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Flyover Bourgeois GenX Man
I’ve witnessed history being made four times in my half-century of life: the end of the Cold War, 9-11, the Financial Crisis of 2007-08, and now the Coronavirus pandemic. Those events—spaced roughly by 10 years—play outsized roles in public dialogue and analysis. They are omnipresent in people’s imaginations as they wrestle with current affairs. However,…
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Mercenaries: Private Military Force in the Atlantic World
This was a paper I wrote for an Atlantic History seminar in my graduate history program. In retrospect, I wish I would have worked on finding additional sources. The paper is informative but not insightful. I have a fascination with private military force–this stems from reading too much libertarian science fiction and letting my mind…
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Opening Moves
Have you ever taken a personality test? I had to take one several years ago as part of an employer’s training program, doing different versions of the Myers-Briggs test and being scored an INTP or an INTJ. My scores for Thinking and Introversion were at extreme ends, I favored my Intuition over my Sensations, but I…
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Reparations: A Dish Best Served Cold
The following post was originally an historiographic discussion submitted as a term paper for a Modern European History reading colloquium. This was the first paper I ever wrote in my graduate history program. Reading it again years later, I’m still happy with the paper though I should have added more of my own thoughts and…
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Learned Optimism: Liberalism, Human Rights, and American Progress
A reader of Chicago Fog will know I’m not an optimist by nature. In fact, people who know me probably think I’m a “glass is half-empty and quickly draining” kind of guy. I bring both skepticism and cynicism to studying U.S. history, and I’ll readily admit a fondness for debunking popular American mythos, whether it…
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Change…and Fade Away
To be alive means to cope with constant change, just as it is that living means we face death one day. Nothing about us is permanent except the matter we are comprised of (or, at least, that is what we are told by physicists). We are also told by evolutionary biologists that as animals we…
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Imperial Blindness
“The history of the United States is the history of empire,” concludes Daniel Immerwahr’s How to Hide an Empire. Immerwahr’s book argues American political discourse resisted a societal and cultural self-identification of conducting an empire while the US government acted the part of an imperial power through its foriegn policy over the last 120 years.…
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Cultural Hegemony and False Consciousness
Ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously, indeed, but with a false consciousness. The real motives impelling him remain unknown to him, otherwise it would not be an ideological process at all. Hence he imagines false or apparent motives. Because it is a process of thought he derives both its form and…
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Wither Moderation
In 2012 historian Geoffrey Kabaservice wrote an interesting book detailing the history of moderates in the Republican Party called Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, From Eisenhower to the Tea Party. Apolitical or centrist types may read Kabaservice and consider it tragedy, while far-right and far-left readers…
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What Comes After God and Country?
Being Nietzschean (seemingly as a condition of birth), ideas like selfless devotion and blind faith always seemed like someone else’s means to an end, a will to power that wanted to sweep me up. Now it strikes me that statism and superstition are life threatening conditions. If humanity wants to survive we mush hang on to…
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The Hazards of Political Belief Spectrums
The graphic above is from a discussion on a UK website called The Student Room. Chicago Fog believes this is a good representation of the parameters of political beliefs reflected in contemporary society: communism on one end and fascism on the other. Clearly, the maker of the spectrum must be from Canada, but this graphic…
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Trump and the Inflection Point
President Trump? Sweet Christmas! The Cubs in the World Series and the end of world must be near. The GOP managed to keep the Senate and the House, making for an absolute disaster for the Dems. Hillary Clinton is done as a politician, and the press is beginning to reveal just how incompetent her campaign was.…
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Sentimentality Is Not Ideology
“Classical liberal” is just a better brand of statist. Here’s to hoping democracy will be the final form of government in history. In the U.S. corporate media, democracy is revered in holy tones. It is the cure all of any nation’s ills. It is sacred. The Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution are…
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Devolving Centralized Authority, Evolving Human State
Political futurism: The state’s devolution will only better humanity. What could the next 100 years look like? I’ll drown more sailors than the mermaid shall; I’ll slay more gazers than the basilisk; I’ll play the orator as well as Nestor, Deceive more slily than Ulysses could, And, like a Sinon, take another Troy. I can…
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The Tea Party
The kettle boiled but then cooled pretty damn fast. What happened? An analysis of the short-lived Tea Party movement. The “Tea Party” movement received intense media attention when it emerged in early 2009. Derided by popular media but coddled by conservatives, the movement shaped the outcome of the 2010 midterm elections and has since lost…
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