Adam's Ideas

The Trump administration has from the start nominated some spectacularly unqualified people for senior jobs.  A few were so preposterous that even the MAGA Republicans in Congress vomited them up, like Florida Congressman and sexual predator Matt Gaetz for Attorney General.  But others equally bad were duly approved and still inhabit top positions, including top national security positions.  Pete Hegseth at Defense, Kash Patel at the FBI, and Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Security come to mind. 

Given those spectacular mishits, it is perhaps hard to get worked up about Jeremy Carl, the current nominee to be Assistant Secretary of State for International Organizations.  This is a mid-level job that primarily deals with the United Nations.  Carl’s nomination now appears to be doomed by his own intemperate remarks at his confirmation hearing, and the courage of Republican Senator John Curtis of Utah.  But understanding why he was put forward at all reveals the mindset now at the heart of American foreign policy.

Mr. Carl has, to begin with, no background in diplomacy or foreign affairs.  He is a conservative activist based at the right-wing Claremont Institute in California, where his expertise seems to be mostly about energy policy.  In the first Trump Administration he served as a Deputy Assistant Secretary in the Interior Department.  Just to get a sense of the difference in approach, in the Biden administration the position was filled by Ambassador Michele Sison, a career diplomat who had served previously as Deputy US Representative to the UN, among other senior jobs.

That Trump and his supporters are not exactly fans of the United Nations is not news.  So perhaps picking someone who knows nothing about the UN is just a typical way to show your contempt.  Past Republican presidents have often appointed people largely to underscore how little the US thought of the UN.  Conservative flamethrower John Bolton, for instance, was Assistant Secretary for IO in the Bush I administration. 

Still, Bolton was at least a foreign policy expert and professional.  Carl is not. What then is behind his appointment?  What does he bring to the table, from the MAGA standpoint?

What Carl seems to offer is his unvarnished embrace of ‘national conservatism.’  This is the shorthand for the MAGA wing that sees its mission as protecting America from the dangerous influence of internal and external forces that seek to weaken our national fundamentals.  These fundamentals can be summed up in the words ‘white’ and ‘Christian’.  Hence our primary national security goals center around stopping and reversing immigration, except from South Africa; supporting similar anti-immigrant movements in Europe, the white homeland; turning away from globalization and any hint of subservience to  international organizations that give power to non-white peoples; and fighting to re-define what it means to be American, away from the Declaration’s creed that we are all equal, towards devotion to a largely mythic past that centers a story of white European success and Christian expansion, downplays the contributions of African-Americans, and rejects any need to reflect on the nation’s shortcomings.    

Carl is infamous for his full-throated warnings about the loss of white culture and the dangers of ‘liberal guilt’.  He has regularly endorsed the ‘Great Replacement Theory’ which says liberals are deliberately promoting immigration to make white people a minority.  In dealing with the UN he could be trusted to fight tooth and nail against any loss of US sovereignty to an organization dominated by non-Western peoples.       

National conservatives reject the idea that American identity is defined by an idea or commitment to a set of principles embodied in the Declaration and the Constitution.  Instead they see the United States as the exemplar and defender of ‘Western civilization,’ transferred here from Europe, where it is now weak and under assault. 

This understanding was front and center when JD Vance went to the Munich Security Conference a year ago and lambasted his European hosts for being weak on immigration and globalization.  It turns out that a year later nothing has changed, even though Marco Rubio’s rhetoric on February 14 was slightly less incendiary:

“We are part of one civilization: Western civilization. We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilization to which we have fallen heir…. This is why we do not want our allies to be shackled by guilt and shame. We want allies who are proud of their culture and of their heritage, who understand that we are heirs to the same great and noble civilization, and who, together with us, are willing and able to defend it.”

Rubio in his speech painted a picture of American history as an unbroken extension of European strength and expansionism, from Christopher Columbus—no apologies, no sir!—through the spread of Christianity, to westward expansion across North America. The only thing to worry about in all this is the prospect of losing confidence in our right to continue to dominate, continue to expand, continue to prioritize our unique ethnicity and culture.

Rubio seems oblivious to America’s self-understanding, from its inception, as something fundamentally new, as a place and people not bound by the aristocracy and militarism and intolerance of the Old World.  Would that Thomas Jefferson, an uncompromising advocate for America’s uniqueness, could return to refute Rubio and his fellow national conservatives with their nostalgia for European ways.  

Europe and America have indeed grown closer over the last 250 years.  This is largely because Europe has become more like us.  European countries in the 19th century slowly threw off ancient aristocracies in favor of democratic institutions and guarantees of human rights.  They haltingly embraced new identities tied to the creed of liberal democracy. 

At the same time millions of people fled from all corners of Europe to the New World, not to make America more European, but to escape from Europe’s miseries.  America benefited from the ordinary people who in America found opportunity denied them in their homelands, and from many of Europe’s greatest minds and talents, who helped make the United States a place of refuge for a civilization seemingly bent on collective suicide.   

Because not all of Europe, of course, moved in the American direction.  In the 20th century America stepped forward again and again and again to defend the Europe that resembled America from the Europe that didn’t: nationalist Germany, fascist Germany and Italy, the USSR.  Yes, we were defending a shared tradition.  A tradition largely made in the USA.   

Carl may be rejected. But the national conservatism he represents is alive and well in the Trump administration.  It is a dangerous and deeply un-American view, a view ironically resembling the blood and soil nationalism that flourished—and is still very much with us—in the parts of Europe Americans sacrificed so much to oppose.  

The news last week that the Central Intelligence Agency was ceasing publication of its unclassified World Factbook would not, in ordinary times, be a big deal.  We could assume that well-meaning intelligence community leaders, after consulting with the appropriate stakeholders, and balancing the pros and cons, had decided it was no longer worth the money and other resources required.  They would explain clearly why they were deep-sixing one of their most popular and widely-used products, one that connected the CIA with the general public and was widely used around the world.  

But these are not ordinary times.  CIA offered no explanation. Some commentators pointed to Director John Ratcliffe’s commitment to “strict adherence to the CIA’s mission” as a possible explanation.  The Factbook is certainly not central to the Agency’s mission and could arguably be abandoned to focus on higher priorities.  But the Factbook has been publicly available for almost 50 years, surviving through plenty of lean times in the past.  Back in the 1980s analysts like me were tasked to support the Factbook by fact-checking and doing research, but the Factbook has for years been produced mostly by contractors.  Certainly the cost of this project was a rounding error in the Intelligence Community budget.

A more uncomfortable reason can be discerned if we look at how the Factbook was seen by the CIA, and by its many users.  In 2020 CIA described the Factbook as “an authoritative source of basic intelligence that has and will continue to be an essential part of CIA’s legacy.”  The New York Times in its obituary article concluded that “The Factbook, published by the world’s premier spy agency, was long considered an objective source in an increasingly subjective information ecosystem.”

“Authoritative.” “Objective.” We all know that we live in a world where information is easier to get than ever, but reliable information is harder to get than ever.  Anyone can go online or to a chatbot and get answers to questions—often hundreds of answers.  Which ones do you trust?  How do you know?  The CIA Factbook was one of those invaluable tools where you could be confident that the facts it provided were the result of careful research, done by experts, double and triple-checked for accuracy. It is this confidence that longtime users of the Factbook cite again and again.

Unfortunately even CIA insiders seem to misunderstand how today’s world works.  Retired senior Agency analyst Beth Sanner told the New York Times “When it started, it was important, because there was no such thing as the internet,” she said. “Now it’s like, what’s the point?”  The point is that ‘the internet’ is often a cesspool of disinformation and confusion.  A trusted guide is needed.

Who could be against this, you might think.  Who could want to make it harder for ordinary people to get objective information?  Sadly the answer is, a lot of people.  Including a lot of people in the current American administration.  This is an administration built on a foundation of lies.  Lies about elections.  Lies about immigrants.  Lies about the President’s corrupt dealings.  This is an administration that fired the head of the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics because it didn’t like the jobs numbers she calculated.

The leaders of the intelligence community have as their first duty to seek the truth.  But today these leaders have unfortunately been active participants in misinforming the nation.  Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard reportedly fired senior members of the National Intelligence Council last spring because they accurately reported that Venezuelan gangs were not conspiring with the Venezuelan government to attack the United States.  The head of the Defense Intelligence Agency was let go after he questioned the effectiveness of US strikes on Iran’s nuclear program. 

At the center of the rot is Trump’s obsession with the Intelligence Community’s finding in 2016 that Russia was intervening to support his election.  Quelling this analysis is a central part of his campaign of revenge against anyone in government who participated in investigating his questionable or illegal activities.  One of the first acts of newly appointed CIA Director Ratcliffe last spring was to do yet another review of those findings.  The review confirmed that the analysis was sound and the conclusions warranted, but Ratcliffe went on TV to falsely claim the Agency had been biased.  

There is an interagency committee charged with uncovering and punishing all those on Trump’s enemy list.  Its chair?  DNI Tulsi Gabbard.

It is unlikely that any senior officer looked at the World Factbook and thought “we need to shut it down in case it contradicts our lies.”  The Factbook dealt with hard data—population numbers, names of obscure ethnic groups, trade statistics.  But it was nevertheless a standing affront to a worldview that asserts the truth is what we say it is.  To a set of leaders determined to paper over inconvenient ‘fake news’ and replace it with self-serving narratives. 

The World Factbook was, compared to much of today’s online world, a drab affair.  It had no influencers behind it, no dancers or singers touting its greatness, no fancy videos.  It had nothing to recommend it but its utility and the credibility that came with the CIA name. Along with thousands of other compilations of carefully scrutinized facts and data assembled the world over by hardworking scientists, bureaucrats, journalists, and scholars, it was one of the vertebrae in the hidden backbone of the modern world, the backbone of a shared reality.  

Observers of tyrants have long noted that one of their strategies is to attack the idea of truth. There is no truth, they say.  All sources are biased.  Everyone lies.  Once enough people believe this, they have no foundation for objecting to what the tyrant says and does.  As the great political philosopher and explainer of totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt, told us in her 1967 essay “Truth and Politics”:  “The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lies will now be accepted as truth, and the truth be defamed as lies, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth vs. falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed.  And for this trouble there is no remedy.”  

For this trouble, the CIA Factbook was, if not a remedy, a corrective.  A sign that your government believed there was truth out there, and you had a right to it.  We will miss you.

I recently re-read the Iliad and the Odyssey during a three-month seminar.  I found reading both poems together extremely helpful.  They are similar but different, reflecting in their styles and manner of writing their central characters:  Achilles in the Iliad, the embodiment of force, bios; Odysseus in the Odyssey, the embodiment of cunning, metis. 

The Iliad is straightforward, linear, told by an omniscient narrator who sees and describes directly and impartially the actions, the thoughts, the feelings of every character.  It takes place over a few weeks in a compressed space, a real space in front of a real city.  We can find the ruins and make maps of the likely terrain.  Yes, there are plenty of gods and some strange whisking-aways, and Achilles does fight a river.  But there are no monsters, no giants, no main actors who aren’t recognizable as part of our day-to-day world. 

The Odyssey jumps in time and space, and much is told indirectly, by people who are remembering long-ago events and have their own agendas.  Fantastic creatures, giants and monsters and goddesses, figure prominently.  Large parts take place off the map, on islands unknown to Greeks of the time, or any time.  Odysseus is both the main subject and one of the main narrators of his story, a story that shifts and changes as he tells it to different people.

Here is the question that prompts this essay:  is the Odysseus in the Odyssey the same Odysseus we see in the Iliad?  I want to argue that the answer is no, at least for most of his 10 years.  Odysseus at Troy is a product of war.  His combination of cunning, persuasive speech, and strategic thinking makes him indispensable to the Greek army.  Odysseus wins the war and earns Achilles’ armor as the best of the Greeks.  But afterwards he loses his way.  The same skills that served Odysseus well at Troy are now his undoing.  He loses everything and must find a new purpose before he is able to master himself and make the Odysseus who has emerged at Troy—perhaps—a fit for Ithaca. 

Odysseus Before Troy

We do not have a direct picture of Odysseus before he leaves for Troy.  In the later books of the Odyssey he is remembered by many as a good king, who treats subordinates like Eumaeus, his loyal swineherd, fairly and well.  His wife Penelope remembers him with real affection.  Only once does Homer describe directly an incident from his youth, in Book XIX, to tell us how he got his famous scar during a hunt at his grandfather’s estate; the story is a conventional hunting tale where the young prince bravely confronts and kills a cornered boar.  The only nod to the Odysseus we know is when Homer says “He told his tale with style” on coming home.

Odysseus rules a small, out of the way island, often described as rocky and poor. He does not seem to have been especially ambitious.   In Book XXIII when provoked by Penelope to recall his bed he describes in detail how he made it with his own hands;  “I built it myself, no one else,” suggesting someone deeply committed to his house and his wife.  (It is impossible to imagine Agamemnon building his own anything.)  In some stories—not told in Homer—he is portrayed as not wanting to go to Troy and only agreeing under compulsion.  In Book XXIV Agamemnon, in Hades, remembers “how hard it was to bring him round.”

Odysseus at Troy

When we see Odysseus in the Iliad almost ten years of war have changed him.  He is an important man.  He is seen as wily and cunning, a clever speaker, and therefore not entirely trustworthy, but also indispensable. 

These traits make him a good negotiator.  He is the one entrusted to return Chryses to her father in Book I to avert the wrath of Apollo.  He persuades the Greeks not to go home when they’re wavering in Book II, is part of the delegation sent to treat with Achilles when he is sulking in Book IX, and wins King Priam’s praise for his negotiations with the Trojans. 

When Thersites, a commoner and loudmouth, calls in Book II for the Greeks to go home and stop fighting for Agamemnon, it is Odysseus who steps in to humiliate and beat him.  This is a strategic, not an emotional response; Thersites threatens to sway the soldiers into abandoning the war.  For the sake of unity and victory he has to be silenced.

Odysseus is a strategist and counselor, along with ancient Nestor; they are the duo who make plans and advise Agamemnon.  Though the story doesn’t get told in the Iliad—it emerges in the Odyssey—he is of course the inventor of the great wooden horse and the strategy that ultimately wins the war.  Odysseus is also a collector of intelligence, who volunteers eagerly for the night-spying mission in Book X to see what the Trojans are planning.  In Book IV of the Odyssey Helen herself relates how he once slipped into Troy in disguise to learn its weaknesses.

Odysseus is a fine though calculating warrior, and excels at wrestling and running and other tests of skill and strength.  He is an outstanding archer, as we know from the climax of the Odyssey.  But his value to the Greeks does not lie on the battlefield. He is the glue that keeps the army together.  He is trusted by Agamemnon, perhaps because as we read in the famous Catalogue of Ships, Odysseus comes to Troy with only 13 ships, one of the smallest of the Greek contingents.   Agamemnon commands 100 ships.  So Odysseus, for all his strengths, is no threat to Agamemnon’s leadership. 

Odysseus’s contingent is placed in the center of the Greek armada, with Achilles and Ajax, the two greatest pure fighters, out on the wings.  He sits at the center where he can advise, mediate, plan, and stay informed.  While Achilles fights for himself and his glory, and will abandon the Greek cause if it conflicts with his greatness, Odysseus fights for all, for Greek victory. 

Odysseus After Troy

Odysseus as he is pictured in the Odyssey has the same skills and strengths, but it is clear that the talents that in the Iliad served to keep the Greeks united and win the war have now become problematic, if not dangerous.   Odysseus is no longer focused on a cause, on something that gives him purpose.  He is not working for the Greeks, not serving a single king, not subordinating himself to the goal of victory in a great war.  His one stated goal, to return to Ithaca along with his 600 fellow Ithacans, is frequently neglected.  He puts his men in danger, over and over, ultimately losing them all.  They in turn do not trust him and often disobey him.

What has happened?  Why has he changed?  

Odysseus had become a central player in the greatest drama of the age.  And then, it’s over. Now there is peace, and the need to consider what comes next.  Back to tiny Ithaca? Should the great Odysseus, known and praised throughout the Greek world, known and praised even by the gods, be confined to Ithaca?  After ten years of the intensity and clarity of life at war, the world of peace may seem confusing, disorienting, pallid.  The deep bonds with peers developed over years of danger and cooperation, suddenly gone.  The sense of purpose, gone.

Odysseus, like others in war, has not only discovered hidden strengths and accomplished great deeds. He has seen and done terrible things. He has lost close comrades.  Soldiers coming off the battlefield in any war face great difficulties in transitioning to peace, returning home to families and loved ones, coming to terms with what they’ve experienced. It’s not uncommon to be ambivalent about what awaits.  Have wives been faithful?  Do children remember me?  Do they understand and appreciate what I’ve been through?  Can I take my old place in the family, the community? 

Ten years of war, twenty years away (in the Iliad, no one seems to go back home for R and R) is a particularly long time.  Odysseus has risen to great heights, further away from his starting point than most soldiers. 

In the opening books of the Odyssey, Odysseus’ son Telemachus hears stories from Nestor, Odysseus’ partner at Troy, and Menelaus, the husband of Helen, portrayed in the Iliad as a second-rater and weak leader.  These stories, some of which Odysseus already knows from his visit to Hades many years before, reinforce these fears.  The two Greek leaders in particular have not fared well. King Agamemnon, leader of the Greek host, has gone home only to be murdered by his own wife.  Menelaus wanders for eight years before making it back to Sparta with the unfaithful Helen.  When Odysseus eventually lands back on Ithaca he gives thanks to Athena for keeping him from Agamemnon’s fate. 

When we finally get a direct picture of Odysseus, in book V, he is stranded on the goddess Calypso’s island where he has been for seven years.  He weeps daily to return home.  His many misfortunes have made him afraid of the gods.  Poseidon is his open enemy, and Calypso has held him captive. As he will complain later, he thinks Athena, his confidante and protector at Troy, has abandoned him.

Odysseus doesn’t know it but Athena has intervened to compel Calypso to set him free (we will discuss later what this might mean).  But when Calypso tells him he can go, he is immediately on his guard:  “Passage home?  Never. Surely you’re plotting something else, goddess.”   When he sails away Poseidon sends a storm to stop him; a sea-nymph offers help, and Odysseus is again suspicious:  “Oh no, I fear another immortal weaves a trap to snare me.”  When he finally sees land his first response is a lengthy moan of despair:  “Worse and worse!  Now that Zeus has granted a glimpse of land beyond my hopes, now I’ve crossed this waste of water, the end in sight, there’s no way out of the boiling surf—I see no way.” And so on for 15 more lines. 

When he does get on shore, more of the same:  “Man of misery, what next?  Is this the end?  If I wait out a long tense night by the banks, I fear the sharp frost and the soaking dew together will do me in…What if I’m spared the chill, fatigue and sweet sleep comes my way?  I fear wild beasts will drag me off as quarry.”

This is not the bold, confident Odysseus of the Iliad.  This is a man close to breaking, at the end of his tether.  What has happened?  Shortly Odysseus will tell us the story of his misadventures.  This will be at a banquet held by his hosts, King Alcinous and Queen Arete of the fantasy island of Phaeacia, a land not on any map or known to any Greek, where gods walk among men.  There Odysseus will spin his own fantasies of Cyclops and Circe and Hades. 

Telling His Story:  The Prelude

Before he speaks at the banquet, however, Odysseus is brought back to Troy.  There is a bard, Demodocus, who sings of a famous quarrel between Odysseus and Achilles about the best way to take Troy.  Achilles favors force, Odysseus guile.  Hearing this Odysseus—whose identity is not yet known to his hosts—breaks down and weeps.  For seven years he has been out of touch with the great war and his comrades from that time.  Now he sees they have become known to all, a subject for song.  Now he realizes that he too is well-known.  When he tells his story, he must place it in the context of this version of himself, the version known to bards and poets. 

Before starting Odysseus sets the stage.  Still anonymous, he asks Demodocus to sing about his great triumph, the wooden horse.  The bard tells how at Troy Odysseus “fought the grimmest fight he had ever braved but won through at last, thanks to Athena’s superhuman power.”  Again Odysseus breaks down in tears “as a woman weeps, her arms flung around her darling husband, a man who fell in battle.”  Hearing about his past glory makes the bitter aftermath, and Athena’s absence, more painful.  

Odysseus now reveals himself and launches into the iconic stories of the Odyssey.  He does not start with the war, however, and we wonder why.  Odysseus at Troy would impress his hosts and establish his greatness.  Since they know something about Troy already it would prove that he is who he says he is.  King Alcinous in fact invites Odysseus to tell that story:  “Why do you weep and grieve so sorely when you hear the fate of the Argives, hear the fall of Troy?…Did one your kinsmen die before the walls of Troy…Or a friend perhaps, someone close to your heart staunch and loyal?  No less dear than a brother, the brother-in-arms who shares our inmost thoughts.”

Instead, Odysseus begins when he leaves Troy.  Is the subject too painful?  Or does it tell us something fundamental about Odysseus; that he is alone, and a loner.  No one lost at Troy touches him the way Patroclus did Achilles.  On his voyage home none of the Ithacans emerges as a close friend, an equal or confidante.  His capacity for manipulation and trickery implies a certain cool distance from others, even those from his home country and his war companions.  

And they reciprocate.  Achilles tells Odysseus, in Book IX of the Iliad, “I hate like Hades’ gates the man who hides one thought inside his heart and says another.”  Agamemnon, though he needs Odysseus, rails at him in Book IV, “You are a genius at manufacturing your wicked schemes and plotting to advance your own self-interest.”

Something that Odysseus probably appreciates in telling about his post-war adventures is that he can say whatever he wants.  He is the only witness—all his companions are gone.  The Trojan war is a story he shares with the world.  His post-war story is his alone.  He can start over and show a different and possibly truer Odysseus.  And he is the unchallenged hero.  Achilles looms over the Trojan War and threatens to put even Odysseus in the shade.  Now Odysseus can take center stage.   

Story-telling is very important to him.  As he tells his hosts at the start of Book IX:  “The crown of life, I’d say.  There’s nothing better than when deep joy holds sway throughout the realm and banqueters up and down the palace sit in ranks, enthralled to hear the bard….This, to my mind, is the best that life can offer.”  Achilles’ idea of bliss is eviscerating his enemies; Odysseus’ is listening to someone tell the story of Achilles.  Or telling it himself. 

The Tall Tales

He starts by stressing that all he wants is to get home:  “So nothing is as sweet as a man’s own country…” But many of his tales show a man who has other goals, and is prone to disastrous errors in judgment.  His first adventure, for instance, and the only one that takes place in a real place with real people, is when he chooses to attack the Cicones, a Trojan ally.  The Ithacans sack their city and kill the men, apparently just for plunder.  But Odysseus says he cannot convince his men to leave with their loot; they are out of control, drinking and feasting.  The Cicones counter-attack and the Ithacans barely get away, with many men lost.

Something is terribly amiss here.  Why does Odysseus, the hero of the Trojan war, the right-hand of Agamemnon, need more spoils?  Hasn’t he been given his fair share from the fall of the rich city of Troy?  His ships should be fully laden.  But his first act is to plunder an innocent city, like a pirate, not a victorious king.  And why are his men out of control?  How has he lost their trust?

Nestor has given us a hint, when he tells Telemachus in Book III about the leave-taking after Troy has fallen.  According to him, at the end the two brothers, Menelaus and Agamemnon, had a bitter falling out, with Agamemnon wanting to stay longer to offer sacrifices to Athena (what sacrifices we are not told; we should remember that Agamemnon sacrificed his own daughter, Iphigenia, when leaving for Troy).  Menelaus and many others sail off, but then Odysseus changes his mind and turns back, “veering over to Agamemnon to shore his fortunes up,” according to Nestor.

Agamemnon has always been a controversial and difficult commander.  Now the Greek coalition has fallen apart in the face of his divisive leadership. In the past Odysseus has helped keep the Greeks united behind Agamemnon to defeat a common enemy, but with the war over Agamemnon no longer deserves his support.  Odysseus, wanting to keep his central place, fails to see this. He leaves angry and ashamed.  How can he and his 600 men go back to Ithaca empty-handed? 

After the Cicones Odysseus is swept away by a great storm, escapes the Lotus Eaters, and then comes to the land of the Cyclops.  Here it is Odysseus, still eager for gain—to know “what gifts he’d give”— who ignores the pleas of his men to leave the giant alone.  More of his men die at the hands of Polyphemus, and when Odysseus boasts and reveals his true name this allows Polyphemus to call on Poseidon to punish him, the cause of his subsequent woes. 

From here on Odysseus regularly recalls his clever escape from Polyphemus’s cave to rally his men and show his ability to get out of every tight spot.  He seems oblivious to how this must sound to them, boasting about a narrow escape made necessary only by his own poor judgment, where his men pay the price. 

Things now go from bad to worse.  On the island of Aeolus he is given the gift of winds, but within sight of Ithaca he falls asleep and his men, distrusting Odysseus and believing the bag of winds holds treasure he won’t share—he has not told them what it really is—open the bag and are again blown far away.  Most of his men are then quickly killed and eaten by the Lastrygonians, a second race of giants.  The one remaining ship limps to the goddess Circe’s island.  Odysseus masters and beds her and stays an entire year, only leaving when his crew tell him “Captain, this is madness!  High time you thought of your own home at last.”

All in all not the actions of a man focused on returning to his wife and son.

On leaving Circe Odysseus is told he must die; that is, he must go to Hades and get advice from the dead.  What this seems to mean is that Odysseus has lost his way and needs to be re-oriented.  In Hades the blind seer Tiresias offers guidance, and then Odysseus catches up on the news and speaks with some of his dead comrades from Troy.  All of them have been grievously damaged by the war:  Agamemnon killed by his angry wife;  Ajax unwilling to forgive Odysseus for winning Achilles’ armor; Achilles preferring to be a slave on earth than ‘reign in Hades.’  Odysseus must think, what did all my efforts and sacrifices gain?  Have I too been doomed by this terrible war?

But he also learns, partly from his own dead mother, that he still has a home.  Penelope and his son Telemachus are alive and loyal to him.  He has been damaged by war, but not destroyed.  He still has some men to bring back.  He can return to the land of the living with the possibility of healing. 

 With more advice from Circe, Odysseus passes by the Sirens and between Scylla and Charybdis—more Ithacans devoured—and to the Island of the Sun.  When Odysseus tries to get his exhausted crew to sail past they mutiny, led by his second-in-command, Eurylochus.   Marooned for a month his starving men disobey his orders not to kill Apollo’s cattle, while Odysseus again falls into inconvenient slumber, a sign that he has failed to exercise effective leadership.  They pay the price: a lightning bolt from Zeus.  Only Odysseus survives.  He lands on Calypso’s island where he is kept by the goddess for seven years, a long dark night of the soul.

The Odysseus now telling his story, on Phaeacia, has washed up on shore with literally nothing, not even clothes.  He has lost all his men.  He has lost all his treasure.  He has lost the chance to bring up his son, and have other children.  His mother has died of a broken heart.  He is fearful and unsure of himself.  He has nothing to show for his twenty years away. 

The Recovery

Can he pull himself together?  In Phaeacia we see him, bit by bit, come back to life. The delightful Princess Nausicaa’s immediate and natural attraction to the castaway begins to restore his confidence; Athena makes him handsome and strong once again.  The bard’s tales of Troy allow him to weep for himself and his former comrades.  He shows some of his old prowess in games held in his honor. 

Since he does this not as the great Odysseus but as someone anonymous, it proves to himself that he retains innate strengths, that when he finally reveals who he is he has already earned their respect.  He will repeat the exercise at greater length when he returns to Ithaca. 

But it is his lengthy tale-telling that perhaps does the most to bring about healing.  It is here that he can exercise what is most true in his character, his ability to speak well, to tell a story, to invent and manipulate.  It is in his story-telling that we see most clearly the many-twistedness, polytropos, the hard to translate quality he is assigned in the Odyssey’s opening lines.  The story shows a man of many turns, alternately far-sighted and blind, cunning and bold, favored and punished by the gods.  Seeking his wife and home, and running away.  Nothing is straight, starting with his track through the sea and its many islands.  And the ever-turning, multi-faceted hero is also the narrator. Or inventer.  We cannot tell. 

The tales show truths about their author, and also have another, immediate task.  Odysseus must make sure the Phaeacians will follow through on their promise to quickly send him on his way, back to Ithaca, with a great load of treasure.  Just before his story-telling, King Alcinous remembers a prophecy, an old tale from his father:   “That Lord Poseidon was vexed with us…One day, as a well-built ship of ours sailed home on the misty sea after such a convoy, the god would crush it, yes, and pile a huge mountain round about our port.”  Odysseus seems to see this as a challenge.  Can he admit to them that he is a special target of Poseidon, and despite the prophecy have them follow through?  Can he navigate this verbal Scylla and Charybdis?  Does he still have the old magic?

Yes!   The stories mesmerize his audience.  After he has finished, King Alcinous heaps more gifts on Odysseus, beyond what the lords of Phaeacia can afford—“a sumptuous tripod, add a cauldron!”—saying he will tax the people to pay for them.  They ignore the prophecy and use their magic ship to sail Odysseus home to Ithaca.   Sure enough, Poseidon imprisons them forever behind a great mountain.  But by then Odysseus is long gone.    

We too, the off-stage listeners and readers, are mesmerized.  It takes an effort to see past the glorious and diverting adventures to the man who is telling the tale.  Even if we do we admire the bard, maybe even overlook his failings out of gratitude for his imagination and the sheer pleasure of, as Odysseus has claimed, “the best that life can offer.”  For Odysseus it is a win-win.

Athena’s Return

After this lengthy prologue—we are now half-way through the Odyssey—Odysseus finally lands in Ithaca.  Here something notable happens:  Athena shows herself again.  She and Odysseus had once been the closest of allies; Nestor tells Telemachus “I’ve never seen the immortals show such affection as Pallas [Athena] openly showed him, standing by your father.”  But Odysseus has not knowingly seen her since leaving Troy.  He is not happy: “You were kind to me in the war years, so long as we men of Achaea soldiered on at Troy.   But once we’d sacked King Priam’s craggy city, boarded ship, and a god dispersed the fleet, from then on, daughter of Zeus, I never saw you.”   He accuses her of mocking him and telling him tales.

Athena’s excuse is that she didn’t want to oppose the powerful Poseidon.  Hardly credible; the Athena of the Iliad never shrank from butting heads with other gods.  But this abandonment and return seems to reflect how Odysseus at Troy used his talents usefully and beneficially, but away from the war these same talents have been his undoing.  Athena stresses that she and Odysseus are much the same:  “We’re both old hands at the arts of intrigue.  Here among mortal men you’re far the best at tactics, spinning yarns, and I am famous among the gods for wisdom, cunning wiles too.”   Her absence coincides with Odysseus’s wanderings and losses; her return signals that he now again has a purpose that will bring out his best.  

This does not mean all will be smooth sailing.  In Ithaca Odysseus will struggle to keep his suspiciousness, his talent for deception and intrigue, and his violent urges under control.  He will probe remorselessly to see who is faithful, especially Penelope, but even, cruelly and purposelessly, his aged father.  Telemachus has to confront him at one point to prevent an endless interrogation of everyone on the island:  “Reconsider, I urge you.  You’ll waste time roaming around our holdings, probing the fieldhands man by man.” 

He carries on a lengthy deception as a beggar in his own house, an act that he seems to enjoy for its own sake:  Odysseus can not only tell a fiction, he can be one.  In one of the most wrenching scenes in the book he will turn away from his beloved dog, who dies on a dunghill.  He will savagely kill all the suitors, even when they offer to repent, and even when he knows it will bring about a civil war.  (Most of the killing is done from a distance, with his great bow, a way of fighting disparaged in the Iliad; Odysseus however is less worried about his reputation than about getting the job done).  But in the end he finds his way back to Penelope, Telemachus, and his people. 

Odysseus and Penelope

When Odysseus and Penelope first speak in Book XIX he is disguised as a beggar and tells one of his many alternate histories, about being Diomedes’ brother from Crete.  But when the two of them are reconciled and spend their first night together in Book XXIII he tells her the same stories he had told on Phaeacia.  This it seems is the version that he wants those closest to him to hear.

Why is he comfortable telling his wife these tales of shifting commitment, not to mention many years bedding down with other women (goddesses, he claims)?  Perhaps because Penelope and he are alike; she too is a deceiver, as we are told, weaving by day and undoing by night to buy time.  She too is eager for gain and will dupe the suitors to get it: “Staunch Odysseus glowed with joy to hear all this—his wife’s trickery luring gifts from her suitors now”.  She too is suspicious and with the test of the bed wants proof that this version of Odysseus still remembers, and can be passionate about, their intimate secrets.

Penelope, like Odysseus, has grown and changed.  While not unfaithful in the way Odysseus admits, she has accepted the need to re-marry and give up the dream of her husband’s return.  She can be trusted to understand him, and to admire his fictions.

In this we can perhaps see that Penelope and Athena are mingled.  They share character traits, share the need to stand firm in a man’s world, and share a clear-eyed love for this flawed but intensely interesting man. The Athena who is by Odysseus’s side at Troy is also Penelope, who wants nothing more than Greek victory so that her husband can come back. The Athena who then leaves Odysseus in the lurch is also Penelope, who has to give up pining for her husband and focus on bringing up Telemachus, until he becomes a man and can take over the household. The Athena who returns is also the Penelope who wants her husband back, but has to uncover who he now is.

For his part, Odysseus the ‘many-turning’ must navigate perhaps the steepest turn of all.  This loner, this most self-contained of men, has to come to terms with the realization that this campaign is not like taking Troy; it’s not all up to him, and he can’t win through sheer cleverness.  Others have a say.  Telemachus has to accept him. The people of Ithaca have to accept him.  Above all Penelope has to accept him.  His temptation is always to succeed by tricking or sweet-talking, but in his own home this will be self-defeating.

Are these new relationships wholehearted, or provisional?  Odysseus is quick to warn Penelope that there is a further test, Tiresias’ obscure prophecy involving a seemingly impossible journey to find men who have never heard of the sea; only then will they have lasting peace.  At the end Odysseus disobeys a direct command from Athena (Penelope?) to stop killing his enemies, although they have thrown down their weapons.  It takes the ultimate intervention, a thunderbolt from Zeus, to make him stop and, perhaps, end the cycle of retribution.

Later poets will find it hard to believe Odysseus is ready for a peaceful life.  Dante places him in the 8th circle of Hell for his many deceptions and lies, and because at the end he sailed into the far West seeking what mortals should not.  Tennyson famously describes an Odysseus unable to stay at home:   

Come, my friends,
‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.

Somehow “and they lived happily ever after” doesn’t quite seem believable.  Odysseus has labored mightily to come to terms with the man he became at Troy, and now he has Penelope’s help. But the changes are deep. Homer is silent on the future. 

Quotes from the Iliad are from the translation by Emily Wilson.  Quotes from the Odyssey are from the translation by Robert Fagles.

The world’s longest land border is the over 5000 miles between the United States and Canada.  It is also the world’s longest unguarded border.

This may be changing.  Last week Canada revealed its military is modeling a US invasion.  The Canadian response would reportedly involve mimicking the Afghan mujahideen and using Canada’s size and harsh terrain to tie down invading forces and inflict unacceptable casualties. 

Americans take for granted the advantages the United States gains from living in a peaceful neighborhood.  But other major powers face potentially hostile countries next door and have to plan accordingly.  Russia borders China in the east—friendly for now, but not in the past—and NATO countries in the West.  China faces Russia, plus bitter enemy Vietnam to the south, nuclear-armed India to its west, and rich and powerful adversaries nearby, including South Korea and Japan. 

Unfriendly neighbors require extensive border infrastructure.  The Russian Border Guard Service, for instance, numbers some 170,000 troops.  In countries with dangerous neighbors, the military must continually plan, train, and equip for possible hostile action from next door.  There are almost always unresolved territorial disputes that can quickly escalate into armed confrontation.

The United States has been protected by two oceans but also by the absence of any threat from Canada or Mexico.  Neither country maintains forces designed to threaten the US, and the US is not postured to carry out operations in either country. 

Until now. Trump’s reckless statements about making Canada the 51st state have alarmed Canadians.  Trump and senior administration officials have made frequent hints about the need to intervene unilaterally in Mexico to fight criminals and terrorists.  The new National Security Strategy asserts an American right to rule the Western Hemisphere.  Tariffs on Canada and Mexico have been threatened, imposed and rescinded for blatantly political ends.  Unilateral action against Venezuela and threats to annex Greenland are further convincing Canadians and Mexicans that the United States could turn on them without warning.    

Americans may be surprised to know that Canada—Canada!— has emerged as perhaps the most outspoken opponent of the Trump administration’s vision for the world.  Two weeks ago at Davos Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney (who is ironically only in power because Trump angered Canadian voters so much they turned against the Conservative Party in last spring’s elections) delivered a widely praised speech that distilled what Canada and many other countries fear, and how they plan to push back.

Carney said what we are experiencing now is not temporary, but a ‘disruption’ in the global order.  The United States is abandoning or weaponizing the multilateral institutions it helped create, and no longer sees itself as acting for the good of anyone other than itself. 

 “…great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited. You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination.

Canadians know that our old, comfortable assumptions that our geography and alliance memberships automatically conferred prosperity and security, that assumption is no longer valid. 

Canada is responding immediately by reducing its dependence on the US and strengthening ties with other economic and strategic partners.

We are fast-tracking $1 trillion of investments in energy, AI, critical minerals, new trade corridors and beyond. We’re doubling our defence spending by the end of this decade, and we’re doing so in ways that build our domestic industries. And we are rapidly diversifying abroad. 

We’ve agreed to a comprehensive strategic partnership with the EU, including joining SAFE, the European defence procurement arrangements. We have signed 12 other trade and security deals on four continents in six months.

In the past few days, we’ve concluded new strategic partnerships with China and Qatar. We’re negotiating free trade pacts with India, ASEAN, Thailand, Philippines and Mercosur.

The long run response is for ‘middle powers’ like Canada to cooperate and work around the United States to shore up the rules-based international system.

Our view is the middle powers must act together because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.

In a world of great power rivalry, the countries in between have a choice: compete with each other for favour, or combine to create a third path with impact. We shouldn’t allow the rise of hard power to blind us to the fact that the power of legitimacy, integrity and rules will remain strong if we choose to wield it together.

The United States has always been willing to occasionally use its domination of international finance and its global military power for its own advantage.  Other countries have chafed but until now considered the benefits outweighed the costs, because the US was seen as committed to a system of mutual benefit.  But under Trump that is no longer the case.  Middle powers like Canada are actively seeking alternatives; over time, American power will drastically decline. The power of rivals such as China will increase.

One clear implication of Carney’s approach will be less defense cooperation. Canada is reportedly reconsidering whether to buy 88 American F-35 fighters, with Swedish Gripen aircraft as the likely alternative. Canada’s new Defense Investment Agency is prioritizing purchases from non-US suppliers, and Sweden is offering Canada a co-production agreement that would create 12600 Canadian jobs.

Many European countries have voiced concerns that military dependence on the US is no longer safe. The American supply chain may be abruptly broken for political reasons. US weapons could be designed with built-in kill mechanisms allowing the US to disable them when it pleases. Canada shares these fears.

Back to that long border. Today it is barely noticeable.  But tomorrow it may bristle with barbed wire, watch-towers, and sophisticated sensors.  Americans will miss the old Canada when it’s gone.  We will have only ourselves to blame.          

The Trump administration’s National Security Strategy dropped on December 4.  The NSS is mandated by the Goldwater-Nichols Act (1986) that requires each administration to produce a public statement of its goals and strategies.

A criticism of these efforts is that they end up being watered-down consensus documents that say little and try to cover every foreign policy base.  However, they can also reveal key assumptions and changes in strategic direction.  They are authoritative expressions of the President and his senior staff; when I was in government I saw them used to justify decisions and win interagency debates.   

According to press reports, the lead author of this NSS was Michael Anton.   Anton was head of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff until September, when he resigned, apparently upset at being passed over for a top job at the NSC.  While there are many fingerprints on this kind of document, Anton’s are the most visible.

Anton is an intellectual who embodies the nationalist and nativist side of the MAGA movement, along with Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, Russell Vought and JD Vance.  He became famous in 2016 for his (initially anonymous) essay “The Flight 93 Election”, where he argued that electing Donald Trump was an existential necessity comparable to the decision by airline passengers on 9/11 to storm the cockpit of the hijacked jet over Pennsylvania.  After Trump was defeated in 2020, he was notorious for entertaining the idea of a ‘red Caesar’, a dictator who would do the necessary work of restoring order to a corrupted society.  His home port is the Claremont Institute, a right-wing thinktank that also harbors John Eastman, the recently pardoned legal architect of Trump’s attempt to overthrow the 2000 election.

The 2025 NSS reflects many of the positions held by Anton and his wing of the MAGA movement.  For them the starting point of all policy, including foreign policy, is that the United States is on the precipice of societal collapse, due to an insidious leftism that seeks to weaken our traditions and values through immigration, DEI, globalization, free trade, environmentalism and the like.   The section of the NSS titled ‘What We Want Overall’ climaxes with a call for “the restoration and reinvigoration of American spiritual and cultural health, without which long-term security is impossible. We want an America that cherishes its past glories and its heroes, and that looks forward to a new golden age.”  Our culture and heritage are under attack from within, and our foreign policy must be structured accordingly. 

To win this fight, Anton and other neo-nationalists argue it is appropriate for nations to nakedly pursue their own interests with little regard for any broader global order or the type of regime in other nations—‘America First.’  Supporting democracy abroad is a mistake; in fact, the word ‘democracy’ hardly appears in the entire NSS.  It astonishingly argues that our founding document, the Declaration of Independence, teaches that every nation’s distinct way of life should be respected; a sharp break with traditional American interpretations that say the rights to ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ are universal and always worthy of support.

The NSS criticizes American interventionism, but with telling exceptions.  One is Europe.  Europe is described as declining and in danger of ‘civilizational erasure,’ due largely to immigration.  Here the NSS echoes the criticism of Europe made by Vice-President Vance at the Munich Security Conference in February, who chastised European leaders for supposedly suppressing populism (see “The Dangerous Strategic Logic of Expanding the MAGAverse”). The NSS calls for the US to help Europe ‘correct its current trajectory’ by supporting ‘patriotic European parties’ and movements.

Behind this approach we can detect the ‘civilizationist’ view, highly influential in Moscow (and Beijing) via the mystic/philosopher Alexander Dugin, that the best of all possible worlds is one where distinct nations with different cultures and values protect and enhance these differences.  Diversity is a weakness.  It is dangerous to mix peoples via immigration, or weaken sovereignty via multinational institutions, or meddle abroad by trying to expand democracy.  Europeans are exhorted to fight the ‘loss of national identities and self-confidence.’

This view of Europe translates into US policy on Ukraine, which centers on a peace settlement and restoring ‘strategic stability’ with Russia.  The NSS claims Europeans ‘want peace’ but are being blocked by European elites who are engaged in ‘subversion of democratic processes’.  The US is therefore defending genuine democracy in Europe by pushing for a peace settlement over the head of Ukraine and against the wishes of Europe’s elected leaders.

While there is little discussion of Russia, it is easy to draw conclusions.  Russia is an example of a nation that, unlike Europe—and the US—is unabashedly nationalistic and proud of its history.   It apologizes for nothing in its pursuit of security and territory.  It spurns immigrants and asks its people to bear more children for the motherland.  (The NSS calls for Americans to have “growing numbers of strong traditional families that raise healthy children.”)  Russia is a model for the West.

While past administrations have put forward win-win strategies that aim for an interdependent global system, the world of the NSS is decidedly zero-sum.  There is no discussion of transnational issues—terrorism, non-proliferation, global warming, pandemics—that might require global cooperation, even with adversaries.  The portrayal of China is entirely as a threat and a competitor.   

In contrast to longstanding US policy, the NSS embraces a world divided into spheres of influence dominated by major powers:  “The outsized influence of larger, richer, and stronger nations is a timeless truth of international relations.”  The NSS makes our domain clear:   “The United States must be preeminent in the Western hemisphere.”  It describes in detail a ‘Trump corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine— the US must dominate our hemisphere militarily and economically, and prevent any other power from making inroads in the region. 

While not explicitly granting China and Russia their own similar spheres, this is the conclusion America’s allies can appropriately draw.  You are on your own. 

The Trump NSS attempts to draw a close to the era of American multilateralism and openness to the world that made the United States the strongest, wealthiest, and most respected nation on earth.  It makes selfishness a virtue and willfully ignores the long-term consequences for global stability, the American economy, and the well-being of the planet.  And it attempts to rewrite our national story by downplaying our Enlightenment origins and our commitments to universal principles and science-based progress, in favor of a worldview embraced by Moscow and Beijing that provides an intellectual justification for a new Caesar.

All this in the name of defending America against a wildly distorted version of modern liberalism.   Rather than ‘America First’ its real slogan should be ‘Un-American.’   

President Trump has frequently blamed Ukraine for getting in a fight with a bigger, more powerful state.  It’s a way to sound realistic in support of his desire to end the war on terms favorable to Russia.  The smart thing to do, for Ukraine, is to take the deal being offered by Moscow, and brokered by the United States.  Before things get even worse.  Because you can’t win.

A few days ago Trump said on Fox and Friends that “Russia is a powerful military nation. You know, whether people like it or not, it’s a powerful nation. It’s a much bigger nation.  It’s not a war that should have been started. You don’t do that. You don’t take on a nation that’s 10 times your size.”

This is a puzzling thing for any American to say, since America owes its existence to a successful war against a much larger and more powerful nation.  In 1775 the population of the thirteen colonies is estimated to have been about 2.5 million, of whom some 460000 were slaves (this number does not include Native Americans).  The population of Great Britain was approximately 8 million, or some four times greater.

In calculating the actual number of soldiers these populations could provide, we have to remember that a considerable number of colonists were loyalists who supported the crown.  Others remained neutral, not actively supporting either side.  Estimates of the loyalist size range from 20-30% of the population.

·      If we assume that 25% were loyalists or stayed neutral, the population supporting the revolution was closer to 1.5 million, while that supporting Great Britain was 8.5 million, or 5.7 times greater.

·      The current population of Ukraine is 38 million, and of Russia 146 million, or 3.8 times greater.

Of course numbers alone are not a measure of military capacity.  Great Britain at this time was vastly superior to the colonies in almost every way: in weapons, in trained manpower, in military experience, and especially in naval power.  During the 18th century Britain had engaged in a series of successful major wars on land and sea, on the European continent as well as in North America, that had greatly strengthened its military capabilities.  In particular, by the time of the Revolution, Britain had the world’s largest and most powerful navy.

Great Britain was also vastly superior economically.  Apart from its American colonies, it controlled extremely valuable plantations in the Caribbean.  It was in the forefront of developing steam technology and exploiting its abundant coal reserves.  It had a developed manufacturing sector and global trade ties, while the Americas were overwhelmingly agrarian.  The British economy is estimated to have been some 10 times as large as that of the 13 colonies.  Britain was able to use its money to augment its regular forces with some 30,000 Hessian mercenaries, who made up 25% of British land forces during the war.

Using the Trumpian calculus, it was therefore foolish of the Americans to fight such a war.  There were plenty of nay-sayers at the time making the same hard-nosed arguments.  The rebels should accept British peace offers, such as those of the so-called Carlisle Commission in 1778. 

The Americans of course did not accept and went on to win.  But they didn’t do it on their own.  They were aided by a great European power, France, which provided money, training, and arms and eventually direct military support.  French assistance greatly complicated British strategy, boosted American morale, and kept the highly-motivated but outgunned Americans in the field long enough to wear down the British.  France at decisive moments, such as the battle of Yorktown in 1881 that effectively ended the war, was able to make up for the Americans lack of naval power. 

Ukraine too can win, provided someone plays the role of France.  The United States today has every reason to fill that role.    

·      France was eager to weaken its rival by separating it from a rich and strategically important colonial possession; the United States should not want Russia to colonize Ukraine and seize control of its mineral wealth, industrial capacity, rich farmland, and strategic position on the Black Sea.

·      France hoped an independent America would become an opponent of Britain and ally and trading partner of France; the United States, and its European allies, would benefit greatly from a strong, free Ukraine that helps check Russian expansionism, with an economy integrated into Europe and the West.

The American Revolution is of course only one of many examples of smaller forces defeating larger ones and changing the course of history.  Maybe we can’t expect Trump to be conversant with the Persian Wars, or the Siege of Malta.  But it isn’t too much to ask that the President of the United States know something about the history of his own country.

Charlie Kirk’s shooting was a tragedy, the full cause and ramifications of which we don’t yet know.  Killing someone in cold blood is unjustifiable.  Killing someone who, like Kirk, was engaging in public debate and discussion, is likely to convince many that talking is a waste of time and more violence is justified.

But that isn’t the tragedy I mean.  What seems tragic to me is the unfortunate direction of Mr Kirk’s brief life.  Charlie Kirk presented himself as someone dedicated to genuine debate, open to all arguments: “Prove me wrong.”  Genuine debate indeed implies the possibility of being proved wrong, of changing your mind about important things. 

But this was not what Kirk actually did.  Instead, he was a debater in the same way as a chess genius who agrees to play all comers, 10 at a time. It’s not impossible to lose, but highly unlikely. There is no real contest. Kirk was a skilled professional dismantling amateurs, mostly young college students. 

If you watch his debates and read analyses of how he conducted them, Kirk’s method was to win by using well-known tactics—false binaries, rapid-fire factual recitation, interruptions, slanted rephrasings, and questionable citations—to keep his interlocutors off-balance.  Further, the recordings of these interactions were carefully edited before being released to the public, to show Kirk in the strongest light and often humiliate those who disagreed with him.  These were not genuine attempts to understand or even to change minds.[1]  [2]They were performances designed to impress gullible bystanders and get people to join his highly partisan organization, Turning Point. [3]

In short, Kirk was a kind of sophist.  Socrates, the greatest critic of sophistry, was himself accused of being a sophist or someone who “makes the weaker argument appear the stronger. A professional sophist is skilled at rhetoric—in itself the neutral talent to be persuasive—and makes their living by winning arguments and teaching others to do the same. 

Whether the arguments are based on truth is beside the point.  According to a 2023 study by the Brookings Institute, Kirk’s regular podcast had one of the highest rates of unsubstantiated or false claims of all popular political podcasts.[4]  Kirk created and ran a growing Turning Point empire that relied on his rhetorical skills and, among other things, made him rich and famous.[5]   

The opposite of sophistry, as exemplified by Socrates, is philosophy.  This is the genuine search for truth.  It uses some of the same tools as sophistry but for a different end, not to win arguments and gain fame or power or money, but to discover what is real, what the difference is between opinion and knowledge. 

Key evidence that one is engaged in philosophy and not sophistry is a serious acknowledgement of ignorance, that one does not know what is true about the most important things.  What are beauty, truth, virtue, courage, piety, nature?   Socrates’s most famous ironic statement was that the only thing he knew, was that he knew nothing—which, however, put him immeasurably ahead of all those who claimed to know, but did not.  An awareness of one’s own ignorance, of the weakness of one’s cherished opinions, is an essential starting point in seeking knowledge and putting one’s beliefs on firmer ground.  Once you become convinced that your have found the truth and no longer need to search for it, you have, for Socrates, abandoned philosophy.

Charlie Kirk does not seem to ever have had any serious doubts about his own opinions.  He came from a conservative family and remained a conservative his entire life.  His core convictions were apparently formed in middle school, in part by reading Milton Friedman, and changed over time only in the direction of greater conservatism.[6] In his interview with Gavin Newsom in 2025 he said that early in his career he was a bit more libertarian, but that seems to be the extent of his flexibility.[7] Mr Kirk’s major ideological shift was in the direction of Christian nationalism and abandoning support for the separation of church and state.[8]

Mr Kirk didn’t go to college, something about which he boasted, claiming it made him more like the majority of Americans.[9]  I would never say college is necessary for genuine learning—bad teaching often ruins minds. But it is also the path for a precocious youngster like Kirk to be exposed to different ideas, to have their preconceptions challenged in an environment where changing your mind doesn’t destroy your career.

Mr Kirk started Turning Point when he was 18, so instead of college he committed to creating a ‘start-up’, as he describes it, a start-up that rested 100% on his sophistry and on never deviating from a given set of positions.  Kirk tells us that after speaking at a college conservative meeting, he was approached by Bill Montgomery, a wealthy right-wing businessman who told him how impressed he was, advised him to skip college, and offered to fund his new enterprise. They became co-founders of Turning Point USA.[10]  Montgomery and Kirk’s other rich donors and supporters expected Kirk to vigorously defend his established views, not adopt new ones.             

Plato in his dialogues shows Socrates interacting with many young men like Charlie Kirk.  Men with great promise but also great ambition.  They are attracted to the sophists, who promise success and fame.  Socrates tries, with limited success, to turn them in a different direction, towards the kind of reflection that would deepen their understanding of themselves and the communities they live in.  This reflection might, in time, make one able to engage in a different kind of politics, a politics informed by prudence and the realization that no one person has a monopoly on truth and virtue.  This was Aristotle’s defense of democracy, that it was able to incorporate the views of many people.       

The Greek sophists ultimately taught a kind of relativism.  Skillful rhetoric could change people’s opinions, in any direction.  What determines the direction is outside the realm of reason; it is whatever the skilled sophist, or his employer, wants. Charlie Kirk, of course, presented himself as a true believer—in right and wrong, in Christianity, in traditional values, in Donald Trump—and scourge of relativism.  But this is part of the sophist’s playbook, since most of us are attracted to people who seem certain of their beliefs, and are confused when someone is less confident.  Did he genuinely believe what he said, or was it a sham?  Kirk was known for taking extreme positions, such as calling for President Biden to be executed, or claiming black people were mentally inferior—were these genuine beliefs, or an easy way to get attention? The sophist is caught in a tangled web.

Everyone agrees that the youthful Charlie Kirk was someone of exceptional intelligence and poise, with great powers of persuasion.  I think his tragedy is that when he was very young, instead of a Socrates, he met people who told him how great he was and offered him money. It would be hard for any 18 year old to resist such flattery, and Kirk’s certainty about his beliefs made him especially susceptible. This path corrupted a promising soul.     

[1] https://www.salon.com/2025/09/17/how-debate-me-bro-culture-ruined-civil-discourse/

[2] https://newuniversity.org/2025/04/14/the-charlie-kirk-and-ben-shapiro-debate-trap/

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/09/27/us/politics/charlie-kirk-debate.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

[4] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/audible-reckoning-how-top-political-podcasters-spread-unsubstantiated-and-false-claims/

[5] https://www.propublica.org/article/at-this-trump-favored-charity-financial-reporting-is-questionable-and-insiders-are-cashing-in

[6] https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-met-charlie-kirk-turning-point-campus-conservatives-profile-20181019-story.html

[7] https://thecharliekirkshow.com/podcasts/the-charlie-kirk-show/my-full-conversation-with-gavin-newsom-annotated

[8] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/charlie-kirk-turning-point-donald-trump-christian-nationalism-rcna156565

[9] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdxqnkwerj7o

[10] https://www.msn.com/en-us/society-culture-and-history/pop-culture/who-are-charlie-kirk-s-parents-and-who-was-his-mentor-bill-montgomery/ar-AA1Mn3po

“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.)