Adam's Ideas

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”   F Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

A coterie of tech billionaires and Silicon Valley high-flyers has swung hard behind Donald Trump.  Their reasons center around the supposed hostility of Biden and the Democratic Party to their techno-dreams. In particular they object to attempts to regulate cryptocurrency and to put some brakes on AI development.  Though many used to support Democrats, now they echo MAGA talking points about DEI and the intolerant ‘woke’ culture that they claim is stifling free speech and interfering with progress.  They threw money at the Trump campaign and in return have been allowed to seed the Trump administration with their followers and policy positions.

Behind these public positions, many tech-geniuses have become enamored of much more radical views.  They view democracy as inefficient and slow, needing replacement by a new regime modeled on the start-up culture that has produced our giant tech companies.  Imbibing ideas from people like reactionary blogger Curtis Yarvin and cryptocurrency advocate Balaji Srinivasan, they envision political systems that run on cryptocurrency, blockchains, and AI.  They toggle back and forth between pursuing utopias that stand outside all existing states—Peter Thiel’s Seasteading, Elon Musk’s Terminus on Mars, Srinavasan’s Network State—and plans for subverting and taking over the United States.  None of these would be democracies but would be run like corporations, top-down with a single enlightened ruler at the top. 

Here are some of the questions we should be asking about this puzzling turn of events.

First, WTF?   You folks scheming to overthrow America’s constitutional system are not the poor, the needy, the oppressed.  Quite the opposite.  You’re some of the richest, most successful people in the country.  You have made it to the top in the current democratic, two-party, ‘woke’ America—many of you sought this out by emigrating here—but that world is now somehow all wrong?  It needs wholesale replacement?  Something is badly off with this picture. 

Second, you want to run the country like a start-up?  You know, I assume, that the vast, vast majority of start-ups fail.  They go down for many reasons:  they don’t understand the market, they can’t hire good people, they underestimate costs, the founder turns out to be a pathological monster, someone else does it better, COVID changes the playing field, etc, etc.  Only a few turn into viable companies, and only a few of those become really successful.   

If this happens, it’s a shame, but there is isn’t much damage.  Some investors lose money that, hopefully, they can afford to lose.  The founders pick themselves up and go back to the drawing board.  But the US government?   We don’t have another one waiting in the wings.  Like 19th century anarchists, there is a hopeless romanticism at work that imagines that when government collapses, a thousand beautiful flowers will bloom.  But in reality, if this government, with all its flaws, goes under there won’t be any solid pad from which to launch the replacement. 

Third, even if the dream is realized, why is it better?  Why is it preferable to live in a super-efficient tyranny, rather than a messy, inefficient democracy?  The history of tyrannies is not exactly brimming with examples of efficiency and prosperity and stability.  Quite the opposite. 

But assume you can make the US like Singapore, with advanced AI taking it to the next level.  What is the argument that this will make people happier?   Or more narrowly, that it will accelerate the progress in technology that seems to be the be-all and end-all of this project?   You really think a dictatorship run by Elon Musk would be more likely to incubate great new companies and new technology?

Simply saying that because it resembles a big successful company it must be better, begs the question.  Companies have very simple and limited purposes.  They often dress them up to sound like they’re in the business of saving the world or realizing the customer’s innermost desires.    But they really aren’t.

Also, private companies are not, rhetoric aside, bastions of rationality and efficiency.  Have you not watched “The Office”?  They often do stupid things that lose money, damage the environment, cause people to suffer, and lead to bankruptcy.  People get sued and end up in court in handcuffs. 

Political systems have complicated and broad purposes.  They have to deliver something called Justice.  They have to protect Community, what we have in common.  Rights, what we protect against Community.  Dignity.  Equality.   Security, external and internal.  They have to create and maintain Legitimacy via some combination of performance, story-telling, historical narrative, and participation in selecting leaders and making decisions.  These inconvenient human needs don’t figure in the techno-utopian plans, which rest on  running roughshod over every human need if it gets in the way of greater productivity.

Fourth, why can’t the problems with our present regime be solved with reform rather than replacement? Have you tried?  No one denies that America’s constitutional system could use improvement.  If even part of the energy and resources and thinking devoted to overthrowing was devoted to improving, we might be in a much better place.  Put your ingenuity and money to figuring out how to fix the electoral system, make the Supreme Court fair, stop political corruption, make it easier to build things, ensure the benefits of technology and greater productivity benefit everyone.  Or is this not really in your interest?  Too tame?  Not enough opportunities to make big bucks? 

We should be more than slightly suspicious that something else is at work here.  The idea that the arena we are particularly good at should be the model for the whole society, that’s a pretty normal idea.  That’s how medieval barons and knights thought.  We are the best at hacking other people to death, so our world will be ordered to put hacking at the center.  The best hackers will rule and receive obeisance.  Hacking makes the world a better place!  Statues will be put up, pictures mounted on all the walls, operas and symphonies will sing the praises, of the great hackers.

In any society the people who are winners, the nobles or oligarchs or high priests, are, predictably, the ones who prate about ‘meritocracy.’  They believe in their bones that the current order is the right order and that they have triumphed in a civilizational episode of “Survivor.”   All that remains is for the losers to submit and recognize that the best have won.  This is why industrialists and financiers from the Gilded Age embraced eugenics and pseudo-Darwinian theories that placed people like themselves at the tip-top of the natural order.       

With this mindset, your goal is to keep upstarts from challenging your supremacy.  How might this happen?  One way, as Nobel Prize winning economist Simon Johnson points out, would be if the federal government were to spend lots of money and effort developing new technologies, as it has often done in the past.  These wouldn’t be patented and owned by today’s oligarchs.  So you might actually be in favor, somewhat counterintuitively, of cutting back sharply on government spending for science and R and D.  And you might also like high tariffs that protect your monopolies.  Hmmm….

One can’t read the books and Substack pieces and podcasts where the techno-utopian dreams are laid out without realizing that these ultra-rich, extremely clever folks have huge chips on their shoulder.  Just inventing things and starting companies and making money isn’t enough.  They don’t feel they are being sufficiently valued.  “We gave you all this and you aren’t grateful” seems to be a common feeling.

It rankles them that some people are less than enthusiastic about all these wonderful new toys. They aren’t convinced that all the social media and smartphones and automated systems, not to mention the coming era of cryptocurrency and AI, are unqualified goods.  They’re skeptical that the tech-bros with their genius brains but underdeveloped souls always know what’s best.  They are tired of constantly being the subjects of Silicon Valley’s latest science experiment.

Even worse, these unwarranted concerns were leading the Biden Administration to think about regulations and antitrust and holding hearings and taxing billionaires.  Asking annoying questions about where technology was going and what might go wrong.

The billionaires find this unacceptable, just the unwashed poking sticks in the humming wheels of progress.

The Techno-Optimist Manifesto

For fun, let’s look at one of the more famous statements of purpose, Mark
Andreessen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto”, published in 2023.  Andreessen is a very successful investor whose firm, Andreessen-Horowitz, sits at the center of the Silicon Valley start-up ecosystem.

Andreessen’s manifesto explains why he has become a huge Trump backer.  He donated heavily to Trump’s campaign, and after the election he started to spend a lot of time at Mar-a-Lago along with his friend, Elon Musk.  (If you want to hear a presumably intelligent man embarrass himself, listen to Joe Rogan’s interview with Andreessen shortly after the election, where both men fall over themselves to tell each other how much they love Trump and how blessed, blessed we are that he won.)

The gist of the Manifesto is that technology, plus capitalism, is the absolute best thing human beings have ever come up with, it is the cause of all our progress and greater wealth and abundance.  If we just let it do its thing it will continue to make us all richer and happier.  But (for reasons Andreessen never addresses) some people are skeptical.  They are the Enemy.

We have enemies.

Our enemies are not bad people – but rather bad ideas.

Our present society has been subjected to a mass demoralization campaign for six decades – against technology and against life – under varying names like “existential risk”, “sustainability”, “ESG”, “Sustainable Development Goals”, “social responsibility”, “stakeholder capitalism”, “Precautionary Principle”, “trust and safety”, “tech ethics”, “risk management”, “de-growth”, “the limits of growth”.

This demoralization campaign is based on bad ideas of the past – zombie ideas, many derived from Communism, disastrous then and now – that have refused to die.

Our enemy is stagnation.

Our enemy is anti-merit, anti-ambition, anti-striving, anti-achievement, anti-greatness.

Our enemy is statism, authoritarianism, collectivism, central planning, socialism.

Our enemy is bureaucracy, vetocracy, gerontocracy, blind deference to tradition.

Our enemy is the Precautionary Principle, which would have prevented virtually all progress since man first harnessed fire. The Precautionary Principle was invented to prevent the large-scale deployment of civilian nuclear power, perhaps the most catastrophic mistake in Western society in my lifetime. The Precautionary Principle continues to inflict enormous unnecessary suffering on our world today. It is deeply immoral, and we must jettison it with extreme prejudice.

There’s a lot more, but you get the idea.

There is of course much that is accurate in Andreessen’s picture.   The combination of science and technology and free markets—what he calls the ‘techno-capital machine’—has produced tremendous wealth and liberated much of mankind from want.  The turn away from nuclear power was a terrible mistake. 

It is however astonishingly blind, I am tempted to say deliberately blind, to the role of political and institutional structures in this process.  The rule of law, the sidelining of stifling oligarchies, the loosening of rigid class divisions, the empowering of ordinary people, the articulation and enforcement of free speech and a free press, the taming of religious sectarianism, and much more, have been essential to the progress he worships. 

Governments have sometimes stifled markets, but they have also delivered education and science and learning, aided infrastructure and trade and banking and on and on.  Government has again and again, through laws and regulation, made new industries safer and therefore more acceptable to the public.  They have prevented monopolies and trusts from destroying the progress Andreessen extols.  They have directed tremendous public resources towards research and science.  They have made the techno-capital machine acceptable by helping to ensure that its fruits benefit more than just a lucky few. 

Liberal democratic governments in particular have been the incubators of progress, and also its beneficiaries.  Liberal democracy, free markets, and technological progress have gone hand in hand.  The year 1776 famously saw both the Declaration of Independence and the publication of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations.  Andreessen quotes from Wealth perhaps the most over-used and poorly understood sentences in the English language: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages.”  Like so many he ignores the rest of Smith’s 750 pages where he tells us again and again that self-interest is dangerous and must be checked, and that rich businessmen always conspire to create monopolies and fleece the public.  For Andreessen, however, selfishness is something to be praised, and government is nothing but an obstacle in the way of Great Men.

Notice the timeline here.  Andreessen says we went off track 60 years ago, somewhere around 1973.  It was, somewhat surprisingly, during the Presidency of Richard Nixon that Congress created the Environmental Protection Agency. It was when the first Earth Day was held.  Awareness of the dangers of the techno-capital machine was growing and becoming institutionalized.  Andreessen is not specific about what caused this historical wrong turn, but we can assume this is what he has in mind. 

Of course we need to point to the obvious, that during the 60 years that we’ve suffered from this awful ‘demoralization’, the United States incubated an astonishing surge in applied technology, especially in computing and communications.  The new industries in these sectors have long overtaken the old manufacturing giants in value and influence.  Andreessen himself has thrived and grown rich off them.  True, we never built flying cars.  But maybe flying cars were a lame idea, compared to the internet. 

The wrong turn Andreessen wants us to lament doesn’t seem objectively to have derailed progress.  Maybe—gasp!—it helped progress by convincing the public that we could let technology go forward while being confident that someone, somewhere was watching out for its dangers and downsides and doing something about them.

Andreessen laments, for instance in this fawning 2025 interview, that productivity growth has dropped from its heyday in the first 2/3 of the 20th century.  He imagines this is because of his ‘enemies.’  There are many explanations for this, the most convincing being Robert Gordon’s analysis in The Rise and Fall of Economic Growth, that this was an abnormal time when the global economy was absorbing genuinely revolutionary technologies—electricity, the internal combustion engine, powered flight, indoor plumbing, antibiotics, radio and television, nuclear power.  These were the ‘low-hanging fruit’ for human ingenuity. It is unrealistic to expect this to continue, and for all the hype around the computer and software revolutions, they have not been nearly as transformative.       

The real difference between productivity then and now is that ‘then’, in the good old days, increases in productivity translated to higher wages and a higher standard of living for ordinary people.  Today, productivity growth is disproportionately grabbed by those who are already rich. Rising inequality is the result.  But this doesn’t seem to concern Andreessen, nor does it seem to occur to him that it might be a drag on progress.        

Finally, we can look at Andreesen’s attempt to articulate what this is all about, what vision of human nature or human good he has in mind. Here he stumbles, in a revealing way.  He wants  abundance, material security, and ultimately absolute freedom and power: 

We believe that technology ultimately drives the world to what Buckminster Fuller called “ephemeralization” – what economists call “dematerialization”. Fuller: “Technology lets you do more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing.

We believe that since human wants and needs are infinite, economic demand is infinite, and job growth can continue forever.

Andreessen goes on to cite the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche to underscore his vision.  He quotes Nietzsche’s warning about the ‘Last Man’ of our modern age who has no great goals, no higher yearnings, who seeks only material abundance and comfort and security.  This is what Andreesen says he wants to avoid.  But his techno-capital machine is precisely what Nietzsche despises and sees as creating the Last Man.  What Andreesen and his fellow tech enthusiasts are asking for is to get to the Last Man as fast as possible. 

Andreessen says, correctly I think, that “the ultimate moral defense of markets is that they divert people who otherwise would raise armies and start religions into peacefully productive pursuits.”  Nietzsche, however, is not interested in peaceful productive pursuits. He thinks they make us weak and boring.  He is calling on us to raise armies and start religions.

There was, however, another famous 19th century thinker who was in fact enamored of technology and, in his way, of capitalism.  His name was Karl Marx.  Marx of course wanted to transcend capitalism but he was clear-eyed about its great creative power.  In the Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels are rhapsodic about what capitalism has accomplished. In only a century it “has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together… rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life…put an end to all feudal, patriarchal arrangements…all that is solid melts into air.”  All this ‘creative destruction’ makes possible a future of technology and unlimited abundance, when man will no longer need to labor but can paint in the morning and fish in the afternoon. 

Andreessen hates communism, by which he means Leninism, for its top-down planning and rejection of the profit motive.  But the vision he and others have for the future is far closer to Marx than Nietzsche: a single-minded surge towards abundance and unlimited wealth, stewarded by a small elite of enlightened experts.  Eventually human beings will merge with their technological creations and we will find ourselves at the true end of history. 

We believe intelligence is in an upward spiral – first, as more smart people around the world are recruited into the techno-capital machine; second, as people form symbiotic relationships with machines into new cybernetic systems such as companies and networks; third, as Artificial Intelligence ramps up the capabilities of our machines and ourselves.

Andreesen has read too much Ayn Rand, a Nietzschean who tries to make his teachings compatible with capitalism.  Rand’s novels exalt the great inventor-businessman, a superior being whose work benefits us all, but who does what he does only for the love of the challenge, of the difficulty, of the fight.  This is the picture Andreesen has of himself and his Silicon Valley friends.  They are the ones who by their striving and sacrifice and genius make things for the rest of us.  Governments—especially democratic ones—are creatures of the Last Men who want only to tear down the great ones, loading them down with Precautionary Principles.   

In a section titled “Becoming Technological Supermen,” Andreesen quotes—slyly, without naming the source—from the 1909 Futurist Manifesto:  “To paraphrase a manifesto of a different time and place: ‘Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive character. Technology must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.’”

Perhaps Andreesen wants us not to notice that the Futurists were precursors of Italian fascism.  A few paragraphs later in their Manifesto, we read this:  “We want to glorify war—the only cure for the world—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman.  We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice.”

Mr. Andreesen and the other pseudo-Nietzscheans around him are playing with fire.  They throw out names and ideas that they don’t understand, in the name of a supposedly apolitical agenda that would throw aside every guardrail, every voice of caution, every consideration other than unrestricted progress. There is no question that anything resembling democracy is intolerable.  They want nothing to oppose them, and they want to be lauded and rewarded as they smash and grab their way through the lives of ordinary Americans.   

Andreessen says there can be left-wing and right-wing supporters of his manifesto.  He is otherwise silent on politics.  But he does say:

We believe America and her allies should be strong and not weak. We believe national strength of liberal democracies flows from economic strength (financial power), cultural strength (soft power), and military strength (hard power). Economic, cultural, and military strength flow from technological strength. A technologically strong America is a force for good in a dangerous world. Technologically strong liberal democracies safeguard liberty and peace. Technologically weak liberal democracies lose to their autocratic rivals, making everyone worse off.

It sounds like Andreessen is a fan of liberal democracy.  But it is not clear that his blueprint for techno-capitalist progress is compatible with liberal democracy, or any democracy.  A society ordered around Andreessen’s model would have to abdicate almost all public supervision and control over private business.  His perfect meritocracy  would honor a few supermen, and ignore or denigrate those who don’t measure up. 

Many of the people close to Andreessen, who share his support for Trump and for unrestricted technological progress, are very clear about their rejection of democracy.  Peter Thiel said in 2009 that he doesn’t think freedom and democracy are compatible.  Curtis Yarvin (quoted approvingly by Andreessen in this 2025 interview) has frequently said a type of monarchy is needed in America, which should get over its aversion to dictators.  Trump himself, of course, has made clear that he rejects democracy, except when he wins.

It used to be taken for granted that democracy, and the free exchange of ideas at the heart of liberalism, were essential to America’s economic and technological success.  It was why we out-competed the USSR.  Andreessen doesn’t mention any of this.

Andreessen and his pals are up to their eyeballs in various libertarian schemes to separate from the United States of America.  Musk wants to go to Mars, Thiel wants to live in the middle of the ocean, Jeff Bezos envisions orbiting cities, Srinavasan (a former general partner at Andreessen-Horowitz) wants to create ‘network states’.  It may or may not be a coincidence that a project backed by Thiel, Praxis, is eying Greenland as the place to build a libertarian utopia; or that Trump has appointed as our Ambassador to Denmark—charged with implementing Trump’s demand that Denmark hand Greenland to the US—Mr. Ken Khouri, a co-founder of Paypal along with Thiel. 

These people who want desperately to leave America behind, who think America is a hopeless mess of pinkos and technophobes, are not interested in making America a better place.  They are looking to strip-mine America to get the money and power to realize their techno-libertarian dreams.  Their thinking is as shallow as their self-image is inflated.  In Donald Trump they think they have found a vehicle for their dreams, someone they flatter in public but in private doubtlessly scorn. 

We will see who is using who.  In The Prince, Machiavelli describes the actions of Cesare Borgia, who on conquering Romagna put in charge a cruel man to restore order.  He was understandably deeply unpopular.  After he had ensured Cesare’s rule:   “One morning, Remirro’s body was found cut in two pieces on the piazza at Cesena, with a block of wood and a bloody knife beside it.  The brutality of this spectacle kept the people of the Romagna appeased and stupified.”

Follow the money, political sophisticates have said for decades.  But today, we need to follow not just money, but a particular form of money, cryptocurrency. 

In what follows, I will try to avoid sounding like Charlton Heston, shouting futilely “Soylent Green is people!”  But I think that’s the truth.  The coup of the Silicon Valley billionaires is well-advanced.  That it is taking place in plain sight makes it not less, but more alarming.*

As has been well-documented, Donald Trump was until recently not a fan of the bitcoin mafia.  Only a few years ago, in 2021, he called crypto a ‘scam’ and ‘a disaster waiting to happen.’   In this he was, for once, on target.  There is room for disagreement about the potential value of this artificial ‘currency’, but I am persuaded by people like Paul Krugman and Bill Gates that it is, in fact, a scam, a variation on the classic pyramid scheme.  By this I do not mean that it can be improperly used as a pyramid scheme, but that it is inherently and unavoidably and knowingly a pyramid scheme, designed to make early investors rich by fleecing latecomers, what Gates calls “the Greater Fool theory.” 

In addition it is also, undeniably, a major source of funding for illegal activities ranging from drugs to human trafficking to pornography.  It is a vehicle of choice for celebrities and public figures looking to make a quick buck.   It has been at the center of major scandals, such as the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX.  Creating, or ‘mining’, cryptocurrencies requires huge amounts of energy and is a major reason for increases in electricity demand, requiring new generating capacity and greater use of fossil fuels, all over the world.    

But in the last several years Trump has changed his tune.  He has become a full-throated booster, promising to end the Biden administration’s efforts to regulate crypto and make the US the “crypto capital of the planet.” His campaign received huge donations from the crypto industry, which also donated heavily to defeat candidates in House and Senate races perceived as ‘anti-crypto’.  According to the New Yorker, “Pro-crypto donors are responsible for almost half of all corporate donations to pacs in the 2024 election cycle, and the tech industry has become one of the largest corporate donors in the nation. The point of all that money, like the attack on Porter [Representative Kathy Porter of California], has been to draw attention to Silicon Valley’s financial might—and to prove that its leaders are capable of political savagery in order to protect their interests. “It’s a simple message,” the person familiar with Fairshake said. “If you are pro-crypto, we will help you, and if you are anti we will tear you apart.”

Trump chose a Vice-President, JD Vance, who is close to Silicon Vally crypto enthusiasts, in particular Peter Thiel, who financed his Ohio Senate campaign.  After choosing Vance, NPR reported that “Trump’s Vance pick has drawn praise in crypto circles, with investors hoping for lax regulations of the digital currency. In his latest federal financial disclosure, Vance reported that he owns between $100,000 and $250,000 in Bitcoin.”   After picking Vance Trump quickly gained the backing of crypto entrepreneur Elon Musk and a host of other Silicon Vally crypto investors and backers.  Trump’s new crypto-czar,  Silicon Valley investor David Sacks, is a charter member of Peter Thiel’s “Paypal Mafia,” which includes Elon Musk.  His appointment was welcomed enthusiastically by the crypto industry, according to The Hill.

Trump just announced the creation of a ‘crypto reserve’, where the US Government is directed to buy crypto from five designated vendors, with the coins set aside to supposedly be used in a financial crisis or to pay down government debt.  State governments are moving to allow pension funds and other public organizations to invest in crypto.  This is despite crypto’s notorious volatility and the lack of a mature regulatory regime to safeguard crypto investors.  Why?

Trump’s enthusiasm is partly due to the opportunities crypto offers to make money and to receive donations/bribes anonymously.  The World Liberty Fund gives the Trump family 75% of its revenues.  Controversial businessman Justin Sun recently bought $75 million worth of Liberty tokens—a purchase he publicized on social media.  On February 26 the SEC announced it was dropping its civil fraud case against Sun for manipulating the price of another crypto token.   

Trump is also benefiting from $tRUMP, a ‘memecoin’ which has been marketed to his supporters and could potentially be worth billions of dollars, though investors could take huge losses if Trump decides to cash out.  Trump imitator Javier Milei, the libertarian President of Argentina, is being investigated for fraud after he endorsed a memecoin that rose in value and was then ‘dumped’ by early investors. 

For the Silicon Valley crypto enthusiasts who played a huge role in getting Trump elected, however, crypto is much more than a way to make money.  It is a vehicle for weakening and eventually replacing democratic governance altogether.  Crypto is the opening wedge in a campaign to have private mechanisms replace key government functions. These private mechanisms would respond to market forces and replace outmoded democratic systems.  Of course, they would be shaped not by a majority of citizens with each person having an equal vote, but by those with the most money. 

Here is how Mike Brock, a close follower of Silicon Valley’s ever-morphing ideological landscape, describes it in his recent piece “How Silicon Valley’s Corrupted Libertarianism is Dismantling American Democracy.”

”…figures like Thiel [Peter Thiel, influential reactionary techno-theorist and JD Vance’s former employer and mentor] began to see cryptocurrency not just as a new financial instrument, but as a tool for fundamentally restructuring society. If traditional democracy was hopelessly corrupt, as Yarvin [Curtis Yarvin, a formerly fringe monarchist and anti-democrat blogger who has become influential in tech circles] argued, then perhaps blockchain could enable new forms of governance built on immutable code rather than fallible human judgment. This vision found its perfect technological expression in Bitcoin.

From Yarvin’s early writings during the financial crisis to today’s constitutional crisis, we can trace a clear intellectual evolution. What began as abstract criticism of democratic institutions has become a concrete blueprint for dismantling them. But the key accelerant in this process was cryptocurrency—it provided both a technological framework and a psychological model for opting out of democratic governance entirely.”

Who is Curtis Yarvin and why does he matter?

 Yarvin is a blogger and programmer whose ideas have gained a lot of traction with people like Thiel,  Musk, Marc Andreesen and other Silicon Valley heavyweights.  JD Vance is a fan.  Yarvin attended Trump’s inauguration and was seen hanging out with various movers and shakers.  This brief summary of his views from a recent piece in the Patreon blog, “The Philosophy Behind Doge:  Curtis Yarvin and the Butterfly Revolution,” makes him sound like the villain in a bad Marvel comic, but it’s pretty much on target:

·       Accelerationism: the belief that capitalism and technology must be massively sped up and intensified to destabilize existing systems, cause a collapse, and ultimately create radical social transformations

·       Techno-Utopianism: the belief that unbridled technology can create the perfect society— at least, for those who control it

·       Monarchism/neo-monarchism: the belief that absolute power should be wielded by a single sovereign

Yarvin has outlined publicly the process for making this happen, which requires a populist who calls openly for concentrating power in the Leader (Trump), and then picks a smart CEO (Musk) to execute the plan.

As we watch Elon Musk take a chainsaw to the federal government, his larger purpose is clear.  He and his fellow billionaires certainly want to reduce government for classic conservative reasons, to reduce their own taxes and weaken regulation and oversight.  But this is not the primary goal.  Musk’s DOGE cuts are minute and will do nothing to meaningfuly lower spending or reduce the deficit, the ostensible reasons.  The real purpose is to gain access to government networks in order to replace existing institutions with proprietary code, AI, and cryptocurrency.  According to Forbes, “Musk has confirmed he wants to put the U.S. Treasury on a blockchain, the technology that underpins bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies—including Musk’s pet project dogecoin.”

Trump’s transition team was heavily funded by Musk and other Silicon Valley billionaires, according to the New York Times.  The transition operation was responsible for identifying and vetting who would fill key government positions.  The Trump transition was entirely funded by private donors, unlike previous transitions, and Trump has not disclosed who they were despite a pledge to do so.   

A love of ‘efficiency’ and hatred for the messiness and slowness of democracy is the through-line explaining the techno-elites embrace of Trump.  Trump shares with them a contempt for democracy, and is easily manipulated.  He is the ‘useful idiot,’ the battering ram who will accelerate the transition to a new order, designed and run by super-wealthy genius elites.

Scorn for democracy and love of efficiency, we should recall, was the leitmotif of fascism and communism during their heydays in the 1920s and 30s.  The future belonged to centralized, top-down systems that would run rings around the decadent liberal democracies.  The trains would all run on time.  Millions in America and around the world were mesmerized by Mussolini’s Italy, Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s USSR—great states in the hands of pulverizing leaders who could sweep away opposition and modernize and rationalize everything overnight.   

It is men with this same vision who are now at the throats of the American people.  These are businessmen who have grown fat under the awful democracy they despise, but are now turning on the system that nurtured them.  Unlike in the 1920s, this time, they believe, technology is up to the task.  Crypto is the bright shiny object, but AI is the One Ring to rule them all.  The willingness of Trump to let the techies pursue AI without obstacles and to fund the massive new energy sources required to build advanced AI models was what drew Silicon Valley to his side. 

In a recent Ezra Klein interview with Ben Buchanan, Biden’s top advisor on AI, Klein and Buchanan agreed that radical breakthroughs in AI are coming very soon, probably within the next three years.  We will see something like AGI or Artificial General Intelligence.  If this happens on Trump’s watch, in an Administration stuffed with AI and crypto advocates, we can have no expectation that there will be adequate safeguards or planning to take account of the repercussions.  The people who believe that the correct approach to everything is “move fast and break things” will be in charge. 

These forces are taking over the MAGA movement and have bent Trump to their will.  They will be hard to stop unless America’s leaders and thinkers first wake up to the magnitude of the threat. 

*I recognize the picture I’m painting here may be exaggerated.  Maybe there is no Silicon Valley tech billionaire conspiracy and they all just switched to Trump to get less regulation and because they hate wokeness.  Maybe Musk really just wants to make government more modern and efficient.  Maybe Curtis Yarvin’s thinking is what it seems, a wild sideshow, not central to how the Thiels and Musks really think.  Maybe AI isn’t on the verge of a breakthrough to AGI or anywhere close to being able to run big public agencies.  Maybe Trump plans to dump Musk and his brethren after they finish their dirty work.  It’s always possible to connect the dots in a misleading way.  I would say, though, that there is enough information pointing in the same direction to demand we pay attention.

The Trump administration can now be seen to consist of three distinct but overlapping forces.  What they have in common are two things:  a rejection of democracy, and a commitment to regime change here in America and around the world.  They are aided by support, or at least acquiescence, from the traditional business class.

First is Trump himself and the personality cult that engulfs a large chunk of his supporters.  Trump is an extreme narcissist who cannot distinguish between reality and what he wants reality to be.  He believes he deserves to rule because he is Trump; no other reason is required.  He has made it crystal clear that he accepts democracy if and only if he wins, i.e. he does not accept it. 

Trump’s idea of the proper regime does not extend beyond one where he rules, and everyone else bends to him.  We can call this a ‘personalistic’ regime, or a ‘cult of personality’, or whatever.  It is a frequently observed way of ruling that Americans used to guffaw at when we saw it in Africa or Latin America or Nazi Germany or Stalin’s USSR or Mao’s China, but which many Americans now think is needed here.  

Some degree of narcissism is expected in anyone who aspires to lead, but extreme versions frequently win out precisely because of their absolute faith in themselves and their right to rule. This pathological egotism, which most of us would run from in anyone we met in our personal life, convinces many people from a distance that this is a ‘real leader.’

The advantage of coalescing around a person rather than an idea or a program is that it papers over disagreements.  The disadvantage is that it subjects society to the whims of the ruler, whose idiosyncratic preferences are unchallengable.  In the extreme cases this results in gas chambers and Cultural Revolutions.  In Trump’s case it is more likely to result in widespread corruption, a permanent erosion of the rule-of-law, and the loss of America’s standing in the world.   Bad enough, but we should prepare for worse: “appetite comes with eating.”

Second we have right-wing ideologues, such as Vice-President Vance and Steve Bannon and the scribblers at the Claremont Institute.  These people reject democracy because they believe the proper regime type is nationalist/fundamentalist rule, grounded not in majority preferences or the genuinely liberal principles of America’s founding, but in some mystical, historical ‘true America’ that must be rediscovered and restored.   This mystical America embodies a crabbed version of Christianity, a cherry-picked set of  ‘European’ or ‘Western’ values, deep suspicion of science and professional expertise, and, not coincidentally, rule by white men.  If the democratic process fails to uphold the correct regime, so much the worse for democracy.

The nationalist ideologues see Trump as the vehicle for their program, which requires foisting unpopular ideas onto an unsuspecting public.  Their models for the best state are Hungary, or even Russia, where speech is controlled, political opposition is suppressed, and the state promotes ‘traditional’ moral and religious values.  Most Americans don’t want this, so the ideologues try to pretend they are populists acting on behalf of ‘the people’—meaning of course the ‘real people,’ not those liberals who are communists and traitors.

They are in fact plotting to take control of the state to promote their undemocratic preferences.  Strengthening the executive to carry out this plot has been a longstanding goal.  To do this they need scapegoats, so issues that could with a small amount of good-will be resolved by negotiation and compromise—DEI, transgender athletes, and dog-eating immigrants—have been whipped up as a smokescreen to divert attention.

Third, and most recently, we have the billionaire technocrats.  Elon Musk is at the forefront, but followed closely by other Silicon Valley titans.  These people reject democracy on familiar Randian grounds—the naturally best and brightest should rule, without interference from the grubby masses.   

What Musk seems to have done is conduct a friendly takeover of Trump (whose worship of money and rich people makes him highly susceptible to manipulation) in order to reshape government, replacing civil servants and Congressional direction with AI.  Instead of the Constitution and its antiquated institutions, we should give authority to automated systems in the name of efficiency.  These will be supplied—surprise—by Musk and his peers, for boatloads of money.  This will supposedly allow us to save money while bypassing or ignoring any annoying restrictions imposed by elected officials and the people behind them. 

Implementing this model will give our genius technocrats free rein to reshape government to prioritize the unchecked development of new technologies, designed to enrich and empower the genius technocrats.  They want government to get out of the way—actually, to throw money at them—as they pursue their dreams of living forever, going to Mars, and accelerating the wholesale replacement of human beings by AI and robots.

These three forces are joined uneasily to another more familiar force, the wealthy 1%, which has labored for decades to direct the Republican Party towards low taxes, weak regulation, and the maximum leeway to use money to influence politics (“corporations are people”).  Weakening the state is a longstanding conservative goal that partially aligns with Trump’s preferences; while the 1% wants a state less able to stand up to the private sector, Trump wants a state stripped of any autonomy that can serve as an untrammeled vehicle for his will.   

It would be going too far to say these ‘traditional Republicans’ want a full-scale change of regime.  What most want is leeway to pursue their private business interests.  But what matters is that they have capitulated to Trump, with only token resistance.  Despite a variety of unpleasant Trump policy preferences, like tariffs and mass deportations, there is no longer any opposition.  Undermining the rule of law and creating a kleptocracy would seem to run against the self-interest of the business class, but the holy grails of lower taxes and weaker government are too potent.

Ironically the traditional 1%, which labored tirelessly to make it as easy as possible to buy politicians, has now been outflanked by people with even more money.  The world’s richest man can exercise dominance by threatening to fund primary candidates, forcing elected officials to bow down to Trump’s most unqualified, flame-throwing loyalists.   Business interests that would prefer more stability and less drama are powerless.

The threat to democracy was of course often pointed out in the 2024 election campaign, but failed to move enough voters, who were more concerned about the price of eggs.  They have, sadly, sold their birthrights for a mess of pottage.  I believe nevertheless that many Americans would turn around, in time, once they see what is being done.   

Whether we have time is the question.  The three forces are united for now in a strategy to move very fast and solidify control before opposition is able to coalesce.  Once Cabinet positions and thousands of subordinate posts are filled with loyalists, including in the armed forces, the FBI, and the Intelligence Community, resistance may be futile. It is vital to throw as much sand in the gears as possible.

(For a slightly different but similar analysis, I recommend this piece by Dani Rodrik:  “The Coming Showdown in Trumpworld”.  Rodrik emphasizes the likelihood that the different forces will start fighting one another; the question is what will happen then.  But I agree with his conclusion that no matter who wins, the average American will be the loser.)

On February 14 our new Vice-President, JD Vance, gave his first major overseas address (see text below).  It was at the Munich Security Conference, a very prestigious annual gathering of Europe’s senior foreign policy and defense leaders.  Senior representatives of the US Government, from both the Administration and Congress, have regularly attended over the years.

The audience was waiting to hear how the Trump administration meant to deal with the war in Ukraine and more generally with alliance burden-sharing, tariffs, and other key national security and foreign policy issues.  But Vance threw them a curveball by talking almost entirely about domestic European politics.  Most of the speech was a tut-tutting, finger-pointing criticism of how Europe was supposedly suppressing free speech and political expression, and this was going to make it hard for the new US administration to cooperate with them.  “If you’re running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you. Nor for that matter, is there anything that you can do for the American people who elected me and elected president Trump.”

Given Trump’s predilection for using tariffs, and threats to seize actual territory, like Greenland, as bargaining chips to advance other policy goals, this sounds like a not-so-veiled threat:  if you don’t shift in the populist direction we like, bad things will happen.  We will call your governments illegitimate and use this as a pretext for pursuing our own narrow interests.   

Why is it that an administration that was until recently described as ‘isolationist’ or ‘inward-looking’ has become aggressively interested in controlling territory and re-shaping the world in its own image?  One might have thought that Trump could care less about what kind of domestic governance or human rights record other countries have.  Isn’t this one of the advantages that the dictators he clearly envies, Putin and Erdogan and Xi, have in conducting their foreign policies?  Doesn’t that make it easier for the US to pursue its “America First” strategy?  But no, it turns out the MAGA movement is not at all indifferent to how our friends, from Canada and Mexico to the EU, run their internal affairs.   

There are I think three main reasons for this turn.

First, there is the Musk angle.  Musk shares with other US tech companies challenges doing business in Europe, but has adopted a much more confrontational approach.  He has been voluble about supporting right-wing parties in Europe, notably the AfD in Germany.  He regularly attacks Britain’s Labor government.   

From his standpoint the EU is a major roadblock to Twitter/X, just as it has been to Meta and Google.  It tries to enforce all sorts of annoying rules about transparency and monopolistic pricing and policing hate-speech, the kind of things that have now gone by the boards in the US.  Musk could face hefty fines if the EU finds he has been tweaking Twitter/X to favor the AfD or Trump.  It would be wonderful to weaken the EU and get rid of these obstacles.

And Musk calculates that if he can influence the success of right-wing movements, they are likely to be grateful when they come to power—just as here in the US.  Musk is angling, for instance, for a multi-billion telecom contract in Italy, whose right-wing prime minister Giorgia Meloni is a big fan.  Unlike most business leaders, who try to remain relatively neutral politically, Musk has now gone all in on one side, gambling that this will pay off for his business interests.

Vance tries in his speech to make light of Musk’s influence:  “Even when people express views outside your own country, and even when those people are very influential — and trust me, I say this with all humor — if American democracy can survive 10 years of Greta Thunberg’s scolding you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk.”  But of course there is no comparison between the impact of a teenage private citizen, and the richest man in the world who controls a major social media platform and multiple companies with huge investments in Europe, and has the ear (if not other parts of the anatomy) of the US President.   

Second, electing right-wing populists to the European Parliament, or to positions of power in major countries like Germany and France, would be very advantageous for the broader Trump agenda.  Vance’s speech is full of paeans to the virtues of allowing ‘the people’ to speak their mind, and the risk of suppressing them:   “Now, to many of us on the other side of the Atlantic, it looks more and more like old, entrenched interests hiding behind ugly Soviet era words like misinformation and disinformation, who simply don’t like the idea that somebody with an alternative viewpoint might express a different opinion or, God forbid, vote a different way, or even worse, win an election.” 

Notice the bottom line here, “win an election.”  The Trump administration is very clearly trying to get certain election results and is using arguments about suppressing speech  as its excuse for blatantly attempting to interfere in Europe’s internal affairs.    

The hypocrisy of this argument is clear from looking at the results of actual populist victories in Europe.  Vance is one of many in the MAGAverse who sings the praises of Victor Orban’s Hungary.  Orban’s regime is, to say the least, not an exemplar of ‘free speech’ or the liberty of everyone to organize politically and speak their mind.  Media, unions, civil society, and opposition parties have all been muzzled.

More generally, a weaker Europe, unable to speak with one voice on issues of trade and economic relations with the US, is very much in Trump’s interest.  Hungary’s example applies here too, as an anti-Brussels, pro-Moscow Hungary embedded in the EU and NATO—supported at times by Slovakia and Poland—has frequently blocked or weakened united action.  A Europe with strong nationalist leaders, suspicious of Brussels and one another, will be easy to manipulate and play off one versus the other.

Vance begins his speech by pointing to Romania, where the Supreme Court in December  canceled an election at the last minute after uncovering evidence of massive Russian interference.  This was supposedly an example of illegitimate opposition to the genuine will of the people:  “Now, we’re at the point, of course, that the situation has gotten so bad that this December, Romania straight up cancelled the results of a presidential election based on the flimsy suspicions of an intelligence agency and enormous pressure from its continental neighbours. Now, as I understand it, the argument was that Russian disinformation had infected the Romanian elections. But I’d ask my European friends to have some perspective. You can believe it’s wrong for Russia to buy social media advertisements to influence your elections. We certainly do. You can condemn it on the world stage, even. But if your democracy can be destroyed with a few hundred thousand dollars of digital advertising from a foreign country, then it wasn’t very strong to begin with.”

Here we see Vance saying the quiet part out loud.  Anyone who argues that populism, in Europe or the US, is supported by Russia or serves Russia’s interests is a. Acting against the genuine will of the people, and b. Trying to prop up a weak government that deserves to die.  No point trying to protect or strengthen Romania; just let it go under.

In other words, what Russia wants for Europe, and what Trump wants for Europe, end up being the same thing.  The Romanian election, that Vance implies was stolen by Romania’s ‘outside neighbors’, was about to be won by an obscure, right-wing, anti-NATO candidate who surged in popularity after an infusion of Russian financing.  This would have been a huge win for Moscow’s goal of weakening Europe.  Both Putin and Trump want a divided continent run by leaders who sympathize with models of personalistic, oligarchic rule.

Third we have straightforward ideological imperialism.  Many in Trump’s orbit see themselves as bearers of a new political and cultural dispensation, one that, like all true believers, they want to spread far and wide.  But this is not just the animal spirits of missionaries who want to save souls; it is also a cold-blooded strategy for preserving their new order.  

Every regime understands that it is far safer to be surrounded by similar regimes, or by those that its citizens and elites see as much worse.  Sharing a 3000 mile border with a liberal-democratic Canada is a great strength for the US—as long, of course, as the US is itself a liberal democracy.  But if it isn’t, Canada automatically becomes a threat.  As the US diverges, soon the border will stop being open and nominal; both sides will find reasons to control movement and trade, to restrict the flow of information and ideas, to portray the other side as suspect and dangerous. 

A free and liberal and prosperous Canada would over time offer Americans an unwelcome example of how we ourselves could live.  Hence it is in Trump’s interest to make it the 51st state, or failing that, to make sure it is clearly subordinate and doesn’t prosper.  One way will almost certainly be to support an indigenous MAGA movement in our next door neighbor.  We can probably expect to see Vance soon give a similar speech in Ottawa.

Similarly with Europe.  To have Europe writ large, or major European states, sustain prosperous and secure liberal democracies is dangerous.  Best if the continent comes to resemble Hungary.  Or falls apart in vicious internal strife, beset from abroad by Russia and from within by radicals—whether right or left wing hardly matters.  Supporting in a variety of ways Europe’s new-right, while undermining European alternatives, will therefore almost certainly be a foreign policy priority for the Trump administration.  This will be seen as essential for preserving MAGA rule in the US. 

Allowing Ukraine to be snuffed out is also consistent with MAGA’s longterm survival.  It shows that powerful, ruthless autocracies will win in the long-run.  Weak states—nota bene, Canada, Mexico, Panama and others—are advised to make their peace with more powerful neighbors.

This calculation is the same as made now by Putin, Xi, and many others.  Putin invaded Ukraine in 2014 when a popular uprising threatened to move Kiev decisively towards the EU and its liberal democratic norms.   Chinese leaders, especially Xi, want desperately to remove Taiwan as a model of democratic rule.  In both cases the existence of alternatives embodied in peoples with similar cultures, languages, and histories—living literally next-door—gives the lie to arguments that only one-man, autocratic rule can succeed. 

For the same reasons, Americans who want to remain free have a huge stake in supporting the survival of genuine liberal democracies abroad.  Canada, Europe, Japan, Australia—these are battlegrounds where our own future will in large part be decided.  In most of these arenas right-wing populist movements already exist and are gaining strength.  Trump’s victory has been catnip to this trend, convincing many that history is on their side.

Americans need to remain connected to the outside world.  MAGA is dismantling our instruments of soft power, like USAID, Voice of America, and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.  We can expect a sustained attack on the ways Americans connect to other people and provide accurate information about American life, and on the ways Americans know about the outside world.  The goal will be to give the impression that Americans are united around Trump and his populist nationalism.  People around the world need to know that this is not true.         

  

Vance Munich speech text Feb 13 2025

One of the things that I wanted to to talk about today is, of course, our shared values. And, you know, it’s great to be back in Germany. As you heard earlier, I was here last year as United States senator. I saw Foreign Secretary David Lammy and joked that both of us last year had different jobs than we have now. But now it’s time for all of our countries, for all of us who have been fortunate enough to be given political power by our respective peoples, to use it wisely to improve their lives.

And I want to say that I was fortunate in my time here to spend some time outside the walls of this conference over the last twenty-four hours, and I’ve been so impressed by the hospitality of the people even, Of course, as they’re reeling from yesterday’s horrendous attack. And the first time I was ever in Munich was with my wife, actually, who’s here with me today, on a personal trip. And I’ve always loved the city of Munich, and I’ve always loved its people.

I just want to say that we’re very moved, and our thoughts and prayers are with Munich and everybody affected by the evil inflicted on this beautiful community. We’re thinking about you, we’re praying for you, and we will certainly be rooting for you in the days and weeks to come.

We gather at this conference, of course, to discuss security. And normally we mean threats to our external security. I see many, many great military leaders gathered here today. But while the Trump administration is very concerned with European security and believes that we can come to a reasonable settlement between Russia and Ukraine, and we also believe that it’s important in the coming years for Europe to step up in a big way to provide for its own defence, the threat that I worry the most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor. What I worry about is the threat from within. The retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values: values shared with the United States of America.

I was struck that a former European commissioner went on television recently and sounded delighted that the Romanian government had just annulled an entire election. He warned that if things don’t go to plan, the very same thing could happen in Germany too.

Now, these cavalier statements are shocking to American ears. For years we’ve been told that everything we fund and support is in the name of our shared democratic values. Everything from our Ukraine policy to digital censorship is billed as a defence of democracy. But when we see European courts cancelling elections and senior officials threatening to cancel others, we ought to ask whether we’re holding ourselves to an appropriately high standard. And I say ourselves, because I fundamentally believe that we are on the same team.

We must do more than talk about democratic values. We must live them. Now, within living memory of many of you in this room, the cold war positioned defenders of democracy against much more tyrannical forces on this continent. And consider the side in that fight that censored dissidents, that closed churches, that cancelled elections. Were they the good guys? Certainly not.

And thank God they lost the cold war. They lost because they neither valued nor respected all of the extraordinary blessings of liberty, the freedom to surprise, to make mistakes, invent, to build. As it turns out, you can’t mandate innovation or creativity, just as you can’t force people what to think, what to feel, or what to believe. And we believe those things are certainly connected. And unfortunately, when I look at Europe today, it’s sometimes not so clear what happened to some of the cold war’s winners.

I look to Brussels, where EU Commission commissars warned citizens that they intend to shut down social media during times of civil unrest: the moment they spot what they’ve judged to be “hateful content,” or to this very country where police have carried out raids against citizens suspected of posting anti-feminist comments online as part of “combating misogyny” on the internet.

I look to Sweden, where two weeks ago, the government convicted a Christian activist for participating in Quran burnings that resulted in his friend’s murder. And as the judge in his case chillingly noted, Sweden’s laws to supposedly protect free expression do not, in fact, grant — and I’m quoting — a “free pass” to do or say anything without risking offending the group that holds that belief.

And perhaps most concerningly, I look to our very dear friends, the United Kingdom, where the backslide away from conscience rights has placed the basic liberties of religious Britons in particular in the crosshairs. A little over two years ago, the British government charged Adam Smith-Connor, a 51-year-old physiotherapist and an Army veteran, with the heinous crime of standing 50 metres from an abortion clinic and silently praying for three minutes, not obstructing anyone, not interacting with anyone, just silently praying on his own. After British law enforcement spotted him and demanded to know what he was praying for, Adam replied simply, it was on behalf of the unborn son.

He and his former girlfriend had aborted years before. Now the officers were not moved. Adam was found guilty of breaking the government’s new Buffer Zones Law, which criminalises silent prayer and other actions that could influence a person’s decision within 200 metres of an abortion facility. He was sentenced to pay thousands of pounds in legal costs to the prosecution.

Now, I wish I could say that this was a fluke, a one-off, crazy example of a badly written law being enacted against a single person. But no. This last October, just a few months ago, the Scottish government began distributing letters to citizens whose houses lay within so-called safe access zones, warning them that even private prayer within their own homes may amount to breaking the law. Naturally, the government urged readers to report any fellow citizens suspected guilty of thought crime in Britain and across Europe.

Free speech, I fear, is in retreat and in the interests of comedy, my friends, but also in the interest of truth. I will admit that sometimes the loudest voices for censorship have come not from within Europe, but from within my own country, where the prior administration threatened and bullied social media companies to censor so-called misinformation. Misinformation, like, for example, the idea that coronavirus had likely leaked from a laboratory in China. Our own government encouraged private companies to silence people who dared to utter what turned out to be an obvious truth.

So I come here today not just with an observation, but with an offer. And just as the Biden administration seemed desperate to silence people for speaking their minds, so the Trump administration will do precisely the opposite, and I hope that we can work together on that.

In Washington, there is a new sheriff in town. And under Donald Trump’s leadership, we may disagree with your views, but we will fight to defend your right to offer in the public square. Agree or disagree? Now, we’re at the point, of course, that the situation has gotten so bad that this December, Romania straight up cancelled the results of a presidential election based on the flimsy suspicions of an intelligence agency and enormous pressure from its continental neighbours. Now, as I understand it, the argument was that Russian disinformation had infected the Romanian elections. But I’d ask my European friends to have some perspective. You can believe it’s wrong for Russia to buy social media advertisements to influence your elections. We certainly do. You can condemn it on the world stage, even. But if your democracy can be destroyed with a few hundred thousand dollars of digital advertising from a foreign country, then it wasn’t very strong to begin with.

Now, the good news is that I happen to think your democracies are substantially less brittle than many people apparently fear.

And I really do believe that allowing our citizens to speak their mind will make them stronger still. Which, of course, brings us back to Munich, where the organisers of this very conference have banned lawmakers representing populist parties on both the Left and the Right from participating in these conversations. Now, again, we don’t have to agree with everything or anything that people say. But when political leaders represent an important constituency, it is incumbent upon us to at least participate in dialogue with them.

Now, to many of us on the other side of the Atlantic, it looks more and more like old, entrenched interests hiding behind ugly Soviet era words like misinformation and disinformation, who simply don’t like the idea that somebody with an alternative viewpoint might express a different opinion or, God forbid, vote a different way, or even worse, win an election.

Now, this is a security conference, and I’m sure you all came here prepared to talk about how exactly you intend to increase defence spending over the next few years in line with some new target. And that’s great, because as president Trump has made abundantly clear, he believes that our European friends must play a bigger role in the future of this continent. We don’t think you hear this term “burden sharing,” but we think it’s an important part of being in a shared alliance together that the Europeans step up while America focusses on areas of the world that are in great danger.

But let me also ask you, how will you even begin to think through the kinds of budgeting questions if we don’t know what it is that we are defending in the first place? I’ve heard a lot already in my conversations, and I’ve had many, many great conversations with many people gathered here in this room. I’ve heard a lot about what you need to defend yourselves from, and of course that’s important. But what has seemed a little bit less clear to me, and certainly I think to many of the citizens of Europe, is what exactly it is that you’re defending yourselves for. What is the positive vision that animates this shared security compact that we all believe is so important?

I believe deeply that there is no security if you are afraid of the voices, the opinions and the conscience that guide your very own people. Europe faces many challenges. But the crisis this continent faces right now, the crisis I believe we all face together, is one of our own making. If you’re running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you. Nor for that matter, is there anything that you can do for the American people who elected me and elected president Trump. You need democratic mandates to accomplish anything of value in the coming years.

Have we learned nothing that thin mandates produce unstable results? But there is so much of value that can be accomplished with the kind of democratic mandate that I think will come from being more responsive to the voices of your citizens. If you’re going to enjoy competitive economies, if you’re going to enjoy affordable energy and secure supply chains, then you need mandates to govern because you have to make difficult choices to enjoy all of these things.

And of course, we know that very well. In America, you cannot win a democratic mandate by censoring your opponents or putting them in jail. Whether that’s the leader of the opposition, a humble Christian praying in her own home, or a journalist trying to report the news. Nor can you win one by disregarding your basic electorate on questions like, who gets to be a part of our shared society.

And of all the pressing challenges that the nations represented here face, I believe there is nothing more urgent than mass migration. Today, almost one in five people living in this country moved here from abroad. That is, of course, an all-time high. It’s a similar number, by the way, in the United States, also an all-time high. The number of immigrants who entered the EU from non-EU countries doubled between 2021 and 2022 alone. And of course, it’s gotten much higher since.

And we know the situation. It didn’t materialise in a vacuum. It’s the result of a series of conscious decisions made by politicians all over the continent, and others across the world, over the span of a decade. We saw the horrors wrought by these decisions yesterday in this very city. And of course, I can’t bring it up again without thinking about the terrible victims who had a beautiful winter day in Munich ruined. Our thoughts and prayers are with them and will remain with them. But why did this happen in the first place?

It’s a terrible story, but it’s one we’ve heard way too many times in Europe, and unfortunately too many times in the United States as well. An asylum seeker, often a young man in his mid-twenties, already known to police, rammed a car into a crowd and shatters a community. Unity. How many times must we suffer these appalling setbacks before we change course and take our shared civilisation in a new direction? No voter on this continent went to the ballot box to open the floodgates to millions of unvetted immigrants. But you know what they did vote for? In England, they voted for Brexit. And agree or disagree, they voted for it. And more and more all over Europe, they are voting for political leaders who promise to put an end to out-of-control migration. Now, I happen to agree with a lot of these concerns, but you don’t have to agree with me.

I just think that people care about their homes. They care about their dreams. They care about their safety and their capacity to provide for themselves and their children.

And they’re smart. I think this is one of the most important things I’ve learnt in my brief time in politics. Contrary to what you might hear, a couple of mountains over in Davos, the citizens of all of our nations don’t generally think of themselves as educated animals or as interchangeable cogs of a global economy. And it’s hardly surprising that they don’t want to be shuffled about or relentlessly ignored by their leaders. And it is the business of democracy to adjudicate these big questions at the ballot box.

I believe that dismissing people, dismissing their concerns or worse yet, shutting down media, shutting down elections or shutting people out of the political process protects nothing. In fact, it is the most sure-fire way to destroy democracy. Speaking up and expressing opinions isn’t election interference. Even when people express views outside your own country, and even when those people are very influential — and trust me, I say this with all humour — if American democracy can survive 10 years of Greta Thunberg’s scolding you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk.

But what no democracy, American, German or European will survive, is telling millions of voters that their thoughts and concerns, their aspirations, their pleas for relief, are invalid or unworthy of even being considered.

Democracy rests on the sacred principle that the voice of the people matters. There is no room for firewalls. You either uphold the principle or you don’t. Europeans, the people have a voice. European leaders have a choice. And my strong belief is that we do not need to be afraid of the future.

Embrace what your people tell you, even when it’s surprising, even when you don’t agree. And if you do so, you can face the future with certainty and with confidence, knowing that the nation stands behind each of you. And that, to me, is the great magic of democracy. It’s not in these stone buildings or beautiful hotels. It’s not even in the great institutions that we built together as a shared society.

To believe in democracy is to understand that each of our citizens has wisdom and has a voice. And if we refuse to listen to that voice, even our most successful fights will secure very little. As Pope John Paul II, in my view, one of the most extraordinary champions of democracy on this continent or any other, once said, “do not be afraid”. We shouldn’t be afraid of our people even when they express views that disagree with their leadership. Thank you all. Good luck to all of you. God bless you.

Recently a friend asked, in the wake of a church service that invited us to join the  “Resistance,” what this means.  What does ‘resistance’ to MAGA look like?

Three threats seem to me to matter above others: 

1. Moves to change the processes for taking or holding power, such as weakening or co-opting institutions like the courts, the press, the military, and the civil service, or altering voting rights.  This can also take the form of corruption and favoritism designed to buy support from businesses, billionaires, schools, media and other organizations.  If successful, these actions would permanently damage American institutions and make the US an ‘illiberal democracy,’ like Hungary—or worse.

2.   Using state power to attack vulnerable people and groups—immigrants, LGBTQ, women, environmentalists.  Especially damaging would be actions against ‘disloyal’ regions or organizations or individuals, as Trump has frequently promised. This can take the negative form of not using state power to stop local governments or ‘private’ groups from intimidating, threatening, or attacking the same targets.  The use of coercion and violence  takes away fundamental freedoms and destroys the conditions for self-government.

3. Big Lies, brazen denials of fact or of science and expertise; creating and amplifying false narratives and conspiracy theories.  These measures are designed to destroy the possibility of principled opposition to authoritarian rule and make it easy to mobilize supporters around an invented reality, whether the infallibility of the Leader or the unqualified evil of his opponents.

Here are some ways to make ‘resistance’ concrete.

Create Communication Capacity.  MAGA is going to move quickly on many fronts to consolidate power and attack its enemies.  We have to strengthen all our resources to collect and track information, to share it openly, to fight through the tremendous noise and confusion and distraction of today’s information systems.  Subscribe to reliable news sources.  Donate.  Build up strong local, independent platforms.  Speak up in the face of falsehoods.

But. Since the election I have been bombarded with demands for money from a dozen news organizations, all saying they are more important than ever.  I know they will help me and people like me understand what is going on.  But I do not see how any of them will do what we so desperately need, which is penetrate the iron information wall around MAGA supporters.  The most important initiative for true patriots, whether liberal or conservative, should be, as Jennifer Rubin recommends, a comprehensive effort to create new ways to reach the public, which is being blasted by disinformation and influencers.  I don’t know exactly what that looks like, but it doesn’t look like conventional journalism. It isn’t enough to interview and research and paint an accurate picture; the facts have to be delivered behind enemy lines. Pete Buttigieg is good at this.

Strengthen bastions of resistance.  These might include blue cities; liberal places of worship; colleges and universities and think tanks and local newspapers.  These are especially important in places that are very ‘red’.  I think it is a mistake to concede geographic regions or rural America or any other sector.  It is a MAGA goal to create a monolithic image of an irresistible force that takes over not just the commanding heights but state legislatures, school boards, county councils, all local units of self-governance.  But in every part of the country there are opposing voices and we have to raise them up. It’s lonely out there in MAGA country, but you should know you are not alone.

Fight like hell, but strategically.  Battles must be picked with care.  We will wear out quickly by reacting at full volume to every outrage.  Getting ahead of the curve is vital by identifying the most dangerous MAGA initiatives early and rallying political, legal, and popular opposition.  Particularly valuable will be to take advantage of actions and statements that contradict what MAGA supporters imagine Trump will do.  Many of those who voted for Trump have no idea what his actual policies are.  When tariffs and deportations and tax cuts cause inflation, when appeasing Putin produces more war, when MAGA zealots go after the ACA and Social Security, these are good opportunities to put forth different policies.  When Trump declines into un-hideable senility, this will also be an opportunity. 

Find some leadership.  The progressive eco-system is splintered and lacking in any recognizable co-ordinating or directing mechanism.  In part this is the result of decades of complacency and believing that the march of history is on our side.  Now that our butt has been kicked it is time for some discipline.  We need to encourage the emergence of a small number of leaders and spokespeople who can become the face of opposition and set strategy that prioritizes the three threats described above.  Part of this will be to say ‘no’ to grassroots demands to include Every Good Thing in the agenda.  Representative Wiley Nickel’s proposal for a Democratic ‘shadow cabinet,’ like in Great Britain, is a good start.  But work outside the Democratic Party is also needed.  There is an opening to build something new.

Practice civil disobedience.  Protests and marches do not have the power of even small, but consistent, acts where people are willing to go to jail or risk police violence.  The lunch-counter sit-ins and Freedom Riders during the Civil Rights Movement only involved a handful of people but had tremendous impact.  We need doctors and nurses who are willing to perform abortions in red states, and face the consequences.  We need churches willing to hide immigrants.  When Trump’s Justice Department tries to arrest political opponents, 1000 people should surround them.  When Trump pardons January 6 participants, 1000 people should lie down at the prison exits.  When tracts of public land are opened for drilling, environmentalists and tribes should get in the way.

Build the alternative.  Some hope that MAGA depends on Trump and once he dies or disappears, MAGA will fade.  Maybe.  But it has lasted eight years, and if it consolidates power during a Trump presidency, it may not go anywhere.  The world is full of movements that began with popular leaders and then morphed into coercive police states.  Chavezismo in Venezuela has outlasted Chavez, like Peronism in Argentina, and Castro’s communism in Cuba.  Iran is a theocracy long after Khomeini, and China a one-party state long after Mao. 

It’s hard to beat something with nothing.  What are we offering instead?  It can’t just be ‘not Trump,’ which failed badly in this election.

Americans are consumed by distrust towards existing institutions.  Among the G7 major industrialized countries the US has the least trust in the major organs of government.  On the right this has moved from distrust of government to distrust of science, business, schools, and democracy itself.  If liberals position themselves as the defenders of the status quo, but with a few tweaks, we will lose.  We must be ready to argue for fundamental change and identify where we are prepared to challenge accepted processes and institutions.  But the change we want must be constructive, not the political nihilism characteristic of MAGA.

Absolutely critical is an economic plan that speaks to working class anxieties.  The Biden  plan to build from the ‘middle out’ was I think sound, and he managed to put in place some of the key building blocks:  industrial policy, anti-trust, unions, consumer rights, higher taxes on the rich, limited protectionism. His approach was a radical rebuttal to the failed neo-liberal model of unrestricted globalization and financialization, which I think most Americans reject. 

What Biden never managed to do was convey that he was in fact radical.  He couldn’t overcome the trauma of inflation and reach a working class audience.  I do not think this means the basic approach is wrong, but it needs a new framework and a convincing spokesperson.

I believe a strategy to systematically reduce divisions and tensions in America and restore trust is a winning program that can gain traction over the next several years.  We must name and target the institutions and accepted ways of doing business that are tearing us apart.  Such a strategy should include programs to mix Americans together, such as a national service program; affordable housing and zoning changes so people of different classes live in the same neighborhoods; and re-invigorated public schools that bind communities together.  Even in this red wave, voters rejected initiatives to expand school vouchers and undermine public schools.

Voter disgust with institutions has manifested on the right with eagerness to elect outsiders and extremists who promise to just blow things up; lack of experience, contempt for decent behavior, and embrace of conspiracy theories are features, not bugs.  But throwing out the bums and replacing them with worse bums is not real change. Liberals should instead prioritize electoral reforms as the best way to really change the status quo:  open primaries, ranked-choice voting, independent redistricting commissions, people’s assemblies.  Maybe now that Republicans won the popular vote there can be bipartisan support for the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact to reform the Electoral College, so the electoral votes always line up with the winner of the popular vote.  An aggressive fight against Citizen’s United and big money in politics would, I believe, be a difficult but very popular campaign.  The Supreme Court is increasingly unpopular and a target ripe for criticism and reform. 

Avoid condescension. We must resolutely avoid the alienating puritanism that so many Americans find offensive.  Admirable efforts to fight racism and end discrimination against women and the LGBTQ community have too often led to efforts by activists to police pronouns and set impossible litmus tests for allies.  MAGA feeds off the view that extremists are in charge of our universities and cultural institutions and using them to impose their ideas on the rest of us.  Liberals should not be vulnerable to ads that seem to align Democrats with taxpayer funded sex change operations for convicts. 

If not this strategy, then something else.  But something. Something that addresses root causes, not symptoms.

Only two days to go and I am cautiously, very cautiously, optimistic about the election.  Trump continues to foul his own nest, and Kamala is steady if less than inspiring.  But it is deeply depressing to think that close to half of Americans are willing to play Russian roulette with our democracy and make a choice that is so dangerous for the country, so at odds with basic human decency, and, as far as I can tell, not in the interest even of his supporters.

Over the past eight years I, like many, have wrestled with the reasons for Trump’s popularity and his ability to take over an entire political party and retain unbridled enthusiasm among millions of Americans.  It is a challenge, because it is hard not to become angry, frustrated, and often deeply embarrassed at the beliefs of many of one’s fellow citizens.

I have encountered many, many explanations for Trump’s success.  Here are some of the most common:

·      Working class anger at de-industrialization and loss of jobs and opportunity

·      Resentment at ‘coastal elites’ and their disdain for the values and lifestyles of the less-educated

·      Shift of the Democratic Party from a working-class base to an educated professionals base, leaving a large class of Americans without a political home

·      Racism, nurtured over decades by Republicans and energized by Obama’s election

·      Sexism, energized by Hillary’s campaign and declining prospects for young non-college-educated men

·      Fear that traditional values and way of life associated with white, Christian dominance are disappearing

·      Dislike of political correctness or ‘wokism’ imposed by educated elites

·      Christian, especially evangelical, politicization and willingness to make politics an essential part of religious identity

·      Trump’s unique personality combining celebrity status and unfiltered language, saying what people ‘really think’

·      Right-wing media’s stranglehold on its audience and willingness to display rank partisanship

·      Social media’s ability to silo and magnify opinions

·      Outside intervention on Trump’s behalf by Russia and other foreign actors

·      Loss of trust in institutions accelerated by Iraq/Afghanistan, the financial crisis, the opioid crisis, failure to stem rising immigration

·      Vulnerability of traditional institutions—media, business, courts, parties—to bullying, the ‘big lie’ and constant norm violations

·      Big money in politics financing longterm efforts to enable minority-rule (via electoral system, control of courts, one-party primaries, gerrymandering, exploiting political veto points such as the filibuster).

I too would love to find the ‘one thing’ that explains the Trump phenomenon, but looking at this list makes it clear to me (even though these overlap to some extent) that there is no single cause.  So there probably isn’t any ‘silver bullet’ to counter it.  Instead we have a tangled ball of twine that needs to be carefully and systematically unwound. 

The closest we might have to a fix is if Trump himself is the necessary catalyst for the MAGA movement, and without him it will splinter and weaken.  This is possible, but more likely I think is that after some jockeying a new leader will emerge to take advantage of the same underlying factors.

Even if Harris wins there is a big job ahead to address these sources of dissatisfaction, and just as important, to be perceived as addressing them.  Biden has done wonders to boost American industry and create blue collar jobs, but has gotten little credit for it.  Some of these are bad things that need to be confronted.  Some are real problems that need to be solved.

Take immigration.  Trump has seized on this as his #1 issue and made it the source of all our problems.  Crime? Immigrants.  Drugs? Immigrants.  Rent too high? Immigrants.  Terrorism? Immigrants.  No job? Immigrants.  Pet disappeared?  Immigrants. Immigrants are ‘them’, dark-skinned outsiders changing your culture, your language, who your kids sit next to in school. 

And they’re here because the rich elites want them here.  Business wants cheap labor, at ‘your’ expense.  Liberals want more immigrants to vote Democratic.  Haven’t liberals said for decades that a larger minority population will produce a permanent Democratic majority?  Well, that’s their plan.

At a certain point any society—even one that is relatively open to immigration and is proud of its history of absorbing newcomers, like the US—will be uncomfortable with high levels of immigration that don’t seem to have any end; in fact seem to be increasing.  In the ‘golden age’ of immigration to the US, the post-Civil War period up to WWI, when we put up the Statue of Lady Liberty with Emma Lazarus’s great poem at her feet, the percentage of foreign-born population in the US peaked in 1890 at 14.8% and stayed there through 1910.  

In 2024 for the first time the foreign-born population exceeded those levels, reaching 15.6%.  In-between the US saw a huge backlash that produced tight restrictions on immigrant numbers beginning in the 1920s and continuing until the Immigration Acts of 1965 and 1990.  The foreign-born percentage in the US dropped to a low of 4.7% in 1970, meaning it has tripled in the last 54 years. 

The backlash after WWI was part of a nativist trend that saw the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, isolationism and refusal to join the League of Nations, and a sharp turn away from the progressive economic policies of the first decades of the 20th century.  The lesson here is not that slamming the door on immigration is good policy, but that when people perceive that there are no serious limits on immigration, they will react negatively and will be receptive to broader illiberal movements.  The prudent course is to preserve both a high level of immigration and support for liberal government via restrictions that are humane and broadly acceptable. 

Easier said than done, when immigration has become a political football and one side is not interested in compromise. But liberals I think failed to anticipate the need to defang this issue and its potential to fuel demagoguery.  Not just here, but also in Europe, where immigration has been the catalyst for the resurgence of far-right parties.  We could take a lesson from Denmark, a bastion of social democracy which has adopted a tough stance on immigration that is boosting support for its Social Democrat prime minister.

Let’s hope for the best on November 5.  And if we get it, the number one priority should be doing our best to reduce the polarization and distrust that has taken hold.  It will take deft leadership, constant communication, and strategic thinking. 

I had read Herodotus’s Histories several times in the past, but only excerpts of what is a lengthy and detailed story.  Previous readings had focused on the ‘main event,’ the war between Greeks and Persians. But Herodotus takes his sweet time getting there and regales his readers with lengthy excursions, stories of great wars and campaigns, and lengthy accounts of barbarian religious and sexual customs.  While also describing many actions of the Greeks, he spends less time with them, probably because as a Greek writing in Greek for Greeks, he assumes they are already familiar with their own world.  He wants to inform his audience of things strange and unfamiliar.

This summer I took a seminar at St John’s in which we read the ‘whole thing,’ an adventure that I don’t think anyone in the class, including the tutors, had ever undertaken.  What do we learn from the whole that is perhaps less evident from focusing on the Persian invasion of Greece?

The Histories begins with the famous statement that his book is written “so that the great and wonderful deeds—some brought forth by the Hellenes, others by the barbarians, not go unsung; as well as the causes that led them to make war on each other.”  Herodotus does not distinguish between Greeks and barbarians; both are worthy of respect, and both provide lessons for his readers. 

It ends, some 700 pages later, with a pithy lesson supposedly imparted by Cyrus, the founder of the Persian Empire—the Persians being the primary ‘barbarian’ discussed in the book.  On hearing a proposal that the Persians should conquer more fertile and better lands, Cyrus warns that if they do so “they should prepare to be rulers no longer, but rather to become subjects under the rule of others.  This was so, he said, because soft places tend to produce soft men; for the same land cannot yield both wonderful crops and men who are noble and courageous in war.  And so the Persians agreed with him and departed, leaving him alone.  They had lost the argument with Cyrus, and chose to dwell in a poor land rather than to be slaves to others and to cultivate the plains.” (9.122)

Now this last sentence of the book is quite astonishing, since a good part of the previous 700 pages has been devoted to detailing how Cyrus and the Persians did indeed conquer the ‘plains’—the immensely wealthy Babylon on the Euphrates, and then the most fruitful land of all, Egypt, where bountiful crops grow just by throwing seed into the fertile Nile mud.  What would make Herodotus say something so obviously untrue? 

The theme of interaction between ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ peoples is a recurring one in the Histories.  Early on King Croesus, rich ruler of Lydia, a powerful kingdom in Asia Minor, is warned not to start a war with the Persians, who live in a rocky, poor country.  Such people are used to hardships and fighting.  Further, if you defeat them, what do you gain? Croesus doesn’t listen and is beaten, becoming a prisoner—and loyal advisor—of Cyrus.

The Persians themselves do not seem to learn the lesson.  Much of the Histories recounts all the times the Persians mount expeditions against exactly the kind of poor, warlike, unappetizing enemies that it seems you should avoid.  Cyrus himself, after making Persia wealthy via victory in Babylonia, decides to march against the remote Massagetians, a nomadic people living in what is now Central Asia.  Herodotus tells us that by this time Cyrus is convinced of his invincibility.  To conquer them he takes the advice of Croesus, who recommends a strategem in which the Persians lay out a tremendous feast with wine and delicacies, which the poor Massagetians won’t be able to resist.  When they are drunk and distracted, the Persians can easily defeat them. (1.207)

Croesus’s plan works, up to a point, allowing the Persians to destroy one-third of the Massagetian army and capture the queen’s son (who kills himself rather than remain a prisoner). But this only enrages the Massagetians, leading to a great battle—Herodotus calls it the greatest ever held between barbarians—that the Persians lose and in which Cyrus is killed.  New-found Persian wealth and luxuries are not a solid basis for defeating poor, hardened tribesmen.

Cyrus’s more than sightly mad heir, Cambyses, successfully conquers Egypt but then gets it into his head to attack the far-off Ethiopians, a people who pose no threat and about whom he knows nothing. After sending spies ahead who report among other things that the Ethiopians live tremendously long lives, he mounts a huge campaign but, consumed by rage, fails to equip his army for a march through the desert.  When they run out of food they resort to cannibalism and are forced to turn back. 

In the most detailed of his Persian campaign stories, Herodotus describes the assault by Cambyses’s successor Darius against the Scythians, another nomadic people living to the north of the Black Sea.  Darius attacks, supposedly to punish them for an earlier Scythian incursion into Persian territory (which took place well before Persia itself had been formed).  Herodotus tells us that Darius’s decision was shaped by Persia’s flourishing, with many troops and ample revenues.  Darius pulls together an enormous force of 700,000 men from all over the empire and marches them across the Hellespont, around the Black Sea, and deep into the northern steppes in a fruitless attempt to bring the Scythians to battle and win a victory. 

Herodotus foreshadows this failure when he tells us “The Scythians were more clever than any other people in making the most important discovery we know of concerning human affairs, though I do not admire them in other respects.  They have discovered how to prevent any attacker from escaping them and how to make it impossible for anyone to overtake them against their will.  For instead of establishing towns or walls, they are all mounted archers who carry their homes with them and derive their sustenance not from cultivated fields but from their herds. Since they make their homes on carts, how could they not be invincible or impossible even to engage in battle?”  (4.46). In short, the Scythians have no cities, no accumulated wealth, and live only to fight and resist.  Darius is astonishingly blind to the nature of his enemies.

These unsuccessful campaigns provide the backdrop for the most unsuccessful of all, the eventual Persian invasion of Greece, initiated under Darius and continued under Xerxes, his successor.  The Persians are ignominiously beaten not once, but twice.  The Athenians throw back Darius’s forces at Marathon; then the much larger invasion under Xerxes is defeated at sea by the Athenians, at Salamis, and on land, at Plataea, by a Spartan-led Greek army. 

From these prior endeavors we can see that the decision to attack the Greek mainland is consistent with Persia’s history of campaigns against peripheral peoples.  The Greeks are not particularly wealthy; they live in a rocky and poor country, as anyone who has visited Greece can attest.  Darius is moved to attack not out of any serious strategic calculation, but out of annoyance at Athens for instigating a revolt of the Greek states in Asia Minor which results in the destruction of Sardis.   Xerxes is urged to continue by advisors who tell him “it is unreasonable that the Athenians have inflicted great evils on the Persians but have paid no penalty for it.”  (7.5). Herodotus tells us that Xerxes’ uncle Artabanos tries to dissuade him by pointing to the previous failures against the Massagetians, Ethiopians, and Scythians, but is thwarted by divine intervention in the form of dreams sent to Xerxes telling him he must invade.  (7.18)

The Greeks, while they are capable of mustering significant military power, especially at sea, are divided into a multitude of competing city-states, often fighting one another.  They would only be a danger to Persia if they united, which is highly unlikely.  Unless of course they had a common enemy.

In short, the Persian threat creates the threat to Persia. Persia fails to use its most powerful weapon to divide the Greeks, mainly money; the Greeks are highly susceptible to being bought off, and a canny enemy can easily play on their mutual suspicions.   The Persian commander Mardonios is advised by his Theban allies to “Just send some money to the most powerful men in their cities.  You will thus divide Hellas against itself…”.  But Mardonios “out of foolish pride” doesn’t listen.  (9.2)

 Herodotus describes in detail how the Greeks, especially Athens and Sparta, the two greatest powers, can’t get their act together even as the Persians are at the gates.  How many times do the Spartans arrive with too little, too late, because they are waiting for the omens to be favorable; or maybe because they wouldn’t mind that much if the Persians took out the Athenians.  How many bitter arguments over which city should be in the lead and who has the right to the top position on the battlefield. 

The Athenians, at least, are willing to give way to Sparta when necessary to achieve common action, even though in the first invasion they basically fight off Darius on their own, and when Xerxes invades they watch the Spartans retreat to the Peloponnese without any thought for Athens. (8.3)   Greek division is just barely overcome to create a united front against the Persians at key moments. 

Persian self-satisfaction and confidence in their numbers leads them into a series of mistakes, both moral and strategic.  Under Darius they are beaten at Marathon; under Xerxes at Salamis and Plataea.  In one of history’s most famous examples of hubris, Xerxes orders the sea to be whipped after a storm destroys his boat-bridge at the Hellespont.  Hundreds of thousands of troops are lost, and hundreds of ships, and Xerxes has to beat a humiliating retreat that culminates, according to one account given by Herodotus, in ordering senior Persians to leap in the ocean to lighten the ship in a storm.  (8.120)

What have we learned from Herodotus’s detailed accounts of Persia flinging itself into massive attacks against marginal enemies?  Since the same pattern is repeated under Cyrus, Cambyses, Darius and Xerxes we can conclude it comes from something deep in Persia’s strategic position or self-understanding. 

It seems that engaging in unprofitable battles for questionable gains is something Empires frequently do. Once established, frontiers have to be defended, distant allies must not be allowed to lose, and the Imperial Power has a reputation to uphold. Emperors find it easy to imagine that their money, numbers, and superior armament make them invincible.  From Scythia and the Germanic forests to Vietnam and Iraq, the logic is consistent. 

It is also possible that Persia’s Kings see these campaigns as a way to avoid the danger pointed to by Cyrus, the ‘softness’ that accompanies becoming wealthy and successful.  Once Persia becomes rich, it might be wise to make sure Persia’s elite does not lose its original warrior spirit.  Regular campaigning keeps these virtues alive; it also occupies the time and talent of those who might otherwise become disgruntled schemers against the King.  Darius at one point justifies the Scythian campaign as necessary to keep his people occupied. 

Xenophon, writing after Herodotus and with his own extensive knowledge of Persian ways from his service during one of Persia’s internal wars, addresses this issue in his Cyropaedia, or Education of Cyrus.  After Cyrus’s initial victories that create the Empire, Xenophon’s Cyrus considers how to rule, saying “I know that if we turn toward easygoingness and the pleasure seeking of bad human beings, who believe that laboring is misery and living without labor is happiness, I say that quickly we will be but of little worth to ourselves and quickly be deprived of all good things..It is a great work to gain an empire, but it is an even greater work to keep one safe after taking it” (Cyropaedia VII 5).  Cyrus tries to keep his key supporters in trim with regular training and lots of hunting. 

Empires once established can take a long time to die.  Their riches and power cushion them, and they often find a second wind under new rulers who undertake needed reforms.  As Herodotus portrays it, failure, even on a colossal scale, does not seem, at least immediately, to threaten either the empire itself or even the position of its Kings.  Defeat in war on the periphery does not lead to the overrunning of the imperial core, or the revolt of subjugated peoples, or embolden internal enemies to move against the King, at least not successfully.  These are all frequently observed consequences of military failure in other cases.  Xerxes makes it back to Susa, his lieutenants straggle home.  The Empire lasts another 150 years. 

Herodotus of course is not aware of the course of Persian-Greek relations over this period, during which Persia becomes closely involved in the internal politics of Greece.  But he can tell that the aftermath of the wars with Persia will be a test for the Greeks as much as the Persians.  As Darius’s fleet is bearing down on Greece, he tells us that this portends a period when “more evils befell Hellas than in all the other generations prior to Darius.  Some of these evils were caused by the Persians, but others by the leading states of Hellas waging war for political domination among themselves.”  (6.98).

Athens creates its own sea-based empire, building on fear of Persia among the Greek states of Asia Minor and the Aegean islands.  Its rising power alarms Sparta, which responds, as Thucydides meticulously describes, by seeking to subdue Athens in a 20-year extended struggle.

Persia, having learned from its defeats, stops trying to conquer the Greeks and adopts an ‘offshore balancing’ strategy of weakening Athens and Sparta by intervening regularly on one side or the other, using money and arms and occasional direct support.  It helps engineer Sparta’s ultimate victory over Athens in the Peloponnesian Wars.  The Empire goes through multiple succession crises, and loses control of Egypt among other setbacks, but stabilizes and has a lengthy period of internal growth under the 45 year reign of Arataxerxes I.  The King’s Peace achieved under Artaxerxes II in 387 BC marks an acknowledgement of Persian dominance over all of Asia Minor.    

In the end, though, the Persian fear of the Greeks proves prophetic.  The Macedonians, a people ironically often allied with Persia, gather strength.  One hundred and fifty years after Salamis, Philip of Macedon and his son Alexander the Great conquer and unite the Greek city-states.  Then Alexander, apparently motivated in part by a desire to avenge the Persian invasions, brings down Persia and makes Greek culture and language dominant throughout the Near East, ushering in the Hellenistic Age.  

But Alexander, like the Persians, can’t stop fighting, often against the same kind of peripheral nomads that proved irresistible to Cyrus and Darius.  He and his Greeks become possessors of the great wealth and luxurious habits that have overtaken the Persians; more than once his own followers object to Alexander’s adoption of Persian ways.   When Alexander dies, his Empire breaks apart into warring dynasties.  The Alexandrian successor-states become bywords for corruption and decadence. 

What exactly happens when a poor, hardened, and god-fearing people suddenly achieves great wealth and power?  Is it ever possible not to be corrupted and, eventually, give way to the next round of poorer, harder, more disciplined successors?  Persia, Alexander, Rome, Byzantium, Baghdad, Spain…the list is long.  Ibn Khaldun devoted his great medieval study of politics, the Muqaddimah (much of it drawing on the history of the same lands once occupied by Persia and Alexander), to these same cycles of rise and decline.  The wealthy, organized urban centers generally have the means to fend off the warlike tribes of the desert; but every so often the tribes find a leader, they unite, and the cities fall.  For a time the new rulers hold on to their old ways and stay strong, but inevitably their wealth and security softens them, they lose their edge, and the cycle repeats.   

Is the United States, or the West more generally, subject to the same arc?  Many have thought so and predicted the end of liberal democracy, or of modernity as a whole.  Nietzsche famously described in the late 19th century the despicable “Last Man,” the soulless product of a modern society that prioritizes comfort and security, and called for his replacement.  Influenced by Nietzsche and similar thinkers, fascists and communists alike claimed in the 20th century that the capitalist democracies had become corrupt and weak and ripe for the taking.   

The decadent democracies however somehow rallied to fire-bomb the cities of their fascist enemies in World War II and force them to surrender unconditionally, then out-spent and out-maneuvered their Cold War communist adversaries.   Perhaps fundamentally new developments—industrialization, scientific progress, mass democracy—allow modern powers to resist the seemingly inevitable cycles of the past.  Nevertheless, the same arguments are heard now from Moscow and Beijing.  Your time is up, is their message.

Nothing lasts forever, and it may be that this time the enemies of liberal democracy have found a winning formula.  Using new media and technology, they have become adept at deepening fissures of race, inequality, and culture inside their adversaries, and instilling distrust of the institutions—government, the press, the schools, science—that provide the glue for liberal societies.  China in particular has taken aim at what it sees as the West’s source of strength, its advanced technology, and dedicated itself to dominating the new realms of quantum computing, AI, and renewable energy. 

Like the ancient Greeks, winning has allowed latent divisions to surface and become toxic.  Post-Persian War Greece splintered between democracy and autocracy, with external powers regularly boosting their preferred faction to weaken and take over target cities.  Within most democracies there now exist growing movements whose leaders look to the world’s tyrants as models. 

As the title suggests, Francis Fukuyama’s oft-cited 1992 treatise on the victory of liberal democracy and market economics, The End of History and the Last Man, pointed back to Nietzsche.  He warned that success in winning the Cold War could be followed by  profound dissatisfaction with the ensuing era of peace and consensus.   The decades since have confirmed his fears.  Forty years of neoliberalism have created an atomized, individualistic citizenry that is prickly in defense of its rights and has little use for, or understanding of, the common good.  Wealth and technology undergird a highly capable military, but also a joyless consumerism that is bemoaned but seems inescapable.  A sluggish politics mired in factionalism and corruption appears unable to respond to today’s challenges, whether climate change or immigration or inequality. 

In response, many have turned to extreme nationalism or religious zeal or fealty to One Leader, looking for purpose and direction.  This is the modern version of Cyrus’s warning.  If you conquer the plains, be ready to become weak.  Your riches will not save you forever.  Be ready, if you lose your footing, to be enslaved, if not from without, then from within.           

We are at the one year anniversary of the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023.  Israel’s response has been to effectively destroy the Gaza strip and make it uninhabitable for the foreseeable future.  Just recently it has carried out high-intensity attacks in the north against Hizbollah, including killing Hassan Nazrallah, Hizbollah’s charismatic and influential commander.  Israel is also bulldozing large chunks of the West Bank and has given a green light to settlers to intimidate and displace Palestinians. 

So far Hizbollah and Iran, Hizbollah’s patron, have not responded effectively.  Iran has (twice now) attacked Israel with missiles, but these have mostly been shot down, with US help.  Hizbollah is reeling from the loss of its communication system (Israel detonated thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies in a devastating intelligence operation), intense strikes on Hizbollah missile complexes near the border, and the loss of Nazrallah and other top leaders.

Where does this leave us?  Israel has for a long time, since it annexed the West Bank and Gaza after the 1967 war, had three basic strategic choices. 

1.        Accommodation. Reach some kind of accommodation with Palestinians, either a 2-state solution or even a one-state solution, that gives Palestinians enough autonomy that most give up demands to return or to destroy Israel, and outside supporters, especially Iran, lose influence. 

2.        Apartheid.  Expel or subjugate Palestinians, and make the West Bank and Gaza de facto if not de jure part of Israel; in effect, an apartheid state. 

3.        Mow the Lawn.  Do neither, but depend on tactical, military superiority to ‘mow the lawn’ and keep Palestinians, including Hamas; and Hizbollah and other Iranian proxies, weak and unable to seriously threaten Israel.  

The necessary condition for all these strategies is continued unconditional support from the United States.  While the official US position has been to support Accommodation, US support has been essential for Mow the Lawn, which Israel has largely followed for several decades.  While Apartheid is strongly opposed by Washington, it is unlikely that the US would act to prevent it, provided Israel can cast this as unavoidable, and can pursue it without major repercussions from regional powers. 

In the 30 years since the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 Benjamin Netanyahu has been Prime Minister for over 16 years.  During his tenure Israel has paid lip service to Accommodation, while in practice moving slowly but firmly to implement Apartheid.  This is partly because of Netanyahu’s own convictions, and partly his need to build governing coalitions that rely more and more on extremist parties.  Netanyahu’s worldview is largely adopted from his father, a close associate of Jakob Jabotinsky, the militant founder of Likud who advocated for a powerful Jewish state and defense force able to coerce Arabs into submission. 

Israel is frequently described as ‘tactically proficient, but strategically deficient’.  It pulls off spectacular intelligence and strike operations, assassinating enemy leaders and destroying militant and Iranian bases and facilities.   With less success, it also conducts occasional longer-term invasions and occupations, as in Lebanon in 2006 and now in Gaza.  These are all part of Mow the Lawn, at least in public discourse; that is, designed to keep Israel’s enemies at bay and eliminate their capability to attack Israel.  Israel’s tactical superiority allows it to avoid choosing clearly one strategy over another. 

During the ‘Netanyahu era’ Israeli settlement activity in the West Bank has expanded, to the point that an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank is now hard to imagine.  The response to 10/7 has made Gaza a moonscape with no prospect that Palestinians, even if fighting stops, would be able to restore even the inadequate infrastructure and services they enjoyed before.  Netanyahu’s ruling coalitions have become progressively more extreme and more dominated by religious nationalists determined to achieve the goal of “Greater Israel”. 

Netanyahu himself is preoccupied with political and personal survival and sees continued war as staving off any reckoning for the October 7 catastrophe.  He is also obsessed with the Iranian nuclear threat and sees his legacy, and his chance for redemption, tied to successful strikes that eliminate Iran’s nuclear infrastructure.  Killing Nasrallah has already improved his image; a successful strike on Iran would make him a hero at home and divert any criticism about Gaza and the hostages.  It would also make it easier to ramp up pressure on Palestinians and satisfy the demands of his right-wing coalition partners.

Israel’s high-profile attacks on Hizbollah are designed to force Iran to respond, giving Israel an excuse to carry out a direct attack on Iran.  US participation is part of the plan, since Israel’s own capabilities are probably insufficient to cripple Iran’s hardened nuclear sites.  Israeli military leaders have publicly claimed they have unilateral means, but Iran has been moving key facilities deeper underground and Israel lacks the really heavy bombs, and the long-range bombers to carry them, that only the US Air Force owns.

Netanyahu’s strategy is therefore to use escalation with Iran to box the US in, so Washington is forced to participate in a direct attack on Iran which Israel can claim is legitimate self-defense to keep Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.  (Iran is now judged to be able to enrich to weapons-grade uranium within a few weeks, and construct a working nuclear device within a few months to a year; Netanyahu was a fervent opponent of the nuclear agreement negotiated under the Obama Administration, which would have slowed Iran’s nuclear development, and which President Trump abrogated soon after he took office). 

Crippling Hizbollah is the necessary condition for this strategy.  Iran has built up Hizbollah for years largely to deter Israel.  Just as North Korea successfully prevented the US and South Korea from attacking the North’s nuclear facilities by threatening to use artillery and rockets to turn Seoul into a “sea of fire”, Tehran wants to use Hizbollah’s thousands of missiles near Israel’s border to keep Israel and the US at bay. 

It is not clear how much firepower Hizbollah has left, but Israel has already destroyed a lot on the ground, badly hurt its ability to communicate, and killed many top leaders.  Israel may now feel that it has reduced the threat from Hizbollah to a tolerable level, and that the time to attack Iran is now, before Hizbollah can recover. 

The US is now the wildcard.  Participating in attacks on Iran’s nuclear program would be a huge escalation with unpredictable outcomes.  Every major country in the region could be affected, and while most would be happy to see a weakened Iran, there would be deep unease at the prospects for a regional war.  Iran would likely attack or threaten oil facilities in the Gulf as well as tanker traffic, causing oil prices to skyrocket, an unwelcome development just before US elections (though perhaps welcome to Netanyahu, an unabashed Trump supporter).  US personnel and facilities in Iraq and the Gulf would be at risk.  Iran’s allies, Russia and China, would assail the US as a warmonger.

However, a number of US strategists and military experts are calling for the US to take part in an attack on Iran.  President Biden has said he is against Israeli retaliation on Iran’s nuclear sites, but it is unclear what recourse the US has if Israel decides to act.  The unknown is whether Israel has the capability, or thinks it has the capability, to be successful on its own.  Netanyahu may ultimately decide to settle, for now, for a more limited retaliation.  But Netanyahu’s political survival now coincides, in his own eyes, with destroying what he has consistently said is the greatest threat to Israel’s survival, an Iranian bomb.  And Hizbollah’s weakness won’t last forever.  I think it is certain that if Trump is re-elected, Netanyahu will lobby relentlessly for an American green light to attack Iran, sooner and not later.   

Attacking Iran would be Mowing the Lawn on steroids, a tactical move that, if successful, might make Israel safer in the short term but would be likely to worsen its longterm security.  Under a different leadership, a triumphant Israel might feel willing to accommodate Palestinian interests.  But this is not how Netanyahu and his partners would respond—they would feel free to put their weight on the Palestinian neck. 

Netanyahu hopes an Iranian defeat might lead to the overthrow of the ayatollahs, and he recently appealed to Iran’s people to throw off their rule.  But it is more likely that Iranians would rally behind the regime, which would continue its support of surrogates and seek new ways to attack and undermine Israel.  Israel’s horrific punishment of Palestinians is giving Iran’s anti-Israel stance new traction in the region.  Israel’s diplomatic isolation would increase.   And the US would become more deeply identified with the most aggressive and violent Israeli actions. 

A lot has been written about Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation project to turn the Federal government inside out and make it subservient to Donald Trump.  Most of Project 2025 consists of detailed critiques of government agencies and suggestions for ‘reform.’  But ProPublica recently got its hands on training videos for Project 2025 that go beyond this to try and offer general principles for conservative activists.  The first two of these in particular are overviews of conservative thought that seem meant to give a veneer of depth and principle to the MAGA movement.  They reveal some important things about the worldview of influential intellectual defenders of MAGA.  Trump himself has no discernible ideology, but a variety of ideas are competing for primacy and these videos give us clues as well as possible avenues of attack.

The first thing one notices is that both lectures are delivered by administrators of Hillsdale College, Matthew Spalding and Christopher Malagisi.  Hillsdale is a private Michigan school that purports to offer a deep education in the Western tradition, but in practice serves as a finishing school for reactionary culture warriors.  Hillsdale has successfully entrenched itself in conservative circles as an educational model; Florida governor DeSantis, for instance, said when he decided to blow up and remake the progressive New School, that he wanted instead to have a ‘little Hillsdale.’ Hillsdale and its supporters see themselves as engaged in a longterm project to change American culture, using higher education as the vehicle to create a cadre of conservative thought leaders and activists.  [1]

Matthew Spalding, who delivers the opening lecture, has a picture perfect resume for his role as articulator of MAGA thought.  He got his education, all three degrees, in the Claremont system.  He is a fellow of the Claremont Institute, publisher of the reactionary Claremont Review, and was also a Vice-President at the Heritage Foundation.  In short, he has spent his entire adult life ensconced in the Hillsdale-Claremont axis, which is the epicenter of ‘serious’ conservative philosophizing.  Its members see themselves as the defenders of Western culture against the circling hordes of multiculturalists, relativists, and secularists.  (The President of Hillsdale since 2000, Larry Arnn, was previously the President of the Claremont Institute). 

In his presentation, Spalding paints a flattened and selective picture of the ideas and institutions of the American Founding.  It is central to the Hillsdale-Claremont ideology that America’s unchanging essence was, and should still be, adherence to a view of human rights derived from natural law, that is, from permanent and unchanging truths discoverable by reason.  As his co-conspirator Mr. Malagisi tells us, the point of conservatism is to defend ‘American exceptionalism,’ meaning adherence to the truths discovered in 1776. 

Essentially, according to Spalding and Malagisi, all was well in America for its first 125 years as we maintained our devotion to these timeless verities.  The evidence of our faithfulness was that during this time we kept the central government small and weak.  But then we Fell.  For reactionary thinkers there is always a fatal turning point, a moment of eating the apple, that has to be discovered and remedied to put humanity back on the correct path.  

Spalding and Malagisi tell us exactly what caused the United States to fall:  the Progressive Movement.  Starting in the late 1800s American elites abandoned the True Faith and, influenced by foreign ideas (those damn immigrants!), began to have heretical thoughts. They began to imagine that some of America’s wealth should be taxed and used by government to solve social problems.  They began to imagine that women could take part in public life.  They began to imagine that the dominance of the economy and politics by titanic corporations should be challenged. 

Hillsdale’s enemies are Theodore Roosevelt and, especially, Woodrow Wilson.  Wilson is impugned for wanting to expand government and make decisions based on science and expertise.  He was, after all, an academic and a political scientist.  Social scientists are, in the Hillsdale-Claremont vision, the snakes in the garden, the tempters offering knowledge of good and evil. 

In the Hillsdale-Claremont account, the Progressives were not just Americans who advocated for reforms to meet the new challenges of the industrial age.  They were traitors to America’s founding ideas and the Constitution.  They did not believe in unchanging Natural Rights.  Instead, influenced by new scientific approaches to the study of man and society, they embraced a view of human beings as more malleable, shaped in key respects by their upbringing and environment, and hence capable of changing for the better.  But many of the obstacles to a better life were beyond the ability of individuals to deal with.  Rugged individualism was not going to clear the slums, improve factory working conditions, educate the poor, challenge Jim Crow, or do away with corrupt political machines.  Government intervention was needed to help people help themselves.

Hillsdale’s hero is—Calvin Coolidge.  Coolidge and his Republican cohorts of the 1920s tried to put the genie back in the bottle.  Less government, and less expectation from the public that government would intervene to help them.  Lower taxes.  High tariffs.  Silent Cal whispering ‘no’ to government programs. 

Unfortunately, a la Spalding and Malagisi, the Depression came along, Franklin Roosevelt got elected, and America went whole-hog down the Progressive path.  The modern conservative movement is largely a noble attempt to undo the New Deal and the assumptions about the role of the state that go with it. 

This view of our history surfaced during the Trump administration, when Trump commissioned a report to counter the 1619 Project.  The 1619 Project was a historical analysis sponsored by the New York Times that placed slavery at the center of the American story.  The Trump response was the “1776 Report”, a historical study executed by a group that didn’t include any actual historians, but did include Charles Kesler of the Claremont Institute, and Larry Arnn from Hillsdale.  Their report made similar arguments about Woodrow Wilson and the Progressives, who were astonishingly singled out as threats to democracy on a par with fascism and slavery. 

What do we get from this, other than a good laugh at the idea of chiseling out Teddy Roosevelt’s face from Mt. Rushmore and replacing him with Calvin Coolidge?  What we learn is how truly reactionary, how truly at odds with the modern world, the MAGA worldview is—and also how much this vision informs today’s conservative practice. 

The America before progressivism was a country where property rights were king, the businesses and trusts and financial powers of the industrial age dominated public life, and courts and politicians deferred to their interests.  Conservative legal scholars look wistfully back to the era exemplified by the 1905 Lochner Supreme Court decision, which struck down a state law that limited working hours on the grounds that it violated the ‘freedom’ of employers and workers to engage in contracts.  Today’s originalist-dominated Supreme Court has been busy doing away with government powers to regulate the economy, while declaring that corporations are people and elevating property rights at the expense of the rights of workers and citizens.

Before progressivism, states in the South, and not just the South, freely and unabashedly denied basic rights to African-Americans, Jews, Asians, Native Americans, and women.  MAGA supporters today are up to their eyeballs in schemes to restrict voting access, criminalize abortion, demonize immigrants, and undermine all forms of affirmative action.

Before progressivism, government jobs were filled by patronage rather than merit.  Today, Trump and his supporters declare proudly they will stack the federal system with political loyalists.

The irony is that conservatives despise progressivism as equivalent to socialism (Trump and his supporters now routinely call even standard-issue liberals ‘communists’), when it was the Progressive movement and its New Deal and Fair Deal successors that saved us from socialism.  The ability of American progressives to recognize and, however imperfectly, remedy some of the injustices of modern capitalism and ‘rugged individualism’ helped convince the majority to support reform rather than revolution.  It fended off the extremism that overwhelmed many European states in the first half of the 20th century.

The Eisenhower-era Republican party seemingly accepted the basic parameters of the New Deal, promising a future of political and economic harmony, or at least civil disagreement.  Government, business, labor, and civil society would work together for the common good.  It is this ‘capitulation’ that Goldwater, Reagan and now Trump reject.  No compromise, they say.  It’s war to the death. 

By rewriting history to declare Progressivism un-American, a threat equivalent to fascism, MAGA’s ideological explainers want to justify sweeping steps to undo 125 years of the expansion of government power, in the name of restoring freedom to American citizens.  Even if this expansion has been broadly popular and resulted in dramatic improvements in people’s lives, including the expansion of the basic human rights the Hillsdale conservatives say they want to protect.  

Since America has strayed so far from its true self, we might need a strongman to make things right.  We might need to intervene to ensure elections don’t give us the wrong result.  We might need to use the military to put down protests.  We might need to fire all the bureaucrats and dismantle government agencies and use the Justice Department to go after our enemies.  Whatever it takes.

Don’t be fooled by the seemingly reasonable presentations by Hillsdale professors in their book-lined studies.  The Hillsdale-Claremont axis is, after all, the home of Michael Anton, the author of the infamous “Flight 93” essay in 2016, which argued that voting for Trump was comparable to passengers choosing to swarm the cockpit against al-Qaida hijackers, even if it meant certain death.  It is the home of John Eastman, the lawyer who masterminded the fake electors scheme designed to overturn Biden’s win in 2020. 

This claim, that the existing liberal order is hopelessly corrupt and failed, is an essential part of the fascist mentality.  It justifies any action in response, however illegal or immoral.  Trump’s drumbeat of pessimism and lies about the terrible state of our country, about how crime and immigration and woke liberals are destroying America, provides the counterpoint to the arguments of Hillsdale’s ideologues.  Never mind that the United States is the richest, most powerful state in human history, a magnet for millions around the world, for 250 years a functioning if flawed democracy, an engine of new jobs and opportunity.  These realities must be ignored to justify dismantling existing institutions and substituting the rule of a Leader who embodies the popular will.   

We should be aware that Hillsdale’s “American Exceptionalism” is not the only set of ideas circling around the MAGAverse.  There are white nationalists and outright fascists; religious zealots who look to Victor Orban’s Hungary as a model for the use of government power to advance a Christian state; and Silicon Valley libertarians who find democracy contemptible and outdated.  Professor Spalding gently rebukes them and tries to claim all these ideas need to be grounded in American natural law principles.  But they are allies, working together against their common liberal enemies.

Project 2025 is, however, not a standard-issue conservative plan to shrink the state.  It is a plan to take over the state and use state power to implement sweeping change in culture and governance.  The relatively moderate professors in these videos who celebrate decentralization and individual rights can be seen as ‘useful idiots’—the Mensheviks to MAGA’s Bolsheviks, destined to be ignored and, come the revolution, sent quickly to the gulag.

[1] I am a graduate of St. John’s College, which really does offer the education in Western thought that Hillsdale pretends to provide.  The Hillsdale approach is a distortion of genuine liberal education—Hillsdale is to St. John’s what the Upside Down in “Stranger Things” is to the real world.  To have a school that purports to defend Western civilization shill for Donald Trump is of course hilarious, but also threatens those who are serious about genuine engagement with our best traditions.  Hillsdale wants to weaponize the study of Western thought by making it seem that it supports one side in today’s political debates.  This is false and a betrayal of the tradition that Hillsdale claims to defend.