All The Things I Was Right About This Year

Commentator

So, in the spirit of holiday cheer and good fellowship, let’s talk about all the things I got right this year.

• I called for Biden to step down from his presidential run right after the 2022 midterms — and kept saying the same thing well after it was boring for me. It wasn’t even just Biden’s increasingly-obvious senility — it was bad politics for him to run again. His selling point had been that he was a transitional president and that he marked a golden opportunity, in the thick of Trumpism, to reboot the Democratic Party and hand off the torch to a younger generation. Oops. Biden’s clinging to power — and, most importantly, the almost criminal unwillingness of the legacy media and Democratic Party establishment to call a spade a spade and permit a contested primary — effectively ends this iteration of the Democratic Party. Salvation could have come from the Gavin Newsoms of the world launching their challenge anytime in 2023; it could have come from Biden heeding the writing on the wall in early 2024 and allowing for a real primary; it could have come even as late as the summer with the party orchestrating a brokered convention instead of a coronation; and it could have happened in the fall if Harris had run an aggressive, imaginative campaign — but the Dems just didn’t have the nerve at any stage of the process. Trump deserves credit for his usual electoral wiliness, but, really, the election result was an own goal of epic fucking proportions. My nausea was activated for the ten thousandth time this electoral cycle when I saw some recent spin of Democratic figures crunching the numbers in ways that were favorable to them — a really nice bit of eyewash to try to convince themselves and the public that the election result that everybody saw wasn’t really what it looked like. The reality is that the Democrats lost everything it was possible to lose, but, with these people, nothing is ever learned and nothing ever changes.

• I’ve been very right also in my analysis of Ukraine. Putin’s management of the war has been played out above all in the court of public relations — the war gives him what he wants in domestic propaganda and he is curiously untroubled by Russia’s exodus from the ‘international community.’ Ever since the lightning strike on Kyiv didn’t work in February 2022, he has been playing for time and attrition — and playing above all against the democratic system. He understood that the early fervor of support for Ukraine would gradually disappear, and he could bank on Republican victories in the US both in 2022 and, above all, 2024 to erode Ukraine’s material support and then to secure his desired peace terms. He is on the cusp of getting exactly what he’s wanted — and that really is an indictment of American parochialism and the fickleness of popular opinion. Of course not all was as it initially seemed in February 2022 — the American intelligence community and special forces had been pushing it for a decade in their relations with Ukraine and those largely-undisclosed activities may have been instrumental in driving Putin towards the full invasion — but the mood in Ukraine really was a full-throated belief in the ‘Western vector’ and the liberal democratic order. My hope at the time of the invasion was that we in the West would recognize this and rally around our own foundational principles. Instead, the dark side of democracy has largely been in evidence — the Ukrainians have been unbelievably brave on the battlefield and in defense of their country, but we have, on the whole, forgotten about them and, for no real reason, been increasingly suspicious of their motives. What’s kept Ukraine afloat is a, to a great extent, sub rosa flow of weapons and support from within the US ‘security state’ but that flow is about to be choked off.

• I have been less right about the impacts of AI. I kind of thought by now that AI would have cut a real swathe through the economy and rearranged our psychological system of values — that we would have reflexively turned over some decent proportion of our decision-making to AI.

  Nick Potkalitsky
  has a very interesting piece in Persuasion arguing that the tapering-off of AI’s growth is a result of inherent limitations in LLM — that, basically, ‘AI’ is a party trick, text-predict combined with search-engine technology that gives an illusion of something like ‘intelligence.’ The general public indifference to AI music, etc, is encouraging for our survival as a species. But I am not entirely convinced. AI is reshaping our relationships to a vast number of activities — whether it’s inter-language communication; or schoolwork (it’s very difficult to convince students to not use ChatGPT); or triage types of decision-making where people are looking for probabilistic answers and are increasingly willing to defer to AI over their own common sense; or, most consequentially of all, warfare. More than I think is really understood, the widespread use of drones in Ukraine has reshaped the face of war — and AI is already being rapidly integrated into the battlefield. On the civilian side, AI really does give the have-nots a chance to catch up to the haves. I believe that AI is soon going to generate a whole range of films that will range across the entirety of digitized history. These films will abide by the Marquess of Queensberry’s rules in terms of creativity — there will be a human ‘controller’ and ‘creator,’ who will have done an enormous amount of work to tinker with AI prompts to make a work of art, but the work will be carried out by individuals with their computers, and will dispense with a great deal of institutionalized media, and will produce a very curious hybrid aesthetic. In business and politics, AI may function a bit like cell phones did in the ‘90s and ‘00s — with the developing world enthusiastically embracing the new technology and using it to catch up to the more squeamish First World.

  

  The Marquess of Queensberry

• I have also been less right about Israel/Palestine — but for the good reason that nobody has anything very intelligent to say. I’ve been right with a key point of analysis, which is that, ever since 10/7, Israel’s response hinged entirely on Netanyahu and his understanding of his own fragile political position; and that the Gaza War really can be understood as a blood feud between Netanyahu and Sinwar — with hostilities dramatically winding down after Sinwar’s death. As a liberal, diasporic Jew, I really am appalled at the direction Netanyahu has taken Israel in — but the unfortunate reality is that he has correctly read Israeli public opinion and realized that there is no effectively no limit to how forceful the Israeli public will permit the IDF to be. The other thing that nobody (at least outside of Israel) seems wiling to say at the moment is that Netanyahu’s policy seems to have worked — at the moment, it is looking like Israel has ‘won.’ The really nervy escalation of the war this summer broke Hezbollah and called Iran’s bluff and removed Hamas’ means of external support. The brutal, if not sadistic, prosecution of the war in Gaza has deeply isolated Israel within the international community, but Netanyahu’s bet — and this seems to have held so far — is that there are no particular consequences from this isolation. American support holds whichever administration is in place and the Europeans wring their hands but without changing the situation on the ground. If we’re being analytical about this, what we can say is that the really key factor here has been the total disappearance of the Israeli left as a political force in the last two decades — and the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and stroke of Ariel Sharon loom as historical tragedies that effectively ended any hope of rapprochement between Israelis and Palestinians. The Israeli left seems to be reduced to a few ex-prime ministers and contrarian generals railing in Haaretz against Netanyahu. My suspicion is that, like the kinds of lesser Biblical prophets whom everybody finds annoying but always turn out to have a point, the Haaretz editorialists will get the last say. Netanyahu has secured his short-term aims but has effectively exited Israel from the international community. I can’t imagine that this will be without long-term consequences.

Since my batting average is, I would say, relatively high in terms of analysis, I feel entitled to talk about what’s working in terms of my method. I’m not doing any original reporting and I’m not talking to anyone — I don’t have any ‘inside scoops.’ But my belief is that reporting has its limits — you usually have to trade access for some degree of independence. I think it’s possible to get a surprisingly accurate take of what’s going on by reading widely — but really reading widely and being willing to take in points of view from all across the ideological spectrum. And, as I’ve been doing more and more of these political pieces, I’ve come to rely on a few framings that (so far) have held up.

• The main one is understanding the really vital evolution in our moment of history to be about the transition from “one-way” to “two-way” communication. This is

  Martin Gurri
  ’s point,¹ and I’ve bored myself and bored you all by repeating it a lot, but I really regard this to be as like flipping to the back of the book and reading the answer key to our era. Mass communication for at least a couple of hundred years has been about somebody or other having access to broadcast technology that allows them to radiate their message from a ‘capital’ to ‘society-at-large.’ The two-way traffic of the internet creates a fundamentally different dynamic of communication that weakens the authority of the center and gives the periphery far more tools to organize its own view of reality. Virtually all of our cultural clashes at the moment have to do with this state of affairs and with the center fighting harder than it has in memory for basic legitimacy.

• Internationally, the framing that I’m finding myself settling on is about three different conceptions of state power. There’s the ‘Western’ model, which is about civil society limiting the power of government (i.e. liberalism). There’s a Chinese model, which is about the state and civil society acting as a single organism. And there’s a Russian model, which is a sort of cunning hybrid of the two where a degree of freedom is permitted in civil society but with civil society sufficiently encouraged to always choose the state. The epiphany I’ve had recently (I’m sure I’ll write more about this) is that our statecraft is suspended between these three poles — with the US, for instance, trying out a Chinese model in its response to the pandemic and with a whole border zone of nations (Hungary, Poland, Georgia, etc) experimenting with ‘illiberalism’ on the Russian model. What we find ourselves in is a very messy international state of affairs, which probably is a revived ‘Cold War’ in the sense of much of the world finding itself choosing (or being forced to choose) between very different conceptions of state power.

• Domestically, the main event is the sudden collapse of what Curtis Yarvin borrowing (I think) from John Rawls calls ‘the cathedral.’ More and more, I’ve come to think about ‘the cathedral’ as being basically an extension of the personality of Franklin Roosevelt. The loci of power in America have traditionally been a) Main Street b) Wall Street c) the union shop and then with d) the cathedral coming into its own towards the middle of the 20th century. The premise of the cathedral is that it is a check on other kinds of power, that it stands for the underdog, and that it gets its influence through a kind of right-think, which is then abetted by interlocking institutions (newspapers, television channels, universities, think tanks, etc) that all end up thinking exactly the same way. As recently as ten or fifteen years ago — with the collapse of the union shop, the obsolescence of Main Street, and the unalloyed villainy of Wall Street — the cathedral seemed like the only possible voice of reason in America. And then, in shockingly short order, the cathedral lost almost everything. The reason is of course that technology changed so rapidly and in anti-institutional direction that the cathedral, caught out in control of the institutions, could no longer position itself as the voice of the outsider. American civic life now is the liberal custodians of various institutions — whether universities, mass media, or the remnants of the Democratic Party — fighting desperately to keep their own jobs more than they are fighting for any liberal principle. It really is an amazingly fast turn of events, and what we find ourselves in — courtesy of the internet — is an era in which almost everything looks different than it did even a few years ago, in which down is up and outside is in, and in which overarching narratives can, to a great extent, be built from scratch.

1. My annoyingly smart boss Yascha Mounk points out that Clay Shirky - whom Gurri also cites but whom I haven’t read - largely gets credit for this idea.