The Scholar's Stage

Book Notes: The Technological Republic (2025)

10 December, 2025Complex Systems, Culture, History, Monied Interests, The Cybernetic Web

ALEXANDER KARP AND NICHOLAS ZAMISKA’S The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West may not be the worst book I have read this year, but it is by far the most disappointing. Karp is the rare CEO more famous for his intellect than his entrepreneurship. The overlap between the students of Jürgen Habermas and captains of industry is small. Among the technology brethren, Karp is regularly portrayed as a latter-day philosopher king. Karp leans into this image. I do not begrudge him this—founders must sell both themselves and their companies, and a company like Palantir is easier to sell when its founder is wreathed in mystique.

There are some downsides to mystique. If people believe you are some philosophic savant, they expect you to write a book with real intellectual heft. An important book. The sort that teaches men how to merge principle with practice. The sort of book that might be remembered.

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Bullets and Ballots: The Legacy of Charlie Kirk

14 September, 2025By The People

I WILL NOT ATTEMPT to eulogize the martyr. Others have done this already—and done so with such skill that anything I write would not measure up. I will do something else here: explain, in sober and measured language, the significance of Kirk’s life to the American right. Like most great men, Charlie Kirk symbolized something far larger than himself. You will not understand why his murder feels so cataclysmic to so many if you do not first understand what Kirk meant to millions of young Americans and to the movement they joined.

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Did Taiwan “Lose Trump?”

16 August, 2025Entangling Alliances, The Presidency

OVER THE LAST WEEK Christian Whiton’s essay “How Taiwan Lost Trump” has ricocheted its way through the Taiwanese media. Ever sensitive to foreign perceptions of Taiwan, the Taiwanese chattering classes have been especially sensitive in the fallout of two news items: Taiwan’s failure to reach a trade deal with the United States and the Trump administration’s cancellation of a planned New York stopover by Taiwanese President William Lai. Most Taiwanese observers have linked these events together. In Taiwan they have been depicted as a terrible portent of future American policy. The general mood is a fatalistic “now we see what Trump truly thinks of us!”
Whiton’s essay succeeds because it confirms this narrative (“You are right: Trumpworld does think the worst of you!”) while also offering an explanation for how this doleful circumstance came about. To the outrage of its allies and the glee of its enemies, Whiton lays all blame squarely at the feet of the powers that be in the DPP.

Hence the essay’s viral run. What of its accuracy? To those familiar with this administration, its personnel, and the broader intellectual environment that it feeds on, does his argument ring true?

Partially. The essay is directionally correct, but glaringly wrong in many specifics.

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Book Notes: Stoner (1965)

20 June, 2025Books and Literature, Possessions For All Time

NEITHER THE MALE AUTHORS NOR THE MALE READERS most preoccupied with middle age are inclined to face it cleanly. The male author depicts the mid-life crisis to escape his own. His novels and screenplays are an adolescent retort to the anxieties of ease. Thus the implausible sexscapades, couture bloodletting, and whiny retreats into solipsism that have defined so much of American literature over the last seven decades. In this tradition, there is little difference between a literary and a demeaning depiction of the middle class man.

John Williams’ 1965 novel Stoner is different.

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The Eight Tribes of Trump and China

31 March, 2025Bargaining and Balancing, Entangling Alliances, The Middle Kingdom, The Presidency

LAST OCTOBER I published a short breakdown of four geopolitical ‘schools’ that might shape China strategy under Trump. That piece was a pre-election preview of a much larger report I was writing for the Foreign Policy Research Institute. I published the preview as security: Trump might not win. If so I had better publish something before election day while interest in Trumpworld was guaranteed.

Trump won. Interest in GOP debates did not abate. I continued to work on the report. As of this week the full thing is out. You can read it, in all its twenty-page glory, over at the FPRI website. What follows are some of its key points:

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The Euro-American Split (I): Dread Possibility

21 February, 2025Entangling Alliances, Europa Regina, Narrative, The Presidency

THERE ARE DECADES WHEN possibility is constrained in a narrow frame. The terrain has been surveyed, boundaries have been laid, and rules have been established. In such an age there is still room for high drama: The decisive round of a boxing match draws the eye despite the fact—or perhaps because—the boxers play an antique game. In such times and climes, victory means mastery of existing modes, not the invention of new ones.

But nothing human is everlasting. Always there comes a day when spectators search for better games and settlers seek out fresher pastures. That day of change arrives with much confusion and fanfare. Sons dishonor their fathers. Daughters rise against their mothers. Ancestral ideals are cast aside, and possibility staggers forth from its long captivity, ready to wreak vengeance on mankind.

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Observations From India

05 January, 2025Bharat, Electoral Intrigues, Futuristics, Narrative, Political Theory, Religion, The Middle Kingdom, Things I Do Other Than Blogging

In November 2024, I traveled to India as part of a delegation hosted by the India Foundation. The foundation is a part of the new nationalist establishment steering Indian society. As they see things, India’s relationship with America has been mediated by hostile parties for too long. On the Indian side you have Congress-sympathizing functionaries; on the American side, a set of intellectuals and diplomats who can neither speak for nor to the American right. Direct links between Indian and American nationalists are needed.

So I was invited India.

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Science Proceeds One Question at a Time

01 January, 2025Books and Literature, Nature Red in Tooth and Claw, Small and Simple Things

MIDWAY through his 900 page history of biology, zoologist Ernst Mayr considers the problem posed by Alfred Wallace. Wallace was a contemporary of Charles Darwin who independently developed a theory of speciation by means of natural selection. By the time Wallace came on the scene Darwin had been sitting on his evolutionary theory for two decades. Reading Wallace’s 1858 paper “On the Tendency of Species to Form Varities” spooked Darwin. He did not want to be scooped. Within a year Darwin had rushed his material into an “abstract which… must necessarily be imperfect” as it only gave “the general conclusions” of his theory, and offered only a “few facts in illustration” to support them. We know this abstract well: it was published as The Origin of Species.

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Republican Debates on China: A Political Compass

31 October, 2024Bargaining and Balancing, Diplomacy, Dogs of War, Entangling Alliances, The Middle Kingdom, The Presidency, Uncategorized

MANY HAVE TRIED to pin Trump to Heritage’s “Project 2025.” The Trump campaign has not only refused to endorse Project 2025—they have refused to endorse any detailed policy plan whatsoever. Trump prefers to keep his options open.

One unanticipated benefit of this approach is that Republicans have spent much of the last year engaged in intensive but open debates over policy. Ambitious politicians, congressional offices, and think tanks have laid out their preferred plans on almost every issue of importance. These plans often differ from each other in striking ways. Absent endorsement from Trump or his campaign, no one quite knows which of these policy packages will eventually be adopted as the Republican standard. The Republicans involved have thus been free to debate the merits and costs of each.

Take China policy.

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Dionysus Against the Daoists

29 September, 2024History, Narrative, Nature Red in Tooth and Claw, Religion, Romans and Grecians, The Middle Kingdom

IN WESTERN PHILOSOPHY AND AESTHETICS a contrast is sometimes made between the Dionysian and the Apollonian. Made famous by Nietzsche, this schema was first used to describe the thought and art of Ancient Greece. On the Apollonian end we have all that is rational, intentional, structured, abstract, or well ordered; on the Dionysian side we find all that is passionate, instinctual, chaotic, sensual or protean. The Apollonian strain of western culture is associated with daylight, law, mathematics, sculpture, discipline, and the city; the Dionysian strain is associated with nightfall, violence, poetry, music, drunkenness, and nature. The Apollonian element is stereotypically male; the Dionysian element is stereotypically female. The Apollonian ideal is realized by the solitary philosopher solemn in thought. The model Dionysian is an ecstatic madman frenzied in a crowd.

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