State of the Union – from humility to nuclear hubris

Two prophetic warnings ignored, an authoritarian body politic now fatally infected by Covidism and militarism is on the verge of nuclear war

“In holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.” – President Dwight D. Eisenhower, farewell address to the nation, January 17, 1961

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Eisenhower’s final public address to the nation six decades ago contained two of the most prescient warnings ever issued by a US president to the citizens he served.

1. He sounded the alarm about the rise of a “military-industrial complex”

2. He exhorted Americans to guard against a loss of democratic control to an entrenched “scientific-technological elite”

Eisenhower’s official White House portrait & farewell speech notes, Wikipedia

Both injunctions have proved tragically visionary and predictive. After more than 60 years of intervening history filled with costly, largely pointless and enormously destructive US military adventurism, and the contemporaneous rise of an anti-democratic technocracy that has been on full display during the past two years of the Covid pandemic, they are undeniable.

President Joe Biden’s March 1, State of the Union address (SOTU) made it clear that Eisenhower’s stark warnings have congealed into official policy in today’s US imperium.