Last Post

This will be the last issue of The Next American Century.

This may surprise some friends who know I had been intending not to end this effort but to expand it, bring in more voices, even turn it into an online journal.

I am doing the opposite for three reasons.

First, the severe challenges to my health I have recently mentioned demand economizing my energy. For some months, my idea had been that “in a few days” I would be back to normal. That became “a few weeks.” Now it is clear that at best the return of my old self is still some months off. In the meantime, I can work for no more than 2-3 hours a day. And it seems possible that I will never recover 100% of the energy I had as a raw youth of 67.

Something had to go. As I still work for my living it couldn’t be any of my paying gigs, especially the Gilder Technology Report to which you can subscribe here.

The Substack Seduction

The need to set priorities led me to an unwelcome insight about how inefficient a single-author Substack is for me and most professional writers.

For a few very successful writers, the toll collectors and rent seekers standing between them and their readers have long since outlived their usefulness.

If you subscribed to Rolling Stone to read Matt Taibbi, (why else would you?) both you and Matt are better off without the middleman.

For most of professional writers, however, the toll collectors are still quite useful; the rent seekers earn their skim. It is not helpful that Substack allows us to evade them.

I have been making my living as a writer ever since (barely) escaping college in 1978. Since 1980 every word I have written has been bespoke. When, a few years ago, I decided I wanted engage topics beyond money and technology—my bread and butter for decades—I realized I had not pitched an article to an editor since 1979. I had forgotten how.

Irresistibly tempting, then, was a forum from which I could publish without needing any other person’s consent. I could write about anything and say whatever, whenever and not be denied.

Fool! A writer has no better ally than a skeptical editor on a tight budget. How else is he to know whether his latest thought should be unleashed on the world.

Editors should be loved

But it had been so long that I did not know where to start, or to whom or how to pitch. (Editor friends please don’t hold this against me. I was shy of asking for help, not in doubt that you would help if asked.) Thus, Substack and self-delusion.

The need to conserve energy was clarifying. It turned out to be a lucky thing that my health would no longer allow me to waste time writing any piece not demonstrably in demand in the form of a cash offer from a smart editor at a valued venue.

Then, quite unexpectedly, new, valued venues began to emerge. For fear of embarrassing myself I won’t name names before the pieces are accepted and the checks cashed. But I no longer feel all at sea. I am confident that over the next few years I will better serve myself and any readers who care by working on some assigned, paying piece for days (even weeks) rather than indulging myself on Substack for a few hours.

But what about going big?

I still think we need a journal advocating for the Next American Century. Which is exactly why I am not going to lead that effort.

That mission is too important for me to wait, possibly forever, for a return of the energy I’d need to pull if off. I’d far rather persuade others—including several outstanding candidates who subscribe to this letter--of the need and then contribute as I can.

I believe in journals, even in the age of the Net. Irving Kristol was right when he said every movement needs a journal. Journals can bring the right combination of focus and breadth to guide a movement.

And I have experience of success. I conceived the City Journal 40 years ago, on a summer night sitting with my wife in our car on Rockaway Beach listening to “Frank Sinatra Radio” while watching the phosphorescent crests roll in—and raging about what the progressives had done to my city. I pitched the idea to the Manhattan Institute. We launched within months. The City Journal has been published in essentially the form I proposed ever since and has accomplished all I predicted and then some.

The movement we need now, and its journal

I offer two propositions.

Proposition 1: American politics is undergoing a dramatic, and dangerous realignment. In both parties the progressive element has become dominant, even though in both parties the progressives remain numerical minorities. The left progressives are open and obvious. Becoming more clear every day is that the Maggots are also progressives. (Trump himself is a more complicated case. I do not regret voting for him.)

The needed response is an anti-progressive movement, led by good-old-liberals and good-old-conservatives.

I need better definition of progressivism before I can proceed.

Optimism and pessimism are poor words, vague, subjective, even silly. But used advisedly, they suit the current struggle.

Progressives are bullies, impatient with democratic procedure (that Miller person now hints at suspending habeas corpus!) and skeptical of liberty. These tendencies arise from their pessimism. They do not believe free people in voluntary cooperation can sustain national greatness or even national happiness. It is all up to the progressives to tell us what to do.

Telling people what to do tends not to work very well, in part because people will demur but also because telling people what to do cuts their skills, knowledge, brains out of the process. Bullying is informationally inefficient.

As their policies fail, they step up the bullying. They get angry. They start to kill.

Pessimism is murder.

Pessimism is the mark of Cain.

Pessimism is despair of what we can accomplish, and envy of what others do accomplish. After all, since greatness is impossible, those others must have cheated.

The Materialist Superstition vs.

At the root of every pessimist regime in our time, Nazi, Communist, Fascist; in Germany, Russia, China, Japan, Cuba has been the Materialist Superstition, the lie that wealth is matter and that the determining factor of any future distribution of wealth is its prior distribution. The only solution is to kill the wealthy and steal their property.

The Optimists’ Faith

Pessimism rejects the mission the Lord has set for us, to join Him as co-creators of the world.

Co-creation requires two beliefs, call them the optimists’ creed.

1. The created world is abundant, coherent, and intelligible.

2. The tools to unlock that abundance are given to us by the Lord as part of our nature. Our minds are formed to grasp His creation, and His creation is made to be opened up by our minds.

The optimists, the co-creators, believe all wealth comes from the mind working upon His creation. As Thomas Sowell remarked decades ago "The Neanderthal in his cave had all the material resources we have today. The difference between our age and the Stone Age is entirely attributable to the accumulation of knowledge."

Blinded by materialism, the pessimists assume that the prosperity of others is a trick or a cheat. Progressives left and now right assume that anyone more successful than they must have fixed the game. The elites. The globalists. And, inevitably, the Jews.

In the West, antisemitism is pessimism’s most enduring form.

Abel was the first Jew, murdered for the prosperity he made.

Pessimism and antisemitism always rise together as they are doing now on both left and right. Protectionism always harbors Jew hatred. Hatred of immigrants always comes to include hatred of the Jews, the eternal immigrants.

Just at the moment, the Maggots are too busy hating the Chinese to focus on the Jews, but they will get there. The new isolationism will provide the opportunity. (As ever, isolationism is being revived by the arrogance of the interventionists. Thirty years of fighting the wrong enemy in the Middle East will excuse abandoning Israel to the enemy we should long ago have destroyed. No fear: Israel will win anyway.)

Happily, as our “first Jewish President” Trump is well inoculated against this sort of thing. And he would be shocked to hear himself described as a pessimist. But how else could anyone describe Bannon or Navarro? Or the propagandists desperate to prove that laissez faire Republicanism savaged the American middle class and only some progressive brutality can save them?

Proposition 2: To counter the emerging progressive pessimist coalition, we need a journal that will demonstrate as a matter of fact, indeed many, many facts, that the pessimists are wrong, that their errors will lead to tyranny and murder and that they must be stopped. The abundance of facts will over time yield a coherent theory relevant to the current circumstance. But above all we must lay out the facts.

The needed factual campaigns in turn come in two categories, one familiar but currently under-resourced, the other almost wholly new at least in the context of policy journals

1. Combating traditional anti-liberty propaganda. Much of the foul misinformation spewed by the pessimists is familiar—e.g., distorted economic data--and can be refuted by familiar means. The challenge here is that so many from the ranks of liberty have been seduced into or intimidated by Maggotry, that this work is not being done as vigorously as it should be. And though the genre is familiar, some of the arguments are new—all the COTI nonsense for instance--and demand new counterarguments. ALSO we have some new resources on our side. New economists such as Pooley and Tupy--the authors of SuperAbundance—stand out. Their work needs to be exploited more fully.

To this traditional but reenergized work we would add new element:

2. Combating materialist pessimism by the testimony of science and technology. To grasp how technology is powering a staggering, exponential increase in abundance is to grasp as never before the power of liberty.

Technology is driving an accelerating explosion of prosperity, making fully and finally evident the literal truth of what might before have seemed at least partly poetry, as in the quote from Tom Sowell above. In the words of my great friend George Gilder, we now know beyond a doubt that all Wealth is Knowledge and all Growth is Learning. We know this because we can see, we can demonstrate to a degree impossible even a few decades ago, how trivial, how utterly replaceable, how fantastically fungible is any apparently material component of wealth.

Now more than ever the facts show how great a crime it is to interrupt or distort the flow of information by the exercise of power. To use George’s words again, to maximize the signal we need to minimize the noise. Protectionism is noise. Economic regulations of all sorts are noise. Pretending the Chinese created nothing we need and stole it all from us is noise. Antisemitism is a cacophony.

True, at its deepest, the optimism v. pessimism, abundance v. scarcity choice comes down to faith v. despair. Yet faith alone cannot vindicate optimism—or liberty. Optimism demands understanding, including—near the top of the list—understanding of science and the advance of technology.

Science and spirit are on the same side.

Suddenly every important national question: war and peace, military readiness, global strategy, energy, climate, health care, trade policy, the prospects for prosperity, turns on an understanding of the relevant science and the potential of relevant technologies.

The solutions to these question will come from exploring the nexus of technology, strategy, and political economy. This has always been true, but in previous eras technological advance was so slow that its implications became clear relatively quickly. Big changes—gunpowder, steel, railroads, internal combustion—happened but were absorbed relatively quickly. From the first mass application of machine guns in a European war to the first tanks took less than four years.

Today slowness to grasp technology is already inspiring disastrous policies.

This very need to understand current technology also presents an interesting journalistic and economic opportunity. The journal proposed would publish not only “policy” pieces, but articles illuminating the new technologies themselves—and the new companies that are launching them. Not only could these be great pieces, unlike almost any other policy journal ours would have a natural base of advertisers/sponsors.

Did someone request a theory?

We do actually have one, embedded in the name of this Substack: The Next American Century. Our theory is that the nature of creation and the abilities the Lord has given us to perfect it, require us to embrace liberty. Faith and Freedom are as inseparable as despair, tyranny, and murder. As America was first in liberty our only hope is to remain foremost in liberty.

Our journal would have a motto. It comes from John Quincy Adams, but I got it from his biographer Rick Brookhiser. As “liberty is power… the nation blessed with the largest portion of liberty must, in proportion to its numbers, be the most powerful nation on earth.”

Liberty is greatest strategy ever devised for world domination and getting more powerful all the time.

The coming super abundance will most favor the nation most free to embrace it. The first American Century came about because the U.S., among the major powers, was that nation. The idea of this journal would be that we should do it again.

Before I sign off for good, I have one urgent request. If you think this journal is a good idea and have some notion of how it might be made to happen, use either the comments section or my personal email << vigilanterichard@gmail.com >> to share.

“Our” journal needs four things:

• Leadership: I believe that the right persons to lead this effort are reading this piece right now. I could name several of you, but that would be rude.

• Writers: ditto.

• Money. Don’t any rich people read this thing?

• And probably an institutional home. Even with substantial funding of its own, I think the journal might do better sheltered by an existing think tank, with e.g., an existing distribution list and other relevant support.

Assuming not all these can be gathered quickly, Plan B would be for sympathetic Substack writers to start collaborating, combining ideas, articles, subscribers, and resources so as to evolve toward the journal and perhaps attract other resources along the way

That’s it. Although this is the last issue of this Substack, I will leave the archives up. If I can figure out how I will remove the paid subscriber option so the archives will be open to all.

Thanks for reading.

RV