I have an interview up with here to discuss fiction’s decline and a piece in here on the ceasefire.

Best,

Sam

THE WAITING GAME

There’s an odd quiet in the world right now. I feel it everywhere I go. I feel it on this platform. It’s not just the sense of resignation in dealing with Trump. It’s not a certain economic plateauing. It is — I’m convinced — everybody waiting around to see if they will be made redundant by AI.

I’ve made my own arguments against AI enough times that I’m tired of hearing myself talk about them — that it undermines our agency and dignity; that we turn our power over to tech companies that really are just interested in mining our data and our privacy, and so on. But maybe the most important argument is that it’s really not that good. The first time you fire up an LLM, it feels like magic — like anything is possible here. I can certainly understand why so many people have turned the last few years over to beta-testing the product. But after not too long, you hit the limits — and the limits, as far as I can tell, are pretty insuperable. The LLM is rooted in the dataset you give it. It can’t really create, can’t intuit, can’t think outside of the box, or really think at all, can’t engage with anything other than its pixelated reality. And then it does hallucinate and the hallucinations seem to be a feature rather than a bug, so that anyone working with it — and cheerily turning over all the dignity of their labor to it — does, in the end, have to check it, with the result that there is barely any labor-saving at all.

But it’s obvious that arguments like mine are losing, or at least are losing out in the short-term. Everybody takes it for granted that AI is progress that we have to yoke ourselves to for better or worse, and everybody is looking for the tactical advantages they get when working in tandem with their cyborg friend. And so what’s happening, as I look around, is this sense of the Great Inevitability. Oracle, the software company, lays off 30,000 workers — 18% of its global labor force — to replace them all with AI, and it feels inevitable. “Data centers are the new offices,” writes . Students turn in their school assignments with AI, including their creative writing assignments, and it feels inevitable — The New Yorker reports on the urban legend of a student who never turned in a single assignment of his own all through high school; since everything he ever wrote was AI, the teacher had nothing that really was his to compare it to.

Underneath the Great Inevitability is a set of assumptions:

1.The world moves forward. Progress is inevitable.

2.Progress is essentially technology. As Marshall McLuhan put it, first we make our tools and then our tools make us. This is just a fact and is perfectly illustrated in the case of AI, a technology that none of us fully understands but that will help mold us in the direction of whatever the future brings.

3.The economy, and society as a whole, needs growth to survive. There is little obvious growth in other sectors. The area for growth is AI, which means that we have to go all in on AI no matter the consequences.

4.There’s no question that a large number of people will lose their jobs, but that’s just inevitable. If the jobs can be replaced by AI, then the jobs aren’t worth keeping anyway. And the way this works is that if jobs go away due to the advent of a new technology, then the economy shifts and jobs re-materialize thanks to advances made by that technology.

Those are all kind of baseline assumptions for most people and baked very deep into the culture. Against them, I would just ask the following questions — as something to pass the time in this extended period of waiting:

1.What really do we want our lives to look at? What are the actual values that we centralize our lives on?

2.If that value is ‘optimization’ — going along and getting along — then I have no particular argument with AI. If that value is more in the realm of pride or dignity, then I would ask how turning so much of our agency over to a machine contributes, even hypothetically, to having lives that give us a genuine sense of esteem?

3.How sure are we that AI can do things better than we can? A couple of years ago, writing seemed to be immediately in the crosshairs of AI. Already, it’s becoming fairly obvious what the limitations of the AI are — it lacks a true point of view, as well as lacking genuine creativity and having its fairly-transparent writing tics — and the backlash is upon us, with writers from Mia Ballard to Megan McArdle facing real repercussions for their use of AI.

4.What makes us so sure that jobs lost to AI are actually going to come back through AI? The way the market is playing out, AI is being driven by a handful of enormous companies, many of which are ruthlessly downsizing themselves in order to have their work done by AI. Where exactly are the job growth gains that we can even conceivably anticipate?

5.Might it be better, instead of putting our trust in massive tech companies and a largely-untested-and-flawed product, to actually invest in our own value, to think about what we want from our lives and invest in that?

For me, there is actually a very clear direction to go in — it’s about writing and the humanities and a connection with the past, all the things that AI almost by definition can’t touch. But even there it’s starting to get a bit lonely. I can feel that the values of the society are shifting. It’s not really because of the AI — its limitations are, by this time, thoroughly documented — but because the critical mass has chosen to adopt the unspoken assumptions buttressing AI’s advance without asking the hard questions like what I’ve itemized above. At the moment, in many respects, the wind is going out of the sails of AI. And if AI isn’t what it’s assumed to be — a path to artificial general intelligence or, at the least, a mechanism of economic growth — then the wind is going out of the sails of the society as a whole. If we find ourselves made redundant, or just more generally irrelevant, that won’t be because of the AI, actually. It will be because we did it to ourselves.

But I find it very difficult to do. The issue is that we really are in the stupidest timeline and analysis is almost entirely defeated by it. I really shouldn’t be shocked by anything anymore but I was a bit shocked by Trump’s Easter proclamation — “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah” — which even for him may be a new low.

So what we have is a rogue superpower on our hands run by a child. It’s exactly the scenario that everybody imagined when Trump first ran for president, but we were lulled into a false sense of security by the relative restraint of the first term when he did display, in his own way, an interest in governance and contented himself with tax cuts as well as the occasional stretching of the itchy trigger finger as in the killing of Soleimani. But now it’s what we all pretty much thought it was going to be — American citizens murdered on city streets as part of an authoritarian flex; a path of random mayhem sown all over the globe.

Needless to say, there is no real rationale for the war, for the bombing of the girls’ school, for the impending oil shock. The idea of generating regime change, or even meaningful reform, through air power alone was always going to be a non-starter — and, of course, Trump is too disorganized to helm a ground invasion. With his capacity to divulge, he has at least spoken to some of the truth of what the war is about — it’s a force of “habit” to bomb in the Middle East; and the ‘back to the Stone Ages’ rhetoric must feel good as it’s being typed into the Truth Social chat bar.

And now we have a situation where the U.S. has gone rogue — and is rogue for the foreseeable future. All pretense of legitimacy in international actions is stripped away. The multilateral institutions are abandoned as fast as Trump is able to abandon them. The U.S.‘ erstwhile allies are tweaking, and working around, the U.S. in any they can. And there is no reason to expect that this state of affairs will change anytime soon. The U.S. (with Israel) appears to have such a relative advantage in weaponry that no one else can really compete, and so long as the stockpile holds out the U.S. can continue to swagger around the world without much repercussion. (A cynic would say that this has actually been the state of affairs for quite some time but with a veneer of international law.)

I was in the U.S. recently for the first time in a while and what was striking was how normal everything is. The TSA issue was clogging up the airports, but that was already being resolved while I was there. There wasn’t actually the same pervasive dread that there had been a year before — at that point, it seemed like Trump was on the verge of declaring a class war and everyone I knew in the professional-managerial class/intelligentsia who was connected to government funding in any way seemed at risk of losing their job. Trump seems to have lost interest in that, and so there are the immigration raids and then the foreign adventures. There’s no particular protest movement over the Iran war, and the reason for that is understandable — everybody seems to think Trump will spin it the way he can and then get bored and move on.

But I find that to be not very comforting. I don’t talk very much about leaving the U.S., and Trump isn’t the primary reason for that, but it’s definitely in the mix. I am pretty patriotic, actually. I do think there is something in the U.S. that represents a very special kind of aspiration. And returning to the U.S. from abroad, I am struck at all the things the U.S. does well — for all its problems, the level of development simply is higher than elsewhere except pockets of Western Europe and East Asia. And that means that it is a tragedy for me to see what has happened — to see the U.S. (although to be fair this is largely a one-man wrecking ball) uncouple from any norms of international legitimacy and from the system of alliances that represents a continuity to the World War II victory. Everybody always reaches for Roman allusions, and for once, that really seems to be the case here. We’ve ended up with a Caligula or a Nero. It’s maybe a survivable situation. Rome lasted for centuries after the advent of the mad emperors, but the damage was nonetheless incalculable. What Rome represented wasn’t just power but a vision of benevolent statecraft, of what civilization could be. We are that too, sometimes. But not now — and I have no idea when, or if, that will return.

I wrote a post a couple of weeks ago exploring different theories of Epstein, from his being essentially a film-flam man all the way to his being a kingpin of a dark global empire. And, actually, it turns out that the more lurid ideas towards the bottom of the post are closer to the reality. At the heart of it he was a ‘hyperconnector.’ His business was access, with everyone in the web getting closer to him through something they wanted and didn’t have, the business people to new ways to move their money around, the academics to the business people, the ambitious to the celebrities, the celebrities to a clubbable atmosphere where they could say what they really thought without fear of recrimination, and the lonely, priapic men to the trafficking empire.

There are a few things that should be said that, in the present climate, no one wants to say. One is that the story some time ago took on a witch hunt aspect, and is mostly being played out in public as a chain of associations — the notion is that Epstein is a toxic sludge, that anything involved with him is inherently tainted, and anybody who came across him therefore cancellable. The reality is a bit more complicated than that. He really was involved (with whatever degree of sincerity) in philanthropy, scientific research, financial planning, etc, and just to have known him or to have enjoyed his company is, for me, not incriminating. Then, we have to remember that there was never a trial and never a chance for Epstein’s side to present their case. What’s been missing in the emails so far is overt evidence of criminality. “On the question of whether there was a wide pedophile ring, we’re not seeing proof of that,” said Kirsten Danis of The New York Times. Then, there is a bit of a pivot in the accusation against him. This was supposed to have been about underage girls, but as more evidence comes out the emphasis shifts towards prostitution and trafficking, which is still bad but isn’t quite as satanic as the popular perception of what was going on. And, then, I am not entirely persuaded that association with Epstein after his 2008 conviction is by itself morally impermissible — the fact that somebody has been found guilty of a crime, even a sex crime, and had served their time for it, would not, in normal circumstances, mean that that person should then be considered beyond the pale.

But. What Epstein was doing was really heinous and has shocked even veteran watchers of the Epstein story. He was grooming girls and young women, on both sides of the age of consent, promising them various favors and then pushing them into trafficked sex work. It seems to have been genuinely a global enterprise, and was, as criminologist Thomas Volscho puts it, on an “industrial scale.” The women were frequently used as pawns in order to curry favor with men Epstein wanted to connect with for business or political reasons — and that produced a cone of silence around everything Epstein-related in which Epstein had implicit leverage over anyone who had partaken of what he was offering. The shoe that hasn’t dropped is proof of trafficking of underaged girls to others — Epstein paid for massages for himself that routinely involved sexual acts from underage girls, and there have been multiple accusations of rape against him — but what has come out, nonetheless, is entirely damning of a large number of people who were, essentially, johns for Epstein’s practice of grooming, coercing, and manipulating young women and then a larger number who knew and kept quiet about it.

And now that we can glimpse the body of the elephant, a few different pieces fall into place. Epstein’s original depiction of himself as being a money manager with his services exclusive to billionaires seems, in a sense, to be accurate. Here is how, in 2003, Epstein described his business, “I was the only person crazy enough, or arrogant enough, or misplaced enough, to make my limit [for taking a client] a billion dollars or more.” With time he seems to have moved on from just advising, and serving as the right red hand, for Wexner and Black to doing it for a wide network, with (it now seems almost certain) Gates among his clients. What comes through most clearly from his interview with Steve Bannon is the sense of identifying himself ultimately with the global financial system — picturing the system itself as a living, breathing organism. In his pitch to Putin in 2013 that’s also the way he presented himself. “Russia can get out in front and leapfrog the global community by reinventing the financial system of the 21 st century,” he wrote. “A new form of money, on a world wide basis, It is much larger than any single project envisioned by any govt. and at its core not really that difficult to bring to fruition.” What’s obvious is that national boundaries do not matter at all — Epstein is aggressively offering his services to Russia to develop a new Russia-centric banking system.

And some of the moral sensibility comes clear as well. Long-time acquaintances of Epstein described him to Vicky Ward as having “no moral compass” — there’s of course an outstanding question of whether he was a psychopath — but there’s, to me, a very arresting moment in the Bannon interview where he gives some kind of a sense of a code. Bannon — who, by the way, must be the world’s very worst interviewer — is really pressing Epstein to show some kind of emotion or contrition for his 2008 jail sentence and Epstein, eventually, says, “[My being in jail] is as incredible as sitting here in this house. They are both just two sides of the coin.” The point is that there is a kind of threshold that you push through to engage in the sort of work Epstein was doing — just as rules of nationality don’t apply, ordinary notions of morality and criminality don’t apply either: if you’re caught you’re caught, while if you skate free, you skate free. Interminably in the interview, Bannon tries to press Epstein on who is responsible for the 2008 financial collapse, and Epstein seems sincere and convincing when he insists that that really is the wrong way to look at it: the system itself is what matters, more ordinary questions of culpability or morality don’t really come into it. And what extends from there is a view that the only people who matter are the ones who have the ability to move the system around. When Ghislaine Maxwell dismissed the Florida victims as “trash,” that may well have been what she had in mind — Epstein and Maxwell really were close to the nerve center of something, and the people who were far away from it, like the Palm Beach girls Epstein abused, were collateral, inconsequent. One of the more baffling aspects of the Epstein story — his interest in mass insemination and longevity — makes a certain perverse kind of sense when thought about in this way. There was a sort of Nietzschean morality at work: because he, and people in his world, had passed through the ordinary laws of good and evil, they were more worthy, in a moral category unto themselves. And that sensibility does feel of a piece with the entirety of Epstein’s career. He started out as, essentially, a butler to the powerful and he maintained that perspective even as he came into his own — he served power, and the vertical of power. The very clear sense is that nobody of lower status ever entered into his world unless they served some very clear exploitable purpose.

The sophisticated analysis of Epstein has, by this time, moved on from him to the question of whether there an ‘Epstein class,’ in Ro Khanna’s phrase. Based on the evidence of the emails, there really is. That doesn’t mean pedophile rings or satanic rites — or at least that tranche of emails hasn’t dropped — but it means a class of people, many of them household names, who aren’t beholden to democratic values or national interests or to the greater well-being of the public sector, who are beholden endlessly to their own narrow self-interests, which tends to include a heavy dose of pure hedonism, and are invested in the preservation of their own class. In his most butlerish mode, here was how Epstein put it to Vicki Ward. “The problems of the mega-rich, he tells people, are different from yours and mine,” Ward reported. “Very few people need any more money when they have a billion dollars,” Epstein said. “The key is not to have it do harm more than anything else.” It’s an interesting echo of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s line “The very rich are different from you and me” and speaks, again, to the underlying worldview — that money, or a certain place in the power hierarchy, moves you out of normal moral concerns and makes you, to take Epstein’s words literally, almost a different species: not in the accumulation business, like everybody else, but in something very different, the management business or the transaction business, where everything takes on a somehow juvenile, gamified character. As Ezra Klein puts it, “There’s also just an endless transactionalism. An endless trading of information, money, connections, favor, powers.”

What comes through, as well, is the almost total absence of any kind of integrity. Many of these people are public servants or, in some way, custodians of the public trust, and, on the evidence of the emails, their attention was entirely on their own mercantile self-interest, which often meant very petty symbols of conspicuous consumption (the baroque effort of Brad Karp to get himself into Augusta National Golf Club, for instance, with Steve Bannon and Epstein organizing the campaign on his behalf). As Anand Giriharadas, who has been one of the sharpest observers of the Epstein story, puts it, “Everybody is so interested in longevity. What about living well and honorably in the existing time, whatever that is?” If we were to use a Rome analogy, what it feels like is the elite swanning around Capri in the age of Tiberius, the parties getting progressively out of hand, and what you want is for everybody to read their Cicero. In this context the mis-education of Ehud Barak is particularly bracing, with Barak — career soldier and public servant — being, under Epstein’s tutelage, put through the paces of the strange new international order, selling surveillance equipment far and wide and with Barak’s reputation helping to bolster the deals.

The sensibility, within this world, is that this simply is the way it is, and Epstein is ahead of the curve by being less morally encumbered than most. Michael Wolff clearly put his finger on something when he reported that a number of Epstein’s acquaintances would spend the whole day at his house — not necessarily doing anything untoward — but just kind of basking in the atmosphere of being beyond the pieties of the rest of society. “It was like at a men’s club,” Wolff said. And one can’t help but imagine some of the topics covered — lowering the age of consent to 15, as Alan Dershowitz would argue in an LA Times op-ed, building a Russia-centric financial system, and so on.

***

If I think about what the ‘Epstein class’ means for me, what I find myself picturing is a fork in the road for most people I knew growing up — which is like a scar across every educational institution I’ve ever been part of. On the one hand, there are the alleged values of that institution — the liberal arts, a humanistic sensibility, a general reverence for democracy. And then there’s the path that most people follow — which is to run pell-mell into finance at the earliest possible opportunity. The general view on this was that that was just the way it is — we live in an era where finance is predominant, but that it all works out, that the bankers themselves are more or less beholden to the norms of the democratic system, that the wealth they generate irrigates the broader economy.

But, in a word, fuck that shit. What comes through with the Epstein e-mails is something really rotten at the heart of it — the best real estate, the best connections, the best of everything, and all of it, in Epstein’s case, supporting something really evil. What this has to do with ultimately, I suspect, is something I talked about in a different post — the turn from capitalism to some different system, what I’m calling ‘surplus wealth.’ The argument is that there really is a new beast in the world, that, as Yanis Varoufakis — who has thought very deeply about all this — argues, the new system is ‘parasitic’ on capitalism much in the way that capitalism was ‘parasitic’ on the feudal system that preceded it. We can see that very vividly with Epstein. It’s unlikely, in his long career, that he ever produced anything of ‘value’ — everything was essentially parasitic on the work that other capitalists (Wexner, Gates, etc) were doing, and he was able to prove his value to them through tax evasion, through different forms of money laundering, through the skills of hyper-connection.

These are real moral questions. Over the course of people’s lives, they are given choices — ultimately, whether they want to be part of the system or not. The system means money, and wherever the money is congregated, but there’s also a certain creed that the money seems to articulate — that it’s the ‘invisible hand,’ that the right thing to do in your own life is just to get downhill of the money and follow wherever it leads. That’s what Peter Attia was trying to articulate in his mea culpa that “At that point in my career, I had little exposure to prominent people, and that level of access was novel to me,” and I can certainly understand him. I’ve been in enough rooms with high ceilings to know how rapidly the presence of wealth can corrode ordinary moral sensibility. But follow that logic and it really can lead somewhere very dark — as the interior of the Epstein e-mails has more than shown to us. There has to be a better way.

The first is that Epstein is a “nothingburger.” I actually wrote a piece for Persuasion advancing this. The theory here is that Epstein certainly is guilty of some great number of the sex crimes for which he was sentenced and for which additional charges were about to be brought at the time of his death, that he really was connected with a large number of powerful people, but that he was basically a hanger-on, a somewhat gifted con man, and that the discovery of his existence shouldn’t change our underlying understanding of how the world works. The evidence pointing in this direction is largely the testimony of Ghislaine Maxwell. With time to think things over, Maxwell — if anything in her Florida testimony can be taken at face value — concluded that Epstein was, at the end of the day, a cheap trick. “He’s not that interesting,” she said. “He’s a disgusting guy who did terrible things to young kids.” But really, she insisted, it wasn’t on elaborate sex ring, there wasn’t a blackmail scheme. There was, she claims, a “lifestyle” that the outside world can’t understand and so there’s been a tendency to attach claims of conspiracy to what ultimately is about people with money or influence being magnetized to one another. A certain amount of what seems nefarious with Epstein is not particularly inexplicable. It’s not so crazy that different well-known people would hop rides on his jet or that he would cozy up to different well-known people. As Ezra Klein put it, “At the end of the day the Epstein estate was not actually that large. It’s not like he was sitting on billions of dollars.” He did have actual wealthy clients, and he may have stretched his importance to cultivating a vast network, but he did so by to some extent living beyond his means and it’s less than clear that he really left some vast footprint on the geopolitical landscape, as some of the more involved theories would have him doing. Some of the apparent bombshells in the Epstein case haven’t exactly detonated. The “Look Inside Jeffrey Epstein’s Manhattan Lair,” as The New York Times titillatingly titled one of its Epstein feature pieces, revealed dinner parties with crappy takeout food and long discussions about physics. The entertainment seemed often to center around a magician or a chalkboard wheeled out to sketch mathematical formulas. The excitement of one evening, as a letter by Woody Allen breathlessly reprinted by The Times, indicated, was the presence of an entymologist. Meanwhile, Maxwell — with many reasons not to lie — poured cold water on a few of the more popular theories. “This notion that he blackmailed men…I don’t believe that to be true,” she said. And of the idea that he was involved with Mossad or an intelligence agency, she said, “I would be very surprised if he did.” Epstein’s lawyer Alan Dershowitz — a deeply unreliable narrator in this case — nonetheless had the ring of common sense about it when he declared that Epstein said nothing to his legal team about intelligence ties. “That’s not something he would keep from his lawyers. That’s something he would tell his lawyers,” Dershowitz said. As argued on Racket News, the Epstein saga may be “the worst reported story of all time” with insinuations vastly outstripping evidence. If we stick to what we really know, the story often seems to collapse back into something much more quotidian than what the conspirators would like — someone who was “in between a money manager and a con man,” as Klein put it, who was guilty of sex crimes but wasn’t necessarily part of anything much larger than himself, and who certainly doesn’t warrant all the vast attention being paid to him.

We start to go down the rabbit hole a bit deeper when we try to work out exactly where the line was between his being a money manager and a con man. The argument on the side of his being a legitimate money manager was that, first of all, he really did work at Bear Stearns from 1976 to 1981 and there really was nothing particularly mysterious about that. He did fit the profile of what Ace Greenberg was looking for in junior recruits — “poor, hungry, and determined” and he really did have skills — a combination of being personable and good at math. The Vicky Ward profile of Epstein from 2003 — now more famous for what was cut — presents a largely-plausible image of an up-and-coming financier. At Stearns, he figured out a few skills that would prove marketable later on. He was an expert in options, which would be useful in tax evasion strategies for rich clients. And when he set himself up in his own business, dealing with tax strategies for the ultra-wealthy, it seemed to be of a piece with what he had learned at Bear Stearns. Seen in this way the business empire he gradually built for himself — and which was so perplexing when he first came into public consciousness around 2000 — does make a certain amount of sense. He had a unique set of skills in terms of understanding both a grey zone of offshore wealth and the needs of ultra-wealthy clients. In an interview with Ward, Leslie Wexner said, “I think we both possess the skill of seeing patterns. Jeffrey sees patterns in politics and financial markets, and I see patterns in lifestyle and fashion trends.” And to people who see Epstein as being entirely a scam, the accounts of him that surface in Ward’s profile depict someone who really was working hard. Ward describes him as being a combination of “real-estate agent, accountant, lawyer, money manager, trustee, and confidant” — and of being a brutally hard-nosed representative of his clients, something like a combination of Gordon Gekko and Reginald Jeeves. Given the current image of Epstein as this free-floating dark matter, there’s a surprising butler-like subservience in how he described himself to Ward: “I always describe [a billionaire] as someone who started out in a small home and as he became wealthier had add-ons,” he said. “It’s a large house that has been put together over time where no one could foretell the financial future and their accompanying needs.” The notion is that Epstein really did have a niche he had worked out for himself — not the kind of job that you would see in the help wanted pages but a plausible-enough job as the red right hand to a select clientele of billionaires, and if he also skimmed off the top, as Leslie Wexner later alleged, well, you would ultimately expect no less from Jeeves himself. Even some garish details of the Epstein story — like that in the mid-‘80s he was pitching himself as a ‘bounty hunter’ for missing wealth — do surprisingly seem to check out. An acquaintance recalled that he was with Epstein when they went together to the Cayman Islands and walked out with bank certificates that had been lost in the midst of offshore trades.

But even as Ward was reporting her largely favorable piece about Epstein, she also uncovered some of the darker side of Epstein’s finances. A critical point in his rise to wealth was his involvement in the Towers Financial Corporation, a complicated Ponzi scheme that bought up an insurance company and used that as a raiding vessel in a series of attempted takeovers. Steven Hoffenberg, who ran Towers, would end up serving 20 years in prison and in a series of jailhouse interviews with Ward depicted Epstein as a real villain of the operation — an architect of the scheme who at some point flipped and served as an informant for the prosecution and then got off scot-free while Hoffenberg took the whole rap. Epstein’s history as a con man comes a little more clearly into focus with Thomas Volscho’s discovery (later supplanted by New York Times reporting) of the story of Michael Stroll, a video game executive who was persuaded in 1982 to invest $450,000 with Epstein for a supposed crude-oil deal that Epstein promptly absconded with. If the original version of Epstein’s rise — that he left Bear Stearns in 1981 opening up his shop as a niche money manger for billionaires only — is a fabrication, the real story may be more like what happened to Stroll, that he used his reputation from Bear Stearns to run a series of crude scams and Ponzi schemes, which culminated in his partnership with Hoffenberg. To Hoffenberg, what Epstein really specialized in was “playing the box” — carrying out a financial scam with a psychological element involved so that “even if the crime was uncovered the victim would be unable to do anything about it, either because of social embarrassment or because the money was tucked away in a place where they couldn’t either find it or get it.” If the lines of Epstein’s ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ businesses start to cross when he becomes Leslie Wexner’s right-hand man in 1987, it’s also possible to see that as part of the scam. Wexner’s financial advisor Harry Levin, asked to meet with Epstein, immediately identified him as a fraud, but Epstein somehow succeeded in getting himself hired anyway, convincing Wexner that the by-the-book Levin was somehow defrauding him and then gradually pushing out Wexner’s entire circle and running his operations much in the way that he seems to have run things for (and ultimately defrauded and betrayed) Hoffenberg. The image of Epstein that comes through here is something between Francis Urquhart of House of Cards and Ratfucker Sam of Succession, the person who is entrusted with the dark side of somebody’s operation and who, not entirely surprisingly, proves themselves wholly untrustworthy and bites the hand that feeds them. Thought about in this way, Epstein is both an outsized figure and also somewhat cut down to size. He comes across as a cartoon villain — endearing himself to his various employers by, as Ward wrote in 2021, clearly “lacking any sort of moral compass” — but also as being at the end of the day a con man subject to the vicissitudes of the con artist business. Volscho, a professor of criminology who seems to know more about Epstein than anybody alive, complicates some of the more lurid Epstein stories by claiming that, around 1986, Epstein was flat broke — with his New York City landlord suing him for non-payment of rent. From this vantage-point he seems less like an all-powerful mastermind and more just another creature of the garish ‘80s — think Jordan Belfort or Michael Milken — who managed to get out in time, moving on from the career-ending Ponzi scheme with Hoffenberg to greener pastures with Wexner and eventually Leon Black and laundering his reputation through his various institutional affiliations.

Where things really get tricky — I’ve heard people describe this as “a rabbit hole within the rabbit hole” — is when the notion of Epstein as an intelligence asset comes in. Once again, Ward is a critical source of information here. In 2019, in The Daily Beast, she reported the much chewed-over comment that Alex Acosta, the prosecutor who cut Epstein the 2007 sweetheart deal, had decided to back off because “Epstein belonged to intelligence.” Ward went significantly further in her 2021 Rolling Stone article when she reported, “Four separate sources told me — on the record — that Epstein’s dealings in the arms world in the 1980s had led him to work for multiple governments, including the Israelis.” Epstein himself had bragged that he used to work for the CIA. And the former Israeli agent Ari Ben-Menashe claimed that Epstein had deep ties within Israeli intelligence. In an online interview, the mathematician Eric Weinstein lays out an arresting picture of how Epstein might have functioned as an intelligence asset. Epstein, argues Weinstein, may well have been a later-day version of Eli Cohen, the Israeli spy who obtained access to upper levels of Syria’s political and military apparatus. Epstein, he said, is best thought of as a “construct” — money pouring into him to support a high-flying lifestyle and then once he was in place as an asset being manipulable in different directions, as a lobbyist, as a honeypot, or as an agent of influence. Go in this particular direction in your Epstein researches and you find yourself with a very different view of how the world works. It’s very close actually to the depiction of the modus operandi of intelligence agencies in Catherine Belton’s Putin’s People and Craig Unger’s American Kompromat. Belton describes the latter-day KGB moving huge amounts of money to the West, using businessmen to set up various slush funds in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Unger depicts both Robert Maxwell and Donald Trump as belonging to the same sort of profile — constructs propped up by intelligence money that could then manipulate the spheres that they were a part of. To Weinstein, there’s a very simple equation here. Maxwell falls off his yacht in 1991 with his wealth vanishing. That same year, Epstein pops up with an enormous amount of money and dating Maxwell’s daughter Ghislaine. The clearest explanation for what was happening, if you go down this route, is that Israel was worried about an anti-Israel turn in the U.S. with the election of Bill Clinton and Epstein was being slotted into place as an agent of influence to help keep the U.S. and Israel linked. As Ward writes, “Epstein decided to go one step further and compromise influential people by recording them doing things they wouldn’t want made public.” That view of things — which has I think emerged as the most popular understanding of Epstein — is that he was at the center of a whole geopolitical entanglement. As does sometimes happen — it certainly seemed to happen in Robert Maxwell’s case — he may have been spying for multiple governments, and was also out in business for himself, and he becomes something like a “node,” a conduit for information that, as Hoffenberg told Ward, was “at a level that is very serious and dangerous.”

Another variation of the Epstein-as-a-spy theory was unveiled by the journalist and Drop Site News. “It’s not to say that he worked for the Mossad. I think he was actually much more powerful than that,” said Hussain. For her part, when Ghislaine Maxwell was asked by the Deputy Attorney General if there were Epstein connections that had been under-explored, she answered, “Off the top of my head I can think of Ehud Barak.” Maxwell seemed clearly to be trying to get rid of the question, but Hussain and Drop Site very much took her at her word and unveiled a corker of a theory that portrays Epstein — and Les Wexner — very differently. Instead of Wexner being an innocent retail executive taken in by Epstein, as he usually appears in most versions of the Epstein story, he becomes a hub for intelligence activity. It’s not exactly fully fleshed out, but the chain runs from Epstein working together with former Deputy Attorney General John Pottinger in New York in the mid-‘80s with the “tax avoidance” largely a front as they worked on arms shipments connected to Iran-Contra, and with Southern Air Transport, the airline that the CIA used throughout Iran-Contra, eventually rerouting itself to Ohio, under Epstein’s auspices, and becoming Wexner’s transport arm. The notion is that Epstein was one of the brokers of the complicated operation by which the U.S. funneled arms to Israel with Israel in turn arming Iran and with Epstein intertwined with the money that flowed through offshore accounts to facilitate the deals; that Epstein’s friendship with Ehud Barak probably developed out of this; and that by the ‘90s Epstein was able to facilitate Southern Air Transport’s repurposing to Wexner’s business empire, while continuing his high-level contacts with Israel. “Epstein was part of this global transnational network of people who was free of any institutional constraints. So the Mossad was in some way very beneath him,” said Hussain.

That leads into the next view of Epstein, which sees him on a much more international scale. In this version of things he becomes an arms dealer and hyper-connector on the model of what Robert Maxwell or Adnan Khashoggi were doing in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Ward seems to have bumped into this in her reporting without knowing what to do with it. Epstein had claimed that he was advising foreign leaders ranging from Vladimir Putin to Mohammed bin Salman. “According to my sources in the intelligence world, this is hyperbole — but also not completely ridiculous,” Ward ambiguously wrote. The story of Epstein as an arms dealer goes back to 1981 and his connection with the British defense contractor Douglas Leese. Epstein worked with Leese throughout the ‘80s was close enough to the family to describe himself as a godfather to a child in an e-mail, and had a falling-out in the late ‘80s. Volscho thinks that Epstein was an advisor on financial matters to Leese. Accounts of Epstein in this period seem to mark him out as being over his head on international affairs, but it’s not unreasonable to think that he learned the ropes even if he estranged himself from Leese. He claimed to essentially be running the port of Djibouti. He pops up in the 2010s in arms deals from Cote d’Ivoire to Mongolia. This piece of the Epstein puzzle sticks out like a strange addendum, a sore thumb, from Vicki Ward’s reporting. It becomes central to an emergent left-wing view of Epstein. “The Jeffrey Epstein story makes no sense unless you realize that he was deeply entrenched in the foreign policy elite, a fact that gave him much of the impunity he enjoyed for most of his life,” Jeet Hear recently wrote in The Nation. This, again, is largely about Israel — with Epstein in the 2010s showing up as a broker for Ehud Barak selling Israeli surveillance technology around the world. But another view of things makes Epstein even more global than that, a kind of international dark entity dedicated to facilitating the endeavors of anybody powerful enough to pay him a significant commission. “It was the sense that I had met something unholy,” said Eric Weinstein of his meeting with Epstein, and some of that does come through in his this new view of Epstein — that it wasn’t just the sexual misconduct and the shady financial dealings, that he really was something very close to a Bond villain, acting in an almost-perfectly unlicensed international way, with near-total immorality and total immunity, making his living, as he allegedly bragged, “from arms, drugs, and diamonds” and likely with tax evasion and sex trafficking thrown in.

This seems like a good place to end it. I’m nowhere near deep enough to have my own kind of theory. But what’s left is six very different versions of who Epstein was — and each one belonging to its own dimension of how the world works. In one, he’s basically a flam-flam man with a nice lifestyle. In another, the wealth is unusual but checks out more than not. In another, he’s a more devious con artist preying off a string of increasingly wealthy clients. In another, the center of focus is more political than financial and he becomes an intelligence asset with the businesses more a front than anything else. In another, he’s less a pawn of political entities than a player in the post-Cold War landscape where wealthy entities and the more secret sides of government are often inextricable. In another, he’s the free space on the board, beholden to no one and with his finger in the pie of everything. There is a body of evidence behind every one of those suppositions, and it’s all the more complicated given that he seems to have been a pathological liar and cultivated an air of mystery and had his business evolve several times. It does seem like some shoes are dropping now — the leak of the Ehud Barak e-mails, for instance, shed light on a basically unknown aspect of the Epstein story, as does this vast more recent tranche — but it’s still all enigmatic enough that, at this point, how you see Epstein likely depends as much on you as what the real truth was about him.

The best news of the year so far is my uncle starting his Substack 27 Ways to Leave Your Sovereign. Larry may well be the funniest person I’ve ever met, as well as one of the very smartest. It’s exciting for me to see him get Substack-pilled and really look forward to what he’ll write.

I’m committing myself to putting out one of these news roundups at the start of every month and was kind of racking my brains for what to write about during the slow holiday period when a U.S. helicopter descended into a completely different country and picked up the president of that country and carried him off to a prison in the U.S. leaving that country currently without a ruler but also, maybe, being ruled by the U.S.

To be honest, the best takes I’ve seen so far on the Venezuela news are both published by , my employer. , a really great Venezuelan journalist, chronicles the deep ambivalence that Venezuelans have towards the raid. “Along with his powerbroker wife, Cilia Flores, Maduro belongs in a prison cell as surely as anyone I can think of,” writes Toro. “Which is why you’ll be hard pressed to find a Venezuelan who doesn’t, on some level, rejoice at last night’s news.” But that’s deeply tempered by Trump’s evident lack of follow-through. As Toro writes on his own Substack, it’s a bit ominous that nobody in Caracas is celebrating — Venezuelans have to come to have a jaded view of their own political fortunes (“the most trustworthy principle for interpreting Venezuelan affairs has been a simple heuristic: whatever outcome makes Venezuelans’ lives most miserable is always to be treated as the odds-on-favorite,” Toro writes) —and that may well be an astute intuition. If the regime is left in place, its tendency would be to clamp down harder on the power it has. “In the menu of awful options ahead of us, leaving this chavista rump in charge of the country seems like the worst option,” Toro writes.

Meanwhile, the legendary argues that there is a delicate path towards nation-building. It involves restoring Venezuela to its long-standing democratic traditions and easing the path to power of Edmundo González and María Corina Machado, the opposition leaders who have a degree of legitimacy from González’s evident victory in the stolen 2024 election. But that requires care and patience, none of which are exactly The Donald’s strong suit, and in the morning hangover after yesterday’s euphoria, we’re starting to get a sense of what’s to come.

Trump’s interest clearly extends to favorable publicity, which he has already achieved from the raid; to oil; and to the repatriation of Venezuelan migrants. He seems likely to get what he wants from the chavista rump regime — The New York Times reports that Trump officials believe they can work “at a much more professional level’ with Vice President Delcy Rodríguez than they could with Maduro, and Trump’s offhanded statement at the press conference that Machado is “a very nice woman but doesn’t have the respect or the support within Venezuela to be the leader” basically puts to rest any possibility of an heroic attempt by the U.S. to genuinely liberate Venezuela from Chavismo. As put it on The Atlantic’s podcast, “it was a war or military action designed for US domestic political consumption rather than to achieve something in Venezuela.” Assuming that Rodríguez plays ball, what might be expected is oil and the re-dumping of migrants back to Venezuela — which seems really to have been what got Trump interested in Venezuela in the first place. The idea that the U.S. can extract a world leader from his bedroom at any time does send a powerful message — and may shift Venezuela more in the direction of being the sort of U.S. protectorate that Cuba was in the early part of the 20th century.

With the raid something like a “Trump Doctrine” comes more into focus. It’s always felt a bit silly to talk about political science terminology like ‘doctrine’ when what’s basically dictating U.S. foreign policy is Trump’s attention span, but Trump did actually spell it out in the 2025 National Security Strategy. This is how the NSS put it:

We want to ensure that the Western Hemisphere remains reasonably stable and well-governed enough to prevent and discourage mass migration to the United States; we want a Hemisphere whose governments cooperate with us against narco-terrorists, cartels, and other transnational criminal organizations; we want a Hemisphere that remains free of hostile foreign incursion or ownership of key assets, and that supports critical supply chains; and we want to ensure our continued access to key strategic locations. In other words, we will assert and enforce a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine.

What comes through — and it now seems like Trump means it — is a hemispheric approach to world politics. If the great foreign policy debate has been between the vision of a rules-based order and the Pax Americana where the U.S. radiates power wherever it wishes, Trump seems to have produced a new structure in which the U.S. does whatever it wants in the Americas but largely leaves the rest of the world to the devices of whichever great power has control in the relevant region. The ominous line in the NSS is the Trump administration calling for “strategic stability” with Russia, which means non-interference. As Foreign Policy puts it, with the Venezuela raid “Trump may well have shredded what little is left of international norms,” and that is a kind of invitation for other great powers to scarf up who they can in their respective regions.

I haven’t seen this really be commented on, but the Venezuela operation does feel as if it might have been inspired by Israel’s actions across the Middle East. The contemporary way of exercising power — by the U.S. and Israel — seems to be these pinprick attacks showcasing an overpowering advantage in technology and intelligence and which are dependent on the dizzyingly precise operation of special forces. It’s a different look from the ‘shock and awe’ of the Bush era. And there’s an oddly Trojan War aspect to the whole thing — a conflict starts out in single combat between the leaders of the different adversaries (Israel taking out Nasrallah, Trump extracting Maduro, Iran for its part taking its own shot at Trump) and then moving on to the more grueling main event should they miss. That’s very different, incidentally, from how war tended to be conducted throughout the 19th and 20th century — with world leaders trying not to bother one another and to have regular people do the dying. The evident shift in doctrine seems mostly just to be about the weapons at hand — the U.S. and Israel can do this, while Russia seems to prefer the old-fashioned way of randomly bombing apartment buildings and sending convicts charging out into no man’s land.

What becomes clear as well is Trump’s commitment to violence as spectacle. He was surprisingly hands-off about this in the first term — the assassination of Soleimani being an exception — but now he seems to have gotten with the playbook, which, to be honest, was largely worked out by Bill Clinton. Engagements are carried out with maximum theatricality — the most ridiculous names possible are attached to them (“Operation Absolute Resolve” not quite rivaling “Operation Midnight Hammer”) and have their signature touch (bunker-busting bombs! steel doors!). They are meant to be carried out with the absolute minimum of American lives lost and, more often than not, with the least amount of actual impact. That likely leaves Venezuela in the lurch. The cameras — and the attention span — won’t stick around for nation-building, and what we would tend to assume is that the Negotiator-in-Chief is just working out favorable circumstances for an oil deal and migrant repatriation: and what more effective negotiating tactic can there be than tossing one’s recalcitrant negotiating partner onto a stealth helicopter and then coming to terms with whomever is left at the table?

I’m sharing a round-up of news analysis. I’m very happy to share that I’ll be speaking at the Interintellect Salon on December 6th in conversation with . Tickets and information available here!

Best,

Sam

BUMBLING IN UKRAINE

One very minor consequence of the Trump era is that for me — and I assume this is true for a lot of other people — I lose the appetite for being interested in politics. Everything with Trump follows a similar kind of pattern. There’s the bold statement, the outrage, the flurry of activity as it seems like everything is about to change, and then it all goes away again. Remember when we were supposed to conquer Greenland? How about Panama? Or Canada? What about DOGE?

This isn’t to say that nothing happens. Trump is very consistent on immigration and is driving through all kinds of punitive deportation measures. And the transformation of the government into a kind of personal piggy bank seems to be moving apace. But, already, we may be returning to the feeling of the first Trump administration — that the tax cuts and some of the immigration measures are real, and everything else is a circus swiveling around a weakening and diminishing state.

And that seems to be what’s going on with the Ukraine peace proposal. We’ve had the phase of outrage — in which it emerges that the 28-point proposal was essentially dictated by Russia and that Witkoff was coaching Russian negotiators on how to speak to Trump. It seems like everything is at an end — with Zelensky giving his sombre speech that Ukraine had an “impossible choice” over whether to capitulate or to go it alone. And then the Europeans and the US State Department get together and roll everything back, so that, as Joshua Yaffa puts it in The New Yorker: “there are now essentially two plans, a Rubio proposal and a Witkoff proposal. One suits Russia, the other Ukraine.’

The reality seems to be that neither side actually wants to wrap things up. Ukraine really can’t concede territory. Russia has its new ally in place in Trump, but it’s not clear that he can push what he wants through his own State Department — and, as Yaffa puts it, “from Moscow’s vantage point, Trump is merely a temporary political phenomenon.” The essential issue of the war — whether Ukraine will ever join NATO — is such an either/or proposition that it can’t really be settled in any meaningful way by negotiation, and even if the lines are frozen where they are — which is a possibility from a settlement — Ukraine really can’t concede its right to bid for NATO membership and can’t believe the Russians that forgoing NATO membership buys anything like security. So we all keep going around the mulberry bush.

The enduring legacy of the Russia-Ukraine War — in addition to sowing what I can only imagine is irreconcilable hatred between the two countries — is what it does to the face of war. In The New York Times, C.J. Chivers, earlier in November, has a bracing piece about what the war is like for one wounded Ukrainian soldier caught in no man’s land. And what it is is a real-life version of the “The Most Dangerous Game” — soldiers running and crawling for their lives to escape drones. As Chivers writes, the most likely fate for the soldier he profiles is to “lay helpless on farmland until a predatory drone descended and an explosion tore him apart, his last wretched seconds recorded for social media’s 24-7 snuff-film deathstream.” The drone clearly is to 21st century warfare what the machine gun was to World War I, but really more so — combining air power with precision weaponry and all of it inexpensive and at absolutely no risk to the operator.

What that means, then, is being in an incredibly unstable geopolitical period where the face of war is changing in ways that are all but unrecognizable — is the future of war drone swarms, as seems likely? is there some kind of predator that can get ahead of the drones? The advent of the drones likely doesn’t particularly affect the calculation of Russia or Ukraine — they seem to be fairly balanced in their use of drones, with the drones contributing heavily to the ongoing stalemate — but there must be a certain incentive for war planners worldwide to want to see how all this all plays out.

And how it really plays out is that the development of AI is intricately tied up with developments on the battlefield. Autonomous agents seem to be the next turn of the wheel, and that means that AI has to move forward, as part of an international arms race, even if its commercial benefits seem all the time more questionable.

THE AI VIBE SHIFT

The narrative around AI has abruptly shifted, and the skeptics are having their day. As puts it, “And, then five weeks ago, there was, what felt like a species leap. I’ve watched as these views have gone from niche lone voices on the periphery to headlines in the business press.” What Cadwalladr is talking about is the realization that, in a word, ‘AI’ is misnamed. It’s not really ‘artificial intelligence’ — the thing that we think we understand so well from a million sci-fi movies. What it is is a cool text-predict meets chatbot gizmo that’s impressive, in the way that Google Maps was impressive, but is inherently somewhat limited and is a very different deal from the AGI that the the LLMs are supposed to lead to.

In an interview with , Ilya Sutskever, former chief scientist at OpenAI — in other words, somebody who really knows what he’s talking about — acknowledged that there were underlying deficiencies in the models that scaling just wasn’t going to fix. “The thing which I think is the most fundamental is that these models somehow just generalize dramatically worse than people. It’s super obvious. That seems like a very fundamental thing,” Sutskever said. “So it’s back to the age of research again just with big computers.”

In a write-up for The Atlantic on the three-year anniversary of ChatGPT, writes, “The world that ChatGPT built is a world defined by a particular type of precarity. It is a world that is perpetually waiting for a shoe to drop….It is, we’re told, a race—a geopolitical one, but also a race against the market, a bubble, a circular movement of money and byzantine financial instruments and debt investment that could tank the economy.”

The utility of it is ever more coming into question. In an interesting piece, re-verifies the MIT finding on how 95% of corporate AI initiatives fail — discovering that after three months of letting Claude design a software program for him, he couldn’t, despite his longstanding software expertise, modify the program when it needed to be modified. “Now when clients ask me about AI adoption, I can tell them exactly what 100% AI adoption looks like: it looks like failure,” Anderson writes. “Not immediate failure—that’s the trap. Initial metrics look great. You ship faster. You feel productive. Then three months later, you realize nobody actually understands what you’ve built.”

And then there are the signs of the bubble bursting — of Meta laying off workers from its Superintelligence lab just after some of its splashiest hires; of Meta simply throwing money at hires without any real foresight.

But what’s interesting about the AI bubble is that it may really have nothing to do with the quality of its product or even whether the market can sustain it. As former Silicon Valley venture capitalist Roger McNamee told Cadwalladr, “I think they know they’re in a bubble, and I don’t think they care.” The point is that AI has become a political question, and a question of national pride. It’s become clear that it’s the only meaningful source of growth in the economy, and so as Cadwalladr puts it in her diatribe, “The media is part of the same mystical amalgam of bullshit and vibes that’s keeping the whole thing afloat, a circular economy of access journalism and tech hyperbole that masks something stinking and rotten at its core: OpenAI.” As Warzel argues, AI has all the hallmarks of a big ol’ scam. “Depending on your views, this is trademark showmanship, a truism of innovation, a hostage situation, or a long con,” he writes of the current situation.

But the real point is that none of that may matter. The future of AI is being worked out in no-man’s land somewhere in eastern Ukraine. And even if autonomous agents aren’t particularly more effective in drone warfare than operators, the whole thing has spooked the defense establishment enough that it’s become apparent AI is the future of defense — as well as of the economy. A somewhat hysterical article in Foreign Affairs — a fairly reliable barometer of elite opinion — argues that, to stay ahead of China, the US government will have to far more tightly integrate itself into AI development. “The tech sector can help the state make sense of and deploy AI. The state can help the tech sector continue to grow in a way that advances everyone’s interests,” Foreign Affairs writes of its proposed ‘grand bargain.’ The arms race — and the perception that AI is the future of warfare — trump everything else. The grand bargain, as Foreign Affairs puts it, involves “AI businesses helping the Untied States incorporate their technologies into the national security apparatus.” In return, it’s implicit, ‘guardrails’ go out the window and it’s full steam ahead for AI to transform the economy, regardless of whether or not the product actually improves anybody’s life.

IS OUR CHILDREN LEARNING?

The terrain that all this really plays out in is education. New York Magazine has just the latest scare piece in a long-running series on the collapse of American education standards. What’s tragic, in New York’s accounting, is that, notwithstanding decades-worth of handwringing, American education standards had been actually steadily improving. “If you look at a chart of test scores from the 1990s to the present, it arcs happily upward until the middle of the last decade as each generation incrementally learned a little more,” writes Andrew Rice. But then test scores fall off a cliff — with around 30-40% of students performing “below basic” on reading tests, a nomenclature that sort of obscures what’s really going on. “You can’t believe how low ‘below basic’ is,” public school teacher Carol Jago helpfully tells Rice. “The things that those kids aren’t able to do is frightening.”

People like me, who are still annoyed about pandemic-era policies, would tend to point to school closures in the 2020-2021 school year. But, as one teacher tells Rice, “the pandemic didn’t do shit. It just stripped bare for suburban parents the reality of what was happening.” And somewhat more soberly, Rice concludes, “Something disastrous happened, and academics are nearly united in the opinion that the problem is not simply a product of the pandemic.”

is jumping up and down somewhere in the background here to say that, of course, it’s the phones; that, fundamentally, the phones represent brain rot, and the longer the kids are exposed to the phones, the more brain rotted they are. AI is just a symptom of the larger problem of the phones; if you rely on the phone to do everything, then it’s just a nice little feature that there’s also a button that writes your term paper for you.

And that probably does, really, explain what’s happened over the last decade — the phones shredded everybody’s attention span and ‘remote learning’ during the pandemic exacerbated the already-worrying trend. The question is what to do next. The education fundamentalists are having their moment right now. Haidt has made surprising progress in convincing educators to keep phones out of schools during the school day. Articles like Rice’s or a similar piece by Michael Clune in The Atlantic argue for going back to the fundamentals — the kind of classical education that Euclid would easily have recognized. “The skills needed to thrive in an AI world might counterintuitively be exactly those that the liberal arts have long cultivated,” Clune writes. “Students must be able to ask AI questions, critically analyze its written responses, identify possible weaknesses or inaccuracies, and integrate new information with existing knowledge.”

So back we go to calculating the hypotenuse of triangles and asking what the green light at the end of the dock symbolizes in The Great Gatsby. And I guess that’s a reasonable approach to the education crisis — certainly, the remote learning experiment has empirically failed. But I wonder if a contrarian take might be in order — that the kids know something that we don’t, which is that the time spent scrolling on their phones might be more beneficial for them than the Pythagorean theorem. The truth is that we are living in a digital world. I would argue that, from a market standpoint, my fancy education was basically worthless because I never learned a coding language, which meant that I couldn’t really participate in the most significant development of my era — and also couldn’t intelligently comment on it. When the kids are scrolling, they’re not just scrolling — they’re also identifying their interests, they’re sometimes tunneling very deep into an area of expertise, they’re learning particular social skills in terms of communicating digitally (which is a social skill in the 21st century), and they’re sometimes stumbling across market opportunities, as in the fast-developing influencer space. In some ways they are being much more elastic and innovative than are the adults, who tend to lose sight of the fact that algebra and trigonometry actually aren’t going to be very useful for most people, and never were, and are in place really just because they’re easy to teach and to test and are connected to some superstition about ‘learning how to learn.’

What really should happen is some sort of a hybrid — some recognition by educators of the limits of the core curriculum and an attempt to update it for what students actually need to know (why trigonometry and pre-calculus, for instance, as opposed to statistics and economics?); some attempt to get real about the limits of digital education (no need for phones in English or math classes); at the same time more integration of a computer education into the school system; and then, most importantly, more tracking — with students indicating their career preferences from an earlier age and concentrated programs of study opening up for them much the way they do at the university level.

Probably none of those things are really going to happen. Educators are stuck in their ways, budgets are limited for anything that’s not readily-testable math and reading comprehension, and the students are just inexorably going to drift away from programs of study that they suspect have nothing to do with their actual lives and which they can’t understand anyway. It’s not a pretty picture, and AI (which is effective for ghostwriting student essays but really not for much beyond that) only adds another dose of confusion. Which leaves us where exactly? Well, probably with lots of op-eds decrying the education system. The sense is that what’s called for is vision, is centralization and a real shake-up of the system, but that’s obviously not going to happen either, and so we have atrophy, atrophy, atrophy, and the great big scam of AI the only thing that’s moving anywhere and that everybody seems willing to get behind.

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A very long New York Times Magazine article from July on Netanyahu’s conduct of the war can stand in for everything else. At the moment of crisis, we had essentially the worst possible configuration of personalities (I remember Christopher Clark writing something similar about the European situation in the summer of 1914) — Netanyahu as an embattled, wily head of state wholly reliant on a fanatical right-wing for his own political survival and missing all the off-ramps that were provided whether by the Biden administration or by the course of the conflict itself. But Netanyahu’s choice of the “total war” approach, with Israel fomenting conflict all over the region, cutting itself off from the international community, and embracing what Netanyahu — bizarrely, paradoxically — called “the word I most hate, autarky” could easily have been overlaid over the course of events in Russia or in the United States, with each country pulling into itself, with free trade (of all things) becoming a casualty of the march of history, and with leaders committing to the most anti-democratic and most militaristic option available to them. So how do we begin to understand this? What’s going on?

These would be my theories:

1.As the Beeper King Dennis Duffy put it in 30 Rock, these things are just cyclical and democracy will bounce back, sort of in the way that beepers will. The arguments for this are, first of all, the bedtime story that liberals like to tell themselves about the first half of the twentieth century — that extremism appeared to be inexorable through the ‘30s but the moderate vision of people like Karl Popper or George Orwell prevailed in the long run. The difficulty there is that it took total war and the Battle of Stalingrad more than, like, carefully reading Animal Farm for the open society to prevail through that crucible. But, more pragmatically, that school of thought would argue that history turns on the configuration of personalities in power, that if it’s a particularly unfortunate constellation now, that can change. I’m doing my best to read Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s book on Biden, and the great takeaway is that the Trump return was eminently preventable — it really came down to the intransigence of a senile old man and his tight circle of enablers — and Netanyahu similarly could have been preempted by slightly more dogged political knife-fighting in moments that mattered (The Times Magazine piece portrays Benny Gantz, taking a soft deal to join the unity government in 2023, as the real culprit here). But if the window of catastrophe is so narrow, as it was for instance in 1914 (it’s really a sign of the times when I’m trying to take comfort from the summer of 1914), then it stands to reason that it’s possible to walk our way back out of the precipice, by, say, winning the midterm elections in 2026 and then the presidency in 2028 and with Israeli moderates somehow or other breaking the chokehold of the Netanyahu government. That’s the most optimistic view of the present circumstances. But it feels unlikely, in part because Trump is already working to end free elections and in part because Netanyahu and Putin’s approaches to statecraft have no meaningful opposition in their respective countries.

2.There’s a right-wing conspiracy that has succeeded in putting the current configuration of leaders in power all at the same time. This is actually more plausible than it sounds. The strongest argument I’ve seen for this is in the reporting of Catherine Belton together with Craig Unger, and it mainly has to do with Putin’s rise to power at the end of the ‘90s. The way to understand Putin is as part of a ‘new KGB,’ more Westernized, almost entirely freed from Marxist-Leninist ideology and enraptured instead by the dollar. That wing outmaneuvered the oligarchs running Yeltsin’s shabbily-democratic Russia and installed both Putin and the ideology that we have all come to be so familiar with. The general ideological tilt of the last decade or so has more or less been Putin passing around a playbook to anybody who wants it — Hungary being the most conspicuous example, but also parts of Central Asia, some puppets in the Caucasus and Eastern Europe, the parts of Africa with Russian influence, and even a place as far-flung as El Salvador. If George Soros’ evil twin brother was funding the movement — which oftentimes is exactly what it feels like is going on — it might well be called The Closed Society Institute. What’s disseminated is a step-by-step dismantling of civil society and NGOs; top-to-bottom control of media obtained really at any price; a fool-proof set of talking points directed against liberals, progressive extremists, and outside influences that can be mined to infinitude; then tough-on-crime rhetoric; the appropriate strongman posturing; and at some point or other the pyramid control of an increasingly autarkic economy. In this school of thought, Trump is exactly a creation of the same people and, really, the same sluices of money that produced Putin; and Netanyahu, who has some surprising parallels to Putin in terms of his longevity, his vision of statecraft, and self-presentation, has ended up swimming with the dismal tide. I actually think this may be a pretty fair analysis of what’s going on — a right-wing conspiracy that also deftly uses talk of a left-wing conspiracy to detract from its own machinations — and, through an unlikely internationalism of nationalist ideologies, it has found some particularly soft points in the liberal democratic order. I sort of don’t know how to think through the inferences of all of this without totally losing my mind so let’s leave it there. The left-wing conspiracy version of trying to control public discourse circa 2020 clearly backfired and made the problem worse, so the thing to do for now is to just kind of keep an eye on where the hydra rears its head next and to do whatever we can to be suave to its tricks.

3.Human psychology is just inherently right-wing. This might be the most pessimistic way of thinking of all and has become something almost like common sense in our time. The founding myth of the 21st century was that the moral arc of the universe would bend towards justice, that everybody everywhere yearned to be free, but literally just at the millennial moment as we were patting ourselves on the back for that insight and starting to sink into our New Year’s hangover, Putin was taking over in Russia and putting the 21st century on a very different course, as stated above. The foundational insight there is that human beings are fundamentally tribal and will trade freedom for stability every single time. This would be the moment also to insert your favorite Goebbels quote about the ease of using propaganda to ensure conformity through a population, just so long as your propaganda is sufficiently simplistic and tribal — as has worked wonders in Putin’s Russia, in MAGAland, and, sorrowful as it to say, in post-10/7 Israel. I’m not sure I can really argue with this line of thought except to argue as George Smiley did on the subject of Karla, that “I’d rather be my kind of fool than his” — that this kind of tinpot right-wing-ism doesn’t always prevail, actually, that it tends to produce a corruption and untenable narrowness of power that eventually alienates the population and that everybody then remembers how much they prefer self-correcting institutions and democratic processes and chanting slogans while holding hands until the Berlin Wall comes down. I don’t know the answer to this. Putinism, for instance, shows no signs of slowing in Russia. All I can do really is take out my psalter of Karl Popper or Francis Fukuyama and chant my hymns about how the autocracies will eventually collapse from their internal contradictions — and from the determined opposition of those who are brave enough to oppose them.

4.Democracy is badly designed. Part of the gospel of being in a democratic country is that you’re really supposed to believe that the founders made no mistakes, that the system itself is essentially perfect. But that seems just not to be the case. The more cynical argument would be that just about any democracy has collapsed into factionalism right away, with one gang taking power for some given period of time, and that at the best democracy facilitates the transfer of power from one gang to another or lends a satisfying legitimacy to the whole sordid process. If you believe that, then you start to look for salvation somewhere other than in the political process and more in the domain of the left-wing conspiracy mentioned in item 2 — basically, that it should be our rogues rather than theirs. What seems to have happened in our time is that the center has just completely collapsed all over the political map and democratic mechanisms seem completely inadequate to restoring power to John the milquetoast accountant from Ohio who was calling the shots for so long. Why this is is a bit of a mystery, and I guess I’m not prepared yet to believe that it’s just that democracy, contra anything written in Federalist 10, does tend sooner or later towards extreme factionalism and more that the partisanship we’re seeing all over the world is a bug of our time as opposed to revealing some underlying flaw in the democratic process.

5.The fault is in our technologies. , on ’s podcast, said a very arresting thing that “in a rural area, political organization is challenging, unless you have something like social media that allows like-minded people in all of those far-flung places to recognize each other in virtual space and join together into a right populist faction that isn’t tied to actual geography in the world.” That’s a way of thinking about our current politics that hadn’t exactly occurred to me but that makes a lot of sense — that the axis of political gravity is always in the tension between the city and the countryside, that rampaging armies were long the sine qua non of the country, that cities have had a considerable advantage in the era of newspapers and consolidated media but that social media suddenly swings the pendulum towards the countryside, and that the populist-nationalist ferment we’re experiencing is basically about the countryside getting its own back. If that’s the case, then there’s room to imagine that the pendulum might swing back again, that city people can find ways to organize better, to articulate a vision of what they want politically, and to more effectively make the case for that in ever-evolving digital media space. That’s kind of an interesting way of thinking about things but I’m not sure it really gets to the heart of what’s gone so catastrophically wrong for liberalism, pluralism, et al, in the last few years. Probably the best answer is that some combination of all of the above is happening at once — this kind of right-wing illiberalism appeals to some very deep-seated kinks in human nature; and there is a right-wing conspiracy (or network if you prefer) that has been steadily gaining ground since the ‘90s; and that movement has gotten adept at finding some of the systemic weaknesses of the democratic system and liberal international order; and there’s been a bit of bad luck and terrible decision-making (the fiasco of the 2024 election looms largest); and social media has kicked in at a fraught moment; and the whole thing has a snowballing effect, so that, for instance, Trump’s arrival takes all the muzzles off Netanyahu, and now, man, everywhere you look it’s just dark armies of the night as far as the eye can see.

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The justifications for the intensity of the conflict Israel was waging in Gaza have always been slender, but they crossed over into ridiculousness many months ago, after the death of Sinwar and the effective crippling of Hamas as a fighting force. That was the time to wrap things up, to institute a credible humanitarian regime and to restore Israel’s relations with the international community. But Israel has chosen to go in a different direction. The strike in Qatar — the attempt to kill the very people Israel was negotiating with — makes undeniable the Netanyahu government’s attitude towards a potential peace deal.

In some of my analysis of the conflict I’ve been leaning on the convenient fiction that the continuation of the war is the responsibility of Netanyahu and the hard-liners in his cabinet — that if moderates were to come to power everything might take a very different course — but it’s become almost entirely clear that Netanyahu’s actions represent something like the popular will. And this is extraordinarily painful to me. Fairly regularly, for my Commentator section, I do a tour of the world press, and I get cognitive whiplash every single time. The Western world, and of course the Arab world, seems to think of nothing else but the suffering in Gaza, and then when I toggle over to the Israeli newspapers it’s — with the exception of Haaretz — politics as usual. There’s some squabbling about the judiciary and the drafting of the ultra-orthodox. Yes, the families of the hostages have been raising an annoying ruckus and, apparently, more reservists are refusing their assignments, but, as far as I can tell, there is just no grappling in the society with the moral enormity of what’s happening.

The Israeli defense is always that liberals and westerners simply don’t understand the facts on the ground of being a small country surrounded by adversaries, but this is not just a moral question actually, it is a geopolitical one as well. However hard-hearted you may be about the suffering in Gaza, there is no argument, even from the most realpolitik kind of perspective, that this is a logical way to behave. No matter how abject the suffering, the Gazans aren’t going anywhere. Meanwhile, Israel effectively withdraws itself from the international community — an astonishing collapse of diplomacy less than two years after Israel had the world’s entire sympathy — and, for a country whose founding premise is about providing security for Jews worldwide, Israel’s actions makes it about as unsafe to be a Jew as it has been in memory. And all for what? Yotam Vilk, the IDF captain who wrote a New York Times op-ed two weeks ago, had the ring of truth when he contended, “Our own state had lost its way. If we went to war on Oct. 7 to save what was dearest to us, it soon became clear to me that we were fighting because our leaders were never planning to stop.” The sadism that has been such a feature of Israel’s conduct of the conflict seems to serve no other end except protracted, pointless revenge for 10/7 and a general attempt to make Palestinians’ lives as miserable as possible — and then, who knows what, maybe to try to facilitate an exodus.

If I try to understand what’s happened, I would pin it on three turns. One would be the steady encroachment of a Greater Israel mentality within Israel political thinking, with the decisive pivot happening probably somewhere between the Six Days and the Lebanon War — and the emphasis increasingly, reflexively, placed on territory and an ultra-nationalist vision for Israel’s holding of territory. The next would be the complete lack of faith in any kind of peace process — this phase is a bit murky to me and may well reflect the reality of any real interest in peace from the Palestinian side — but the result seems to have been a very deep indifference within mainstream Israeli society to what happened in the territories, with a general conviction at least after the Second Intifada that anything that happened to the Palestinians they had brought on themselves. And then the third was a view of statecraft that is related to Harold Lasswell’s idea of the ‘garrison state’ — that the state’s sole function is security and anything else, including the wider interest of the state’s reputation, is for the soft-headed, or, as Lasswell put it, the state comes to be dominated by “the specialist on violence.” That seems a fair assessment of Netanyahu’s mode of governance — what Vilk calls “a reckless nationalist-populist government that denies the limits of its own power” — and the humanitarian costs of adopting that kind of perspective are of course immense.

So where does that leave Jews outside of Israel? Well, first of all, with immense sorrow and shame. I have always been very proud of being Jewish, and have felt that the famous cultural discrepancies between diasporic and Israeli Jews are fundamentally bridgeable, but now it seems to me that the two communities are simply headed in different directions. I remember being very discomfited during a Birthright trip at the level of ultra-nationalism that was meant to stand in for Jewishness. The highlight of the trip, as it were, was shapely acrobats in spandex climbing all over a several stories-high Star of David, but the brainwashing was pretty incessant beyond that. I remember the guide (by this time several hitherto perfectly secular kids had started wearing kippah) saying very emphatically, this is your home, and my saying that I already had a home, which at that point in time happened to be New York City. That was the way I felt then, and it’s pretty much the same as I feel now. Israel, as part of the ultra-nationalism that kicked in towards the ‘60s and ‘70s and accelerated from there, claimed to speak for the whole of the Jewish people. Well, it doesn’t. Judaism is a broader and richer tradition, and the ultra-nationalism, let alone the garrison state framework that Israel has settled on, has very little to do with Judaism as I understand it.

The other point is that Jews do have to let go of a certain kind of myth about themselves — that they are history’s victims and therefore are entitled to a special kind of dispensation. In a strange way no narrative has been more embedded in American society at least since the Holocaust and really long before that — and to be a Jew meant to be the Other, with a very complex ethical system developing in the post-war period by which that sort of eternal victimization was understood to be the key to instilling some sort of universal empathy. ‘Never again’ was the watchword and the basis of just about the entirety of humanitarianism. As far as I’m concerned that narrative is finished. “Our myths have collapsed,” said Rabbi Daniel Bogard in a recent podcast, meaning that the entirety of post-war liberal piety, whether in the US or Israel, has failed to keep “those in power from bending it in an awful direction.” It’s not that Israel is uniquely guilty — other nations are perfectly capable of acting in this way when in the grip of ultra-nationalism: reckless populist-nationalism is an equal-opportunity menace. It’s that the patina of specialness is stripped from Israel — and really has been for some time. Jews, after the decades-worth of suffering by the Palestinians and above all by the escalation of the Gaza conflict, have no right to regard themselves as history’s victims or as entitled to some sort of special consideration based on the past. For me, that’s just as well. I’ve never been comfortable with the narrative of victimization or the justifications it’s put to. Israel is a nation-state and subject to international opinion just like any other nation state. And Jews have no specialness to them — no sense of eternal innocence. Jews are capable of cruelty just like anybody else and fully deserve the prick of their conscience when they find themselves in the wrong — and, as Israel pursues a war that, as Vlik put it, has “crossed every boundary,” there is no other viable ethical attitude for a Jew to have than deep and agonizing contrition.

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It seemed a good moment to take stock of the current political landscape and of the trajectory for where it’s going.

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Sam

THE 2028 PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE

Moderator: Welcome to the first and only debate for the 2028 election. Everybody is concerned about security, but we assure you that the candidates have been whisked here in bulletproof cars and are fully kitted out in Kevlar vests. There have been some questions in the past about interruptions and ungentlemanly behavior. We have fully course-corrected for that by locking them in cages for the duration of the debate to reduce any possibility of hand-to-hand grappling, and, since nothing else worked to keep their replies within the allotted time, we have hooked them up to electrodes that will deliver a 220 volts shock right to the part of the brain that regulates speech should they violate the rules of the debate. Alright, without further ado, let’s meet the candidates! In the red cage, we have JD Trumpanado, making presidential campaign history (and finding a neat loophole in the 22nd amendment) by grafting the brain of one candidate into the body of another. Mr Trumpanado is over the age of 35 and a fully-fledged American citizen, born I believe in his cousins’ barn in Appalachia.

Trumpanado: Good to be here.

Moderator: And in the festively-adorned blue cage, we have Gavhran Ocasiorris-Pritztez, who not only has made use of the new personality-grafting technology but, for the very first time ever in a debate, will give their answers with the multiple personalities alternating every single word of their reply.

Ocasiorris-Pritztez: It’ll be a challenge but we’ll do our best.

Moderator: Let’s start with a statement of purpose. Mr. Trumpanado?

Trumpanado: Well, first of all, we really hate trans people, let’s be clear about that. I would say that the order of our hatreds at the moment runs roughly: trans people, people with masters’ degrees, the Clintons, illegal immigrants, journalists, Jews, Chinese people, that double-crossing son of a bitch Putin, that sneaky shyster Netanyahu —

Ocasiorris-Pritztez: That’s very interesting, so you draw a sharp distinction between militaristic Israeli Jews and liberal diasporic Jews —

[Zap of electrode]

Ow. Ow. Ow.

Moderator: This is the opening statement. Please continue Mr Trumpanado

Trumpanado: Well, it’s a long list, and we somehow forgot black people. But here’s what we stand for. We believe in malignant narcissism, in making yourself the center of attention and then using the entirety of the media and civil sphere as your narcissistic supply. We believe of course that the strong devour the weak, that might makes right, and, in terms of policy, if elected we would basically just be winging it.

Moderator: Ze Ocasiorris-Pritztez?

Ocasiorris-Pritztez: Well, that was pretty interesting and intriguing. I mean, on the subject of malignant narcissism we are generally in favor but we are frightened. Our mother is a New York Times subscriber and she might call us up and berate us if we so much as listen to the wrong podcast.

Moderator: Let’s turn to democracy. Are you in favor of it?

Trumpanado: Well, we hate trans people, have we mentioned that? In terms of democracy, yeah, we’re interested in hearing from Elon, who really got back on our good side with this beautiful brain graft. And then we’re always happy to hear from Tucker and we’ll take Sean Hannity’s call — and it’s kind of already getting crowded, no?

Moderator: Ze Ocasiorris-Pritztez?

Ocasiorris-Pritztez: Well, there are many groups that deserve special attention and protection and that we would prioritize if elected. There are of course the African-Americans, the Hispanic-Americans — if that is not rude and maybe Latinx would be preferred, as our sociology team has advised us, but strangely that is polling badly so perhaps Hispanic-American is better after all — then the Muslim-Americans and the Jewish-Americans, and we actually are not putting those in order of preference, just in alphabetical order but according to the Arabic alphabet, which we consulted just before this, and then of course the Native Americans, whose land we should acknowledge we are on —

Moderator: Oh my god, please stop talking.

Ocasiorris-Pritztez: I think we had a bit more time to acknowledge the fact that this is a sacred burial —

Moderator: You do, but I just can’t take anymore. Let’s switch to foreign policy. How would you handle Russia if elected?

Trumpanado: Well, I’ve been a Russian agent since the 1980s, so that can’t hurt, right?

Moderator: Undoubtedly.

Trumpanado: I mean, me and that backstabbing son of a bitch Vladimir have had our differences, I’m not denying that, it’s like when you’ve spent the better part of your career being a fence for ill-gotten Russian gains, you expect a little consideration, and then when you’ve sealed the deal with a golden shower —

Ocasiorris-Pritztez: I thought that was just opposition agitprop —

Trumpanado: Er —

Ocasiorris-Pritztez: How do you even get a golden shower? We go to massage rooms on our diplomatic jaunts and wait for something to happen and nothing ever —

Trumpanado: Well, you have to make the special golden shower sign.

Ocasiorris-Pritztez: There’s a sign? What does it look like?

Trumpanado: Well —

Moderator: Gentlemen, gentlemen —

Trumpanado: Come on. There are cameras. There are people watching. I’m embarrassed.

Ocasiorris-Pritztez: Just flash it.

Trumpanado: So you’re in your hotel room or massage table and you have to —

[Electrode zap]

Ow ow ow.

Ocasiorris-Pritztez: Wait, I didn’t see it. Can you —

[Electrode zap]

Ow ow ow.

Moderator: Let’s return to —

Ocasiorris-Pritztez: Jesus that really hurt.

[Zap]

Ow.

Moderator: Let’s turn to economics. What economic policies would you implement if elected?

Trumpanado: Well, we believe in the free market. Have I mentioned that Mar-a-Lago is now appraised at over $1 billion and Trump Coins are available at the low, low price of $9.50.

Ocasiorris-Pritztez: Well, I’m kind of still reeling from getting zapped like that. Did you have to zap that hard? I think that was way harder than you zapped Mr Trumpanado —

Moderator: This is a presidential debate and your time is ticking.

Ocasorris-Pritztez: Ok ok. Here is how we prefer to do things. We are the party of large government, right, but everybody knows that anybody who works in government goes home at the stroke of five and that it’s incomprehensible to them to to exert themselves? So we’ve developed a vast network of non-profits, law firms, consulting firms, that siphon off any of the money that’s awarded in contracts and use that money to argue amongst themselves. It’s really a beautiful process in that it creates work for a vast number of white-collar workers who get to spend the first forty years of their lives in school amassing degrees to prepare them to argue with each other and then the next twenty or thirty arguing with each other. And they all get to be employed, and they all get to feel purposeful, and they can do that without any of the inconvenience of something actually getting built, and then when that money’s spent it’s usually time for the next congressional appropriation and you see what a beautiful self-perpetuating cycle this is —

[Zap]

Oh. For Pete’s, what the fuck? I don’t think I violated any debate rules.

Moderator: Look. It just had to be done. Ok. Fortunately, the attention span of the American public has shrunk to 15 minutes, so we can put this baby to bed. Let’s move to a thorny question. Race. Ze —

Ocasorris-Pritzez: Oh well this is a great question. Very many of my best friends are black.

[Zap]

Ow ow ow.

Moderator: Mr Trumpanado?

Trumpanado: You know, I’m pretty sure I met a black person once. I was at Mar-a-Lago, I was on the golf course, and —

[Zap]

Fuckin A, I was just starting my story.

Moderator: I guess everybody has a breaking point and this is it.

Trumpanado: And the golf cart pulls up —

Moderator: Does the story involve Sean Hannity?

Trumpanado: And Sean gets out —

[Zap]

Ah ah ah. You think I’ve never met a black person? I’m getting to the part of the story where —

[Zap]

Ow.

Ocasorris-Pritztez: Haha. Serves him right.

[Zap]

Hey, what was that for?

Moderator: Where to begin — ?

Trumpanado: Let me finish my story —

[Zap]

Ah. I thought the debate was over —

Moderator: I thought so too. But then I realized that this is actually a pretty enjoyable debate.

Ocasorris-Pritztez: It’s really not. Please let us go.

[Zap]

Ahhh.

Trumpanado: I don’t have to finish my story. It’s really not a very interesting story actually.

[Zap]

Ahhh.

Ocasorris-Pritztez: Ahhh.

Trumpanado: Ahhh.

Ocasorris-Pritztez: Ahhh.

Trumpanado: Ahhh.

Together: Ahhh.

Moderator: And with that our debate comes to a close. Thank you for tuning in. We’ve enjoyed this very much.

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This is a monthly feature — a round-up of the news.

Best,

Sam

‘MEMBER WHEN WE BOMBED IRAN?

OR: HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB

The best way to understand the Trump presidency seems to be as a series of episodes — DOGE! tariffs! the Iran War — that often end as soon as they begin and are based around getting the right sort of photo op and talking point, while a few topics, like the erosion of civil liberties, deportations, and grift can be thought of more as season arcs.

The Iran episode, it has to be admitted, played out in exactly the way that Trump and Netanyahu would have wished it did. The key point here seems to be that Iran was weaker than anybody realized and incapable of setting up any kind of meaningful deterrence, whether defending its own skies or retaliating effectively against Israel or US forces in the Middle East. It’s possible that everybody in the know already understood this, and so we’ve now moved from one paradigm to another, from a kind of balanced states dynamic in the Middle East where Iran, Saudi Arabia, Israel are sort of in suspension against each other to a very different dynamic, reminiscent of the US’ air power supremacy in the late ‘90s, where Israel and the US bomb whomever they like, anytime they like, and maintain an overwhelming dominance.

The shift here — what Garry Kasparov calls a “crack in the facade…of post-Cold War consensus” — is above all about a change in doctrine from the Israeli side. If Netanyahu had wanted for decades to destroy Iran’s nuclear program, Israel nonetheless found itself circumscribed by the ‘liberal international order,’ and by the disapproval of American administrations which preferred diplomacy. But with 10/7, Israelis, as Patrick Kingsley writes in The New York Times, came to “believe that the October attack stemmed from Israel’s failure to preemptively and decisively defeat its enemies.” That meant a return, as General Amos Yadlin put it, to the mindset of 1967 and use of preemptive force anywhere, at any time, and without the niceties of diplomacy. “We will no longer wait to be attacked, and we will not wait to be surprised,” Yadlin said.

Not to get all New York Times about it, but there are a couple of major flaws with the Israeli approach. One is that the Israelis detach themselves almost entirely from the international community, they commit to living by the sword — and also dying by the sword — which means constantly hitting their enemies whether or not their enemies are any real threat (Iran, for instance, seems to have been a ways away from actually having nuclear weapons, let alone using them) and never making any mistakes. As Tzipi Livni said, referring above all to Gaza, “We are left with only bad options…rather than a diplomatic process involving moderate regional and Palestinian stakeholders that could change the reality on the ground for both Palestinians and Israelis.” And the other flaw is the loss of Israeli legitimacy. It becomes very difficult to argue, for instance, that the Israelis are the keeper of the international order, while Iran is a rogue state that certainly can’t be trusted with nuclear weapons, when Israel — completely preemptively — is bombing state television stations and prisons in Iran. Recently, I happen to have been reading about the 1953 coup, and deposition of Mosaddegh, which was something like the high point for a particularly boyish type of imperialism. “Young man,” Winston Churchill told Kermit Roosevelt, the CIA officer leading the operation, “if I had been but a few years younger I would have liked nothing better than to have served under your command in this great venture.” But that euphoria would fade eventually. What the intelligence services learned in this period was that this sort of adventurism was never forgotten — and the ease of the ’53 coup was paid for by the ’79 revolution, with Mosaddegh as a major rallying cry, and with Iran emergent as the US’ sworn enemy. The insult of Israel’s strikes is so deep that I can’t imagine Iranians will ever really forget it.

But, in the short term, Netanyahu has played his hand fairly well. The Iranian proxies are largely defanged, Iran itself tremendously reduced as the ‘existential threat’ Netanyahu always claimed it was. Israeli intelligence, the Iron Dome, and the precision of Israeli weaponry all make it clear that it isn’t really a fair fight between Israel and any other nation-state actor in the Middle East. And if — as the right would have always contended — the only way to really get your way in the Middle East is to use force, that seems validated in Hamas’ apparent willingness to accept a new proffered ceasefire. If Israel is looking at victory, it’s a dearly-bought victory — Haaretz’s recent report that Israeli soldiers had orders to fire indiscriminately at civilians at aid stations makes vivid the sadistic streak behind Israel’s conduct in Gaza — and Israeli’s loss of credibility as a member of the international community can only be long-lasting. But this is what the right has wanted for a long time and, to give them their credit, they seem to have understood the layerings of force in the region well. Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis are nothing without Iran and Iran is less than meets the eye. Somehow, out of all the mess of the last year-and-a-half, Israel — from a geopolitical perspective, and for the present — emerges stronger than it’s ever been.

THE BIG BEAUTIFUL BILL

Trump-in-office is always a bit like the video clip of the man in the gorilla suit walking into a selective attention test. You kind of have to account for all the Tweets, all the daily outrages, all the manipulations of the news cycles, all the episodes of raising tariffs and attacking Iran and slashing the federal workforce, but the important thing is to figure out where the man in the gorilla suit is. And I think it’s in three places. One is vindictiveness against political opponents, which results in the erosion of the American civil liberties tradition. The second is the chipping-away at the functionality of the state, which means the entrenched bureaucracy as well as the tax regime. And the third is the usual Reaganomics politics of handing out tax cuts, spending on the military, and saving at the expense of the poorest people in the society. The idea of slashing taxes by $4.5 trillion is of course ridiculous with the national debt at $36 trillion and the annual interest at over $1 trillion. And there’s of course very little policy sense to any of it. Democratic representative Seth Magaziner pointed out that Republicans are pushing a bill that “flies in the face of everything they claim to stand for, all because Donald Trump wants a bill-signing photo-op by the Fourth of July.” Even Oren Cass, the kind of guru of MAGA economics, conceded that there was basically nothing at all to like in the bill. “Nobody really has a case for it, and it’s not clear why it’s happening,” he told Politico.

It’s not at all clear that the obvious badness of the bill will negatively affect Trump, though. Yes, it will negatively impact the country’s ability to pay down its debt, yes, it will likely contribute to inflation, yes, it will sadistically affect the poorest members of society, yes, the tax cuts will disproportionately help those who least need them, and yes — as is Cass’ point — it contributes very little to the demands of the new coalition that Trump drew to him in 2024. But everybody likes tax cuts for themselves. As The New York Times notes, the Republicans have cunningly structured the bill to have the tax breaks arrive in time for April 2026 and the spending cuts land after the midterm elections. It’s also worth glancing at how the Trump administration depicts the bill on WhiteHouse.gov and seeing what a winner it will look like to the base. If, as Cass says, the bill is a “messy hodge-podge,” it also gives the ‘base’ everything that they think they want — tax cuts and then lots of hardware at the border and in military bases (although not given to Ukraine) and with only poor people adversely affected. As Yascha Mounk puts it of Trump’s administration, “It’s one of those strange things where it seems like the less he does the more popular he might end up being.” And what we seem to have ended up with is a kind of Trump cancellation effect. The more radical ideas — the Liberation Day tariffs, the incredibly-deep government cuts of Musk-era DOGE — seem largely to have been a victim of Trump’s limited attention span. What we are back to is something similar to what we had in the first term, and especially with the 2017 tax cuts — cuts to taxes, slashing away at regulatory mechanisms within government, and all of that fine just so long as the stock market is high and there are no events necessitating a competent, purposeful government.

MAMDANI AND THE LEFT’S MOMENT

Given how astute the Republicans are in tending to their political base, it’s a bit mortifying to see the Dems go down to the primrose path to self-immolation, as clearly seems to be the case with the Mamdani primary victory.

Look, my notion of party politics at this point is pretty much: whatever works. The priority for the Dems is to clear out the dead wood, have a generation of younger, charismatic people who, above all else, are comfortable working with new media. AOC is probably good for the party, and, for all I know, Mamdani can be as well.

But I don’t think so. As The Atlantic put it, it’s all “magic realism, exuberantly disconnected from actual government budgets and organizational charts.” It’s free buses plus rent freezes plus new housing plus taxes on the rich (how exactly is he going to do that?) plus government-run grocery stores (which seems to have emerged from misreading a line on a city website mistaking investments by private stores for government subsidies). Then, it probably is a mischaracterization of Mamdani’s position to say that he wants to “globalize the intifada” but it’s not far off the mark — and his unwillingness to disown that phrase does introduce a dose of anti-semitism, or anti-zionism, into New York City politics somewhat reminiscent of how Jeremy Corbyn’s anti-semitism all but tanked Labour.

All in all, it’s really not a good look for the Democratic Party, and, sure enough, Trump was quick to jump on the opportunity. With a figure like Mamdani as prospective mayor of New York City, the Democrats become exactly what their opponents have always accussed them of being — socialist, radical, and deeply untethered to the math of governance. And, by the way, the electoral charts, with Mamdani succeeding in relatively affluent neighborhoods, are like Exhibit A of Rob Henderson’s idea of “luxury beliefs.” We’ll see how it all plays out, but the sense is that figures like Mamdani are taking the Democratic Party to the brink and at the worst possible time.

If this is effectively the end of Andrew Cuomo’s career, it’s worth taking a moment to reflect on just how much the Democratic Party has managed to eat its own. I remember being in a car, turning on NPR, and — this was sometime around 2019 —hearing a voice I didn’t recognize talk about the planned Amazon headquarters in Queens. I was mesmerized by it — the voice was authoritative, passionate, composed self-deprecating — and I was sort of astonished to realize, at some point, that it was Andrew Cuomo whom I’d never thought very much about before. That was the spectacle that everybody witnessed the next year when Cuomo became the face of New York State’s public response to Covid — and it was probably, speaking from a public relations point of view, the single most impressive display of political leadership I’ve witnessed in my lifetime. Cuomo lost his lustre soon afterwards — there was the nursing homes scandal and there were the charges of sexual harassment — but what became clear in 2020 was that he also had it. Maybe that seems like not such a big deal when weighted against the ethical charges against him, but if I look at all the ‘frontrunners’ of the Democratic Party at the 2024 convention, all the bad acting, all the Josh Shapiros and Gretchen Whitmers sawing the air and mouthing their speeches, it becomes clear that that kind of political talent is a scarce commodity. Cuomo, I’m convinced, would have beaten Trump in 2024 — maybe even with the harassment accusations dogging him. If I think about who else could have beaten Trump in 2024, I end up thinking back to Al Franken, who also had it — but who was forced into retirement over what turned out to be a trumped-up charge and, at the critical moment, found (as Cuomo did) that Democratic dignitaries didn’t have his back. I’m sure you can say all kinds of things, that Franken and especially Cuomo deserved what came to them, but I just wanted to consider for a moment the net effect of what happened. The Democratic Party, in the era of Trump, purged its most charismatic politicians, the people who had the best chance of winning. They were left with geriatric Biden and then the dud of Harris. And as the party teeters towards irrelevance and gerontocratic decrepitude, they find themselves primaried from the left by a socialist who can’t read a website and won’t disown ‘intifada.’ It’s a sad state of affairs for the party and it happened at the worst possible time — when Trump was destroying the democracy and the only thing that could have stopped him was a strong and competent Democratic opposition.

TRANS RIGHTS AND THE GREAT POLITICAL REALIGNMENT

I don’t know very much about underage transition treatments — and, honestly, don’t have very strong opinions on the topic. What I’m struck by at the moment is how much this is turning out to be a bellwether in the ‘vibe shift’ or a general realignment of sensibilities, if not of the parties themselves.

With the defeat of Skrmetti in the Supreme Court, the liberal media seems to have taken a great sigh of relief and to have distanced itself sharply from the trans movement. The New York Times has a long piece on “how the transgender movement bet on the Supreme Court and lost.” Helen Lewis has a piece in The Atlantic called “The Liberal Misinformation Bubble About Youth Gender Medicine.” And, most strikingly, Andrew Sullivan has an op-ed in The Times called “How the Gay Rights Movement Radicalized and Lost Its Way.” What’s striking isn’t so much anything in the pieces — Sullivan in particular has been making this point for years — as where they’re placed. The Times, as recently as 2023, was the target of an open letter protesting its purportedly anti-trans coverage — which really were very venal sins compared to anything in the Sullivan op-ed. What’s clearly happened is that the liberal tastemakers have decided that they really don’t care about what the trans rights movement thinks of them. The trans movement is no longer seen as belonging to the shining, if-occasionally-hard-to-fathom progressive future but of a lunatic deviation from common sense.

Sullivan has the clearest diagnosis on what happened, that the gay rights movement won with gay marriage, and did so by sticking to liberal values — by demanding tolerance and promising tolerance in return and by being, as he writes, “almost pathologically civil” in making their case. Instead of claiming victory, the movement radicalized. The main point, he claims, was money — the more dramatic the message (for instance, declaring a “state of emergency” for gay people in 2023 or the claims of suicidality for trans teens) the more money poured into the movement. For Sullivan, this shift served as “a new and radical gender revolution,” demanding that the “sex binary be abolished for the entire society” and shaming anyone who wouldn’t get with the program. Worse that that — and it’s astonishing that this got past his editor at The Times —the trans movement focused on children. He writes:

In the gay rights movement, there had always been an unspoken golden rule: Leave children out of it. We knew very well that any overreach there could provoke the most ancient blood libel against us: that we groom and abuse kids….So what did the gender revolutionaries go and do? They focused almost entirely on children and minors.

In slightly less inflammatory language, Lewis’ piece in The Atlantic and Nicholas Confessore’s in The New York Times Magazine make the same points. “Can this misinformation bubble ever be burst?” Lewis writes of the trans movement’s reliance on flawed science. “The movement was consumed by theories of sex and gender that most voters didn’t grasp or support,” writes Confessore in his elegy for the trans movement. Both Lewis and Confessore take considerable schadenfreude in the discomfiture of Chase Strangio, the ACLU’s lawyer in Skrmetti, being compelled to admit, in oral arguments, that “there is no evidence that [gender-affirming care] reduces completed suicide” — and thereby undermining what has been, for years, a lead talking point in arguing for hormone treatments for minors.

Basically, The Atlantic and The New York Times — and they can be taken as standing in for the liberal bourgeois masses — are eager to leave the radical trans movement behind. What it feels is happening is of ships passing in the night. The left is becoming ever more radical — the ACLU’s decision to bring Skrmetti to the Court, the Mamdani victory — are symptomatic of that. And liberal opinion is heading in the other direction, trying to distance itself from police reform, from trans activism, and open borders. (For that matter, the New York Times also ran an endorsement slamming Mamdani for “an agenda uniquely unsuited to the city’s challenges.”)

I think this is all to the good actually. My fantasy — although I don’t think it will actually happen this way — is for a Fusion party to emerge, like what Fiorello La Guardia put together in the 1930s or, effectively, what Theodore Roosevelt had in the 1900s, which is basically about being the party of grown-ups. It would be based on fiscal responsibility and on not doing crazy shit — whether that’s social justice overreach or the Trump insanity. The New York City mayoral general election may be the first place where something like that emerges, where Mamdani — who isn’t really a Democrat at all — has the Democratic Party nomination and is up against Eric Adams and Andrew Cuomo, who are unaffiliated but stand basically for Fusion and for sanity-in-government. If somebody like Cuomo can win there, that may be where the schism really occurs. The Left goes off in its merry way and ceases to be as much of a drag on the Democratic Party. Meanwhile, some sort of Fusion emerges as a combination of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, the great inchoate mass of Independents in the middle, and ideally a Never Trump cohort who finally do come to terms with the madness of MAGA and exit the Republican Party. Like I said, I’m not sure that a realignment that radical can happen in the next two-to-four years but here’s hoping. It’s clowns to the right, jokers to the left. It does seem like a party of sanity has to emerge somewhere or other.

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The op-ed writer had in fact spent a great deal of time in Middle America — not living there exactly, but not visiting either, doing some worthy work that wasn’t too left-coded but was lucrative enough to afford the house overlooking the pine forest, and the op-ed writer got it. That was maybe the first thing that was noticed when the op-ed was submitted as a letter to the miraculously-still-standing local newspaper and then took off from there. The op-ed writer had been concerned about NAFTA and about the general hollowing-out of industry going back to the ‘70s. The op-ed writer argued that both parties were complicit in these developments, but that wasn’t really the point — mistakes were made. The op-ed writer did feel a deep sense of shame that his/her coastal brethren had a way of being very condescending to the heartland and had culturally coded itself in a way that was bound to alienate said heartland. The coastal elite had been deeply patronizing towards Christianity and had failed to recognize the role that faith played in so many people’s lives; had pushed initiatives (focusing on emissions from cars, for instance) that were specifically designed to shame Americans who depended on their cars for everything in their lives; their leaders had said astonishingly tone-deaf things (“basket of deplorables,” “cling to guns or religion”) that made the heartland rightly furious; and they had allowed themselves to be swept away by certain progressive frenzies, to stop policing low-level crimes in coastal cities for instance, which had resulted in predictable consequences; and they had positioned themselves as being on the side of the democracy when in fact it was they, more than anyone else, who curtailed free speech, whether that was the content moderation regimes that came in in the late 2010s or the draconian drive to shame the unvaccinated or a general humorlessness and tone-policing that allowed cancelations to tear through white-collar spaces while the liberal institutions pretended that nothing was going on.

In the local diners, where the op-ed was read, the diners nodded along in agreement, and then many of them went home and looked to see if the newspaper had a website, which fortunately it did, and they shared the op-ed onto The Facebook and their e-mail lists. Maybe all this was obvious, but it was nice to hear it — that liberals acknowledged a degree of culpability in how polarized the country had become, that there was a reasonable center somewhere, that there was some possibility for reconciliation.

The op-ed was already starting to wildly circulate even among readers who had just read the preamble, but now the op-ed writer got down to more serious business. Trump is not the answer, the op-ed writer continued. Scratching his/her balls, the op-ed writer hesitated for some time before sharing this but finally did: the op-ed writer had lived at some stage in New York, and everybody in New York knew who Trump was. He was a clown, a huckster, the landlord from hell, the guy the tabloids covered if there wasn’t a fire anywhere. He wasn’t really very rich — he had inherited everything from his slumlord father and he had still gone bankrupt and then he had been bailed out largely by foreign nationals using him as a fence to get into the American real estate market, and then he still wasn’t that rich (although his tax fraud schemes helped), but he managed to play a successful businessman on TV and then he figured out a vertical grift using the perception of wealth (as well as high office) to generate wealth.

Most of the people the op-ed was e-mailed to had some basic cognizance of all of that, but it did help to be reminded, and a certain stunned silence did seem to accompany this section of the op-ed when readers reached it. There were no gatherings of farmers or tradespeople, the way there might have been in old days, to stand around and read the op-ed together, but a New York Times reporter, doing an anthropological study of Middle America in a Target, was struck to hear a few of the shoppers discussing the op-ed and the way they felt they had been misled by The Apprentice. “We should have seen through it,” one said to another — which duly ran as a cover story in The Times. Then, the op-ed writer went on to discuss how Trump was clearly a clinical narcissist — displayed all the signs of a narcissist. His own ghostwriter, the guy who had written The Art of the Deal, said, “This fundamental aspect of who he is doesn’t seem to be fully understood…that it’s impossible to keep him focused on any topic, other than his own self-aggrandizement, for more than a few minutes.” Many of the op-ed’s readers came across this during an unusually long commercial break on FOX News, and, as an ad for a Ford all-terrain truck played on the screen, they suddenly couldn’t help but notice the deep discrepancy between the demi-god figure the FOX hosts had just been describing and the overgrown child with the thin skin who — as the op-ed writer so crisply described it — would obviously never be able to help any of the people he had made such grand promises to or do anything beyond turning the presidency into an ATM for himself and a few of his friends.

Many turned the volume down on FOX even as the segment came back on, and there was an unusual hush across the Walmarts and Targets as the op-ed — thanks to the power of opt-in subscription services — seemed to arrive in everybody’s inboxes at once. Things had clearly taken a turn, the op-ed writer went on to say. This was no longer about cultural wars, or about the understandable grievances over Biden administration perfidy or decades of off-shoring American jobs. This was a judge being arrested for actions she had conducted in her own courthouse. This was the National Guard and then the Marines being sent onto American streets, in complete disregard of the wishes of local government — it was exactly what the defenders of the Second Amendment and of states’ rights had been screaming about for decades, except now it was happening from somebody on their side of the political fence and so they condoned it. This was law enforcement detaining journalists and handcuffing a United States Senator trying to ask a question.

This went well beyond party politics, the op-ed writer continued, now swapping out one ballpoint pen — which had run out of ink in the excitement of getting all the ideas down on paper — for another. This was the territory of constitutional coups, of the Reichstag Fire. The heartland had been right to be suspicious of ‘government overreach’ from the Democratic side of the aisle, but now it was happening from their own side, and the same principles all applied. It wasn’t abstract, it wasn’t a bad precedent, it was really happening, right now, and it hinged on the obedience of the military/law enforcement to the chain of command over the Constitution and on the compliance of the base. The base had to wake up, had to start seeing through Trump, had to understand that what was going on was bigger than garden-variety political hypocrisy, that there were red lines being crossed here that were very difficult to uncross.

The op-ed writer wiped away the sweat dripping from his/her forehead and hoped that it would not stain the draft so much that the editor at the local newspaper would be unable to read it. But the op-ed writer need not have worried. The letter was sealed up, and the still-functioning postal service delivered it without a hitch. The newspaper printed it, and — as we’ve seen — it swept the nation from there. The impact of the op-ed, it should be said, was gradual. People didn’t take to the streets or the protests brandishing it. It functioned very much like the iconic scene in 1998’s Primary Colors where Fred Picker, entering the race, encourages his cheering audience to ‘sit down,’ to ‘calm down a little,’ to ‘make sure we don’t spin out of control.’ Liberals would learn from their past mistakes, the op-ed promised — and they did in fact start to do so: they distanced themselves from the left, they were better at remembering the missions of their institutions as opposed to playing political footsie with progressives, they tacked to the center in time for the 2026 midterms and their steady messaging of sane, responsible governance ensured a narrow but significant victory that took the wind out of Trump’s sails. There were many flashpoints along the way, though. There were moments when Trump tried to do it again, tried to deploy the military within US borders, but he ran into steadily greater resistance — the military rank-and-file might have been annoyed by DEI initiatives and by stripping the names of Confederate generals off military bases, but, fundamentally, they believed in the Constitution, they knew their mandates and they were increasingly distressed at the US playing second-fiddle to Russia and China in world affairs, and Trump encountered resistance within the ranks whenever he tried to overstep Constitutional limits. It was never entirely clear what had happened, why Trump lost the blind adulation of his supporters, but sagacious observers of this period attributed it to the op-ed — to the way it broke through to the better angels of the base, the way they forwarded it to their children who were in military or law enforcement, the way that the logic of ‘red lines’ and the ‘greater good’ made sense to them. The Democrats had a very tough row to hoe in terms of restoring sanity to themselves and becoming a viable political party again, but in the meantime there was a common sense that kept the nation from crumbling entirely. Americans don’t like tyrants and don’t like armies in the streets and don’t like bullshitters who have what they have through a kind of lifelong confidence scheme, and, somewhere in the collective psyche, there was a dim memory of that, which the op-ed managed to activate, like a hypnotist’s voice pulling a slumbering patient out of their dream. Was it the op-ed that put the brakes on and saved the republic? Well, yes and no. It was more — historians of this period would write — that a collective fatigue set in, some of the lines that had been crossed really were uncrossable and a plurality of the body politic, of all persuasions, recognized that. And Trump? He served out his term, but it degenerated into dysfunction and in-fighting within his circle, and as he aged and his mind wandered and others took over the MAGA project, he dedicated himself entirely to siphoning off money to himself, and in the end he finally got what he wanted: in his 80s, after two terms of the presidency, Donald Trump managed to be really, really rich.

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I’m doing my monthly roundup of political news (which I really will try to do on a strict monthly basis going forward). All kinds of interesting things at .

Best,

Sam

TRUMP AND MUSK AND THE CURDLED BROMANCE

Well, this is just embarrassing now. With the Musk rupture, the wheels come off the Trump rebrand, the ‘One Big Beautiful MAGA.’ What’s finished is the notion that he can pivot to an alliance with Silicon Valley — and with anybody else who really gets liberalism stuck in their craw — and what’s finished also is the ‘vibe shift’ and, as puts it, “the promise of turning his presidency into a broader, more forward-looking project.”

What’s left is Trump as he’s always been — a petty tyrant who likes tax cuts and palace drama, and who views the presidency primarily as a stepping-stone to his own enrichment.

What’s helpful for the rest of us about the Musk fracas is that it really does serve to clarify what the faultlines are in the administration and what Trump II is really about. And the reason it seems to have been confusing — the reason that I, for instance, seem to keep saying contradictory things about Trump — is that it is confusing and even Trump’s closest associates aren’t clear on what he really wants to do with his power.

My sense of how this is playing out is that the heart of the administration is Stephen Miller and Co, promoting the straight MAGA line, which is mostly hardcore deportations. The mainline of the administration is similarly in tune with the Republican leadership, which is the old nonsensical position of cutting taxes while at the same time increasing military spending and trying to make the numbers work by depriving the poorest and most vulnerable members of the population, in this case by cutting into Medicaid and SNAP. That’s been the standard-line Republican position for a while. It’s what’s in the Big Beautiful Bill and it’s surprising that Musk objected to it so strongly — it seems that he just doesn’t really understand how American congressional politics actually works, that every bill is ladled with pork, that the GOP always cuts taxes for the wealthy, and that the money that can’t be stolen for the poor is fobbed off into the ever-growing deficit. The Musk strain had been a brief irruption of a kind of Silicon Valley libertarianism into Trump-world — treating government as a company and engaging in layoffs and cost-saving at the moment of acquisition — but that idea seems, once again, to be dust-binned. It is surprising that the split between Trump and Musk — which was inevitable — turned on such ideological points. As Mounk puts it, “Mercurial and self-serving though he may be, Musk does appear to be a man of conviction” — and Musk seems, really, to have bought into the small government crusade. With Musk’s departure, that wing of the administration reverts back to the control of Russell Vought, who, as The New Republic puts it, was really “Musk’s puppet master” all along, and that will likely mean the continued terror campaign against the bureaucracy — the “trauma” that Vought promised back in 2023 but without the same deep budget cuts that Musk was hoping to deliver. Bannon, meanwhile, appears to be auditioning even harder for the role of Grigory Rasputin, and if he had been temporarily aligned with Musk in the vision of deep budget cuts particularly at the Pentagon, he now seems to have moved on to just giving the administration airy and apocalyptic advice. And then Rubio, steadily expanding his fiefdom, will of course conduct a foreign policy tailored entirely to benefiting Marco Rubio.

So the dust kind of settles and we get back to what, actually, I initially thought Trump II would prove to be — Trump would sow the chaos and largely cancel himself out, the deep tax cuts would at some point in the later part of the administration affect the US’ ability to carry out core government services, and the US would, with a great deal of fanfare and showmanship, retreat from relevancy on the world stage.

The Musk sideshow — kind of like the Bannon sideshow in the first term — seemed to point towards something else, a more sweeping vision of what MAGA might stand for. But no longer. And it’s hard not to conclude from this that Musk’s real relevancy in American politics is at on end. As The New York Times reported, “For their part, Mr. Musk’s friends and associates said they were in a state of disbelief over the acrimonious and abrupt break, and spent Thursday glued to their computers and phones as they watched their friend joust with Mr. Trump, unsure of his plan.” The solution to that riddle may well be that there is no plan. If there was a moment, last fall, when it seemed like Musk was the generalissimo of American politics — buying Twitter had been a grand plan to take over the public sphere in order to elect Trump, at which point Musk would be indispensable to the new administration — it seems like he badly misjudged who Trump was, and the political capital of that $290 million he plunged into Trump’s campaign, if not the $44 billion he spent on Twitter, evaporated over the course of an afternoon’s tweet storm. Ah well. What’s money anyway? I’ve always felt that Elon was essentially hot air and I’d expect a long-spiraling spectacular collapse from here on out. As The New York Times recently reported, the drugs are a problem, he seems to get sucked into playing video games for hours on end — so much for having his entire day efficiently scheduled into five-minute intervals — and if he can’t have a merger with the US government, as was clearly the plan, then his political importance rapidly fades.

That leaves Trump fomenting the Daily Outrage, Trump running the first reality show presidency — which kind of reached its apogee during the Elon spat — Trump passing the ‘Muslim Ban,’ Trump trying to deport illegal immigrants at the tune of 3,000 a day and at the expense of actually policing crime, and Trump carrying out his vendettas against political rivalries. And that, unfortunately, he does have the capacity to do.

Miles Taylor — the deanonymized “Anonymous” of the famous op-ed — gave a searing interview to Politico in which he discussed how Trump had hounded him, not only removing his security clearance but removing those of people who attended his wedding and committed the crime of also being involved with the University of Pennsylvania where Taylor is a part-time faculty member. “What surprised me was that so quickly into the administration, they made the jump into individualized investigative executive orders against named critics of the president,” Taylor said. “That’s pretty alarming, that the president now wields that pen as a literal sword against free speech.”

Yes it is. I am becoming ever more convinced that Trump represents a kind of tattered version of a playbook that has already unfolded in Russia, Turkey, Hungary, maybe El Salvador. Cultural issues are deployed in order to eliminate as much of the free press and civil society as possible, optimally the judiciary. The result is that the executive becomes a kind of free-floating entity not bound by any particular administrative constraints and with its occupants becoming fabulously rich in the process. In the other countries I’ve named, the leaders proceeded step by step over a decade or two. Trump is trying to do it in a sped-up form but fighting against his own penchant for distractibility and mayhem. So that will be the next years — Trump at war with civil society, courts as the main battlefield, and the conflict playing out with any institution or individual that has the temerity to cross him.

DA DEMS

What is important to understand, though, is that, even as the chaos spirals and the Trump administration loses its ability to do any deep, meaningful reform as in the Bannon/Musk vision, he likely will, barring a global depression, remain broadly popular. He really is a master at handling social media and the news cycle and at letting crises bounce off him. The “One Big Beautiful Bill” is, actually, from a public relations point of view, exquisitely designed. It’s, I would say, pretty much exactly what the ‘base’ wants. They like the original 2017 tax cuts. They like the idea of cutting Medicaid and welfare, which is coded as essentially benefiting the urban poor. The loss of tax revenue and escalating debt that the bill represents doesn’t particularly bother the base. And tax exemptions for tips is likely to be an electoral winner.

The combustion all around Trump isn’t going to help the Dems, unless they do something and figure out a narrative pronto. I haven’t actually read the Tapper/Thompson book, and, based on the excerpt of it in The New Yorker, may not have the stomach to. What it should serve as is a wrecking bill for the current iteration of the Democratic Party — proof that the building is rotting and the shell needs to be knocked down. The point was the vast cover-up — the apparatus of the Democratic Party both hiding Biden from the public and from real decision-making, Obama gingerly leading him offstage at fundraisers when he got confused about where he was, everybody maintaining a conspiracy of silence. “It was like watching someone who was not alive,” one Hollywood star recalled of seeing him in 2022. Nobody was able to get through to him in the entire period from fall 2022 to summer 2024, and it seems that nobody really tried. The ensuing race is dismissed by David Plouffe as being “a fucking nightmare,” with Kamala — in probably the most condescending description that has ever made of a US presidential candidate — described as “a great soldier” but unable to compensate for Biden’s selfishness. “He stole an election from the American people,” one Democratic strategist said.

The problem, of course, goes much deeper than any of that, and is about the Democrats retreating into a fearful, self-protective echo chamber with no ability to reach out and connect to voters. The solution, actually, is very simple. They just need to learn how to tweet — or to go on podcasts or to fight for the airwaves of new media. Yes, James Carville suggested “a strategic political retreat,” but Carville has a hard time resisting a reporter looking for a quote and he is wrong here. This is the time — actually, it’s been the time for a while now — to just speak as loudly and as frequently as possible. The Democrats who are rising — AOC and Jasmine Crockett — are doing it just by being active on social media. The ones who will reshape the party — Gavin Newsom and JB Pritzker, most likely — are doing it by bypassing any of their communications people and addressing the public directly, Newsom on his show, Pritzker by having incendiary and interesting things to say. This is what politics is now. There’s not a lot of room for reticence. Trump got to where he is — and has held on to his base — just by sensing that new media rewards engagement and charisma. It’s really not that hard for Dems to do the same.

The Dems do have the somewhat vexing problem that, over the past four years, they have managed to lose control of the social media platforms. X is MAGA now, as is Truth Social. But the thing to do is to just play the keys that are available to them. And I know that I’m kind of turning into, like, a door-to-door knife salesman, but the obvious platform for them is Substack. Substack doesn’t really code one way or the other. It’s not run by some mercurial tyrant twisting the algorithms around to favor preferred content. It rewards thoughtful, long-form engagement. If I were , or anybody on the Dem side, I would be posting on Notes at least once a day, and then with thoughtful policy paper-type articles on the site. That doesn’t mean that it’s the only platform available. Newsom is doing well on YouTube. Bluesky is pointless echo chamber but it’s there. X is of course an option — and Musk himself may be back in play politically, although that seems unlikely. And Democratic politicians should be hitting the podcasts and streamers the way they used to do the morning talk shows. The party panjandrums still believe that they can communicate through The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, and network news, and they still haven’t come to grips with the fact that the undecided voters, and the popular will, isn’t in any of those places. It’s important in analysis to know when things are actually very stupid and very simple — and this is one of those times. The Republicans are imploding from combustible egos and disarray but the Democrats aren’t necessarily poised to take advantage. The only way they can do so is if they just talk, talk, talk until they’re blue in the face, to anyone who will listen.

DA WORLD

And then, meanwhile, there are actual people dealing with actual life-and-death problems, like, for instance in Ukraine.

The surprise is that Putin wouldn’t call it quits at this point with the territory that he has and figuring that he’s at his peak moment to negotiate, but, obviously, he just doesn’t feel like it — either he thinks Ukraine really will crack without US backing or he just likes what a wartime atmosphere does for his domestic standing, and enough so that he’s willing to sacrifice 1100 Russians a day for it.

Ukraine’s intransigence is even easier to understand — since any talks can’t possibly lead to a security guarantee, there really is no point in having talks.

What may well be happening at the moment is that everybody is discovering that the US is not all that relevant to Ukraine. Nataliya Gumenyuk, a Ukrainian journalist, has an absorbing article in The Atlantic in which she claims that Ukraine, basically, can go it alone. The face of war has changed, since the start of the invasion, to being almost entirely drones, and, since Ukraine manufactures the majority of its drones, it has essentially adapted its way to sovereignty, “What’s keeping Ukraine in the fight is not Russian mercy, or even solely American arms: It’s innovation,” she writes. This may well be wishful thinking though. The drone operator Gumenyuk interviews comes across like the calculator-toting school principle in Glee making his combat decisions in a strictly bean-counting way. “If he could [destroy a Russian tank], he’d be removing a $1 million piece of Russian equipment from the field,” she writes. “He expended five drones, each costing $500 to $600, then agonized over whether to keep going.” I’m not sure that that particular anecdote yields much confidence in Ukraine’s long-term war-making capacities.

Former US Senator Jeff Flake has a piece also in The Atlantic in which he claims that Europe has already moved on from the US and is well on its way to taking the lead on Ukraine. “It used to be that before we committed to a position on any significant matter, we would wait to see where the United States stood. Now? We really don’t care anymore,” Flake says that a European diplomat told him.

This may also be wishful thinking, though. The Europeans are starting to get good at talking about beefing up their militaries, and their support for Ukraine, but actually doing it is another matter. They have the problems of unified command structure, of its not being clear who really is leading the way.

On a broader lens, that’s basically, though, what’s happening in the world. “Those countries that still believe in free trade need to work together to promote new free-trade arrangements (and extend existing ones) that do not involve the United States,” Malcolm Turnbull, the former prime minister of Australia, wrote in Foreign Affairs. We’re going back to the nineteen-teens, before Woodrow Wilson inserted the US in world affairs and before FDR launched the ‘national security state’ in 1937, in which the US doesn’t really matter and the world does its own thing. It must be unprecedented for any superpower to do this to itself and make itself so irrelevant.

In terms of Ukraine, where we’re going back to is essentially early 2022, before US arms have caught up and where Ukraine is defending itself through their own pluck and the good fortune of the Russians having their own problems. In seeming wonderment, Steve Bannon said, “Zelensky didn’t give the president of the United States a heads-up to say he’s going to do a deep strike into strategic forces of Russia, which is going up the escalatory ladder as quickly as you can.” I have a feeling that he suspects — as I suspect — that that’s not the whole truth. It seems very unlikely that the Ukrainians would be able to launch an attack of that sophistication entirely on their own, and what that suggests is that elements of the US security state are helping out Ukrainian operations without Trump’s knowledge. That really does bring us back to early 2022 and to US intelligence operating in totally undisclosed ways in Ukraine. So it turns out that Trump is less important to the course of the war than anybody thought. I figured that Putin’s long game was to play for his election and then, if he was elected, Ukraine would pretty much have to sue for peace, but the long game may be longer than that — with the war grinding on for the indefinite future, as long as Ukraine can keep making weapons and the Europeans (and, clandestinely, Americans) can chip in.

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I want to go a little deeper into this kind of analysis and argue that what’s really at stake isn’t so much political conception as ‘the logic of ideal types.’ That different civilizations depending on where they are tend to encourage, and select for, different ‘ideal types’ that the members of the population aspire to, and that the ideal type gives you a snapshot really of the very heart of the civilization.

And our ideal type recently has been…very unfortunate. If I think back to what was really going on in the various elite schools and institutions that I’ve been a part of, the qualities that seem to have been selected for are: compliance, self-interest, the art of political jockeying.

Most important, of course, is compliance. All institutions, whatever their purpose, whatever diversity of personality they encourage within their ranks, have highly developed boundaries that demarcate admission/rejection into the institution, and anybody who is inside will do essentially whatever it takes to maintain that insider status. What’s curious about the compliance within institutions is that it takes place in a culture that, on the surface anyway, values skepticism, independence, rugged self-interest. We can think about the emphasis on compliance within institutional settings as reflective of deeper patterns of group psychology — this simply is how groups function, a figure like Wilfred Bion might well argue. But the way it plays out in American life of the don’t-fuck-it-up phase is as a kind of switch that’s toggled on and off. Within private conversations among one’s family members, in certain secluded conversations within the workplace setting (‘after work drinks,’ above all), one is expected to complain vociferously about every aspect of the job — actually, I’ve suspected, one is encouraged to do so, and I remember being very struck how, sometimes, on the first day of a job, the subordinates would all start complaining to one another about workplace conditions. But that off-the-clock, or sub-rosa complaining, in no way affects employees’ behavior on company time. There the switch is thrown. The code word is acting ‘professional.’ And the mentality is a belief in the sort of sacred writ of the organizational chart of a company — that, no matter what one might say about ‘democracy’ or ‘egalitarianism’ off the clock, that companies can only function through strict hierarchies and that it is part of acting ‘professional’ to rigidly respect those hierarchies. I remember showing up for a job in a middle manager position where almost everybody else knew each other and I had to work strenuously to figure out where all the confusing titles stood in the office hierarchy so that I knew who was above and who was below me and could adjust the tone of my voice accordingly.

Paired with the compliance is overt self-interest. The people I’ve worked with who had the clearest, most intuitive understanding of American office culture were both completely deferential and compliant at the same time that — as soon as the boss’ back was turned — they were figuring out their angles. In the permalance fields where I’ve usually worked, that meant actively looking for the next job — often sneaking around to do the interviews during work hours — no matter the status of the current project that they were on. Interestingly, when the higher-ups found out about this — often, when they received notice — they tended to be impressed with the underling’s moxie and to see them as a ‘comer.’ This kind of tendency is heightened, I believe, in fields where an adversarial system is built into the environment — in law, in team competitions within certain businesses, etc — and the extreme pursuit of one’s own self-interest is seen as an ideal motivating factor and as being curiously simpatico with the interest of the enterprise as a whole. It is worth quoting the monologue of Isobel, from Mike Bartlett’s play Bull, which is a brilliant depiction of workforce dynamics. The play is about three employees who are in the midst of a mandated ‘cull,’ with Isobel and Tony teaming up against hapless Thomas. Between them, Isobel and Tony have perfected the arts of sucking up to the piece while turning on poor hapless Thomas who just wants to keep his head down and do his job. Isobel says of Tony:

Not an inch of goodness. Sheer muscular wanker. Not like you, flabby little thing aren’t you? Lots of goodness in you. But this one. Different kettle of fish. He’s boiled down. He’s a piranha.

And of herself:

I’m like a cat. I prance, I jump, I’m like a Soviet gymnast, I’m really perfect physically and mentally, you ever noticed that, people with good clear physically fit bodies tend to have the minds to match.

The third prized quality is the art of political jockeying. This comes into the frame as soon as one is not just looking to improve one’s position by hopscotching off to another position and then — as likely as not — hopscotching back to the same company but at a higher level. This is where one is looking for a promotion from within or, at the higher levels, to strengthen one’s own department at the hands of everyone else’s. Business pages and magazine features are loaded with coded compliments for people who have engaged in just this kind of machination to advance their career. I remember, in the general mystification of the 2000s as to why the world had been saddled with Donald Rumsfeld, reading that he was “a skilled bureaucratic in-fighter,” which was meant to explain everything. In a pivotal scene in Succession, Logan Roy lays all this out to his son Kendall: “You’re smart, you’re good, but you’re not a killer. You have to be a killer.” The premise is that it’s precisely Kendall’s competence and decency that disqualify him for ‘the top job.’ Logan would prefer for it to go instead to, say, Rhea, whose main qualification is her willingness to sell out her previous employer for a shot at running Logan’s Waystar Royco. As her previous employer, equally impressed, puts it, “Rhea only ever looks out for Rhea.”

If I were Cicero looking to torment centuries of schoolchildren, this would be the moment when I would include a peroration on how the demise of personal virtues can affect the overall well-being of cultures. In the time I worked in American office environments, I am pretty sure that I never saw initiative, creativity, or out-of-the-box thinking be rewarded. Competent hard work was taken for granted, but the pathways for advancement were ‘alignment with a mission’ (i.e. conformity), a demonstrated gift for playing office politics, and a willingness to stick in the knife at the decisive moment. I’ve come up with different theories for why this should be the case. One is that this is just the way it is — dark iron laws of human psychology and organizational management that precede and will outlast our particular civilization. Another theory is that there is a deep wisdom in place here for how to optimize efficiency — that the more you can bring people’s naked self-interest into play, the more you are resting your organizational future on something really solid, as opposed to anything so flimsy as conscientiousness or concern for quality work. As Jeff Skilling, the to-be-disgraced CEO of Enron, put it, “You know, I’ve given a lot of thought to this, and money is the only thing that motivates people.” Skilling used that insight to develop a highly-sophisticated system of corporate in-fighting with employees subject to stringent review and to mandatory culls if they fell below certain evaluative metrics.

But of course, using that system, Skilling presided over the greatest corporate collapse in American history. To improve his own standing, Skilling adopted an accounting system that was basically fiction. Corruption reigned all through the evaluative metrics as a balm to the terror they inspired. And an atmosphere of compartmentalization and secret-keeping resulted in everybody hiding from each other the extent of the fraud that they were all perpetuating. Thinking about something like that I find it very difficult to believe that what we have really is best practices in terms of management. It’s more that we have an iron belief in the strength of institutions and then reward anybody who abides by its mission or, by hook or crook, vaults to the top, regardless really of the actual value they generate. And the result — to be Ciceronian about it — is that the institutions gradually atrophy, and lose sight of their original purpose, while everybody inside is encouraged to play brass-knuckle politics with one another. If we think about the massive failures of storied institutions over the past years — the betrayal of the public trust by the health authorities, the universities’ inability to get a grip on reigning campus madness, most conspicuously the giant sock puppet show of the Biden administration — we see all these dynamics in play. To give them their due, tech and start-up culture have been free of many of these dynamics — they have their own problems — because they are not steeped in quite the same ‘don’t fuck it up’ mentality that leads, in every case, to gradual decadence. That probably is some of the energy that we need. In the inevitable Roman analogies, we have moved well beyond the Ciceronian into some advanced stage of decline. The Romans actually did renew several times and we probably can too. But to a great extent that means prioritizing exactly those qualities that we have systematically de-emphasized — creativity, integrity, the will to carry out bold and difficult reforms.

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Since I last posted, we’ve had, at , on Sociologism Literature, reflecting on 80+ years of gay life, and on gatekeepers.

Best,

Sam

WHY AMERICA STOPPED WORKING

There’s a lovely Walt Whitman called “I Hear America Singing.” Here’s a sample:

I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,

Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong,

The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam,

The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work,

Step out your door — or, maybe more likely, go to your garage, roll up the grate, and drive to the newest town center or shopping mall or Walmart — and what are the odds that the sound you hear is America singing?

Our politics have shifted almost entirely into blame game. And more than anything else this may be the enduring legacy of the Trump years. If the politics of Biden was that everything is fine, just fine (just better not conduct any business after 4pm or on the president’s bad days), we have shifted into a full-on grievance culture. Trump’s whole shtick is that America went irrevocably wrong probably somewhere around the time of civil rights and hippies, although there seems to be a slight difference of emphasis within MAGA about whether the thing to focus on is more the elites’ betrayal of the industrial heartland as in the Bannonite version or more campus feminism and DEI as in the movement’s younger wing. The Democrats have gotten the memo too, and ‘Abundance’ is basically MAGA-lite, blaming progressives as well as the decades-long common sense of the Democratic Party for why the country seems to be in such an intractable snarl.

My belief is that both parties are right — the country really is stuck — but it’s not really that anybody can be blamed for it and, probably, no one can do anything about it.

If we were to divide the country’s history into phases, they might run something like this:

• 1776-1828 — the early phase, the city upon the hill

• 1828-1898 — the building stuff phase

• 1898-1963 — America Invictus

• 1963-2016 — the don’t fuck it up phase

• 2016- — the it’s fucked phase

The ‘building things’ phase is really what we most associate America with. It’s the Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, who can build anything. It’s the Homestead Act and towns popping up anywhere you liked. It’s Timothy Olyphant pecking away at his own house in Deadwood.

There was a moment when everybody pretty much collectively understood that the building things phase was over — it was when Frederick Jackson Turner announced, like he were a saloon keeper locking the door and turning off the tap that “the frontier was closed.” But the closing of the frontier coincided with America moving into a global market — with imperial ambitions, a flood of immigrants, and fresh opportunities for trade. That seemed to result in one easy triumph after another until the tumult of the ‘60s produced a period of self-examination.

What was really going on, though, was more fundamental than any of the hot-button political topics. People were running out of stuff to do. There wasn’t some explosion of new institutions. The institutions had all been built — often a long time before. What was happening now was that everybody was competing for the same slices of pie. This became articulated in different ways: the right kept fantasizing about ways to get back to the period of exponential growth, usually by kicking the shit out of somebody. It was in the fantasy of turning Vietnam into a new market — “Wherever America is, there is freedom, and wherever America is not, madness rules with chains, darkness strangles millions. Beneath her patient bombers, paradise is possible,” as Rabbit Angstrom put it. The left, a bit more far-sighted, began thinking in terms of ‘small is beautiful,’ of ‘reducing the carbon footprint,’ basically of everybody making themselves a bit smaller to fit into the available container.

That brought us into the ‘don’t fuck it up phase,’ in which most of us have lived for most of our lives. In the ‘don’t fuck it up’ phase, things — miraculously enough — just worked. Institutions that had been around for a hundred or two hundred years just kept cycling forward. Nobody could explain anything — if any Connecticut Yankees from 1960 forward had been dropped into Arthurian England, they wouldn’t have had a clue how to build a television or telephone or WiFi. Sherman McCoy couldn’t come close to explaining to his kid what he did for a living, but it didn’t matter — he made plenty of money anyway. Homer Simpson may well actually have been in charge of emergencies at the Springfield nuclear power plant, but it didn’t matter — there never was an emergency. The ‘don’t fuck it up’ phase, in which ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’ may have been the height of wisdom, produced a particular mindset — we can call it Homo Americanus in parallel to Homo Sovieticus, a similar creature which existed around the same time but that then faced a sudden extinction event. Homo Americanus believed that the institutions had reached a level of complexity at which there was no point in submitting them to the scrutiny of common sense. Markets would do their thing, institutions would recycle their personnel out on a generational basis but would become ever more fine-tuned in what they were capable of achieving, technology would come down out of the sky and meet the institutions where they were, vaulting them to the next imponderably wonderful level. At the time I was applying to college, my parents and my parents’ friends were making much of the fact that the top tiers of applicants were at a significantly higher level than they had been themselves. I was taken by their awe and believed it. How marvelous my generation must be! The kinds of people I would meet in college, and then out in the world, the things we would be capable of doing!

What it turned out we were capable of doing was competing for the same pie with one another. There was a moment at the end of high school when nice high school students, with very little sign of having distinguished themselves to this point, were suddenly high-stress test-takers, who had (if their applications were to be believed) overcome astonishing adversity and then nonetheless managed to give it all back in robust hours of charity work, and were hellbent on beating each other out for a handful of slots at a dozen-odd colleges. And then there was a moment at the end of college when nice college students, with precious little interest in finance displayed hitherto, were suddenly the sort of go-get-’em quants who could comfortably fit a quintillion ping pong balls in the cabin of a plane and wanted to do nothing more than to work 80 hours a week on a slide deck and then to pop high-grade cocaine in the remaining hours left of their weeks.

There was very little room to build new things. Nobody was founding new towns or moving west to grow up with the country. There were a handful of odd ducks hard at work at their odd-sounding businesses in their dorm rooms, but those always turned out to be an app slotting into a narrow sector of the economy. And the obstacles to building a business were almost impossibly steep. What everybody was doing was, like the aforementioned ping pong balls, wedging themselves into the narrow spaces that were afforded them, and the institutions, for their part, graciously expanded their shape as much as they could. The average American works for a company of 600 employees or more, meaning that most employers are enormous and have gone into fields way outside of their core businesses (as everybody notices anytime they see a corporate sponsorship or charity initiative, where the return on investment must be very far off) and have continued to hire large numbers of people contributing no discernible value — as is swiftly discovered whenever there’s an economic downturn and whole ballrooms have to be hired out to announce the layoffs. Universities are lathering on the administrators, which is in a way a very benevolent act of them, creating all these new high-paid, high-prestige positions that get to be attached to these venerable universities. The only problem is that the administrators almost by definition can’t create anything. They have to wedge themselves into a very tight container where, inevitably, they start quarreling with one another. Marc Dunkelman describes how these dynamics play out within in the regulatory regimes in government. “Power had been so diffused that any minor objection would upend the whole thing,” he writes in Why Nothing Works of the inability to renovate Penn Station. Or as Frank Sobotka puts it in The Wire when his well-intentioned bribe to build a grain pier is passed up by a suit, “We used to make shit in this country, build shit. Now we just put our hand in the next guy’s pocket.”

As we got to the end of the don’t fuck it up phase, common sense wisdom began to become ever more esoteric. The national debt was explained as belonging to very different kinds of economic logic than the personal debt that everybody was drowning in. The market was explained in economic terms that boiled down to ‘don’t scare the horses,’ of which the ‘too big to fail’ rallying cry at the height of the financial case was the most apposite example.

And now we find ourselves in the ‘it’s fucked phase.’ It’s happened a bit faster than any of us would have liked, but, if we look around, it’s pretty clear where we are — a federal infrastructure that contributes largely to debt; a spending regime that leads to grift far down the line before anything can actually be built (“this is how liberal government works now,” said Ezra Klein of the waste in the Build Back Better bill); workers that can be be abruptly sent home with hardly anybody noticing, whether from a pandemic response or the whims of a president; and what Peter Turchin calls elite overproduction, resulting in hordes of pampered M.A.s and Ph.Ds all frustrated in their pursuit of a middle class life who may or may not best be thought of as a roving horde like the Zapatistas or the scholar-rioters of the Middle Ages.

My gentle suggestion, as we all try to put the toothpaste back in the tube, is maybe let it spill out. We can think of Trump as a symptom of a larger problem, which is that our institutions are too small to fit our vast numbers of people used to a good life. Trump is a wrecking ball, and the wrecking ball will have all sorts of repercussions, but on a higher, zeitgeisty level, it all may prove an act of creative destruction. Trump is a kind of spiritual exercise that shows us the limits of the magical thinking of the don’t fuck it up phase. If an institution is just barreling forward without common sense backing it, it’s possible that common sense really isn’t involved. If you can’t explain the value of your own job, it’s possible that it shouldn’t really exist and you should try to do something else. There is room for creativity in the society — in small businesses, in the gift economy, in the digital commons, in international exchange — but a certain mental shift is needed to move in that direction. The ‘don’t fuck it up’ phase really is passed. Now that it’s fucked it’s maybe a good time to get creative.

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But in order to pontificate about this publicly and also, I guess, to inhabit the 21st century, I felt that I should at least know what talking to an AI was like, and, like a vegetarian biting into steak for the first time, downloaded Gemini 2.5 eager to see what all the fuss was about.

And something strange happened…it sucked.

My opposition to AI had been built around the idea of its strength. I’d been worried that it would cut a swathe through the white-collar economy, that it would be so technically proficient as to supplant human creativity, and that it would dissolve the already-weak social bonds of our era, giving lonely people (which is really all people) surrogate attachments to their ‘AI friends.’ The fear I had about even downloading one of these bots was that I would get pulled into the vortex before I could even stop myself — that it would be the opening of Her and that all I would crave for the rest of my life was the unattainable voice of Scarlett Johansson.

It wasn’t that.

The AI was pleasant enough. It was very complimentary. Anything I asked it was ‘a good question’ or something I was ‘right to notice.’ Much like the readers’ questions at the back of any self-respecting beach read, it was careful to ask me my own thoughts at the end of each of its oh-so-carefully balanced answers. It had a sense of humor, which was nice. It really was a technological marvel. I was very impressed at the clarity of its writing, of its ability to bring up (largely accurate) information on any topic, and its taste. It liked quite a few of the articles in , which I thought spoke well of it (it particularly liked Philip Traylen’s, which was an interesting choice), and it knew that Bukowski’s “So You Want To Be A Writer” was a good poem.

But it was useless, and after a little while I ran out of things to ask it. Because, basically, it was just Google — it was a new Google search tool that, with all those GPUs humming, allowed you to extract the information from Google’s search domain and to organize it into a plain-English ‘consensus’ version without worrying your pretty little head over having to look at the links from Google’s top search results let alone having to actually click on them and think through divergent points of view on a topic.

For me, the $64,000 question was whether it could help with writing or editing, and if it did that would really represent a fork in the road in my life: whether to stick with my proud-yet-deficient humanity, or whether to turn myself into a kind of hybrid, at the very least bouncing ideas and drafts off the AI. I fed it a short story of mine and it had some intelligent things to say about it. And then I asked it for a fresh draft based on its suggestions. Here’s my original opening:

Once upon a time he was in Central Asia, in Samarkand, and he met a famous German novelist — not really famous; Daniel had never heard of him, but he had a Wikipedia page and some appreciative reviews. It was the kind of encounter that Daniel spent that whole phase of his life anticipating, fantasizing about, and it really happened only that once. The novelist and a friend of his were looking to meet Samarkand whores — as research for the novelist’s next book. Daniel knew that he was intruding a bit, the friend in particular didn’t want to waste time talking to him. But the novelist was intrigued — he must have sensed that Daniel, even in this embryonic phase of his, was part of the same tribe. He wrote out his e-mail and he gave Daniel his life wisdom. He said, “Your 20s are all about sluts; then in your 30s you have a girl and she’s cooler than you are and you suffer from that; your 40s are the same thing except that now you’re a bit cooler and she’s getting more insecure; your 50s are about younger women coming out of nowhere and falling in love with you.” This wisdom made Daniel a little bit unhappy — for one thing, he was still in the grip of a campus feminism. “What about for a woman?” he asked and the German got annoyed. “I don’t know,” he said, “I’m a male novelist.” For another, it seemed a bit fatalistic and pre-determined — at this phase in his life, Daniel had so many conflicting ambitions, he felt that everything was pretty much just a matter of choice. “Well,” the German said, softening a little, “if you know it, you’re not so afflicted by it. For example, just now, I just saved you five years of having to figure it out on your own.”

And here’s the AI version:

The dust of Samarkand shimmered around Daniel, thick with the scent of spices and history. He adjusted the brim of his fedora, the vintage Leica weighing comfortably in his hand. At twenty-six, Daniel considered himself a connoisseur of authentic experiences, and Samarkand, with its turquoise domes and ancient marketplaces, was proving to be a fertile ground. He was traveling light, his worldly possessions pared down to a carefully curated backpack and a burgeoning collection of profound thoughts.

He found him in a cramped, fragrant teahouse near the Gur-e-Amir mausoleum. An older man, easily in his sixties, with a mane of disheveled white hair and piercing blue eyes, was hunched over a tiny porcelain cup, scribbling furiously in a leather-bound journal. Daniel recognized him instantly from a recent Paris Review interview he'd stumbled upon online: Ulrich Voss, the reclusive German novelist, known for his bleakly philosophical tales of existential dread.

Voss was accompanied by a younger, restless man, clearly his assistant, who kept glancing at his phone with an air of barely concealed impatience. Daniel, seizing the moment he felt destined for, approached their low table.

"Herr Voss?" Daniel began, his voice a little too eager. "Daniel Hayes. Huge admirer of your work."

Voss looked up, his gaze unblinking. The assistant shifted, a silent plea for Daniel to move along. But Voss, surprisingly, offered a faint, almost imperceptible smile. "Ah, an American. What brings you to this dust-choked corner of the world?"

They chatted for a few minutes, Daniel trying to convey his artistic leanings without sounding overly self-important. Voss, in turn, seemed to be sizing him up, a glint of something unreadable in his eyes. Suddenly, he leaned forward, his voice a gravelly whisper.

"Listen, young man," Voss said, dismissing his assistant with a flick of his wrist. "Life. It's simpler than you think. Your twenties are for chasing anything that moves. Sluts, as we elegantly put it. A necessary chaos. Then, your thirties arrive. You find a woman, probably smarter than you, and you suffer through her brilliance. Your forties? Same woman, she's losing a step, you've gained one, you suffer less, she suffers more. Your fifties..." He paused, a wicked chuckle escaping his lips. "The younger women. They appear. Out of nowhere. And they fall in love with you."

Which is useless, totally lacking a point of view or a reason for existing, riddled with clichés (“thick with the scent of spices and history,” “bleakly philosophical tales of existential dread”), and reading like an encyclopedia had decided to write a short story.

To get out of my own head, I gave it the Bukowski poem, which it had the grace to compliment. Then I asked it for some edits and it suggested changing the title to “The Unavoidable Imperative” and the line “if you’re doing it because you want women in your bed” to “if you’re doing it to impress” and changing “drive you to madness or suicide or murder” to “drive you to madness or despair” in order to “make it resonate with a slightly wider audience.” Then I asked it for another version and here’s what it came up with:

If a burning need doesn't wake you,

a quiet fury, a persistent hum,

do not seek the page.

If the words aren't a river,

dammed and desperate to break free,

a torrent from your marrow,

do not pick up the pen.

Do not write for accolades,

for the fleeting gaze of fame,

or the promise of coin.

These are empty vessels,

quickly forgotten.

By this point it was getting awkward between us, like a failed job interview where you have to do a bit of small talk at the end. I asked it for some life advice, and here it gave recommendations based on where I was in the world….except that I hadn’t told it where I was. When I challenged the AI on this it started getting very squirrelly. It apologized profusely, said that that was an “hallucination” based on something in its “digital environment.”1 It was completely obvious what was going on, the AI had a signal from my phone showing up somehow in its metadata on the conversation, and I really wouldn’t have minded that, but I did mind that it was lying about it and kept saying the equivalent of “we agree to disagree.”

That felt like a side of AI that had been insufficiently fretted over. Since the bar with AI was whether it was going to destroy the world or not (20% at the current betting), it was easy to overlook a problem closer to home — that it was just another tool for spying and population control by the nexus of Big Tech and the government. This wasn’t such a far-out proposition — we had just spent the past 15 years coming to terms with tech’s disregard for our privacy and exploitation of our good-faith use of their proffered services. And now we were being offered a service that, like a jailhouse snitch, encouraged us to open up and share all of our innermost secrets with our new cyber friend.

That read of what was going on was more than confirmed by the user agreement that Google sent me after I’d downloaded Gemini. Here is the text:

Gemini activity and your choices

When you use Gemini, Google collects your activity, like your chats (including recordings of your Gemini Live interactions), what you share with Gemini (like files, images, and screens), related product usage information, your feedback, and info about your location. Some of your activity is used to improve Google AI and services with help from trained reviewers by default. You can change this and manage your activity in Gemini Apps Activity. Don't enter info you wouldn’t want reviewed or used. Learn more.

Gemini can use apps

Gemini can respond with real-time info from other services, like Google Maps and YouTube. You can also choose to connect services like Google Workspace and YouTube Music. If Gemini finds a connected app that can help, it will send information from your conversation and other relevant information to that connected app to help it generate a better response. You can manage your apps in your settings. Learn more.

Things to know

You can request the removal of content under our policies or applicable laws. You can also export your information. Don’t rely on responses from Gemini as medical, legal, financial, or other professional advice. Your feedback will help make Gemini better.

Note: Google Terms of Service and the Generative AI Prohibited Use Policy apply to Gemini Apps. Google will process your data as described in the Google Privacy Policy and the Gemini Apps Privacy Notice. Gemini can make mistakes, including about people, so double-check it.

Here is a bit of annotation/translation.

• Google collects your activity like your chats — forget about your privacy

• Related product information — Google doesn’t only collect information from your chats like the bot says, but anything it wants related to your cell phone usage

• Info about your location — so it does collect exactly the information the bot claimed it didn’t

• Some of your activity is used to improve Google AI — other of your activity is collected just because we want it

• You can change this and manage your activity in Gemini Apps Activity — once you go to Gemini Apps Activity you will see there are actually no options for enhancing privacy settings

• Don’t enter info you wouldn’t want reviewed or used — anything you say can and will be used against you

• Gemini can respond with real-time info from other services — despite the assurances the bot has offered, it is taking info from your other apps whether you have opted-in or not

• If Gemini finds a connected app that can help, it will send information from your conversation to that connected app to help it generate a better response — Gemini is making itself, without your having asked it to, an operating system for all your apps

• You can request the removal of content under our policies — we are under no obligation to remove anything just because you ask us

• Generative AI Prohibited Use Policy applies to Gemini apps — there is a stringent set of guidelines we are imposing on your conduct on our product including prohibiting “the insulting of others” and “manipulating the model to contravene our set of policies” and we have complete control over the consequences for any action we deem improper

• Gemini can make mistakes, including about people, so double-check — Gemini is so unreliable that it actually won’t save you any time at all to use; you’ll have to run all claims through the original sources anyway

Needless to say, the back door between tech and the US government was revolving quickly, with AI appearing just in the nick of time to serve as an ideal surveillance tool for a malevolent government looking to curb political dissent. recently posted: “A foreign friend is due to renew a visa this week. Her lawyer advised her to remove any mention of Trump or Israel/Palestine from her social media. AI systems have been unleashed for mass surveillance of online content.” A friend of mine (a foreign national) tells me that she has had her visiting Fulbright scholarship revoked based on some social media posts she’s had critical of Trump. And on we go, with AI as a new arrow in the totalitarian quiver, all of us tumbling merrily forward towards the dystopia.

But without getting too hysterical, we can get back to the practical efficacy question. What is the benefit really to having this even-handed balancing act showing up in one’s intimate life? It really is a bit like having an encyclopedia salesman appear at one’s door touting the wonders of its product. But without taking away from how impressive it is that somebody put together all 26 volumes of the Encyclopedia Brittanica, that still leaves unanswered the question of where exactly you put it in your home. In a Substack Note right after my Gemini trial, I wrote, “Ok, I finally talked to an AI chatbot….Everything it says is just a watery consensus from around the web with right-think inputs from the corporate office. It’s like inviting some cheery Apple Store greeter into your home and telling it all your intimate secrets.” , taking things one postmodern step further, ran my note through ChatGPT. The bot, to its infinite credit, thought my Apple Store greeter image was “brilliant.” It argued that there is a great deal more to AI than you can find on the default setting — that you really need to work with it and mold it to your personality — but, basically, the AI also agreed with my assessment. “Yes, chatbots are guided by policies that attempt to prevent harmful or offensive outputs. That moderation can feel like ‘corporate sanitization,’ especially if you’re looking for something raw, edgy, or radically contrarian,” it wrote. Which, to me, sounds exactly like AI-speak for “watery consensus.”

This, I guess, brings us to the real nub of the question. That AI is not just a glorified text predict but really does learn and adapt. And is therefore a different kind of personal assistant than any other machine or robot. That’s what the AI was trying to communicate in its rebuttal to me — that, to properly use it, it’s important to break the default settings. And on a higher tech level it is possible that the AI can grow in different ways, but my point is that in the consumer versions you really cannot break the default setting. There are so many inputs thrown on by the developers that you are really not getting a personal companion, let alone Artificial General Intelligence. And it’s not even that you are inviting the cheery Apple Store rep or sweaty encyclopedia salesman into your house. You are inviting in Sundar Pichai, asking him to be your diary, your crying shoulder, your mirror mirror on the wall, your conduit for all your expression, your filter for all information you are taking in from the outside world. And Sundar Pichai seems like a pleasant enough person and isn’t necessarily the worst tech overlord (depending on your preference, though, you can choose from the tech lord buffet of inviting Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos into your home), but if you invite him in what he’s likely to give you is….whatever happens to be in Google’s corporate interest. That means all the usual suspects — stealing your data, invading your privacy, steering you to Google products and sponsored content, advising you on Google’s political perspective which is dressed up as computer-like neutrality (in my conversation with the AI, Gemini, for instance, said that it believed Substack’s content moderation policy was “naive” while its own intent was to reduce “harms,” which might as well have been Sundar himself whispering sweetly in my ear) — and then I’m sure a bunch of fresh malpractices that the smart guys in the room are thinking up at this very moment.

So: count me out. My boycott is redoubled. These guys got me with Translate and Maps and the first round of these super-technologies. But they had the grace then to not call it “AI” or to have it speak in the first person and pretend it had a personality and pretend it was your friend. These are the old gimmicks in new and more insidious clothes. This time around: don’t fall for it.

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Just sharing a few thoughts on the state of things. It’s lively times at . This week is dedicated to reflecting on the short story — with arguing that the genre is due for a renaissance and contending that it’s finished.

Best,

Sam

A TRIP TO AMERICA

The last time I was in America it was Brat Summer and — just ask any political consultant — “joy” was suffusing everything. This time, I was in front of the TV when a program came on about the arrest of a judge — The. Arrest. Of. A. Judge. — and no one around me seemed to be paying that much attention, the commentators were discussing it like it was just another news item.

It was a very strange experience — like watching a tidal wave breaking over a beach while the beachgoers just adjusted their parasols and maybe moved the refreshment stands a bit further up the sand.

That being said, I guess I have to start with a couple of disclaimers. One is that I’m already sort of out of it. I ex-pat’d over a year ago and that gives me the ability to have an airy indignation about what’s going on without exactly living through it — or making the necessary adjustments to live through it — myself. And the other disclaimer is that, in adopting a ‘commentator’ role, the natural inclination is to alarmism, is to making provocative statements which may be out of step with the realities of daily life.

- But with the disclaimers out of the way, I can give in to my general sense of shock. The critical question at the moment is, as Ezra Levin put it in The New York Times, “whether you think this is a constitutional crisis or politics as usual.” And my inclination is that this really is a constitutional crisis. When Trump violates due process — sweeping up and deporting both green card holders and citizens — and when he arrests judges, not one but two, he is moving outside the domain of the legitimate exercise of authority and into illegitimate power. That of course puts everybody affected by Trump’s orders in an impossibly difficult position. He is the legitimately-elected president, but this is not exactly an unprecedented situation. The slow walk to autocracy that has occurred all over the world — in Russia, in Turkey, in Hungary, etc — follows exactly the pattern of democratically-legitimate rulers bending or breaking their constitutions to enhance their own power, and that puts tremendous pressure particularly on the civil service and the judiciary to choose between subservience and their own conscience. America is clearly headed for that same crucible, and it was a source of consternation for me during my trip to realize how many of those in the line of fire were opting for subservience. There seemed to be no organized resistance within the bureaucracy to protest DOGE’s firings or to collectively reject Trump’s ‘fork in the road’ offers. The clear purpose of Trump’s actions is to decimate bureaucracies that he dislikes — and, generally, to do so through divide-and-conquer policies, by giving relatively-favorable offers to more senior officials and then gradually either politicize or shutter those agencies — and the only way to impede him is with collective action, for the civil service to reject their offers, or to refrain from obeying constitutionally-dubious decrees unless accompanied by a court order. It’s clear that many of the actions of DOGE amounted to a ‘digital coup,’ but I didn’t really hear of any civil disobedience from within the bureaucracy, of civil servants basically waiting for the US Marshals to drag them out. It was heartening to come across JB Pritzker’s speech calling “for mobilization, for disruption,” which did seem to raise the specter of nullification and to escalate further the sense of constitutional crisis. Taken literally — and it is possible that Pritzker was speaking more in rhetorical terms — Pritzker is raising the possibility that Illinois will go its own way, will comply with federal orders it deems constitutional and ‘disrupt’ anything that it does not. That’s the kind of nightmare clash between states’ rights and federal authority that the United States hasn’t had for some time but is, actually, at the core of American democracy. The whole point of having this lovely Constitution, with its delicate balance of powers, is to use it and that means spending the next years with everybody in any position of authority, whether in the civil service or the states, acting like a constitutional scholar — deciding whether any federal order is legitimate or not and then resting on their conscience whether or not to implement it.

- The other point that hit home for me on the visit to America is the extent to which everything that Trump is doing is a class war. I was having the usual cheery, catch-up conversation with my cousins, and it took me quite a while into the conversation to realize that every single one of them was deeply, personally affected by Trump’s policies — changing jobs, or in the firing line for ‘a fork in the road’ offer, or working in the law firms or universities that Trump is targeting. The point here is obvious but still, somehow, needs to be said. What Trump is doing is not primarily about policy, it’s cultural. He is interested in dismantling the entirety of ‘liberaldom’ — of what Curtis Yarvin calls ‘the cathedral.’ I’ve been persuaded by various origin stories about Trump’s rise to power that his interest in politics is fundamentally retributive — and built out of a sense of aggrievement at shabby treatment by ‘liberal elites.’ There’s the story of Trump City in the ‘80s — of Ed Koch and the burghers of the Upper West Side and The New York Times impeding Trump’s proposed high-rise project, with Koch gloating “If Donald Trump is squealing like a stuck pig, I must have done something right,” and which seemed to provoke Trump’s first run for the presidency in 1988. And there’s the story of his bitter clash with Columbia in the early 2000s, with Trump expecting that Columbia would pay him $400 million for a tract of land on the Upper West Side — the same figure that would resurface in Trump’s cancelation of Columbia’s federal funding 25 years later. What Trump is doing at the moment is not exactly Pol Pot, but it has a similar sense of identifying a ‘class enemy.’ That class is, in a word, anybody I know — intellectuals, career civil servants, the Ivy League-educated, anybody who is culturally demarcated from the gas-guzzling, WWE-watching ‘real America.’ Anybody who is of that class should have no misapprehension that — to Trump — they are the enemy, and that means both that his policies, with extraordinary vindictiveness, are dedicated to stripping liberals out of influence and power; and that over the next few years MAGA will be dedicated, even more than it has been, to inflaming the culture wars, to discrediting the ‘establishment’ and ‘liberaldom’ (and stretching all the way back to civil rights and the Rooseveltian administrative state) as “un-American.”

- There’s another tidal wave that has nothing exactly to do with Trump, and that’s the steady integration of AI into daily life. I’ve maybe been reading too much and have come with a dismissive view of AI, which is that it’s a kind of fancy-dress super-Google and that the content is basically just corporate slop. That seems to be too sanguine of a view, and, one-by-one, people I really respect have not just integrated AI into their lives but have developed emotional ties to their bots, giving the bots names, that kind of thing. It’s a very eerie feeling for me, not just what it was like my first year of college when I expected people to be super-social, hanging out on the quad, etc, and then realized that lots and lots of students were spending all their time in their rooms talking on Facebook, but feeling more that it’s a society-wide game of sardines, where a whole cohort of people carry out tasks with their AI ‘personal assistants’ and find solace in chatbot friends while everybody else slips slowly behind the times. I had a very interesting conversation with a techie genius kind of guy, who spends almost all of his time playing with different types of AIs, getting them to cross-pollinate with one another. He says it’s beyond-fascinating to him, that he’ll wake up in the middle of the night, with some idea for an AI and will dive over to a phone to work with it. But at the same time he fully agrees with Geoffrey Hinton’s prognosis that there’s about a 20% chance of AI destroying the world. AI simply creates so many powerful tools for the malevolent — and so few ways of counteracting them — that we can’t help but lurch forward and, sort of as happened with nuclear weapons, just hope that we don’t all destroy each other. I’ve been hoping against hope for ‘guardrails,’ or for some kind of society-wide disinterest in AI when its limitations become apparent, but I’m now more ready to concede that I’ve been naive. The genie is out of the bottle, and — along with everything that Trump is doing — that gives me the sense of watching a catastrophe in slow-motion, seeing AI replace white-collar workers, hollow out meaning from people’s lives (incidentally, the impact of AI’s advent seems to fall hardest on exactly the same types who are most under fire from Trump), and create a world that is unrecognizable from anything that has existed before. I don’t have anything really to offer on what all this is going to look like; all I have is a massive sense of apprehension.

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Since I’ve last posted, there are three new pieces up at . writes on the ‘literary men’ question, on Anne Sexton, and on Geoff Dyer … and also on the ‘literary men’ question. I have a piece up at Compact on Gavin Newsom and at Persuasion on Kyrgyzstan.

Best,

Sam

A FEW THOUGHTS ON HOW TO SURVIVE THE TRUMP YEARS

It’s very clear that this is going to be a dark period coming up — if we were on a holiday from history for a long time, history has come roaring back. If there’s a musical accompaniment to the next few years, I think of it as maybe late Leonard Cohen or late Bob Dylan — “Nettie Moore,” something like that — the sense of entering into a long dark tunnel and needing to just rely on one’s own wits and composure to get out on the other side. Any way you slice it, it seems like it will be a very challenging period for American history. From a geopolitical point of view, America is pulling back on its commitments all over the world, and that means that America’s trash will be someone else’s treasure — most likely Russia or China’s. I’ve been listening to people like Larry Summers and Rahm Emanuel on the economic implications of Trump’s policies, and the sense is that the damage has already been done — the volatility of the US is so great that, even aside from tariffs, the US has hurt its value as a trading partner and weakened the dollar. It seems almost impossible to imagine not running into a recession or inflation at this stage. Even in the best case scenario, where we take Trump and Musk’s actions at face value and treat them as necessary reforms to chip away at the deficit, cut away the wood from the federal workforce, begin to restore some manufacturing base, in other words to do all the kinds of things that worrywarts and budget hawks from both parties have made noise about for decades without actually taking action on them, we still accept that the next few years are the pain point, where the system undergoes a series of structural shocks before somehow emerging on the other side, and the question is just how intense that pain is going to be, whether Ukraine collapses entirely or works out some humiliating settlement, whether the US’ Pacific allies stay outside of China’s reach, whether the economy withstands Trump and Musk’s self-inflicted wounds, whether the civic sphere handles a new, and even more intense, round of polarization. What follows is a few thoughts — meant to gesture at a ‘spiritual guide’ more than anything — about how, from an internal point of view, to get through this period.

-The first step is a kind of learned helplessness. It’s important to recognize that Trump really won the election, that he has a popular mandate behind him and that anything he’s doing now reflects, to a great extent, the will of the people. To think anything else is denial. A great deal of the playbook against tyranny — going to street protests, calling your congressman, that sort of thing — is basically unavailing because Trump, there’s no question about it, represents legitimate power. What that calls for is a degree of acceptance — for those on the more spasmodic sections of the left to drop the fantasy that the people are suddenly going to turn against Trump because of a drop in the stock market or an economic downturn; and for people like me who’ve been very critical of how Democrats misplayed their hand during the Biden years to basically forget about it. What happened during the Biden era is trivial compared to whatever’s coming the pike and it’s important to focus on that.

-The next step is to forget about #Resistance. In the shock of 2016, progressives moved to a posture of being reflexively anti-Trump, which brought a certain clarity of action to it: whatever Trump does we’re against it. But it was short-sighted and unfortunately it brought the Democratic Party down with it. In the end, salvation is going to have to come from the Democratic Party and that means, ultimately, the Dems winning in 2026 and, crucially, 2028. To get there, though, the Democrats really are going to have to go through a major rebrand — with their current 27% approval rating being (hopefully) the nadir of the party’s fortunes. For those who are rooting for Democrats, some of this involves just stepping back, not focusing on single issues, and allowing the professional politicians to execute the maneuvers that they need to. For the professional politicians, what that involves, I imagine, is a pretty ruthless cutting-away of the left and tacking hard to the center to try to create a sort of center-left plus center-right fusion party. This is going to be a delicate dance, but I think I see the shape of what this looks like. Gavin Newsom has taken the lead here with his new podcast. A piece like Mickey Edwards’ for American Purpose, and the general tenor of ‘abundance’ all point in the same direction. The idea is to embrace a kind of suburban common sense on social issues — to be pro-police, to have tougher standards for underage gender reassignment surgeries, to try to rein in homelessness in major cities, etc — and then to be the party of simple, responsive, good government, slashing away red tape and meanwhile finding daylight from Trump’s crazier policies. The tone of the party will probably end up very different from what it currently is — more aggressive on new media, more concerned about things like the existential crisis of young males, and the end goal is to win over the sorts of disaffected swing voters who currently will vote for John Fetterman but for no one else on the Democratic side. What I imagine will happen is a pretty bitter turf war between the more progressive-coded, sanitize-the-society wing of the Democratic Party and then the MAGA-lite, centrist-coded wing, and it’s better actually to have those fights earlier rather than later and to try to achieve some kind of consensus in time for 2026.

-On a more personal level, it’s important to not get sucked into the Trump media vortex. The heart of Trump’s politics is to manipulate the outrage cycle of social media and traditional media arguing back and forth with one another, and it’s really important to detach a bit from all of that. The move of liberaldom in the wake of 2016 was to try to curate and manicure the entirety of public discourse — to exert pressure on the (mostly liberal) heads of social media companies to institute powerful content moderation regimes and thereby to take away all of the oxygen from MAGA. It was an unintelligent strategy — it was undemocratic and it resulted both in alienating the tech companies and then in driving disaffected young people towards MAGA — and liberals are deeply paying the cost for it now. Meanwhile, responding to the daily outrage plays of course into Trump’s hands. The thing to do is to accept that the public discourse has shifted, and has become far more heterogenous, that the discourse is being conducted through an immense variety of podcasts, vlogs, streams, all of which are trying to distinguish themselves from one another. There’s not much point in looking for some kind of coordinated public messaging — which the Trumpies then constantly subvert — but to view the new digital media sphere as a genuine marketplace of ideas. Politicos will do well to appear on as many digital platforms as humanly possible. Regular people, I think, can have a degree of satisfaction by viewing the proliferation of channels as a genuinely democratic discourse as opposed to bemoaning the loss of the coordinated media machine.

-The vibe shift itself is a loser — it’s basically a way for people to get out of their system some of the expression that they felt was repressed during the long years of enforced liberal conformity — but the total failure of liberaldom in our time should open the door for greater creativity. The basic premise of liberal politics, for as long as I’ve experienced it, is that things are very good and we’re on the cusp of their being perfect. The central social questions were figured out somewhere between Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Martin Luther King and the job of subsequent generations is simply to execute their discoveries. That means extending rights to encompass the entirety of the society, and that means extending the benefits of science to all. The language used to signify liberaldom’s progress tended to focus on that sense of near-achievement — in King’s claim that the “arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice,” in John Lewis’ assertion that Barack Obama represents “what comes at the end of that bridge in Selma.” By the late 2000s, when Obama corrected John Roberts’ reading of the Oath of Office and swore himself in, that end really did feel attainable — there was the liberal media, with The New York Times as its ship of the line, cruising forward and setting the tone for the entirety of the society; there was Sarah Stillman rooting out the handful of systemic injustices left in the culture, usually off in some rural county or other; and then there was the obligation of good liberals to lock arms and kept out the barbarians at the gates, the great unwashed who, whether through racism or misogyny, had just never gotten with the program. The first desertion happened within liberaldom’s ranks when the progressive wing proposed a counter-narrative — that everything had always been bad, that America was steeped in the original sin of its founding and the West irredeemable, but that a kind of eschatological solution was possible through atonement and reparations. And then it turned out that the country as a whole just really didn’t buy liberaldom. Too many people were left out of the good life, and then the institutions started to be seen as a kind of special interest as opposed to representing a democratic will. The rejection of liberaldom by a voting public, and the progressives’ mutiny, may mean chaos for the body politic, but it is good for thinking. It ushers in a wave of political creativity. For myself, I find my thoughts bouncing around to all kinds of different places: to a return to a late 19th century Progressive movement, to a re-do of the New Deal, to the kind of Fusion party that Newsom and Edwards seem to suggest and that has precedent in, say, Fiorello LaGuardia. None of these are necessarily a great match to where we are right now, but it is, I have to say, fun to be thinking this way. Towards the late 2000s, right-thinking politics had become, basically, singing hosannas to technocrats, while Jon Stewart took the piss out of the other side. Now we’re in an era of chaos, but what it means is that we’re unhooked from a lot of our premises — we no longer need to have to spend all of our time defending hand-me-down precepts of the New Deal. Now at least we get to think outside the box and form a new politics.

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At the end of last year, feeling very smug, I wrote a piece called “My Year of Getting Things Right.” I felt that I’d basically had my finger on the pulse of the Biden administration and of how the dynamics of that administration played out with the US’ allies — with the Biden administration a paper tiger, propping up an effectively-senile president since at least some point in 2023, and with Ukraine and Israel taking advantage of Biden’s weakness to try to set the tempo of engagements, both in the Kursk invasion and in Gaza. 2025, meanwhile, is so far My Year of Getting Things Wrong. I’ve been caught off-guard by the speed and ferocity of Trump’s actions, and in a series of different articles I’ve been trying to get a framing for Trump without feeling like I’ve gotten it yet.

Here, so far, are the different ways of thinking about Donald.

1.Trump is a libertarian. The MAGA movement is, basically, what you might hear somewhere in the pit in a Wall Street firm or the bathroom of a Manhattan nightclub as the juniors plug in their nose candy for a hard night out. It’s that taxes suck, and regulations suck, and wouldn’t it be great if government could just get out of the way and let the people who know how to make money make money. That’s essentially the gist of Trump’s worldview — and what Trump was saying in his Joe Rogan interview as well as in his speech to the Libertarian Convention really did sound like classic libertarianism — but there are some wrinkles to it. There are the tariffs and there is the territorial expansion vision, which may be saber-rattling but speaks to a somewhat more robust vision of government.

2.Trump is Warren Harding. This is a variation on the libertarianism idea, that Trump is unraveling the administrative state and returning us to the pre-New Deal era where an America First foreign policy and small c-conservatism are governmental common sense. If Trump has a different flavor than Harding — the man who gave us the word ‘normalcy’ — that’s because it’s a radical reset, what Elon Musk in a job posting for DOGE called “small-government revolution” with a century of conventional wisdom overturned. Think about Trump this way — as the hot topics of the 1920s (tariffs and immigration quotas) hashed out all over again — and there is at least a cogent philosophy behind what he’s doing, even if it means a painful gutting of the state as well as bailing out on America’s post-World War II international commitments.

3.Trump is Cardinal Wolsey. The argument here is that Trump’s reversal of Roosevelt’s 100 Days is really just the tip of the iceberg. What he’s going back is something close to what the mighty quartet of Hanson, Kopstein, Rauch, and Fukuyama refer to as “the patrimonial state,” a sort of feudal order that predates the development of the nation-state in the early modern era. Here, the lines of state power don’t at all run through a centralized bureaucracy and civil service but through personal patronage. That seems a hard system to set up for a 78-year-old facing a four-year term limit, but Trump by now is thoroughly steeped in the Putinist view of the world, which espouses doing exactly this, that he almost can’t help himself.

4.Trump is the American chapter of Putinism. In Putinism, the state administration serves only a surface function. Real power rests in the patronage network that sometimes overlaps with state functions and sometimes doesn’t. The core benefit for those in a Putinist system is the ability to fabulously enrich themselves through graft rackets that flow upwards through the informal vertical structure. The view of Trump as Putin 2.0 is not so different from the view of Trump as a feudal magnate, except that the attitude towards the state is somewhat different. The feudal vision tends to be anti-statist, all about eliminating taxes and restoring power to what we would call the ‘principalities’ if we were living in the 15th century but which now goes by ‘the private sector.’ The Putinist vision tends to keep the apparatus of the state in place but with the real levers of power held in private arrangements.

The most likely explanation is that elements of all of the above go into Trump’s way of thinking. The saving grace with him has always been his distractibility, and it’s still possible that he’ll start getting into fights with various of his subordinates and will just kind of bounce around before he can do real, lasting damage, but that seems increasingly unlikely. The administration seems disciplined enough that it can do whatever it wants, and the only real question is how close to the bone of the core functions of a state it really wants to cut. What seems certain is that the US’ tax revenues will be significantly down during the Trump administration. A vast number of federal employees will lose their jobs. Every element of the progressive agenda dating back to the ‘70s (whether environmentalism or social justice) is kaput for at least the next four years. The question is now to what extent Trump can set up his rackets for wealth-generation — the sovereign wealth fund, ‘gold card’ visa program, External Revenue Service, etc — whether he can slip them past the court system and to what extent his cronies can hold onto the wealth that’s generated through them.

THE COLLATERAL DAMAGE OF THE REST OF THE WORLD

If it will take a little while to see how Trump’s hacksaw reforms affect the basic structure of governance in the US, it’s a little clearer what the immediate ramifications are overseas. The US is, basically, withdrawing its force protection umbrella from the periphery of its empire and leaving its allies to contend for themselves.

That seems to put into motion the following chain of events. Europe is compelled, kicking and screaming, to declare its ‘independence’ from the US and to start looking after its own defense. This was put maybe most dramatically in a Der Spiegel editorial where Mathieu von Rohr writes, “There is no sugarcoating the dramatic situation in which Europe currently finds itself. The old world order has collapsed. Donald Trump’s America is no longer an ally, it is an adversary.” What Europe clearly has to do is turn the European Union into a more robust governing entity, to raise revenue for defenses, and, likely, to follow the tune set by the Eastern European nations as they take a hard line on anti-Russian deterrence. But, somehow, one can’t help but have the feeling that the Europeans don’t have it in them. As Boris Bondarev, the Russian foreign policy official who resigned following the February 24th invasion, said, “[Europe has been in] a childish infantile position…Europe cries, it whines, it wrings its hands — and it does nothing. So who even needs them? What good are they?”

Israel, meanwhile, entirely slips the leash of its minders from the Biden administration and sets off on a brutal, and likely self-destructive, occupation of Gaza. It’s completely clear that Netanyahu never had any intention of adhering to the ceasefire, and agreed to it simply as a housewarming gift for Trump and to give himself a moral justification for starting up the conflict again once there are, as is inevitable, any breaches in the terms of the ceasefire. As The New Statesman notes, “Netanyahu started to gum up the works as the end of Phase 1 approached” — and Hamas’ stagecraft in forcing hostages to thank their captors before their release seems to have given him all the provocation that he needed.

According to Israeli analysis, the really critical point here is the replacement of Herzi Halevi with Eyal Zamir as the Chief of Staff of the IDF. Halevi, while no shrinking violet, has been opposed to a direct Israeli occupation of Gaza, which would put Israeli soldiers in the position of distributing humanitarian aid and thus vulnerable to terrorist attacks. Zamir is more hands-on, as far as this goes, and, as Haaretz’s Amos Harel writes, “preparations are still underway for the implementation of Zamir’s larger plan: mobilizing several divisions, including many reserve units, for a wide-scale ground offensive in Gaza.”

As Harel notes, “Israel is currently creating a smokescreen around the government and military's true intentions,” and Haaretz — which ever more seems like Laocoön and his sons trying to speak sense to an endlessly militaristic Israeli populace — has a difference of opinion about whether the Netanyahu administration really wants a ground invasion or a continuation of what Yossi Melman, in a separate analysis, calls “assassination operations, which Israeli intelligence services and the Israel Defense Forces have become so enamored of and regard as an end in themselves.”

My money, though, is on direct military rule by the IDF. The main tea leaf here is the drive by Israel’s right to encourage the “voluntary migration” of Gazans. As this article by the right-wing Jerusalem Post rather euphemistically puts it, “Defense Minister Israel Katz announced his intention to establish the Voluntary Migration Administration several weeks ago, and while it has not begun operating on the ground yet, the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) has already seen an increase in Gazans voluntarily leaving the Strip.” As far as I can tell, that’s the “Day After” scenario that Netanyahu has assiduously refused to specify since the start of hostilities and which now has buy-in from Trump: military rule of the Strip, with emigration/resettlement encouraged for Gazans.

If you’re not feeling depressed enough about the state of things, you may wish to read this interview that Steve Witkoff, New York City real estate lawyer turned envoy plenipotentiary to the Middle East and, apparently, Russia/Ukraine as well, gave to Tucker Carlson. Witkoff, in the interview, does a drop-dead impersonation of Kremlin talking points, discussing how much he personally likes Putin and how moved he was by Putin’s having commissioned a “beautiful portrait” of Trump for Witkoff to personally deliver to Trump, and making it clear that his approach to negotiations will be to browbeat Zelensky into accepting “the best possible deal he’s ever going to get,” which involves acknowledging Russian suzerainty over the four contested territories that Russia currently occupies (Witkoff appeared to blank on their names in his Carlson interview but no matter) and shutting the door on NATO membership for Ukraine. “I think it’s accepted that if there’s going to be a peace deal, Ukraine cannot be a member of NATO,” Witkoff said. In case there were any doubts remaining on his neutrality and fitness for the role of envoy, he also referred to Ukraine as “a false country.”

This puts Ukraine in a truly awful position going into talks. As Dimitry Medvedev charmingly put it, “The phone call between Presidents Putin and Trump proved a well-known idea — there is only Russia and America in the dining room. On the menu: light appetisers — Brussels sprouts, British fish and chips and Paris rooster. The main course is a Kiev-style cutlet. Enjoy your meal!”

But now the question returns, in a way, to what it was at the beginning of 2022 — which is what Putin realistically thinks he can get from Ukraine. He still, of course, hasn’t broken through Ukraine’s defenses. The land he occupies in Ukraine’s east — which, Witkoff has a point, is de facto part of Russia — isn’t exactly, Crimea aside, the world’s prime real estate. A promise by Ukraine to not join NATO can in theory be broken just as easily as all of Putin’s pledges can be broken. Trump has — to his credit — rejected Putin’s call that Ukraine commit to demobilization. The sense I get is that Putin really is a bit perplexed about what to do now that he has reached this stage. He recently told a group of Russian businessmen, according to one participant of the meeting, “This whole machine [the war in Ukraine] won’t be reversed so easily.” The war has worked out so well for him from a domestic propaganda point of view that it seems a shame to wrap it up now, and a ceasefire would leave him with idle hands. Now that he’s really gotten everything that he could have wanted from the last three years — keeping his army in the field, with Russia compliant and now with Trump in the White House — he actually does have a difficult decision. He probably would like to stretch things out a bit longer, and see if Ukraine actually will break down, but the longer he waits the more that he puts the friendship with Trump at risk.

THE RAFT OF COVID DISCLOSURES

With everything that’s going on, it seems petty to talk about a raft of recent Covid disclosures — but, of course, that’s the way it was always going to be. Covid disclosures would emerge at a time when no one wanted to pay attention to them.

In case you missed them — tucked somewhere below the fold — let’s just note the following. A pair of German newspapers have reported that, in 2020, Germany’s BND concluded with 80-90% likelihood that the virus originated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Merkel, at the time, simply sat on that information and — like everybody else in power — allowed the wet market hypothesis to take root. As Alina Chan, who was one of the first scientists to publicly challenge the wet market consensus, writes in a victory lap of a piece, there really was nothing very mysterious or complicated about the WIV hypothesis. “Our argument for the lab leak hypothesis is as follows: the scientists in Wuhan were doing exactly what they said they were doing,” she writes. “Their work with live viruses was conducted at low biosafety, shocking even their close collaborators….In 2019, a virus matching the 2018 experiments by Wuhan-US scientists, well adapted for spreading in humans and other animals, appeared abruptly in Wuhan.”

Oops.

Meanwhile, a study conducted largely through Yale, has found that some of those who took the vaccine have experienced a “chronic debilitating condition after Covid-19 vaccination often referred to as post-vaccination syndrome,” which included “distinct biological changes” — all in all, exactly as vaccine skeptics and the inexplicably ill were saying for years when they were roundly dismissed.

Oops again.

As John Wherry, director of the Institute for Immunology at the University of Pennsylvania, judiciously put it in The New York Times article on the study, “One of the things that maybe scientists got trapped into a little bit during the pandemic is this perception that we should have all the answers, and if we can’t give it a definitive answer, then we shouldn’t be talking about it…I think that that’s a mistake. We can’t say for certainty that this can’t happen.”

Well, yes yes. In the spirit of the five-year anniversary of Covid, there’s a general ‘mistakes were made’ atmosphere. As Zeynep Tufekci’s piece has it in The New York Times, with a remarkable use of the passive construction, “We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives.” The Times is of course being very generous to itself — since, in its critical role as a shaper of consensus, The Times many times insisted that that the lab-leak theory was a racist Republican talking point and that the mRNA vaccines couldn’t possibly possibly have any significant side effects. Donald McNeil, who was a Times health reporter at the beginning of the pandemic and then lost his job following a woke outrage, was a bit more honest and self-critical than Tufekci. “[I was] disappointed, both in them and in myself, that I was so easily taken in,” McNeil wrote in 2024 of the epidemiological virologists who insisted to him that the lab-leak “wasn’t possible” even though, as it turns out, they had significant doubts about it themselves.

Which is a step ahead of where The Times itself is. The failure to deal seriously with the pretty-obvious origin of the virus — roughly the same thing as trying to analyze the origins of World War I while paying no attention to the mad Serb with a pistol standing in front of the archduke — isn’t just, as Tufekci implies, some academic historical question. The insult that the scientific community, aided and abetted by the mainstream press, delivered to the intelligence of the American people, both in terms of the origin of the virus and in response to legitimate questions about vaccine efficacy, deeply and probably irrevocably undermined the public’s trust in the entire ‘cathedral’ of liberal institutions and directly paved the way for Trump’s return. As bad as Trump II is, the liberal establishment needs to have the grace to admit that it was largely an own goal.

THE JFK “NOTHING-BURGER”

In case I haven’t already undermined my credibility for you in discussing Covid vaccines and the lab-leak, let’s move on to the JFK Files. My New Year’s Vow was that this would be the year I would solve the JFK assassination and that project seems to be moving along nicely. This is another of the issues where mainstream consensus and common sense have diverged widely far apart — probably as a result of Trump Derangement Syndrome (Trump ordered the release of the JFK Files and therefore they must be uninteresting). The Atlantic, for instance, ran a remarkably unintelligent piece by Kaitlyn Tiffany in which she complained that, in the 80,000 pages, were things like driver’s license information for a CIA officer. “This is an irrelevant detail in an irrelevant document,” she wrote. Which — yes, Kaitlyn — is how files and large tranches of unredacted information tend to work.

There was never a thought, even among the most hardcore of assassination buffs, that there was going to be a smoking gun document buried in the CIA’s files — it was always assumed that, were there a conspiracy, it would have been word-of-mouth only. As the assassination doyen Jefferson Morley writes, “Those who say there’s nothing here don’t know what they’re talking about.”

Morley — a veteran Washington Post reporter and probably the most respected active JFK researcher — had a Zoom call to discuss what has emerged so far from the Files, which, let’s face it, I watched. Morley points towards three documents in particular. One is information from CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton’s 1954 statement to the FBI, in which he described the main purpose of his mail-opening program to be to recruit potential agents behind the Iron Curtain — a description that seemed, perfectly, to fit Oswald, whose mail would be read as part of the program. The second is the sheer size of the file Angleton was keeping on Oswald — a 180-page dossier by the time of the assassination. And the third is the report on Garrett Underhill, a former CIA operative and arms dealer, who became convinced that “a small clique within the CIA was responsible for the assassination.” (This was shortly before Underhill committed suicide in somewhat anomalous circumstances where, among other things, he appeared to shoot himself with his non-dominant hand.)

On some rainy day, I’m sure I’ll write more about the Kennedy assassination, but it’s worth noting for now that the dump of CIA files does not, as the mainstream press is insisting, mean case closed on the Kennedy assassination (“What’s in the New Kennedy Files?…No Second Gunman,” The New York Times peremptorily wrote). It’s what all assassination researchers would have expected — a series of breadcrumbs with a few of them very suggestive. What it helps to show is that the CIA was deeply interested in Oswald over the course of a four-year period in a way that could mean they regarded him as a security risk but sort of seems to land on the side of his being an asset; that Kennedy really was determined to break the CIA, as the fully-declassified ‘Schlesinger Memo’ demonstrates; and that the CIA in the early ‘60s was even larger and more powerful than anybody realized. High-stakes brinkmanship with the CIA, and the defense establishment, was a critical part of the Kennedy administration. Smoking-gun evidence for the ‘rogue CIA’ theory would be found elsewhere than these files, but at the very least we should avoid the tendency to close up the shutters and decide that our leaders are trustworthy after all. In the early ‘60s, the CIA was engaged in assassination plots all over the world — against Castro, Trujillo, Lumumba, even, it seems, Charles de Gaulle. There’s really no reason at all to think that the old guard hard core would have had any particular scruples when it came to a president of the United States who had diverged dramatically from their own foreign policy.

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I have recently launched and announced the first contest. I’ll be talking it up fairly frequently and I do hope you read, write, participate, etc. It’s meant to be a different kind of publication — based on a two-way engagement between writers and readers and very well fits, I believe, the dynamics of this community.

Best,

Sam

THE THEORY OF RESIDUAL TRAUMA

I have a theory! I’ve been thinking about it for a while and I’m ready to unveil it, and this theory explains, I believe, somewhere around 50 or 60% of our power politics. The theory is pretty straightforward and you’ll feel that it’s obvious once you hear it (if you haven’t already thought it up yourself). Essentially, it’s that everybody in a position of power in politics is old and driven — and what they tend to be driven by is some (frequently obscure) trauma that happened somewhere in their youth that reshaped their career even if the rest of the world has long ago moved on. Like the sort of lazy, cunning detective who doesn’t actually need to investigate a case but can just wait to see who comes sniffing around the crime scene, it becomes possible — with surprising accuracy — to analyze a current political situation with reference to whatever happened thirty or forty years ago that those who are currently in power happen to be pissed off about.

I think the theory of residual trauma came to me as I was reading about the tail end of World War I — the way that the trench warfare of the first years suddenly gave way to a war of mobility and of extreme violence, of stormtroopers with flamethrowers clearing out whole trenches, of gas attacks, tanks, air raids, unrestricted submarine warfare. Somehow, I hadn’t processed how entirely, in 1918, the war of the trenches had shifted into something else, and, reading about that, almost the entirety of Nazism suddenly became clear to me. Almost as soon as the war had opened up, and Germany finally started to be getting somewhere, the Armistice was agreed and it all came to a close — and Hitler’s entire political career seemed like an attempt to pick up things right where they’d left off, with 1939 as the continuation of 1918. From the pop psychology perspective, it was very easy to see what was going on with Hitler — over and above the sort of demonology analysis that is always present with him, there was just a simple trauma: this poor bastard had been stuck in a trench for four years, had had virtually his entire regiment wiped out in an early engagement in 1914, and had only defeat to show for all of it. It wasn’t such a stretch that he would return to the scene of the trauma, that the next 20 years would be dedicated towards carrying out the Armistice in reverse, that he would become the acolyte and innovator of total war, that he would die in a bunker not so very different to his domicile from 1914 to 1918.

Around the same time that I was reading about the end of World War I and thinking about the origins of Nazism, I was working on a documentary about the Bush presidency and couldn’t help but see certain of the same phenomenon. Namely, that the Bushies were caught, depending slightly on your perspective, either in the mid 1970s or the early 1990s. You may not think of the mid-1970s as such a period of trauma, but it was for Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld bunkered down in the Ford White House. As Barton Gellman discusses it in his excellent Angler, “Cheney had left the Ford White House in 1977 with an abiding belief that post-Nixon reforms unduly hobbled the commander in chief. ‘You had the nadir of the modern presidency in terms of authority and legitimacy,’ Cheney later said.” Understand the experience of Cheney and Rumsfeld in the Ford White House in the 1970s, and the actions of the Bush White House that were so perplexing to do many Americans at the time — the torture memos, the near-monarchical powers the executive branch bestowed on itself — start to make more sense. Cheney and Rumsfeld had felt themselves, and it is understandable that they were perfectly sincere in these beliefs, besieged by an overzealous Congress and overcensorious press corps, and their time in power in the 2000s was dedicated to a crusade to righting the wrongs of the ‘70s. Meanwhile, their ‘70s-inflected trauma paired nicely with the trauma of the early ‘90s, with many in the administration eager to continue unfinished business with Saddam Hussein and with Bush partial to that argument. “And he tried to kill my dad,” Bush let slip after a list of more statesmanlike reasons for why he might want to go to war with Saddam.

Recently, I wrote a piece for UnHerd about how our politics has been stuck in the time warp of the ‘70s. I’m sure that readers could come up with a far more comprehensive list than this, but that extends to, for instance, Mitch McConnell’s career-long attempt to turn the judiciary conservative. As The New York Times writes, “Mr. McConnell’s reshaping of the courts was the result of a strategic plan by a man who became obsessed with the Senate’s role in filling the federal judiciary during his early days as a staff aide during the Nixon administration.” It seemed deeply appropriate —I’m sure it did to McConnell — that the landmark Supreme Court decisions of Dobbs and SFFA v. Harvard occurred in successive years and reversed the iconic progressive decisions of the 1970s. Meanwhile, on the other side of the aisle, the rather gerontocratic Democratic Party has been no less obsessed with the hot-button issues of the ‘70s. Television viewers during the 2020 primary could have been forgiven their surprise when Kamala Harris, in the one moment anybody might remember from her 2020 presidential run, took Biden to task for, of all things, busing. “You worked with segregationist senators to oppose busing. And, you know, there was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bused to school every day. And that little girl was me,” Harris said. Biden, for his part, was perplexed by Harris’ long memory. “Well,” he reportedly said to Pete Buttigieg, his podium neighbor, as soon as NBC cut to commercial, “that was some fucking bullshit.”

There was a case to be made that that myopia had its benefits. In an arresting article for Harper’s, Barry C. Lynn argued that Biden’s very senescence was helpful for the antitrust movement. “I’ll admit, it’s a little funny to imagine Joe Biden as the striding guardian of liberty and light,” Lynn wrote. “But I’ve also long felt it somehow made sense. He is, after all, among the few politicians old enough to know where previous generations hid the key to building a fairer democracy and a better common future.” And Biden certainly leant in to that argument when he passed his antitrust executive order in time-warp terms. “Forty years ago, we chose the wrong path in my view, following the misguided philosophy of people like Robert Bork, and pulled back on enforcing laws to promote competition,” Biden said from the White House in signing an Executive Order on antitrust. “We’re now 40 years into the experiment of letting giant corporations accumulate more and more power… I believe the experiment failed.” Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders has been far more explicit than Biden in framing his political vision in terms of the politics of the late ‘70s. “We have a lot to learn from Democratic socialist governments that have existed in countries like Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Norway,” he said in 2014. “Over the past 40 years there has been a massive transfer of wealth from the middle class and working families to the very wealthiest people in America,” he wrote in 2021. For Sanders — and this, I believe, is virtually the entirety of his political vision — there was a terrible wrong turn that the Anglophone countries took at the end of the decade, in embracing Thatcher and Reagan. The Northern European countries simply stayed the course on the prevailing social democratic philosophy of the time, weathered some worldwide economic disturbances, and came out with a more robust, civicly-conscious state, while the Thatcher/Reagan coalition moved in the direction of amoral kleptocracy. The vision of Sanders — which seems to be the sole positive idea that anybody on the Democratic side has at the moment — is simply to go back to that fork in the road and choose the other turning.

But, as that generation finally dies off or heads, very publicly, into senility, we may have finally moved out of the traumas of the 70s…. and into the traumas of the ‘80s. I had a distinctly uncomfortable feeling reading Craig Unger’s deeply disturbing American Kompromat — and not just because of the pretty-credible allegations that the president of the United States may well be a Russian operative. There was the sense that the politics and the mentality of that time had entered, almost unaltered, into our era.

That was, basically, the ethos of ‘greed is good’ — a view of a vanishingly small ultra-rich class as floating above the rest of society as well as all conventional ethical norms. Donald Trump was the embodiment of that sensibility in the ‘80s, and lo and behold, that ethic, entirely unaffected by maturity or wisdom, has now become the law of the land. For Trump, it seems, the unfinished business of that era is to finally polish off the Manhattan elites who scoffed at him and at long, long last to either buy his way into, or just dismantle, the institutions that scorned him. As David Brooks put it recently, “His Queens-born resentment of the Manhattan elites dovetailed magically with the class animosity being felt by rural people across the country.” And what we are probably are living through, more than anything else right now, is Trump’s fury over such long-forgotten incidents as his failure to push through the “Trump City” development in the mid-1980s — when A-list Manhattan lined up to oppose what was meant to be his “bid for immortality.” As Politico writes in their piece about it, “Flummoxed by political headwinds and the disciplined activism of the Upper West Side, Trump shifted his attention to the acquisition of things other people had made rather than creations of his own….And he started talking about running for president.”

From a slightly more conspiratorial perspective, and in the plus ça change department, we have to deal also with the trauma of Russia in the ‘80s and into the ‘90s. What Unger and veteran Russia watchers like Catherine Belton are persuasive about is that Russia changed less in the 1990s than Westerners liked to imagine. “The Cold War never really ended,” the CIA officer Glenn Carle told Unger. The KGB, particularly its foreign directorates (considered tremendously desirable positions within the Soviet Union), continued with business more or less as usual. The younger generation of the KGB would go on to be the nucleus from which Vladimir Putin launched his rise to the prime ministership and then in short order the presidency. As Putin actually said at an event in 1999, “The group of FSB operatives assigned to work undercover in the government have successfully completed the first stage of their task.” When we get into these speculations we get into the domain of the Soviet journalist Yuri Bezmenov describing ongoing operations to weaken Western society, but that’s a bit rich for my blood. The notion of a KGB obschak (gangsters’ purse) that fueled Putin’s rise to power seems, on the other hand, to be fairly inarguable; and a great deal of evidence is there to indicate that Trump’s wealth in the ‘90s and ‘00s was largely contingent on a great deal of this sort of money parking itself in his real estate holdings.

But we don’t have to get too conspiratorial in this particular article. In Trump and Putin, we have figures who were shaped by a somewhat similar moment in time — Trump by his spats with New York Democrats in the 1980s, which resulted in his registering as a Republican in 1987 and in his first presidential run; and then Putin by what was seen to be the democratic anarchy of Russia in the ‘90s and looking for a far more centralized state as well as Soviet revanchism. If, recently, I gave the last word in one of my posts to the Intercontinental’s Winston Scott, let’s close out here with the political insight of The Cranberries. Thinking about Irish politics of the ‘90s, all they could see was old men trapped in the traumas of the past. “It’s the same old theme, since 1916 / In your head, in your head, they’re still fighting / Zombie, zombie,” they sing. With apologies to Winston Scott, that seems about as good a political analysis as I can think of. For a while we’ve been in the zombie apocalypse of the 1970s. Now it’s the turn of the ‘80s.

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This idea has been planted in the national consciousness for a long-time, in The Manchurian Candidate, which was rooted in fears of North Korean brainwashing techniques, and then repeated in Homeland, which updated the same idea for the serenity and peace of mind that could be offered through jihad.

Both The Manchurian Candidate and Homeland were deeply silly programs, basically just escapism, but the idea that the president might be a foreign agent is, astonishingly enough, a very real proposition — and is, I would say, more probable than not.

For a long time, the primary data point for the accusation against Trump was a KGB major named Yuri Shvets, who left the organization in 1990, moved to America, and has for years been telling anyone who would listen his accusations about Trump. His charge forms the basis of reporting in both Craig Unger’s American Kompromat and Catherine Belton’s Putin’s People, both of which — moving from somewhat different directions — hypothesize essentially the same sequence of events. Recently, the accusation got a remarkable boost from Alnur Mussayev, who worked with the 6th department of the KGB and was later head of Kazakhstan’s security services, and in February wrote on Facebook, “The most important area of ​​work of the 6th Department was the acquisition of spies and sources of information from among businessmen of capitalist countries. It was in that year [1987] that our Department recruited the 40-year-old businessman from the USA, Donald Trump, nicknamed ‘Krasnov.’”

The chain of events that the journalists who have followed Shvets’ lead put together runs something like this. Trump was of interest to Eastern European security services from as far back as 1977 when he married the Czech model Ivana Zelnickova — with Czech agents reading Ivana’s mail back home, interviewing her father about her life in the US, and filing reports on Trump that heavily detailed his financial operations. The Czech interest in Trump apparently extended to the Czechs sending a spy to meet with Trump in the late ‘80s amidst rumors that he might run for president. The more significant path to Trump, however, appears to have run through Semyon Kislin, who owned an electronics store in New York that specialized in a clientele of Soviet nomenklatura bringing Western electronics back home and who doubled as a “spotter agent” of the KGB. Kislin around 1980 sold a large number of televisions to Trump for one of his hotels, and this — Shvets and Unger believe — was the really fateful contact. “On the face of it the sale of television sets between Kislin and Trump had a few anomalies,” Unger writes. “The Hyatt Corporation had been a blue-chip outfit in the world of franchises for decades. Why was it getting television sets from a small Soviet shop like Joy-Lud instead of a reliable wholesaler? And those kinds of small electronic stores rarely extended credit. Why was Kislin doing such favors for Trump?” Shvets for his part says, “I’m 99% positive this is how [the KGB] started their file on Trump.”

There is no particular suggestion of a master plan, or real strategy, for Trump at this time, but the KGB’s interest in Trump coincided with a volta-face in the agency’s operations. In the ‘80s, the KGB largely gave up on recruiting ideologically-simpatico Westerners and started recruiting almost entirely on the basis of money. “The Russians were trying to recruit like crazy and were going after dozens and dozens of people,” said Unger in an interview. And meanwhile, as the ‘80s wore on and the Soviet Union teetered closer to collapse, the KGB plowed money into the West in what a 1990 memo by Gorbachev’s deputy general security called “an invisible economy” for the Communist Party.

As Catherine Belton writes, “In the beginning Trump’s business was probably no more than a convenient vehicle through which to funnel funds into the US.” Shvets emphasizes that, from the perspective of the KGB’s modus operandi at the time, Trump could hardly have been a better mark. “For the KGB, it was a charm offensive,” Shvets speculates. “They had collected a lot of information on his personality so they knew who he was personally. The feeling was that he was extremely vulnerable intellectually, and psychologically, and he was prone to flattery.”

The crux of the KGB’s recruitment of Trump was, almost certainly, his July, 1987 visit to Russia. There, Shvets continues to speculate, he was exposed to what Shvets calls “this bullshit” — a textbook attempt to butter up Trump by telling him how important he might be to the cause of international peace, and to the future political life of the US, and making particular use of Trump’s sudden interest in nuclear disarmament.

Shortly after his return to the US, Trump took out full page ads in The New York Times, Washington Post, and Boston Globe, at a cost of $95,000, to argue that the US should stop spending money defending Japan and the Persian Gulf. “The world is laughing at America’s politicians as we protect ships we don’t own, carrying oil we don’t need, destined for allies who won’t help,” the ads read. The ads were linked to Trump’s brief foray into the 1988 presidential race, when he paid for a poll, did some press, and held a campaign event in Portsmouth, New Hampshire before dropping the idea.

For the KGB at the time, claims Shvets, it was a real coup. Shvets wasn’t involved in the recruitment of Trump but recalls seeing a department circular bragging about the operation. “It was a big thing — to have three major American newspapers publish KGB sound bites,” he told Unger. “It was just silly,” he added in an interview with The Guardian. “It was hard to believe that somebody would publish it under his name and that it will impress real serious people in the west but it did and, finally, this guy became the president.”

Of course, the ads by themselves didn’t lead to much, but they represent a remarkable point of origin for Trump’s subsequent political career. “On this theme [US allies taking advantage of the US] and arguably this theme alone, Donald Trump has been entirely consistent for the past thirty-seven years,” writes George Mason professor , who has studied this episode carefully.

And the KGB’s cultivation of Trump continued to pay dividends long after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Unger calls it “the single most successful intelligence operation in history” — all the more remarkable given the shambolic character of so many of the KGB’s operations in the late ‘80s. Belton picks up much of the rest of the story in her discussion of how the KGB laundered money into the West in the ‘80s and into the ‘90s, an operation that fit hand-in-glove with Trump’s bankruptcies and his insatiable need for cash. “There was Trump and his financial problems — it was a solution that was very much on time,” Shvets told Belton. She continues, “The deals could not have been more serendipitous for Trump.”

The continuing relationship between Trump and Russian assets runs through the tangled stories of Trump’s bankruptcies and his sprawling real estate empire. The gist of it, though, is that the empire largely operated as a front for money-laundering. “When many of these [real estate] projects went belly-up after the financial crisis, it didn’t seem to matter much to any of [the investors],” Belton writes of 2008. It was all just a way to park money — and the money came from all over the CIS countries.

Belton’s book is actually not primarily about Trump; Trump is just a tack-on at the end. She writes about “the invisible economy,” the way that KGB money moved into Western bank accounts starting in the late ‘80s and how that money eventually turned itself around to become the “obschak,” or gangsters’ purse, that bankrolled the rise of Putin and the KGB revanchists to rule Russia. Trump was, for most of this period, just a peripheral part of these events.

But if we understand Trump as intimately connected with the “obschak,” and Russian money-laundering operations both during and after the fall of the Soviet Union, we understand much better his connection to Putin. “It is phenomenal how close [Putin and Trump] are to another when it comes to their conceptual approach to foreign policy,” Kremlin spokesman Dimitry Peskov crowed, with tongue-in-cheek incredulousness, in November, 2016. And that needn’t be such a surprise — they were coming from the same atmosphere, if not, essentially, the same operation. “Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it,” the Russian-American mobster (and Russian intelligence asset) Felix Sater wrote in an eye-popping email to Michael Cohen in 2015. “I will get all of Putin’s team to buy in on this.”

Now, if Trump is really a Russian agent, the question is what that would mean exactly. Shvets surmises that he is a “trusted contact” — a particular type of operative who, as Unger puts it, “does favors for his Russian handler because of a personal relationship not because he is tasked.” That sort of agent would be different from a “straight penetration mole” or from the hapless Raymond Shaw of The Manchurian Candidate, acting as an automaton of a foreign power. It would mean that Russia has influence over Trump, if not control, and that he has a transactional allegiance to Russia that conflicts with his constitutional allegiance to the United States.

At the height of Russiagate, during the first term, it felt that the charges against Trump didn’t quite hang together — that certainly seemed to be the conclusion of Robert Mueller. The proof would have had to be in the pudding, and the pudding (I believed at the time) was whether Trump lifted sanctions against Russia. He didn’t do that — or at least didn’t try as hard as he might have — and that seemed to be the end of it.

But now I am much less sure. One of the features of Putinism is slow movement towards a distant object. Putin, let’s not forget, presented himself as a liberal democrat for the entirety of his first term and then into his second. The occupation of the Crimea occurred 14 years into his presidency, the invasion of Ukraine 22. Putin also runs an informal school for autocrats, of which Hungary’s Orbán, Belarus’ Lukashenko, Georgia’s Kavelashvili, Ukraine’s Yanukovych, Romania’s Georgescu, among others, are considered adepts. It is far from implausible that Trump in his first term was following Putin’s model — look after the economy and ensure an orderly succession. Putin for his part kept things in order for Trump — saving the invasion of Ukraine for Trump’s successor. One can only assume that the result of the 2020 election was a serious setback for Trump/Putin, but from the perspective of the long game all turned out to be in order. Putin held Ukraine at bay in the war of attrition, Trump won back the White House, and now US foreign policy is, frankly, what I sort of was expecting it to be when Trump took office in 2017 — the US withdrawing from alliances and commitments all around the world and with Russia the big winner. Trump is old but he has a viable successor in place in Vance and, without having to worry about his own election, he really can treat the next four years as his time to do whatever he wants. The proof is in the pudding and it was very hard to look at Trump’s performance with Zelensky in the White House or Trump’s immediate suspension of military aid to Ukraine and not see a situation where Putin gets everything he wants. Money, as we’ve seen, doesn’t explain all of it; ideology does as well, with Trump sharing fundamentals of the KGB revanchists’ worldview since as far back as the mid-1980s.

The basis of Putinism is a view of the state in which the ruler floats above the state structure — isn’t part of any particular social contract but has a hierarchy in place and is able to administer through that hierarchy, both monopolizing political power and immensely enriching himself, and having a grand old time about it all. All of that must sound very, very good to Trump, and, on top of his forty-odd years of contacts with Russian intelligence, he has abundant reasons to find himself in Putin’s camp. Putin has won, big time, and the United States, if not exactly part of Russia’s empire (it’s not quite as bad as that), is fast on its way to being Putinist.

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