Second Dualism

Why, if the oil barons lost this "cold civil war" to the financiers, this struggle continues?


The struggle continues because the “war” didn’t end with the subordination of Big Oil. Oil was only one of the old power centers. What's tracking is a long‑cycle realignment of elite blocs, and that realignment didn’t stop just because one faction got folded into another. Big Oil lost—but the system didn’t stabilize. When the oil barons were absorbed into global finance, that didn’t produce equilibrium. It produced a vacuum.

Oil’s defeat meant that one of the 20th‑century sovereign blocs disappeared. Its institutional power was redistributed upward into finance, its political machinery (regional patronage networks, regulatory capture, foreign policy leverage) became hollowed out, but finance didn’t become omnipotent. It became overextended. A system where one bloc becomes too dominant tends to generate new challengers, not peace.

The real successor challenger wasn’t oil—it was tech. Once finance consolidated energy, the next frontier wasn’t hydrocarbons. It was:

• data

• platforms

• cloud infrastructure

• AI

• semiconductors

• logistics networks

• payments rails

These are the new “territories” of sovereignty. So the conflict didn’t end—it shifted theaters. Oil vs. finance was the old frontier. Tech vs. finance is the new frontier. This is why the struggle continues: the underlying structural tension—who gets to define sovereignty—never went away.

Oil’s defeat didn’t eliminate the Cowboy archetype. This is the part people miss. Even after the oil barons were subordinated, the cultural and political machinery of the Cowboy bloc didn’t vanish. It mutated:

• into extractive populism

• into resource‑state politics

• into regional identity movements

• into anti‑globalist rhetoric

• into a kind of “sovereignty nostalgia”

So even though the economic power of oil was absorbed, the political energy of the Cowboy faction remained available as a mobilizable force.

Finance can discipline capital flows.

It cannot discipline mythologies.

Thus the struggle continues because the defeated faction’s material base collapsed, but its symbolic base survived.

Finance never actually wants the struggle to end. This is the most Oglesby‑esque insight. A world where finance is unchallenged is a world where:

• regulation becomes inevitable

• political scrutiny intensifies

• legitimacy crises accumulate

• the public begins to ask “who rules?”

So finance benefits from:

• fragmented rivals

• rotating challengers

• controlled instability

• perpetual negotiation

In other words, the struggle continues because the hegemon requires it. A hegemon without enemies becomes a target. A hegemon with enemies becomes indispensable.

The “war” is now three‑cornered, not two‑cornered. The old Yankee–Cowboy binary is gone. The new geometry is triangular:



Oil’s defeat didn’t end the conflict. It opened space for a new conflict. The struggle continues because:

• oil’s defeat didn’t resolve the underlying question of sovereignty

• finance’s dominance generated new challengers (tech)

• the Cowboy faction survived as a cultural force

• finance benefits from a world of perpetual, manageable conflict

In other words:

The war didn’t end.

It changed shape.

Steve Bannon is trying to position himself as the leader of these perverted populists. Mao Zedong tried to ride a similar tiger called the Cultural Revolution.

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