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The Long View

The Long View 2007-10-15: Kurdistan & Armenia; A Failure of Theory; The Return of the Fantastic

John mentions in passing here something that didn’t make much of an impression on me at the time, but sticks out now: Literary modernism actually had to exert a great deal effort for several generations to delegitimize the fairy tales and minatory stories that people ordinarily prefer for their

The Long View 2007-10-12: Doris Lessing, the Zombie Continent, Orthodox Revival

The birth rate in Poland did tick up a bit, but in overall terms it was pretty small compared to the decrease over the twentieth century. Doris Lessing, the Zombie Continent, Orthodox Revival The more interesting Nobel Prize award of recent days is not the one to the Goracle (only

The Long View 2007-10-07: War, Demography, & Belgium

While demography does have interesting things to tell us about the shape of history, it is of not much use in isolation. For example, Europe having gone through a population explosion in the nineteenth century certainly enabled the mass conscript armies of that era, but it didn’t determine them.

The Long View 2007-10-02: Gore's War; Dragon Party; Blimp

The prophesied re-alignment of American politics never quite happens, probably for what are fundamentally tribal reasons rather than policy preferences or ideology, which are probably downstream of a more durable identity for the average person. A party that would be both inherently stable and would do best in general elections

The Long View 2007-09-27: The Real EU; Christian Jacobinism; Credit for Iraq; The Unwatchable War

I sometimes wonder what John J. Reilly might have made of the Trump presidency. It is quotes like this one that give me some clues: Maybe, but it is not at all clear that the shredded and discredited wreck of the Republican Party can benefit from the implosion of its

The Long View 2007-09-24: Danilevsky; Demographics; The Syrian Desert; Cumbey

As John points out here, it probably shouldn’t have been surprising that Russia would eventually revert to her historic pattern of Church-State relations, but the twentieth century had some rather dramatic events that obscured that pattern for a time. And “eventually” can sometimes be a very long time. Along

The Long View 2007-09-21: The Fall of Empire; Board of Estimate; Future Follies

John J. Reilly makes an aside here, borrowing from Mark Steyn, that a large part of the world currently enjoys a perfectly reasonable standard of living, approximately equivalent to Portugal, which is likely no American’s idea of a hellhole. The numbers tend to be a little hard to wrap