I am reading the manuscript of a book and one of it's main themes is that among the most lasting victories in history are defeats. Thermopylae, Masada, Roncesvalles, the Alamo to name few. The most dangerous and unkillable thing on earth is a legend.

The other common theme in history is that defeat is often more fecund than victory. Many of the flexible tactical formations movies ascribe to Rome originated from the debacle of Cannae. Carthage lost in the long run.

You win the campaign by coming out ahead on average. It's interesting to consider the fortunes of progressives. Did they peak around 1998 and have they been steadily losing to Black Swans since then? Not just to Brexit and Trump but to Covvid and their self inflicted shutdown.

They're losing because they just can't handle Black Swans. They're too inflexible to adapt and the only strategy they have is narrative control and spending giant sums of money.

But here's the thing: there are many more Black Swans in the offing and their prospects are dim.

Of course I could be wrong but I think it's more than likely that we'll see another Black Swan before too long because of complexity and the progs will have less energy to meet each succeeding challenge and the metric for this is the deficit.

The left may think of DT as the Last Surprise but that's almost surely not the case. And each time around they face the new surpise two things are true. They have more debt in their pocket and they have to spend more for narrative maintenance.