The Regrettable Century

This week the boys sat down to do a close reading of an article by the Kritikpunkt Team titled Fascism? For What? We deal with the age old question, is fascism on the rise and if so why? From the article: "Hitler and his associates ruled by perverted means because they were evil, and with their malice they were able to win over their masses. Today there are evil people again, and they must not be allowed to take power, because then one would once again have to submit to non-democracy. Such is the theory of bourgeois anti-fascism. We consider this formula wrong, and we ask instead: what would a fascist regime actually have to offer the economy it would have to administer today?" https://kritikpunkt.com/fascism-for-what/

This week, the boys got together with our official European correspondent, Matthew, to talk about the triumph of the AFD in the Anhalt Sachsen elections this past week and end up talking about the European Right, Fascism, Post-Fascism, and how to keep losing elections to racist ghouls while acting morally superior and helping no one.   Join the Regrettable Century Patreon Visit the NEW IMPROVED Regrettable Century merch store

Welcome to a special, long-form collaboration: The Regrettable Century and VarnVlog combined in our Captain Planet team of pessimism. Today, we are opening up a comprehensive multi-part investigation into New York Times columnist Ross Douthat's landmark 2020 thesis, The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victim of Our Own Success. Drawing its name and conceptual infrastructure from Jacques Barzun’s classic From Dawn to Decadence, Douthat’s work defines a decadent society not as a spectacular moral collapse, but as an advanced state of structural stasis. It is a condition where a society remains remarkably wealthy off of past advancement and technologically proficient off of prior development—what Marxists would define as the crushing weight of dead labor—yet is fundamentally unable to advance any further economically, scientifically, or culturally. Douthat paradoxically kicks off his book by quoting Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci on the interregnum—the morbid symptoms that emerge when the old is dying and the new cannot be born. We seize on this crossover, exposing a fascinating systemic reality: modern post-liberal, distributist, and traditionalist conservatives are quietly haunted by the exact same structural trends that Marx tracked via the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. They observe secular stagnation all around them, yet must look to Aristotle, Ibn Khaldun, Adam Smith, or David Ricardo to describe it because they are ideologically barred from admitting Marx was right. We parse through the first major horseman of the book—Stagnation—and apply it to our 2026 material realities: The Let's-Pretend Economy: We re-read Douthat's pre-COVID evaluation of tech "unicorns" like Uber and WeWork. We map how this pattern of "let's pretendism" has seamlessly mutated into the massive generative AI and large language model (LLM) bubble—where over-inflated tech valuations run on billions of dollars of burning venture capital while generating zero real-world productivity growth. The Chip Monopoly Mirage: Why the only true driver of physical profitability in the Magnificent Seven stock cluster remains the actual commodity production of silicon chips, while the rest of the tech ecosystem functions as an elite real-estate leasing scam. The Demography Bomb: A preliminary look at the collapse of global social reproduction. We track why the aging out of the Baby Boomers and the severe contraction of global birth rates have left the imperial core, Europe, and China facing identical structural resource deadlocks. The Geopolitical Quagmire: How the escalating cost structures of the permanent arms economy prevent the Western core from manufacturing basic munitions efficiently, trapping modern empires into proxy-war management. We strip away the shallow, vibes-based discourse of the modern culture wars to map out the long-durée arc of a global system running out of track. Read the history, check the material baselines, and protect your peace.   Douthat, Ross. The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success. New York: Avid Reader Press, 2020.   Support our collaborative efforts on Patreon: VarnVlog: https://www.patreon.com/varnvlog

Economic D-Day, Iran Strikes Back, US Army Secretary Resigns in Protest, Iran's Financial Situation, Azov on the Rise, The Zionist/Ukrainian Nazi Alliance, Inter-Agency Intel War in Kiev, Russia Advances...   Join the Regrettable Century Patreon Visit the NEW IMPROVED Regrettable Century merch store

This week the dudes and the patrons got together to chill and discuss the overall vibes in the world.   Join the Regrettable Century Patreon Visit the NEW IMPROVED Regrettable Century merch store