It's not really that hard at least from a European perspective, as Ferguson points out in "Pity of WAr" a purported victor like the UK
lost an entire generation in the battlefield, for what the media ended up representing as a confused cause, the French had mutinies toward
the end of the war, then again with the likes of Nivelle and Foch, maybe they were do that, The Russian experience toppled the regime in charge, Of course Iraq in the popular imagination has been painted
as worse than Vietnam, the Civil War, et al; hence the skiddishness
of the major players against Iran

The back to back oil shocks of the 1970s, along with the removal of wage and price controls, made the 70s, an interesting era for music
but a strange one to live through

A progressive academic with little executive experience, with an ahistorical mindset, pushes through a piece of legislation that the
populace is not in favor of; this is what Glenn Reynolds would call
a bug not a feature

One wonders how accidental the absence was, FDR was one of the last remaining major figures of the Wilson administration, yet he helped
demolish it's status, by cooperating with the Nye Committee, before then, isolationism was not so great a force (one of the junior staffers
on that panel, who was soon to rise in the Government bureaucracy
was Alger Hiss, first in the AAA and later at State. Later actions like
the 'court packing scheme' did little to engender comity, the Hatch Act arose out of the blatant electioneering that he was engaging it
against who he considered his foe, who weren't abroad for the most part

Why is that, those who try to determine the taxonomy of 'this rough
beast that slouches" toward mine and your town, are to be dismissed as cranks.

The fact is the progressive solution really hasn't worked,
the Fed is as accurate as a passel of blind dart throwers in gauging
our economic condition, social security and other programs are unsustainable in Keynes 'long run' yet they have a growing constituency. I do disagree with Beck on at least one point, both
Russia and China, didn't 'transform' in the last generation, they reverted, the first to the modified Czarist state, with the siloviki as the new Boyars, China back to the Chiang regime, with the PLA.

That conversation I had with that Argentine historian, who I was surprised when he referred positively to Jonah Goldberg, no one else
in my neighborhood, knows who he is, and needless to say, a big
admirer of Sarah, remarked on that seemingly long ago election day.
He had seen the chiliastic left and the right, tear out the center of his nation,over a forty year period, he left after the Proceso junta, he agreed with Churchill's aphorism about democracy "worst form of of government, except for all the others" and fit classical liberalism in that same place

Russia is like the proverbial 'Norwegian blue parrot' it's a dying nation
it just doesn't know it yet. If it's very lucky it can return to it's borders back in the 16th Century, before the Tatars but I don't think
so. China is a formidable contestant for the prize of hegemon, but
it's economic system, makes AIG seem transparent. The post AGW
dystopia "Mirrored Heavens", has it falling prey to a sixty year civil
war, which seems more than a bit unlikely, but without a kernel of consent, warlordism with a PLA flavor sounds likely