A running joke personal joke I have when frustrated by humanity is that every movement compelling enough to reach any scale reveals itself eventually to be “oops all reactionaries” The bigger the thing or the deeper down you go and eventually with fractal consistency “oops, all reactionaries!”
Anytime I have really hard contact with reality this turns out to be true. Reality has been particularly harsh over the last couple decades insofar as materialism has gone for the species.
I have been shielded from reality by the gracious people of the United States of America. And even then if you look too closely “oops all reactionaries!”
I think “oops, all reactionaries” turns out to be a decent lens for assessing our past, present and probably future. If it’s any good it has a core that should concern if you take it too literally. You then have to decide how seriously to take their literalism. If you get it wrong you might wake up dead.
Which I don’t love. Most people just want to go along to get along. Which isn’t to say that getting along in America is easy. We are a surprisingly competitive place for the richest nation state to have ever existed among a bizarre republic of slowly expanded frontiers and boomtowns. So we’ve got plenty of pockets where reality has always been all reactionaries.
We’ve hit our limits a million times and still have shockingly low density. Being an industrious people who enjoy markets this has worked out relatively well for the “empire” and it’s people.
America! It’s not bad and I recommend it even if we do functionally have feudal lords in the form of capital, labor and land managers at various levels of public and private parcels. But being civilized people trying to make a buck we really don’t like it when the shock troops are deployed at home.
We do seem to be ambivalent about it being deployed abroad. This has been my Ted Talk on homeland security. Really though beware the politics of wealthy heiresses.