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...

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This week the dudes and the patrons got together to chill and discuss the overall vibes in the world.

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This week the boys sat down with Dean and Matt from The Magnificast to discuss their new book. 

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

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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.

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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 

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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...

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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! 

Historical Revisionism and Delegitimation of the Revolutionary and Anticolonial Tradition—A Review of War and Revolution

Liberals and Reactionaries

From Karl Marx to the Fourth of July

THE MYTH OF THE “CONSERVATIVE REVOLUTION”

Communist and Neo-Babouvist readings of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution