The world feels unsettled, as if history itself were changing tempo. The familiar landmarks of the modern age are blurring, slipping away, and the stories we once told ourselves about progress and power no longer map cleanly onto the terrain before us. What we are living through seems, with each new day, less like a passing rearrangement of power, less like a momentary realignment of nations. We sense something deeper and more enduring: a transformation whose outlines we are only beginning to discern. History no longer feels like something unfolding behind us but something rushing toward us, urgent and impossible to ignore.

[...] China now accounts for more than half of the world’s installed solar and wind capacity combined. Roughly three-quarters of all renewable energy projects currently underway worldwide are either in China or being driven by Chinese contractors. About 30% of global emissions come from China, but so too does much of the growth in decarbonization technology. China has transformed the global energy transition by demonstrating that massive and rapid deployment could make renewable energy cost-competitive worldwide.

[...] That historical chapter may now be closing. China appears to have found that path. The system powering its success is an extraordinarily intricate alloy of Confucianism, Leninism, technocratic authoritarianism, state capitalism, and market mechanisms. Yet based on the many conversations I’ve had with Chinese intellectuals, they now recognize that China has attained wealth and power in a distinctly Chinese way. If Levenson’s framework is correct, we are witnessing not merely China’s rise but its graduation from the central quest that defined its modern history.

[...] What might have been another season of U.S. introspection has morphed into something more acute: the painful recognition that another system, however flawed, has delivered results on a scale that the United States has not. This is to me, as an American, a source of not inconsiderable anguish. I take no pleasure in witnessing what my country has become—a nation I love, torn apart by political tribalism so intense and so toxic that I fear it may be beyond repair, at least in the coming, and critical, decade. But confronting this crisis requires looking squarely at what seems so unsettling about China’s success. As Chas W. Freeman, a retired senior U.S. diplomat, has observed, “Americans now exhibit an odd combination of self-doubt, complacency, and hubris”— a mix that has prevented the kind of clear-eyed assessment the moment requires.

[...] Consider what China’s trajectory means for countries across the Global South that were told for decades there was only one path to prosperity: the Washington Consensus path of privatization, deregulation, and democratic governance. China offers proof that another model can work: state-led development, long-term planning, massive infrastructure investment, and selective integration with global markets, all while maintaining political autonomy. Whether one admires this model or not, its success cannot be denied, and its implications ripple far beyond East Asia.

https://www.theideasletter.org/essay/the-great-reckoning/

The peasant way of life is a critical buffer against climate change. Peasant villages recycle biochemical waste back to the land; many peasants also supply their nutritional needs from their own farms. Peasants, who directly manage about 10 per cent of the land on Earth – an area five times larger than all towns and cities – supply a countervailing principle to corporate extractionism and short-termism. They also preserve critical local knowledge of land and weather systems, and the interactions of plants and animals. The peasantry is one of humanity’s most crucial economic, social and ecological resources, and we need to invest in it if we are to flourish. Affluent and innovative, this class will insulate us from more extreme degradation of natural systems. Impoverished and terrorised, it will be forced, in the end, to leave the land en masse, with manifold catastrophic consequences.

https://aeon.co/essays/the-planet-and-human-social-life-depend-on-peasant-farmers

Of the American elite who see continuing value in literate thought, they are, for the most part, happy to create a society where a small “cognitive elite” dominate the rest. Poor kids spend an extra two hours on the black mirror every day, while rich people send their kids to private schools where no electronic devices are allowed, as Mary Harrington recently explained in the New York Times. Controlling the media effect is possible even in America; we have simply reduced it to a class privilege. I love the First Amendment and abhor censorship, and yet I have reluctantly come to believe that the Great Firewall of China will be a long-term benefit to that country. What China shows us is that, contra the whole line of technology-first scholarship following McLuhan, it’s the social system technology is embedded in that matters. China is not a utopia, but its citizens have a brighter future than ours, and they will be able to read about it, thanks to a sociopolitical system that still sees literacy as necessary and retains primacy over private capital.

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/we-used-to-read-things-in-this-country-mccormack

The government agency tasked with enforcing the nation’s labor laws and protecting the interests of its workers was now posting stark, black and white propaganda images announcing that “globalism has failed” and “your homeland is calling,” along with Christian religious content insisting upon “One Nation Under God.” Earlier this month, the full force of its far-right turn was made clear in a post that read “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage. Remember who you are, American.” As many commenters pointed out, the phrasing recalls the Nazi slogan “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer,” or “one people, one realm, one leader.” This one raised alarm bells far beyond the comment section.

https://thebaffler.com/latest/a-piece-of-work-kelly

In December 2025, NASA let the Perseverance rover drive using AI-generated waypoints for two days on Mars, covering 456 meters without direct human control. The system analyzed orbital images and terrain data to identify hazards and plan a safe route, which the rover then executed with its onboard autonomous navigation.

Because of the long communication delay between Earth and Mars, rovers already operate semi-independently. This test shows how generative AI could further streamline navigation, reduce operator workload, and enable longer, more efficient drives.

NASA sees this as a step toward more advanced autonomous exploration—supporting future Mars missions, drone swarms, and projects like Dragonfly to Titan, where intelligent onboard systems will be essential.

https://www.universetoday.com/articles/nasa-let-ai-drive-the-perseverance-rover-for-two-days

A well observed feature of the far right is its strange tendency to combine indifference to factual accuracy, or even honesty, with soaring rhetoric about truth, beauty, and greatness. Beyond just a well-documented willingness to obfuscate, bullsh–t, and lie, many of the far right’s core ideological convictions seem like bloviated imaginaries and outright fabrications. Often figures on the far right openly acknowledge this tendency, as in a 1922 speech where Benito Mussolini admitted his adulation of the rejuvenated Italian nation was a manufactured myth:

We have created our myth. The myth is a faith, a passion.
It is not necessary for it to be a reality. It is a reality in the
sense that it is a stimulus, is hope, is faith, is courage. Our myth is
the nation, our myth is the greatness of the nation! And it is to this
myth, this greatness, which we want to translate into a total reality,
that we subordinate everything else.

This willingness to conjure patently artificial values into being, while still insisting all else be subordinated to the products of one’s fantasy, is hardly unique to the early twentieth century right. In 2004, a George W. Bush administration official widely believed to be Karl Rove dismissed the “reality based community” for failing to realize that, as an empire, “we create our own reality.” In The Art of the Deal, Donald Trump anticipated his political style by admitting he engaged in “truthful hyperbole” that “plays to people’s fantasies” and desire to “believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular.” More recently J. D. Vance, himself well-versed in far-right thought, has insisted that if he has to fabricate stories to attract people to his cause, then by God, he’ll do so.

The far right tends to associate the liberal — and often socialist — emphasis on reason with an egalitarian inclination to treat all people alike. The basic idea is that all individuals possess a capacity to dialogue and reach correct, or at least mutually beneficial, conclusions about what is right and wrong and who ought to be in charge. The far right perceives this as threatening to orderly respect for hierarchical authority and the aspiration for greatness that gives life meaning and texture. Then as now, the far right expresses a strategic skepticism toward the claims of critical reason — but only in order to induce a deeper commitment to its preferred dogmatism. Once you deny that critical reason has any independent force, it is very easy to insist that power alone gets to decide who believes what.

From the far right’s standpoint, an excess of critical reason has a dangerous tendency to promote democracy by encouraging endless criticism and discussion that ultimately leads people to question authorities they are better off submitting to. Everyone reasoning and criticizing for themselves can only lead to political and moral chaos. Moreover, since most ordinary people tend to be motivated by low materialistic concerns, encouraging the democratic use of critical reason by all will tend to debase the aspirations of the political community.

For many on the far right, reason can never mobilize people’s passions, bind them together, and encourage them to submit to authority the way identification with myth, volk, power, and glory do. The Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt — a contemporary of Mann’s — captured this spirit well in Political Theology and other works, where he emphasized that political concepts are secularized theological concepts. Ultimately, we must all irrationally choose the God we worship together, and being a political community means defeating enemies who worship another. To this day, the far right’s ability to win converts is due to its radical emphasis on aesthetics at the expense of all convictions. Its aim above all is to excite, to not be boring.

https://jacobin.com/2026/02/mann-doctor-faustus-fascism-far-right/