Dialectic of Rearmament

As many across the West are falling into nihilism and despair, foreign adversaries are coercing a generation to wake up to a larger mission than their own personal gain. Will this cohort rise to the challenge of rearmament like its ancestors, or cede global leadership to near-peer rivals eager to fill the void? Despite their differences, Democrats and Republicans have a common foe in Beijing. As the saying goes, “Politics ends at the water’s edge.” Rearmament can serve as a catalyst for national unity and revitalization, moving forward with the “pessimism of the intellect, and optimism of the will.” 

New York Times columnist Tom Friedman erred badly in 2005 with his bestselling book, The World is Flat. He argued we had reached the end of history. 

The post-1989 unipolar order was then dealt a death blow with the COVID-19 pandemic, if  not before the 2008 financial crisis. Regionalization and reshoring are in, while multilateralism is out. Swiss economist Jean-Pierre Lehmann believes, “There is no new global order, just a chaotic transition to uncertainty.”

While there is no committee to save the world, perhaps the United States and her allies can be salvaged. World War Two pulled the US out of the Great Depression. Rebuilding domestic industry could snap many Western countries out of the COVID blues. The social fabric needs to be rebuilt just as much as the defense industrial base. Woodrow Wilson argued, “The highest and best form of efficiency is the spontaneous cooperation of a free people.” Mobilization can serve as a stimulus of production and employment, fostering an internal cohesion unknown at previous stages of industrial civilization

Everything is interconnected, so the fallout over a war in Iran or Taiwan could result in cyber disruptions or myriad other complications at home. Only one empire can retain global dominance, with the US as the incumbent, and China the rising, hegemon. French philosopher Rene Girard believed that “two desires converging on the same object are bound to clash,” and “where danger threatens That which saves from it also grows.” 

Yet a sense of fatalism has poached the body politic. The world is a tragic place. There is little any one person can do to change it. Many on the periphery, disillusioned by events in the metropole, have made a wager; best to leave national projects to those who are foolish enough to pursue them, or those who can mobilize millions of dollars behind their designs, and instead focus on upping their salary so they can vacation in exotic locations and brag about it on social media. Folks have prioritized their individuality to avoid getting swallowed by what Georg Simmel described as the “social-technological mechanism.”

This is nothing new. Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel noted shortly after the 2008 financial crisis: “Rather than fight the relentless indifference of the universe, many of my saner peers retreated to tending their small gardens.” Tocqueville defined individualism as peaceful resignation:

a mature and calm feeling which disposes each member of the community to sever himself from the mass of his fellow-creatures; and to draw apart with his family and his friends; so that, after he has thus formed a little circle of his own, he willingly leaves society at large to itself.

Younger generations, rendered irrelevant by virtualization and burdened by massive amounts of debt, were traumatized by a lockdown which shuttered the community while leaving liquor stores, casinos and cannabis dispensaries open for business in what felt too much like an Aldous Huxley novel. Some are anxious to make up for lost time in their careers and personal development. Professor Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret wrote in June of 2020: 

The dream of class mobility dissipates when society locks down, the economy stalls, the death count mounts and everyone’s future is frozen inside their own crowded apartment or palatial mansion. The difference between the two has never been more obvious. 

Now an entire generation will be defined by uncertainty and insecurity. Why care about a nation that fails to reciprocate, or a system that is clearly rigged?

Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, Erich Fromm’s
Escape from Freedom, and Robert Nisbet’s The Quest for Community argue modern totalitarianism arose from the discontents of caused by isolation and loneliness. Humans need to feel like they belong to a community. Pandemics not only induce suffering, but isolate individuals and instill a distrust in others who could be carrying the disease. David Brooks writes:

When it is not connected to some larger purpose beyond itself, suffering shrinks or annihilates people. When it is not understood as a piece of a larger process, it leads to doubt, nihilism and despair.

Given the concomitant rises in desolation and suffering, it should be no surprise the US dropped to its lowest position ever in the 2025 World Happiness Report. Humans live ever more destitute lives on an ever more connected earth. It is difficult to connect to an abstract and distant state composed of “imagined linkages” without in-person communities, what Edmund Burke described as the “little platoons” of society.

Just as a generation is about to disintegrate, the challenge of a lifetime appears: rearmament. To quote Francis de Sales, millions across the West can “take hold and never let go.” 

Yet with billionaires’ assets appreciating greatly since 2020, while others struggle to find a job loading torpedoes into a submarine, perhaps rearmament is not meant to be a collective project. Instead, it is an opportunity for the rich to get richer, and feel ever more important, while the rest are replaced by robots. Not very exciting. The book of Matthew says:

Whoever has will be
given more, and he will have
an abundance. Whoever does
not have, even what he has
will be taken away from him.

Granted, nobody chose to come into being. We were, in the Heideggarian sense, “thrown” into the world, “like a dog without a bone.” Prussian philosopher Leo Strauss noted: “To be a human being means to be in the world…..To live dangerously means to think exposedly.” 

Without economic prosperity, or any opportunity, it is impossible to be in the world in any meaningful sense. The nation is more than a capitalist enterprise. Yet a minimum subsistence and freedom from want is necessary.  While humans have a tremendous amount of agency, they are also, as Karl Marx noted, prisoners of the material conditions under which they operate. 

The first industrial revolution forced many in 19th century Britain to move from the farm to the countryside to work in the mills. This had both costs and benefits, as Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer note:

The liberation of citizens from the injustice of the feudal and absolutist past served, through liberalism, to unleash machinery, just as the emancipation of women has culminated in their being trained as a branch of the armed forces.

At the mercy of wars, tariffs, and depressions, the second industrial revolution had a similar impact as the first, with workers moving from Alabama to Detroit for the promise of Henry Ford’s Five Dollar Day. This historical pattern of industrial transformation underscored the vulnerability of individuals to forces beyond their control. 

Pearl Harbor sprang the US and its citizens into action, with the country experiencing unprecedented growth until Nixon’s withdrawal from the gold standard in 1971. Germany’s Wirtschaftswunder or postwar economic miracle was, like Japan’s, underwritten by the US in exchange for demilitarization. Then, the hypermobility of capital in the third industrial revolution caused the United States to lose almost 8 million manufacturing jobs between 1979 and 2010 to places like Germany, Japan, Mexico and China. What Daniel Bell optimistically described as the “postindustrial society,” where white collar jobs and the training to work them would be plenty, never came to fruition. Entire communities were destroyed by plant closings. All that remained were prisons, liquor stores and broken families. 

The reader may wonder whether some events described occurred a century ago, or yesterday.  The negative consequences of the fourth industrial revolution have profoundly reshaped American society. The pandemic fostered a hyper-individualistic and isolated culture, with lasting detrimental effects on children and overall public health. The way to bounce back is not to descend into hedonism, but to find fulfillment in rearming the republic. A rapid expansion of the defense industry, coupled with comprehensive training programs, offers an opportunity for millions to regain self-respect. 

In March of 1935 the British government argued in their Statement Relating to Defence:

We . . . are approaching a point when we are not possessed of the necessary means of defending ourselves against an aggressor . …An additional expenditure on the armaments of the three Defence Services can therefore no longer be safely postponed.

The Economist magazine noted: “Britain’s rearmament programme is the greatest public works programme ever devised in time of formal peace.” If one accepts Rudolf Hilferding’s conception of the national interest uniting domestic labor and capital in solidarity against foreign enemies, perhaps today’s defense contractors are similar to Nehemiah, rebuilding the defenses of Jerusalem, or Bernard Baruch, who warned about the military capabilities being developed by the Nazis in the 1930s. This shared focus on national defense, however, must transcend narrow economic interests and become a unifying force for the entire nation, fostering a sense of collective responsibility for our security and future. 

A rising tide is rumored to lift all boats. Perhaps through a Hamiltonian “augmentation of fluid capital” produced by the militarization of the economy, many will be lifted from their despair and into an adventure of a lifetime. World War II forced the United States to maximize its industrial resources and created the richest country ever known. Widespread prosperity pre-empted class conflict, advancing internal stability and social cohesion. A similar undertaking should be much easier in the 21st century given all the data the state has on its citizens, and the ability to use AI and other emerging technologies to influence opinion in a direction more sympathetic to the nation. 

Like it or not, such an algorithmic manipulation project is well underway. 

To truly unify the nation, as many people as possible must have a fair chance, eradicating the economic insecurity fracturing communities. According to a study by Deloitte and the Manufacturing Institute, in the manufacturing industry alone, 2.1 million manufacturing jobs are expected to be unfilled by 2030. Rapidly reskilling and upskilling workers is essential for building consensus and shared investment in our digital transformation. Without this, the potential for perceived ‘unequal burdens’ in times of crisis, where defense contractors’ profit while others suffer, threatens to shatter the fragile ‘class peace’ and undermine national unity. Sociologist Talcott Parsons observed that feelings of unfairness breed aggression, serving as both an excuse for failure and a natural manifestation of humanity’s ‘struggle for existence.’ 

Granted, if the US wants to win the AI race, they must recruit the most talented engineers from around the world in what Palantir CTO Shyam Shankar describes as “Operation Paperclip 2.0.” Yet the US should not forget many within its own borders who could use an opportunity to demonstrate their potential. Just because an ex-Marine developed a drinking problem during the pandemic does not mean they cannot get sober and change the world. Innovation can emerge from unexpected places when society converts the unattainable to attainable, and allows all of its members’ to fulfill their destiny.

A well-rounded education, grounding specialization in the wisdom of the Western tradition, is essential for a thriving and unified society. The promise of automation could be that, freed from the incessant and unnatural compulsion to specialize and earn a profit, citizens could spend more time engaging with the arts. This return to the humanities and foundational knowledge serves not only individual enrichment but also strengthens the civic fabric, fostering a shared understanding and appreciation of cultural heritage. 

The conversation should not be limited to the living. In the 1970s, when asked what he thought about the French revolution, which occurred in 1789, Chinese statesman Chou Enlai responded: “it’s too early to tell.” Though the United States does not place a high value on learning history, its adversaries sure do. 

Nothing under the sun is new. 

The stifling of dissent undermines the foundation of a robust and unified society, hindering the ability to address shared challenges. Why take a controversial stand and risk upsetting colleagues when one can stay silent and climb the corporate ladder? Only a senator’s son could afford to do otherwise. Endless connectivity has created a “context collapse” of uniformity, like the houses in post-WWII Levittown, “little boxes” of different colors “all made out of ticky-tacky and they all look just the same.” Former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, who possessed a rare phronesis, wrote: 

Inundated via social media with the opinions of multitudes, users are diverted from introspection; in truth many technophiles use the internet to avoid the solitude they dread. All of these pressures weaken the fortitude required to develop and sustain convictions that can be implemented only by traveling a lonely road, which is the essence of creativity.

Perhaps a wrongheaded conformative dominance and persecution of those with unpopular views is what Edward Gibbon described as “a slow and secret poison” that will lead to the West’s collapse. Millions of imprisoned minds need to be set free. 

Can the technological republic be constructed while retaining a commitment to liberty? Military action abroad almost always goes hand in hand with suppressing dissent at home. A citizen cracking a joke, if left uncensored, could turn opinion against the national security state. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) hardly has to worry about dissent because they have no tradition of free speech. Preserving liberty and winning the ideological war while simultaneously ensuring dominance in the hard war is perhaps the biggest challenge facing the West. Robert Hutchins wrote at the start of the Cold War, when the threat posed by the Soviet Union spurred significant rearmament and technological development in the United States: “If we abandon our ideals under external pressure, we give away without a fight what we would be fighting for if we went to war.” Herbert Marcuse viewed both Stalinist Russia and the American led West as entrenching unfreedom and domination and purveying violence, though they claimed otherwise. 

Wartime leaders, whether the enemy is a pandemic, climate change or foreign adversary, too easily shut down all resistance, as if they, and they alone, are the son of God. The dialectic lies in improving warfighting capabilities while preserving civil liberties; moving rapidly into the future while not forgetting the lessons of the past; resurrecting the republic without banishing all sinners. 

The West is ready to industrialize again. A lack of sunk fixed capital will allow for a quick shift to customizable manufacturing close to the near the end-user, via 3D printing. Western democracies tend to be decentralized and therefore avoid national strategic planning. This is quickly changing by necessity, mobilizing resources toward a shared goal in a new intelligent age of economic development. 

Yet the culture is in crisis. Folks have thousands of friends on social media media, yet have forgotten how to talk to one another. The path toward healing comes through purpose that goes beyond mere superficial agreements, taking the West to a shared future of civic revitalization underwritten by massive economic prosperity. In this moment of cultural and economic reckoning, the West must embrace reindustrialization as a transformative project, not just to rebuild its factories, but to reweave the very fabric of its civic life. 

At the beginning of the fascist era, Walter Benjamin wrote:

Nur um der Hoffnungslosen willen ist uns die Hoffnung gegeben.

It is only for the sake of those without hope that hope is given to us.