America as Prussia in 1806: Decaying Institutions, Social Nihilism, Elite Complicity, and a Slow March Toward Disaster

It’s a somewhat long article, but I thought it was insightful and interesting, and it’s also a nice brief on history. Here’s the opening extract, to try to convince you to read the rest:

>*A vain, immoderate faith in these institutions made it possible to overlook the fact that their vitality was gone. The machine could still be heard clattering along, so no one asked if it was still doing its job. – Carl von Clausewitz on Prussia in 1806*

>In the autumn of 1806, the Kingdom of Prussia, “The Iron Kingdom,” suffered one of the most rapid and humiliating military defeats in modern European history. The twin battles of Jena and Auerstedt shattered not only its army but the myth of invincibility that had surrounded the legacy of Frederick the Great. For the young Carl von Clausewitz, then a junior officer in the collapsing Prussian forces, this moment marked a personal and national catastrophe that would shape his life’s work. Clausewitz would come to see the defeat not simply as a failure of generalship or tactics, but as the exposure of a more profound institutional and societal crisis; one in which a state had grown complacent, a military rendered obsolete, and a society stripped of civic vitality falling apart during “the most decisive conflict in which they would ever have to fight.” In that collapse and Clausewitz’s later reflections, one finds an unsettling parallel to present-day America, a powerful nation outwardly strong, yet increasingly vulnerable to the same internal rot.