You can't fully understand anything without understanding everything. This is true of the health of a body or the functioning of a machine. It is also true of politics and the world structure, of which we are, willingly or unwillingly, a part. But what is the operating system of this complex entity?
The Alt-Right claimed that politics is downstream from metapolitics, which is downstream from culture, which is downstream from race, which is the anchor point. The problem here is that Aryan man was thus revealed as being the source of the degeneracy of modern times. This concluion, extremely awkward for the Alt-Right, was explained away by the absurd notion that someone (i.e. "the Jew") had been pissing in this Great River of Wonder.
What they failed to see were the mechanics of the modern world and the coercive force of the global system, with its economic gravity, military force, and its utilisation of morality or soft power. In the Alt-Right view of reality, the corrupting and polluting effects of this global system are ascribed instead to a mere bogeyman, whom of course they have to build up to the requisite size to compensate for their enormous analytical shortfall. This partly, but not wholly, explains their tragic obsession with the Jew.
Since 1945, when the global system was last rebooted on a major scale, the global order has been clear. At the top of the system you have an odd entity that can best be called the Anglosphere. It is composed of the remnants of the British Empire, revivified by that Empire's own breakaway state the USA. The state of Israel and the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, along with a few other Gulf "oily-garchies" are at least a subsidiary part of that arrangement.
Just beneath this top tier, you have a range of allied/ semi-subject states, which derive enough benefits from the system to go along with it, without rebelling or opposing it. These states include countries like Germany and France (which now exist in a pseudo or proto-imperialistic form as the European Union), some other European states, Japan, South Korea, and possibly a few others.
It is in this penumbral zone that you can most easily gauge the health of the system.
Beyond the rings of allied, semi-subject states, you have states that are caught between wanting to join the system or, increasingly these days, former client states that were once part of the system but have drifted out of it due to a lack of perceived benefits. These states occupy a more ambivalent position, so we can call it the Ambivalent or Inter-Imperial Zone. The countries here sometimes move away, sometimes closer. Examples would include states like Turkey, many Latin American states, and once, but not any more, Iran, which has hardened in its opposition to the system since exiting it at the end of the 1970s.
The most striking point about this system is that although it is strongly hierarchical in structure, with several tiers, it is overwhelmingly egalitarian and democratic in texture. The elites at the top counterintuitively promote what appears to be an "egalitarian" and "democratic" morality, which seems to contradict their hegemonic and exploitative position.
The fact is, however, that this morality is nothing less than another tool of oppression, dominance, and privilege.
Beyond the Ambivalent Zone, you have a number of states that are really too big to ever be subsumed into the Anglo-centred global system. You could say that they have their own centres of gravity. Nevertheless, they are capable of occasionally aligning with the system, although they are often neutral. These include countries like Brazil, India, and possibly Indonesia.
Finally, as far away as possible from the centre of the Empire, you have its true rivals: Russia and China. The history of both of these entities in the 20th century has been much misunderstood. This is because they have been viewed by Conservatives and Leftists through the distorting spectrum of a supposed Left-versus-Right global struggle, which simply doesn't exist.
The struggles of Russia and China in the 20th century were essentially struggles for independence, with a kind of Fascistic militaristic Communism selected as the best method of achieving what were essentially power political goals rather than ideological ones.
Looked at in macro-empirical terms, these struggles more or less commenced with the fall of Germany. This had essentially played an insulating role, protecting these giant entities from the putative Anglo-American World Empire already emerging in the late 19th century through the merging of British capital with American growth.
But enough history for now. How does the system exert its power, and why does this globally hierarchical system LARP as "egalitarian" and "democratic," when economically it is anything but.
The best way to understand this is to look at how "The Empire" exerts its dominance financially. The countries at the centre of the system have two obvious characteristics -- their workers are overpaid in terms of global competitiveness and their governments habitually overspend with minimal consequences. Further out from the magic circle, workers are paid a more realistic rate or underpaid, while governments only overspend with caution or severe negative consequences.
These economic characteristics are directly linked to political ones. Because "Empire" governments can generally overspend without resorting to increased taxation and thus enjoy a lack of consequences, these states are better able to sustain the typical short-termist style of democratic government, that is, they are more able to please their voters. This makes social control relatively easy. But this doesn't mean that control is effortless. Even these consumerist-and-economic-growth-centred democracies have to be managed so as to filter out elements of populism, and of course hatred for their politicians remains endemic.
Further outwards, beyond "The Empire," nations are less able to sustain such crowd-pleasing systems. Where they attempt similar democratic systems to the West, they inevitably become unstable and this then tends towards various forms of dictatorship, oligarchy, or semi-democracy.
Freedom is the luxury of the privileged
The ability of the hegemonic Anglo Empire countries to overspend is based on their control of the credit system. What does this essentially consist of? It is nothing else but faith in power. A lesser political entity calling credit into existence undermines its economic position immediately, because capital and value can flee rapidly to more powerful political entities. In fact, the Empire's number one priority has always been to facilitate such transfers because nothing ensures its power more than this.
However when the highest political entity -- the Empire -- promiscuously calls credit into existence, capital and value has nowhere else to flee, unless there is an alternative system emerging.
It was this cardinal fact that allowed the Empire to go off the Gold Standard in 1971, which can be taken as the Empire's coming into existence in its fullest form, and which also allowed the astronomical QE of recent years. By rights we should be in a Weimar-style hyper inflation!
The Empire eclipses its rivals
With the full emergence of this system, however, the first real problems started to emerge, as its two-tier nature became increasingly apparent. This was further exacerbated by the Empire increasing its power projection. From the early 1980s, it started to weaponise the mere fact that it could sustain overspending. Live Aid, attacks on the Kremlin, the Anti-Apartheid struggle, the deification of the Dali Lama, Amnesty International, Save the Whale, and all the other manifestations of Soft Power that sprang into life around that time, showed that this was an era of weaponised morality and power projection. Nothing less.
The collapse of the Soviet Union, with the temporary prostration of Russia in the Yeltsin years, highlighted the success of the Empire, while covering up its defects. The same could be said about the "Chimerica" relationship. Smug with the collapse of its main Soviet rival, and awash with moral confidence, the Empire assumed it could reel China in with economic engagement without conceding privilege. But China had its own agenda, essentially the economic weaponisation of it's extreme poverty and pseudo-chattel status to achieve drastic modernisation. They stooped to conquer!
But the inequality inherent in the global hierarchy also opened up divisions with countries closer to the centre, like Germany and France. The collapse of the Soviet Union played a role here too. The Empire responded to this historic event by allowing its semi-vassals to expand to the East. This expansion gave them greater confidence to assert their own interests and attempt to establish their own privileged position, a project they are pursuing with the putative empire of the European Union.
The tensions this created mainly played out between the Empire's London branch and Brussels. In essence, this is what Brexit was. Not so much an attempt by the ordinary British voter to keep the pint and avoid "straight bananas," or whatever other EU nonsense the tabloid press played up, but instead a reflection of "EURexit" from the Empire. Yes, this is the exact opposite of what it is routinely portrayed as being: Britain did not leave the EU, the EU left Britain -- and the Global Anglo-American Empire of which it is a part.
Other changes to the system are obvious, once you know what to look for. Historically, the 1990s and early Zeroes saw a big push for democratisation. The Neocon wars of the post-9/11 period were part of this. But, really, this was something quite different. More correctly it was an intensified imposition of the dominance of the Empire over a wider area. I hope you enjoyed the experience Afghanistan!
On the ground, this was experienced as a kind of moral and ideological pressure, backed up by various forms of economic blackmail and occasionally war. Many of the countries in the Ambivalent Zone -- Greece, Turkey, Thailand, the Philippines, Chile, Argentina, Venezuela -- which had been left alone to construct their own undemocratic or partially democratic systems, now felt increasing pressure to step in line. Some genuinely believed that adopting the same kind of short-termist democracies as the West would open them up to the same kind of overspending privileges enjoyed by the Empire itself. It didn't. Instead it opened them up to corruption, economic instability, and social unrest. Some of them snapped back into authoritarianism, occasionally with a Leftist or Islamist tinge. In fact there has been a flight from Western-style democracy.
This is the World today, one characterised by increasing multipolarity and the rapidly declining centripetal power of The Empire.
Since 1945, the Empire could both live well beyond its means, morally signal its superiority to the rest of the World, and even weaponise this to increase its dominance further. But now it can't, or can only do so to an ever-weakening degree. Former vassal states are restless, and seeking to move away. Those who once accepted the Empire's moral superiority, and tried to imitate it, now regard themselves as cheated. They are now embracing their own organic forms of organisation.
As for those great states and civilisational areas that once seemed submerged beneath the deluge of Western power, they are once more stretching their eminences towards the sky, disrupting the flow of power and privilege to a single centre.
