The world this week needed a political maneuver pulled off with no laughs, and an influential group of American politicians (with one admirable exception) proved unable to accommodate.

The Congressional Progressive Caucus took about 36 hours to pull off a circular firing squad stunt that would have made the Keystone Kops stand and applaud:

On June 27th, analyst Christopher Mott at The Institute for Peace and Democracy published a white paper called, "Woke Imperium: The Coming Confluence Between Social Justice and Neoconservatism." You might remember it. It was featured here in a TK article called "The Great Military Rebrand," and Chris and I did a Callin show about his thesis.

One of Mott's central ideas was that Americans imagine they don't fight wars for crass reasons of conquest or regional self-interest. They prefer grand battles of good and evil, part of a worldview that places "universalist narratives at the center of the human story." Enemies are therefore cast not as mere competitors for resources or territory, but agents of Satanic influence:

Foreign rivals… can be painted as being "on the wrong side of history", "against Progress", "diabolical", and so on… At the same time, these very causes are likely to be systematically de-emphasized in the cases of nations allied to the U.S—such as Saudi Arabia…