QUESTION ASKED: American Weimar or American Hapsburg?

Above all, the typical affluent young American, the sort who in a more stable time might have thrown in his or her lot with the bureaucracy or a management job in the Mittelstand, the corporate heart of the economy, now resembles no literary figure so much as Ulrich, the protagonist of Robert Musil’s 1913 novel The Man Without Qualities.

Ulrich is a forerunner of our college-educated millennials: morally enfeebled, sexually frustrated, professionally stunted. He has acquired enough sophistication to see through the forms of politics and social life — ‘critical thinking’, as the imposters of our schools call it — but not enough conviction to act in a way that might improve his life by bringing him into authentic contact with ‘reality’, which he knows is somewhere out there but cannot touch.

Musil never finished his novel. But Hitler, who rode the failings of Weimar all the way to the top spot, eventually gave the Ulrichs a purpose. The American future won’t be Weimar, but late-Hapsburg: a dual monarchy, divided between itself and within itself by nationalism, decadent with corruption and lassitude, scapegoating Jews because it cannot accept its own mediocrity, and waiting for the historical intrusion that will free it from the slow spiral of decline.

Read the whole thing.

Earlier: Weimar America?

If the polls are right, we’re about to elect our equivalent of Field Marshall von Hindenburg, in the form of a 78-year-old with obviously failing mental capacity whose career in any case has shown him always unable to resist the blandishments of the left. Biden is, at best, a transitional figure to the complete wokification of the Democratic Party, and the further extension of the administrative state that is its preferred instrument of rule.

How good and hard do Americans want to get it for the next four years? We’re about to find out.