What I'm reading: Andor, homoploutia, Prussia

Gabriel Winslow-Yost, The Revolution Will Not Be Star Wars, NYRB

No spaceshiploads of refugees get turned away by neutral planets, no companies profit by selling the means of the massacre or buying up abandoned properties, no public grows bored of hearing about the deaths. The secrecy around it all protects the galaxy’s inhabitants from any question of complicity. How little, beyond the fashion, it resembles the Holocaust—or, for that matter, the genocide we’ve all been watching, or not watching, for the past year. Disney is in the business of fantasies, and this is genocide as we would dearly prefer it to be.

And how could it not be? It’s Star Wars, after all. The point is not that Andor fails in its effort to depict political violence but rather that, for all the show’s intelligence and skill and ingenuity, major elements of its subject are simply incompatible with its nature. What it depicts most clearly is what Star Wars can’t show.

Branko Milanovic, New Capitalism in America

In contrast to the old-fashioned capitalists, the homoploutic elite feels that it merits its high incomes: they might conveniently forget the capital part of that income, and focus solely on the labor part for which they have studied hard and work hard. Three things are linked here: ownership of lots of capital, high level of education, and a highly paid job. Thus, instead of a class-based society of the old capitalism, we now have an elite-ruled society.

Secretary of Defense Rock, America as Prussia in 1806

Beneath that surface prosperity, however, the foundations were rotting—strategic clarity had vanished, institutions had become performative, and the elite was unable or unwilling to respond to a rapidly changing world. When the reckoning came, it was not gradual but immediate. The Prussian state collapsed in weeks. The lesson, as Clausewitz knew, was that apparent stability is often the most dangerous phase of decline, when a state still looks functional just before the storm.

The civic and intellectual disconnection afflicting American strategy today is inextricably linked to the broader assault on the nation’s institutions...