor and died before he could finish them off. But as a student of history, I’ll be astonished and amazed if Cold War II magically fizzles out before costing thousands, if not millions or billions, of lives — and it brings me zero pleasure to say that.

In fact, it terrifies me. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to die for democracy. I’d much rather, to paraphrase Patton’s famous words, make these authoritarian bastards die first.

Next week, we’ll dive into just what Cold War II means for the future, and try to “see around the corner” towards the things that the zeitgeist is currently missing.

1. If you can’t recognize the Jokerhood in Donald Trump, well, I can’t help you, and I kind of wonder how the hell you got to this Substack anyways.

2. Or maybe, “thoroughly”?