Why Don't We Live in a World of Four Hundred Nation-States?

Those who have actually read the work of theoreticians of the information age like Alvin Toffler may remember its view that the centralized, sovereign, nation-state was an entity befitting the supposedly passing industrial age, which would prove itself exceedingly ineffective and irrelevant in the information age, a lumbering dinosaur (with the dinosaur the more lumbering the bigger it is), as other actors took a larger part in political, economic, social life--international organizations, and non-governmental organizations, and multinational corporations to name the more obvious. Indeed, those who trafficked in such visions commonly expected that many of the states of the time, including such developed, affluent, stable Western states as Canada, Britain, Spain and Italy, would be torn into smaller pieces by secessionist movements, and the stripped-down city-state would make something of a comeback as thriving urban centers relieved themselves of burdensome ties to their hinterlands, giving us a very different-looking map of the world, with the list of nation-states it presents drastically increased, perhaps risen to four hundred, perhaps much more than that.

Of course, this is not what happened--and in spite of an era of endless crisis managed with extreme incompetence by those who hold power. Rather what has been at issue has been a profound overestimation of the information age's "dynamism," and the associated fantasy that location, natural resources, territorial control, scale, were ceasing to matter in a world where the small but agile, and the flexibly networked, were fitter to survive than old-fashioned government, a belief that was partly a matter of technological hype, but also, given the trend of that theorizing, the libertarian contempt for government.

After all, consider what has been, rather than what the proponents of the information age imagined would be. As far as international organizations go perhaps none has been more powerful than the European Union--and its limitations have only grown more evident all the time. While on paper it represented an economic space of comparable affluence to the United States, and had infringed on the sovereignty of its member states in ways that have made it deeply popular, actually faced with financial crisis in 2007 that entity, absolutely unequipped to rescue its portion of the trans-Atlantic banking system, had no choice but to turn to America's Federal Reserve for $10 trillion in short-term loans. Meanwhile those who imagined that the organizations of "civil society" could replace the welfare state or the regulatory state have learned otherwise in an era of mounting social and ecological stress, such that those who are serious about redressing such problems, contrary to the foolishness of Third Way-peddling pseudo-social democrats and corporate claqueurs such as Thomas Friedman, still look to the public sector for solution precisely because it has means, and because it can command. And multinational corporations show themselves at every turn hopelessly dependent on not just the public goods but the outright subsidies supplied by those states out of other people's taxes, which they could not afford themselves--as that aforementioned financial crisis reminded everyone--while the mania for privatization has proven to have distinct limits. (Given the choice between paying a private military company to fight the next oil war, or having the tax-paying working people living under friendly governments foot the bill, which do you think the occupants of the executive suites prefer? Meanwhile it's no coincidence that much as it may have outsourced America still has its Defense Department, rather than "Admiral Bob's Global Defense.")

Indeed, consider those predictions of Canadian, British, Spanish, Italian breakup. All four of those countries remain entirely intact, the splitting away of Quebec and Scotland and Catalonia and Padania seeming no closer now than it did a half century ago--with the same going for the rest of the world, with the anomaly of Eastern Europe notably connected with the nomenklatura of its governments having decided to dismantle their own countries for the sake of stealing whatever they could from their publics (very successfully), with the process pretty much running its course in a not quite two year period extending over 1991-1992. Contrary to what many a Western analyst predicted over the following decades, no Russian break-up followed the Soviet one--all as the list of genuine city-states has not grown at all. Back then we had Singapore and Monaco and Vatican City, and now we still have . . . Singapore and Monaco and Vatican City.

The result is that with only a very few marginal exceptions (East Timor, the last act of the Yugoslav break-up in the independence of Montenegro, the formation of South Sudan) the map of the world in 2025 looks pretty much like the one of 1995, with this, again, less different from that of 1975 than the hawkers of information age had many anticipating, which throws into sharp relief just how much its champions got wrong. Meanwhile, if the world order appears anything but stable it is not because of signs of late realization of what such theorists predicted, but because of the old industrial age rules, and what they mean for the largest and most powerful states especially. Motivated by the same old concerns of elites for their narrow economic interests, and the power of the states on which they rely, pursuing their "national interests" in a world where location, resources, control, scale still matter, they are not above fighting to redivide the world in ways which would change the lines on the maps--and as the horrors in Ukraine show, doing it through the same old industrial warfare that fashionable military theoreticians not so long ago told us had become passé.

Kevin Phillips on Financialization and Decline

I suppose that few these days encounter theorizing the "rise and fall of great economic powers" outside a university program or contact with the associated scholarship but it was more common to do so once upon a time. Thus did Paul Kennedy become a bestseller with a book about that subject in the late '80s, while in the earlier part of the century Republican strategist Kevin Phillips brought such arguments to that part of the popular audience that reads really serious books on public affairs (rather than just elite gossip and the rants of their preferred flavor of Talking Head), arguing for a particular variation on the theory (tying the great power cycle to particular energy regimes that had seen the Netherlands and Britain rise and fall in the past, as an oil-addicted America was at risk of doing) in 2006's American Theocracy. Two years later he related what he had written to the then just emerging crisis spawned by the combination of deregulation, loose monetary policy and financial "innovation" within an increasingly internationalized financial system in an ever-more financialized economy in Bad Money.

In an interview promoting the book Phillips said that Bad Money was his last about the political and financial affairs of the present, and that in his revulsion at the present state of things he was relieved to turn back from that to (I quote from memory, but here it goes) "People who deserve to be in the history of books," in contrast with the present-day elite that "deserve to be nothing." Hearing that I thought Phillips was sincere but probably wrong--that he would go back to writing about the present again soon enough. However, it turned out that this was exactly what he did. If the gravity of the crisis proved such that Bad Money got an update his next book was 1775: A Good Year for Revolution, while so far as I can tell he did not produce another book directly addressing contemporary affairs in the decade between that book's release and his passing in 2023. Still, it is all too easy to imagine what Phillips would have had to say about the post-crisis, Great Recession-mired, America in which the development of everything he had denounced so forcefully for so long continued unabated.

Of Finance and Decadence

I remember decades ago first encountering the cyclical theories of the rise and fall of great economic powers--the patterns those theories' proponents held to be evident across the history of such different polities as the city-state and thalassocracy of Venice, the Netherlands in its Golden Age, the United Kingdom in more recent times.

One development oft-noted as part of the cycle was how these powers' once-flourishing industrial capitalism became increasingly "financialized."

Those discussing the matter were stronger on registering the tendency than explaining it, but one thought I have had has been that industrial success provided both the capital and the need for a sophisticated financial system. Afterward the reality that real-world value creation with all its physical and temporal limitations cannot compete with "making money from money" from the standpoint of ease, speed, scale of gains (at least, until those gains turn out to be just so much paper); and the fact that the way of life of an aristocratic rentier is so much more alluring than the life of a bourgeois industrialist or merchant; meant that financial activity had a way of coming to prevail over industry in business, in policymaking, in the economy as a whole. It also seems plausible that the process was helped along by how, as conditions change, and the likely very specific advantages that made a country a great industrial success vanish, industrial success gives way to stagnation--for even if one is not prepared to go so far as to acknowledge the tendency of profit rates to fall that goes back at least to Adam Smith in the classical economics tradition, the fact remains that industrial success inspires imitation and even counter-measures, as technology and other circumstances change, so that old titans inevitably, and usually much sooner than they expect, find themselves at a disadvantage. (Thus did the Dutch United Provinces create the world's first modern economy, but then a bigger United Kingdom unburdened by the need to defend a land border against a hostile military superpower, with better access to the world's oceans, and massive surface deposits of bituminous coal in an era in which the steam engine was becoming really useful--and as a result of its already exploiting those coal deposits, the most developed transport infrastructure to be seen in the region--increasingly have the advantage.)

On the social and cultural side the process also has its implications. Particularly obvious is that you get a bigger gap between poor and rich in a financialized economy--because where industry means high-productivity jobs for the many, finance means vast paper profits (and whatever it is that paper wealth's holders can cash them in for) for a few, the more in as this usually means not producing but taking what others have produced. Meanwhile those who have wealth become less inclined to any "enlightened" conception of their self-interest, showing themselves less far-seeing, as they become more indulgent of themselves and less ready to make any concessions toward the have-nots as in their ever greater sense of entitlement they contrive to lay their hands on ever more by any means necessary, and then show off what they have--making the "Puritan" virtues of "hard work," delayed gratification, restraint all look ever more like sanctimonious claptrap in circumstances where the winners are playing by very different rules, and life that much harder for those who would refuse those different rules. Indeed, there is a sense of degeneracy in the air that, in the Victorian version of all this, had "race theorists" claiming to detect an atavistic resurgence of the facial features of cave-men in slum-dwellers, and the habits of the worst of slum-dwellers in the lifeways of mansion-dwellers. (To put what one noted observer of the time into more contemporary reference, in its way of getting ahold of money and its pleasures alike the financial elite is nothing but a pack of Jerry Springer guests up on society's commanding heights, as another observer notably sensitive to the contrast between industrial and financial capitalism was moved to write of the survivals of barbarism in "the leisure class.") Reflecting this, while the great realist Balzac made his enduring mark on world literature portraying such a cultural moment (the highly financialized world of the Orleanist monarchy), it seems more characteristic of its mood that it throws up figures like a Baudelaire. Naturally at such times there is a widespread sense that "This can't go on"--but go on is what it often does for a long time, until it can't, by which time everyone caught up in this is really, really in trouble.

What the CPI Doesn't Tell Us

The sorts of economic commentators who are given the kind of media platform from which one can reach an appreciable audience are famously averse to any sort of long-term thinking about how the public is doing. They think in terms of quarters, not of decades--with the result that they tend to ignore long-term trends that are highly inconvenient from the standpoint of those who prefer to paint rosy pictures of how the economy has been doing.

Consider, for example, what we find when we use that most common inflationary measure, the Consumer Price Index (CPI). We see that if, when adjusted using the CPI, the median male income has had its ups and downs over the last half century or so, it has not risen appreciably--every rise followed by an economic downturn that knocks it back down so that any further "rises" are just a matter of years-long recovery, with wages likely to be barely back up to what they had been before the next "recession" knocks that income back down again, again and again.

Of course, this truth being inconvenient many a champion of the status quo dismisses the use of the CPI as producing an overly "negative" picture, "exaggerating" inflation, and so obscuring real gains, all while they suggest that many a gain may simply not register in the numbers. "What about your cell phone?" they say. "Hmmmm? Hmmmm? You didn't have that before so clearly you're better off and should shut up now, pleb."

Alas, there is a stronger case that, far from exaggerating working people's problems, the CPI itself produces an overly rosy picture of the situation. Perhaps the full value yielded by our electronics is not registered in the economic statistics (though I think such claims at best exaggerated), but there is also a vast range of other goods about which the same cannot be said. What does it actually cost to buy a home and keep it (paying the tax and maintenance and insurance), for example, or alternatively, rent a home--especially one in which parents can raise children decently, within tolerable commuting distance of a job that can pay for such a home? What does it cost to own and operate the vehicle they will use to make that commute (especially in the absence of a viable alternative in the form of public transport), or pay for health care, or cover the cost of supporting themselves without a collapse in their standard of living when they are too old to work at anything like their current job with its demands, or pay for a college education for their children? When we actually dig into these matters what we find is that, far from holding steady, the purchasing power of the median income has halved or worse with respect to every one of these essentials over the past half century--the public has got significantly poorer when its situation is measured by the only yardstick that counts in the end, its ability to buy the goods it needs to live, in a way the CPI grossly underrates.

What the Complaints About How Hard it is to be Famous are Really About

It is a commonplace that the famous complain (ceaselessly) about the downsides to being famous. How complete strangers may be inappropriately familiar with them because they deludedly think they know them, even though they don't. How googling themselves they will find people saying nasty things. And so on and so forth.

The complainants often being unintelligent, inarticulate, unreflective, they tend not to explain themselves very well. The complainant isn't complaining about fame, really. What discomfits them is fame on very particular terms. What they really complain about is being famous enough for others to know them, but not having enough power to not have to care what those others think, so that they suffer a measure of exposure for a measure of privilege, but do not feel really and truly secure and protected and comfortable.

To cite an easy Hollywood example, studio heads are famous--in cases, famous enough to have their doings well-reported in the press, their faces known (and even get badmouthed a great deal online as they outrage fandom again and again and again and again and again and again as they crassly, grubbily, exploit franchises of which they know and understand absolutely nothing). But one doesn't often see them complain about "being famous." It's the actors who complain--because they are more visible, and less protected, than the Suits in the executive suites, a lot less sufficing to destroy their careers than the Chief Executive Officers whose principal "skill set" is losing their companies' money, then claiming nine figure compensation packages for having done their shareholders the favor.

Why People Can't Stand Hearing Celebrities Whine About "How Hard it is to be Famous"

It is a commonplace that celebrities often complain about the less attractive aspects of being famous (or rather, fame on the very particular terms on which they enjoy it).

It is also a commonplace that many have little patience for the complaints.

Some of the reasons for this impatience are the same as the impatience that many display with complaint generally, in all their ignobility--the idiot bully's instinctive pouncing on any utterance of anything that smells of dissent to beat it down, the sneering of those who know not morality from moralizing, the perverse thrill some derive from displaying callousness toward others.

Such human refuse are not rare. Indeed, they seem to comprise most of the pool of people you'll meet online. However, there seem to me to be reasons for the intolerance more specific to this situation. There is the reality that the complainants often are clueless narcissists oblivious to how many in the world have it far worse than they do; how the complainant is so often self-important rather than really important; how easily they could just walk away from being famous if they find it so unbearable, in a way that people generally cannot walk away from the vast majority of things that are making the miserable miserable.

There is also the fact that in whining about being famous they are apt to crap all over the desperate dreams of nobodies who believe their sole hope of a life worth living is to become famous themselves--without which, what is left to them?

And there is, of course, the fact that the complainants are apt to be doing all this in the course of cashing in on the very fame they complain so much about; whining about how hard it is to be famous in a ghostwritten book they are selling on the basis of their fame, from which they hope to realize more money than their readers are likely ever to see in their lifetime (not least, should they actually write a book themselves).

Remember Paul Flart?

Back in 2018 an individual working as a security guard in a hospital recorded videos of his flatulations and, using the name "Paul Flart," posted the videos online for six months. At that point Monsieur Flart "went viral" (or so we are told). However, rather than achieving his declared aspiration of "making a living off of farting," he seems to have, besides losing his job as a result of his notoriety, to have subsequently slipped back into obscurity going by how little information has been made publicly available about him since.

Still, if he did not quite achieve his "dream," it seems to me that Paul Flart is nonetheless highly symbolic of the culture we have been living in for at least these past hundred years--this his particular form of the grab after celebrity that, as Upton Sinclair observed a century ago, seems to many of those enduring a working class existence the sole chance for something better (however small that chance).

It especially seems to me symbolic of the Internet--literal flatulence summing up well most of what one finds online, and what the vast majority of web users gravitate toward, helping to make it the intellectual wasteland that it is, as all those who have dared to offer (or seek) anything else in expectation of an audience have learned to their cost and, I do not doubt, frequent embitterment.

Is There a War on Independent Bloggers?

Far from being a situation where those who "work hard" may reasonably hope to make steady progress, those who have been "independent" bloggers for very long are likely to have experienced repeated setbacks as, due to reasons of which they have been told nothing, the traffic they laboriously built up collapsed to nearly nothing--and had to be laboriously built back up again. Thus they never get ahead, while the reason for their not getting ahead seems to them to be their being in the Kafkaesque situation of having been judged guilty of crimes they have not been told under laws of which they know nothing except that they are changing all the time, as indeed those who have so judged them insist that it is right they be told nothing. If we explained how the algorithms work, the Search Engine Overlords say, people would actually know what they would get punished for and so abide by the rules in order to avoid punishment--and we can't have that, can we? It would be totally at odds "with giving users the best possible experience!"

Going by what they actually see online it would seem to them that to the Search Engine Overlords "best possible experience" means the constant infliction on the web user of the sites of parasitical scum trying to shake them down for their money, clickbait trash, and spamdex pages of exactly the kinds that their highly touted algorithms are supposed to keep from offending the Internet user's sight. Indeed, those told that the search engines punish "low quality content" and self-promotion they found that there is a double-standard at work--in which the search engines are catering to the well-funded and "brand-named" as against the rest, whom the executives of the Search Engine Overlords themselves openly compare with the contents of a cesspool, with this extending to indulging the low-quality content and self-promotion of the Big Sites, not least in their outright selling visibility (advertising, after all, the revenue stream for the search engine owner). This is complimented and reinforced by the pseudo-good citizenship of the responsible executives who insist that they seek to promote "authoritative" sources and guard against the much-derided "fake news"--with, of course, "authority" equated with the well-funded and brand-named, and "fake news" equated not with the lies that a media machine effectively the propaganda arm of the powerful has spewed ceaselessly through its disgraceful history, but those outside that lie-spewing machinery, all as the standard by which they judge the "fakeness" of the news deriving from that source is not that of "realfact," but of "goodfact," as determined by masters whose brazenness in exercising their power makes a mockery of Progressive-era fantasies that "professionalism" would set everything wrong with the media aright.

Still, if it has been established over and over again for many years that the web's dynamics, and those of the media machine, have both left the independent bloggers hopelessly outmatched in the competition for eyeballs that we call the "attention economy"--and to the extent that they have managed to get noticed at all been so to the advantage of the Established (in spite of the right's complaints it is the left that suffered worst from how the web and the media work, from the Big Tech's censorship-that-does-not-speak-its-name)--the fact remains that even if they have greatly favored them, those in power can never be comfortable with the fact of a mass of people presenting their opinions to the world at large without their communiques or their persons having been vetted by their Ministry of Truth because it is simply too large and unruly a thing to ever be a safely integrated, controlled and reliable part of the Media Ecosystem as they would like it to be, and so an uncertainty and an annoyance they need no longer tolerate, to go by their actions as they set about making the web approximate their ideal for that ecosystem (pretty much the online equivalent of '90s animation classic Phantom 2040's Maximum Era).

In the circumstances it does not strike me as being at all an exaggeration to speak of the mainstream media, Big Tech and that Establishment opinion which views the public's speaking up and finding any sort of audience with extreme distaste generally as waging a war against independent bloggers, and indeed having done so for many, many years now--and which should also be regarded as a war on free speech, the real war on free speech, and a war on democracy, long-escalating and increasingly making headway such that, going by what many say of recent "Helpful Content" updates, there now seem to be grounds to wonder if those fighting the war on bloggers are not now approaching their clearly yearned-for Victory-Bloggers Day.

Back when the vaporware hustlers, sci-fi power fantasy addicts and aspiring Führers of Silicon Valley were clumsily concealing their true natures behind their crudely made and ill-fitting countercultural masks, and the news and entertainment media performing their role of obediently repeating the goodfacts of the powerful to a public for whose intelligence it has never shown anything but the most acid contempt, the promise of a free and open and democratic Internet made for not just a marketing tool, but good public relations (as seen in those ridiculous commercials where Big Telecom slapped contemporary-sounding covers of '60s hits by bands like The Rascals onto "power-to-the-people"-themed commercials pushing their crappy services onto the consumer).

Nowhere near so many bought this garbage as some would have us believe, of course. Certainly any leftist worthy of the label, all too aware of the hard realities of "inequalities in resources, infrastructure, class power" between groups, was unlikely to be taken in, while even so "safe" a figure as Thomas Frank had his first popular success with a book tearing apart the stupidities of "market populism." Still, the mainstream being what it is the propaganda for those stupidities was everywhere, as the media that reached a broad audience on the whole treated them with great deference for many, many years.

All of that has since palled, and the fact that those who championed that fatuous cyber-utopianism when it was useful have long since seen it as being in their interest to turn against it in the way described here, making sure that the really effective Means of Communication are in what those in power would consider to be safe hands as the public listens and obeys rather than talks back. And so just as elites talk up democracy when convenient (as a club with which to beat regimes they disapprove for other reasons) they spend their time and energy trying to defeat democracy in actuality, as seen in how where they cannot wholly deny the public the franchise they contrive ways to nullify it, so that just as you have your vote but also find that "nothing ever changes," you will still have your little blog--but no one will ever see it, as in the process whatever measure of democracy we had online fast vanishes.

If the Information Age Never Happened, Where Does That Leave Us?

While few remember this today--at least in part, I suspect, because many prefer that it not be remembered--the "information age" was supposed to entail a transformation at the civilizational level comparable with the transition from an agrarian world to an industrialized world. This was supposed to be because of a radical substitution of "INFORMATION!" for every other economic input that was to make said information ever more the foundation of productivity, wealth, power and devalue tangible assets like land, minerals and (unskilled) human labor by comparison--"dematerializing" the economy in a manner that drove Newt Gingrich's "guru" Alvin Toffler and Reagan administration house intellectual George Gilder to, with their coauthors, declare grandiosely in the opening words of their would-be "Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age" in 1994 that "[t]he central event of the 20th century is the overthrow of matter" as "[t]he powers of mind are everywhere ascendant over the brute force of things," and make very clear that they have in mind exactly what Toffler predicted ). Exemplary of what this meant in more concrete terms was Toffler's prediction in a book he published just a few years before putting his name to that document (1990's Powershift) that by 2025 the information age civilization would have replaced the industrial--one feature of which would be its having shifted away from industrial-style fossil fuel-burning to running on renewables.

Obviously, this did not happen. If many heeded Toffler, Gilder and company's pontification about the overthrow of matter one would have done better to heed instead what Madonna said about how we were "living in a material world," as we still do now, a fact underlined by how in 2025, far from an energy transition having been completed, it is not even clear that is properly beginning, the makeup of our ever-burgeoning "energy portfolio" having scarcely budged from what it was when Toffler was making his predictions, with this only the most obvious way in which our economy has been very far from "dematerializing" in that way Toffler predicted, and which would have been the case if "matter" and "the brute force of things" had been overthrown. However, it was not so easy for the champions of an imminent information age to back away off of the idea of an information age, hoven, however it originated, given how they had pressed into the service of a particular propaganda responsible for wide public awareness of the concept (thus could Jerry Seinfeld's neighbor Newman threaten him with the fact of his control of "INFORMATION!")--whose propaganda is made all too clear by the mention of such names as Gingrich, Gilder, Reagan. They simply had too much invested in it to let it go even as it lost credibility, with one result their lowering the bar for the "information age" from civilizational transformation to people simply having gadgets that access the Interweb, with, ironically, the economics of those gadgets endlessly reminding us how material their existence is. Thus, in contrast with the Tofflerian vision that had the "INNOVATION!" of the INFORMATION! Age using our ever-growing "knowledge" to find in the abundant and cheap raw material satisfactory or even superior replacements for the rare and costly, we hear ceaselessly of the need of those gadgets for copper and other still more exotic elements, not least those that actually get lumped together in discussion as rare earth minerals. Thus do we hear ceaselessly not of the radical economies we are achieving in the power consumption of these devices, but of the immense "carbon footprint" of what we do with our computers, with some worried that the reliance of artificial intelligence research on copious amounts of electricity dependent on our fossil fuel-guzzling energy base will by itself be enough to derail our extremely belated, glacially slow (and by those interests that have power, ferociously resisted), progress toward a "net zero" world.

Of course, all that being the case raises the question--if the Information Age, the proper Information Age that was the cause of all the fuss, never happened, then where does that leave us? The obvious answer is that when it comes to what really matters we remain squarely in the Industrial Age, with all that Age's ways of operating and thinking, with its constraints and rules and contradictions and problems that we not only failed to transcend because, again, the Information Age never came about, but which have actually worsened since that time when Toffler argued for the Information Age as our way out of them. One may argue why this has been the case--whether there was nothing to the information age but delusion, hucksterism and cynical political gamesmanship from the start, or whether the policies governments followed in the name of the information age were exactly the thing to prevent such an age from ever being properly born by making the envisaged and required radical technological progress less likely. However, whichever explanation we favor, that the Information Age did not happen is indisputable, and acceptance of the fact indispensable to our understanding our present discontents--and considering what options we may have for dealing with the unhappy situation with which they face us.

Of the Politician's Rhetoric of "Sacrifice"

Political hacks of a certain kind love to speak of "sacrifice"--to tell the public that it must "sacrifice" for this or that end. For balancing the government's books. For the sake of "growth." For the sake of a war.

In doing so they remind us of their essential illiteracy and dishonesty. After all, what does the word sacrifice mean? It means one's giving up something they have that is of value to them--as when people who live by animal husbandry sacrifice the livestock that is the basis and measure of their wealth to propitiate a deity. This means that for us to speak of sacrifice the sacrificer must offer up the thing themselves, acquiescing in the demand; the thing being sacrificed must be theirs to be sacrificed; and the thing of theirs that they sacrifice must be something they regard as valuable.

When governments tell their public that they must "sacrifice" by having their health benefits or their pensions cut, or by paying more taxes, they eliminate the element of choice for the public--because, after all, the public does not make that choice, their government does. "But isn't their government run by their elected representatives?" those who have civics textbook ideas about democracy actually existing in those states whose political Establishments love to call them such will retort, and of course, those who insist upon claiming evidence of a public "consensus" behind everything that office-holders do.

As a practical matter what the public is apt to have is a government that, elected within conditions highly controlled by the elite, was voted for by only a minority of the public in even "landslide" circumstances (looking at Britain today, remember, only one in five eligible voters cast their ballot for Keir Starmer's Labour), and proceeded to behave in a manner that broke every promise it made to its public scarcely a month earlier in a Manifesto that was itself a rejection of virtually every pledge Starmer campaigned for the party leadership on a betrayal and line of policy that public is apt to highly disapprove, with this so much a constant of recent years that the electoral process enjoys ever less legitimacy in the eyes of the public. Indeed, from France to South Korea it seems to be becoming routine for the heads of government in so-called democracies to in the course of transacting what ought to be ordinary government business illegally invoke emergency powers for the sake of imposing programs entailing "sacrifice" because the opposition to them is such that they cannot implement them in any way at all consistent with even the slight and debased democratic norms that have been allowed to prevail until recently.

Looking at such a situation it seems safe to say that while one can imagine a context in which a government which is really representative of the public one can speak of that public's collectively choosing to sacrifice--but in any situation actually evident in such countries today it would seem that, no, the public at large isn't choosing. Rather others are choosing for it, in contradiction of and even in defiance of its preferences as they show themselves "generous with other people's things"--as it happens, the things of those who have least (such governments rarely call for "sacrifice" on the part of the rich, and even more rarely exact it). One can and should add to this that as the functionaries of those governments speak of "sacrifice," in "sacrificing" the well-being, and even the freedoms, of their country's citizens they themselves do not feel themselves to be giving up a thing of value--having no regard for those citizens' well-being and freedoms, and not even trying very hard to pretend that they do for as long as anyone can remember (indeed, these politicians, who have been constantly been attacking these things in the most open and sanctimonious fashion for many decades now, often seem grateful for the excuses to step up the attack that prompt their calls for "sacrifice")--yet again making their speaking in terms of sacrifice an absurdity.

The result is that even if their "leaders" are too obtuse to understand their misuse and abuse of simple words in their own language (such is what one now gets from the so-called "highly educated" that idiots of elitist mind love to talk about), the public should be under no illusions that in anything like such circumstances "sacrifice" is merely one of those words which are used to dress up the exploitation of the many by and for the few, and commensurately wary of any utterance from their "leaders" containing that term. This is all the more in as they are hearing it so much now, and will hear it so much more later, not least in the nations of Europe, where, as national Establishments clamor for "rearmament" and even a "war economy" from every orifice in a manner that can give the impression of a bidding war ("We think 2.5 percent of GDP is not enough! We're going for at least one percent more than that!" "Oh yeah? Well we're going for 5!"), those in "show business for ugly people" are auditioning for their dream role as wartime leader. Hoping to be Churchill or de Gaulle as these have been mythologized by their cultists, they bear a stronger resemblance to other persons from England and France, and Italy and Germany, and many other countries we remember just as well from that conflict, and with whose (real life and not at all mythological) records their politics and personas and even the histories of their political parties in many a case would seem the far better fit.