I was scanning the library for any insights into witches & their craft, and pulled down an old favorite called Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of Millennial Experience, by Richard Landes.
I think I'll reread it, since it's full of insights on how to interpret crazy times. Things were crazy enough when I first read it in 2011, but in hindsight we see that the craziness was just getting warmed up.
Of course, things are always crazy, since humans are always crazy, and the more history one reads, the more one is astonished that anything ever goes right.
Come to think of it, this is one of the sensibilities that distinguishes left from right: the progressive looks at the world and is resentful that things aren't better, while the conservative looks at it and is amazed and grateful that anything at all works out.
According to a note to myself in the back of the book, there's a deep logic to the illogic of politics, and it goes like this:
1) Take power.
2) Eliminate the forces of evil.
3) New humanity emerges, i.e., utopia, heaven on earth, arrival of the eschaton, etc.
4) Turn to demonizing narrative upon inevitable failure of #3.
The Brandon administration is well into #4. The list of people and things he has blamed for his narrative collapse include Putin's Price Hike, Big Oil, Big Meat, Corporate Greed, Ultra-MAGA, gas station owners, etc. Every day there's a new malefactor, since the public isn't buying any of the administration's narratives.
Speaking of which, another note says that the narrative describes "what is supposed to happen," not what actually happens. It is a model, and like any model, it is not the reality. Politics in particular is susceptible to dysfunctional models, and you could say that history is the wreckage of bad models.
For example, Marx's narrative predicted how history will go under conditions of communism. How history went is another story, and one reason why it went so badly was the titanic effort to force it to go where it would not and could not go. But for the left, impossibilty is always beside the point.
It's the same with the global warming crowd, which is literally trying to force the world to go where it will not and cannot go, with entirely predictable consequences.
Another note says "The only good thing about the left is that its millennial movements always fail." However, the failure is usually a drawn-out process, as the left heroically resists the feedback of reality and tries to prop up its failed narrative. Says here that "apocalyptic time is inherently unstable and doesn't last long." We shall see.
I'm not optimistic, because another note says "all political movements must partake of millennial impulses." If this is true, it means that if conservatism is to achieve #1 above (gain power), it must somehow tap into the millennial impulses of the mob.
And one doesn't have to read much mediocre conservative writing to see the process at work. We have to somehow sell the idea that Everything's Gonna Get Better, knowing full well that it will be an accomplishment to truly change anything.
This doesn't make us pessimistic, much less cynical. We just know human nature, that's all. We actually enjoy resting under the shade of timeless truths while watching with bemused horror as our little glimpse of history passes by.
Here are some aphoristic branches to insulate you from the heat of the moment:
I am not trying to poison the wells. But to show that they are poisoned.
No paradise will arise within the framework of time. Because good and evil are not threads twisted together by history, but fibers of the single thread that sin has spun for us.
History shows that man’s good ideas are accidental and his mistakes methodical.
Intelligence does not consist in finding solutions, but in not losing sight of the problems.
To be a conservative is to understand that man is a problem without a human solution.
Christianity does not solve “problems”; it merely obliges us to live them at a higher level.
For the Christian, history does not have a direction, but rather a center.
Bottom line: there's an occasional victory but no end to the war, so
Let us live the militancy of Christianity with the good humor of the guerrilla fighter, not with the glumness of the entrenched garrison (Dávila).
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