SOME INSIGHTFUL COMMENTS FROM A FRIEND: “Without making apologies for the leadership class anywhere, I would note that we appear to be at a system-maximization plateau. Things go on until they can’t, and we are at the point where they can’t. The default approach in any context is going to be a series of increasingly extreme efforts to extend the status quo. We are at the point at which those efforts are underway — globally, not just in the United States — and contending with their antagonists who recognize the imminent cessation of the status quo and wish to hasten it, without a comprehensive vision of its successor. Final phase will be the overthrow of the status quo married to a comprehensive successor regime, but that’s nowhere close. The transition is going to take some years, and it will be difficult in the extreme.”

Flashback: “To understand events around the world today, one must think in terms of the class struggle.” “Around the world in the postwar era, power was taken up by unelected professional and managerial elites. To understand what’s going on with President Donald Trump and his opposition, and in other countries as diverse as France, Hungary, Italy and Brazil, it’s important to realize that the post-World War II institutional arrangements of the Western democracies are being renegotiated, and that those democracies’ professional and managerial elites don’t like that very much, because they have done very well under those arrangements. And, like all elites who are doing very well, they don’t want that to change.”