Home
Creators
Search Recent Random
Posts
Search DMs Popular Hash Lookup Tags Random
Importer
Import FAQ
Register Favorites Keys Review DMs Logout
Community
Telegram ThePornDude
Home Creators Posts Import Register Favorites Logout

/503/ Effervescent Decadence in the Third Modernity (Patreon)

Published:
2025-07-31 23:14:23
Imported:
2025-08
Tags:

Downloads

  • 503-review-july.mp3

Some files exceed the archive size limit and weren't saved: 1 file. Please note these limits are in place to keep this site running long term, without costing a fortune. You can favorite the creator though, certain milestones increase the limit.

Content

On the end of the end of history and what comes next.

Phil is back on the pod, talking with George and Alex about the big themes of the podcast. In particular, we look at a recent essay in Foreign Policy by historian Christopher Clarke called "The End of Modernity".

To what extent was the 1989 moment as significant in Beijing as Berlin?

Is Trump actually Stalin (but in a good way)?

Is Russia the revisionist power? And if so, in what regard and what are the consequences?

Who says the choice is between "liberal democracy" and "authoritarian populism"?

Then, we take your questions and comments from the past month.

Links:

The End of Modernity, Christopher Clarke, Foreign Policy

The End of the End of History: Politics in the Twenty-First Century, Bungacast, Zer0 Books

Into the Abyss, Ed McNally, Tribune

Files

Comments

Davka Smolah Collective

This "End of Modernity" piece is postmodernist liberal trash and if this is the best the so-called "Left" can put up then I honestly find it more plausible that Trump is leading an about-face and reversal of the world-historical automobile to RETVRN to modernity and modernization.

jkjkjkj

I find Clarkes scaremongering about Russia silly but there is a certain degree of defensiveness that Phil has about russia that I find equally dishonest. There has been a long standing trend of many on the left to present Russia not as a nation which desires a large (and possibly expanding) imperial sphere of influence but as a victim of western imperial military aggression and frankly that’s just pop history slop that doesn’t actually stand up to scrutiny. Yeltsin famously told Clinton to hand Europe over to Russia in the early years of his presidency and the point Phil brings up about Kosovo is undermined the minute one remembers that Russia pursued its own Kosovos 7 years before in Georgia and Moldova. This is before even getting into the attempts by Russia to pressure the CIS states into establishing a CIS military infrastructure under russian leadership in the 1990s (ie: not a neutral institution but an outright alliance). arguments made by mearsheimerites about nato expansion are typically even more hackish, as Russian interventions in Moldova, Georgia and Ukraine have always preceded efforts by those governments to join nato, not succeeded them (this was the case in Ukraine when the maidan government explicitly vowed to continue neutrality after losing Crimea in march of 2014 and Russian involvement in Donbas was taken as the turning point for a pivot to nato and is even moreso true in Georgia and Moldova where NATO wasn’t even relevant in the 1990s). this also depoliticizes Russias demands towards all these countries in it’s near abroad (in the case of the Minsk negotiations for instance, Russias policy was to push for a “federalism” plan that would have de facto made the Donbas part of Russia while de jure maintaining it within Ukraine with a veto over national policy, thus giving Russia a direct veto over all Ukrainian national policy making, thus turning Ukraine into a de facto puppet state). Making demands like this is not a simple need for security, it’s an obvious overreach made out of imperial ambitions that if anything risks Russian national security by antagonizing countries that would otherwise be happy to be militarily neutral. It’s fairly clear to me that Russian leadership views its neighboring countries as rightly puppet states to its interests, and any nation that is not fully acting with in its interests is a “Russophobic Nazi state” (funny enough, even the burns cables from the Obama era found that Putin hated Yanukovych, partially because he saw him has incompetent and partially because he saw him as insufficiently deferential to Moscow). Even the issue of nato ignores that Russia was offered a position in nato by Clinton and Putin was the one who turned it down, specifically because he felt that the process of conforming with its requirements was humiliating for and unbecoming of a great power like Russia

Roberta

Please do produce an episode on bad historical analogies. We need it.

Pier Paolo Tamburelli

the Trump/Stalin thing is just that both are defensive strategies by powers that believe they are overstretched. And that is also a reason for “stability” 1945/91: there has never been a world power so defensive as USSR, not even the Habsburgs. Even the Afghanistan war, they did to prevent afghan communists to get crazy and end up like in Iran (which btw proves they were right). USSR was such a stabilizing power.