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."