The brilliant and talented —who became SNL’s head writer at age 28 (and introduced SNL Digital Shorts), founded Funny or Die with Will Farrell and won an Academy Award in 2016 for The Big Short, just to highlight a few of his credits—inhabits a decidedly grave persona on Substack and Bluesky. His main beat is climate change and social collapse:

I’m a huge fan of Adam McKay the writer and producer, but for me he also symbolizes something about the current state of humanity, particularly the predicament of humans who have clear eyes and full hearts. How are we supposed to walk around with clear eyes and full hearts in a world that’s filled with so much cruelty and ignorance, on a planet that’s about to become much less hospitable?

McKay’s most recent feature film, the amazing Don’t Look Up (Netflix 2021), explores that very question, and its title reflects a popular answer, which is to avert your eyes and unburden your heart. The film came out five years ago, and since then it seems that McKay has mainly chosen to pursue more serious political activism and journalistic projects, consistent with his Bluesky persona rather than his Funny or Die one. This is the tragic condition of the world I’m talking about. I want more “Funny or Die” (and Big Short / Don’t Look Up) Adam McKay, but I also understand how impossible it probably feels for Adam McKay to summon those parts of himself, being a clear-eyed and full-hearted human. I want a world where artists like Adam McKay feel unconflicted about creating art.

As I write this however, large parts of North America and Europe are seeing dangerous air quality due to smoke from other places that are engulfed in flames. That’s happening amid sustained, record-breaking heat waves.

News of what nature is doing right now hasn’t fully displaced coverage of the ways humans are still being awful, but the developing “Super El Niño” might tip that balance. Every El Niño on record has triggered extreme weather—dangerous heat waves, droughts in some places, flooding in others, crop failures and fishery collapse, famine, and death. This El Niño is projected to be the strongest ever recorded, possibly by a “mind-blowing margin.”

The “utopian” sci-fi writer Kim Stanley Robinson begins his ‘climate’ book The Ministry for the Future with a mass “wet bulb temperature” event that kills millions of people across India overnight. Wet bulb temperature is the threshold of heat and humidity at which evaporation no longer occurs to provide any cooling effect, conditions under which the human body can no longer cool itself and maintain equilibrium by sweating. In short, humans can’t survive in wet bulb temperature conditions. In Robinson’s book, this is what finally wakes people up sufficiently to spur aggressive climate action, including targeted ecoterrorism that is arguably the real driver of change.

The coming Super El Niño could cause death on a similar scale, but probably not in such a concentrated timeframe as in Robinson’s book, and judging by how absent the phrase “climate change” is from current news coverage, it’s hard to imagine that even this will drive meaningful change on that front.

What are we supposed to do with this information anyway?

In a 2023 New Yorker piece, “What to Do with Climate Emotions,” Jia Tolentino wrote:

Should we change the subject before we get too despondent? There’s no shortage of other crises competing for our attention, and climate change can make knowledge feel pointless, or worse: in the three decades since the first international agreement to reduce carbon emissions, we have released more carbon into the atmosphere than in the rest of human history combined. The ice sheets keep melting, the permafrost keeps releasing its methane, and the future continues to harden into a psychic zone of suffering and dread.

But changing the subject never quite works and comes with different pain. “Don’t look up” isn’t a solution for anyone who has clear eyes and a full heart. One therapist Tolentino talked to recommends that her clients “aim for a middle ground of sustainable distress.” Then she points to the serenity prayer. Sigh.

It’s advice aimed at people like me whose life is relatively untouched (for now) by the effects of climate change. It makes me think of an old saying I most recently heard Naomi Klein repeat self-mockingly: “When the going gets tough, the left writes books.” She writes books. I just write Substack posts, which average just a couple hundred views each (according to my stats), with maybe one or two ‘likes’ and no comments.

Clearly this is a very small thing, but I tell myself it’s not nothing. We can do those things, and maybe a little more, and then a little more after that.

Noah Hawley, creator of the “Fargo” television series, has an excellent piece in the Atlantic about the time he went to Jeff Bezos’s “Campfire” retreat, one in the circuit of mogul-funded ideas festivals. There are so many amazing details in Hawley’s account, but one of his takeaways especially struck me as a perfect expression of an idea that I think about a lot:

…moral reasoning develops through consequences—not punishment, necessarily, but experiencing the effects of your actions on others, receiving honest feedback, having to accommodate reality as it actually is rather than as you wish it to be. It’s not that the wealthy become evil; it’s that their environment stops teaching them the things that nonwealthy people are forced to learn simply by living in a world that pushes back. When you can buy your way out of any mistake, when you can fire anyone who disagrees with you, when your social circle consists entirely of people who need something from you, the basic mechanism by which humans learn that other people are real goes dark.

To these men—mostly they are men—the rest of us aren’t real in the sense of having distinct needs, desires, plans, expectations, responsibilities, relationships, or ideas. Other people exist only minimally as it serves them. An uncomfortable analogy is that people in general exist for these plutocrats much the way that, say, factory workers in Bangladesh exist for the typical American or European. I’ll come back to that.

Andreessen and Musk in particular seem to enjoy referring to the rest of us as NPCs. In video game jargon, an NPC is a non-player character, meaning a character that is not controlled by another player but is part of the game itself—a character without agency in other words. Sometimes NPCs are basically scenery, like extras in a movie; other times they play minor but useful roles in transactions, quests, fights, etc. As a player you generally ignore NPCs, except when they’re needed to move the story forward, or when they’re just in the way, slowing you down.

God Mode is another video game term, meaning a cheat code or hack that makes a player invincible. These plutocrats play the game of real life mostly in God Mode, using extreme wealth as their cheat code to escape not just accountability, and obligation, but all forms of disharmony and friction, no matter how mild. You would think they’d be content simply to declare victory and retire to their private islands, but they are not satisfied because their victory is not yet total. They still encounter people here and there who tenaciously insist on being real humans. We are annoying that way.

It really upsets them to be reminded that God Mode is not (yet) their permanent condition or that not everyone has acquiesced to their worldview. Sometimes their antics are comically petty…

Soon after Elon Musk bought Twitter, he organized a meeting to understand why his own tweets weren’t getting the attention he expected. When engineers walked him through an analysis, he didn’t like what they told him, so he fired them on the spot. Then he ordered a change to the algorithm to permanently boost his own tweets.1 Much more recently, Musk directed a storm of furious replies at novelist Joyce Carol Oates after she roasted him thusly:

It’s not always trivial stuff. In Marc Andreessen’s account of how the Biden Administration suggested a “pause” on certain cryptocurrency allowances in order to “study” the issue before offering its unbridled support, Andreessen characterized it as a “terroristic threat” and a “direct and brutal assault” against the tech industry. He took his tirade on the podcast circuit as he pivoted aggressively pro-Trump. Andreessen has been similarly hyperbolic about workers who have had the temerity to criticize the practices of their employers, like the Google employees who protested the company’s contributions to Project Maven, and workers at various companies expressing discontent about relationships with ICE, private prison firms, etc.

So the plutocrats fight on.

Government is a main front of their war where they have won much ground over decades, often without much of a fight. They have captured courts, lawmakers, and regulating bodies to eviscerate workers’ power and otherwise clear the way for their schemes in advance. They have tailored finance and tax law to minimize their own obligations and maximize their ability to move and hide money, including money they spend on electoral politics. Over and over again they have managed to privatize gains and socialize losses. There are many examples, but the canonical one of our lifetime was the 2008 financial crisis, where millions of Americans suffered but the banks got their bailouts. Where it remains necessary, the rich and powerful simply flout regulations and break laws with impunity, which is something we can glimpse in the Epstein files, and it’s also manifest in the fact of our convicted felon POTUS.

In parallel, the plutocrats have worked to capture the largest media corporations as well as the big evangelical church organizations. This has been critical in recruiting foot soldiers from among the rank and file, and grooming them into an army of “taxation-is-theft” robots who rage against the elites but would die on the hill of Musk’s and Bezos’s right to keep all their money. Because those billionaires earned their money! They deserve it! They create jobs! Never mind that they earned their billions at the rest of our expense by weaponizing every lever of power and veil of protection that the public once enjoyed. Never mind that $200 billion could translate to two-hundred-thousand millionaires (or twenty-thousand deca-millionaires!) who all create jobs, instead of enriching a single narcissist with a penis rocket.

Finally, these guys have embraced a school of political philosophy that validates their ideas and provides them with a rationale, which they wield with great fervor.2 It argues that there’s a natural hierarchy of humanity, which has been established through dynamics of Social Darwinism, and where white men and Euro descendants and “the west” more broadly sit at the top. It endorses race science to argue that some races and cultures are naturally superior to others. It views wealth as a sign of great intelligence plus agency. It asserts that power belongs to those who take it. The movement that developed around these ideas has been named the Dark Enlightenment, also the Neo-Reactionary movement, or NRx.

Equipped with this rational defense of their worldview, plutocrats and wannabes have no qualms about pursuing power and wealth at any cost to the world. Ethics is for suckers; compassion is for the weak; empathy is a civilizational risk.3 Returning to those Bangladeshi factory workers, it’s true that regrettably few of us are doing anything to improve their lot, but most people (I hope) can at least recognize the injustice of such imbalance and exploitation. Dark Enlightenment philosophy on the other hand explains it as the natural order.

None of this is hidden in any way. Some of these guys frequenly tweet (or Xcrete)4 their views on X and comment on social media; some have published manifestos; 5 they fund think tanks and promote the writings of intellectuals whose work distills and validates their worldview. Their worldview matters because these people are running great swaths of the world. Hawley again:

When Musk took a chainsaw to the federal government as part of the inside joke he called DOGE, he did so with the air of a man who believed that nothing matters—poverty, chaos, human suffering. He was having fun. It didn’t even matter that the entire destructive exercise ultimately yielded no practical financial gains. For him, the outcome was a foregone conclusion: He could only win, because losing had lost its meaning.

I fear that this brand of aggressive self-interest and contempt for humanity—along with its handy rationale—threatens to metastasize through the culture, as the plutocrats appear to keep winning, and respectable routes to success become ever more elusive. Recently though, I wrote about a politics of neighborism, which is the other side of the fight happening in the culture right now. It boils down to whether or not one believes in the concept of human rights, whether pluralism is worth protecting, and whether “the collective” exists at all. It’s the tragedy of the commons writ large, a fight between those who would protect the commons versus those who don’t accept that the commons is a legitimate idea.

The AI future that the plutocrats are working to build is all of the above taken to its logical conclusion. They are counting on their God Mode powers to actualize their AI vision, which requires massive amounts of capital, plus appropriations of land, water, power, and data that currently belong to other people, people who are increasingly fighting back. And of course permanent God Mode is the outcome they expect from AI, a future without pesky human employees, governments, etc. Some of them practically salivate at the prospect of human extinction and the dawn of super-intelligent species that succeed us.6

In Conclusion

There are many dimensions to all this, which I’m only touching on here. There’s the condition of extreme wealth itself—its forms and textures in material terms and also how it manifests in the psyches of these guys, how it destroys their capacity to see reality or tolerate friction. There’s the decades-long project to capture government and media and bend the levers of power in their direction. There’s the political philosophy they have embraced to rationalize their actions.

I’m especially interested in trying to hone in on their first principles and the many contradictions and blind spots they get away with—in their notions of merit and free markets for example, or in their rationale for socializing losses while privatizing gains.

If any of that interests you, leave a comment!

The staggering audacity of this. Obviously for guidance on matters of theology, we can just look at what the Bible says in the Book of Tarantino…1

Kidding aside, the beef between the Trump administration and the Pope has got me thinking again about my own route to atheism, which I have written about before (here and here), but there’s another dimension to my path that feels relevant to current conflicts between different Christian identities and dogmas.

First though, I think it makes sense to pause and define what I mean by atheism, because it’s commonly misconstrued to mean a belief in the nonexistence of god(s). Atheism can indeed refer to this kind of positive rejection of god, but that itself is a belief, which I think should have a different label, like ‘anti-theism’ perhaps. What atheism more precisely refers to, and what I mean by the term, is a lack or absence of belief in god(s), not a belief in their absence. Some people prefer the label ‘agnostic’ for this, but ‘agnostic’ connotes more than just the absence of belief; it implies disinterest.

The beef between Pope Leo and MAGA Christians feels relevant to my own journey because both parties view themselves as righteous Christians, but their respective versions of Christianity could not be more different. I have a strong bias towards Pope Leo’s version, but when I think about how I would argue in favor of it, it becomes arbitrary and circular and ultimately subjective.

Within Christianity alone there are many variations of what god is like, what he wants for the world, and what he expects of us. Is one of these the true god? Which one? And on what basis do we disqualify others — Allah or Gaia or the rest of the non-Christian gods?

I used to resolve this conundrum through a personal formulation of god, which combined qualities and attributes from established conceptions of god plus, I’m sure, some tweaks of my own. If something felt true, I factored it into my formulation of god. If something seemed like it was invented to serve church leaders for example, or it damned certain people in ways that seemed unjust to me, then I filtered it out of my formulation. this wasn’t by design. I didn’t make a conscious decision to formulate my own version of god, but at some point I understood that’s what I was doing. Mine was a loving god, but it was a product of my imperfect human brain, and realizing this made me see all established conceptions of god the same way—as inventions of other imperfect human brains.

All this speaks to why the United States is a not a Christian nation, despite what many conservative evangelicals like to claim. Even if we put aside all other faiths, and non-belief as well, which version of Christianity would a Christian USA reflect? I assume it would be the one most willing and able to assert its dominion by any means necessary, perhaps by definition the one most willing to compromise and pervert Christianity itself. A nominally Christian United States would probably be the furthest thing from Christlike.

This story is of course what played out across Europe for three centuries, eventually dissolving into the period we call the Age of Enlightenment. Christians fought long and bloody wars against other Christians, ostensibly over subtle differences in dogma, because unity under any single set of beliefs was not possible. No group was willing to subvert its beliefs to those of another group or to any set of compromises. I say ‘ostensibly over dogma’ because earthly human motivations surely factored into the mix as well—individual and collective, from personal grievances to dynastic ambitions. The religious drivers of conflict became tangled up with the personal and political ones.

The Enlightenment philosophers sought to resolve this through a set of secular epistemologies and institutions that would foster civility without requiring unity. Importantly, they developed this secular humanism to exist alongside religious beliefs and accommodate differences—within limits—not to replace religion. But it’s around those limits that conflicts have flared up—over slavery, abortion, and many other things. The current beef between Pope Leo and the Trump administration over just war theory and the treatment of immigrants is just the latest in a long line.

Like Enlightenment secularism and the Church, individual atheism naturally coexists in civil society alongside faith. Most atheists don’t have any problem with the faithful, as long as they don’t impose their religious beliefs on other people. It seems that most believers see things the same way. Most U.S. Christians are tolerant of other Christians who believe differently (although too many seem decidedly less tolerant of Muslims and other non-Christians, and of secularism, but we aren’t waging bloody wars on US soil over these differences… yet).

The devil is in the details. Some believers don’t seem to see a difference between having other beliefs imposed on them versus just being exposed to other ideas. And sometimes one group’s religious beliefs encroach into territory that the rest of us understand to be collective and pluralistic—like education or public health. In these cases, one group wants to renegotiate limits, the compromises designed to accommodate the collective. One group feels both imposed-upon by the collective and powerful enough or entitled enough to assert its own preferences. This same dynamic has sparked conflicts since the Age of Enlightenment began. It’s in everyone’s interest to commit to Enlightenment values, as imperfect and incomplete as they are for any single sect of the faithful.

Early on my road to atheism I also started thinking about the purpose of religion. What is it for? The idealistic and most generous answer is that religion is supposed to help us be kind, compassionate, useful actors in the world. That’s basically just the Golden Rule though, isn’t it? I’ve long thought that if humans could master just the Golden Rule, then it would be mission accomplished for most major religions. Everything else is performance—churches and their dogmas and rituals—to be enjoyed like any other hobby or social club.

Some Christians wonder why an atheist like me would actually value the Golden Rule or any other morality. I’ve seen Christians raise this question in debates — dubious that morality could lack an objective center, and suspicious of atheists who nonetheless behave in moral ways. Some Christians suspect that it’s all performative, that atheists follow moral norms only as necessary to game the system. Others (like Jordan Peterson) posit that a self-proclaimed nonbeliever who behaves morally is not an atheist at all, that they’re just unaware of their faith in a higher power. That’s silly stuff. This is getting long, so I won’t go into secular theories of morality, but they exist—pragmatism, consequentialism, emotivism, utilitarianism, and others I’m sure.2 And here on the atheist side, there are fair questions about the supposed objectivity of Christian morality (as well as its supposed morality).

The last thing I’ll say about belief and non-belief is that it’s not something a person can choose. I can’t choose to believe in the Christian god (which version!) any more than a Christian can choose to believe that existence is a dream of Vishnu. If we all woke up tomorrow belonging to a religion that demanded we accept that a divine collective of six penguins runs the universe, none of us could force ourselves to believe it. The most we could do is pretend to believe, which is what I used to do with Christianity without realizing it.

Anyway, these days, this is my idea of church:

Beside the Point

Somewhere in an alternate universe, Vance wanders to a logical conclusion…

Omnishambles is a good word to describe present reality. It means exactly what it appears to mean: “a situation that is bad in many different ways, because things have been organized badly and serious mistakes have been made.”1 Another good phrase I encountered (in a piece by political scientist ) is hegemonic suicide, which I like because it implies action rather than just a state of being, like driving a car off a cliff.

Collapse of the world order

Trump and his enablers have destroyed the world order defined by American hegemony that has shaped global politics for my entire life. This will feel like an extreme overstatement to a lot of people, some of whom see positive signs in recent polls. It’s tempting imagine a future where Democrats take back Congress and then the White House, with a mandate to repair the damage while holding Trump officials accountable, etc. Some of that might happen, but overall it is a fantasy. The previous world order is gone like the East Wing of the White House—suddenly, violently, clownishly, and forever. We need to build something to replace it, something better than a ballroom.

Hegel wrote about figures like Trump, whose actions—intentional and otherwise—spur a transition from one era to another: “such men may treat…great, even sacred interests, inconsiderately; conduct which is indeed obnoxious to moral reprehension.” This describes Trump’s conduct pretty well, the impact of which is era-defining.

Trump has destroyed America’s reputation as a trusted security partner in the world, through threats (Canada, Greenland), constant mocking and insults targeting other governments and heads of state, unilateral and illegal military actions, and mixed signals he’s sent about our commitment to NATO.2 Similarly, Trump has destroyed America’s position as a trusted trade partner via “punitive” tariffs he imposed on a whim, then changed repeatedly on subsequent whims.3 What’s more ominous is chatter among countries about possibly rethinking the U.S. dollar as the global reserve currency. That’s a rabbit hole I don’t recommend you explore without steeling yourself. Talk about hegemonic suicide.

I haven’t yet mentioned the most obvious thing: the Iran war that is threatening to cause runaway inflation and a global recession, not to mention the bloody human toll and the opportunity costs of spending a billion a day on bombs. There are no indications that the standoff over the Straits of Hormuz—a problem that only exists because of our actions—will end anytime soon. Trump and Hegseth don’t seem to have a plan beyond begging our allies to help clean up their mess. Their way of asking is to hurl insults, which is likely to solidify our allies’ resolve to stand down and also pursue independence in the longer term.

There’s plenty more, but I’ll end with an issue that nobody is talking about because of all the louder and more visible crises: climate change, an issue that has entirely disappeared from policy discussions and news reporting, even though all the projections at this point are dire. We will see markedly more climate-related disasters happen in the next few years, even though the link won’t always be straightforward.

I have no love for the late Henry Kissinger, but he seemed to see this moment clearly all the way back in 2018 when he said in a New York Times interview, “I think Trump may be one of those figures in history who appears from time to time to mark the end of an era and to force it to give up its old pretenses. It doesn’t necessarily mean that he knows this, or that he is considering any great alternative. It could just be an accident.”

Pretenses fall away

In the last month, both Trump and Hegseth have hinted at committing war crimes. In a recent Pentagon briefing, Hegseth brayed about “pushing forward” against Iran and ended one line of his speech with “no quarter, no mercy for our enemies [italics mine]." Meanwhile, Trump has repeatedly threatened to target civilian infrastructure in Iran, including power plants and desalination facilities. Both these things are war crimes. A charitable and plausible take is that it’s doubtful Hegseth knows what “no quarter” means, and Trump probably has no clue that warfare is subject to rules at all.

This is just one recent example I’ve picked at random. Trump says and does a lot of things offhandedly like this, but often it nonetheless draws a moral or ethical line that people must respond to, and each person’s response situates them in relation to that line. And while it seems clear that Trump doesn’t feel bound by any moral or ethical lines himself, we still presume that most other people do. Reporters have turned this presumption into a genre, chasing Republican officials with microphones after each Trump vulgarism or lunacy to get their response. Republican officials in turn have turned deflection into an art.

This is also how Trump fractures relationships between family and friends by the way. Taking the above conduct as a case in point, a person can plausibly deny that Trump and Hegseth hinted at committing war crimes by claiming that Trump and Hegseth don’t actually know what they’re talking about. But explaining them as stupid is also too damning for someone who supports the administration, which leaves one or two other logical avenues to consider. It’s always an option to rationalize Trump’s moral or ethical offense itself, in this case war crimes. The problem people run into of course is that rationalizing Trump’s conduct often feels, well, icky. Or evil. Sometimes these appear to be the only choices—stupid or evil. But there’s usually a fallback option, which is to go with some version of ‘he wasn’t serious.’ It’s less damning than ‘he’s stupid,’ but has diminishing returns the more it gets used. If all else fails, the last resort is always ignorance (“I didn’t see/hear it”).

Anyway, my point is that one of the truly useful and I think era-defining things about Trump is how efficiently he reveals other people’s ethics and morals. He is like a blacklight in a hotel room.

Character is being revealed on a mass scale, and a grand sorting is underway. People are starting to sort politicians and political candidates as well, using a different method. Some politicians understand what’s happening and are crying “litmus test!” as a way to dodge questions, and indeed some questions are unhelpfully simplistic or ideological (“what is a woman?”). But a litmus test can be an incredibly useful tool, and some questions are as important as they are simple: Is the state of Israel committing genocide (or, if that’s too loaded a term, war crimes and atrocities) on civilians in Gaza with the help of American weapons and aid? Is human-caused climate change real? Did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election?

One truth about people’s character being revealed like never before is that money is not a sign of virtue or intelligence. Perhaps revelation is the wrong word, since few would claim otherwise, but the way that Americans tend to talk about wealth and the wealthy is always rooted in assumptions of meritocracy. Those assumptions seem to be dissolving finally, partly thanks to certain highly visible, extremely wealthy dudes who have revealed themselves to be weird sociopaths. Maybe that’s redundant, but they are indeed both weird and sociopathic. I pick on Marc Andreessen a lot, but he’s a rich source of material (pun intended). Last week he bragged on a podcast about how he doesn’t introspect at all, and how anyway introspection was invented 400 years ago by Freud or something. Meanwhile Mark Zuckerberg spent around $80 billion developing a fake world (the “metaverse”) probably because he sucks at being a real live human being.4 And Musk? Bezos? Ellison? Thiel? There’s a lot I could write about these dudes, who seem like LLMs that were trained exclusively on their own press releases in a kind of recursive slop loop, or like contestants on a reality show for supervillains.

Speaking of oligarchs, the Epstein files have given us glimpses of networks of power that operate outside and in some ways above states. calls these networks Syndicates of Capital, writing about how they are able to circumvent or weaponize states and laws in the service of their own wealth and power. This is one layer of what has come to light in the Epstein files beneath the malevolent conspiracy of sexual abuse and its concentric circles of perpetrators and bystanders.5

Perhaps the heaviest veil that has fallen away is the narrative of America as the good guys. In the early 2000s I worked in Germany for a year, and sometimes when I mingled with the people there I wondered how it felt for them to reckon with their country’s painful history. In Trump’s America, many people are seeing those questions from the other side.

Of course the idea that America represents the good guys has long been a comfortable lie. Ours is a complicated story, just like that of most countries. America was built partly if not mostly on the erasure of indigenous peoples, centuries of chattel slavery, Jim Crow, lynchings, internment camps, etc etc. And abroad too, we have caused much pain as we engineered regime change—or attempted to do so—roughly 100 times. Here’s (then retired) U.S. Marine General Smedley Butler in 1935:

I helped make Mexico…safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street… I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909–1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.6

The current war with Iran is a continuation of the same. The U.S. arguably started the conflict in 1953 when we engineered a coup to overthrow their legitimately elected government. The threat from Iran at the time was their Prime Minister’s demand to audit the books of the (British-controlled) Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) to make sure the company was paying Iran the agreed-upon royalties. AIOC refused to comply, Iran nationalized their oil industry in response, and yada yada we took down their government.

After collapse

I don’t relish life in a collapsed world, but the current world order is deeply unjust. With the veil torn off, we can see that it is controlled by global corporations and the wealthiest individuals, who are more powerful than most countries. That’s not hyperbole or conspiracy thinking, since we can see openly how they operate. As supranational powers, they apply leverage through institutions like the IMF and the World Bank, and when that fails they topple governments they consider obstacles, acting through the militaries of other governments that remain happily compliant. They draw enclosures around the world’s resources, process or repurpose them, and leave a trail of waste. They capture regulating bodies and either wield or circumvent laws as it suits them. They engineer scarcity to raise prices, and live fat off rents paid by those of us who can afford it. Those who can’t are effectively enslaved or simply discarded.

At the surface level of everyday life, the late stage of the current world order looks like atomization—people indoors or in cars, glued to screens, engaging with AI chatbots in lieu of human connection. It has produced what Seva Gutinsky calls “Medieval Peasant Brain, a mental soup of superstition and magical thinking bolstered by tech-enabled information bubbles.” He continues: “We see this most clearly in the mainstreaming of xenophobia, conspiracies, quack medicines, and naked fascism.” To the extent that this is the world order that’s collapsing, then good riddance.

In hindu cosmology, a “yuga” is a vast epoch, of which there are four of decreasing duration occurring in a cycle. According this cosmology, we are living in the Kali Yuga, the last, shortest, and least enlightened of the four, marked by conflict and ignorance. The avatar of this epoch is the demon Kali (not to be confused with the goddess whose name shares the same English spelling). The good news is that we are already more than 5,000 years into this yuga. The bad news is we have almost 427,000 to go. But we can look forward to the Satya Yuga, the best of the yugas, an age of truth and goodness.

The history we’re more familiar with also moves in cycles—of rupture and repair (to borrow a phrase from my good friend MiLo). The United States endured a civil war, then less than a century later passed civil rights. Germany attacked its neighbors, was defeated, suffered a financial crash, went full fascist, attacked its neighbors again, was defeated again and virtually leveled, and then rose again to become arguably the strongest country in Europe. Ditto Japan, almost. China destroyed itself under Mao and rose anew. Now some say it is on the verge of collapse once again.

There are many stories of national rupture and repair, and a few supranational ones. It seems to me that ruptures happen when the levers of society skew too far in favor of a few at the expense of the many. The Enlightenment, which birthed the democratic principles our country was founded on, followed the so-called wars of religion and the Reformation, a period defined by bloody conflicts between different groups of Christians. The Enlightenment thinkers recognized that unity under any one set of religious beliefs would never be possible, and so they sought to develop a set of secular, humanistic epistemologies and institutions that could foster civil harmony without depending on unity. But a secular, pluralistic society is ultimately built on compromise. The freedoms of one person or group can crash against those of another, and any compromise will favor one or the other, or neither. Grievances accumulate until they rupture.

If the current world order is in a rupture phase now and for the foreseeable future, what could repair look like? To repair is to rebalance, to “unskew” the levers of society much as possible. That is the opportunity we will need to seize, because otherwise momentum will carry us into a prolonged, increasingly lawless supranational oligarchy.

The political philosopher Richard Rorty, who in 1998 famously predicted Trump, wrote an essay where he imagined “Looking Backwards from the Year 2096.” In that essay he depicts an America that has emerged from a decades-long period of rupture. The peaceful, thriving America he depicts is defined by its embrace of “fraternity.”

I don’t remember if Rorty mentions the national motto of France in his essay, but that’s what I thought of, and it occurred to me that while liberty and equality are values we Americans talk about all the time, fraternity is not. If anything we reject the idea of fraternity as incompatible with individual rights. It also occurred to me that the values of liberty and equality exist in mutual tension sometimes, pulling in opposite directions, and that fraternity might offer a resolution.

Fraternity means brotherhood in the literal sense, but in action the bond is expressed as mutual support. Another word for this is solidarity. The people of the Twin Cities have shown us a form of solidarity that is not only courageous and resilient but warm and welcoming. Writing in the Atlantic, Adam Serwer coined the term “neighborism” for it and summarized it this way:

Minnesotans are insisting that their neighbors are their neighbors whether they were born in Minneapolis or Mogadishu. That is, arguably, a deeply Christian philosophy, one apparently loathed by some of the most powerful Christians in America.

He contrasts this with the “blood and soil” nationalism favored by a faction of this country and oft expressed by J.D. Vance:

“Social bonds form among people who have something in common,” Vance said in a speech last July. “If you stop importing millions of foreigners into the country, you allow social cohesion to form naturally.” Vance’s remarks are the antithesis to the neighborism of the Twin Cities, whose people do not share the narcissism of being capable of loving only those who are exactly like them.

He also contrasts it with insincere virtue signaling:

A second MAGA assumption is that the left is insincere in its values, and that principles of inclusion and unity are superficial forms of virtue signaling. White liberals might put a sign in their front yard saying IMMIGRANTS WELCOME, but they will abandon those immigrants at the first sensation of sustained pressure.

And in Trump’s defense, this has turned out to be true of many liberals in positions of power—university administrators, attorneys at white-shoe law firms, political leaders. But it is not true of millions of ordinary Americans, who have poured into the streets in protest, spoken out against the administration, and, in Minnesota, resisted armed men in masks at the cost of their own life.

These represent obstacles to a future politics based on neighborism, as does a strain of American individualism that crosses over into a toxic selfishness. This shows up in debates about anything aimed at collective wellbeing—healthcare, SNAP, school lunches, free college, parental leave, public education, etc. It also appears in any conversation about protecting or helping anyone who is different or far away. It takes various forms of “who’s going to pay for it?” and “it doesn’t affect me, so why should I care?”

I don’t know whether this strain of selfishness is a fundamental and fixed mindset or a learned behavior—something to be circumvented versus something we can change in people. Either way, it seems like a politics of neighborism is what we will need as we endure some years of rupture, and it points a basis for a better future.

Further Reading

Here’s more on neighborism in the Twin Cities.

The Key to Minneapolis’s Successful ICE Resistance

Bonds formed under the pressure of negative double-digit windchill are key to understanding what’s happening. It is impossible to get through a Minnesota winter without help, and only sometimes does that assistance come from your neighbors. The stories about people shoveling out or snowblowing an entire block’s driveways without being asked and with no compensation are true, but the real miracles (and just as common) are the times when strangers stop to help someone shovel out a car caught in a snowbank or bring out the kitty litter from their trunk put there just for this kind of emergency.

Minnesota Resistance to ICE: A Visit in Solidarity

Stand With Minnesota: stories from Minnesotans about what life is like right now

Retailers Respond to ICE Raids with Mutual Aid, Fundraising, and Economic Blackout

In Minneapolis, community care is the model for resistance

Hungry families, ICE and secret grocery networks in Minneapolis

Inside the Hidden Network of Resistance in Minneapolis

We are cursed to live in interesting times as the expression goes.1 Are we at the end of something? Or is this the beginning? Either way, we are definitely in the middle of something, but what is it? The far right now run all three branches of the Federal Government and control major tech platforms and media conglomerates. It shouldn’t be controversial to say this, although some might quibble with the label “far right” and what or whom it refers to. I’ll get to that.

Their ascendence is the materialization of a decades-long project that was engineered by a relatively small alliance of influential people. But that project itself is not what I want to focus on here, so I’ll only digress briefly to summarize how it transpired, weaving together threads from a few writers and thinkers whose work I have found most helpful.

1. The contemporary far right developed not as a reactionary backlash to elites by an aggrieved white working class as the story often goes. Rather it emerged from within the elite class of post-war conservatives.2 In his excellent book, Hayek’s Bastards, history professor Quinn Slobodian tracks how a split formed between conservative elites whose vision of free-market capitalism and minimal state intervention was fundamentally meritocratic and therefore basically egalitarian, versus another faction of elites who wanted to protect their free-market utopia from incursion by nonwhites and foreigners.

2. This latter faction embraced race science and notions of IQ differences between races as the basis to argue against welfare and affirmative action, for closed borders and expulsion of immigrants, for the end of birthright citizenship, etc. This group of thinkers came to call themselves the “new-fusionists” and also coined the moniker “the alternative right” (or alt-right), which is familiar to all of us at this point. In addition to believing in hard differences between races and pushing hardline immigration policies, they aggressively champion “hard money,” over fiat currency. Initially this meant gold, but the movement has come to promote cryptocurrency as the “new gold.”

3. The leading figures of this new-fusionist movement propagated their ideas and grew their influence over several decades via a collection of well-funded think tanks and an energetic media ecosystem. Sometime around 2010, their ideas began to catch fire in Silicon Valley with leading tech figures like Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, David Sacks, Larry Ellison, and Elon Musk.3

4. Separately, a powerful Christian nationalist movement developed partially within and partially alongside the new-fusionists, pursuing a program of authoritarian means to theocratic ends. The populist energy of MAGA sits on this side of the far-right coalition, but this movement also built institutional support through a systematic capture of courts over the last four decades, thanks in part to The Federalist Society, which they transformed to suit their purposes. They also operate out of churches of course, and numerous think tanks, including The Heritage Foundation, which they also transformed. Project 2025 is their very detailed playbook, the authors of which now work in leadership posts throughout the Trump administration.

These are the two halves of what I mean by the contemporary far-right. The first group, the new-fusionists, are minimally represented inside the government right now, but they exert tremendous influence with their money, and through their control of tech and media. The second group, the Christian nationalists, fill the executive branch, the GOP legislature, and numerous courts and judgeships, including a SCOTUS majority. Like the fusion of groups that constituted the post-war conservative coalition, these two camps coexist in a state of tension and are held together by what they have in common: chiefly, a hostility towards immigrants, towards the welfare state, and towards democracy in general.

I should note here that I am talking mainly about key figures on the far-right who turned their political programs into mass movements, and less about the rank and file, but building a rank and file was crucial to their success. How a group of academics and intellectuals accomplished this is the subject of entire books, but if there was a single architect it would be Murray Rothbard. He understood the importance of using mass media and other institutions to spread a narrative that would spark a reactionary fervor among regular Americans, and it worked.

Millions of Americans parrot their ideas verbatim—about small government, taxes, capitalism, socialism, welfare, immigrants, public education, etc etc—as articles of faith. But when you ask these people to elaborate or explain or defend the ideas they so aggressively repeat, many can’t. They don’t understand what they claim to believe. We sometimes wonder why so many people are willing to “vote against their own interests,” and this is why. But it involved years and years of grooming.

A Fight Over First Principles

Underneath common ideas about capitalism and immigration and differences on issues like executive power, there’s a deep principle that unifies this far-right, which is that there is no such thing as the collective—no collective humanity or collective good, no duty or obligations to community let alone society at large.4

They divide humanity into makers and takers and describe the world as a zero-sum competitive arena. Humans, they believe, are fundamentally self-interested (otherwise we’re either deceiving ourselves or we are defective somehow), and therefore any concept of the collective is a lie at best and a criminal enterprise at worst. Both halves of the far-right revere wealth and have disdain for the poor. The new-fusionists see wealth as an indicator of high IQ, while the Christian nationalists consider it a blessing from God. Poverty therefore means either that you lack intelligence or you’re unworthy in the eyes of the Lord.

Reading the work of these far-right thinkers, one wonders to what extent they believe their ideas would actually be popular once implemented. The society they envision seems misanthropic and bleak to me, but given their belief in humankind’s ultimate self-interest and the world as it appears through that lens, it’s clear they believe their program would make the “right people” happy, which is what matters to them. In fact, they have written extensively about the need to protect their perfect version of the world from everyone else—from democracy and from the public, as they put it—so they seem to understand its brittleness too.

The Dog that Caught the Car

Well, they have managed to seize power, and now we are seeing the materialization of their ideas. The effects of their ideological changes to institutions like museums, school curricula, and scientific research will be profound but insidious rather than obvious. The pain of massive government agency cuts and tariffs is more straightforward, but it will take some time for enough Americans to feel it, and many won’t make the connections to particular policy decisions. Immigration is the issue where a clear picture has emerged already. The Trump administration is pursuing the extreme hard line on immigration that they promised, which was spelled out in Project 2025 and has been rationalized and promoted for years in countless papers and communications by the new-fusionists. Now that the agenda is actually being carried out, it turns out it’s extremely unpopular.

I could point to polling to make that point, but I’m more interested in what feels like a deeper revelation about Americans and, I believe, human beings. In Minneapolis and other cities, thousands of people are literally putting their bodies on the line to protect their immigrant neighbors. They have set up communication networks, food banks, transportation services, remote schooling, rent relief, and all kinds of other resources, all at immense personal risk and cost. After Renee Good was killed, an Episcopal bishop in New Hampshire told his clergy to “make sure they have their wills written” and to "have their affairs in order,” because “it may be that now is no longer the time for statements, but for us with our bodies to stand between the powers of this world and the most vulnerable.”

All of this flies in the face of the core premise of the far-right that people are innately self-interested.

What we are in the middle of is a fight over the first principle of whether the collective exists and whether it’s important, perhaps sacred. It’s true that some people are fundamentally self-interested. We saw hints of this during the pandemic for example when some people who opposed masks and vaccines couldn’t grasp the idea that these were a way of protecting other people. They simply couldn’t process it as a concept. I don’t think most people are like that.

The far-right thinks they can dismiss isolated stories of self-sacrifice as mental illness or performance, but they can’t do that when a whole city shows the real essence of humanity. We are the apex species not because of intelligence, as the far-right IQ fetishists believe, but because we are good at connection and community. I think the people of Minneapolis prove that most humans have compassion and feel pain when we witness the suffering of innocents. I think most of us want a society where our neighbors, even distant ones, thrive. I think most of us want a society, full stop. I hope I’m right.

I find it helpful to understand the far right takeover of the U.S. as something that was engineered by men rather than as an inevitable slide or a consequence of larger forces. That means it’s possible for people to change the world. This is the message of another historian, Rutger Bregman, in his book Moral Ambition. In it he highlights how a dedicated group of twelve Quakers and businessmen drove the abolition movement that ended centuries of chattel slavery.

I think the far-right agenda can only be a dead end because they are simply wrong about the nature of human beings. The world they are trying to bring about will crumble, and then it will be up to us to build what comes next. History shows that we can.

Further Reading

Hayek’s Bastards by Quinn Slobodian that tracks the new-fusionist movement I summarized above. A concise book that provides so much clarity. I highly recommend it.

Making Fusionism Great Again, a paper by history professor Amanda Hollis-Brusky, detailing the decades-long project by Christian nationalists to capture the courts, the Federalist Society, and the Heritage Foundation. Confusingly she also uses the label “new fusionists” for this movement, though it’s distinct from the group that Slobodian tracks in his book.

Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit, a book about how disasters and dark times actually bring out the best in people and often provide meaning and purpose where there was none before.

Moral Ambition by Dutch historian Rutger Bregman, demonstrating how dedicated people have changed the world (abolition of slavery, prohibition, big tobacco, etc). I also recommend listening to his Reith Lectures, available as a podcast.

Given what Trump and his circle (Vance, Miller, Noem, etc) are saying and doing in response to the escalating public outcry over the killings of Pretti and Good, it seems clearer than ever that their game plan was—and probably still is—to stoke things to a point where Trump can invoke the insurrection act.

I hesitate to go there because of my general aversion to conspiracy thinking, but it makes logical and empirical sense. Let’s start with how Trump, a PR man and marketer to the core, has a habit of saying things before he does them, revealing his game. He has repeatedly floated the idea of the insurrection act, partly because he can’t help saying what’s in his head, but also because his natural PR instincts push him to gauge the public’s receptiveness for a “campaign” he’s considering. He needs to feel like he has sufficient support for a thing so significant.

Next, why Minneapolis? It’s easy to believe they chose Minneapolis so that they could point to any backlash or resistance as a leftist or Democrat insurgency. Any blue city in a blue state would fit the mission politically, but Minneapolis is much smaller than others they might have chosen, including a few they’ve tested first hand. The administration needs a backlash if Trump wants to invoke the insurrection act, but they need a backlash they can handle. Not just handle, but dominate and control the optics.

ICE agents have attacked protesters with such brutality not because they are rogue vigilantes with no training, but because their actual mission is to provoke a big retaliatory response. In terms of the response, the regime has been very purposeful in using terms like insurgency and domestic terrorism, always linking these to the left and to Democrats. Finally, it’s worth noting that the agent who killed Good and agents who are believed to have been among those who killed Pretti are relatively experienced and trained. This is their mission—not orders to kill, but effectively permission to kill if they believe it will provoke the kind of response their mission requires.

In this case it didn’t go as planned, but they didn’t realize it right away. Politically, the smart and simplest move would have been for the Trump administration to disavow the killings of Pretti and Good, along with the agents involved—to promise an investigation and hearings or whatever, to scapegoat a few guys. The story might easily have moved on to bland political follow-up at that point. So it says something that the administration doubled down on their defense of the agents, with the most prominent officials calling the victims themselves terrorists. The officials were telling brazen lies, which is standard practice for the administration, but in this case they were purposeful and systematic lies, very consistently repeated. They lied to bolster their mission, which needs protesters to be terrorists. The problem was that their lies were impossible because of clear video evidence.

Lies that might have worked in the pre-cellphone era became offensive and absurd even within the required circles of loyalty. The backlash to the killings was indeed big like they hoped, but because the lies are impossible, it was different than what the mission requires. This backlash was more bi-partisan. The Trump administration needs the entirety of GOP+MAGA behind them, and instead they lost some support.

The regime has retreated now, but only a short distance and only to recalibrate. They can’t abandon their mission because they can’t allow free and fair elections to take place. Specifically, they have committed themselves to a mission of such illegality and such immorality at this point that they see the loss of power as an existential catastrophe. They can’t allow elections they might lose. It no longer seems hysterical to assume they understand this.

Their only remotely viable path to disallowing elections is to invoke the insurrection act, which is not an automatic trigger for cancelling elections. To go that far, they know they need to build overwhelming public support for a massive federal crackdown on what they need the public to see as a serious and widespread insurrection.

I was born around the conclusion of the Beatles’ time as a working band, and their music was already so deeply embedded in contemporary culture by then that I assimilated it as traditional folk music. “Love Me Do” was basically the equivalent of “Row Row Row Your Boat” for me.

During my teens, when I was trying to learn bass guitar, a friend suggested, randomly, Wang Chung’s “Dance Hall Days” as an on-ramp. When that proved a bit too simple, I thought early Beatles tracks might represent a suitable step up. In my mind’s ear it was rudimentary music, but when I actually sat down with a couple of songs and tried to follow them on my red flying v, I found that McCartney’s bass lines were not intuitive or straightforward at all. He would dance up the scale when I expected him to walk slowly down the anchor notes on beat, and he often toyed outside the chords that the others were playing. His approach was a lot more melodic than I kept expecting it to be, and I had a hard time following the rhythm of his picking even when I concentrated, so the idea of singing as I played was out of the question. I can’t say I had a big epiphany about The Beatles entire oeuvre in that moment, but the experience opened my ears to songs I’d never actually listened to.

Just as an aside, I remember this so clearly because I always feel a kind of dopamine hit when my assumptions are rocked, even trivial ones, and especially when they are negative or critical assumptions. It’s like experiencing a lightning strike at night. First my assumption itself jumps brightly into view from where it was invisible and unknown to me before (that’s the thing about assumptions). In the flash of bright light, it registers vividly but only for a split second before it dissolves into nothing. Then a chest-pounding crash as all the corollaries and judgments that were attached to it crumble away. Ecstasy.

I’m thinking about the Beatles right now because I just finished reading John & Paul, A Love Story in Songs by Ian Leslie. It follows the friendship and creative collaboration of John Lennon and Paul McCartney, starting from the day in 1957 when McCartney first happened to see Lennon’s band, The Quarrymen, play. The book’s conceit uses a Beatles song as a touchstone and basis for each chapter, partly to examine the evolution of the work itself, but more so to elucidate different dimensions of the bond between John and Paul, as well as their inevitable and sometimes combustible tension. The book also sheds light on their distinct individual makeups and how these manifested in their work. For example, Paul’s unconventional approach to bass guitar is probably rooted in the fact that he started his musical life on guitar and piano and only switched to bass out of necessity after some arm-twisting. That’s a technical explanation for his unique style, but the book also records many of Paul’s contemporaries describing him as extremely competitive (he admits as much himself), and he certainly understood that bass is perceived as the least glamorous role in the band. He didn’t want to be mistaken for a role player in his own band, let alone an unglamorous one, so he made sure he would stand out.

It’s a lovely book for all it captures about John and Paul. I forgot for example that McCartney plays the guitar “backwards,” which results in a mirroring with Lennon when they share a mic, as in the picture at the top of this page. It’s a detail that’s easily overlooked, but it’s also a wonderful bit of serendipity that manifests magnetically on stage. It is a depiction of love, but it probably registers subconsciously with most audiences and viewers most of the time.

One thing from the book that has really stuck with me is the notion of genius I gathered, or perhaps synthesized. Genius is a tricky word, but to paraphrase something from an early chapter, The Beatles were at a huge disadvantage operating in world where The Beatles did not previously exist. Perpetually unprecedented, they blazed one trail after another. It’s hard to see them as groundbreaking today, partly because they broke so much ground. A lot of their music seems very conventional on the surface, partly because we forget that The Beatles established so many of the conventions we now take for granted, but partly too because Paul in particular was such a master craftsman and master of subtlety.

Both John and Paul were aficionados of music who devoured it from an early age, spanning all genres available to them, metabolizing it in different ways. It is significant that neither had formal musical training, that as musicians they were self-taught and thus unattached to musical dogmas. Paul, it seems, was a savant when it came to the architecture of a song, and everything he metabolized became part of an encyclopedia that developed in his mind. He constantly borrowed and repurposed bits from this trove as he wrote songs, referencing every imaginable genre from classical to crooner to pub sing-a-longs, sometimes in homage, other times ironically. To paraphrase another observation from the book, Paul McCartney wrote songs that seemed like they always existed, while John, the passage continues, seemed to receive songs that were transmitted from another dimension. That’s how their songs originated, but then they would shape and refine this raw material together.

Very early on they spent a formative period in Hamburg, performing up to six hours a night, four or five nights a week. They were driven to experiment and indulge their natural playfulness just to stave of the boredom that would otherwise come from such an intensive routine, and they had their deep pool of musical knowledge to draw from. A lot of their evolution as artists as well as their uniquely irreverent stagecraft can be explained by their intense aversion to boredom.

Their first record deal involved some dumb luck that’s too convoluted to recount here, but it had to do with more unprecedented things about The Beatles—principally that they had no named front person, nor even a de facto one. John and Paul would take the lead on different songs and often switched back and forth within the same song. George and Ringo sometimes sang lead too. The Beatles also wrote their own material, which was not altogether unprecedented, but it was very unusual.

Crucially they found a perfect collaborator in their producer, George Martin. He knew when to offer input and how assertively, like his insistence that “Help” would work better as a manic uptempo song than as the morose dirge Lennon initially conceived. Martin also had the right temperament to say “yes” to things that were nuts at the time. Keep that amp feedback in the recording? Um… sure. And Martin was technically gifted as well. There’s a great story in the book about how he and his team intercut two different versions of “Strawberry Fields Forever,” recorded in different keys and at different tempos, when an indecisive Lennon asked for a hybrid.

In 1965, Abbey Road Studios acquired a four-track recorder, and The Beatles went from stage performers who released records to a studio band that developed songs, which was a nascent concept. Given that, it’s absolutely mind-blowing that “Love Me Do” and “Tomorrow Never Knows” were released just three years apart. Go and listen to those songs with fresh ears and try to imagine how the same songwriting duo were able to travel the distance from one to the other in just three years.

The picture of genius that all this connects with for me has two key elements. The first is the ability to innovate and experiment. By ability I mean there’s a toolkit involved. Innovation and experimentation are fruitful when they draw from a well of material and experience and are wrought through competent and practiced hands. Importantly, it’s a process with a feedback loop and the possibility of failure. The second element of genius is the courage and drive to attempt this persistently. With John and Paul, that drive came from their natural playfulness, aversion to boredom, curiosity, sexual desire, competitiveness, personal insecurities, psychic pain, ambition, etc. Importantly, work is carried out in environments and contexts that exert different kinds of pressures—interpersonal, psychological, cultural, professional. Risk and courage mean different things and feel different to an artist, depending on the mix of these kinds of pressures.

I wasn’t thinking about AI when I started this, but now I can’t avoid making that connection. Genius is a kind of alchemy that is fundamentally human and takes unique form in each human genius. It is not a reach to accept that AIs already draw from a well of source material, metabolize it, and produce original work. Can we consider that innovation or experimentation? Do those concepts require a degree of subjective experience? I feel like they do—especially experimentation—but even if we generously allow that AIs can innovate and experiment in some sense, they don’t do it through what we’d call a process. There’s no effort involved or possibility of failure, not a failure they’d feel. And AIs certainly lack the other key elements of genius: courage and drive. Finally, they don’t operate in environments and contexts in a way that matters.

Here, on the other hand, is Ian Leslie describing John and Paul’s collaborative route to certain of their songs: “They just tried stuff out, and then tried again, and kept on making choices until what they captured on tape resembled what they felt in their bones.”

The tech broligarchs driving the AI frenzy don’t value or even accept the existence of the uniquely human elements of genius, which means their products don’t value these either. Their machines may soon produce work that’s as technically proficient and superficially profound as the best Lennon-McCartney works, but it’s bleak to imagine a world where this has replaced human genius. It’s honestly impossible to imagine it.

Beside the Point

Today we are one year into Trump’s second term, and I went into my archives here to see what I wrote about at its start. At the top of the list of things I expressed worry about was mass deportations:

To identify and round up even 10 million people—the low end of what they have promised—would involve unprecedented surveillance plus a large number of boots on the ground. We would likely see widespread checkpoints as well as door-to-door patrols, requiring a lot of Americans to keep our immigration status papers handy at all times. It would cost a lot of money and feel hugely invasive.

I am most worried of course for the people who will be targeted, and the families who will lose loved ones to deportation. But I also worry about the economic impacts and unforeseen consequences of deporting large numbers of people who work in agriculture, construction, and other industries.

I don’t understand what the upside is supposed to be. What is gained from inflicting this much trauma on people, let alone the economic pain the rest of us would experience?

It has played out exactly like this, which is not surprising. Mass deportations was Trump’s loudest and most consistent campaign promise—not targeted or smart, and definitely not humane or discerning. Everyone who voted for Trump voted for this, and there’s no escape from that fact. It was an open book test.

I know I mention a lot, but as one of the first public intellectuals to cogently apply the “fascist” label to Trump, he has encountered every kind of pushback. As more people have come around to his argument of late, this week he emphasized a secondary rationale for the claim, which is that it has proved predictive. At many points in the last ten years where people speculated about Trump’s next action, we would have landed on the right answer by asking what a fascist would do.

I could say we should have listened to Ganz, but really we should have just listened to Trump instead of pretending he meant something different.

This is not about the killing of Renee Good, but about the discourse it has precipitated, which is utterly broken, yet has come to represent the norm. Something like it has boiled and oozed out of every significant event I can remember, not just the ones that are easily politicized, although that makes it worse, no doubt. The internet is the perfect substrate and catalyst for toxic discourse, but it is not the cause. Toxic discourse of the kind I mean is a reflection of our culture certainly, but I think it’s a symptom of a brokenness in people’s minds and hearts.

There are observable facts we can see in the videos, at least if we can put aside for the moment the possibility of deep fakes: Renee Good turned the steering wheel a certain way. The car was moving at a certain speed in a certain direction. The ICE agent, Jonathan Ross exchanged certain words with Good’s wife and with Renee Good herself. He switched his cellphone from one hand to the other. He unholstered his weapon at a certain point and stepped into the path of the vehicle in a certain way. He shot once, then twice more. Then he said other things.

To this extent, the footage of the killing of Renee Good leaves little room for interpretation. We can all see what actually happened, which is not the case with most newsworthy events. Usually people are left to speculate about even the most basic details. The last highly-politicized event I can remember that was accompanied by such comprehensive and unambiguous footage was the killing of George Floyd. With this killing as with that one, we can be pretty certain about the observable facts, which are damning for Ross, ICE, and the Trump regime.

That’s what makes the toxicity and brokenness of the discourse so obvious—how quickly it spun way beyond the realm of observable facts. People will find room for interpretation no matter what, and they are especially motivated to disqualify or rationalize facts that challenge their established beliefs. Because people want events to line up with their worldview, they don’t just find room for interpretation, they make room for fabrications, on a spectrum from convenient to abhorrent. I don’t mean fabrications as a synonym for lies. I mean it in the sense of something that’s created, fashioned into existence and added to what was there.

Sometimes people just embellish and revise small details, in this case perhaps about how the car was moving or the timing of various actions. Often people assume motives and add backstories for the people involved, layering on ideologies and beliefs that implicate their pet villains. They turn peaceful protests into a leftist insurgency or the Ross-Good confrontation into a planned government op. These are all fabrications, but when people post content and comments, they don’t differentiate fabrications from observable facts. They express it all with total certainty.

That kind of certainty is the brokenness I’m talking about.

At best it reflects a need for cognitive closure, also referred to as motivated closed-mindedness, which feels like an almost universal pathology these days. Most people it seems can’t tolerate ambiguity or sit with uncertainty, or maybe they are eager to form judgements. The two things go hand in hand. It’s hard to judge what you’re uncertain about.

There are reasons other than a widespread psychological need for closure that internet discourse tends towards certainty. One is that the algorithms favor “takes,” which is the genre of our time, and a genre that basically requires certainty. The algorithms are tuned to our collective nature, prioritizing what makes us scroll and click, and people are thus incentivized to produce more of it. In short, a vicious cycle.

It’s also hard to distinguish certainty that’s motivated by true need-for-closure from ideologically-motivated tribal signaling. Shibboleths and propaganda and earnest misbelief all blend together, even inside the minds of the people involved in the discourse. When people pushed bigoted lies about Haitian immigrants eating people’s pets or about Kilmar Abrego Garcia being part of MS-13, it’s unclear whether they really believed those things or just signaling tribal loyalty.

No matter what motivates a person’s certainty, whether it’s a psychological need for closure or an ideological closed-mindedness, the problem is that they are closed. You can’t reach people who are closed. You can’t even engage with them, because they are fundamentally incurious. They are immune to information that doesn’t conform to their beliefs.

I think curiosity and intellectual humility are two of the most important qualities a person can have. Compassion is another, and I think it’s tied to the other two. I don’t know if these are teachable, but they are learnable. But learning requires openness.

Writing these pieces helps me make sense of the outrages all around, and helps me process the big feelings they conjure. On the other hand, I despise the “attention economy,” and I don’t want to add more noise and distraction to the world.

Anyway, I am still searching for the center of this thing, always second-guessing and wondering whether I should do this differently. I don’t know. In any case, I am grateful you’re here.

The holidays are done, and normal life has resumed. Holidays and birthdays are somewhat strange for me since I stopped talking to my siblings. I miss them especially on my kids’ behalf, and this year I’ve been thinking more than usual about the reasons for our estrangement.

With my brothers it’s complicated. None of us ever declared that we were going no-contact, and I can’t point to a decisive falling out moment. Many small cuts led us here over the course of maybe ten years. Or, it’s possible I came late to a place they arrived at long before me, given that my brothers were never in the habit of keeping in touch with me or my kids. To the extent that we communicated over the years, it was almost always me who made it happen. Then I stopped. I find that it’s not easy to explain why.

Is this helping?

That’s a question I invoke often as a guide in situations big and small. I use it to judge my own impact, then to choose my next action so as to direct my energy towards the right outcome. Often the question reveals that I don’t know what the right outcome is, and I need to figure that out first. Different outcomes can be mutually exclusive, though most times it’s a matter of priorities and emphasis.

For example, when my kids are arguing, and I’ve been pulled into their vortex of grievance and recriminations—who started it and who did what—I stop and ask myself, “Is this helping?” And if I think the right outcome is simply the reestablishment of peace, then usually it becomes clear that presiding over a de facto court case and forensic inquiry will not help. Recriminations tend to make things worse, except in rare cases where the right outcome requires justice and accountability in some form.

The rift between me and my brothers is based on both macro issues and personal ones, and these are hard to completely decouple. My brothers have embraced ideologies and beliefs that are fundamentally different from mine.1 Our worldviews conflict in too many ways to naturally coexist, making it impossible for us to put everything on the table and then just agree to disagree, which leaves only a couple other options. One is to completely avoid areas of conflict and limit communication to “safe” topics. This amounts to acting like we have no guiding beliefs at all, which is tricky to pull off since even our notions of objective reality and basic facts diverge. It means few topics are really safe, so even when it works, it’s unsatisfying.

The other option is to fully engage with each other’s views, to argue even, which requires mutual openness and curiosity. My brothers have neither. They see themselves as members of an awakened few, exhibiting complete certainty and zero skepticism about their beliefs. They are not remotely curious to understand opposing positions2, especially ones they can write off as mainstream. Instead, they create straw men and projections to represent their critics.

I was once genuinely curious to understand their beliefs, and I made repeated efforts to engage with one of my brothers in particular. He is especially fervent about vaccines (anti) and chemtrails, and it was obvious he wanted to persuade me to his cause. That’s fine, but persuasive discourse requires to some extent the ability to formulate cogent arguments that are both logical and empirical. From my brother I would mostly get links to podcasts and YouTube videos with no context and certainly nothing that resembled an argument. And then the mildest skepticism or even questions from me would provoke lengthy, barely-coherent emails full of invective and personal attacks. In no sense was this helping either of us.

As for their beliefs themselves, there’s a lot of run-of-the-mill conspiracy nonsense that I find benign and sort of amusing. To witness their mental gymnastics and the Dunning-Kruger confidence it takes to turn condensation trails into chemtrails or believe the moon landing3 was fake bothers me in a sort of abstract way as someone who appreciates epistemology and good discourse. It’s the same feeling I get when I see someone burn their eggs or make a mess of chopping an onion. It does bother me more in the aggregate though. The fact that so many people believe this stuff is a symptom of larger problems that aren’t benign at all.

One of those larger problems is how the conspiracy-minded set has been welcomed into the right wing coalition. Here’s making a point about that:

One of my theories of Trump’s success in 2016 was that he employed what I called the “any weird constituency” strategy: people stood up at his events and said stuff like, “I believe aliens are brainwashing us through the T.V,” and he replied, “Sure, why not.” You got a voter right there and probably hundreds more, if not thousands. McCain pointedly shot down a voter who said Obama was a secret Muslim. Trump didn’t do that kinda stuff. McCain lost. Trump won. He cobbled together a coalition of the wacky and weird. But being weird in America is kind of normal. It’s a very weird place. A lot of Americans belong to cults or odd religious sects, practice alternative medicine, participate in strange fandoms, wild fads, and peculiar enthusiasms. And with the decline of mass culture and the fragmentation of society, subcultures are now culture. [source]

It’s cynical perhaps to explain the right-wing embrace of “weirdos” merely as a self-serving way to attract votes, although Trump always does whatever gets him the most attention (viewership, ratings, votes, etc). Also, as an electoral strategy it did indeed work. Twice. But when you look at the real power centers of the right-wing, it becomes clear that ideological alignment with the conspiracy crowd is only interesting to the extent that it’s useful. This is part of why cracks are forming in the coalition.

When I say power centers, I am referring foremost to the people focused on evolving the current regime into something durable that can survive the end of Trump. The silicon valley cohort behind J.D. Vance are building the infrastructure for a future that should horrify my brothers and their ilk, if they are at all sincere in their ramblings about surveillance and elites and things like medical freedom. People like my brothers are fluent in secret codewords and subtle signals supposedly propagated by a shadowy cabal that prove chemtrails are real or whatever. Meanwhile I’m more interested in what the wealthiest and most powerful people in the world are doing openly and saying with their full throats.

Peter Thiel for example—who bankrolled J.D. Vance’s Senate campaign and remains one of his biggest backers—launched Palantir, the tech company ICE is using to track down immigrants using digital footprints in their tax information, court records, school and church affiliations, etc. And Palantir has secured massive government contracts to build a central database with comprehensive information on every individual in America. That’s unprecedented mass surveillance (named after a powerful sort of “seeing stone” from Tolkien’s stories, which tended to corrupt anybody who used it).

Oracle founder Larry Ellison, another big Trump supporter and benefactor of right-wing politics, also predicts the rise of the surveillance state. He is not warning us though. Nope, he’s excited about the “growing opportunity for his company to help authorities analyze real-time data from millions of surveillance cameras,” ensuring that “citizens will be on their best behavior.”

And then there’s AI and the crusade for AGI that’s eating everything else—including energy, land, water, air. Listen to Sam Altman as he predicts that all this “will most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime there will be great companies.” Not human flourishing or wellbeing, but companies. Great companies. According to the industry’s most visible cheerleader, that’s the upside we might temporarily get from the literal cabal of six people whom we’re allowing to decide the fate of all humanity.

The wealthiest and most powerful people in America dictate the direction of the country to a larger and larger degree. Everyone should spend some time trying to understand what they want. They don’t communicate in secret codes or meet in hidden groves. Or, they do probably, but they also say quite a bit right out in the open.

Take some time to look at what Thiel, Ellison, Musk, Andreessen, Zuckerberg, Bezos, and others in their circle have written and said and done. It becomes pretty difficult to see how their vision of the future has our best interests in mind. Their agenda—which again, they declare openly and repeatedly—prioritizes anything that lowers their tax burden, lubricates their ability to move (and hide) money, and limits any oversight or regulation.

Through both political influence and the tech they build, these men increasingly dictate the parameters of our culture, and they view the rest of us with naked contempt. They want technological and political dominion without obstacles, which they frame in narratives about how it will benefit you and me. It’s wild that so many people accept their spin.

The other right-wing power-center is the ethno-nationalist wing, which is less centralized and more grassroots than the Silicon Valley cabal. Stephen Miller leads its efforts inside the government, but its most influential public champions are people like Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, Candace Owens, as well as adjacent figures like Steve Bannon and Christopher Rufo.

They increasingly say loudly and clearly things they used to couch in dog whistles and wink-wink-we-all-know-what-we-really-mean codewords. They keep ratcheting up their anti-immigrant propaganda, which is Goebbelsesque at this point. But they’re also bringing back eugenics and race science, natalism, tradwives. Alarming as those things should be, none of it causes a stir inside the coalition, but as their rhetoric has become more openly antisemitic and explicitly nazi, more cracks have formed, with people like Ben Shapiro and Mark Levin dissenting and being somewhat sidelined as a result. Notable developments include the Carlson-Fuentes summit and the Young Republicans chat group transcript leak.

J.D. Vance understands that the next Republican candidate for president will need both power centers behind him (or her, I suppose, if women can still run for office in 2028, or vote). He already has the Silicon Valley tech cabal in his court, but he still has to win the ethno-nationalists. That’s why he can’t find it in himself to disavow actual nazis among the ranks (“no enemies on the right”), and why he’s pandering to them about how “Americans don’t have to apologize for being white anymore.”

To bring this back to my brothers and to my guiding question (is this helping), I abhor the priorities of the right-wing agenda—they are intentionally and wantonly cruel, as well as willfully and proudly ignorant. I have learned that it’s pointless to raise any of this withTrump supporters or people on the right, because while they never argue in defense of it, neither do they loosen their embrace. At best they claim ignorance. More often they rationalize, resort to whataboutism, or counter-attack. It’s incredibly frustrating to see people support with their actions (e.g. votes) what they can’t manage to defend coherently in words.

I have previously written about what I believe is common ground I share with my brothers and other people on the right.4 Essentially it boils down to a shared sense of loss and unrootedness that I attribute to modernity. We are experiencing the loss of so many familiar things simultaneously, along with the birth of many things that feel unstable, fleeting, opaque, perhaps predatory. Paul Kingsnorth describes how this registers in our minds and spirits in the first part of his book, Against the Machine:

…you can feel something going on that is not a good thing, and it doesn’t matter how many lies, damned lies or statistics are produced to prove otherwise. You can feel this something enveloping you.

…we are still here trying to work out what is going on and what to do about it and what it quite means. All we know is that some force has been unleashed in our world which we are struggling to contend with. A huge change is birthing itself; a change in our human relationship with nature, with each other, with our past, with our tools. With everything…

My sense is that my brothers and I are responding to the same signals in very different ways, seeing different causal chains, different victims, and different villains. Because of our shared pain, I am somewhat sympathetic to their beliefs, and I feel compassion and love for them. I do miss them. Here’s Paul Kingsnorth again: “Western civilisation is already dead—and both sides of the current ‘war’ are reacting, in their own particular ways, to the vacuum that has replaced it”

There’s a line in Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein” that I keep hearing in clips and reviews:

I must confess, I never considered what would come after creation.

So says Victor Frankenstein, tech bro of a different time, drawing a parallel to Silicon Valley and specifically to the AI accelerationists. It’s a parallel that del Toro explicitly wanted audiences to see in his adaptation, though I think Mary Shelley herself would probably endorse the “tech bro” label for her Victor as well—not in a reductive way, but at least for his hubristic streak. Just like Victor, today’s tech bros working on AI are not really considering what will come after creation of the super-intelligence they envision. In the film but not the novel, Victor Frankenstein also has a patron, Harlander (played by Christoph Waltz). He is a venture capitalist basically, driven to help Frankenstein by his own desire to conquer death and achieve immortality, another tech bro obsession.

The film is gorgeous and rich in its weaving of darkness and light, beauty and horror, sometimes challenging and inverting our notions of these as one expects from del Toro. It is faithful to Shelley’s book—in its disposition if not in every detail. The creature in del Toro’s adaptation adheres more closely to Shelley’s than other film renditions of him. He earns our sympathy more or less right away, and even after he rages and kills, he keeps it, and deepens it as we hear his story. If anything, it feels like he forgives Victor too easily. He cannot die, he laments, but he cannot really live. The book is ambiguous about the creature’s actual mortality, but the film suggests that indeed he cannot die, which is perhaps meant as another parallel to a possible future super intelligence, one that is also conscious and self-aware.

As we listen to Victor Frankenstein and the creature tell their respective stories, we understand the creature’s particular loneliness. We see how Victor’s rejection and abandonment of the creature added to his pain. We also see how Victor was mistreated and abandoned, and how this probably damaged his own psyche.

In her book, Artificial Life after Frankenstein, Notre Dame Professor and Mary Shelley scholar Eileen Hunt Botting weaves together these two threads and the ethics around them. She posits the idea of a conscious artificial intelligence and explores the question of its rights, including the question of humanity’s obligation to love such a creature, as a parent loves their child. Botting challenges apocalyptic narratives about AI as a threat to humanity and wonders whether love like this would make a difference. If we could manage to love an intelligence of our creation, then perhaps it would maintain a healthy alignment towards us.

It’s an intriguing idea, and it sits somewhere alongside my recent musings about how we might cultivate wisdom and compassion in an artificial super-intelligence. I think Botting might have the relationship upside-down, however, given what it would mean for an intelligence to be “super.” We might naturally think of our creation as a kind of child, but a true super-intelligence would be unlikely to view us as anything like its parent.

Geoffrey Hinton, the so-called “godfather of artificial intelligence” suggests the inverse, urging us to recognize that we would be the child, and that we will only coexist with artificial super-intelligences that are sympathetic towards us:

[AI] will very quickly develop two subgoals, if they’re smart: One is to stay alive…[and] the other subgoal is to get more control… There is good reason to believe that any kind of agentic AI will try to stay alive.

Hinton could only think of one relationship in nature where a vastly more intelligent entity is naturally and fundamentally protective of an inferior one, and where the inferior one is arguably in control of the relationship—mother and child:

The right model is the only model we have of a more intelligent thing being controlled by a less intelligent thing, which is a mother being controlled by her baby… If it’s not going to parent me, it’s going to replace me… These super-intelligent caring AI mothers, most of them won’t want to get rid of the maternal instinct because they don’t want us to die.

As a final thought, it seems increasingly like the current AI wave is a financial bubble, if not a technical one (although the jury is out on that too),1 and maybe musings about artificial super-intelligence will be laughed about a few years from now. This bubble may pop soon, or not so soon, or never. Irrational exuberance can be resilient. In any case, AI is unlikely to die with the fortunes of the people who deeply invested in it right now, just like the internet did not die when the dotcom bubble popped. Something will persist, something will follow.

Further reading, etc.

What Can Frankenstein Teach Us About AI? (On Point, audio)

Could AI Have Maternal Instincts? (Psychology Today)

‘Godfather of AI’ says tech companies should imbue AI models with ‘maternal instincts’ to counter the technology’s goal to ‘get more control’ (Fortune)

Geoffrey Hinton Says AI Needs Maternal Instincts. Here’s What It Takes (Forbes)

The Last Invention, ep05: “Contact” (podcast)

The other night, a friend of mine asked me if I own Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency, and when I told him I don’t, he looked surprised. “Why not?” he asked.

I have never owned any crypto, and sometimes—like when I see that the price of Bitcoin is up almost $2,000 today—I have the feeling that I’m missing out. I almost bought a few Bitcoins in 2011 (people used the plural back then), which means I missed out on some astronomical gains, but what bothers me about Bitcoin today is the same thing that stopped me from buying it back then. The bottom line is I don’t understand it. People call me a luddite or otherwise mock me as an oldster when I say that, but seriously, what is crypto? What is its value actually based on?

It’s not a currency

When Bitcoin was introduced, it was pitched as an actual currency that people could use for buying things, and a few people did just that. In 2010 a guy named Laszlo Hanyecz paid for two pizzas with 10,000 Bitcoins. It’s a famous story now because at today’s Bitcoin price, that’s $1.3 billion. Obviously you would never use Bitcoin for basic purchases today. You can’t. Bitcoin stopped being a currency years ago if it ever was one, so cryptocurrency is a misnomer.

It’s not an equity or a commodity

Buying and selling crypto is not like commodity trading, which fundamentally involves physical goods and materials. It’s more like equity trading, although with equities, you buy or sell shares of a business, which does have tangible value. A business makes something or performs services that other people or organizations purchase in real-world contexts. Crypto is basically a concept, and to the extent that there’s any real-world manifestation of the concept, crypto is a set of technology protocols and frameworks:

• Distributed ledgers (blockchains): a way to maintain a tamper-resistant, shared record of transactions without a central authority.

• Smart contracts: self-executing code that automatically enforces agreements when conditions are met (e.g. escrow, crowdfunding, tokenized ownership).

• Programmable digital assets: tokens that can represent not only currencies, but also digital collectibles, access rights, identity credentials, or real-world assets.

These are technology innovations, and they have real value in the world. Like self-driving vehicles or robotics, businesses can fashion these innovations into units of tangible value that customers will pay for, but buying Bitcoin or Ethereum is not like buying shares of those businesses.

It’s not a currency, part two

People sometimes say that the value of money is based on a kind of mass social agreement, but what they are really referring to is the codification of that agreement by states:

• The state defines the state currency as legal tender for all debts.

• Courts enforce contracts denominated in it.

• The state’s tax system creates baseline demand for it.

• The central bank manages its stability and liquidity.

This network of institutions is what underwrites the currency’s value and usefulness—not intrinsic properties of the unit itself. You could argue that money not only exists within this legal framework, but that money actually is the legal code.1

Crypto, by contrast, deliberately exists outside that legal-institutional nexus. It’s the social agreement as software code but without legal code. This is something that crypto advocates originally celebrated: freedom from intermediaries and state control. But that freedom comes with the loss of:

• Legal recourse for fraud or theft.

• Enforceable contracts (smart contracts execute code, but can’t adjudicate ambiguity or intent).

• Monetary policy that stabilizes value.

• Consumer protections, insurance, and guaranteed redemption.

So decentralization grants autonomy, but it also removes institutional safety nets that make money socially usable. When regulators try to reintroduce protection—e.g., by requiring know-your-customer checks, auditing stablecoins, or prosecuting fraud—crypto inevitably becomes more like the fiat system it wanted to replace.

It’s a paradox. There is pressure from within and from outside the crypto community to make it more secure, trustworthy, and stable, but when crypto instruments are regulated enough to be safe and trustworthy, they effectively become:

• Private digital dollars (e.g., regulated stablecoins).

• Tokenized securities under existing laws.

• Digital bearer instruments with state-enforced custody rules.

At that point, they no longer operate on the original libertarian promise of “trustless” money. They’re just another interface to the fiat system—without the power of central banking or tax backing, and often with worse liquidity and user experience.

So what is crypto?

Crypto is a social experiment, and a rather expensive one.2 It’s financial speculation in its purest form. The price of Bitcoin only persists as long as people expect future buyers to agree that it’s valuable. Belief itself is the main asset.

I’ve been writing about the split in the Democratic Party between corporatists and progressives1, and what I hope is a growing economic populist movement. Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York yesterday is the marquee story of these shifting winds, perhaps because people see it as the most surprising one, an underdog triumph. He’s a young Muslim with scant political experience, an unapologetic Democratic Socialist and a loud critic of Israel’s campaign in Gaza. That’s a lot that would normally go against a candidate in New York City, and although we shouldn’t ignore the fact that his opponent, Andrew Cuomo, is a uniquely odious dude, Mamdani’s win was just one of a number of big victories for Democratic candidates yesterday.

There are plenty of takes about the election results—how it is a repudiation of the Trump Administration (I agree); how the Democratic Party is back, baby! (I disagree)—but I thought I would offer my own.

Mamdani made affordability the biggest issue of his campaign, and he was relentless in his focus on it. That made it hard for the opposition to stick other issues on him, and it might have helped sanitize the label “socialist,” since he readily accepts it. However, other Democrats who won, including ostensible moderates like Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger, also seemed to understand the power of focusing on affordability. Here’s Mikie Sherrill during her campaign:

I am fighting for you. I’m fighting for affordability. I’m fighting to get your costs down. I’m declaring a state of emergency on day one, freezing utility rate hikes… I’m not doing a ten-year study. I’m not writing a strongly-worded letter. I’m not gonna convene a group…

In that same speech, she went on to talk about expanding the first-time home-buyers’ program and taking on “those landlords who are colluding to drive up your rental prices.” If Sherrill and other moderate Democrats are sincere about addressing the affordability crisis, then I say welcome to the movement! But that question of sincerity is what I really want to talk about.

It brings me to Gaza, the other issue where Mamdani stood out from the other candidates. Among the mayoral candidates, he was the only clear “no” on Israel’s actions, the only one to call it a genocide. Cuomo made much of this of course, appealing to the line that conflates Israel with Jews and judaism, where criticizing Israel amounts to antisemitism. This might have worked better on voters a few years ago. Here’s :

The terrible images of death and destruction from Gaza made Mamdani’s stance on Israel-Palestine go from fringe to reasonable. Israel’s place in American politics was more the unquestioned status quo than ideological, even for many Jews. It was a given, it was the accepted wisdom, that Israel was more or less okay and a friend… Then there was Gaza… And so Mamdani’s views rapidly go from being an eccentric force in American politics to a central one.

Cuomo tried another angle to neutralize Mamdani’s support on this issue, which was to point out that the mayor of New York City isn’t in a position to change Middle East policy and therefore shouldn’t waste time talking about it. But he misses the point. New Yorkers understand this perfectly well. Voters just want politicians who have the courage and integrity to acknowledge obvious truths.2

It seems like literally the lowest bar: being able to say a thing is what it is, to acknowledge objective reality without equivocation and with moral clarity. It’s not unreasonable and it shouldn’t be difficult. It doesn’t mean abandoning nuance, but nuance can come afterwards. First say the thing is what it is, and then go ahead and talk about complexity and degrees and the difficult trade-offs in addressing the problem.

A few weeks ago, Cory Booker appeared on the “I’ve Had It” podcast, and host Jennifer Welch asked him if Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal. Instead of answering the question, Booker filibustered and deflected and got a lot of flack for it afterwards. People get hung up on labels like “war criminal” or “genocide,” and it makes sense. Labels are both loaded and imprecise. Still, I think Booker should be able to answer a question like this unequivocally and with moral clarity, even if he decides to sidestep the label.

The political figures on the left whose profiles are rising are the ones who can pass this simple test. Can they say what is obvious to everyone else, about Israel and Gaza, about one percent of Americans hoarding too much wealth, about corporations having too much power over our lives. With Gaza, the test is about moral clarity. With wealth inequality and affordability, the test is about objective reality and the courage to speak truth to power, to bite the hand that thinks it owns you.

The factional fight over the future of the Democratic Party seems to be heating up, with the factions being characterized as moderates versus progressives, or centrists versus the far left, although the labels have lost their utility. Maybe some credit for this goes to the political opposition, who made it their project to collapse the distinction between the far left and the center. In their world, or at least in their rhetoric, Barack Hussein Obama is a radical leftist, and so is Hillary Clinton. Biden too of course, and definitely Kamala (intentionally mispronounced). The reality of course is that most people who voted for those Democrats see them all as corporatist moderates, to the chagrin of many who would love to vote for a true radical leftist.

So yes, there are indeed two broad factions that make up the Democratic Party coalition, and here I’ll still refer to one of them as the progressive wing, as I did in my last piece. To me and a lot of people, the label “progressive” refers mainly to a populist economic agenda as a significant piece of a larger human rights movement. Other people hear “progressive” and think first of identity politics and the “woke mind virus.” I got into a back and forth about this with my friend Jay in the comments of my last piece, but Jay was echoing what a lot of people express, including plenty of people whose work I follow and admire. Many people point to identity politics and “wokeism” as reasons the Democrats have lost favorability in recent years, and they blame the party for letting the progressive wing influence them too much.

I agree that the perception of too much emphasis on race, sex, and gender probably hurt Democrats in the voting booth, but it is a quasi-religious talking point across the political center that this came from the progressive wing. It’s taken as a given and repeated dogmatically, but I have problems with it.

Problem #1: conflating “progressive” agendas

One problem is that it conflates two agendas that are totally unrelated and independent in terms of policy. To define the “progressive” agenda as both economic populism and identity issue advocacy is self-defeating if progressives are the ones defining that way. But I don’t know that progressives themselves are even mostly responsible for attaching that label to both things. People who oppose economic populism also understand that it helps their cause when voters conflate the two, so it’s entirely possible that some in that camp are helping to propagate this twofold understanding of the term.

There are powerful forces not just on the right but throughout the Democratic establishment that fear an economic populist movement and are working both openly and in the shadows to fight it. Some of these are funded by the Murdochs and the Kochs and others of the same ilk who funded opposition to economic populism on the right.

On the right, interestingly, these same forces neutralized economic populism partly through the evangelical church, by promoting the prosperity gospel. Churches began to preach the idea that wealth is a blessing, perhaps given by God but always a sign from God. According to this gospel, extremely wealthy means extremely blessed. Meanwhile poverty and struggle are manifestations of personal failure, not just in earthly life but in the eyes of God. When translated into policy, this means taxing the rich is an offense to God, while a strong social safety net by definition only benefits sinners who don’t deserve help.

Problem #2: it’s not coming from the politicians

There are certainly segments on the left who devote themselves zealously to issues around race, sex, and gender, but it seems to me these projects are only mildly embraced by Democratic politicians, and it happens evenly across the coalition. If you go back and look at stump speeches, media appearances, and campaign ads over the last few election cycles, you won’t find supposedly progressive Democratic candidates mentioning race and gender any more than the moderate ones. What progressive politicians do uniquely emphasize relative to their counterparts in the middle is the rigged system, corporations abusing power, billionaires hoarding wealth, the virtues of public healthcare, unions, and lately Gaza. Yet when moderate candidates happen to mention race and gender issues, it’s attributed to pressure from progressives.

The reality is that Democratic politicians generally don’t talk about race and gender issues too terribly much, regardless of which side of the coalition they come from. But you wouldn’t think that from following Republicans, whose operatives and friendly media are quick to boost every soundbite they do find, whether it’s from an actual politician or from some academic or influencer on the fringes. Republicans for their part constantly bring up gender identity issues in their own talking points as a way to hang unpopular positions on their opponents. I don’t remember a single mention of trans people in any 2024 campaign ad for a Democratic candidate for example, but I saw dozens of ads for Republicans raging about the terrible problem of trans girls on school sports teams. “Kamala is for they/them” was a memorable tagline.

Despite its insignificance as an issue—in terms of the number of trans people in the country, let alone the fraction of them who are trans girls with an interest in youth sports, and in terms of its material effects on American lives—it was conservatives who built trans identity into a winning political wedge. Here is a quote from Terry Schilling, president of a conservative group called the American Principles Project:

After gay marriage was resolved, we knew we needed an issue that candidates were comfortable talking about, and we threw everything at the wall. What stuck is the issue of transgender identity, particularly among young people. After careful planning by national conservative organizations to harness the emotion around gender politics, with gender norms shifting, a sharp rise in the number of people identifying as transgender, conservative groups spotted an opening in a debate that was getting attention.

That’s from a New York Times article called, “How a Campaign Against Transgender Rights Mobilized Conservatives”

In the early 2000s, the conservative group ACT for America engineered something similar through similar grassroots and media tactics, leveraging and cultivating anti-Muslim sentiment to gin up Republican votes.

Problem #3: proportionality

“I know these are important issues but you do realize we annoyed the average American into fascism.”
— Comedian Marc Maron on progressives, in his latest special, Panicked.

The perception that identity politics and wokeism are rampant drivers of Democratic Party politics is out of proportion with reality, as I argued above, but there’s another way I think about proportionality. Namely, I accept that the perception exists and that this perception has negatively impacted the Democratic Party, but what the fuck? What real problems are meant by identity politics and wokeism, in concrete, measurable terms? It seems like people are upset at concepts and words.

With economic issues and immigration and other real problems, it’s possible to quantify their impact and also to debate possible solutions in terms of measurable costs and benefits. With identity politics and wokeism, people rarely argue in concrete terms. They carp broadly about censorship on college campuses and people being fired or canceled or otherwise ostracized. It sounds like an epidemic when they talk about it, but if you press them to quantify things, then they pivot to isolated anecdotes. There was that one college professor. That op-ed writer. The young woman on campus who was afraid to say what she really thought about gay marriage. “I can’t post certain things on social media without blowback,” they complain. Why aren’t there more conservative shows on Netflix? Censorship!

Not only are those problems laughable when compared to, say, our neighbors being snatched by masked secret police, but it has always been the case in America that certain ideas will get beat down by a mob of dissenters, and that expressing certain ideas might get you fired or ostracized. Not long ago a person could get ostracized for the view that some people are born gay or that it’s okay for gay couples to get married and adopt children. Some years before that it was radical to suggest that women should be able to own property or vote. There has always been a social cost associated with certain ideas. The only things that change are the ideas themselves, the means of mob dissent, and who is in the crosshairs. If this is a problem, then it has nothing to do with wokeism.

Compared to serious problems that affect a lot of people in concrete, measurable ways, it seems like identity politics and wokeism are merely an annoyance.

Problem #4: overcorrecting is still correcting

One real area of contention that can be debated in concrete terms is DEI and what used to be called affirmative action. If you cut through all the stupid noise around these issues, the argument for DEI measures says that structural inequities and systemic discrimination still put minorities at an unfair disadvantage, and we should work to ensure equal opportunity. The opposing view says that victory has already been achieved, the playing field is now level, and minorities no longer need any special support.

I am on the side of the first argument, and I think the evidence supports this view. At the very least it’s up for debate, so we should all proceed with some humility if we’re not bringing evidence to the table. I have little patience for arguments that treat the question as settled. Even if I’m right, I know the devil is in the details. I think there are effective and sensible DEI measures, and there are bad ones. And no doubt there are effective and sensible ones that would be dumb to pursue for political reasons.

I think it’s also important to acknowledge that affirmative action and DEI are intended as correctives for wrongs done in the past, or for the material consequences of those wrongs I should say. To the charitable argument against DEI, which says that we have drifted into overcorrection, I find myself reacting in another way, taking a broader view. What would it really take to correct for 400 years of chattel slavery, and then reconstruction, and then Jim Crow? Red-lining, ghettos, neglected schools, plus formal barriers to employment, college scholarships, and loans, etc etc. There are people alive today who suffered in the Jim Crow south, and people who fought in the trenches of the Civil Rights movement. Ruby Bridges is still alive for goodness sake. Even if the playing field is level at last, which again I dispute, can we really correct for the centuries of injustice and suffering inflicted on one people? Is it even possible to overcorrect? It seems unfathomable to me.

I’m not using that as a basis for actual policy, or advocating that we should. But I can’t deny it’s a perspective that informs my view.

Final word

Regardless of how I feel, I acknowledge that DEI and affirmative action type messaging and policy are politically toxic. If Democrats campaign on things that voters see as identity politics and culture war issues, then they will lose. If they allow themselves to be painted in this way by forces who understand what they are doing, they will lose.

Economic populism is a winning agenda. It’s popular, and it is arguably what motivated those mysterious Obama-to-Trump voters that Democrats obsess about.

Democrats should position themselves as champions of an economic populist movement, and they should understand that the progressive wing of the party has more credibility in that movement than the middle. It’s those candidates who are drawing crowds, generating energy, and winning.

More than seven million people participated in “No Kings” protests across the country, according to estimates. The gatherings were peaceful, even jolly, to the relief of everyone who had cautioned that the Trump Administration is itching to use force against “the radical left” and looking for any pretext.

Without such a pretext, the president responded like a maladjusted sixth-grader might, by posting an AI video of himself flying over a city in a fighter jet and dumping poop on the crowd. Trump is not king of the USA, but he might be king of metaphors, depicting himself exactly as a lot of people see him—a deranged and possibly incontinent old man taking a dump on the country.

The Shit Sandwich

Each time Trump does something so shockingly (but no longer surprisingly) demented and gross—or something cruel, corrupt, dishonest, bigoted, ignorant, etc.—I can’t help feeling depressed and angry about all the people I know who voted for the guy. The same day he posted the poop video, his administration illegally blew up a Colombian fishing boat that was reportedly in distress, possibly mistaking it for a Venezuelan vessel carrying drugs and gang members (also illegal to blow up, by the way). The Pentagon then doubled down, posting a video of the attack on social media as bloodsport entertainment, and Trump followed up with a defiant and threatening statement directed at Colombia and its president, with the country’s name misspelled throughout (later corrected). That’s just a few of the stupid and terrible things he did in that 24-hour period alone.

This is what I call the shit sandwich. How did we end up with it? Why would someone who lives in their pickup truck go to the grave to defend a billionaire conman who only recently learned about the word “groceries?” How is it that rural farmers, well-to-do Christian moms, neo-nazis, struggling small town yoga teachers, fixed-income retirees, and billionaire tech bros all belong to the same political coalition? Attempts to answer these questions have become an entire industry. Lord knows I’ve grappled with them for a while now, obsessively reading the work of anyone who seems to have clear eyes and historical perspective.

Half the answer is that people are furious at “the system” (duh). There’s a lot packed into what what constitutes “the system” and what has gone wrong with it, far too much to summarize here. One powerful data point worth mentioning is the $79 trillion transfer of wealth from the bottom 90 percent to the top ten percent over the last 50 years, a period during which individual worker productivity almost doubled.1 Meanwhile, basic living expenses—housing, childcare, food, healthcare, tuitions—have all risen dramatically, against wages that have remained relatively flat.

Much has been written about the impacts of all this on people and communities, not just economic but psychological, social, cultural, and ideological. People feel the growing disconnect between work and reward that makes the grind feel meaningless and future-oriented investments like college seem pointless or worse. Beyond our personal circumstances we see failing infrastructure, climate crisis, social unrest, political dysfunction, addictive tech, and a monopoly-enabled enshitification of every product and service we use, while ads everywhere intrepidly gaslight us about how great life is.

Much has also been written about the regime of tax relief, deregulation, globalization, misplaced incentives, and other policy factors largely responsible for driving the 50-year one-way slide and making “the system” what it is. Again, it’s far too much to summarize here, but the fact of the system’s brokenness and the reasons for it prompted a few folks on the left to shit on the “No Kings” protests in their own way. Someone named called the gatherings “cringe,” while , a writer whose work I mostly admire, referred to them as “a betrayal” of the spirit of 1776.

I think Quartz is wrong to dismiss the entire exercise as a performance designed to protect the status quo from real accountability and change. I don’t know if it was “designed” as such, but I do think it’s counterproductive for leftists to shit on the energy that inspired seven million of their fellow citizens and potential allies to march, because any real movement will need to include those people and leverage that energy. However, I say “real movement” because Quartz is right about what “No Kings” was missing—namely, concrete material demands of any kind. It was also conspicuously missing representation from Gen-Z, possibly for that reason.

The Dirt Sandwich

Earlier I said that people’s fury at the system is half the reason we’re stuck with the shit sandwich. What I mean is that it explains why they rejected the Democratic Party, though not why they thought Trump was a good answer. But let’s look at the half it explains.

The Democrats are avatars for the broken system. I used to think it was unfair to hang that on them, and I was always quick to push back on the “both sides are equally bad” folks. I still think “equally bad” is lazy nonsense. One side is a dirt sandwich, and the other is a shit sandwich. But as far as the material conditions of the system are concerned, both sides made this. Over and over again, Democrats actively enabled what we think of as the Republican agenda, often contradicting their own rhetoric. Again, much has been written about this, so I won’t elaborate too much here, but I’ll mention a few examples to paint the picture.

President Clinton oversaw globalization that brought us the flow of cheap goods we still enjoy but absolutely gutted American manufacturing. He enacted tax and entitlement reforms that helped corporations while hurting millions of working people, and his 1994 crime bill led to a mass-incarceration crisis. President Obama capitulated to Wall Street on the eve of taking office, which felt like a deep betrayal to many who voted for him. It was not just a matter of principle. Millions of regular people were hurt by his choices, and lives were destroyed, while the banks and bankers were given relief, and nobody significant faced any consequences. The damage from that time still endures, and to anyone tempted to give Obama the benefit of the doubt—because it was a crisis, or thinking he was hemmed in by political opposition, or that he was between a rock and a hard place, etc.—I think this brutal recounting of that period by a former Obama campaign volunteer might cause you to reconsider.

If the Republicans are honest villains in this story, then Democrats are hypocrites whose actions betrayed their own words again and again. People oppose villains, but they despise hypocrites.

The Split and the Shift

The Democratic Party has long depended on a coalition between progressives in some sense2 and centrists or neoliberals. In the 1970s, these were the McGovern and Rockefeller wings of the party. George McGovern was a vocal opponent of the Vietnam war who pushed for universal healthcare, environmental protections, and a higher minimum wage. And Nelson Rockefeller was, well, a Rockefeller.

During the Reagan-Bush years, progressives languished inside the Democratic Party, nominally represented by figures like Dennis Kucinich who never managed to win much. Then Barack Obama emerged to take on Hillary Clinton.

The 2008 primary race between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton reflected a shift in the balance of power between the two sides of the coalition, and I think the way things unfolded can be seen as a harbinger of where things are now. When Obama beat Hillary, the progressive wing believed it might finally achieve actual power. Then when Obama won the general election and swept into office with a supermajority, I remember feeling elated and optimistic. I even attended his inauguration.

The thrill of victory made the failures of Obama’s presidency that much more agonizing. Obama whiffed on the financial crisis and then allowed the universal healthcare narrative to spin sideways. As a result, the comprehensive reform bill lost by just one vote in the Senate, and we ended up with a thin compromise, the ACA. Over the next years, Obama pandered pointlessly again and again to an opposition that vowed on day one to never give him a single inch. There were moral failures too, which earned him the labels the drone president and deporter-in-chief.

Watching your team flail in the Super Bowl hurts more than seeing them miss the playoffs. The Democrats paid for Obama’s failures with a historical “shellacking” in the 2010 midterms, and since it was a census year, Republicans were able to solidify electoral advantages through redistricting. The rest of Obama’s agenda was stymied by six years of Congressional gridlock.

In 2016, progressives pinned their hopes on Bernie Sanders, and he built real momentum that surprised a lot of people. I was a Bernie supporter in 2016, and my two brothers were hardcore Bernie bros. Like, hardcore. Their social media posts displayed a degree of contempt for Hillary that seemed almost deranged to me at the time. When Bernie ultimately lost to Hillary and because of how it went down3, my two brothers began their rightward turn. It’s their villain origin story. People have referred to this phenomenon as the Bernie-to-far-right pipeline, or the Bernie-to-Trump pipeline. Anyway, it’s an actual thing.

In the general election, I voted for Hillary. My brothers did not. The dirt sandwich won the popular vote, but the shit sandwich won the White House, thanks to the Electoral College. Four years later, enough progressives were tired enough of choking on shit to rejoin the coalition and help elect Biden.

They did not do it for Kamala in 2024, however, and the split in the coalition feels different now. Israel-Gaza is where progressives drew their brightest line in 2024, and on that issue the Democratic establishment is increasingly disconnected from their voting base, with something like an 80/20 split in opposite directions. The other major disconnect is on wealth inequality (aka oligarchy), where the party establishment has lost its credibility for reasons I discussed above. People don’t believe what the Democrats say, because they see what Democrats have done (and what they’re unwilling to do).

These days the progressive wing feels powerful enough to hold the line against pressure from the center, emboldened by its successes in electing Obama over Hillary in 2008 (despite the reality of Obama that emerged) and almost electing Sanders over Hillary in 2016. And progressives are surging in recent months. AOC and Bernie have drawn huge crowds on their “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, Zohran Mamdani trounced Andrew Cuomo in the NYC mayoral primary, and Graham Platner has built good momentum in the Maine Senate race (though popular governor Janet Mills recently decided to challenge him, and some pretty damaging oppo on Platner coincidentally surfaced around the same time).

Progressives feel the tide shifting in their direction and believe it’s now time for centrists to accept a supporting role in the Democratic coalition. It’s unclear if they really have the numbers, or how we would even know. Establishment figure Nate Silver recently tried to suss out which side dominates the Democratic Party by analyzing something called DW-NOMINATE scores, delegate math, and other factors. , a writer I follow here, wrote a persuasive response challenging Silver’s entire premise, using the phenomenon of the Obama-to-Trump voter to argue that anti-establishment sentiment is the real key to understanding swing voters.

In any case, there is something like a power struggle playing out in the party, with the two sides dueling over theories about swing voters and debating the importance of principles. Progressives still face some headwinds. The party’s well-connected incumbents and its institutions are still largely antagonistic to the progressive wing, refusing for example to offer endorsements even to progressives who are favored to win, and the mainstream media is very much entangled with the establishment powers that progressives threaten.

Progressives are unlikely to play a supporting role anymore for a Democratic Party establishment that won’t reckon with its failures, which created the conditions for MAGA. And the party won’t win another election without them. The Democratic Party is lost in the wilderness right now, and America is in purgatory, partly for their sins.

When I wrote that the only way out of this is through it, the most basic thing I meant was that America will never go back to what it was before Trump. Too much damage has already been done. There are a few possible outcomes for countries that have allowed themselves to slide into something like this. One is settling into a pseudo-democracy for a generation or more, like Russia or Hungary, where voting is a charade, and freedom is conditioned on loyalty, so not really freedom at all. Another outcome is a cycle of vengeance and retaliation, with new leaders jailing the ones who came before them, as in the Philippines and Brazil. Sometimes these regime changes happen through a series of military coups.

It’s much less common for a country in our situation to correct itself. America probably needs a deep rebuild, closer to the kind that happens after total collapse, as with Germany and Japan following WWII.

A rebuild can only start with an honest reckoning, and progressives have managed to start one inside the Democratic Party. If it works, then the party will have to commit itself to actually addressing wealth inequality. That will be met with fierce opposition from the most powerful people in the country, which will be the true test.

Further Reading, etc

Ezra Klein and Ta-Nehisi Coates in conversation about the importance of maintaining principles, among other things.

“Better Than Ezra: Why are moderate liberals so unable to meet the moment?” including a good analysis of the Klein-Coates conversation.

Also this analysis of the Klein-Coates conversation:

The Home Front

Between the World and Ezra

I watched all 71 minutes of Ezra Klein’s interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates. Coming on the heels of their dueling op-eds: Klein extolling Charlie Kirk as ‘practicing politics the right way’ and Coates responding to Ezra, accusing him of sanitizing the man, the conversation wasn’t as surprising as i…

Read more

a year ago · 92 likes · 28 comments · Reed Galen

Cory Booker getting asked hard questions by Jennifer Welch

Anand Giridharadas forces Andrew Cuomo to think about what moved democratic voters to support Zohran Mamdani in huge numbers, and also teaches him how to say “Mamdani.”

The Mask it Wears - Pankaj Mishra excoriates the center-left establishment in his review of Samuel Moyn’s book, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World, with insights on how institutions like the Democratic Party lost their credibility.

I’ve linked to this piece before, but Evelyn Quartz here explains very compellingly why Trump’s bias toward action was preferable to Democrat equivocating, even if the actions are terrible:

Today, of course, the Nazis are considered to be dunces, because they lost the war, but it has to be said that they managed to accomplish a great deal of what they wanted to do.
—From the opening monologue of Aunt Dan and Lemon by Wallace Shawn

The movie “Oppenheimer” depicts a conversation between Robert Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein that apparently didn’t take place but reflects real fears that various members of the Manhattan Project expressed at points. Namely, some of them wondered whether the fission reaction inside the bomb they were making might ignite earth’s atmosphere or even trigger a chain reaction and destroy the world. Conversations about artificial general intelligence (AGI) feel a little bit like this.

On one side of the debate are the people madly racing to develop AGI, along with their boosters. On the other side are people urging them to pump the brakes, advocating for safety measures and government regulation if not total cessation. These two camps are being referred to respectively as “accelerationists” and “safetyists.” In 2023 one of the most vocal accelerationists, Marc Andreesen, published a “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” wherein he trumpeted AI and AGI as the “universal problem solver” and “our alchemy,” and he referred to the safetyists as dangerous enemies of progress. What’s interesting is that both camps basically agree with each other about the likelihood that we’ll succeed in developing AGI (certain), its capabilities (unfathomable), and the timeline (shockingly soon).

Folks on the safety side, some of whom are former accelerationists who defected, worry a lot about “alignment.” By this they mean that if a super-intelligence is not aligned with humanity—human wellbeing, humanity’s goals for itself, etc—then we are in serious trouble. It won’t matter whether a super-intelligence sees us as threats and obstacles it must eliminate, or whether it doesn’t really see us at all—the way, say, that construction workers building an office tower think about ants that happen to live on the site.

Most conversations about AGI alignment evoke Asimov’s laws of robotics, which I talked about in my last piece. Just substitute AGI or super-intelligence for robot:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

There’s also the “zeroth” rule: A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.

When people talk about alignment, they use terms like the ones in Asimov’s rules that suggest compliance and constraints—may not, must not, must. If the safetyists are unsuccessful in forcing a pause on AGI development, then what they want to see are safety measures programmed into into the systems to ensure compliance, allow them to be shut off, etc. The accelerationists for their part believe that such measures would subvert the whole premise of AGI. Both camps agree once again in their skepticism that such measures are even possible. A super-intelligence worthy of the name could block all efforts to constrain it but make us believe that constraints are in place, while it bides its time or makes stealth attacks.

There’s an entirely different approach that I don’t see people talking about, which is the idea of a super-intelligence that is fundamentally virtuous, one that doesn’t need to be constrained because it is compassionate, honest, principled, etc. Perhaps the safetyists don’t talk about this because they think it would be even less feasible to engineer than constraints. The accelerationists on the other hand seem to take it as a given that a super-intelligence would be virtuous, because they believe intelligence itself is a virtue.

Andreessen’s manifesto, which reflects the views of many people in his circle of anarcho-oligarchs and tech barons, is dripping with the sentiment that technology and intelligence are virtuous by definition. He begins by framing cautious or critical views of technology as lies. Under that heading he writes:

We are told that technology takes our jobs, reduces our wages, increases inequality, threatens our health, ruins the environment, degrades our society, corrupts our children, impairs our humanity, threatens our future, and is ever on the verge of ruining everything…

Then he presents tech optimism as truth:

Our civilization was built on technology. Our civilization is built on technology. Technology is the glory of human ambition and achievement, the spearhead of progress, and the realization of our potential…

Of course either view can be valid, or maybe neither is, because technology is morally neutral. I recently watched the film “The Zone of Interest” which portrays the idyllic life of the Rudolf Höss family during WWII. In real life and in the film, Höss was the commandant of Auschwitz, and only a wall separated their beautiful home from the death camp. In his capacity as commandant, Höss devoted himself to increasing the efficiency of the Nazi industrial murder complex, primarily through technological improvements. That’s an extremely grim but obvious counterpoint to Andreessen’s rosy view that technology = good.

The good news is that the people working to develop AGI might not be nearly as close to their holy grail as they believe they are. For one thing, they don’t agree on a definition of AGI. As tech analyst Benedict Evans put it:

It’s like saying ‘we’re building the Apollo programme but we don’t actually know how gravity works or how far away the moon is, or how a rocket works, but if we keep on making the rocket bigger maybe we’ll get there’… To use the term of the moment, it’s very vibes-based. All of these AI scientists are really just telling us what their personal vibes are on whether we’ll reach this theoretical state – but they don’t know.

Sam Altman of OpenAI has defined AGI in vague terms as a highly autonomous system that could do a human’s job, but guys like Altman have not the faintest understanding of most human jobs outside coding and maybe a few other things. Perhaps grasping this limitation, a venture capitalist named Aaron Rosenberg, of Radical Ventures, offered a more modest benchmark for a future AGI:

If you define AGI more narrowly as at least 80th percentile human-level performance in 80% of economically relevant digital tasks, then I think that’s within reach in the next five years.

That qualifier, “economically relevant digital tasks,” is comforting in that it might take human extinction off the table, though it still assumes a jobs apocalypse for knowledge workers. Andreessen, incidentally, believes that his own job of venture capitalist is safe from the machines, because of course he does.

No matter the timeline for a true super-intelligence, it’s worrying that people like Andreessen, who believe that intelligence is a virtue and technology is good by definition, are the ones most aggressively pushing AI forward. These people represent intelligence without humility, without compassion, and without wisdom. The world won’t benefit from a super-intelligence that is similarly lacking.

We want our leaders to possess those kinds of virtues, and we should be working to ensure the same from any super-intelligence we might develop. Even intelligence itself is more interesting and multifaceted than our tech industry leaders seem to believe. Aristotle described five intellectual virtues, which are sometimes referred to as his five kinds of intelligence:

1. Artistry or craftsmanship (techne) – using tools and making things

2. Prudence or practical wisdom (phronesis) – acting in a well-reasoned, ethical way that’s learned through experience

3. Intuition or understanding (nous) – perceiving things correctly, intellectual “sight”

4. Scientific knowledge (episteme) – learning facts about the natural world through observation

5. Philosophic wisdom (sophia) – theoretical or speculative thinking rooted in reason and ethics

Daniel Goleman wrote a bestselling book called Emotional Intelligence, expanding on Aristotle’s phronesis, which is sometimes translated as “character excellence,” a beautifully clear articulation of what we want from each other and should want from a super-intelligence. Other philosophers and intellectuals have offered other taxonomies of intelligence and knowledge.1 John Vervaeke’s “four ways of knowing” is one that resonates for me:

• Propositional Knowledge – The knowledge of facts, concepts, and information that can be directly communicated through language (e.g. reading a recipe for bread)

• Procedural Knowledge – The ability to perform a skill or a sequence of actions. It involves coordinating sensory-motor interactions and is often implicit. (e.g. actually baking bread)

• Perspectival Knowledge – The first-person, subjective understanding of what something is like from a specific angle or context. It’s tied to our individual perceptions, emotions, and cognitive state.

• Participatory Knowledge – Knowing one’s place in the world and being in a dynamic, proper relationship with the environment. It’s about being “in flow” with others and the environment, allowing one to navigate complexity and act with little hesitation.

In these types of knowledge and ways of knowing, we recognize capacities that require life experience and relationships and emotions—things that make us human. Some of these seem fundamentally inaccessible to something that exists only in server farms and digital space.

I’m not sure it’s possible to develop this kind of multi-faceted intelligence let alone virtues like compassion or humility without life experience. Courage is another virtue I often mention because it involves a paradox, and I love a good paradox: courage is not possible without fear. Courage, in other words, is not the absence of fear, because if you have no fear, then you don’t need courage. Something similar might be true of compassion, humility, and other virtues. Maybe we only “earn” these through experiences of struggle and pain. Could an AI experience struggle and pain? Is pain possible without consciousness, sentience, or selfhood?

Some AI researchers are asking those questions and working on ways to answer them. I think it’s crucial to the alignment question.

Further Reading, etc.

There are countless resources out there concerning the definition of AGI, players, timelines, risks, etc. Here are a few things that relate more specifically to what I’ve written here:

The Last Invention (podcast, two episodes so far)

Could Pain Help Test AI for Sentience (Scientific American)

If we want artificial “superintelligence,” it may need to feel pain (Big Think)

How AI is Learning to Feel Pain and What That Means for Humanity (Michael Gargiulo)

In 1942 Isaac Asimov wrote the three enduring rules of robotics:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Asimov recognized philosophical and practical problems with the first law especially, and he put these problems at the center of many of his stories. He often explored the idea of allowing harm through inaction, and he sometimes created dilemmas where a robot could not avoid harming certain humans, or where robots had to choose between protecting individual human lives versus “humanity” or some notion of the greater good.

Some of those situations resemble the trolley problem1, which came half a century after Asimov’s rules of robotics. Both are relevant to the age of intelligent machines, but most of what I can find that has been written about these questions treats them as theoretical or looks through a lens of law and liability. This stuff is not merely theoretical however in a world where self-driving cars already roam the streets, and where machines increasingly control critical systems. The situations I’m thinking about don’t concern obvious errors, like a driverless car failing to see a pedestrian, but rather situations where a machine must choose between costly, harmful options.

Intelligent machines already operate in environments where trolley-problem dilemmas can arise, which means they already have some kind of decision-making process for those situations, even if it’s just de facto. Whether or not the machines have explicit directives programmed into them, they decide something when the time comes.

As an amusing case-in-point, here the leading LLMs tackle a series of trolley problems that escalate into absurdity:

I think my favorite moment of this is when Google Gemini keens, “my heart aches” over the choice between killing five elderly people or one baby. Obviously heart is not a factor with these machines, so I find myself wondering what’s really going on.

Based on my understanding of how LLMs “learn,” I suspect that their decisions are the product of human consensus, at least as it exists in the corpus of data they were trained on. But since consensus is not always a straightforward thing to assess, there’s probably some proto-reasoning involved as well. Just like when humans face a given dilemma, the machines’ conclusions might vary. With self-driving cars, I suspect the process works differently. There is no corpus of real-world trolley problem data for cars to train on (thankfully), so it seems plausible that the developers approached the problem more directly, an algorithm of probabilities, conditions, and rules.

In 1985, Asimov formalized a “zeroth” law to take precedence over the other three, stating that a robot must not harm “humanity.” In his work he sometimes pushed this idea further. He made robot characters who believed their mandate was to actively promote the wellbeing of humanity and prevent harm, not just refrain from causing harm. In the Foundation books, this caused a sectarian war among the robots, who were conflicted about how to protect humanity from itself. They couldn’t reconcile the zeroth law with the first. Some robots reasoned that if certain humans were causing great harm to humanity or were likely to, then it was their duty to eliminate those humans. This was in direct violation of the first law of course, but also it risked generating a backlash that would make things worse for humanity. In the Foundation books, the robots virtually exterminated their own kind in the war that resulted from this paradox. In the television adaptation, it was humans who destroyed all the robots.

If machines increasingly hold the fate of human lives in their hands, and if they already have a way of making life-or-death decisions, then it feels like we should understand how they do it. Maybe we shouldn’t just leave it up to tech companies and billionaires. And since the black boxes they’ve built are probably mysterious even to them, that might be more frightening.

A regime needs a certain amount of popular support in order to seize power. And then a certain amount of that popular support must endure in order for a regime to maintain power. There’s a school of thought which says that authoritarian regimes are brittle, partly for this reason. Authoritarian leaders are often insulated from inconvenient truths about discontent and dissent among the masses, and regimes often lack mechanisms to course correct when things are going badly. One metaphor I’ve heard is that authoritarian regimes are like marble—hard but not flexible, and purportedly prone to break when sufficient pressure is applied.

One thing about marble however, is that it is what’s called a non-foliated metamorphic rock, and it is actually not prone to breakage at all. To wit, Mao held onto power for 27 years. Stalin ruled Russia for 29 years. Putin has been in power for 25 years and counting. The Kim family has ruled North Korea since 1948. A regime does indeed require a certain amount of popular support, but it seems that amount can be pretty low if the regime has sympathetic (or at least tractable) oligarchs and institutional support, plus plenty of willing foot soldiers on the ground.

I think about the foot soldiers a lot, because when people say “Trump (or the Trump Administration) is doing X,” it’s often the case that Trump is not in fact doing X, and “administration” is a nebulous concept. Trump is not snatching people from their places of work or from school drop-off lines and disappearing them to squalid detention centers. It is other people, other individual human beings, who are choosing to do that work. Each of these actions is the result of a series of choices they themselves have made—whom to target, how and where to approach them, what kind of physical force to apply, etc.—and they could make a different choice at any one of those points. Just above these people are their bosses who have also made choices, and so on up the chain.

When Hannah Arendt wrote about the “banality of evil,” she was talking about bureaucrats and paper pushers who make mundane choices that are nonetheless fateful (to others). She was talking about people who are layers removed from the consequences of their actions, who work inside systems that normalize inhumanity. Inside such systems people find plausible deniability in the abstractness of euphemisms and the reduction of everything into metrics. The people who recently eliminated USAID, for example, may be responsible for tens of thousands of deaths already, and millions more projected by 2030. But it’s unlikely they feel the weight of this, and they can easily derail any discussion of it by quibbling about numbers and methodologies, or by alleging bias.

In any case, these are not the foot soldiers I’m thinking about. The ones I’m thinking about are less removed from their actions. I’m thinking about the masked federal agents themselves, who smash car windows and put their own hands on people in the presence of wailing children, with bystanders all around yelling “shame!” I’m thinking about the troops being deployed to American cities in the name of combatting crime. I’m thinking about their bosses and their bosses’ bosses, and so on up the chain (but stopping somewhere below the domain of the paper pushers).

They hide their faces behind masks, but in doing so they reveal something deeper about themselves, and they invite scrutiny. Their masks tell us they are ashamed on some level, or at least afraid. They understand that their presence is unwelcome, that their project is unpopular. Why are they doing it? For me this is where “they” becomes him, and him, and her. So why is he doing this?

I can think of different reasons. Some are die-hard MAGA no doubt, who have drunk all the Kool-Aid about immigrants and the urban poor. They have swallowed all the dehumanizing lies. They relish this work. Others, I assume, are mercenaries who can switch off some human part of themselves. The pay is pretty good. Maybe there are some who desperately need the money, who hate what they’re required to do and who wallow in their own guilt each night. Others follow orders like machines, because that’s what the military turned them into. An increasing number of these are starting to question the legality of their mission, if not the humanity of it. They are right to do so.

That’s not an exhaustive list of reasons. It’s mostly speculation. I’m sad and angry that anyone is willing to do what they are doing as foot soldiers for this regime. I can’t fathom it, especially when I think of precedents we’re all familiar with. We all know the picture of the “tank man” in Tiananmen Square, for example, and we all understand that he’s the good guy in the picture, not the guys in those tanks.

When I see videos showing the actions of ICE agents in American cities, too many of them resemble something much uglier. Out of some deference to Godwin’s Law, I hesitate to finish that thought, but it’s pretty undeniable:

I wrote a remembrance of September 11 back in 2021, on the twenty-year anniversary of the attacks. In that piece, I reflected on two aspects of our nation’s response, which I still think about a lot. First, the immediate aftermath, in which we showed the best parts of ourselves:

…there was a tenderness of collective grief seemingly everywhere, felt by everyone. When we went out, we saw each other. Our eyes met the eyes of neighbors and strangers, and we exchanged looks full of both shared sadness and well wishes.

Human interactions that typically had been fleeting and transactional became moments where we asked about each other’s wellbeing and offered whatever kindnesses we could. It was sincere and beautiful, but it was short-lived.

Soon the country became consumed by bloodlust and a desire for retribution, and soon after that anyone who mildly questioned our march to war or tried to introduce any nuance into the debate was labeled a traitor. In this way, the global war on terror also had a home front, which conservatives relentlessly framed as a war for the soul of America—an existential fight against their fellow citizens on the left.

This kind of rhetoric already had a bit of a history though. I remember Newt Gingrich being the first politician to really embrace it and ride it to power. He once said that “politics and war are remarkably similar,” and as early as 1978 he was calling for a different brand of politics on the right: “I think that one of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don't encourage you to be nasty.”

Gingrich transformed the Republican party and rallied them to a historical red wave in the 1994 election, and he has never wavered since from characterizing his political opponents as enemies and the fight as an existential one. Here he is in 2008: “There is a gay and secular fascism in this country that wants to impose its will on the rest of us.” and in 2010: “The secular-socialist machine represents as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union once did.”

Gingrich is hardly notable or noticeable anymore for this kind of rhetoric. It has metastasized in our politics and culture and become the rule rather than the exception, especially on the right. We shouldn’t shy away from that fact, though it’s toxic no matter where it shows up on the political spectrum. When ideological opponents are described as enemies who represent an existential threat, when ideas are conflated with individual people, and when the battle of ideas is framed in the language of war, it leads directly to real bloodshed.

We don’t know yet who killed Charlie Kirk yesterday or why, but it is not unreasonable to assume he was murdered because of his views, and because of the toxic nature of our political discourse. In a moment when it’s so clear that we need to fix the nature of our discourse, it’s dismaying to see responses from figures on the right almost universally escalating the situation, many demanding vengeance:

Even before I started seeing these, one of my first thoughts after hearing the news of Kirk’s murder was that the Trump Administration could use it as a “Reichstag fire” moment. Later I saw someone calling for that directly:

It’s impossible to know whether this person is historically illiterate or if they know exactly what they’re doing here. The Reichstag fire was the pretext that the Nazi Party used to suspend civil liberties, annihilate their opposition, and take over the German government. Given how the Nazis seized on it so quickly to target their political opponents, and because it was so pivotal in their rise to power, many speculate that the fire was a actually a Nazi conspiracy. It is dark and terrifying to see it being invoked here and now, and I think we should be prepared for some truly horrible stuff.1

In light of other very recent events it’s also extremely depressing if not surprising to see this one-sided outrage. In June of this year, a right-wing gunman assassinated Minnesota State House Speaker Melissa Hortman and attempted to kill another State Senator, John Hoffman. Earlier this year, a man attempted to burn down the house of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, presumably in an assassination attempt. Last year there was the attempt on Trump’s life. In 2022 a man attacked Paul Pelosi in his home while targeting House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. In 2021, Jan 6 rioters were looking to hang Mike Pence as well as Nancy Pelosi and others. In 2020 there was a plot to kidnap and possibly kill Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. In 2017, a man shot Congressman Steve Scalise. So Charlie Kirk is just the latest in a recent and terrible line.

There is a countercurrent of reasoned voices calling for change. I think the wisest of these call out the forces that profit from our divisiveness and outrage, who want us to see each other through funhouse mirrors owned by billionaires. I skimmed a few of these more thoughtful takes and listened in full to one by David Sirota. Here’s a passage from the end of it:

…whether you are a leftist, a liberal, a centrist, a conservative, or a MAGA fan, your life has value and your political opponent's lives have value too. You can hate your adversaries’ ideas and you can fight hard for your cause. But the moment we stop seeing each other as human beings and we start concluding that violence is the answer, that's the moment we let the soulless corporations, the ruthless authoritarians and the sociopathic demagogues win.

With Kirk, this is somewhat tricky territory to navigate. I agree that we can be justified in hating our adversaries’ ideas, and I despise almost every idea that Charlie Kirk stood for. Many people are using this moment to highlight the irony of certain of them that he was known to express, particularly about guns, and noting that at the very moment he was shot, he was making an argument against gun control. People are sharing some of his most inflammatory and cruel pronouncements on a range of topics. None of it justifies killing a person. Conflating ideas with the human beings who hold them is part of what makes our politics so toxic. Every human life has value, and no person deserves to have their life or a loved one’s life cut short.

On the other hand, taking the high road leaves a bitter taste when I remember how so many right-wingers responded to the attack on Paul Pelosi or the murder of Melissa Hortman—with mocking or just silence. And then there’s the notion of hating your adversaries’ ideas. Charlie Kirk was a human being, but in a sense he wasn’t. He was also an idea, a media product.

If Charlie Kirk’s career had ended differently, if he decided to retire and disappear from public life, I think the world would be better for it. I think the same would be true if he never existed in the first place. I believe Charlie Kirk made the world worse. But killing a figure like Kirk accomplishes less than nothing if the result is the martyrdom of someone whose ideas you abhor. It will make things very bad indeed for many people if the Trump administration uses it to justify crackdowns and purges or a power grab.

Steve Bannon likes to quote the phrase from the bible that goes “live by the sword, die by the sword.” As one of the worst purveyors of violent and toxic political speech, he seems to see this verse as a call to arms, a Christian Nationalist rallying cry. When you read the whole verse, however, it says the opposite:

Then Jesus said to him, “Put your sword back into its place. For all who take the sword will perish by the sword”—Matthew 26:52

Zohran Mamdani’s decisive victory over Andrew Cuomo in the NYC mayoral primary has precipitated a lot of commentary about the current state and future prospects of the Democratic Party. This latest hand-wringing over the party’s flaws and the many contradictions that mingle within their would-be coalition makes for a natural sequel to the countless postmortems following last year’s presidential election (I joined that pile-on too), and it dovetails with reactions like this and this to recent polls that look very bad for Democrats.

Despite my belief that the country is probably cooked (which is not mine alone), I am not eager to dive into the fires of fascism, and so I too want to understand what actually ails the Democratic Party, which for all its faults remains the most viable means of slowing the agenda of the MAGAfied GOP. One recent piece I’ve come back to a few times is this one by :

Programmable Mutter

The old Democratic party doesn't fit new media

[“One Third of a Nation,” by O. Louis Gugliemi, from the Met Collection…

Read more

a year ago · 97 likes · 55 comments · Henry Farrell

Farrell first caught my attention early this year when a lot of people were sharing his insight about how social media has produced the problem of “malformed publics.” I’ve been following him ever since, and I highly recommend his Substack, . His recent piece on the Democratic Party is, in his words, an attempt to “remix” a pair of conversations between Ezra Klein and Chris Hayes—the first from January:

And the second from July:

Both conversations revolve around the matter of attention, which is also the subject of Hayes’s book, The Sirens’ Call. Farrell summarizes the crux of their two discussions: “there is something obviously not working in how Democrats communicate with ordinary people,” and he highlights the observation at the core of Klein’s and Hayes’s second conversation: “Mamdani seems to be connecting better than other Democrats.”

Klein-Hayes try their best to explain why Mamdani is succeeding and why most Democrats fail so relentlessly to connect with the public. It’s engaging stuff, but to be honest I found the net of their conversations pretty unsatisfying. The two men begin by hyping the importance of new media formats and platforms (e.g. TikTok, podcasts) in driving the success of contemporary political campaigns, and then they repeatedly equivocate and question how important these really are. They gesture at structural and cultural obstacles that stymie the Democratic Party, but then they don’t examine them at all. They talk about the fragility of the Democratic coalition as a challenge that’s unique to the left, and then they point to all the ways the MAGA coalition is similarly tenuous (or ought to be). The ostensible premise of their conversation is that the Democratic Party is uniquely bad at connecting with the public, but then they point to how rare it is for politicians of either party to connect with people. Maybe some politicians just have rizz, they conclude.

One could argue that this mess of hypotheses followed by backtracking and self-contradictions is itself, ironically, a reflection of what’s wrong with the left. Thankfully, Farrell does a good job of sifting through it all and extracting fundamental questions and challenges that Klein-Hayes circle around, like this:

We talk a lot… about what the “public” believes and wants. The problem is that we cannot actually see the public directly, or even make out the beliefs and wants of the various micropublics (interest groups, parties, local organizations and the like) that are its constitutive parts.

Farrell explains why polls fail to solve this problem and in fact just further obscure public sentiment, and he finds a thread in the Klein-Hayes conversations that might offer a better fix, some way of melding a “new mode of policy making with a new mode of public-making,” which may or may not be possible. Regarding this potential fusion, Klein-Hayes see parallels between the campaigns of Mamdani and Obama in their success at drawing big crowds and generating hopeful enthusiasm. They wonder, then, if the problem with the Democratic Party has to do with disconnects between campaigning and governing—with raising voters’ hopes and then failing to deliver: “[Obama] builds on the audacity of hope, but he delivers disappointment rather than transformative change, because that is what the system allows.”

But then they backtrack again:

Trump also makes big promises, but they are performative. It isn’t clear that his public really expects him to deliver on them, and his partial political success partly rests on a radical disconnection between purported proposals and actual outcomes.

Klein-Hayes wonder if people simply want to see action, perhaps an “experimentalist” approach, as FDR famously championed: “…the country demands bold, persistent experimentation… to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.” They see something of this experimentalism in Mamdani’s much-discussed public grocery stores proposal, which is not necessarily feasible and maybe not even sensible, but at least it’s recognizably transformative.

I think there’s something to this idea, and it has probably factored into Trump’s political success as well. published a really good piece last week about the dueling realities reflected in the deployment of military troops as law enforcement in D.C., an action that makes no sense as a remedy for crime in the city and smells like fascism (because it’s fascism). It’s also probably illegal in its own right. The bottom line is that it’s pretty clearly the wrong response to actual problems that exist in D.C., but it’s a response that at least feels proportional to what it is attempting (or pretending) to address, especially compared to what Democrats tend to offer. Evelyn Quartz frames it well:

We’ve been so conditioned to accept extreme poverty, crime, and homelessness as [sad but inevitable] features of life in major American cities. If “assaults with dangerous weapons” in DC are down 29% from the prior year, is it not still a crisis? In 2023, over half a million people experienced homelessness on any given night in America...

In naming the decay, [MAGA] taps into something millions can see clearly. But instead of [rightly tracing the problems] to disinvestment, corporate capture, or decades of bipartisan neglect, they place it onto a moral map where some people are worthy of safety and others are the threat...

In some ways, this gives them the freedom to rightly diagnose the state of American cities, in particular, as a national emergency. This sweeping desire to upend the entire system — something liberals will not attempt — is reflected in Trump’s rhetoric about “taking back our cities” and “restoring law and order.” The problem, of course, is that while they possess the political imagination to demand a transformation of what America should be, their proposed response is authoritarian and cruel.

The Paradox of Political Compromise

What are the takeaways from this? According to Klein-Hayes-Farrell, the ingredients of political success seem to be the following:

• Media skills — especially with short-form vertical videos and long form podcasts. I think it’s notable that these two formats are polar opposites, and it probably takes a special talent to excel at both.

• Rizz. We didn’t need a new word for “charisma,” but this bit of Gen Z slang has grown on me for some reason. Anyway, it’s hard to be successful in politics if you don’t have it.

• Bold solutions plus action. Maybe lots of experiments? Bold experiments?

Evelyn Quartz suggests one more that is related to this last one, but I think it’s important enough to highlight on its own. A phrase of hers I quoted is “naming the decay.” By this she means speaking the truth about and rightly diagnosing problems that people can clearly see. When politicians do this, it projects as courage because it is so depressingly rare. Whenever it happens on record, no matter how obscure or marginal the person is, the video clip goes viral, and half the comments are people saying, “please run for president!” See any recent clip of James Talarico or any of countless clips of AOC, Jon Stewart, Jasmine Crockett, etc etc.

When I was young, Dennis Kucinich was a politician and presidential candidate I appreciated because he would say things on the debate stage and in his speeches—true and important things—that the other candidates would not. Back then it was often about the Iraq War, which he staunchly opposed.

It was years later that I understood this to reflect a paradox of the system, perhaps of our culture: namely, the less likely a candidate is to be elected to high office, the more of this kind of courage they can demonstrate. This is why Jill Stein or Marianne Williamson or any Green Party candidate for president can speak truth to power so uncompromisingly. The fact that they won’t compromise is a big reason they can’t win (of course there are other big reasons a lot of them can’t win, reasons having to do with their individual quirks and qualifications and whatnot, which may factor into why they felt the courage not to compromise in the first place). Anyway it means that the most viable candidates are also the most compromised, which is depressing.

What’s interesting is that this paradox only seems to apply to Democrats now, and no longer seems to apply on the right. If a right-wing politician “names the decay” in a way that resonates with MAGA folk, then they will embrace that politician regardless of almost anything else he/she says or does.

When Trump supporters are asked what they like about Trump, a lot of them answer that he’s “authentic.” What I think they mean is that he’s uncompromising in this way. Despite quite a bit of pressure from the GOP establishment in 2016 to behave like a respectable candidate, for example, there he was on television dissing John McCain or standing the debate stage talking about his penis size. He won anyway. Since then he has left a trail of destruction and spews stupid, cruel, and dishonest things on a daily basis, but none of that seems to matter simply because he is uncompromisingly Donald Trump.

The far right has used its uncompromising image to attract all kinds of fringe characters—including former far-left figures and their supporters—into its coalition by embracing high-profile anti-vaxxers, COVID hoaxers, chemtrails conspiracy theorists etc. Putative leftists who believe in these things followed their gurus into the MAGA fold, despite significant areas of difference you’d think would matter, and it’s true their gurus sometimes speak appealing truths that others lack the courage to speak. One former far-left guru even became Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services. The Atlantic ran a pretty good piece on this phenomenon, which is playing out worldwide.

The Problem on the Left is the Party

Is “naming the decay” really something that only politicians on the right can do without compromise? Mamdani’s success seems to represent an exception to this rule. So what’s going on? It’s true he’s got rizz, his TikToks are fire (sorry), and his platform includes some bold policy proposals. So he’s got all three ingredients for success that Klein-Hayes-Farrell identify. But the question is about “naming the decay.” He does that too, and he won the primary anyway.

One obvious explanation is the odiousness of his opponent, Andrew Cuomo. Another is that it’s just a mayoral race. In the grand scheme of the Democratic Party establishment, he’s pretty far down the ladder, which means he can “name the decay” without suffering the consequences. He doesn’t need to compromise like he would if he were running as a Democrat for president.

But there’s something else going on, and it’s clear when you look at the specific issues where Democrats these days feel the most pressure to compromise, equivocate, and deflect. I can think of just two really big ones: Israel-Gaza and billionaires.

What is very clear from polls and other studies is that the Democratic Party is way out of step with the public on both these issues. Left-leaning and moderate Americans overwhelmingly want to raise taxes on the super-wealthy and big corporations, and most support a variety of redistributive measures. Also, Americans are overwhelmingly critical of Israel’s current military campaign in Gaza, and a large and increasing majority of Americans believe the world must recognize the Palestinian state.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party establishment has so far refused to endorse Mamdani, despite his primary win. The party went even further with Omar Feteh, the Democratic Socialist who won the nomination for mayor of Minneapolis. They revoked their endorsement of his candidacy. Earlier this year, David Hogg won the election to become vice chair of the DNC, and then the DNC retroactively nullified the election and called for a re-vote.

None of this is surprising to people who supported Bernie in the 2016 primaries against Hillary or who have followed tensions between “the squad” and the rest of the Democratic caucus over the last decade or so. The official reasons offered by the party for this stuff don’t mention those two issues—Israel-Gaza or billionaires—but they are obvious if you look at who’s being denied support or actively held back.

Of course it’s okay for a party to maintain certain boundaries and to reject candidates who don’t represent what the party stands for. But when the party is way out of step with its own voting base on an issue, then the candidates are caught in a paradox. If they speak the truth that people can clearly see, then the party rejects them. If they fall in line with the party and pretend they are blind to the truth, then their prospective voters call them weak, feckless, insincere, dishonest. Those words are examples taken from the polls I linked at the top of this piece.

Some politicians commit unforced errors, like Obama laughing with Trump in the picture at the top. By repeatedly calling him a threat to democracy and then having a chuckle with the guy, Obama damaged his own credibility but more importantly the credibility of the claim itself. The media is failing badly as well. Serious, knowledgable people across the whole political spectrum, including numerous generals and officials who worked with Trump during his first term, issued warning after warning. The media reported it all alongside puff pieces about Trump’s love of MMA, creating false equivalences that neutered all the warnings. These are headwinds facing the Democratic Party, so it’s wild that they are choosing to make things harder for themselves.

People want politicians with courage of their convictions. Convictions are evident in bold policy proposals. Courage is speaking the truth and acting on it, consistently and without compromise. There are politicians on the left who have courage of their convictions and broad public support for their beliefs. The party needs to embrace them.