Weekend Reading: Everything Old Is New Again
Remember that song about history repeating? It sort of is, in terms of ideas.
This weekend’s set of readings had their original in last week’s readings on Elon Musk and his refashioning of the entire hiring and payment system of the US government. Along the way, Steve Bannon’s opposition to Musk was unavoidable. And along the way, other things Bannon’s been plugging, caught my attention, including this video:
In the video, Bannon defended Trump’s comment that Canada should become the US’s 51st State -and why it makes sense, from a geopolitical point of view. A point of view which Bannon says assumes the next battle for resources between the world’s power blocs will be Antarctica, with its minerals and other wealth now becoming more accessible because of global warming.
Which brought me to An Expert in Grand Strategy Thinks Trump Is on to Something, By Thomas P. Barnet. His reading is,
Three key trends animate the globe right now: (a) an East-West decoupling dynamic, (b) a re-regionalization imperative along North-South lines that brings “near-shoring” production close to home markets, and © a growing superpower clash animating all these “races” — namely, adapting to climate change, winning the energy transition, achieving AI supremacy, etc.
Trump, love him or loath him, sees just enough of this world and the fear it generates to know the right plan of attack.
Trump’s approach to international affairs reflects Americans’ judgment that we are done building a world order — which we’ve overseen from 1954 to 2008 -and now must vigorously embrace an aggressively competitive approach to this multipolar world; in other words, be less the generous market-maker and more the selfish market-player.
The world’s superpowers (U.S., Europe, Russia, India, China) fear one another more and more. We sense an imperative in this re-regionalization/decoupling era — one that screams get yours now before somebody else does!
Europe and the U.S., with Trump’s return, seem destined to complete their conscious uncoupling like two self-absorbed celebrities whose career needs no longer jibe. And just as Russia has sought to put the pieces back together of its empire, we now spot the same acquisitive rumblings within Western ranks.
Trump has long argued that Europe and Canada both “owe” America vast sums of money for defending them for decades against the Soviet/Russian threat. He now implies that America deserves Greenland as compensation for that strategic debt, arguing that we’ll do a better job of developing and defending Greenland than tiny Denmark has ever managed.
In seeming reply, the august British newspaper, The Economist, calls for the EU, having just cut a landmark trade deal with South America’s Mercosur bloc, to now vigorously invite Canada into its economic union. If that deal makes sense for the European Union, why doesn’t it make similar sense for America when it comes to Canada and Greenland?
Together with Alaska (which we bought from Imperial Russia in 1867), Greenland and Canada comprise North America’s “crown jewels” when it comes to an Arctic revealed by climate change. The warming Arctic possesses almost one-third of the world’s remaining hydrocarbon (oil, natural gas) reserves, along with prodigious amounts of minerals (nickel, zinc, rare earths) critical to both national security and the energy transition.
Does anybody think Canada and Greenland won’t need serious help in standing up to Russia and China’s aggressive ambitions across that vast and strategically crucial landscape?
Or how about China’s recent emergence as primary trade partner and source of investment throughout South America? The Chinese will be more than happy to beggar our neighbors of energy, minerals, and food while climate change devastates these vulnerable economies in the years ahead, knowing full well that the vast numbers of climate migrants escaping that desperate situation will head to North America — not China.
Wanting to know more, I found, in turn, one of his lectures which fleshes things out more and it is quite interesting, from start to finish:
Which brings us to fun with maps: Maurice Gomberg’s New World Order Map from 1942 (which I’ve referred to time and again since 2008) already envisioned a world of power blocs, and it’s interesting how similar -yet different- they are to the blocs enumerated by Barnet. His “superpowers” are U.S., Europe, Russia, India, China; in 1942 they were envisioned, broadly speaking, as the USA and Protectorates, the British Commonwealth of Nations, and the USSR, though you can also see sort of sub-groupings: the United States of Europe, the Federated Republics of India, the Arabian Federated Republics, the Union of African Republics, the United States of Scandinavia, and the United Republics of China. The case of India and China are particularly interesting here as they aimed to project what, at the time, were considered the logical widest spheres of interest of the two (one might think the Indian portion would appeal to today’s Hindu nationalists, for example; but in China’s case it incorporated Vietnam and Thailand but excluded the actual bone of contention, Formosa (Taiwan) or the Pacific islands which were viewed as part of the American area of protectorates.
But it seems even that map had a predecessor, which I found through an entry in Worldcrunch, which referred to Technocracy, Inc. and the Technate of America, which described this map:
As follows:
The map envisions much of the Americas and eastern Pacific basin as merged into a single “Technate of America”, to be ruled by a technically skilled, empirically-driven, non-partisan elite. The Technate is shown stretching from Greenland west to the International Date Line and south to encompass the Caribbean and parts of Columbia, Venezuela and the Guyanas. Its territory is colored red — the semi-official color of the Technocracy movement, also seen on its logo — and small, circular symbols indicate “Defense Bases” at its outer boundaries, as far afield as Attu; Pago Pago; Cape Farewell, Newfoundland; and Georgetown, Guyana.
But what about the group that commissioned the map? According to post,
The Technocracy movement had its brief heyday in the 1930s, its leading proponent engineer Howard Scott (1890–1970) and his Technocracy Incorporated, founded in 1933. The movement was ideologically somewhat diverse and fractious, but Scott’s version was fueled by the Great Depression and the crisis of capitalism, quack economics, post-First-World-War isolationism, and an infatuation with Fascist form and ritual. At the core of its ideology was a rejection of the “price system” underlying the global economy, in which money as a medium of exchange determines the value of goods and services and financial considerations are fundamental to all economic decision making. Citing the Depression as Exhibit A, movement adherents viewed this system as inherently unsustainable and predicted a total system collapse no later than 1940.
Technocracy Inc.’s prescriptive program had economic, political and geopolitical elements. At the core was a shift from the price system to what Scott called “an energy theory of value”, in which goods and services were to be valued based not on money but in terms of the energy inputs required to produce them. This in turn would necessitate the abandonment of democracy and the embrace of a technocracy-government by an unelected, technically skilled, empirically-driven elite with the expertise necessary to determine values and make rational resource-allocation decisions. The outward manifestations of this authoritarian outlook had a distinctly Fascist flavor: Technocracy Inc. members wore a uniform of double-breasted suit, gray shirt, and blue tie, with the red Technocracy logo worn on the lapel; drove gray-painted cars; and saluted one another in public.
As demonstrated by the map offered here, Technocracy, Inc.’s geopolitical program was simultaneously expansionist and isolationist. It called for a “Technate” consisting of a union of the nations of North America, Central America, the Caribbean and northeastern Pacific, along with the northern tier of South America. The rationale was that “the natural resources and the natural boundaries of this area make it an independent, self-sustaining geographical unit.” ( The Technocrat,vol. 3 no. 4 (Sept. 1937), p. 3) In keeping with Technocracy Inc.’s authoritarian tendencies, the Technate would ensure its security by enacting a “Continental integration and mobilization”, and “complete conscription of men, materials, machines, and wealth by the government of the United States”, which were to be “placed before all other objectives of the American peoples” ( The Technocrat, vol. 9 no. 3 (Apr. 1941).
Key to this project was the construction of a chain of far-flung “defense bases” along the Technate’s borders, as shown on the Technate of America map offered here. Behind these the Technate would be entirely secure, its economy “self-sustaining” and independent of global trade, and its defenses sufficient to deter would-be invaders. As such, it would have no need to become involved in the conflicts of either Europe or Asia.
In the blog which linked to the article on this map, is this passage on a link to the era that Elon Musk might claim:
Musk himself feels connected to this technocratic movement; as U.S. historian Jill Lepore explains inThe New Yorker, Musk’s preference for using X — a letter popular among technocrats — or number-symbol combinations instead of names reflects this connection (for example naming one son X Æ A-12).
Similar fanciful designations were adopted internally by members of Technocracy Incorporated — including Elon Musk’s grandfather.
We can argue that Bannon, who both admires and loathes Musk, and others are ironically enamored of this world view (ironic because probably not sharing the appeal to Musk, or his forebears, of “an unelected, technically skilled, empirically-driven elite with the expertise necessary to determine values and make rational resource-allocation decisions,” but sharing a kind of neoDarwinian approach to global politics). But what of Trump himself? In a recent New York Times op-ed, Jennifer Mittelstadt asserts that Trump is not isolationist but, more accurately, a “sovereigntist:”
American sovereigntist politics originated over 100 years ago in the moment of profound crisis and possibility of 1919, when the world undertook a referendum of sorts on the surge in globalization that preceded World War I. Nations, increasingly interconnected, were rocked by the halt in trade and migration that followed the war’s conclusion. At the same time, empires collapsed and new nationalist movements emerged or flourished, with the result that some states died and altogether new ones were born.
Amid this dramatic change emerged a proposal for a novel form of supranational government — the League of Nations. As diplomats and lawyers hammered out guidelines, they prompted fierce debate over the purpose of nation states and sovereignty….
In 1919, a group of senators known as the “irreconcilables” blocked the United States from joining the League of Nations. They were backed by a grass-roots movement of patriotic organizations, veterans’ groups and Protestant fundamentalists who argued that the League aimed to usurp American governance. In their words, it would replace the Constitution with world government, diminish America’s unique history and culture, and allow uncivilized, nonwhite and non-Christian states to exert power over its citizens.
So the maps themselves can be read in different ways even as different people perhaps latch on to different details on those maps; but there is enough shared interest -or ambition- to paper over these differences in the quest to obtain and then wield, power. As Worldcrunch puts it,
Therefore, while the maps from Trump’s circle differ in details, they do not differ in direction. Each interprets the Republican Make-America-Great-Again credo less economically than geographically, which is disturbingly new.
But that’s not what’s at stake (yet): it’s about the feeling conveyed in the map legend — the self-confidence of being part of a movement that continues its expansion into eternity and vastness. Utopian maps first work inwardly; they create community and claim allegiance before eventually — or perhaps never — exerting power outwardly.
But what of Trump himself? It’s not like he’s a Bannon who may have read/seen Barnet’s thoughts. But in the Free Press’s Tuesday, 02.11.2025) there’s this glimpse of The Prophet of Trump’s Second Term:
If Buchanan prefigured President Trump’s first-term nationalism, another thinker anticipated Trump’s second-term war against the administrative state and sweeping revision of American foreign policy: international relations professor Angelo Codevilla.
Today’s political vocabulary-”ruling class,” “administrative state,” “Deep State,” “cold civil war,” “uniparty”-comes from Codevilla’s pen. One sees Codevilla’s influence everywhere, from Trump’s reversal of DEI and affirmative action to DOGE’s unspooling of USAID to reductions in the federal workforce to the foreign-policy pivot toward our own hemisphere. Friends and participants in his seminars, such as Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought, State Department director of policy planning Michael Anton, and State Department counselor Michael Needham, serve in the administration. They are busy enacting his critique of America, with unpredictable consequences.
You can read the full 2010 article of Angelo Codevilla: America’s Ruling Class-And the Perils of Revolution, which, at the heart of the article, argues thus:
Never has there been so little diversity within America’s upper crust. Always, in America as elsewhere, some people have been wealthier and more powerful than others. But until our own time America’s upper crust was a mixture of people who had gained prominence in a variety of ways, who drew their money and status from different sources and were not predictably of one mind on any given matter. The Boston Brahmins, the New York financiers, the land barons of California, Texas, and Florida, the industrialists of Pittsburgh, the Southern aristocracy, and the hardscrabble politicians who made it big in Chicago or Memphis had little contact with one another. Few had much contact with government, and “bureaucrat” was a dirty word for all. So was “social engineering.” Nor had the schools and universities that formed yesterday’s upper crust imposed a single orthodoxy about the origins of man, about American history, and about how America should be governed. All that has changed.
Today’s ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters — speaking the “in” language — serves as a badge of identity. Regardless of what business or profession they are in, their road up included government channels and government money because, as government has grown, its boundary with the rest of American life has become indistinct. Many began their careers in government and leveraged their way into the private sector. Some, e.g., Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, never held a non-government job. Hence whether formally in government, out of it, or halfway, America’s ruling class speaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats. It rules uneasily over the majority of Americans not oriented to government.
The two classes have less in common culturally, dislike each other more, and embody ways of life more different from one another than did the 19th century’s Northerners and Southerners — nearly all of whom, as Lincoln reminded them, “prayed to the same God.” By contrast, while most Americans pray to the God “who created and doth sustain us,” our ruling class prays to itself as “saviors of the planet” and improvers of humanity. Our classes’ clash is over “whose country” America is, over what way of life will prevail, over who is to defer to whom about what. The gravity of such divisions points us, as it did Lincoln, to Mark’s Gospel: “if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand.”…
Describing America’s country class is problematic because it is so heterogeneous. It has no privileged podiums, and speaks with many voices, often inharmonious. It shares above all the desire to be rid of rulers it regards inept and haughty. It defines itself practically in terms of reflexive reaction against the rulers’ defining ideas and proclivities — e.g., ever higher taxes and expanding government, subsidizing political favorites, social engineering, approval of abortion, etc. Many want to restore a way of life largely superseded. Demographically, the country class is the other side of the ruling class’s coin: its most distinguishing characteristics are marriage, children, and religious practice. While the country class, like the ruling class, includes the professionally accomplished and the mediocre, geniuses and dolts, it is different because of its non-orientation to government and its members’ yearning to rule themselves rather than be ruled by others.
Even when members of the country class happen to be government officials or officers of major corporations, their concerns are essentially private; in their view, government owes to its people equal treatment rather than action to correct what anyone perceives as imbalance or grievance. Hence they tend to oppose special treatment, whether for corporations or for social categories. Rather than gaming government regulations, they try to stay as far from them as possible. Thus the Supreme Court’s 2005 decision in Kelo, which allows the private property of some to be taken by others with better connections to government, reminded the country class that government is not its friend…
Nothing has set the country class apart, defined it, made it conscious of itself, given it whatever coherence it has, so much as the ruling class’s insistence that people other than themselves are intellectually and hence otherwise humanly inferior. Persons who were brought up to believe themselves as worthy as anyone, who manage their own lives to their own satisfaction, naturally resent politicians of both parties who say that the issues of modern life are too complex for any but themselves. Most are insulted by the ruling class’s dismissal of opposition as mere “anger and frustration” — an imputation of stupidity — while others just scoff at the claim that the ruling class’s bureaucratic language demonstrates superior intelligence. A few ask the fundamental question: Since when and by what right does intelligence trump human equality? Moreover, if the politicians are so smart, why have they made life worse?
The country class actually believes that America’s ways are superior to the rest of the world’s, and regards most of mankind as less free, less prosperous, and less virtuous. Thus while it delights in croissants and thinks Toyota’s factory methods are worth imitating, it dislikes the idea of adhering to “world standards.” This class also takes part in the U.S. armed forces body and soul: nearly all the enlisted, non-commissioned officers and officers under flag rank belong to this class in every measurable way. Few vote for the Democratic Party. You do not doubt that you are amidst the country class rather than with the ruling class when the American flag passes by or “God Bless America” is sung after seven innings of baseball, and most people show reverence. The same people wince at the National Football League’s plaintive renditions of the “Star Spangled Banner.”
Unlike the ruling class, the country class does not share a single intellectual orthodoxy, set of tastes, or ideal lifestyle. Its different sectors draw their notions of human equality from different sources: Christians and Jews believe it is God’s law. Some lbertarians assert it from Hobbesian and Darwinist bases. Many consider equality the foundation of Americanism. Others just hate snobs. Some parts of the country class now follow the stars and the music out of Nashville, Tennessee, and Branson, Missouri — entertainment complexes larger than Hollywood’s — because since the 1970s most of Hollywood’s products have appealed more to the mores of the ruling class and its underclass clients than to those of large percentages of Americans. The same goes for “popular music” and television. For some in the country class Christian radio and TV are the lodestone of sociopolitical taste, while the very secular Fox News serves the same purpose for others. While symphonies and opera houses around the country, as well as the stations that broadcast them, are firmly in the ruling class’s hands, a considerable part of the country class appreciates these things for their own sake. By that very token, the country class’s characteristic cultural venture — the homeschool movement — stresses the classics across the board in science, literature, music, and history even as the ruling class abandons them.
As a kind of postscript on maps and what they represent, two articles help illustrated examples from the Philippine experience.
The first is, The Philippines Isn’t What It Used To Be, which looks at the territory mapped out, visually, by the revolutionary generation, which is different from what Filipinos today consider their national territory.
The second is in my The Philippine Diary Project: Philippine Wartime Views on the Future of Indonesia, China, and Japan. You’ll notice, for example, in the Greenberg map, the expansion of the territory of the Philippines and how this reflects actual proposals and discussions at the time.
Originally published at https://mlq3.substack.com.
