Future History, page 14
This was all irrelevant to the hysterics. Once dogma is established and accepted, the Leftist is psychologically incapable of questioning it. Orthodoxy is more important than rationality. One of the heroes of the Liberal Statist left, Lenin93, established the principle of "democratic centralism," an idea that infected all subsequent Liberal Statist thought. Discussion and debate are acceptable until the leadership decides what is true and what is false, what is right and what is wrong, what is virtuous and what is evil. Any subsequent dissent is heresy, and the heretic must be ignored, despised, silenced, excoriated, and, if need be, killed. In like manner, those public figures who led the hysterical attack upon industry were lionized, honored, praised, and virtually worshipped. In one of his more bizarre moments of self-adulation (and they were legion), Barack Obama94 declared that his accession to the presidency marked "the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal." No one on the left evinced the slightest astonishment at the megalomaniacal, preposterous idiocy of the remark. And when Albert Gore Jr., who had been Vice President of the United States, became the international hero of the environmentalist left, no one bothered to question his motives. His hysterical propaganda film An Inconvenient Truth won an academy award95, and he, like Obama subsequently, was for some reason awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Unnoticed and unmentioned was the fact that he had invested heavily in so-called "green industries" such as the manufacturing of geothermal turbines and "smart grid" technology, and made a fortune from government subsidies (paid to him largely by the Obama administration.) Interestingly, when enterprises he approved of and had invested in were given taxpayer money, he called this incentives to environmentally responsible organizations. Any subsidies given to enterprises he disapproved of he called payoffs to special interest lobbies.
In any event, global warming hysteria was one of the two direct causes of the Second Great Depression. Once established as orthodox dogma, the logic of global warming made it incumbent upon the United States to lead the industrialized world in the subversion of their industrial economies. Greenhouse gases were causing global warming; therefore, greenhouse gas emissions must be reduced. The goal ultimately set by the hysterics was for the United States to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to 83% below 2005 levels by 2050, which would mean around one billion tons of greenhouse gases permitted per year. Much blather was expended on optimistic projections of energy replacement via wind, solar, and geothermal power, but it was all, of course, nonsense. The only alternate form of energy production that could conceivably reduce the need for fossil fuel was nuclear power, and that was anathema to the environmentalists. (Indeed, a bill introduced in 2036 by Senator Sarah Palin96, Republican from Alaska, to fund research into nuclear fusion, which if successful would eliminate all reasonably objections to nuclear power development, was soundly defeated by the Democrats.)
In any event, the plan was unworkable as a simple matter of practicality. To reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 83% below the 2005 level would mean returning to the emission level of 1910! In 1910 the U.S. population was 92 million; by 2050 the population would reach 420 million. If measured in terms of gas emissions per capita, the goal was 2.4 tons per American in a population of 420 million, which would translate into a per capita emission last seen in 1875, when our population was a scant 45 million. Any attempt actually to implement this scheme would obviously be suicidal; but implement it we did, and the consequent disruption of the economy threw the nation into an economic collapse beside which the First Great Depression paled in comparison. By 2050, unemployment reached 48%, social welfare costs quadrupled, inflation reached 220%, the trade deficit quintupled, and industrial production (quite intentionally) fell by 62%. The Second Great Depression is rather poignantly dated as beginning in 2029, one hundred years after the First, but while we can say that the First ended in 194697, no date can be given for the end of the Second. With Leviathan's destruction of both capitalism and democracy, such things as business cycles, the value of currency, political competition in the arena of ideas, public sector vs. private sector, all became meaningless. To this tragedy must be added an element of farce: it had become quite clear that planetary temperature was relatively stable, and that such variations in temperature as did exist were unrelated to human activity.
Our reflections center on American History, not World History, so our comments on the rest of the world are perforce limited in scope to those developments that impacted the U.S. directly. The Third World War, which was the second cause of the Second Great Depression, falls into this category.
Certain developments with their origins in the 20th century had led by the middle of the 21st to an international crisis that was incapable of peaceful resolution. It is difficult, and perhaps presumptuous, to attempt to summarize a century of international relations in a few pages. It is necessary, however, to make the attempt, so as to understand the impact of the World War upon the Civil War. The following developments are of primary importance.
One: the proliferation of nuclear weapons, especially the neutron bomb98, created a situation in which any confrontation between nations had the potential for catastrophe. The first generation of nuclear powers was limited to two, the United States and the Soviet Union. They were soon joined by France, Britain, and China, and then, years later, by Israel, Pakistan, and India. One quality common to the countries on this list was the awareness that a nuclear exchange could lead to the destruction of both combatants, and as such needed to be avoided at almost all costs. This realization, referred to by the startling acronym M.A.D. (mutually assured destruction), acted as a brake upon rash overreaction by regimes that, while combative, ideologically hostile to one another, and pursuing oppositional policies, were none the less not suicidal. That situation changed when Iran and North Korea acquired the weapons and Islamic radicals seized control of Pakistan.
The government of Iran (but not, 2050, the majority of its population) adhered to a perverse brand of radical Shi'ite Islam. The differences among the several Muslin sects need not concern us here, but it is important that Shi'ites believe in the "hidden imam," a messianic figure who has been in hiding for a thousand years and who would appear at the end of the world. This belief provided some people in the irrational religious leadership with a motive to end it.99 This regime had been established in 1979 in a national anti-western upheaval, was overthrown and re-established twice, and became even more radical each time it was restored.
The government of North Korea, a hereditary Communist dictatorship, was unrestrained by anything even vaguely approaching rationality. It was a regime of lunatics ruling a population of impoverished, famine-ridden people whose minds had been numbed by incessant, ubiquitous propaganda. Repeated attempts on the part of the rest of the world at normalizing relations foundered on the abnormality of the regime. Its acquisition of nuclear weapons constituted an existential threat to peace.
This proliferation of nuclear weapons led to a new nuclear arms race. Iran's acquisition destabilized the Middle East, dramatically shifting the balance of power in the region, and in due time Egypt, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia became nuclear powers. So at the other end of Asia, and for the same reasons, did South Korea, Indonesia, Vietnam and, after heated, bitter debate, Japan.
Two: The effective end of Europe as a center of power, and indeed as a distinct civilization, contributed to the shift in the balance of power. The Europeans had been cowed by the environmentalist extremists in the same manner as had the United States, with the same resultant self-inflicted wounds. In addition, they (and we) had accepted the idea that the industrializing nations of the east and the south were exempt from greenhouse gas emission limitations, and were thus essentially bribed by the west to impose self-limitations. Brazil and Indonesia were paid huge amounts of money to reduce the rate of deforestation in the Amazon rain forest, Borneo, and Sumatra. China, India, and Brazil, by 2050 the dominant economic powers on the planet, continued to churn out the gases as their economies continued to churn out manufactured goods, which were then purchased by us and the Europeans.
The vaunted European Union, which had once been touted as the next superpower, proved to be unworkable and unsustainable. A major reason for this was that the native Europeans in every country except Greece had negative population growth rates. They were, in effect, going extinct. Population increases were a result entirely of immigration from South Asia and North Africa, which meant that by 2050 Great Britain was 25% Muslim and 20% Hindu; France was 45% Muslim; Germany was 40% Muslim; and the Netherlands became the first European country with a Muslim majority of 57%. Though the "Europeans" still controlled most "European" governments, they had become hostages to their own enormous minority groups, and this crippled any attempt to formulate and pursue a coherent foreign policy. Thus it was that …
Three: When the Iranians attacked Israel in 2079 and the Egyptians and Turks (allies of Israel) intervened on Israel's side, leading Pakistan (an ally of Iran) to attack Turkey, India (an ally of Turkey) to attack Pakistan, and China (an ally of Pakistan) to attack India, Europe stood by in supine impotence, while the United States, convulsed by its own domestic troubles, proclaimed its steadfast support for Israel and then declared neutrality. The War very quickly escalated to full nuclear exchanges. The widespread use of the neutron bomb prevented a suffusion of radioactive fallout, but almost the entire population of the Middle East south of Ankara, north of Riyadh, east of Islamabad, and west of Tripoli, was exterminated. Deaths were estimated at just over two and a half billion.
China and India suffered tremendous losses as well, but their enormous populations allowed for enough survival to begin the task of replenishment. But China, needing to marshal its resources for the War and the years of recovery, ceased to purchase American securities. The infusion of Chinese money into the American economy was the only thing forestalling a depression since the early 21st century. Now the lack of that of borrowed money, coupled with the self-destructive environmental programs, destroyed the economy of the United States.
As for the question of who won the Third World War, the answer is obvious. The winner was Brazil, who found itself in 2080 in the exact same position the United States had occupied in 1945. The rest of the industrial world was either in ruins or in economic collapse, the world was Brazil's market, and it had no competition. The Brazilian century had begun.
INTERLUDE: PRESIDENTIAL RANKINGS
(Editor's note: This brief examination of the presidents was included in the 2160 edition of this collection of essays as an addendum. We are inserting it here because we feel this to be a more appropriate place in the sequence of essays.)
In 1962, Pulitzer Prize winning historian Arthur Schlesinger polled the members of the Association of American Historians and asked them to rank the presidents of the United States in order of greatness, under the following categories: Great (1-5), Near Great (6-10), Above Average (11-15), Average (an indeterminate number), Below Average (the next to bottom five), and Poor (the bottom five.) A newspaper called the Chicago Tribune repeated the polling in 1982 and 1992, and another newspaper called the Wall Street Journal repeated it yet again in 2003. The last poll, in 2020, was conducted by the New England Convention. The criteria Schlesinger proposed for the evaluation were:
1. Ability to articulate a vision for America's future;
2. Ability to mold public opinion;
3. Skill in dealing with Congress;
4. Coherence and effectiveness of domestic policy;
5. Coherence and effectiveness of foreign policy;
6. Judgment in judicial and cabinet appointments.
The criteria reflect the Liberal Statist mentality of which Schlesinger was an exemplar. The presidency as conceived by the Framers was not designed to articulate visions or mold public opinion. The other four criteria are valid, though prior to the first Roosevelt domestic policy was more likely to be formed by Congress than by the president. (Lincoln and, on occasion, Jackson were exceptions.) The Liberal Statist bias is also obvious in the way in which some of the presidents are evaluated. Using the six criteria as proposed, Calvin Coolidge was a great president. Needless to say, as a believer in limited government and the free market, he was consistently ranked only average, below average, or poor.
In any event, the original 1962 ranking was as follows:
Neither Kennedy, the incumbent at the time, nor the first Harrison, who died one month into his presidency, nor Garfield, murdered before serving a full year, were included in the ranking.
Twenty years later the ranking (1982) was:
Some interesting changes occurred. W.H. Harrison, Garfield, and Kennedy were included in this ranking, though their ranks are peculiar. Harrison caught cold on inauguration day, the cold developed into pneumonia, and he died a few weeks later. Why he is ranked as the poorest president, when he had the opportunity neither to succeed nor fail, is inexplicable, as is the ranking of Garfield as the last of the below average presidents, when he served for less than a year before his assassination. (Given the Liberal Statist mentality prevalent among historians, this ranking may reflect nothing more than that the two men in question were not Democrats.) And Kennedy's truncated administration, distinguished by few successes and numerous failures, hardly qualifies him as above average. Wilson and the first Roosevelt have changed places, as have Washington and the second Roosevelt, and Eisenhower has gone from below average to near great. (In American political history, presidents frequently left office under a cloud of unpopularity, which the passage of time then redressed.)
The next ranking, in 1992, ranked the same thirty-eight men. It was decided to exclude the two most recent presidents, Reagan and G.H.W. Bush, on the quite reasonable grounds that proximity in time adversely affects objectivity of assessment. Very few changes occurred from 1982.
Washington and the second Roosevelt have again changed position, and the first Roosevelt has moved up a category. Other differences are trivial.
When the poll was repeated in 2003, the criteria remained the same but the subject list was different. Garfield and W.H. Harrison were (rightly) excluded, Reagan and G.H.W. Bush were included. G.W. Bush was excluded because he was the incumbent. The ranking was as follows:
The top three remain the top three in this ranking, though now Washington replaces Lincoln as number one. Reagan's presence in the "near great" column relegates Polk to "above average," and Nixon advanced from "poor" to "below average." The presence of Clinton and the first Bush in the "average" category is probably more a reflection of contemporary politics than anything else. The first Bush was confronted by a Congress controlled by the other party; it was he who had to deal as president with the reconfiguration of the international situation subsequent to the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe and the collapse of the Soviet Union itself; who organized a United Nations military action to drive the Iraqis out of Kuwait, and he committed the unforgivable sin (not unknown in American history) of not having been his predecessor.100 Clinton, on the other hand, a charismatic man with great personal charm, came into office with a congressional majority of his own party, a majority he lost two years later. The major accomplishments of his administration … welfare reform, a balanced budget … were actually accomplishments of the Republican Congress with which he had no choice but to cooperate, and his failures … a preposterous Rube Goldbergian101 health care proposal, a startling indifference to the emergence of Islamic terrorism … make it difficult to understand why he was ranked as average. True, US military intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo were successful actions taken for moral reasons; they also, in keeping with the Democratic Party's attitude toward the use of force, were unrelated to American national interests. And his impeachment, an unpleasant by-product of his chronic immaturity, inability to distinguish between truth and falsehood or right and wrong, his lack of self-control, common decency, and common sense, was a national embarrassment. An average president? This assessment is difficult to justify.
A scant seven years later another poll was conducted by a minor university's research wing using criteria much more extensive to the point of a Byzantine complexity. The results, however, confirm the Liberal Statist bias of academia as demonstrated by the previous polls, as well as certain irrational elements that had by that point become normative. (The inclusion, and the consequent ranking, of W.H. Harrison and Garfield is difficult to justify, though of course both are explained by the partisan mentality in which Liberal Statism reveled. Harrison was a Whig, i.e., not a Democrat, and Garfield was a Republican, i.e, not a Democrat.) In addition, all previous polls had excluded incumbents on the perfectly reasonable grounds that objectivity would be difficult if not impossible achieve. This did not prevent the inclusion of Obama (above average?!) in the 2010 poll, even though it was conducted when he had been in office for less than two years. Of course, inasmuch as Obama was not only the darling of Liberal Statist academic mentality, but also largely the creation of the Liberal Statist press, his inclusion and his rank comes as no surprise. The results were as follows:
The final exercise in presidential ranking was compiled in 2025. Again in the interest of objectivity, the incumbent and her predecessors for the preceding decade were excluded from the poll. The results were as follows:
This final poll provides evidence of the final absorption of academia and the media by the Liberal Statist mentality. Obama: a president who octupled the national debt, crippled the free market, embraced an almost Stalinist cult of personality, despised every quality that had made America exceptional (indeed, denied that America was exceptional), and accommodated alien regimes hostile to what was left of Western Civilization and dedicated to the destruction of the United States … near great?! Clinton, Carter, Lyndon Johnson, presidential failures of egregious proportions … above average?! The first Bush, who drove Iraq out of Kuwait and oversaw the end of the Cold War … below average? The second Bush, whose attempt to destroy the Taliban and Al-Qaeda was vitiated by Obama, who, after presiding over seven years of prosperity, had the misfortune (like Van Buren, Harding, and his father) to preside over a downturn in the business cycle and an insane culmination of congressionally mandated irresponsible lending102 … our worst president?! Leftist prejudice radiates redolently from the page.103
