American Weimar or American Hapsburg?

Dominic Green:

“…Ulrich is a forerunner of our college-educated millennials: morally enfeebled, sexually frustrated, professionally stunted. He has acquired enough sophistication to see through the forms of politics and social life — ‘critical thinking’, as the imposters of our schools call it — but not enough conviction to act in a way that might improve his life by bringing him into authentic contact with ‘reality’, which he knows is somewhere out there but cannot touch.

Musil never finished his novel. But Hitler, who rode the failings of Weimar all the way to the top spot, eventually gave the Ulrichs a purpose. The American future won’t be Weimar, but late-Hapsburg: a dual monarchy, divided between itself and within itself by nationalism, decadent with corruption and lassitude, scapegoating Jews because it cannot accept its own mediocrity, and waiting for the historical intrusion that will free it from the slow spiral of decline…”