'Twould appear that old Oswaldo hasn't been reading---or understanding---his Churchill. (You know, the one who claimed that Democracy was an absolutely freaking awful form of government---only W. was able to say it in only a few pithy words.)

We've been there, done that, and survived to live another day to confront even more vile, dastardly villains. But then, Spengler must really get off on this stuff. Otherwise, he'd've chosen a different moniker.

(And what sells better than wise and eloquent projections of gloom and doom, and our increasingly degraded civilization?)

OJ:

Nice analysis.

Nation States offer a degree of certainty.

Market-States offer a higher degree of opportunity and uncertainty.

Herd animals have a low tolerance for uncertainty and will do anything, including running off cliffs, to avoid it.

The media hasn't replaced the discredited left. The left has brilliantly co-opted the media over the past 85 years, in tandem with accomplishing the same result in academia. My sense is this was, historically, the most successful execution of subversion accomplished by the Soviets, excluding China.

With our essentially 45/45 percent political polarization, the Fourth Estate has gained unprecedented political power.

The media was just as anti-Clinton and is as anti-Blair as it's ever been anti-Right.

Seems to me the Western government is also at the end of its financial rope, especially in the U.S. Well, if not at the end of the rope, certainly toying with a devastating tangled knot. That is because the governments have too many masters all at the trough looking for a new source of their financed coercively at the expense of others financial security and liberty. The media covering this on the side of the financial markers appears woefully ignorant or indifferent to the sorry reality that much of U.S. fiscal and economic policy is in denial of economic gravity... That, or they are simply oblivious.

My guess is, as with most any successful nation, eventually you come to believe that you cannot fail simply because it seems so unlikely.

That and a dime will get you nothing.

Anti-Clinton? You need to get out of your Time Zone more often.

The only reason we aren't discussing how President Algore's third term policies will affect the upcoming '006 elections is because the press covered for both Clintons at the expense of the Dems in rest of the government.

What financial rope? Our deficits are minor in historical terms, especially for a time of war. Check Britain's debt after the Napoleonic wars, ushering in the Pax Britannica, or ours after WWII, ushering in the American Century.

Gore would have won if he'd not run as a part of the discredited Left. He repudiated his own and Clinton's Third Way legacy.

Mr. Judd, Your terminology has left me a bit confused. You equate, parenthetically, the nation state with the welfare state, and claim that both are losing relevance to the entity known as the market state. Surely though, your new term (I have not encountered it before) market state, preserves the idea of national sovereignty -- that is, I see an international trend favoring the nation state system (as it is traditional undestood, i.e., no confluence with the idea of welfare state) over the transnationalist movement (world courts/international law and one world government (the U.N.). The transnationalists don't have a Chinaman's chance of their vision coming into being. The nation state system (rooted in culture, langauge, borders and shared history) will continue. I suspect you are calling it the market state system because the role of government in these soverign nation states (the stewardship/nanny role) has outlived its relevance in citizens lives. You are speaking of nation states, moving forward in an increasingly anti-transnationalist world, that are transitioning from nanny states to market states. Please correct me if i have misunderstood.

Mr. Savage:

No one is more transnationalist than the Right, which is eagerly turning over national sovereignty in the field of trade. Nor is anyone a greater threat to traditional state sovereignty, insisting on the right to ignore the sovereignty of anyone we disagree with -- Afghanistan, Iraq, North Korea, Iran, etc.--and make them conform to the universalist norms we espouse.

The precise idea of a transition from nation-state to market-state comes from Mr. Bobbitt's book and he indeed means that government is ceasing to promise to provide for all pour welfare and promising opportunity instead.

------------------------------

-INTERVIEW: with Philip Bobbitt (Borzoi Reader)

Q: I know that at one point the subtitle was The Long War and the Market-State. What do these phrases mean?

A: The “Long War” is a term for the conflict that began in 1914 with the First World War and concluded in 1990 with the end of the Cold War. The Long War embraces the First World War, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War, the Korean War, the War in Vietnam and the Cold War.

The Long War can be understood as a single conflict fought over the constitutional issue of what form of the nation-state—fascist, communist or parliamentary—would succeed the imperial states of the 19th century.

The “market-state” is the latest constitutional order, one that is just emerging in a struggle for primacy with the dominant constitutional order of the 20th century, the nation-state. Whereas the nation-state based its legitimacy on a promise to better the material well-being of the nation, the market-state promises to maximize the opportunity of each individual citizen.

Q: What is changing in the wake of the Long War, as the market-state emerges?

A: As we move from the nation-state to the market-state, deterrence and assured retaliation cannot provide strategic stability because threats to the state today are ubiquitous and easy to disguise. We cannot deter various novel forms of mass destruction because of the indeterminate sources of such attacks. The strategy of nuclear weapons cannot protect the critical infrastructures—including the virtual infrastructure of public confidence and security—of the new market-state. This will not eliminate reliance on weapons of mass destruction, however. It might even bring about conditions that make their use more likely.

We can devise doctrines and institutions that are capable of providing common goods for the new society of market-states. These common goods include organizing expeditionary forces to destroy terror networks, developing shared missile defense systems, providing security guarantees as a means of averting weapons proliferation, resisting the regionalization of trade, and creating markets in education, environmental protection, and public health. (Failing to do so, we will set the stage for a cataclysmic war in the early decades of this century.)

Q: You argue that the Long War is an “epochal war” that, like earlier such wars, is leading to a constitutional transformation. Does America’s current (and highly unconventional) war fit this prediction?

A: Very much so. The current conflict is one of several possible wars of the market-states as they seek to open up societies to trade in commerce, ideas, and immigration which excite hostility in those groups that want to use law to enforce religious or ethnic orthodoxy.

Q: Is the current war unique or is it a reversion to a period of stateless brigands and mercenaries that preceded the era of the modern state?

A: I think it is not simply a reversion. States make war, not brigands; and the Al Qaeda network is a sort of virtual state, with a consistent source of finance, a recognized hierarchy of officials, foreign alliances, an army, published laws, even a rudimentary welfare system. It has declared war on the U.S. for much the same reason that Japan did in 1941: because we appear to frustrate its ambitions to regional hegemony.

The media was just as anti-Clinton and is as anti-Blair as it's ever been anti-Right.

oj. Didn't you mean to put a question mark or an exclamation point at the end of the sentence above? You surely don't mean it as a declarative sentence.

Why not?

If his campaign was supposed to be a repudiation of Clinton, why didn't he (or the Left in general) dump Clinton and Clintonism when they had their chance? A President Algore who'd have been in office since a Clinton resignation shortly after 20 January 1999 could have easily run and been reelected twice by running the same campaign that got him so close against Bush. Keeping Clinton in power was the worst mistake the hard Left Dems made. (And a sign their derangement predates Bush.)

Because it's not true.

Gore didn't deviate to the Left until his only challenger was Bill Bradley in the primaries. He was fatally hurt by the Party's weakness.

"Bill Clinton lacked the courage of his convictions"

heh, heh, "convictions"..good one.

Right on regarding Gore. He was more of a party man than Clinton - but he was also more of a bully, which is why he wanted to thrash Bradley so hard. It showed throughout the general campaign, and then again in the aftermath. And it is why his concession speech had to be as gracious as possible - anything less, and he would have been marked as Nixon (or worse).

The media was not so much pro-Clinton as it is (and has been) anti-Republican. However, the failure to ever confront him over Juanita marks them, along with their ontological inability to confront him on his later statements about pursuing Osama with all his might. Just like the senators who could (should) have voted to convict, knowing that there were never 67 votes overall.

It was, of course, NBC that publicized Ms Broaddrick and the media meme of Wag the Dog that diminished the attack on Osama.

OJ --

The financial rope has to do with the trillions of promised benefits and the vastly over extended U.S. consumer and soon to be recessionary economy's ability to finance it. When it hits is to be seen, but soon enough we'll have issues like we had in the 1970s when we had to default on the dollar by removing it from the gold standard entirely.

That's silly. The "overextended" American has a houshold net worth of $50 trillion and demographic trands mean we will asily be able to afford even an unreformed welfare state, of which there is no prospect.