The Regrettable Century

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

This week the boys sat down with Dean and Matt from The Magnificast to discuss their new book. From the editor: Capitalism's excessive patterns of production and consumption are fueling the biggest existential threat to humanity: climate change. The central assumption of our current economic system puts economic growth before all other values. But infinite growth on a finite planet is fundamentally impossible. We must embrace the idea of degrowth. With a name like "degrowth," misunderstandings are easy to come by, like assuming degrowth is about austerity or population control; on the contrary, degrowth means rejecting economic growth as the measure for social progress, such that we might grow other parts of our social life and ourselves. The problem isn't too few resources or too many people; it's capitalism's system of growth. Enough Is Enough argues that the economic and theological directions offered by liberation theology give us a unique paradigm for Christians to question the hegemony of growth. In a moment of climate crisis, Christians can orient themselves according to alternative values rooted in a relationship with creation that sees all creatures as siblings. Degrowth encourages us to expand our imaginations beyond a fixation on growth for growth's sake, to discover ways of organizing our societies according to different values. It's time for us to say, "Enough is enough," and to accept that if we abandon our drive for growth, we will discover there is already enough to go around. Buy the book from Fortress Press Support The Magnificast

Pentagon Wants to Retreat From the Persian Gulf, Shipping Chaos Threatens World Food Supply, Arms Manufacture Scam, Mossad Iran Purge, Israel Bombs Turkish Assets in Syria, Royal Navy Too Small and Weak, Ukraine Drone War Failure and Russian Breakthroughs... Join the Regrettable Century Patreon Visit the NEW IMPROVED Regrettable Century merch store

This week Jason and Kevin got together to do a close read the document that is causing American Conservatives to lose their minds, the new program of the Democratic Socialists of America. Join the Regrettable Century Patreon Visit the NEW IMPROVED Regrettable Century merch store

In this episode the boys continue their ongoing discussion of the influences of popular-socialism, folk-socialism, left-populism, and left-nationalism on the western workers' movement and how to navigate the impossible task of resurrecting the "Real Marxist" tradition. The Problem With Left Nationalism https://jacobin.com/2026/01/left-nationalism-universalism-populism-melenchon The Left and Its Meaning https://sublationmedia.com/the-left-and-its-meaning/ Folk Socialism — A Left-Populist Disorder https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/article/folk-socialism-a-left-populist-disorder/ A Socialism for the 21st Century https://truthout.org/articles/a-socialism-for-the-21st-century/ Neoliberalism and the Socialist Movement in Britain: From the Third Road to Jeremy Corbyn and Brexit https://mronline.org/2024/09/11/neoliberalism-and-the-socialist-movement-in-britain-from-the-third-road-to-jeremy-corbyn-and-brexit/ Marxist Internationalism or National Interest? https://www.theleftchapter.com/post/marxist-internationalism-or-national-interest People, class, democracy: re-mapping left populism from populist social democracy to popular socialism https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13569317.2024.2371506#d1e175

This week, two old veterans of about two and a half decades in the fight against half a dozen imperialist wars read and discussed an article about why there is not anti-war movement. Join the Regrettable Century Patreon Visit the NEW IMPROVED Regrettable Century merch store

Iran War Strategic Summary, Iran and Oman Hormuz Agreement, The US is Out of Missiles, China Missile Practice on US Ship Models, Ukraine Bombs Restaurant, Ukraine 40 Day Drone War Failure, Ukraine Counteroffensive Failure, Ukraine Out of Air Defense Missiles... Join the Regrettable Century Patreon Visit the NEW IMPROVED Regrettable Century merch store

This week we continue our series on republicanism by returning to an episode we did on the complicated legacy of the American Revolution. This older episode now has a 40 minute preface where we discuss the episode and how much things have changed since the original, enjoy! Like the bourgeois project as a whole, the historical consequences of the American Revolution have had mixed results. Simultaneously spurring on the cause of human freedom and stifling it, the American Revolution was pregnant with a creative and destructive spirit. As the American Empire appears to be in decline, we ask whether or not things could have gone, or could still go, in another direction. Check out Matthew and Jason's Podcast About the History of the Soviet Union: https://regrettablecentury.podbean.com/e/introducing-the-unbreakable-union-podcast-the-contemporary-importance-of-soviet-history/ War and Revolution: Rethinking the 20th Century https://thecharnelhouse.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/domenico-losurdo-war-and-revolution-rethinking-the-twentieth-century.pdf Historical Revisionism and Delegitimation of the Revolutionary and Anticolonial Tradition—A Review of War and Revolution https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/21598282.2016.1172752 Liberals and Reactionaries http://www.leninology.co.uk/2011/10/liberals-and-reactionaries.html From Karl Marx to the Fourth of July https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2010/07/inde-j03.html THE MYTH OF THE “CONSERVATIVE REVOLUTION” https://socialistworker.org/2011/12/14/myth-of-the-conservative-revolution Communist and Neo-Babouvist readings of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution https://www.academia.edu/38110441/_Communist_and_Neo_Babouvist_readings_of_the_Enlightenment_and_the_French_Revolution_in_E_Vallance_ed_Remembering_Early_Modern_Revolutions_London_Routledge_2018

JD Vance Admits Epstein Was Mossad and Israel Derailed Negotiations, Pentagon Budget Crisis, US Weapons Shortage, Failure and Firings in Ukraine... Join the Regrettable Century Patreon Visit the NEW IMPROVED Regrettable Century merch store

This week the boys all got together to do a bonus episode about the current state of the republic. We are clearly ailing as a society and we are clearly in trouble as a country. Will the decline of the empire lead to the fall of the republic? Join the Regrettable Century Patreon Visit the NEW IMPROVED Regrettable Century merch store

This week we sat down with our comrade Brad, a union organizer and CPUSA member, to discuss an article he wrote about two conflicting visions of radical change at the heart of the unfinished American Revolution and its implications for the contemporary workers' movement. Abolition Democracy or Reconstruction Democracy? Working-Class Leadership and the Unfinished Democratic Revolution https://newjubileenotes.substack.com/p/abolition-democracy-or-reconstruction

Israel Tried to Assassinate Iran's Negotiators, The Abysmal State of US Oil Reserves, The War is Back the Strait is Closed, Ukraine on the Brink, Russian Advance Slowed but Ukrainian Losses Surge... Join the Regrettable Century Patreon Visit the NEW IMPROVED Regrettable Century merch store

We continue our month long series on American Communism by doing a close read and discussion of two articles about the Communist Party of the United States of America's role as the cutting edge of liberatory politics in the mid 20th century. Join the Regrettable Century Patreon Visit the NEW IMPROVED Regrettable Century's merch store

*The first version of this episode was only an hour long for some reason. We've re-uploaded the full episode which is a half hour longer.* For America's 250th birthday, the boys got together to discuss the legacy of the American Revolution. There are two major poles of thought on the American left, with wildly differing interpretations of the American Revolution. They both make some good points, we discuss those here. The Social and Intellectual Legacy of the American Revolution https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/essays/social-and-intellectual-legacy-american-revolution Ken Burns Makes the Case for the Greatness of 1776 https://jacobin.com/2026/05/ken-burns-american-revolution-history Class Struggle Was a Crucial Part of the American Revolution https://jacobin.com/2026/05/american-revolution-britain-class-struggle Radical historian challenges traditional Marxist view of ‘so-called’ American Revolution https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/radical-historian-challenges-traditional-marxist-view-of-so-called-american-revolution/ The Conquest of Power, Chapter 2: The American Revolution https://www.marxists.org/archive/weisbord/conquest2.htm

Last week's British race riots were largely organized by a rising movement of affiliated neo-Nazi organizations called Active Clubs. It should surprise no one that they have direct links to Ukraine. This week we do a close read of an article from the Azov Lobby Blog and discuss the outsized impact of Ukraine's Azov movement on global neo-Nazism. Join the Regrettable Century Patreon Visit the NEW IMPROVED Regrettable Century's merch store

This week we invited Daniel Tutt and C. Derick Varn to talk about their new book, The People are Not One: Socialist Strategy After Left Populism. From the publisher: In The People Are Not One, Daniel Tutt and C. Derick Varn dismantle the central illusion of contemporary left politics: that “the people” can serve as a coherent subject of emancipation. Against both right and left populisms, they argue that this fantasy of unity obscures real class antagonisms and traps socialism in a dead-end politics of moral appeal and electoral maneuver. Through a sustained critique of left-populism, post-Marxist theory, and Democratic Party–oriented socialism, Tutt and Varn show how the collapse of mass politics, alongside debates over the professional-managerial class and the atomization of working-class life, has produced a strategic impasse on the left. What follows is not a lament but a provocation: a call to abandon populist shortcuts and rebuild socialist strategy on the terrain of class struggle as it actually exists—uneven, divided, and politically unformed. The People Are Not One is a manifesto for a post-populist left willing to confront fragmentation head-on and begin the long work of reconstructing class power. https://www.revolpress.com/people-not-one https://danieltutt.com/ https://www.patreon.com/cw/varnvlog

Trump Threatens Iran and Backs Down Again, US Intel Upgrades Israel's Espionage Threat Level, Israel's Plans For Radical Militarization and Autarky, Sy Hersh Says Trump Wanted to Use Nukes on Iran, Ukraine's Long Range Strikes Aren't Going to Win the War... Join the Regrettable Century Patreon Visit the Regrettable Century Merch Shop