Category: Political issues

At least we’re smarter than they are


A dragon descends on Oxford. Image by ChatGPT.

Ezra Klein has a must-read piece in the New York Times this morning: Now Is the Time of Monsters. (You can read this link without a subscription to the Times.)

Klein lists the monsters:

1. Authoritarian resurgence

2. AI and technological upheaval

3. Climate crisis

4. Demographic shifts

As Klein writes, “Any one of these challenges would be plenty on its own. Together they augur a new and frightening era.”

I should hasten to say, as Klein also does, that demographic shifts in the form of falling birth rates don’t scare me. That’s mainly a right-wing goblin, and I suspect that it’s only falling birth rates for white people that matters to them. I think I would merge Monster No. 4 into Monster No. 1 — the racism of authoritarians.

I’m also not as worried as some people are about AI’s taking over the world and making the human mind obsolete. But again I think there is a connection to Monster No. 1: Authoritarians will find all sorts of ways to use artificial intelligence as a tool to keep the rest of us down — ever better lies and disinformation, for example. To me, Monsters No. 1 and No. 3 are the biggies, with Monster No. 3 amplified by the authoritarian denial of climate change because of the money and power they get from an oil economy that oligarchs own and control.

When I lose sleep over Monster No. 1, the greatest comfort comes from knowing that no one is alone. The smartest people in the world see what’s happening. It’s the smartest and best people in the world up against the richest and meanest, with the richest and meanest having persuaded the poorest and dumbest that they’re on their side.

Yes, the people who are developing AI’s must be very smart, but they are more like idiots savant interested mainly in the technology and the money.

As for the MAGA crowd — Trump, his appointees, the Christian nationalists, the brownshirts, the right-wing radicals, Trump voters — they are all as dumb as rocks. We’ve got to outsmart them.

Klein offers no solutions. He only describes the monsters. As the smartest and best people in the world try to figure out how to deal with the dumbest, the meanest, and the richest, it occurred to me to wonder if Monster No. 2 — artificial intelligence — might have some useful advice.

Using ChatGPT’s “o1” engine, which is supposed to be better at reasoning than “o4,” I asked a question:

I am going to paste in an essay from this morning’s New York Times written by Ezra Klein. The headline is “Now is the time of monsters.” He lists several existential problems that the world faces today. Please analyze this piece with an eye toward philosophy and psychology. These problems are collective problems. But the question I would like for you to answer is, given these collective problems, what can an individual do not only to help, but also to preserve individual stability in a time of rapid change and chaos. These ideas need to align with my personal politics and philosophy. I am am a progressive. I would like to live in a world shaped by John Rawls’ “justice as fairness.”

The link below is the AI’s response. Most of it, I think, is what any nice and well-mannered intelligence would say. It contains very generalized ideas; there is no brilliant strategy that no one has thought of before. I do like the point about “narrative reframing,” though: “Successful social transformations often begin in the imagination, with bold visions that inspire people to action.”

If AI’s are capable of imagination and “bold visions,” I haven’t yet figured out what questions to ask. But I do think that, as smart people, we should be learning how to use AI’s, and we should keep abreast of their development. The Wikipedia article on ChatGPT says that the man who exploded a truck in front of the Trump hotel in Las Vegas used ChatGPT to help plan it.

Can AI’s help us plan the resistance?

Ezra Klein: Now Is the Time of Monsters

ChatGPT’s response

The Dark Enlightenment


The view from an upstairs window

It’s a bleak time for those of us who live in the world of ideas as much as in the real world. Today, unless gangs of violent and raging liberals egged on by Joe Biden storm the U.S. Capitol and try to prevent the Congress from certifying Trump as the winner of the November election, the Congress will … certify Trump as the winner of the November election. We liberals, creatures of the Enlightenment, can only grit our teeth and watch as democracy and the law take their course.

It’s a stunning piece of work. An elite of highly privileged people who openly hate democracy have used the institutions of democracy to advance their project of dismantling democracy. It takes a lot of lies to do that. It also takes a lot of people (77,303,573, to be precise) ignorant enough and foolish enough to fall for it.

And it also takes a lot of weakened institutions that could have stood in their way but didn’t, with the media, the justice department, and the courts at the top of the list.

I admit that, every day of late, I find myself pacing back and forth, from upstairs window to upstairs window, trying to figure out what is likely to happen in the next four years. But mostly, I think, what happens in the next four years is unpredictable.

We know what they want. We recoil at the horror of their ideas, best described as the Dark Enlightenment. We know that the men who are about to install themselves in the White House very much believe in this Dark Enlightenment and have a playbook.

But what’s unpredictable is what they actually will do, and to what degree the institutions of democracy remain strong enough to stand in their way. Even though they have a theoretical playbook, they have conflicting interests, and they are not nice people. We can expect them to waste a big part of their energy in conflict with each other, as opposed to conflict with the beast — the Enlightenment — that they all hate and want to overthrow. As JD Vance told a podcaster, “There is no way for a conservative to accomplish our vision of society unless we’re willing to strike at the heart of the beast. That’s the universities.”

Vance uses the word “conservatism” to describe the ideas that are threatened by the universities. I’d call it something else. It’s not just people that we’re up against. It’s also ideas, ideas that are very dark and very ugly.

For those of us who live in the world of ideas and thus know some history, these dark ideas, along with their ugly playbook, are things we’ve seen before. They want something that can’t be done without violence and a means of getting a lot of people out of their way. They’ve already used violence, and they’ve already made a lot of threats against people who are in their way. Now we will see how far they will go.

Where to find Paul Krugman now


Source: Wikimedia Commons.

On December 9, Paul Krugman wrote his last column for the New York Times. He had been writing for the Times for almost 25 years. Now more than ever, with four years of Trumpian madness ahead of us, we need intellects like Krugman’s. Krugman is still with us. He has moved to Substack.

His most recent Substack post, from December 26, is Trump’s Great Illusion: Conquest doesn’t make a modern nation — or its leader — great.

Axios reports this morning on a poll which found that two-thirds of Americans say they are limiting their intake of political news. An exception is Fox News, where viewership has increased since election day.

I can only guess what this means, but here’s my guess. Of all the low-information clodpolls who voted for Trump, Fox-watchers are the sickest and also the most highly motivated. There are not as many of them as we sometimes think. During prime time, about 2.5 million people watch Fox News. That’s far less than 1 percent of the American population. They are probably basking in post-election triumphalism.

As for the rest of us, people are exhausted.

But what about us high-information types?

I don’t think it’s just me, because it’s something that shows up constantly (as contempt and, often, as vitriol) in the comments section of political pieces in the New York Times and the Washington Post. We are fed up with MAGA-cowed both-sides “journalism” that treats MAGA depravity and disinformation as something to be taken seriously. We blame this sanewashing and the normalization of depravity and disinformation for helping Trump get back into the White House.

I have no idea why Paul Krugman retired from the New York Times, but it wouldn’t surprise me if he was under pressure to both-sidesify his columns. At Substack, we will hear what Krugman is thinking knowing that mid-level editors at the New York Times, nervous for their jobs, aren’t pressuring Krugman in any way.

I am not among the many who have canceled their subscriptions to the New York Times and the Washington Post. Though their political reporting is not to be trusted, those two newspapers are still the only remaining news organizations in the country with the resources to cover everything else. And, besides, we need to monitor the degree to which the corporate media are capitulating to Trump and Trumpism.

Speaking only for myself, I’m as eager as always to try to figure out what’s going on in the world. But it’s clear that we’re in an era in which we must give far greater weight to independent voices, and far less weight to corporate sources trying to play both sides.

Clarifying the complicated

It’s a complicated world. Fortunately there are experts who have put extraordinary efforts into understanding it. We ordinary folk must rely on those experts. In a sea of propaganda and disinformation, the trick is to find the people who know the terrain and who aren’t trying to deceive us.

Sarah C. Paine is a historian and professor of strategy and policy at the U.S. Naval War College. Watching this video will require two and a half hours of your time. But I can’t imagine a quicker way to get a high-altitude view of what’s behind the conflicts that are roiling the world today, conflicts that each of us feel in our own lives, no matter how isolated we may think we are.

I have long argued that these conflicts boil down to something simple enough for anyone to understand. This also is the key to understanding the purpose of the disinformation and propaganda with which we all are targeted, disinformation and propaganda that on November 5 swung an American election and put Donald Trump, America’s Putin, back into the White House.

It boils down to this: There are those who believe that democracy and the rule of law are the best way to order societies and to create wealth. And there are those who believe that authoritarianism and corruption are the best way to order societies and to create wealth. The difference is in who gets the wealth and who holds the power — the many, or the few.

The only flaw of this video is that the interviewer is a peacock and a windbag. Sarah Paine’s answers are usually more concise than the rambling, wordy questions. So try to ignore the interviewer as best you can. Sarah Paine, though, won’t waste a second of your time.

Hat tip to Ken, who referenced this video in a recent Substack article.

Young men and the right-wing rabbit hole

⬆︎ Two Europeans who are not down the right-wing rabbit hole. Listen with headphones, or with a good sound system.

That people like Donald Trump, or Elon Musk, should be what they are makes a certain kind of sense. They have money and power, and they want more money and power. In their narcissism, they think they totally deserve what they have. They think they deserve our adulation for having it — lords of the universe.

But for young men there is no excuse. If voices like Andrew Tate, Joe Rogan, and Jordan Peterson sound like hope, then something inside is stunted. The options outside the rabbit hole are unlimited. They’re just not as easy.

The smartest podcast I’ve ever listened to

Jonathan Rauch is one of my oldest friends. I’ve known him for forty years. Ken Ilgunas is one of my newer friends, fourteen years. I’ve listened to them at the dinner table a good many times, but listening to them in a podcast is even better.

Both are writers. They are of different generations, which makes their conversation even more interesting.

Here’s the link: Jonathan Rauch on the 2024 election, 1960’s Star Trek, and the magnetism of sociopaths.

Jonathan’s next book, to be published by the Yale University Press in February 2025, is Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain With Democracy. My own tiny press, Acorn Abbey Books, has brought out new editions of two of Jonathan’s books that were previously out of print, Denial and The Outnation.

The CEO shooter

While a tsunami of healthy, hilarious, and ever-so-understandable schadenfreude broke out in social media after the shooting of a predatory health care CEO, the punditry scolded us and clutched their pearls, warning us of the dangers of political violence.

But 48.36 percent of the population — those who didn’t vote for Trump — are not as deranged as the 49.97 percent who did. Having lived through years of MAGA political violence, the glorification of MAGA political violence, and the return of a MAGA criminal to the White House with a cast of MAGA goons having a net worth of $340 billion, at least 48.36 percent of the population can distinguish between political violence that serves justice and political violence that serves fascism and oligarchy.

I have argued in the past that, as Putinization comes to America, there is a limit to what Americans will put up with. If the people of South Korea, Belarus, Georgia, Peru, Slovakia, and even Russia will take to the streets in a heartbeat because they hate being kicked around, then Americans, in a country born out of violent revolution, will take to the streets in half a heartbeat. The grassroots political instincts that MAGA tapped and perverted to serve fascism and oligarchy are just as present in those who hate fascism and oligarchy. The CEO shooter reminded us of that, and no doubt terrified those who will do everything possible to retain for themselves a monopoly on violence.

So, mystery shooter, whoever you are and wherever you are, you’re obviously the hero and inspiration that a lot of people need right now. The punditry, clutching their pearls in their corporate gigs, would have us believe that all political violence is equally bad. No it isn’t, because of the difference between justice and injustice. It’s safe to assume that that neutralized CEO, indirectly, out of corporate greed, caused the premature deaths of tens of thousands of people. We can confidently say that he deserves our contempt, even if saying that he, or anyone, deserves to die is farther than we want to go.

They’ll probably catch this guy and make an example of him. But if they take him alive, we’ll get to hear why he did it. America’s CEO’s, and those who are preparing to Putinize America, won’t like that story one bit, because it probably will be a story about predation, exploitation, and the greed of the powerful. And it probably will be a story about one of the many powerless people who died because of it, someone whom the CEO shooter loved.

Journalism isn’t enough


Anne Applebaum. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Journalism — even good journalism, if we could get it — is too narrow a view of events to help intelligent people adapt to the ugly, complicated, and chaotic situation in which we now find ourselves. Now more than ever we need historians and public intellectuals, people like Anne Applebaum.

In today’s New York Times, there is a transcript of an Ezra Klein podcast with Anne Applebaum, Trump Kicks Down the Guardrails. It’s a must-read.

There can be no real discussion of our current situation without an awareness of people who have been in similar situations in the past and the tyrants who put them there. How did it end? What did people do about it? I have journalist friends in high places who are very proud that their work is “descriptive, not prescriptive.” That’s not enough. Without a prescription, a strategy, for coordinated action, what’s to stand in the way of Trump and his regime of grifters, sickos, kleptocrats, and clowns?

As we all hold our breath and wait for Trump 2.0 to get his hands on the levers of power, Applebaum has this advice:

“The worst result or the worst consequence of this kind of government, if that’s what we’re going to have, and of course we still don’t know yet, is that people become apathetic. They say: This is all so overwhelming, it’s so huge. I don’t even know what’s true and what’s not true anymore, and I’m just going to stay home.

“Try to overcome that. And it almost doesn’t matter what it is that you do. Involve yourself in a local group, a discussion group. Join a political party. Run for local office. Try to be present in your community in some way. Do something that makes you active. And that makes you feel that you’re taking part in the governance of your country.”

That’s pretty weak tea, but it’s a necessary start. As for figuring out what’s true and what’s not true, sometimes that’s hard, and we need help from people with a particular kind of knowledge. But often it’s dead easy. If something serves the interests of grifters, sickos, kleptocrats and clowns, then it’s probably a lie, no matter how many people believe it.

Not just democracy, but also the rule of law


Matt Gaetz. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

The incomprehensible becomes even more incomprehensible. Last week, decent human beings had to confront the news that the most evil man in American history, a man who should have been in prison long ago, was voted back into the White House by the American people.

And now decent human beings are having another sleepless night (it’s 3 a.m. here), after Trump said he will nominate Matt Gaetz, another incomprehensibly disgusting human being who belongs in prison, to be attorney general of the United States.

There can be no doubt that Trump’s intention is to crush the rule of law along with the American democracy.

Heather Cox Richardson writes:

“Republican establishment leaders have always wanted to dismantle the New Deal state that began under Democratic president Franklin Delano Roosevelt and continued under Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower and presidents of both parties until 1981. But they have never wanted to dismantle the rule of law on which the United States is founded or the international rules-based order on which foreign trade depends. Aside from moral and intellectual principles, the rule of law is the foundation on which the security of property rests: there is a reason that foreign oligarchs park their money in democracies. And it is the international rules-based order that protects the freedom of the seas on which the movement of container ships, for example, depends.

“Trump has made it clear that his goal for a second term is to toss overboard the rule of law and the international rules-based order, instead turning the U.S. government into a vehicle for his own revenge and forging individual alliances with autocratic rulers like Russian president Vladimir Putin.”

Richardson seems to think that there is some hope that establishment Republicans in Congress will work with the remaining Democrats in Congress to stand up to Trump in defense of the rule of law.

It really boils down to a bunch of fascists in a battle over which will make them richer — old-fashioned business conducted under the rule of law, or a corrupt economy that they can loot, like Russia’s, and send to the gulags anybody who gets in their way.

There were amusing stories yesterday about a spike in Google searches last week for “how to change my vote.” That’s just more incomprehensibility. Some of the people who are stupid enough to vote for Trump also are stupid enough to think they can change their vote — millions of them, apparently, to have reached a score of 100 on Google trends.

Once again I want to say how important it is to follow Heather Cox Richardson. The mainstream media are in the absurd position of having to report on a country’s descent into fascism as though there are two sides to it. As I have said before, no valid centrist narrative exists. The truth about the condition in which we find ourselves can be told only by those who have no Republican ass to kiss.

Update: In a comment on this post, the always well-informed Chenda (who is in the U.K., by the way) mentions that there are now stories that some formerly high-level people in Washington who got themselves onto Trump’s enemy list are making plans to leave the country. I’m attaching a link to today’s Washington post piece on this:

Go bags, passports, foreign assets: Preparing to be a target of Trump’s revenge

This is an alarm bell if I’ve ever heard one. Knowing some German history is very helpful here. How far down the food chain will Trump’s retribution go? We have no way of knowing at this point. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration of the Supreme Court’s new ruling to say that, if Trump shoots some generals and admirals as an official presidential act, then he is not criminally liable. Even for small-fry bloggers like me, too obscure for Trump to bother with, there will be brownshirts to take care of Trump’s business.

Those who are on the record as people who recognize Trump for what he is — a fascist and a depraved and extremely dangerous human being — had better be thinking through the contingencies and making some plans.

What were the mistakes?


Nancy Pelosi. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

The punditry, like vultures, are feasting on the battlefield after the election. It’s not about lessons learned. It’s about their pre-existing agendas — inflicting damage on Democrats if they’re right-wingers, pulling the Democratic Party ever more to the right, if they’re centrists. There are even a few on the left who say that a Bernie Sanders platform would have won this election.

But when Nancy Pelosi speaks, I listen. She has no agenda other than winning. The Guardian has this today: “Nancy Pelosi says Biden’s delay in exiting race blew Democrats’ chances.”

Why would Nancy Pelosi zing her own party, in public? I think it’s because she wants to send a clear message to whoever was protecting Biden, with a warning to any future factions within the Democratic Party whose agenda is pushing a particular candidate rather than winning an election.

This has happened before, in 2016, when a strong faction within the DNC was determined to have Hillary Clinton, no matter what. And now it has happened again, with Biden. Both times, we lost.

Nancy Pelosi, please please stay with us through the 2028 election. And if something like this happens again, please tell us way, way before the election, not after.