The Great Schism

It’s been awhile. Welcome back, Aaron. I’ve been on an Orthodox Christianity kick again. Every so often, there’s a compulsion inside my soul to dive into what the Orthodox call the “Great Mystery.” In our world of solve-it-all-now enlightenment-obsessed approach to everything from geopolitics to religion, to Truth Social posts bordering between trolling and blasphemy, the Orthodox sensibilities about faith permit me, in my own mind, to leave things unsolved. I have been silent, almost evaporated from the discussion these last few months because of the war. I hate it. I am disappointed with the current choices in American global rulership. If I am critical of Trump, I am a traitor to the country. If I am critical of Israel, an anti-semite. Critical of the podcast gang, a sell out. It is exhausting and demoralizing how American politics makes people such tribal monsters. It has become the fundamental flaw in our system. The government requires watchdoggery; all governments who aren’t subjected to it have overrun their people. So I remain insistent that no politician is infallible. They all live within a system of tradeoffs and dubiously ethical boundaries, in order to make marginal headway within the exuviae of the good ‘ol Constitution. I have written it too many times to count, but this thing we insist on describing as a democracy is not one, and it particularly isn’t a constitutional republic as the term-nazis insist. This is a strange oligarchy, mixed with the state-run and managed economy. The traditional Kings and Dictators of the past have been replaced by an indescribable web of unaccountability, manifested as a theater of placeholders in Congress, and a vascular-type system of bureaucrats. I find myself more and more resolved that what we have will not hold together, or it will simply because the future citizens will refuse to take the mantle of a fake “democracy” on. Either way, it’s station as an enviable system is changing. It will not remain as a something that can solve the grievances and troubles of three hundred and fifty million people. It’s not that it’s a bad framework, or that the constitution is bad, it’s that the whole thing was never designed for the scale and weight it bears. When Jefferson purchased the Louisiana territory, he thought it would become its own republic, autonomous from the colonial one on the east coast. Neighbors of convenience and with similar interests, but one unbound to one another in a suicide compact that future American generations would insist on and eventual go to war over in the 1860s. What we are in now is the only thing that could have plausibly come from requiring all states and people to mutually live together in such a diverse and radically unique geography. So, when I lose my patience with the political class or their commentators in my moments of frustration, I have learned to lean more deeply on the mystery of the spiritual world that surrounds all of this. It’s my own kind of “leaning” center, and in the hardest moments of watching problems in our world that seem unsolvable, it has served me well. This moment in American history is an odd one. The world is realigning, and I think Trump realizes what is under the hood and is doing what he can to manage the coming discombobulation. I don’t want to give him a pass for his unforced errors of stupid tweets, starting wars, and dictator kidnappings, but I also have a fraction of the information that his team does. The reality that I think is setting in on him and others is that the American moment is actually over. That’s not the crisis that it might appear to be. Certainly, there will be Boomers that melt like a water-soaked Elphaba Thropp in her Flying Monkey castle, but the charade has concluded, and I think the people in Washington know it. I’m probably being overly generous here in this assessment, but the longer this goes on, the more I think Trump realizes that he only has one option from this American collision course with geopolitical forces that have finally come to bear their ultimate burden on the brokest empire of all time. Trump, hopefully, is trying to leave the American people in the best possible position given the massive shift coming. His push at Greenland and Venezuala seem to be about consolidating the Western hemisphere into the last, consolidated, place of influence America can have, and his dealings in the Middle East and with Israel seem to be about damaging China and Russia, in an attempt to set them back economically for the longest time possible, rather than the podcaster speculations of Epstein blackmail or demon possessed control. Trump’s choices seem irrational and foolish, but only from the typical 21st century construct, where America has to win everything all the time to make sure the world remains dominated by the American empire. I feel like Trump has looked under the hood of this once-humming machine and realized almost all of the structure inside is broken and irreparable. America first, given his options, means that you manage the unpreventable decline to leave the people in the best position available, and that isn’t one where the status quo continues. The dollar is dying, if it isn’t already dead. Its tie to the global oil market is failing. Russia and China are calling the debt bluff of the American experiment, and while the entire global system is based on a mutual hot potato of overwhelming debt, China and Russia seem to be saying that the United States has clearly lost its moral authority in managing that debt-based system. In a sane, free market, free of the collusion of governments and corporations, and one that isn’t subsidized to hide the real costs, gas should be closer to $8 a gallon. Gas has been a false marker of the health of the dollar since the oil crisis in the 70s. Politicians know that groceries and gas are the only things they have to keep insulated from inflation. There are simply not enough people willing to raise enough frustrations about other price increases to ever threaten their ability to show up to the theater every day. But the BRICS system threatens all of that. So we see Trump positioning himself to try to realign the West to minimize the impacts of what has become inevitable. This isn’t a “hate America” discussion, but a realization that America has to deal with its past sins of debt and global hegemony. If the Boomer generation could turn off their televisions long enough, they might remember that there was a time when being a conservative meant that the ideology wanted fiscal responsibility in the government. 9/11 obviously changed that opinion for many, but there are still realities that confront the hope-ium that everyone has been indulging in for the last twenty-five years. Systems fail when they go broke, and when they go broke, the realigning happens quickly. It doesn’t mean that America is going to disappear, but it does mean that the rest of the world has had enough of our style of leadership. They want the options to escape our way of doing business and government, and there are simple, pragmatic realities that are facing the United States. Our military, filled with the most amazing men and women, is strangely on the confusing side of the conflict because our weapons, while impressive and technologically superior, struggle to deal with the new kind of warfare that we are seeing in this conflict. We also have to be honest about our own bureaucratic aspects of the military. Just because our men in uniform are amazing doesn’t mean the brass above them necessarily are in touch with the new version of war that the troops have to encounter. It’s also easy to blame Israel for all of this, and to be sure, they have played a part in it by demanding that their interests are inextricably linked to ours. But to concoct a scenario where they are the dominating government of the entire globe is a bit far-fetched to me. Governments are notoriously bunglers. Their ineptitude typical…