Bret Devereaux

One problem I see with a lot of history, but also nat. sec. political analysis that gets to the public is that it stays up at the level of abstraction. For example recently, the explanation the public got for the collapse of the ANA/ANP was 'corruption' and 'demoralization.'

Which is true, in an airy, summary kind of way. But at some point, you need to make that concrete: the problem was leaders stealing gasoline and ammo from their units and selling it or putting people on the roles to get a paycheck who weren't really there, etc.

I notice this issue in student papers: if you ask them why something happened, they are very prepared to give you 3-4 abstract nouns which explain why something happened. If you ask them for the nuts and bolts of how <abstract noun> leads to event...they've got nothing.

And I notice this same problem in a lot of 'explainer' journalist focused on foreign policy. You saw this, again, with coverage of the Taliban's setting up a government...very few articles sought to sit down and explain who was who and who might actually have power.

I lost count, for instance, of the number of Taliban explainers where somehow Hibatullah Akhundzada... the ::checks notes:: "supreme leader & commander of the faithful" just didn't figure in. His *existence* much less his role in the leaderships structure was never explained.

This tendency to dwell entirely in abstraction - and to propose solutions which only exist in the air of abstraction and not on the ground of reality - seems to me to be a common error of the intellectual class and one that good teaching should push against.