The Apostate

 Okay, so I thought Haley Stevens was perfectly entitled to her own opinions on El-Sayed's campaign in Michigan. I even thought it was legitimate for her to try to influence him to tone down or shift his rhetoric or positions. But to switch sides and back his MAGA opponent—as she did yesterday—just two days out from the election—is indeed what Sen. Chuck Schumer called it: a "despicable betrayal" of party and principle. 

There's something almost eerie about the psychology that could go back on one's own prior words so brazenly. Time and again, Stevens had denounced the GOP candidate for a host of valid reasons. Now, at the last minute, she declares that she wants him to be a U.S. Senator. As Lord Byron wrote of the erstwhile Jacobin-cum-Laureate Robert Southey: he "turned his coat — and would have turned his skin"—and that seems to be what happened here too. 

The Dewey Arch

 The New York Times ran a guest column yesterday that described the history of "triumphal arches," which Trump is obviously trying to imitate in the construction of his new so-called "Arc de Trump" in D.C. 

But the Times piece leaves out of the story one of the closest parallels from our own history: the Dewey Arch, which was built in New York's Madison Square in 1899 and demolished a year later. 

Calumny

 The New York Times ran an article yesterday in which they detail how, in the last few days before the midterm elections, Republican candidates are resorting to the most rancid possible personal attacks to try to chip away at Democrats' clear lead in the polls. In some cases, they are dredging up details from the opposition candidates' personal lives that ought to be treated as off-limits. 

But in other cases, they are simply making up outrageous and lurid accusations out of whole cloth. One Republican candidate calls his opponent a "groomer," based on no evidence whatsoever. Our vice president darkly implies that a Democratic candidate could only have stood up for the rights of trans children in the past because he has some creepy sexual fixation on the subject. 

Double Injustice

 The New York Times reported yesterday that the Trump administration is apparently planning to deport more than a hundred Afghan nationals to Pakistan—with the full knowledge and deliberate intent, as part of the agreement, that Pakistan will then subsequent force them back across the border to their home country. 

The planned group of deportees reportedly includes people who would be obvious targets for persecution or assassination if they are sent back to Afghanistan, including relatives of people who risked their lives to aid the U.S. war effort against the Taliban. 

Half-Truth

 I wish I could say that, since Donald Trump is totally wrong, that means that Democrats are always right, and that everything they do to prevail against him in this week's midterm elections is therefore justified—but unfortunately, that does not appear to be the case. 

Obviously, the big story about election interference right now is the fact that Trump has turned the U.S. Department of Justice into an instrument of his personal authority, and is using it to sow doubt about the integrity of the vote for transparently corrupt and partisan purposes. 

The Conceptualists

 A group of rich kids and their hangers-on, none of whom seems to need to work for a living, get together for a weekend of sex, drugs, and ultra-violence in a country manor. One of them may be not quite what they seem. Such is the by no means unpromising premise on which Martin Amis constructs his insanely readable second novel, Dead Babies (1975). 

The plot of the novel has been compared to a parody version of an Agatha Christie weekend murder party. But the compulsive aspect of the novel does not stem from its mystery or suspense (though there is plenty of that too). As with other Amis novels, it derives above all from the virtuoso prose.

Schopenhauer vs. The Royal Danish Society

 Arthur Schopenhauer's On the Basis of Morality is one of the funniest books ever written. Long before I got around to finishing the whole book, I had read its immortal first edition preface, in which AS takes the Royal Danish Society of Scientific Studies to task for passing over his essay in a prize contest. 

We subsequently learn that Schopenhauer's contribution was the only entrant that year in the essay contest. The Royal Society still could not bring themselves to bestow this recognition upon it. 

Chapters on Socialism

 With the recent resurgence of interest in socialism on the American left, it's worth revisiting John Stuart Mill's Chapters on Socialism as probably one of the best attempts ever to think through systematically both the merits of the socialist critique of capitalist society and the viability of its proposed alternatives. 

Better than perhaps any writer in history on the topic, Mill performs the feat of holding multiple ideas in mind at the same time—and managing to distinguish between them. He is therefore the opposite of that individual William Hazlitt once identified as the great pest of all political life: "the person with one idea." 

Grands Séducteurs

 A friend and I the other weekend sat down to watch Disney's largely overlooked and forgotten contribution to the L. Frank Baum expanded universe, Oz: The Great and Powerful, starring James Franco in the title role. 

It took about five minutes into the film before I realized this movie could only have been made before #MeToo. 

AI Over-Production

 The other day on this blog, I was warning about how AI companies don't seem particularly likely to ever attract the level of mass consumer demand they would need to pay off the extraordinary amount of debt they are taking on to build their products. 

This seemed like it could lead to either of two outcomes; both of them bad. On the one hand, the bubble could burst, once investors realize there is not enough revenue forthcoming to justify this capital expenditure; on the other: the government—captained by our current AI-friendly White House—could wade in to try to fill the gap by stimulating demand for AI services artificially. 

People's Actions

 We tend to assume, at least for heuristic purposes, that in a democracy, if people vote for a particular candidate, that means they largely approve of that person's campaign promises. Thus, according to this logic, people who voted for Trump in 2024 must in some sense have "chosen" his worst and cruelest actions in office—particularly since Trump didn't exactly hide the ball on the campaign trail as to his intentions. He had "Mass Deportation Now" signs printed up and distributed to people at the official Republican National Convention. 

But, strange as it must seem, this may not be the case. A recent series of focus groups with Trump voters across the country—discussed on the latest episode of Ezra Klein's podcast—apparently revealed that, no matter how blatant it may have seemed—to our eyes—that Trump was running in 2024 on a platform of white nationalist authoritarianism, most of the people who cast a ballot for him were not doing so because they backed such a program. 

New Haiti Documentary

 This week, PBS Frontline aired a must-watch documentary about the crisis set off by the Trump administration's decision to revoke Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haiti. The film opens with footage of people arriving in Cap-Haitien from U.S. deportation flights. The deportees cover their faces with clothes to obscure their identities from gangs, who will kidnap and extort them if they find out they have any ties to the U.S. 

Some of them describe spending years or decades in the United States, earning advanced degrees and contributing to the U.S. economy. One woman says she was a pharmacist with a doctorate. Now, they have been expelled to a country that has been reduced largely to rubble by ongoing gang violence, and where a multinational UN security force is now waging active armed combat to try to wrest some territory from marauding criminal networks. 

Merrie England

 As a young socialist, I generally avoided reading the acknowledged classics of socialist thought. This allowed me to persist in the pleasant and untested belief that someone had worked out a plausible comprehensive theory somewhere for how all this was supposed to work, and I just didn't know about it yet. 

And so, if anyone asked me for my institutional model of socialism, I could gesture to these dense volumes and explain that someone smarter than me must have thought of it already. I was just here as an evangelist for a system that more profound minds had already worked out. How could they not have? Don't you see how thick their books are? 

Beasts of Burden

 New York City apparently passed a resolution this week phasing out the use of horse-drawn carriages over the next two years. 

I thought of a passage in that aching pastoral novel I just read—beloved by many—J.L. Carr's A Month in the Country, about the passing of horse-centric civilization from rural England. 

Two Quislings

 I know it's not really my business as an outsider to judge, but I really wish someone in Venezuelan politics would show some backbone for God's sake and finally stand up to those self-appointed hemispheric honchos Donald Trump and Little Rubio. 

The New York Times today features an article about recent political talks in Venezuela between the government and what passes for the domestic opposition (the most famous actual leader of the opposition, after all, remains de facto exiled from the country). 

The Thaw

 When future cultural historians try to write the story of our era, I have no doubt that AOC's use of the phrase "woke 1 was crazy" over the summer will stand out as a critical turning point. The moment conveniently bookended the early 2020s era of "peak woke" or "the Great Awokening" or whatever you want to call it—and while most of us knew on some gut level that this epoch had already ended long before, it helped to have someone within the progressive movement declare its death officially so we really knew it was over and not coming back.

Most people reacted to the news of its demise with something like relieved chatter. A shadow had been lifted. It was "ding dong, the witch is dead." "Woke 1," if we are calling it that now, was really a period of cultural revolution—and like any other revolution, it made great and ultimately unsustainable demands on our conscience and idealism. And so, when it was behind us, we all relaxed a bit into our "normal shapes" (to quote Dwight Macdonald—more on that below), like someone holding in their paunch in company who now finds themselves home in front of the TV again. 

Books vs. TikToks

 In the latest mailbag post on his blog, Slow Boring, Matt Yglesias starts with a brief (but convincing) refutation of a recent Jacobin article that offers a novel, leftist theory of the root-causes of the present "reading crisis."

There has ben a lot of hand-wringing over the past year about the reported decline in reading for pleasure among twenty-first century Americans. 

Cet animal est trés méchant

 A New York Times article yesterday points out that Trump's latest dust-up with Ukraine's leadership repeats a now-familiar pattern of behavior for him. First, Trump insults and berates a friendly nation. Then, when the latter tries to mildly push back, Trump seems genuinely outraged and appalled that they would dare to defend themselves, rather than grovel and kiss the boot that kicks them.

As Peter Baker's analysis puts it: "The rules of the road when it comes to President Trump’s relations with foreign leaders are clear: He may trash you. But woe unto you if you whack back."

Monsters

 Like the rest of the world, I too saw that Elizabeth Holmes documentary over the weekend. I found it a completely riveting yet ultimately unsatisfying and strange piece of work. 

The directors make the odd choice never to review in depth the factual background of Theranos and Holmes's career. For this reason, the film never bothers to re-indict her for fraud or to convince the viewership that she really did lie to investors and cheat the public. 

It Wasn't Us, Canada!

 Listening to former Canadian trade negotiator Chrystia Freeland's interview with Ezra Klein yesterday on his podcast, I received a sharp reminder of what it means to be part of a nation that is morally disgracing itself on the global stage. As a friend of mine would put it, there may be no such thing as collective guilt—but we are certainly experiencing collective shame. 

Like the majority of my fellow Americans (Klein cites polling to this effect on his show), I entirely take Canada's side in the trade war. Most Americans view Freeland's nation in friendly terms. We know they had been a good neighbor and ally and trading partner to us for decades—until Trump staged a gratuitous and unprovoked attack on their economy—for the explicitly stated (and completely deranged) purpose of trying to undermine their sovereignty and forcibly incorporate their territory into the United States. 

Crisis of Overproduction

 Fears of an "AI bubble" are back in the news this week, with investors starting to show some alarm about the level of indebtedness of the big AI companies and the mind-boggling and possibly unrealistic scale of future earnings they would need to generate ever to pay it off. 

Some analysts have started to talk about this as the risk that we may end up with a ruinous over-supply of AI infrastructure, after the current capital build-out, without ever generating enough consumer demand to actually pay for all these AI services we are developing. 

The Merchant's Function

 An opinion piece in the New York Times yesterday argues that business schools ought to be abolished. Whereas every other professional school in a university teaches students to pursue some identifiable public good—the author argues—MBA programs only teach people how to make money for themselves and the shareholders. 

As the author, a Cambridge business school professor himself, puts it: "A medical school’s core justification is health, and a law school's is justice — undisputed public goods. Business schools are organized explicitly around a private good: the pursuit of profit." 

La France s'ennuie

 The riots and violent protests that have gripped France over the last few days are rather frightening. They are also typically French in that it's very difficult to tell what they are even about. 

They had something to do with conditions at French schools, I thought. But now I am told they are more about the cost of living and the deteriorating conditions of the country's public finances. 

Abattoir

 Nicholas Kristof's column yesterday in the New York Times calls our attention to a recent undercover video released by an animal rights activist that offers a glimpse into the inner workings of one of the slaughterhouses that puts chicken on Americans' plates. 

The indelible video shows the assembly line manner in which the chickens are strung up in rows by the heels (I think of Ezra Pound: "by the heels at Milano") on an electronic conveyor belt. As the birds rotate through the room past a series of knives, the latter cut their throats. 

Denaturalization

 In his memoir about life in France on the threshold of World War II, Scum of the Earth, Arthur Koestler charts out the full ignominious course of events by which once-proudly democratic France surrendered to Hitler and gradually converted itself into an authoritarian, collaborationist state. 

First, Koestler recounts, the French government locked up all the anti-Hitler refugees from Germany and Eastern Europe (including Koestler himself). This perverse action was accompanied by a wave of unthinking xenophobia directed against any outsider, wholly unable (or unwilling) to distinguish friend from foe.

Private Execution

 So I guess, per Trump's remarks yesterday, our nation will not in fact be live-streaming the gruesome death by firing squad of a human being for the delectation of howling social media mobs, despite Pete Hegseth's earlier pledge. Even Trump appears to have blanched at the optics of lining up rifles to shoot down a semi-paralyzed man who uses a wheelchair to get around.

But it's only the live-streaming that's been called off, keep in mind. Not the execution itself. That means a group of U.S. soldiers will still be lining up, presumably, with rifles at the ready, and gunning to death a disabled man. The bullets will still tear through his flesh and blot out his life. He will still void his bowels in the final moment of agony. 

Betrayed by Immoderation

 Yesterday, Trump appears to have moved from tongue-lashing Ukraine to actively trying to undermine their efforts to defend themselves. He has already pulled most forms of military aid from the country. Now, he seems to have gone even further, apparently blocking Ukraine from a key Pentagon platform for intelligence sharing (though U.S. officials deny anything has formally changed). 

In the past few days, Trump delivered a major form of diesel sanctions relief to Russia—overriding the clear intent of Congress in their recent bipartisan sanctions legislation—in exchange for no concessions whatsoever from Putin. Trump proceeded to blame our Ukrainian allies for being invaded. He also exerted verbal pressure on Ukraine to halt strikes on Russian energy infrastructure. 

Save My Skin and Damn My Conscience

 Okay, so let me see if I'm following along accurately here. In the last few days, Trump has announced a major form of sanctions relief for Russian diesel in exchange for no concessions whatsoever from Putin. He then proceeded to blame Zelensky for the war, even as Russian bombs killed more Ukrainian civilians. He then declared a bilateral "energy ceasefire" between the two nations, which Putin proceeded to violate within hours. 

And still, Trump does not appear to be interested in applying any pressure on Putin to end his invasion of Ukraine. Instead, all he seems to want to do is to blame Zelensky for being invaded and to unwind whatever shreds of U.S. support are still in place for Ukraine. 

A Higher Level of Suffering

 The other day on his Substack, the blogger Noah Smith was warning that the availability of endless short-form video content on our smartphones risks trapping us in a kind of hedonistic dystopia: a place where reward-chemicals have become so readily accessible that much of the meaning is drained from life—since meaning can only be derived from struggle. 

He writes with despair: "Perhaps it’s in the fundamental nature of intelligence to hack its own reward function — to find a way to give up striving and building and loving, and to simply hit the dopamine button until it starves itself ecstatically to death."

A Little More Socialism Please

 Californians are getting ready to vote next month on Proposition 42, a measure that would forbid any future tax on wealth holdings. Gavin Newsom announced his endorsement of the proposal a few days ago, adding his voice to those of tech billionaires who sponsored the measure, as well as the Wall Street Journal editorial board, in opposition to the possibility of any tax on wealth as opposed to income. 

The reasons they cite are essentially the same old penguin ones we've discussed before. They point out that billionaires may simply leave the state to avoid paying. California will experience capital flight and end up poorer in public revenues than it was before the wealth tax. As the richest burghers among the Penguins intone, in Anatole France's novel Penguin Island: 

Slow-Motion Munich

 Ever since Trump came back into office, people have been warning that it seems like he is planning to betray Ukraine. But, no matter how inevitable it seemed that Trump would eventually pull a Neville Chamberlain and cut a deal with Putin to hand our ally over to the country that was invading them, the decisive moment never quite came. Instead, Trump would at times appear to suddenly and radically undermine our relationship with Ukraine; but then, the next day, he would backpedal. And so the cycle would continue. 

For all we know, Trump's remarks yesterday may not have been his final word on the subject either. Mere days from now, he may patch things up with Zelensky yet again and pivot to offering another round of halfhearted praise for our ally. Whatever Trump may do from day to day, however, the larger pattern is unmistakable at this point: he really is walking away from Ukraine, by whatever fits and starts. He may be acting less precipitously than Neville Chamberlain did in 1938—but this is still a Munich in slow motion. 

Hegseth's Snuff Film Studio

 Last week, following the horrific botched execution of Christa Pike in Tennessee, I repeated as a sort of thought experiment Albert Camus's argument (in Reflections on the Guillotine) that every government that really claims to believe in the death penalty ought to broadcast footage of its executions as widely as possible, since they claim that the whole point of the killing is to "send a message." 

Be careful what you wish for, I guess. Because just days later, the Trump administration announced that they do indeed plan to livestream the public execution by firing squad of a man convicted for his role in a 2009 mass shooting (convicted, we should add, in the military justice system—a parallel legal system with fewer constitutional protections for defendants; though there seems little doubt of his guilt). 

Good Samaritans

 In a recent podcast interview with Ezra Klein, Michigan Senate candidate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed was trying to explain what motivates his sense of mission to try to expand access to healthcare in this country. He told the story of a former patient of his—a woman struggling with homelessness and substance abuse—whom he encountered in the emergency room. 

After ordering the usual round of tests and treatment, he said he tried to convince her to stay in the hospital system for rehab. He prepared a whole treatment plan for her, and the hospital would have covered it. She refused these multiple offers of help, however, and left, claiming that her daughter was picking her up. 

Bloody Hands

 Just days after the horrific botched execution of Christa Pike reminded all the world of the inhumanity of capital punishment—and stripped away any lingering illusion that lethal injection is an especially "painless" or "humane" means of taking a person's life by force—Texas apparently proceeded last night with yet another state murder. 

Jamaal Howard was taken to the death chamber last night in Huntsville, where he was administered a fatal dose of pentobarbital. Multiple courts, including the Supreme Court of the United States, declined to spare his life at the 11th hour, despite claims he is intellectually disabled. According to the Associated Press, he was "pronounced dead at 8:03 p.m." 

Are We Guilty?

 Over the summer, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney indelibly (and correctly) said that the U.S. had essentially "attacked" his country in an unprovoked act of trade aggression. "America has changed, [...] and we will not return to our old relationship," he said. 

I was of course entirely with him on the merits. The Trump administration had started harassing Canada, belittling its nationhood, threatening to annex its territory, and using strong-arm trade war tactics to try to force it to cede sovereignty—all totally without provocation. It was and is an insanely gratuitous sabotage of a centuries-old friendship and alliance. 

Acte Gratuit

 I spent a lot of time last month, as part of the reflections around the 25th anniversary of 9/11, trying to pinpoint exactly what the difference was between the Bush and Trump administrations. 

After all, every Trump-era human rights abuse has its rough analogue from the Bush and Obama–led War on Terror. 

"It Doesn't Really Hurt"

 Up there with the notion that "everyone goes to the death chamber with great dignity and decorum," another great myth about capital punishment is that the state can somehow murder people "humanely."

As Arthur Koestler writes in his classic Reflections on Hanging, "the defense of a savage method of execution on the grounds that 'it doesn't really hurt,' is another leitmotif down to our day."

Jejune Sympathies

 A couple weeks ago, the leftist streamer bro Hasan Piker generated yet another round of inevitable headlines when he appeared to imply that the United States is a bigger terrorist than Al Qaeda. 

Obviously, this was a ridiculous question to pose in the first place. These are not commensurable entities. The U.S. is a global power that has existed for two hundred and fifty years, has the largest military budget in the world, and fields troops on every continent. Al Qaeda, meanwhile, has existed for less than a few decades and never had anything close to that reach. 

All Too Human

 One of the greatest sources of confusion in the interminable AI debate is the fact that many of the people building the most sophisticated models also hold a quasi-religious belief in the inevitability of an eventual AI "singularity," which they have long endowed with divine and apocalyptic traits. 

In trying to figure out how seriously to take both their warnings of "existential risk" from AI, as well as their utopian promises of eventual "superabundance" or immortality from the same technology, then, our challenge is constantly to have to figure out how to separate out the scientific from the mythological elements of the way the designers are thinking about their new machine. 

Nightmare Scene

 In his Reflections on the Guillotine, Albert Camus argues that every government that wants to maintain the death penalty should have to conduct all of their executions in public. Indeed, they should broadcast footage of the state murder as widely as possible. 

He argues this because, in the absence of it, the public has no window into what actually happens in the death chamber. This allows the authorities to draw a veil of decorum over the whole hideous proceeding. As Arthur Koestler observes, in his Reflections on Hanging, the officials and the newspapers can talk about the execution in somber tones afterwards, leaving us to believe that all was transacted with the utmost calm and respect. 

Suddenly Surrounded

 Yesterday, driving through the deep South, I was pulled over by someone representing himself as a member of the county sheriff's "counter-narcotics" team. He ended up searching my vehicle, lining up and photographing the covers of some novels and nonfiction political books I had with me in the car, and berating me about going to a protest. 

"Why not just say you're heading to a protest? That's your right. But we've got people trafficking drugs. We've got people trafficking human beings. We've got people trafficking terrorism. Why not just be honest with me? You're going to a protest. Doesn't it feel better to be honest with me? Don't you feel better?"

Closed System

 The other day, I found myself in a conversation with a very conservative Catholic. I kept worrying I would out myself somehow as a secular liberal. But somehow instead I kept being taken for a Protestant. 

In reality, I don't consider myself as a member of either camp. If anything, I aspire to live up to Graham Greene's dictum to be a Catholic in a Protestant country and a Protestant in a Catholic one. But I guess in this conversation, I was in Catholic country, and so I kept finding myself putting a gentle word in for Luther. 

Merry Men?

 As of the last reporting I saw yesterday, UK authorities still have no clear account of the motives or identity of the people they arrested earlier this week outside of the Fairfold air base. They released the suspects surprisingly quickly, however, which tends to suggest no one actually thinks they were linked to a violent terrorist plot. 

According to the Wall Street Journal, one emerging theory among the locals holds that "the men, all from London, may have been in the area to steal fuel[.]"

Farm Populism

 Reading V.L. Parrington's epic three-volume study of the Main Currents in American Thought, it is clear that a persistent theme in the work—indeed, a characteristic obsession of Parrington's—is that American farmers and agrarian interests have long been the source of every progressive, popular, democratic, pacifist, humane, and reformist impulse in American life. 

John Dos Passos's USA trilogy often reflects the same assumption. When Wilson's war in Europe looms, the characters in Dos Passos's epic often talk as if it were a given that the small farmers of the great Midwestern Plains would be one of the surest political obstacles (alongside industrial workers) to this push for war and profiteering. 

Higher Law

 I attended a talk the other week about the state judge who was prosecuted—and convicted—last year for allegedly shepherding an immigrant out of the backdoor of her courtroom in order to protect him from ICE arrest. 

This incident always stood out from other times the administration has targeted or prosecuted people for First Amendment–protected activities because in this case, arguably, the judge actually did sort of kind of break the law. 

Noli Me Tangere

 The New York Times reported yesterday on the debate surrounding Washington State's graduated tax on incomes greater than a million dollars a year. "Critics want voters to repeal it," the Times summarizes, "and bar state leaders from imposing income taxes in the future, arguing the millionaires tax will drive out wealthy entrepreneurs and eventually lead to income taxes on everyone else."

Here, one is reminded of that scene I was just talking about from Anatole France's Penguin Island (1908), in which the wealthiest penguins approach their kind-hearted lawgiver, Father Mael, to plead an exemption from any form of progressive taxation. As they solemnly insist, hat-in-hand: 

The Shah

 Now, in the midst of Trump's ongoing war in the Middle East, seemed like a particularly apt time to pick up Ryszard Kapuściński's classic book of reportage on Iranian politics, Shah of Shahs. 

The book convincingly and indelibly portrays the Shah's former regime as a nightmare state of total despotism, in which neighbors feared to confide in neighbors, lest they find themselves reported to the authorities, and the deadly Savak secret police exercised a reign of terror over the public. 

Racist Catch-22

 In the face of a rising tide of anti–South Asian hatred on the American right, a number of commentators have pointed out the "damned if you do, damned if you don't" quality to xenophobic racism. 

On the one hand, after all, the right accuses immigrants and racial out-groups of refusing to "assimilate," of living in Balkanized impoverished enclaves, of causing urban blight and bringing into the country various disruptive anti-social behaviors. 

The Sacrificial Rite

 An appeals court in Texas yesterday issued what appears to have been an utterly baffling and cruel decision. The trial court had reopened a capital murder conviction involving a woman accused of killing her daughter. The judge in the lower court found that the prosecutor's office had withheld exculpatory evidence, and that the woman was actually innocent. 

Yet, the appellate judges reversed him. 

Taking

 Earlier this summer, the Trump administration decided that the word "harm" in the Endangered Species Act doesn't include destroying endangered animals' habitats so as to render their conditions of life untenable. 

We know this, apparently, thanks to a handy canon of statutory interpretation, "noscitur a sociis," which tells us that "harm" must mean something like the words that surround it in the statute, such as "take," "capture," "kill," etc. 

Penguin Logic

 The bill for Congress's attack on the welfare state is slowly coming due. Millions of people have already lost food assistance over the last year due to new SNAP "work requirements" enacted under Trump's reconciliation bill. Next week, on October 1, the federal government will cut its contribution to the administrative costs of the program, shifting more of the responsibility to states—changes that many observers fear could force still more people off the benefit rolls. 

At the start of next year, new "work requirements" also go into effect for Medicaid. Congress already allowed expanded ACA subsidies to lapse. J.D. Vance—a man who embodies the Straussian dictum that a lie repeated often enough will be perceived as true—brags that he just eliminated 750,000 cases from the ACA rolls for reasons of "fraud" (read the room, bro—do you think taking more people off health benefits is anyone's idea of a top priority right now?)

Undesirable Ally

 Just when I was starting to legitimately like Dr. Abdul El-Sayed's campaign in Michigan (his response to J.D. Vance's attacks was masterful), he's let me down by once again failing to distance himself from a rather unsavory admirer. 

As the New York Times reported earlier this week, just days after a number of Jewish leaders in Michigan had said they would endorse El-Sayed in spite of certain misgivings, Tucker Carlson has come out as an improbable (or perhaps not so improbable) defender of the Democratic candidate.

The Pirate Flag

 For months, critics of Trump have been accusing him of despoiling Venezuela. 

Yesterday, he got up in front of the assembled nations of the world and said that that is exactly what he's done. He boasted openly that he was seizing Venezuela's natural resources. 

"To the victor belong the spoils," he crowed, in his speech to the United Nations General Assembly. 

No Plan

 Our ruling class has been sneering for months at the local data center backlash that has been springing up across the country. Tech companies ask impatiently who they have to "bribe" to get their centers built in small towns across America. 

As Jasmine Sun says of tech executives in a recent interview: "when I talk to them about the build-out, I’m not hearing any sort of personal moral reckoning with slowing A.I. down. I’m hearing: How do I make the bribes bigger? How big do they need to be?"

Life Imitates Art

 In a new video essay published yesterday for the New York Times, Ezra Klein points out that many of the people currently building AI—the people who are now telling us that they believe their own creation might kill all humanity within the next decade—also believed that AI posed an existential threat to humankind even before they started building it. 

Indeed, they started building it precisely because they thought that someone would eventually build it, and they thought they needed to be the ones to build it in order to ensure it was safe and would serve human interests, because they thought that otherwise it certainly would lead to human extinction. 

What is the Objection to Liberalism, Exactly?

 At the outset of his 1993 book The Anatomy of Antiliberalism, the political theorist Stephen Holmes observes that he is "not worried about the practical consequences" of the anti-liberal theories he explores in the book. At the time he was writing, he says; "[t]hey benefit from historical circumstances that make them politically harmless," he observes. 

I have no doubt that this was largely true in the democratic West in 1993. It was certainly something I myself believed the first time I encountered the ideas Holmes describes. As even these illiberal thinkers appear to believe, liberalism seemed so much in the ascendant that it could not seriously be endangered—and therefore its critics could only serve, if anything, as a healthy corrective to its myopia. 

Licensed Killers

 In his excellent study of the tropes of anti-liberal thought, The Anatomy of Antiliberalism (1993), Stephen Holmes includes at one point a paraphrase from Joseph de Maistre's notorious discussion of the role of the executioner in society. 

"Imagine a philosophical visitor from a foreign planet," Holmes summarizes Maistre's argument, "who has been informed that, on earth, there are two licensed killers. He knows that one, the soldier, kills the innocent, while the other, the executioner, kills the guilty. [...] The extraterrestrial observer is then asked to guess: which one of the two is the most highly honored by human society?"

Existential Risk

 The national news media have been in the throes all week of an epic freakout about the specter of "AI existential risk." Like a lot of people, I find myself unsure how seriously to take this. 

We have to start with a recognition—first off—that the people now estimating the risk of human extinction from AI superintelligence at a one-in-ten chance would have given you roughly the same odds five or ten or twenty years ago. 

Squash, Anyone?

 The Trump administration earned a richly-deserved defeat yesterday in an important First Amendment case. In the wake of ICE's extrajudicial killings of two people in Minnesota earlier this year, a private citizen had sharply criticized the director of the agency in an email and said his conscience would haunt him.

DHS responded by warning the man of potential criminal prosecution, and sent agents to his door to harass and intimidate him. 

Alas, Poor Theology!

 I was walking through Times Square yesterday and had to dodge a woman with a sign that read: "Jesus is King. Don't Go to Hell!"

I had to sigh that in two thousand years they still haven't come up with a better argument than appeals to spiritual terrorism. 

What the Scholars Couldn't Find

 In his book Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib, Seymour Hersh recounts at one point the testimony Donald Rumsfeld gave to Congress after photos came to light of the extreme abuse of prisoners at a U.S. military facility in Iraq. Rumsfeld says he was as appalled as anyone. The torture and humiliation displayed in the photos were "fundamentally un-American." They showed "acts that can only be described as blatantly sadistic, cruel, and inhuman." 

Fast forward to yesterday's news, when a government inspector general published photos of 18-square-foot large wire cages in which people were apparently confined in the Florida heat at the so-called "Alligator Alcatraz" detention site. The administration, at first, made a bunch of claims about the "enclosures" that were hard to credit. People asked to go inside the boxes, they say. Huh? There were no locks on the doors. The Inspector General found locks on the doors. 

Bush's Wars: Liberal and Cosmopolitan?

 In his contributions over the past week to the 9/11 25th anniversary discourse, Matt Yglesias has offered a fine synthesis of the chief strands of the emerging liberal nostalgia for Bush. Yglesias wants us to remember that, however many mistakes the U.S. made in its response to 9/11 (and he agrees there were many), the motive force behind the "War on Terror" was a genuine commitment to universal values. 

Bush really meant it, in other words, when he said that stuff about advancing "freedom" and "democracy" around the world. Many neoconservative and even liberal and left intellectuals (Christopher Hitchens, e.g.) went along with it because they believed it too. The post-9/11 response, then, really was part of a larger commitment to "liberal cosmopolitanism" in that era, as Yglesias puts it. 

Terrorists

 In the many think pieces that filled my news feed last week on the subject of the 25th anniversary of 9/11, astonishingly few devoted any attention to the question of whether we are at risk of suffering another conventional attack on U.S. soil of a similar scale. 

This seems like a question we really ought to be asking ourselves, since we are in a protracted war with a foreign adversary that has a long history of sponsoring international terrorism. 

Welcome of Tyrants?

 Trump is making a high-profile trip to Ireland this weekend to attend a golf tournament. The New York Times this morning notes that his arrival in that country has prompted "protests and praise." 

Praise?!! I thought. I was outraged. How could the Irish let me down so grievously? I had my Byron quotes all cued up. 

In Byron's poem "The Irish Avatar," he bemoaned the warm reception King George III found in Ireland on a state visit, even as he was oppressing its inhabitants:

Brothers in Hunger

 The news out of Europe this past week has been dominated by headlines about the rise of the far-right—from the disturbingly strong showing of the AfD in one state election in a formerly Communist region of Germany, to gangs of black-clad, balaclava-wearing anti-migrant gangs roving the British coast to intimidate asylum seekers. 

I always make the mistake of assuming at first that these moments will be clarifying and unifying for the left. I expect the response among liberals, leftists—and even center-right people who oppose fascism and racism and accept the basic tenets of liberal democracy—to be to realize that we have to work together and form a popular front against rising fascism. 

Where Are You on 9/11?

 Today marks 25 years since 9/11, and every commentator and newspaper editorial board will be penning obligatory pieces on the meaning of the attacks and the way they reshaped the world over the last quarter-century. Matt Yglesias, in a podcast episode this week on the subject, kicked off his reflections by quipping something like, "so—9/11 was bad." The joke being that this is such an obvious and universal sentiment that it hardly passes for a "take."

But of course—and however strangely—it's not actually a universal sentiment. One of the biggest political controversies of the summer revolved around a years-old remark from leftist bro streamer Hasan Piker asserting that "America deserved 9/11" (Piker later disavowed the comment as "inappropriate" and quibbled "I didn't say Americans deserved 9/11—I said America deserves 9/11"—which is an interesting and perhaps not entirely hollow distinction; we'll return to that later). 

What's the Matter With Mugsborough?

 As I discussed in a previous post, Ezra Klein devoted a recent episode of his podcast over on the New York Times website to the famous "What's the matter with Kansas?" problem. As he framed it at the top of the episode: "One of the big problems in left-wing politics is that the very people who Democrats, liberals and socialists think should be the most excited about the big, new government programs intended to help them are often the least excited — and are often voting for the party that wants to cut government."

Why is this? Why are the people who seemingly stand to gain the most from expanding social programs in fact voting against them? Why is "socialism" suddenly most popular only among people with graduate degrees living in leafy-green college towns and suburbs; whereas people in rural and depressed post-industrial rustbelt towns voted for a man in 2024 who proceeded to slash food stamps and Medicaid for the poor, as soon as he was in office, in exchange for increased tax subsidies to the rich? 

Why I Voted the Socialist Ticket (Again)

 I think I'm noticing a pattern here. 

In my role as public commentator, I'm always making these arguments that sound like they are in favor of the "Establishment" or "centrist" part of the Democratic coalition. 

I appeal to electability. I say things like: look, people, regardless whether you prefer Medicare for All, or a public option, or just increasing subsidies under the ACA—none of it will make the least difference if Democrats lose every election and the government is run entirely by Republicans who proceed to cut Medicaid and axe even those few other health care benefits we currently have. So our first priority needs to be to win, then we can iron out differences between us later on. 

Directional Socialism

 In Walter Greenwood's classic proletarian novel Love on the Dole, the heroic martyred socialist Larry Meath—when pressed to justify his political views—never gets much further than explaining the principle of surplus value. The laborers are the ones who did all the work to produce wealth, he argues—so why should they get to keep so little of the proceeds? 

This is why Robert Tressell called his own working class protagonists "ragged-trousered philanthropists"—they were charitably supporting a class of owners and capitalists in a state of idleness—and received only contempt for their pains. ("Is it not enough that you eat the bread of others' labor, but you must despise them as well?" as Ernest Crosby once asked of the bourgeoisie). 

AfD

 The disturbingly strong showing for the far-right AfD party in Germany's state elections in Saxony-Anhalt over the weekend fortunately does not immediately change anything about the policies of the German central government. Nor does it presage some inexorable global tide of the extreme right (the AfD is strongest only in historically depressed ex-Communist areas of the country, not nationwide). 

Still, I do think these results underscore that electoral politics across the West are no longer a contest between the center-right and the center-left as we once knew them. Rather, the struggle is between a loose coalition of anti-fascist parties, and a resurgent populist far-right that is deeply xenophobic, wears its historical ties to European fascism on its sleeves, talks about mass expulsion of nonwhite immigrants, and displays a weird affinity for Vladimir Putin. 

Snubbing Africa

 A couple days ago, the UN General Assembly voted to replace the Mercator projection on global maps with a new visualization of the world that depicts the relative sizes of the various continents more accurately. 

The United States was the only government on earth to vote against the new map. 

Why? Because Trump is wedded to the delusion that Greenland is bigger than it is, because of his colonial designs on the Danish territory? 

An Eagle in His Nest

 John Ganz in his newsletter today quotes from a new essay about the controversy that has ensued, following revelations of the extent of the personal acquaintance between Noam Chomsky and Jeffrey Epstein. For everyone who at one point admired Chomsky when they were a budding leftist, this news was indeed a blow; and many on the Left have apparently been arguing for months over whether we now have to reevaluate his entire career. 

My own view is that Chomsky always had certain annoying and disingenuous intellectual foibles; but at the same time, he became a hero to the anti-war left for a reason. I found myself reflexively quoting him—without the thought of Jeffrey Epstein even entering my brain—just two days ago, on the subject of the dehumanizing way we treat war in this country. Many of Chomsky's best lines and moral observations retain their emotional power. 

Centrist or Liberal?

 A couple days ago, the center-left prime minister of Spain suggested that the Moroccan government may have deliberately refused to prevent migrants and asylum-seekers from crossing the border into Ceuta earlier this summer. 

This is a rather odd thing to charge any government with, though, since the last time I checked, it's not the responsibility of any state to hold their own population prisoner within their borders and prevent them from exiting. 

Just a Game?

 Yesterday evening, the Trump administration's comms team apparently rolled out a set of retro flash games on the official White House website. 

One of them is called "Rio Run." God help me, I clicked on it. 

You play in the game as an old white man who wanders around the screen intercepting "border crossers."

Campism

 The Trump administration is obviously flailing around at the moment to try to find the right formula that will explain away the disastrous failure of their war of aggression on Iran. "There is no war," they say; "war, what war?"; "and anyways, we're winning." 

But yesterday, they seemed to converge on a new line: blame Ukraine. 

Trump, in one of his various unhinged social media rants, suggested that the U.S. is not running out of munitions in its war, and has more munitions than ever, and anyways, if we are running out of munitions, it's because the Biden administration gave so many away to Ukraine...

The Worst of the Younger Generation

 Well, Milo Yiannopoulos—that one-time enfant teribble of the MAGA alt-right—has been deported from the country, allegedly for overstaying his visa. 

Before anyone crows about this as poetic justice, though—or, still worse, concludes something like "wow, ICE may be cruel, but at least they're even-handed!"—John Ganz cautions us that this deportation appears to have been almost entirely the product of a creepy factional dispute within MAGA. 

Capitol of the Lost Republic

 I admit that I haven't followed very closely the news this summer about Trump's ever-multiplying D.C. construction projects—the White House ballroom, the planned "Arc de Trump," the "Garden of Heroes," the "Reflecting Pool," and lord knows what else. Every time I see a headline about one of these stories (and they come at us almost daily now—viz. the latest this week about the Supreme Court's acquiescence in the ballroom litigation), I tend to scroll past it—thinking "bah, we have bigger fish to fry here people!"

But I really shouldn't think that. Trump's redesign of our nation's capital is actually central to his larger authoritarian project. It's his way of symbolically burying the old America and the old D.C.—the "capitol of a lost republic," as John Dos Passos called it (in his capsule biography of La Follette). Trump is driven to build in order to pave over the America that was—and to put some new gaudy wasteland in its place that will bequeath to posterity the essence of his tinsel soul. 

Very, Very Evil?

 I had been no huge fan of Dr. Abdul El-Sayed's Senate campaign in Michigan up to now (though everyone who can should of course vote for him to keep that Senate seat blue). 

On the one hand, I never bought the insinuation that El-Sayed is personally anti-semitic. On the other, there should never be a "part two" to any statement in which you are condemning a hate crime against a synagogue. As El-Sayed has himself since acknowledged, he should have just said: this is terrible "full stop."

Kingsblood Royal

 At some point along the way it became fashionable not to take Sinclair Lewis quite seriously as a novelist or social prophet (Nabokov, for instance, once mocked the whole genre of novelistic social criticism to which he belonged as "Upton Lewis"). It becomes clearer by the day, though, that this was a terrible mistake. We need him more than ever. 

His 1947 "race" novel Kingsblood Royal is one of those books I've lugged around on my shelf from apartment to apartment for the last twenty years without actually reading it. I knew roughly the premise of it, and therefore thought I knew its contents—which I found intriguing but not relevant enough to actually bother reading until now. 

Alone Time

 The latest episode of The Argument podcast tackles the great debate over the alleged "loneliness" crisis, with Derek Thompson plumping firmly for the view that Americans are spending too much time alone and it's making us miserable—and the other two co-hosts taking a more ambivalent stance. 

I am in a somewhat odd position on this issue since, intellectually, I've been convinced by the Robert Putnam arguments about declining social capital for years. The fall of in-person "community" was a major topic of discussion in divinity school ten years ago, and probably is still.

La Question

 Yesterday—fourteen years after charges were initially filed in the case—a military judge in Guantanamo finally threw out evidence in the Khalid Shaikh Mohammed case that had been compromised by torture. 

Obviously, this is a setback the government richly deserves. One only wishes the officials responsible for the torture program were being sanctioned in some more lasting way. 

Pudd'nhead Wilson

 The Introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of Pudd'nhead Wilson gives voice to the widespread perception that the novel is in some ways a stunted classic—a book that fails to carry through its own profound and intriguing themes to their logical conclusion; preferring instead to accept the cheap victory of becoming a merely mechanical—if satisfying and gripping—detective story. 

But if true, this is precisely part of the genius and power of the novel: because one of its great themes is precisely the stunting of personality under the force of social convention—something Twain himself knew intimately. 

Where the Money Goes

 The news has been dominated this week by two big tales of our current government's colossal self-inflicted economic mismanagement: namely, 1) the rise of the national debt to over $40 trillion; and 2) Trump's renewed trade war with our closest neighbor and biggest trading partner, Canada. 

I've been talking less about the second of these two, in part because I tend to lump these tariff wars into the mental category of the merely inane aspects of Trump's rule—as opposed to the genuinely evil aspects, like his wars and enforced disappearances of innocent people to overseas detention camps. 

Socialism of Fools

 It is rather alarming that at a time when a right-wing would-be authoritarian is actively dismantling all of our democratic institutions and constitutional checks-and-balances, while fighting a needless and illegal war that is driving up the costs of everyday goods, the most politically engaged of our younger generation seem far less interested in any of these things, than they are in what an earlier generation (in the bad old days) would have called, ahem, "the Jewish question." 

What is even stranger is that the new antisemitism does not seem to split along traditional party lines. Rather, it constitutes a new axis in American politics that is dividing both parties' coalitions. 

The Means Test

 The latest episode of the Ezra Klein show starts with a familiar conundrum—the same one we were talking about on this blog just a week ago: namely, why is it that many of the same people who ostensibly stand to benefit most from a progressive economic program are voting against it? 

Why, for instance, have many potential beneficiaries of social programs helped elect a Republican who proceeded to cut food stamps and medicaid—as part of his big budget disaster last summer? Klein's guest on the episode, Annie Lowrey, short-hands this as the "what's the matter with Kansas?" problem. 

Rivals and Borrowers

 The latest episode of the Ezra Klein podcast from last week was devoted to a somewhat panicky discussion of an allegedly impending "China Shock 2.0." 

As Klein and his guest describe it, China is poised to overtake the rest of the world not only in the manufacturing of cheap consumer goods of the sort we associate with the first "China Shock"—but in the industrial production of just about everything else—including the most important "technologies of the future"—EVs, lithium batteries, solar panels—maybe AI and humanoid robots too, to give the more headline-grabbing examples? 

Debt Crisis

 The New York Times ran an opinion piece today hinting at an outside-the-box solution to the problem of our swelling national debt (which notoriously passed the $40 trillion mark this past week): namely, simply cancel it. Refuse to pay. 

The piece points out that ancient civilizations did this all the time. In fact, many of them built some sort of periodic debt jubilee into their calendars. 

Who Cares? It is French!

 There is much that is baffling about Trump's needless unprovoked trade war against our closest neighbor, biggest trading partner, and quondam ally Canada. But perhaps the strangest point yet to emerge is the specific issue over which trade negotiations apparently broke down. 

When Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney declared yesterday that he was walking away from trade talks, he said that U.S. negotiators were insisting on concessions that were simply too extreme to be considered, and would implicate fundamental principles of sovereignty. 

A Fool's Errand

 In the final weeks of the Biden administration—shortly before Trump's second inauguration—I recall seeing an opinion piece in Politico. It took the quixotic line that Biden ought to pardon all the January 6 rioters who opposed the certification of his election before the expiration of his term. 

The authors gave essentially two arguments for this seemingly paradoxical course of action: 

1) Trump was going to do it anyway, as soon as he took office; so why should Democrats not steal his thunder and get the credit for magnanimity? 

17,000 Bombs

 The U.S. military has all but admitted at this point that they blew up a school full of children in the opening hours of our ongoing war of aggression against Iran. 

But, having tacitly confessed this much, they claim this incident was wholly unique. There is only "one active civilian casualty investigation from the 13,629 munitions," as one military spokesperson told Congress earlier this year. 

Numidia

 In his historical novel The Gladiators, Arthur Koestler writes at one point about the fate of the Roman exiles who fled the tyranny of Sulla's dictatorship. 

They first sought refuge in Numidia, he says, whose king appeared to welcome them. 

"It turned out, however, that the King of Numidia, who had seemed friendly and put them off with all sorts of promises, had only done so in order to make them feel safe, and extradite them to the dictator; for dictator Sulla's power reached far and his thirst for vengeance was unquenchable." 

Bloodline Punishment

 The third article of the U.S. Constitution includes a striking phrase forbidding Congress to "work Corruption of Blood." This was intended to forbid the practice under the old tyrannical kings of punishing children and heirs for the acts of their parents. It therefore appeals to a basic moral intuition: the innocent should not suffer for the deeds of another person.

And yet, right now, there is reportedly an Iranian family—a mother, a father, and a teenage son—being held captive in a detention camp on U.S. soil—all because one of them happens to be the child of someone indirectly involved in the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis. 

Voting Against Interest

 The New York Times ran an editorial last week reminding us of the looming Medicaid cuts under Trump's big budget disaster that are set to take effect after the midterms, and which are likely to push millions more low-income Americans off of health insurance. 

These changes come on top of the government's recent failure to extend ACA subsidies, as well as cuts to nutrition assistance that already went into effect last year. 

The Day of Reckoning

 The Bezos-ified Washington Post ran a big scary editorial the other day warning about looming fiscal catastrophe, due to the inexorable rise of government spending and public debt. 

On the one hand, I'm tempted to dismiss this as ideologically-motivated alarmism. (One notices the essay points the finger at entitlement spending but does not mention Trump's tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, e.g.) Besides, people have been saying for years that we are headed for a debt crisis, yet it never actually seems to arrive. 

The Next Dilemma

 In one of the essays in his collection The Trail of the Dinosaur, Arthur Koestler makes the point that many of the historical dilemmas or controversies that once seemed most insoluble were eventually overcome—not because one side or the other at some point "won" the argument—but simply because new problems emerged that made the whole previous debate seem silly. 

The Crusades didn't end because Christianity "beat" Islam or vice versa. So too, Catholics and Protestants never did manage to exterminate one another in Europe's wars of religion—much as they tried. Instead, in both cases, the two sides first fought each other to a stalemate. And it seemed there was no possible exit. But then, new social circumstances arose that made the whole fight seem boring and irrelevant. 

The Gladiators

 Arthur Koestler's The Gladiators is ostensibly a novel about the first century B.C.—Koestler's only "historical" novel, to my knowledge. But it is quite obviously also a novel about the twentieth century. 

Knowing what we do about Koestler's life circumstances and the state of Europe in 1939—when the book was published—this should perhaps not surprise us. 

Gone Forever

Grief comes by strange and circuitous byways. I've written before on this blog about how I broke down in tears the night my dad went into the E.R. after the seizure that racked his body in the final weeks of his battle with brain cancer. But from that day to this, no other tears passed my eyes. I didn't even cry the day he died and they took his body away in a van. Sad as I would inevitably feel at odds moments of the day, I was denied the relief of tears. For months now, I've felt only a strange numbness. 

Until this morning. Seemingly for no reason at all—perhaps just because there was no reason, and nothing else was going on—I suddenly started bawling. 

Vicious

 The New York Times ran an eccentric "man bites dog"–type story yesterday (or, perhaps it is more accurate to say here, a "dog bites man; man smites dog" story) about a 120-pound Anatolian Shepherd named Bruce whose supporters filed an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court to stay his execution, after a state court had earlier judged him to be incorrigibly "vicious" and ordered him put down. 

Given that the Supreme Court routinely allows human beings to be killed in state and federal death chambers across the country, year after year, it should perhaps not surprise us that they failed to intervene in this case to stop Bruce's euthanasia. Indeed, it would in many ways be grotesque if they had allowed the dog to live when they have not bothered to do as much for so many men and women. 

Still Dos Passos's U.S.A.

 One of my reading projects for the summer has been to finish John Dos Passos's U.S.A. trilogy, and I just did last night. There are obviously many things one could say about an epic of that scale, but what came to mind for me in reading the last volume of the trilogy (The Big Money), was that our 2020s are coming to resemble very much the 1920s of a century ago that Dos Passos describes. We are still Dos Passos's America—and not in a good way. 

The trilogy as a whole is an elegy for the "lost republic" of Jeffersonian democracy, to use Dos Passos's phrase—the "storybook democracy" of Walt Whitman, as he elsewhere calls it. Beginning with a sympathetic depiction of I.W.W. labor radicalism at the turn of the century, Dos Passos charts the inexorable rise of big business and the dulling of conscience and moral values, as people find themselves duped into a needless war in Europe that is then cynically exploited by business interests. 

Burrito-Logic

 Meanwhile, as the left is converging on a new agenda defined by economic and affordability issues (to the chagrin of people like me who still think things like racism, refugee rights, trans rights, police violence, etc. are also important and need to be talked about)—the right seems to be trying to head in the opposite direction. 

To be sure, plenty of Republicans and even some "MAGA" bros keep urging Trump to focus on gas and food prices. Yet, pundits who support Trump's actual policies, like attacking Iran and imposing trade barriers on the rest of the world, have to argue that voters should just suck it up and tolerate a certain amount of economic pain for the sake of the administration's cultural and power politics goals. 

A Pillar of Salt

 Just my luck that all the progressive DSA-backed candidates I found most annoying or wrongheaded seem to have won their primary campaigns this cycle; whereas I was finally starting to warm to Francesca Hong in Wisconsin—and now she's the only one that's lost.

Hong was an interesting case since she seemed to get backlash from all sides. 

"Moderates" and party establishment types predictably warned that her views were too far left to win a general election—and perhaps they're right about that. 

Cuba Libre?

 The New York Times's new reporting today on the administration's lawless renditions to Eswatini has to be seen to be believed. 

I have known for at least a year that the administration is kidnapping and deporting people to secret prisons in war-torn autocracies in Africa—effectively a form of enforced disappearance. 

In My Dreams

 I woke up in the middle of the night last night after a particularly vivid dream—probably the result of eating too much pizza at dinner (melted cheese being understood since Victorian times to be a source of intense dreaming—most likely for lactose intolerance reasons). 

In the dream, Donald Trump had just taken over the organization where I work, and was now serving as CEO. I guess he was paying an in-person visit for some sort of team-building exercise, because we were all seated outside around a conference table. Trump had a personal calendar open before him, and was trying to rally the troops. 

He seemed to be confused about why team morale had been so low since his takeover. 

Two Versions of the Right

 You'd think just reading a mainstream newspaper would be enough on its own to make one acquainted with the depths of depravity in the Trump administration. But sometimes, one catches a glimpse of the alternative media ecosystem in which the American MAGA right lives, and one sees that the abyss is even deeper than one could have imagined. 

Today, for instance, I was trying to look up news reports about the TPS designation for Somalia, when I stumbled upon a press release from some evangelical group. They were applauding a MAGA representative for drawing up articles of impeachment against Judge Allison Burroughs for daring to pause Trump's termination of Somali refugees' legal status under the TPS program. 

"Send Me"?

 A recent article in the Intercept reports that the Pentagon has begun to use overt references to scripture in its online recruiting. One recent ad from the U.S. military prominently features the phrase "Send Me" over images of soldiers gearing up for battle. 

And if this sounds ambiguous to most of us, a Pentagon spokesperson went on to quote a full passage from Isaiah that uses the phrase; and the official "Department of War" accounts reportedly re-shared that post in turn. 

Leave it to the Trump administration to eliminate any shade of subtlety. 

Masters of Modern Thought

 Ross Douthat published his swan song at the New York Times yesterday—his final column for the paper before heading off into the sunset of Bari Weiss–controlled media. It was a fitting capstone to his career at the Times, in that it summed up a central motif of much of his writing there: namely: I'm not sure who's right, but I know I'm mad about it. 

For years, Douthat has been telling us that, as a conservative Catholic intellectual, he is against liberalism.

But he also knows that most of the illiberal alternatives on offer are not rationally or morally defensible. 

Data Centers

 In a podcast interview earlier this week about the current populist backlash against AI data centers, Jasmine Sun and Ezra Klein started off by trying to explain what it is like to actually live in the vicinity of one of these facilities. "What do they sound like?" Klein asked. Sun replied: "they sound like humming, buzzing, whirring."

B-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R!

What are the machines saying, a hundred of them in one long room?

They must be talking to themselves, for I see no one else for them to talk to.

Ceuta

 The arrival earlier this week of tens of thousands of migrants and asylum-seekers in Ceuta (a Spanish territory in North Africa) obviously gave the global far-right an issue they could demagogue for days. Extreme rightists on both sides of the Atlantic (including, of course, people in and close to our own U.S. government), who have been framing nonwhite immigration as an "invasion" all along, could flaunt viral images of the desperate sea of humanity and say: "see!? this is what happens as soon as you elect a leftist government! They open the borders!"

That much—alas—is expected at this point. 

Proletarian Voters?

 The "dirtbag" stream of the Left seems to be taking a victory lap after the results were finally announced in the Senate Democratic primary election in Michigan yesterday. They view Dr. Abdul El-Sayed's win as a vindication of the whole macho, aggro, "up yours" brand of politics they have been wanting to see take over the Left for a long time. 

"Chuck Schumer Eats Shit," was Ken Klippenstein's headline yesterday, responding to these events. So much for that "now is the time for everyone to come together and focus on the general election" speech that El-Sayed gave yesterday. 

Primary Season

 I sometimes feel I must be the last Democratic voter in the country who has not been obsessing over the primary election in Michigan. I have no strong feelings about who should win, and mostly just want this contest to be over so we can focus on what seems to me the bigger issue here: namely, that Donald Trump and a supine Republican majority are dismantling our democracy.

When I awoke this morning to see that the race was still deadlocked, I let out a groan: this—the lack of a resolution—was the only possible outcome I distinctly did not want. 

Successive Degrees of Unfreedom

 I'm sorry to keep going on about André Brink's A Dry White Season. But I wish that our government wouldn't keep proving my point for me that it feels more and more by the day that we are living in a political situation very much like the one he depicts in the novel. 

The book is about apartheid South Africa—and everyone knows these days that apartheid South Africa was an authoritarian state. 

Neurotic Cinderellas

 The other week, Stephen Miller delivered a characteristically bizarre speech at a terrorism conference hosted by the State Department. He and Marco Rubio are obviously dreaming up some neo-McCarthyite campaign against the Left—so far with limited success. 

But what I really found interesting was the moment Stephen Miller tried to psychoanalyze his opponents: 

The leftist is fundamentally motivated by envy, by hatred, by jealousy.  The leftist looks at what is beautiful and what is good and what is natural and is filled with envy and hatred.  The leftist looks at a perfect family with a perfect life and a perfect job and perfect kids that goes to church every Sunday and is filled with a feeling of inadequacy and jealousy, and they covet. [...] 

Swift on War and Alliances

 Since we are still apparently stuck in the middle of Trump's illegal, futile, and endless war on Iran, I turned to Jonathan Swift's 1711 anti-war tract, The Conduct of the Allies, in the hope that it might have some wisdom to teach our present generation. 

Alas, I found the essay far less ideologically congenial than I had hoped. Swift's pamphlet argues in favor of a treaty over the continuance of war, but it is far from a pacifist tract. Indeed, Swift offers essentially no humanitarian arguments against war. Instead, his arguments rest almost entirely on appeals to gut-level selfishness and the pocket-book. (And I remind you what Mencius had to say about that.)

A 2,000-Pound Bomb

 Trump is very obviously telegraphing his desire at this point to wriggle out of the war he started with Iran. But that doesn't mean he won't still commit various crimes and obscenities in his flailing efforts to do so.

One of those obscenities was plastered across the front of the New York Times yesterday. A visual analysis from the paper showed an enormous crater where had once stood a family home. Three people reportedly died in the strike: a mother, a father, and their two-year-old child. 

A Dry White Season

 I finished reading André Brink's classic 1979 novel A Dry White Season today. My admiration for it grew the deeper into it I read. At its opening, the book seems set to be made of rather unpromising materials. But it gathers to a peak of enormous emotional power by its final pages. 

Brink's book is obviously a classic story about politics and injustice, apartheid and authoritarianism. 

Split Consciousness

 I was writing in another place and context the other day about Elon Musk's disturbing pattern of extremist far-right rhetoric lately—his talk of the need to "deal with," as he puts it, "traitors and invaders"—by which he appears to mean immigrants and liberals who support welcoming policies. 

I said something at the end of the piece along the lines of: "fortunately, we're still a long ways from Elon's neo-fascist vision being realized. We don't yet have neo-Nazi thugs patrolling the streets murdering and lynching nonwhite immigrants and liberals..." etc. 

Apartheid States

 The analogy that has become very common to draw in recent years between Israel and apartheid South Africa has always been imprecise. Arab people living in Israel's 1948 borders have rights of citizenship. They vote in Israel's elections and send representatives to the Knesset. 

Indeed, if Israel were still limited to its 1948 borders today, it would be a straightforward democracy. A flawed and unequal democracy in many ways, to be sure—but then, what democracy isn't? (Our own democracy here in the States, one may have noticed, is not doing so hot.)

The Death Chamber

 My home state of Florida executed two people yesterday—reportedly the first time that has happened in the state since 1964. 

The first of these two state-sponsored killings made it easy to see the futility and inhumanity of the death penalty in all its barbarism. 

Trump's Vision of Judgment

 A recent Daily Kos headline reads: "Trump only 'pretty sure' Lindsey Graham is in heaven."

The reference was to Trump's eulogy yesterday for the departed senator. Apparently the full quote was: "I think I know where he is, and I think he’s up there. I think he’s watching us. I’m pretty sure of it."

His Prominence

 For some reason, the name of Cecil Rhodes still connotes the utmost in prestige in our society. Elite students still scramble over themselves each year to secure a Rhodes Scholarship—despite the fact that it is named for a man who effectively stole a bunch of land in South Africa, dispossessed its inhabitants, reduced them to a system of virtual slavery, and governed for years as a capitalist dictator. 

Surely here is proof of that old truism—remarked by Henry Fielding among others—that if a swindler only swindle on a large enough scale; a robber only rob enough territory; a murderer only kill enough people—he will cease to be condemned as a criminal and start to be sanctified as a statesman. For "power has never lacked eulogists" (Elias Canetti; Stewart trans.). 

High T–Roosevelt?

 A recent piece in the Intercept traces Pete Hegseth's obsession with testosterone levels—and other manifestations of masculine insecurity—to a lifelong desire to model himself on Teddy Roosevelt. 

The writer, Nick Turse, includes an anecdote from early in Hegseth's military career: "Stuffed in Hegseth’s Army-issue green duffle bag when he arrived at Gitmo was a sheet of plain white copy paper inside a black plastic frame with a quote from his hero, former President Teddy Roosevelt."

The Best Thing

 The Wall Street Journal published a pretty remarkable story yesterday based on unreleased footage from an upcoming Lindsey Graham documentary. Apparently, it shows just how closely involved Graham was in cheerleading and directly inspiring Trump's Iran war. 

By the Journal's account, both men took an unsettlingly personal delight in the destruction and mayhem they had unleashed. In the war's opening days—when as we now know a U.S. Tomahawk missile annihilated an Iranian school and took the lives of more than a hundred children—Graham and Trump were crowing together over the TV images of their fiery handiwork. 

Motley of Satire

 I was writing in the previous post about what I called the "counter-tradition" of European and American writers who criticized imperialism. What strikes me though about reading the examples of this counter-tradition in Sven Lindqvist's book—and in the separate examples I assembled—is how often these writers felt the need to present their criticism in the indirect form of sarcasm. 

The result is that I need to provide a whole paragraph of context, lest the contemporary reader get the false impression that Mark Twain actually meant it, say, when he wrote that "the world belongs to [...] the white man." 

In Every Land He Slayeth

 Everyone knows that European nations brutally colonized and subjugated much of the rest of humanity from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century and—through a combination of disease, war, enslavement, dispossession and deliberate genocide—pushed many human communities around the globe to the point of near-extinction. 

Everyone knows this—so what's the point of thinking about it now? What's the point, specifically, of revisiting Sven Lindqvist's 1992 book, "Exterminate All the Brutes"—about the history of European colonial genocides? 

Senior Thesis

 Even back during college I was very committed to defending the liberal project. But I took a kind of grudging interest at the time in various "communitarian" and "traditionalist" critiques of liberalism and modernity. I thought they might be onto something; I thought liberalism could learn or gain something from them; and I went out of my way to vindicate them from charges of necessarily leading to authoritarian illiberalism. 

I even devoted an entire 40-page B.A. thesis, about the history of fascist ideology, to attempting to draw an overfine distinction between religious conservatives and traditionalists, on the one hand, and genuine fascists on the other. 

Mahdi Against Mahdi

 Trump was back to threatening war crimes against Iran this week. As he fumes about the fact that the war of aggression he started is not working out well for him, he has vowed to begin blowing up Iranian civilian infrastructure—unless they agree to let Trump walk away from this war of his own making and restore the status quo in the Strait of Hormuz that prevailed before he started bombing. 

Nor is this the only recent sign that we are heading back into full-scale war. In response to the deaths of four U.S. service members, Trump declared on social media that "Every time Iran kills an American Soldier, they will pay for that killing many times over." 

Be a Bourne

 Three more Americans died this week because of Trump's utterly needless and unjustifiable war of aggression in Iran. 

As Thomas Hardy wrote of another pointless colonial war—this one at the turn of the century: 

South of the Line, inland from far Durban,

A mouldering soldier lies—your countryman [...]

Revisiting Benda

 I finally finished Julien Benda's The Treason of the Intellectuals (La trahison des clercs) this week. The book has sat on my shelf unread and followed me through various moves for at least a decade—perhaps almost two—so I feel a certain sense of accomplishment in getting around to it at long last—even if the book is not that long and can be read in a day or two. 

My copy dates from a 2007 print run, and comes complete with an introduction by Roger Kimball, of The New Criterion and National Review fame—which feels very of its moment. These were the grand old days of bow-tie-wearing right-wing "intellectuals"—and there was something of a vogue among neoconservatives for Benda specifically. 

Our Muste Moment?

 Norman Mailer writes at one point in The Armies of the Night that, whatever else the Vietnam War did, it brought the American Left back together again. 

For the decades before the war, after all, the Left had fractured down the middle over the issue of communism and the Soviet Union. "Consider a countdown of the punches," Mailer writes; "famine in the Ukraine; Moscow trials; Hitler-Stalin pact; slave-labor camps; Cold War"—and on. 

Imperfect Democracy vs. Perfect Tyranny

 For my sins, I still occasionally check in on that podcast I was ranting about a few weeks ago—the one that features a couple of leftist bros I used to admire from the good old days of the fight against the neocons. 

This time, they were out with a new episode reporting on a bunch of corruption scandals and mob hits in Ukraine (some with shadowy alleged ties to state security forces), which they claim are being under-reported in the Western press. 

What Would Macdonald Do?

 Back in the late'40s, when he was slowly divesting himself of his earlier pacifism and becoming a reluctant Cold Warrior, Dwight Macdonald felt called upon to explain in print whether there was any daylight now between his position and that of President Truman. 

Macdonald explained that there still was; and it consisted chiefly in the fact that the means by which the U.S. government proposed to prosecute the Cold War were wrong, in his view—because they would make enemies of those he called "the chief victims of Stalin's system"—"namely the people of Russia." 

Jus in bello

 The recent death of Lindsey Graham prompted me to recall that ugly episode from the early weeks after the October 7 massacre, when he appeared to justify the equivalent of dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza in retaliation. 

In one interview, Graham was asked: "Is there a threshold for you, and do you think there should be one for the United States government in which the U.S. would say let’s hold off for a second in terms of civilian casualties?" 

Newts and Abundance

 The other day, Matt Yglesias was complaining about environmentalist NIMBY voters in Britain who were blocking some new housing development because it would imperil an endangered variety of newts. "Who cares about newts???" he demanded to know. 

Another writer called him out for this comment, and Yglesias writes in a follow-up post that he was perhaps being a bit glib when he wrote that. He was "mouth[ing] off," he admits, and it was bad form. 

What Can We DO About It?

 Earlier this week, a group of nearly 200 economists and businesspeople signed an open letter on the future of AI, entitled "We Must Act Now." 

The statement is a model of strategic ambiguity—that sort of deliberate fuzziness as to key details that is often required to reach a consensus viewpoint that a large committee of people might be willing to get behind. 

The Tragedy of American Diplomacy

 The Tragedy of American Diplomacy is one of these classic and famous books that's just faintly disappointing once you actually get around to reading it. I came to it knowing that it was supposed to be the definitive critique of U.S. foreign policy that launched the whole genre of New Left historiography. I found it instead to be somewhat leaden and clumsy in its prose, and basically focused on the wrong questions. 

To be sure, the core of William Appleman Williams's thesis is inarguable. The basic "tragedy" of American foreign policy, as he sees it, is that our nation proclaimed the ideals of self-determination and anti-colonialism, but then we lived to contradict them. 

Graham, Revisited

 In yesterday's post, after devoting about 75% of the piece to expounding all the good reasons to despise Lindsey Graham—I ended by admitted that, in spite of everything, I always sort of liked him. 

It was seemingly hard not to. Even during Biden's last State of the Union speech in 2024, he at one point made some inside joke and pointed at Graham. "Lindsey knows what I'm talking about," he said. Cut to a shot of Graham giggling in the audience. 

Lindsey Graham

 By any reasonable standards, Lindsey Graham—the Republican Senator from South Carolina who died over the weekend—was a pretty terrible person. 

He knew exactly who and what Donald Trump was. In his own short-lived bid for the White House in 2016, Graham correctly diagnosed Trump as a "xenophobe" and a "bigot." Graham's own policy views obviously inclined him to the paradoxical mix of warmongering neocon hawkism and genuine patriotic idealism that motivated a figure like John McCain—in other words, the polar opposite of a corrupt transactionalist like Trump. 

The Folly of Despotism

 My post the other day about Albert O. Hirschman's The Passions and the Interests ended with something of a cliffhanger, so I wanted to swing back around to revisit it now. 

As Hirschman documents extensively in that book, early modern political thinkers were fundamentally concerned with the question of how to curb more effectively the human propensity to violence and despotism—given that mere "moralistic exhortation" had at best proved ineffective (and at worst had itself inflamed the tendency to persecution and war). 

The American Peril

 Two days ago, the Wall Street Journal reported on an alleged Iranian plot to assassinate Donald Trump in the midst of the ongoing war in the Middle East. 

What?! Assassinate our head of state in the midst of ongoing negotiations? 

Oh, you mean—exactly what we just did to them about four months ago? 

The Heel-Turn

 I was listening to the latest episode of the Rational Security podcast yesterday, and they devoted a segment to reporting that Michael Cohen, Trump's former personal attorney and fixer turned critic, has now apparently changed his mind for a second time and become a Trump loyalist again. 

For those who missed the intervening change of heart, Cohen at one point renounced his friendship with Trump and said in effect that he regretted ever knowing him. Indeed, Cohen notably testified against Trump at his New York trial. 

Let Them Be Left

 The New York Times ran a story yesterday whose headline says it all: "Trump, Ending Decades of Protection, Opens Wild Habitats to Drilling and Mining." 

Even without reading the article I could have guessed what, specifically, he had done. Back in law school, I recall reading the 1995 Supreme Court case that dealt with the definition of the term "harm" in the Endangered Species Act.