Last year, writing about the artificial shortage of spots at elite colleges, which have not really grown since 1970, I made this observation:

The year 1970 keeps popping up in this kind of context. For all the clamor of that era’s counterculture about “change” and “revolution,” there are an awful lot of things that began to stagnate at about 1970. It is America’s Year of Stasis: the year our per capita energy usage peaked, the year many towns erected zoning barriers against growth, and apparently the year elite colleges decided they had grown as much as they ever needed to and would stay that way forever.

What we need to confront is the wider cultural malaise of a country that in significant ways gave up on growth as a goal—for universities, for towns, for energy, for everything—50 years ago.

I have a new piece up at Discourse this morning on “The Year of Stasis,” which expands on that observation.

Incidentally, after writing this, I came upon a website titled simply, “WTF Happened in 1971,” which consists of graph after graph showing this phenomenon from many different angles. It seems to be a grab bag of complaints about everything going wrong starting in 1971, but there is an underlying trend to it: a slowdown of growth and economic progress.

One of the things we need to realize is how deliberate this all is. We didn’t stumble onto stasis, we pursued it. In examining the Henry Adams Curve—a leveling off of energy consumption per capita starting in 1970—I came across a great illustration of this in the strangling of nuclear power.

The first nuclear power plant in the U.S. went online in 1957, and by 1973, there were nearly 200 nuclear plants across the country at various stages of permitting, construction, and operation. Then it all came to a grinding halt: In 1970, Congress passed the National Environmental Policy Act, which imposed extensive new permitting requirements on any large project, and the 1971 Calvert Cliffs case applied this law to require stricter licensing of nuclear power.

The judges’ ruling declares their dedication to upholding “the commitment of the government to control, at long last, the destructive engine of material ‘progress.’” Well, mission accomplished.

Complaints about nuclear energy are familiar. The one that was new to me is this: “I was astonished to discover recently that New York City’s subway system has not been extended since 1940—that’s 85 years of stagnation.”

Some of this is associated with the left, but I point out how thoroughly it is infused in today’s right.

[P]erhaps the purest expression of this viewpoint is Donald Trump courting the longshoremen’s union. The president of the International Longshoremen’s Association has been threatening a nationwide dockworkers’ strike to prevent ports from automating the unloading of shipping containers. According to a New York Times report:

Writing on Truth Social, Mr. Trump said that he had met with ILA leaders and was sympathetic to their concerns. “I’ve studied automation, and know just about everything there is to know about it,” he wrote. “The amount of money saved is nowhere near the distress, hurt, and harm it causes for American Workers, in this case, our Longshoremen.”

But the “traditional” method of shipping that Trump is trying to protect is not all that old. It dates to—you guessed it—about 1970. The modern intermodal shipping container was invented in 1956 and standardized by the International Organization for Standardization in 1968. And the unions fought it every step of the way because it deprived longshoremen of the extra work of moving and arranging non-standardized boxes and barrels.

Though after watching Elon Musk last night, I think there are some conservatives who want us to go back to 1933.

We need to remember that stasis is not, in fact, sustainable. It is usually a prelude to collapse.

Read the whole thing.

Discourse

The Year of Stasis

We live in a deeply conservative and anti-progressive era—but it’s a curious kind of conservatism. It is shared almost equally by self-proclaimed conservatives and self-proclaimed progressives. Everyone seems to be fixated on preserving the past in some way, setting up an idealized version of the way things used to be an…

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a day ago · Robert Tracinski

“From ‘Throw Your Body on the Gears’ to ‘Build the Future’”

After I wrote that piece but before it was published, I came across an even more perfect example of the mania for stasis.

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As Donald Trump is sworn in as president for a second time, the peculiar anxiety of our current moment is that we know very little about what is going to happen next.

I can see I’m not the only person to think this. I just got in my e-mail a newsletter from Matt Yglesias stating that “No One Knows What Trump Is Going to Do.” He gives a lot of complicated reasons, but the basic situation is simple. The whole American political system has been re-organized as the vehicle for the personal whims of a single man, and at this point, there are no apparent institutional, political, or cultural counterbalances to those whims.

We don’t know what will happen because it is all going to happen in the mind of a man with no convictions, values, or loyalties. It is inherently unpredictable. So we have to contemplate all possibilities, with no real way of assessing the likelihood of any outcome.

We need to ask ourselves what 77 million voters failed to ask themselves last November: What could possibly go wrong?

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The Man-in-the-Middle Presidency

First, though, a final note about outgoing president, Joe Biden.

The selling point for Biden is that he was “The Man in the Middle,” a cautious politician trying to straddle the fence between opposing sides. It gave him a certain predictability and the assurance that his administration would be guided by normal politics, only more so.

But it was also the key to the failures of his administration: His normal mode was to do everything in half-measures and delays. His support for Ukraine dribbled out slowly and reluctantly, with a lot of self-deterrence in an unnecessary fear of Russian escalation, never giving them what they needed to get the upper hand. This is why the Ukrainians look back on his administration with understandable bitterness. His Attorney General was so slow at authorizing an investigation into Trump’s role in the January 6 insurrection that the whole case got bogged down in delays and eventually was canceled after Trump’s re-election—despite special counsel Jack Smith’s confidence that he had sufficient evidence for a conviction. The Biden administration’s slow pace gave them the worst of both worlds: Trump got to endlessly complain about his martyrdom, while still getting off scot-free.

The most recent symbol of this is the TikTok ban, which was delayed until literally the last day of Biden’s administration, so that Trump could swoop in and lift the ban (on his own conditions; see more on that below) and pose as the savior of millions of young internet addicts.

If you set out to take Vienna, take Vienna. If you set out to ban TikTok, ban TikTok.

Finally, Biden initially promised he would not run for re-election and that he would just be a transition to the next generation of leadership. And he eventually did not run again—but only after waiting too long and giving his vice-president too little time to turn his failing campaign around.

In this, as in everything, he was the Man in the Middle, taking half-measures instead of making bold decisions, and that is what doomed his presidency to failure on what Biden himself regarded as the most important issue: safeguarding democracy against the threat from Donald Trump.

Losing Our Shirts for Principles

Now to return to the nature of that threat.

I described 2024 as the year the guardrails fell. We saw that with the courts and with the voters. Since the election, and particularly in the weeks leading up to the inauguration, we have seen it with everything else.

We saw this just before the election when two billionaire sponsors of big newspapers—Jeff Bezos for the Washington Post and Patrick Soon-Shiong for the LA Times—spiked their own papers’ endorsements of Harris rather than risk Trump’s anger if he won. The result at the Washington Post has been a mass exodus of reporters and commentators. Since then, it has become clear that none of the big media companies will stick their necks out.

In December, ABC paid $15 million to settle a bogus defamation suit filed by Trump, and now there are reports that Paramount, the owner of CBS, is planning to settle an even more bogus Trump suit: Trump has sued them because he didn’t like the way they edited an interview—an absolutely open-and-shut case that should have been laughed out of court in its first five minutes. Paramount would almost certainly prevail, so why pay millions more to Trump while selling out their news division?

Here's why:

CBS parent Paramount Global has a very big bit of business pending—selling itself to Skydance, a deal that requires the transfer of broadcast licenses from one to the other. The transfers must be approved by the Federal Communications Commission. Brendan Carr, Trump’s pick for Commissioner, has said publicly the FCC will give the proposed merger a closer look, indicating that editorial fairness would be considered.

Meanwhile, a conservative group called the Center for American Rights filed a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission objecting to the transfers for, among other things, CBS “track record of ideological bias and news manipulation.”…

Trump himself has called for the broadcast licenses to be revoked, something departing FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel condemned in final remarks as she dismissed a series of complaints. “The action we take makes clear two things. First, the FCC should not be the president’s speech police. Second, the FCC should not be journalism’s censor-in-chief,” she said.

Actually, what these cases make clear is that FCC licensing should not exist. It is an instrument for the abuse of power that has been waiting for the president to come along who would have no compunction about abusing it.

The same thing is more widely true about all of the power government has over the economy. This has always provided a vast potential for abuse, but never before—with the possible exception of FDR—have we had a president willing to explore that potential quite so shamelessly.

This explains a paradox that has been bothering some people. It seems that someone like Jeff Bezos has so much money he can afford to take on big fights and stand up to a bully like Trump. But it depends on how you look at it. Sometimes having more money just means having more to lose and can make you more afraid. (In intellectual movements, I’ve seen the same thing with status instead of money. The person seemingly in the most high-status position is often the most timid and conformist, because that’s how he got into that position.) In this case, just as Paramount wants a merger and Trump can hold this over their heads, Jeff Bezos finally built his own reusable rockets and doesn’t want to get shut out of government contracts by his business rival, Trump’s “First Buddy” Elon Musk.

This is why I never expected the billionaires to stick their necks out, and it’s why I expected well ahead of time that the big mainstream media outlets would all fold. If you want to know why, re-read the boardroom scene in The Fountainhead. “Are we losing our shirts for principles or something?” That scene. Part 4, Chapter XVI—go re-read it, because you’re living through it.

Oh, and I promised to return to the Tik-Tok ban. Remember that TikTok was banned because it is Chinese-government-controlled media, used to engage in propaganda in the US. But now Trump, who makes such a big show of wanting to oppose China, says he will lift the ban. Here’s one reason:

TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew is among the tech executives cozying up to Trump as he retakes the White House. Chew plans to attend Trump’s “victory rally” in Washington on Sunday, The Post previously reported, and has been invited to sit on the dais on Monday as Trump is sworn into office, alongside tech leaders such as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, founder and executive chair of Amazon.

Incidentally, this gives the lie to Trump’s populist claptrap about the people versus “the elites.” Because the weather is cold today—though no colder than Obama’s inauguration in 2009—Trump moved the inauguration indoors. That means his billionaire cronies get to attend—but ordinary supporters were left literally out in the cold. There’s some pretty clear symbolism there about who really counts and who doesn’t.

Here’s the other reason Trump is reversing himself on Tik-Tok.

Trump said he would “extend the period of time before the law’s prohibitions take effect, so that we can make a deal to protect our national security.”

“I would like the United States to have a 50% ownership position in a joint venture. By doing this, we save TikTok, keep it in good hands and allow it to say up,” he wrote on Truth Social.

It’s not entirely clear what 50% ownership for “the United States” means, but it sounds like he wants Tik-Tok to become state-owned media.

If you’re keeping track, here’s where we’re at.

The big television companies and newspapers are kowtowing to Trump. (The New York Times went so far as to give a big interview to ridiculous court intellectual Curtis Yarvin. More on that some other time.)

The big social media companies are owned by Trump cronies like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, who has recently made his own MAGA transmogrification, accompanied by a whole new MMA-inspired public image as a kind of cut-rate, Kirkland brand Elon Musk.

And if you want to sell books, instead, Amazon is in the hands of another Trump favor-seeker.

If you are in the ideas business, as I am, you are now looking at a bigger and more impenetrable MAGA dominion over the media business than the left ever had in the heyday of the “mainstream media.”

And let me be very clear about something. This is not my projection of what might happen. It’s not a worst-case scenario for four years from now. It’s something that has already happened between the election and the inauguration.

And if you’re saying: Oh, well, you can still go out and start up a Substack—remember that Marc Andreessen is a major investor in Substack, and he is another one of these Silicon Valley lemmings who has gone MAGA. Yes, there are other alternatives to Substack, and you can bet that I am ready for them. But what guys like Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban learned long ago is that you can go ahead and let the small publications write their articles for an audience of intellectuals. The populist authoritarians are far more concerned with controlling the mass media—what people see in the big newspapers and on television and now on social media, which is where the overwhelming majority of people get their news.

Faced with the threat of government retaliation from a president unconstrained by political principles, the big guys aren’t going to lose their shirts for principles—so that privilege will devolve onto us little guys.

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The Concentration of Powers

Here’s another thing that is not a projection of the future, but a reality already accomplished before the inauguration. Donald Trump now faces no real opposition from or oversight by Congress.

I had held out hope a few months ago, particularly when Matt Gaetz withdrew his nomination for Attorney General, that Trump’s worst appointees would not make it through Senate confirmation. But it is clear by now that Senate Republicans intend to confirm the comically unqualified drunkard Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense, and there is little chance they will show any resistance to the rest of Trump’s anti-cabinet.

But it gets worse. Not only is Congress failing to offer resistance to Trump’s appointments, they are allowing him to dictate congressional appointments.

Speaker Mike Johnson on Wednesday removed Representative Michael R. Turner of Ohio from the helm of the House Intelligence Committee, in a shake-up that signaled he intends to align the pivotal national security panel more closely with President-elect Donald J. Trump.

Mr. Turner, who emerged from a meeting with the speaker on Wednesday afternoon looking furious, has told people that Mr. Johnson informed him his ouster was the result of a request from Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, according to a person familiar with those conversations.

Turner was removed partly because he has criticized Trump in the past, but also because of this: “He has also been a leading proponent of supporting Ukraine in its fight against Russia, breaking with the ‘America First’ stance of the president-elect and many others in his party.”

We cannot rely on the separation of powers. Nor can we rely on the Democratic Party, but I’m hoping you already knew that. RFK, Jr., is expected to get the votes of several Democratic senators, including Bernie Sanders. Same for Tulsi Gabbard. Eight Democratic senators voted to advance the Laken Riley Act, which enables a more draconian immigration police state, giving the government the power to detain illegal immigrants indefinitely for charges as small as a shoplifting. The labor unions are making nice with Trump because they favor restrictions on immigration and free trade.

My sense is that many Democrats are so shaken by the prospect of losing the blue-collar vote—being the voice of the “proletariat” is so central to their identity—that they will adopt a bunch of key MAGA policies just to appease “the working man.” And it’s worth remembering how many of the worst elements of Trump’s agenda were borrowed from the old platform of the Democrats to begin with.

The upshot is that at this point, we have to assume the only guardrails and counterbalances to Donald Trump’s power are the ones in Trump’s own brain—and we know they’re not there.

That is what I find uniquely disturbing about this moment. It is what has been literally keeping me up at night—which is not normal. After thirty years of writing about politics, I am able to take the long view, and not much still gets to me. But I’ve never seen an environment in which there are no limits, no guardrails, no checks on the insanity. Everything is up to Donald Trump’s whims, and anything can happen.

The Emperor of Greenland

I won’t try now to make predictions, because my point is that this is what we can’t do. But that in itself is kind of terrifying, the prospect of a president unbound by the pressures from his party, the opposition, the press, the other branches of government—even from the public.

There has been some discussion about whether or not Donald Trump has an electoral “mandate.” Certainly, if you just look at the vote totals, 49.9% of the vote is not a mandate. But people are increasingly acting as if he does have a mandate, and that’s why I think the old approach is wrong. Just under 50% of the vote doesn’t seem like a mandate—unless a candidate gets that after doing and saying things what would previously have been completely unacceptable, things that would previously have limited him to less than 5% of the vote.

So it’s not about having a majority. It’s about the sense that he has broken through all the old norms and standards and brought us into a new era in which we don’t know what, if anything, is still unacceptable.

For crying out loud, Elon Musk just did a straight-up sieg heil salute at a Trump rally. (See the image at the top of this newsletter, but definitely follow that link.) Ten years ago, maybe even five, he could never have shown his face in public again after that. Today, I can guarantee you that he will face no immediate consequences, and I would even bet some Trump supporters start doing Nazi salutes ironically to show their defiance of “the elites.” (And then, if history is any guide, they will start doing it unironically.)

In the day after the election, I embraced the possibility of a more optimistic scenario. Maybe the wheels will start to come off, Trump will face opposition from Congress and the courts, his policies will turn out to be unpopular, he will do a lot less than he threatened. And maybe some of that will still be true. But the lack of effective opposition to Trump so far requires us to ask what happens if he can actually do whatever he wants.

It is time to ask ourselves what is the worst that could happen.

The symbol of this, in my mind, is Greenland. All of Trump’s talk about annexing Canada, taking back the Panama Canal, and taking over Greenland might seem like typical bluster, like distractions from the real issues. But an update from Claire Berlinski woke me up on this. She links to an article from Robert Kagan arguing that the collapse of Ukraine would be a debacle far worse than the US withdrawal from Afghanistan and warning Trump not to let it happen. But Claire—correctly, I think—views this as naïve.

Whereas Kagan hopes Trump will be loath to superintend over a strategic and moral catastrophe that would make him a loser forever in the eyes of a profoundly diminished America, Trump has already priced that in and figured out how he’ll avoid that. He reckons that acquiring Panama and Greenland—and for God’s sake, Canada—will distract Americans from their loss.

In this interpretation, Trump shares Putin’s vision of a world carved up into imperial zones of interest, with the United States becoming Greater America—through purchase or conquest, or perhaps nuclear blackmail—to compensate for the loss of its global power. He has either agreed to this with Putin explicitly, or he is counting on Putin to understand the implicit quid pro quo. His base, he reckons, will be so thrilled to be Greenland’s new imperial overlords that they’ll forget all about the destruction of Ukraine.

This explains Trump’s whole approach. It explains why he’s appeasing our enemies and antagonizing our allies. It’s because he does not view them as allies but as vassals to be exploited as part of his empire. It’s a brutal, primitive, Medieval view of the world.

I would add that by targeting Greenland, a Danish territory, Trump is literally trying to carve off a part of Europe. Europe is used to not having to be a great power, because it has the protection of a great power, the US. But under Trump, they have to realize that America is now one of the great powers looking to carve off chunks of Europe for itself.

Or as I would tell the Europeans, Europe needs to either become one of the great powers or get carved up by them. They certainly have the ability to do so, but it’s doubtful they can summon the will.

My friend Jack Wakeland thinks I’m overanalyzing Trump with all that stuff about a “medieval” mindset: “This is idiocracy, not imperialism.” But he really sums up the vast diminishment of American power and the loser mentality behind this.

The United States already exercises a loosely united and coordinated foreign policy for THE ENTIRE FREE WORD. Trump proposes to withdraw to Greenland and Panama.

When our friends and allies speak of the rules-based international order, they are speaking of the AMERICAN order.

He’s the head of a gigantic organization that includes half of the land and sea area of the globe, and he thinks his job is to get title to a ditch in the jungle and a frozen wasteland. And he’ll do that by severing all the ties that other American leaders painstaking built over the past 75 years of undivided efforts—all of the ties on which this world-wide leadership was built.

Trump is forfeiting his position of Leader of the Free World to become Emperor of Greenland.

If we ask what can possibly go wrong, this is what can go wrong: the destruction of decades of world order and two and a half centuries of the American system.

It may not all happen, but it’s definitely possible. Some of it is already under way, and there is no way of predicting how far it can go.

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Jimmy Carter passed away recently at the age of 100. His presidency is a byword for failure, and I’m not much of a fan of his post-presidency, either, which included a lot of charitable good works but also some weird free-lance foreign policy meddling. But since we’re not supposed to speak ill of the dead—at least not until after a slight delay—I did manage to find a case for one good thing Carter did as president.

After Carter defeated Republican Gerald Ford in the 1976 presidential election, his incoming administration asked to read the secret records of Nixon, Kissinger, and Ford’s negotiations with Mao and Zhou Enlai. Perhaps conscious of what they’d given away in early, excited visits to China, Nixon and Kissinger obfuscated. They only provided the records when Carter’s government threatened to sue. Carter was shocked by what he read. “We should not kiss-ass them the way Nixon and Kissinger did”, he concluded….

In the first summer of his term, Carter sent his Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, to China. In part because Carter knew he’d soon have to shepherd the Panama Canal treaties through Congress, the president told Vance to put forward the maximum position on Taiwan suggested by Kissinger at the height of the Watergate crisis in 1974, asking Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping to agree to continued US governmental ties to Taiwan after diplomatic normalization, perhaps similar to the semi-official ties that the US had with the People’s Republic at the time. Carter added a further request: to allow the United States to continue to sell arms to Taiwan after recognition.

On the face of it, Vance’s suggestion was flatly turned down by Beijing. Today, when Vance’s trip is recalled at all, it is remembered as a failure. But, back in Washington, Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski had noted what he called a “loud silence”: Deng had said nothing about arms sales. This was the first suggestion that Carter might be able to square the circle of establishing diplomatic relations with China and preserving a meaningful say over the future of Taiwan.

Carter pushed through and eventually got what he wanted. The continued existence of an independent Taiwan supported by US military power is partly his legacy. So, to some extent, is Taiwan’s example of a Chinese democracy.

Chiang Kai-shek’s son, Chiang Ching-kuo, realized that the only hope for his regime after de-recognition was to win broad American support all over again, including for the nature of the Taiwanese government. Chiang went from Taiwan’s most feared policeman to the president who oversaw—however begrudgingly—the island’s democratization.

This, at least, is the case made in this article.

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By the way, that link also references a wave of ignorant Zoomers becoming angry at an upcoming ban of TikTok, the Chinese-controlled, video-based social media platform. The case against TikTok, made here by Jonathan Last, is that it is basically a Chinese intelligence operation controlled by Xi Jinping, which steals US viewers’ data and uses its opaque algorithms to boost messages the Chinese government wants to broadcast to the under-30 set in the US. I certainly don’t see this as an issue of freedom of speech, any more than the shutdown of RT America. Foreign dictatorships and their propaganda operations do not have free-speech rights.

But the story is that a bunch of angry kids from TikTok have been departing for RedNote, a literal Chinese social media site, as a free-speech protest. But then they’ve been discovering that RedNote is—surprise, surprise—heavily censored by the Chinese government, which has been scrambling to suppress discussion of banned subjects like Tiananmen Square and homosexuality and to prevent its Chinese users from seeing posts from its new American users. Oh, and TikTok has always been banned by, you guessed it, China itself.

I guess this is a lesson our miseducated next generation is going to have to learn all over again.

The Ultimate Resource

Before they moved on to global warming, environmentalists used to claim we were going to run out of resources. So I perked up when I saw a post from Ed Conway, author of an interesting-looking book called Material World, on how there are no “lost” minerals.

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Donald Trump will be sworn in for his second term next week, a prospect that carries a lot of uncertainties, none of them good. I’ll be writing about that soon.

But today and tomorrow, to clear the decks, I want to comment on a few recent news items and some links I’ve gathered over the past few months and haven’t had the opportunity to use, but which are too darned interesting to pass by.

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Sic Semper Tyrannis, Baby

First, a follow-up on the attempted coup in South Korea. President Yoon has been impeached, and it looks like Korea’s Constitutional Court, which has the power to affirm or deny the impeachment, will rule next month. They are expected to affirm Yoon’s removal, but “if the deeply unpopular leader is allowed to return to office, it could set a precedent for future leaders to use martial law as a political tool, said Ha Sang-eung, a professor of political science at Sogang University in Seoul.” Yes, and not just in South Korea. (But in the US, because we are led by idiots, they will call it “marshall law.”) In the meantime, after an awkward standoff between police and the presidential guard, Yoon has finally been arrested.

But that’s not what’s really interesting here. What is interesting is the symbolism used by Yoon’s supporters and by the opposition—both of which are borrowed from America.

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Be ready for what the next year is going to throw at us.

What If Trump Succeeds by Failing?

Speaking of the next year, I was asked once again by Discourse to provide my prediction for next year, so I reiterated my comments about the most annoying way this all ends:

But what if it all just doesn’t happen? What if [Trump] files lawsuits [against his critics] that get thrown out and then drops the whole thing? What if he stages a few deportations for show, but under pressure from businesses that rely on immigrant labor, he lets most of them stay?

Remember the border wall in his first term: He did just enough to create a few photo ops and claim victory, but then quietly abandoned the project.

In reading the rest of this roundup from Discourse’s other writers, I was struck by how conservative the publication has become—but also how much self-delusion is required for the more old-fashioned, pro-free-market type of conservative to find a bright side in Trump’s return to office. More than one of these contributions, for example, predicts that the US economy will improve in the next year because Trump will pursue an agenda of deregulation—but they don’t even mention Trump’s central campaign promises, which are highly regulatory: tariffs and mass deportations. Both of those are likely to be very bad for the economy, and everybody knows this. So it’s striking to see them all just ignore it.

They have also very credulously bought into Elon Musk’s reputation. If you’ve followed Musk for long before this, you know that he has a tendency to make broad and highly confident predictions—about full self-driving, about landing people on Mars, about Hyperloop—that never come to fruition. Yet his reputation in the media somehow continues undiminished. Similarly, Musk’s confident predictions about his so-called Department of Government Efficiency are likely to be undercut by constitutional limitations and by his own general ignorance of how government functions.

But notice why Musk’s reputation survives repeated failures of his big promises. It’s partly because his companies do deliver on some things, such as reusable rockets. But it’s also because people don’t really care whether Musk actually puts a million people on Mars. They want him to perform a role: the inspiring “visionary genius” with big plans. So it doesn’t matter all that much whether the plans are realistic. In fact, the less realistic, the more audacious—and hence the better they serve their purely literary function.

Similarly, it’s possible that a lot of Trump’s agenda will dissipate in practice. And the thing I add in these comments is that maybe his supporters won’t care.

Perhaps this is what his voters really want: They want to cheer on Trump as he makes the “elites” angry—but they’re not all that concerned with whether he achieves actual results.

Like Musk, Trump is here to perform a role: the outrageous “outsider” who makes “the establishment” angry and afraid. So long as he performs that role, they will be satisfied. And if I’m right, they will be even more satisfied if he fails at his core agenda, because then Trump won’t have to take responsibility for its disastrous effects.

In effect, Trump can succeed in his second term by failing.

Mine is a relatively optimistic take on this, in which Trump doesn’t get to do any of the good things he may want to do (for example, the deregulation or the budget-cutting) but also doesn’t get to do the bad things. At the New York Times, Frank Bruni raises a darker possibility: Trump implements destructive policies which have destructive effects—but people don’t care, because everyone is so stuck in subjective media bubbles that the reality of a tariff-driven recession is drowned in a sea of partisan propaganda.

I don’t think that’s likely. I think the most likely non-optimistic scenario is this: Trump balks at imposing mass deportations and across-the-board tariffs, but instead uses these policies as instruments of political corruption. CEOs who make the pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago, donate to his inauguration committee, and suppress criticism of him in the newspapers they own will get relief from tariffs and deportations for their businesses or industries. (Elon Musk, for example, may be winning Trump over on H-1B visas for the tech industry.) People who lose the scramble for influence get hit by those policies. The same is likely to happen with deregulation and budget cuts. What stays and goes will depend a lot on who has influence at court.

The Thinking Man’s Majority

I think we are currently one-third of the way through a major political re-alignment. I say one-third, because one major political party has fundamentally rebuilt itself. But the other major political party has not realigned in response. Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris all ran very traditional Democratic Party campaigns: largely center-left in policy substance, cautiously and quietly “progressive” on culture war issues, and with a few big promises sprinkled in to try to keep the party’s petulant far left in the coalition. They depended on popular discontent with Trump—for a variety of legitimate reasons—to carry them over the top. This worked in 2020 and in mid-term elections, but it has now failed twice when it really counted.

We have yet to see what the Democrats will do in response, but I have another new piece in Discourse offering one piece of advice: Democrats should embrace becoming the party of college-educated voters.

Since the election, there has been a certain amount of panic among Democrats over the fact that their party seems to be losing the blue-collar vote and becoming the party of college-educated voters. USA Today observes, “Two-thirds of white men without a college degree supported [Donald] Trump this election, according to exit polling data from The Washington Post. So did 60% of white women who didn't go to college.” On the other hand, according to CNN exit polls, “[Kamala] Harris won white women with a college degree by about 15 points—an improvement over both [Joe] Biden and [Hillary] Clinton.” Trump won the votes of college-educated white men, but only by a 2% margin, much lower than in the past two presidential elections.

Why is this a reason for panic? There’s an old story about Adlai Stevenson, the Princeton egghead who ran for president in 1952 and lost to Dwight D. Eisenhower. After a particularly eloquent speech, a supporter approached Stevenson to assure him he had the vote of “every thinking person.” “That won’t do,” Stevenson supposedly replied. “We need a majority.”…

Yet…America absolutely needs a political party that is informed by the outlook and priorities of the college-educated—and less-educated voters will eventually feel the consequences of telling all the educated “elites” to go to hell.

My main example is vaccines—and the disastrous consequences that will follow as we reject them. I go on to talk about the advantages college educated voters bring to these issues.

Obviously, not all non-college-educated voters are this misinformed—nor does going to college automatically protect someone from making foolish choices or believing flim-flam. But there’s an obvious reason college-educated voters will be more likely to get their information from “high-quality news media” rather than the online or cable TV rumor mill. A college education provides four years of training (or more) in how to do research, how to evaluate sources, how to weigh different claims of knowledge. If you’ve ever had to put footnotes in a class paper, you know that “I watched a random influencer on YouTube” or “I listened to Joe Rogan’s podcast” are not adequate citations. My editors here won’t even let me link to Wikipedia.

A college education also provides graduates with a base of technical knowledge that makes it easier to evaluate claims. Perhaps more crucially, it gives them a familiarity with the kinds of institutions that produce knowledge. If you’ve spent a few semesters doing lab work for your professors, you will be less inclined to believe modern medicine is all some kind of conspiracy cooked up by Big Pharma.

By contrast, if you don’t know how any of these systems work, you will go with what you do know—so it’s no coincidence that Trump is trying to give us an “As Seen on TV” administration. “Vote for the guy you saw on TV all those years, so he can appoint other people you’ve seen on TV.”

College-educated voters have their problems, including a greater likelihood of absorbing the latest crazy fad from academia. But as we’ve seen recently, populism has its own crazy fads. The system I advocate is one in which a party does not give up on popular appeal but does at least attempt to show that they know what they’re talking about.

Under the old standard, candidates in both parties would use populist rhetoric on the campaign trail and make broad appeals to the common man—but then they would dutifully journey to Washington, DC, to give serious speeches at think tanks to demonstrate (with a greater or lesser degree of success) that they could talk intelligently about the big policy issues. Those are the rules the Democratic Party should stick to. A politician has to gain some credibility with blue-collar voters, while still being able to pass a job interview with college-educated voters.

The realignment of the Democratic Party will be the second third of our current political realignment. The final third will be the two parties competing on these new grounds until they reach some kind of equilibrium.

I’ve been arguing for a new “liberal” coalition that can attract the liberal elements from each side, who will find common cause against both the illiberal left and the illiberal right. I admit that after last year’s election, this is less likely—and I fear we will end up with a new political alignment in which we are instead given a choice between two illiberal populist factions.

A lot of that is going to be decided starting now.

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This is the last of my highlights from my best work in 2024, before I reluctantly turn my attention to the incoming Congress and administration.

This one will be very relevant to the goals of the new conservative faction that is dominant in Washington: a dissection of the fake traditionalism of the illiberal conservatives.

But first a note about how this newsletter keeps going. Look, I’m going to be blunt. The current era has not entirely been a land of opportunity for advocates of a free society. It’s easier than ever to get published and reach an audience—but harder than ever to keep doing it without going broke. Things are even harder for those of us who want to ensure the accuracy of information in an era of relentless online propaganda and bogus AI search results.

See another journalist’s warning about the new “postliterate media economy” that is making us into “a kind of folk-story society ripe for manipulation by demagogues.” Read the piece, which may be eye-opening to you. A lot of it jibes with my own experience. I have already written in the last year on the economic decline of media and the need for new business models.

Substack is one of them—but it’s still easier on this platform to make a lot of money by sticking to a strict partisan approach and telling a fanatical faction only what they want to hear.

So if you value this kind of newsletter, I ask you to consider making a donation to help make my work possible. It really does make a big difference.

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Drinking Coffee with John Adams

I mentioned recently that the most interesting thing said by vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance in his acceptance speech at the Republican convention was that “America is not just an idea.” It’s a halfway step toward the nationalist conservative position, stated more baldly as “America is not an idea.”

I said I would have more to say about this in a longer article, and it has just gone up at Discourse. Not only is it true that America was founded on the ideas stated in the Declaration of Independence (and re-founded on them by way of the Gettysburg Address, where Abraham Lincoln described America as a nation “conceived in liberty”). I argue that even if you look at America as a set of customs, traditions, and folkways, you will find that all of those were also shaped by our basic ideas.

I have long heard, for example, that the fact that Americans tend to prefer coffee to tea is the legacy of the American Revolution. I was delighted to find a quote on this directly from John Adams, in a postscript to a letter to Abigail Adams written about one year after the Boston Tea Party. I quote a slightly shortened passage in my piece, but I want to give you the full version here (with uncorrected spelling and punctuation).

I believe I forgot to tell you one Anecdote: When I first came to this House it was late in the Afternoon, and I had ridden 35 miles at least. “Madam” said I to Mrs. Huston, “is it lawfull for a weary Traveller to refresh himself with a Dish of Tea provided it has been honestly smuggled, or paid no Duties?”

“No sir, said she, we have renounced all Tea in this Place. I cant make Tea, but I’le make you Coffee.” Accordingly I have drank Coffee every Afternoon since, and have borne it very well. Tea must be universally renounced. I must be weaned, and the sooner, the better.

Here is my conclusion.

Thus began a tax protest we’re still engaged in 250 years later. Americans still drink less than one-eighth as much tea per capita as the British. We changed our habits and customs to conform to our ideals.

I also point out that if you conceive of America as a “people,” that also has been shaped to fit our ideals.

If America were only a “people”—well, the largest one-day expansion in the people of America was the passage of the 14th Amendment and its recognition of the citizenship of four million former slaves. In this case, it is the American ideal of equality that literally helped create the American people.

Similar ideas have also shaped our immigration policies over the years.

I also promised that I would deal with the bad epistemology in the nationalists’ implied view of ideas. Here it is.

When they say that no one fights for an abstraction, the nationalists are implicitly assuming that ideas are empty of content, mere hot air without substance. (They can speak for themselves on that, I suppose.) But according to the empiricist philosophy that was widely accepted in the founding era, abstractions are based on and refer to concrete facts. When we fought the American Revolution over the abstraction, “liberty,” we were fighting over the very substantial issues of taxes and representation and government power. When we fought the Civil War over the abstraction, “equality,” we were fighting over the very concrete reality of millions of innocent people held in cruel bondage.

Tocqueville inevitably comes up in this piece, because conservatives keep citing a few passages from him that they like while completely ignoring everything else he wrote about the American character, including our eagerness to embrace change.

That leads me to two additional examples that I couldn’t cram into this article. One of the links I cite for the nationalist dismissal of ideas is an awful speech by Rich Lowry, where one of the claims he makes (about five minutes in) is that “if you take a white American and a black American, and they happen to meet on the steps of the Opera House in Paris, they instantly have more in common than anyone around them because they are both products of the wellsprings of American culture that have influenced them.” (I would say that depends a lot on how much they like opera.)

This reminded me of something Tocqueville said. If two Americans meet on the opposite side of the world, he wrote, they instantly recognize each other as fellow countrymen and form a bond of friendship. But this not the case for two Englishmen, despite the fact that they also share a distinctive culture. Why? Because British culture (especially 200 years ago) included clear class distinctions. Englishmen and other Europeans would still hold a certain reserve toward one another because they would be afraid of making associations across divisions of class and status that would be inappropriate when they return home. Americans, by contrast, can make these associations without reserve, because we habitually regard each other as equals.

You can see, in Tocqueville, more evidence for how American culture, down to its smallest details, is shaped by our ideals.

Yet even the English, I should mention, were already shaping their culture and institutions in service of basic ideas a century before the American Revolution. Another nationalist conservative article arguing for the superiority of tradition over ideas begins by gushing over the pageantry of the then-recent British royal wedding. It was the wedding of Harry and Meghan, which in retrospect really undermines this theme. More fundamentally, this writer doesn’t seem to realize that Britain has the royal family it has—descendants of the House of Hanover—because it got rid of the Stuart kings in order to subordinate royal power to Parliament and to the English Bill of Rights.

This turns out to be the very cause in which John Locke articulated the philosophical ideas that would later provide the basis for the founding of the United States of America. England was altering its culture and institutions to fit its ideas even before we did.

This, you will find, is the hallmark of today’s allegedly traditionalist conservatives. They talk endlessly of their reverence for this nation’s history, while ignoring or rewriting most of it.

Like I said, these are some extras I wasn’t able to cram into my article in Discourse, and they offer further support for my overall conclusion about “the basic contradiction of the nationalist conservatives”: “They are trying to conserve a culture that was based on a liberal tradition. They are trying to reduce a nation founded on universal ideas into a nation of static, concrete customs.”

Read the whole thing.

Discourse

America Is Absolutely an Idea

Is America an idea? Obviously, the country as such is not a disembodied abstraction. It has territory and a population and long-established institutions. But the question is whether our culture and institutions are based on an idea and defined by an idea…

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5 months ago · Robert Tracinski

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I talk to Dr. Amesh Adalja, Senior Scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

We look back at the covid pandemic and how the predictions of the experts fared—including an interview with Dr. Adalja very early on—versus the claims of their critics. We spend some time puzzling out the paradox of rising opposition to vaccines after the development of a successful vaccine in record time. (Be sure to listen for the section on the push for a 100-day vaccine development timeline. See more on that here.)

Finally, we look at some of the incoming administration’s appointees and examine the overall phenomenon of a “return to the primitive” on issues of health, medicine, and wellness. (For more on that, see the new anti-health fad for “raw water.”)

See the video here.

I’ve been sending out a few highlights of my best work in 2024, and I know I just sent you one about immigration. But since that issue is cracking open right now—and especially in a controversy over immigration from India—I just had to remind you of the one below, which was one of the articles I most enjoyed writing last year.

The article I link to was published in Discourse, but I’m sending you this announcement of it because I added a lot of extra comments about the benefits of immigration. See also further comments on America’s import-export trade in talent. in the context of this summer’s Olympics.

Let’s just say that when it comes to one of the big issues of this new year, my readers are going in very well-informed. So consider taking advantage of the last few days of our holiday sale.

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Make Immigration Great Again

I have a new article up at Discourse presenting the “The US Cricket Team’s Guide to Winning at Everything.” This is my promised commentary on the big lesson of the US cricket team’s upset win over Pakistan.

America just posted a stunning win from a team we didn’t even know we had, in a sport most of us don’t understand and could not possibly explain. If we can figure out the secret behind this, we can figure out how to become a leading world power in anything.

And the secret is very simple: immigration.

The big thing you’ll notice about the US cricket team is that it is dominated by Indian immigrants (plus an Australian, a South African, and the US-born children of Caribbean immigrants).

The joke that immediately made the rounds after the surprise US win in Dallas is that Pakistan didn’t lose to “India-B” (one of the Indian national cricket teams), they lost to “India H-1B.” India vs. Pakistan is the most intense rivalry in cricket, fueled by the geopolitical rivalry between the two countries. It’s a bit like the Yankees vs. the Red Sox, but with nuclear weapons. The US cricket team is dominated by Indian immigrants who are here on H-1B visas awarded to skilled workers, particularly in the tech industry.

The biggest star of the game—the team’s “bowler,” the equivalent of a pitcher in baseball—is Saurabh Netravalkar, who was raised in Mumbai and came to the US for graduate school. By day, he’s a software engineer at Oracle.

As I point out, “It is very difficult for a country that has no history or experience with a sport to excel at it.” So instead, we simply imported centuries of history and expertise. And if we can do that with cricket, we can do it with anything else—as we have done all along.

You want to beat the Nazis to the atomic bomb? Bring in a bunch of German Jews, a few Italians, and definitely some Hungarians. The Manhattan Project was built on the work of refugees. It’s one of the great self-owns of history that the fascists drove a bunch of Europe’s top scientists into the arms of the Allies.

Similarly, if you want to beat the Soviets to the Moon, grab all the best German rocket scientists. One of the keys to America’s post-World War II ascendancy isn’t about traditional values or good old American ingenuity. It’s about the ingenuity of new Americans and the benefits of the wartime and postwar migration of European talent.

The lesson for today is pretty clear.

Unfortunately, this is not a lesson anybody seems to want to hear right now. As I observe, “If we want to make America great again, we need to make immigration great again. But somehow the people who claim to be interested in doing the former are dogmatically opposed to the latter.”

Read the whole thing.

Discourse

The U.S. Cricket Team’s Guide to Winning at Everything

Do you want the USA to be No. 1? Do you want us to lead the world in, well, pretty much everything, from sports and entertainment to manufacturing and technology? Then le…

Read more

7 months ago · Robert Tracinski

The $7 Trillion Subsidy

The rejoinder you will often hear, even frome some otherwise sensible portions of the right, is that you can’t have both a welfare state and immigration.

Bryan Caplan has an interesting post criticizing Milton Friedman for endorsing this idea, pointing out that it amounts to the rule you can’t achieve one increase in freedom without achieving every other increase in freedom at the same time. In effect, the free-market utopia has to be achieved all at once or not at all—which is not how things ever work.

In passing, though, Caplan makes what is actually a bigger and more important observation: “Once you realize that the welfare state is primarily about helping the old, not the poor, it turns out that immigration may be the only way for aging countries to sustain their welfare states.” In other words, Friedman got the economics of immigration backward.

It’s not that you can’t have a welfare state with immigration. The reality is that you can’t have a welfare state without immigration. Immigrants are young and come here in search of opportunity, so they work and start new businesses and end up subsidizing welfare for the native-born.

I’ve been keeping in my back pocket a link to a Washington Post article summing up a Congressional Budget Office report that quantifies the long-term contribution of immigrants both to the US economy and to the federal budget.

Voters and political strategists have treated our country’s ability to draw immigrants from around the world as a curse; it could be a blessing, if only we could get out of our own way.

Consider a few numbers: Last week, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office released updated 10-year economic and budget forecasts. The numbers look significantly better than they did a year earlier, and immigration is a key reason.

The CBO has now factored in a previously unexpected surge in immigration that began in 2022, which the agency assumes will persist for several years. These immigrants are more likely to work than their native-born counterparts, largely because immigrants skew younger. This infusion of working-age immigrants will more than offset the expected retirement of the aging, native-born population.

This will in turn lead to better economic growth. As CBO Director Phill Swagel wrote in a note accompanying the forecasts: As a result of these immigration-driven revisions to the size of the labor force, “we estimate that, from 2023 to 2034, GDP will be greater by about $7 trillion and revenues will be greater by about $1 trillion than they would have been otherwise.”

So there we have the actual impact of immigration. Not a drain on the federal budget, but a $1 trillion per year subsidy in tax revenues—and a $7 trillion benefit to the US economy as a whole.

And that’s not counting all the other benefits.

Immigrants are also associated with other positive growth effects, including higher entrepreneurship rates and disproportionate contributions to science, research, and innovation.

This article was published back in February, so it does not mention cricket—but we can now add that to the list.

It is tempting for the native-born to deflect their unease with the parasitic ethics of the welfare state by projecting it onto somebody else. But immigrants are not the parasites on the system. We are.

Conservatism Versus Greatness

Matt Yglesias, a guy famous for calling for One Billion Americans, recently posted some comments on the benefits of immigration. They’re probably good, but they’re behind a paywall, and I can’t subscribe to everything and neither can you.

But in the free preview, he makes an interesting observation on a somewhat different issue.

[V]isiting Shanghai “can trick you into thinking China is the richest country in the world, instead of a middle income country—China is just coming off of the greatest construction boom in world history, and everything in those Tier 1 cities is at the beginning of its capital depreciation cycle.” What I think is most interesting about this is the fact that people who visit Shanghai and see all the brand new buildings really do find it incredibly impressive. Now look back around at the United States, and note that every city has a lot of rules in place that are explicitly designed to discourage replacing the existing stock of buildings with newer ones.

The story of how those laws came to be is complex. But on some level, laws that prevent America from having a China-scale construction boom are in place because people think that’s what they want. The fact that nearly everyone who goes to Shanghai comes away impressed—so impressed that they develop an exaggerated sense of Shanghai’s prosperity—is telling us something about ourselves. Sometimes old things can be genuinely impressive and beautiful. But Americans should get real about the fact that the “historic” architecture of DC and San Francisco is not exactly Florence or the Barri Gòtic. We would like our country better with more renewal of the built environment.

There’s a tie between the fear of immigration and the fear of building newer and bigger things: a small-minded conservatism (whatever its superficial political trappings) that recoils from the new and longs for the familiar—and in the process shrinks from pursuing the greatness of which America is capable.

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This week, I’m posting highlights from The Tracinski Letter: some of my favorite articles that I wrote in the last year.

Below is an article from October 26 about an issue that will be front and center in the new year: immigration. In fact, over the Christmas break, some of Donald Trump’s top supporters have already begun setting upon one another in a civil war over H-1B visas and a nativist smear campaign against Indian-Americans.

Since trade will also be the focus of the new administration in the new year, see also my examination of exaggerated concerns about US manufacturing and my suggestions for the right way to encourage US manufacturing.

The Tracinski Letter gives me the base of support to write these articles and advocate for important ideas to a wider audience. Please consider subscribing now.

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Trump’s Worst Idea

I have a new piece up at The UnPopulist looking in some detail at Donald Trump’s worst idea—which also happens to be the central promise of his campaign: mass deportations targeting 20 million immigrants, both legal and illegal, with some native-born American citizens thrown in for good measure.

The good thing about having this published at The UnPopulist—which was not my first plan, but that’s another story—is that Shikha Dalmia knows the immigration issue well and was able to provide some extra facts that reinforce my case. For example, we already have some idea how many US citizens get wrongly deported under existing immigration policy.

Jacqueline Stevens, a political scientist at Northwestern University and an expert on deportation law, estimates that 1% of the inmates in immigration detention nationwide are American citizens. Between 2003 and 2010, even before President Obama kicked his own deportation program into high gear, more than 20,000 U.S. citizens were detained or deported as aliens. And that is a conservative estimate.

This was in years when the number of deportations was relatively low. So deporting 20 million immigrants all at once could mean deporting hundreds of thousands of US citizens—and let’s be honest, they would mostly be US citizens from a few specific ethnic groups. To put this in context, this is several times more than the number of Japanese-Americans unjustly interned in the war panic of 1942.

Mass deportations would be a disaster all around, and not just for immigrants and their families. (Another statistic: There are about 11 million illegal immigrants in America—and about an equal number of US citizens, their spouses and children, who share a household with them.) I look at what mass deportations would do to the construction industry, which has a particularly high percentage of immigrant workers, especially in some of the skilled trades. Anyone who knows the field knows that a vast anti-immigrant sweep would grind construction to a halt. I also link to an analysis of a similar effect on the food industry.

In short, if we deport anywhere close to 20 million people, we could expect an immediate and sharp economic downturn, including shortages of food—think of what the covid pandemic did, then multiply it—a worsened shortage of housing, and even a big hit to manufacturing. We would all be worse off.

And then there would be the political crisis. I don’t mention this in my piece, because there was enough to deal with already, and because this point is a bit more speculative. But Trump’s supporters have talked about taking the National Guard from conservative states like Missouri—presumably because they assume these troops would have the proper political loyalties—and sending them to enforce anti-immigrant sweeps in liberal states like New York. But what happens if New York contests the legality of the deportations and seeks to block them, as they almost certainly would? Could we see a convoy of the Missouri National Guard being met by the state police at the New York border and denied entry? And then what happens? As with everything else proposed by Donald Trump, this is a plan for constant constitutional crisis.

If we are going to put ourselves through such a vast national crisis, there had better be an equally vast problem we are supposed to be solving. But there isn’t. There is no basis in reality for the idea that immigrants are hurting America. In fact, immigrants are building America, as they always have. I offer some statistics about that and reach this conclusion.

The evidence shows that immigrants enrich this country as we all grow together, that a new American’s gain is not some other American’s loss—and this is how it has always been in our history.

This is why the right has to invent preposterous stories, as I described in my previous post on this issue, in order to justify an anti-immigrant pogrom. But if we vote for this, we won’t have the desperation of an actual crisis as an excuse. We’ll be doing it in cold blood, motivated solely by fear and hatred of people who are different from us.

All of this brings me back to question I raised in that previous installment: “What is the immigration issue really about? What are its deepest philosophical roots?”

The Overpopulation Hysteria, But for the Right

This question was prompted by an online seminar on immigration that I did with Richard Salsman for The Atlas Society.

This was an interesting session, because Richard and I usually clash horribly the closer we get to electoral politics, where he still clings to the notion that the Republican Party is in favor of free markets. Yet on this one issue, we largely agreed on our vision of what the optimal policy would be: The US should permit many more legal immigrants but do so in an orderly way by setting up large Ellis Island-style processing centers. I regret that I had to inform Richard that in the eyes of virtually all of today’s remaining Republicans, this would make him a wild-eyed “open borders” fanatic and one of the “globalist elites.”

Richard is trying to find a way to be pro-immigration while still supporting the Republican Party and its candidate, so he tries to square that circle by complaining about insufficient enforcement and specifically the fact that immigrants are not properly “registered” and some “sanctuary cities” refuse to aid the enforcement of anti-immigration laws. My answers were off-the-cuff but I thought they were illuminating. I pointed out that these are exactly the reactions you see on the right to issues like gun control, where they oppose registration of guns because they know it’s a step toward confiscation, and many local sheriffs create what you might call “sanctuary counties” where they refuse to aid the enforcement of anti-gun laws. In short, everybody resists laws they regard as unjust. So you can’t come up with a procedural reason to support the party that wants to do the wrong thing on the substance.

But here’s the thing that I realized after this discussion. I had led with facts showing the value of immigration to the economy and the culture, and while Richard agreed, he dismissed these as merely practical or pragmatic arguments, secondary to the moral principles involved. I’ve seen other Objectivists take this approach, so it led me to ask myself why I thought it was so obvious to lead with the value offered by immigrants. And it’s not to make a purely pragmatic argument for immigration. Rather, it is to make a metaphysical argument for immigration.

I think this actually addresses most clearly the reason people are opposed to immigration, certainly the way people are now whipping themselves up into a murderous frenzy over it during a time of peace and prosperity. Think of the words Donald Trump uses to describe this issue, words that are clearly resonating with his supporters: calling immigrants “garbage” who are “poisoning the blood” of the country. Is this a guy carefully making arguments about the morality of transnational migration or the proper role of government in managing borders? Obviously not! This is someone with a metaphysical horror of new and different people coming to this country. He is revulsed by their very existence.

That’s why I lead with the reality of the many and varied positive contributions of immigrants to this country. What I want to establish, in effect, is that people are good. Human beings should not be assumed by default to be a plague of locusts or a horde of marauding invaders. They are not poison or a cancer on the earth. Human beings are workers and builders and problem solvers. More human beings, new human beings, all varieties of human beings should be welcomed as positive additions to any society.

You might notice that this is the same issue we confront with radical environmentalists who obsess about overpopulation. So I was both appalled and also kind of delighted when someone in the comments section at The UnPopulist made the case against immigration in these terms: “Fewer people, fewer problems.” That sums it up. Immigration is the overpopulation hysteria, but for the right.

It’s no wonder that our current surge of anti-immigrant sentiment is coupled with a bleak, relentless pessimism. Trump’s supporters agree with him that America is “a failing nation.” There is a chicken-and-the-egg question here about whether an irrational fear of immigrants leads to an irrational pessimism, or vice-versa. But it doesn’t really matter, because the two ideas go hand in hand. When you accept a narrative of decline and collapse, you will naturally see humans as tribes fighting each other over limited and dwindling resources. And you will continue to believe this while living in the world’s most prosperous nation.

Obviously, when we say that human beings in general are good, this does not rule out the fact that some specific humans have proven themselves dangerous to others, which is why we can and should screen immigrants for known criminals—which would be a lot easier, by the way, if excessive restrictions on immigration didn’t create a huge black market for smuggling people across the border. (Though even then, in recent years most illegal immigrants have been legal visitors who overstay their visas, meaning that they were already screened and allowed into the country, just never sanctioned as permanent residents.)

Yet unless there is specific evidence against a person, our attitude should be: The more the merrier. After all, if more people meant more problems, America’s growth from 3 million people at its founding to 330 million today, swelled by wave after wave of immigrants, would be a story of relentless decline. Instead, it’s a story of relentless growth and progress.

We should all be acutely aware of this because virtually everyone reading this is descended from one of these previous waves of immigrants. Unless you look like this guy, you are an immigrant.

Actually, that’s true even if you do look like this guy, because he was Sicilian. “Iron Eyes Cody,” the actor who played the soulful Native American in that old ad, was actually the son of recent immigrants, born in Louisiana as Espera Oscar de Corti. He was yet another newcomer who enriched this country by going off to Hollywood and appearing in dozens of screen roles in American Westerns.

The metaphysical pessimism of the anti-immigrationists is actually a self-fulfilling prophecy, because if we listen to them, we will have fewer people and more problems. The deepest answer to the anti-immigration hysteria is that humans are creators who solve more problems than we cause, that America’s history is grand-scale proof of this, and the rule we should actually follow is: more people, fewer problems.

Or we could plunge ourselves into a profound national crisis because we choose, instead of growing and creating, to vent our fear and hatred. This is the choice we all face in the next few weeks.

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This week, I’m posting some highlights from The Tracinski Letter—some of my favorite articles that I wrote in the last year.

Below is an article from July 30 about the two-front culture war we’re engaged in, with “woke” conformists on one side and traditionalist conformists on the other.

See also my examination of the rotating anti-free-speech attitudes of left and right in “Censorship: Local, Express, and Round Trip.” Also see my wry observations, in two parts, on the “late stages” of various ideologies on the left and the right.

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Settling Upstream

A little while ago, I came across a news story that seems to sum up where we are right now.

The story is about Poland’s selection for the Venice Biennale, which is, as the name implies, a biennial art festival in Venice that is supposed to represent the very height of the elite “artworld.” It’s organized a bit like Eurovision (which represents low-brow pop culture, yet somehow produces equally awful results) in that every country gets to select its own contributors.

Under the control of a right-wing authoritarian administration, the Polish government did what the nationalist conservatives in the US would like to do. They used their control of the state to support politically connected right-wing “traditionalist” artists. Here’s the result.

Six months ago, Ignacy Czwartos won the opportunity of a lifetime.

A politically conservative painter whose work contains religious, historical, and military images, Czwartos was an outsider in the contemporary art scene in Poland. But that didn’t stop the government there, at the time led by the populist Law and Justice Party, from choosing him to represent the country at the Venice Biennale.

OK, so what is his art like?

Visitors paid attention to one painting in particular. “Nord Stream 2” depicts Angela Merkel, Germany’s former chancellor, alongside President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. They are separated by a metal pipe that evokes the gas pipeline linking their two countries, and appears to form the shape of a swastika. Czwartos said that the painting was “a warning” about those countries’ close ties.

You can see an image of this piece in the article and at the top of this newsletter. It is illustrative but not particularly inspiring. The art is realist, but not skillful or well-painted, and it is entirely in a symbolic and propagandistic style. It’s not even good propaganda. Czwartos is a Polish Jon McNaughton, only much worse. You can see more of his art here. It is the work of a thoroughgoing mediocrity.

Czwartos was selected in a politically rigged process.

That year [2015], the Law and Justice Party came to power and began a yearslong effort to shift the country’s culture to the right, including by ousting liberal directors from major art museums and replacing them with conservatives who would promote traditional values.

Among the museums affected was the Zacheta National Gallery of Art, in Warsaw, which convened the jury that chose Czwartos to represent Poland at Venice.

One juror, the curator Joanna Warsza, said that the selection process was “a setup” designed to choose a “far-right” artist, and that Czwartos was the only option available.

A few weeks after Czwartos was selected, however, a new government formed a ruling coalition after an election that defeated Poland’s authoritarian right. So “the new culture minister announced that he would send Open Group, a Ukrainian collective, to the Biennale instead.” (Czwartos responded by holding his own separate exhibit, which is what the article is mostly about.)

What is Open Group’s art like?

Titled “Repeat After Me II,” the show consists of two large videos featuring Ukrainians who fled after Russia’s full-scale invasion, reproducing the sounds they remember from the war. They imitate the sounds of bombs exploding, automatic gunfire, and helicopters whirring overhead, then give an instruction to viewers: “Repeat after me.” Microphones stand on both sides of the pavilion, and visitors are also encouraged to imitate the noises.

Aside from the fact that this whole thing is ridiculous, juvenile, and meaningless—and involves no artistic skill whatsoever—notice what both exhibits have in common. Both are oriented entirely toward a political message, and the most crudely obvious and simple messages at that.

Political messages and overtones in art are hardly new, and a fan of Ayn Rand’s novels can’t exactly complain about political themes in art. But at its best, a political message is incorporated into something that has a deeper and more personal meaning. We can enjoy the operas of Giuseppe Verdi without having to know anything about the Risorgimento, and there are plenty of fans of The Fountainhead who don’t subscribe to Ayn Rand’s laissez-faire economics. Why? Because the theme of the novel, as she stated it, was “individualism versus collectivism, not in politics, but in man’s soul.” It is the soul that was her concern, and the politics was secondary.

Yet in the works described in this article about the Vienna Biennale, the political themes are very much on the surface, with nothing underneath. This art begins and ends with its political message, and the only question is whether it’s a right-wing message or a left-wing message.

Years ago, the late political commenter Andrew Breitbart famously said, “Politics is downstream of culture.” That’s true, as far as it goes, but I am afraid the conclusion the right has drawn—following the lead of the left, as usual—is that if they want to win political battles, their activists need to move upstream, kick the artists out of their encampment, and set up there to produce political propaganda in place of art.

It's a culture war in which culture is losing—or rather, one in which culture has to fight a two-front war against those who would collapse everything into crude political messaging for their side.

Below are a few more scenes from this two-front war.

The Woke and the Trad

In addition to being exclusively about a rather shallow politics, the other problem with our current culture war is that it is conceived as a war fought about culture, when it is actually a war fought with culture—that is, a war fought by producing your own art and ideas, not just by criticizing someone else’s. (See, for example, conservatives freaking out about the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics, in part because they got their art history references wrong and confused a banquet of the Olympian gods with the Last Supper.)

In short, you can’t cancel your way into a cultural golden age.

To get an idea of this problem, I recently came across a piece I had missed a few years ago. It is confession by a young woman who, as a teenager, helped set off the trend of online hysterias over supposedly “problematic” actors, authors, or films. It turns out, in retrospect, that she was just projecting out onto the world the inner turmoil of her own psychological problems after the tragic death of her older sister.

I tried going back to school after a few weeks, but I found myself picking frequent arguments with classmates and teachers. The school made an arrangement with my parents: I would be placed on “medical leave” for the remainder of the semester. I would graduate on time, but I wouldn’t return to campus.

Stuck at home, I devoted myself to Tumblr. What was I trying to accomplish? Mostly, I was interested in knocking people off their pedestals. I also enjoyed being popular, controversial, discussed….

In the years since, I’ve looked back on my blog with shame and regret—about my pettiness, my motivating rage, my hard-and-fast assumptions that people were either good or bad. Who was I to lump together known misogynists with people who got tattoos in languages they didn’t speak? I just wanted to see someone face consequences; no one who’d hurt me ever had.

There’s something almost quaint about it all now: teenage me, teaching myself about social justice on Tumblr while also posturing as an authority on that very subject, thinking I was making a difference while engaging in a bit of schadenfreude. 

So far as I can tell, however, this little bit of introspection is an isolated exception.

As for the right, if there is anything the new nationalist conservatives have managed to produce as their vision of the future, it is a collection of “trad”—i.e., traditionalist—lifestyle blogs and social media accounts. These do what most social media lifestyle accounts do and present a glamorized and highly inaccurate version of the subculture they are intended to celebrate. That is particularly so for a “trad” lifestyle that starts out as a cartoon caricature version of the past in the first place.

Among the most popular versions is the “tradwife,” which offers an idealized vision of a woman who submits herself to selfless service to her husband. You can see how this would be very popular with the kind of sadsack young man who tends to be attracted to the traditionalist right. But a few young women get sucked into it, too.

Here is the story of one of them, Lauren Southern, a woman who made a (small) name for herself a few years back as a young right-wing media firebrand. Then she disappeared into a “tradwife” marriage in which her husband turned out—surprise, surprise—to be an abusive creep before abandoning her and their child. Here is a profile on her story.

She was, it seemed, all set to embrace the nurturing, feminine, domestic role promoted by Right-wing traditionalists, idealised by “tradwife” influencers, and criticized by progressives as “dangerous and stupid.” Four years later, though, Southern caused a new round of shockwaves—this time with a video recounting what happened next: the breakdown of her abusive marriage, her return to Canada as a single mother, and a stint living hand-to-mouth in a cabin in the woods….

She tells me she knows many other women still suffering in unhappy “tradlife” marriages. One of her WhatsApp groups, she says, “is like the Underground Railroad for women in the conservative movement”. Some of these are prominent media figures: “There are a lot of influencers who are not in good relationships, who are still portraying happy marriage publicly, and bashing people for not being married while being in horrendous relationships.” She hopes that in speaking out she can reassure “all of these women who are thinking in their heads: I’m uniquely terrible, and I’m uniquely making a mistake” that no: something is more generally amiss….

There were warning signs from early on. “If I ever disagreed with him in any capacity he’d just disappear, for days at a time. I remember there were nights where he’d call me worthless and pathetic, then get in this car and leave.” But she didn’t see them, thanks to the simplified anti-feminist ideology she’d absorbed and promoted: “I had this delusional view of relationships: that only women could be the ones that make or break them, and men can do no wrong.” So she didn’t spot the red flags, even as they grew more extreme. “He’d lock me out of the house. I remember having to knock on the neighbour’s door on rainy nights, because he’d get upset and drive off without unlocking the house. It was very strange, to go from being this public figure on stage with people clapping, to the girl crying, knocking on someone’s door with no home to get into, being abandoned with a baby.”…

Ellen (not her real name), 35, is another previously married erstwhile “trad” who is now in Southern’s network. She describes how the men who self-select into these communities are often “wayward, antisocial, disagreeable and very, very misogynistic”, frequently themselves from broken homes and with limited real-world social support…. [According to Southern], “Those guys want someone they feel they can definitely control, who’s never going to leave them, who they can do anything to.”

I have heavily excerpted this article because the author has an annoying compulsion to balance every criticism of the “trad” right with a criticism of the “woke” left. Yes, I know that I’m doing that here, for the most part—but this is in an article that is focused around the failure of the trad lifestyle, and it’s by an author and in a publication (Unherd) that made their names by criticizing the woke, so it has the air of a cringing apology for daring to depart from their side’s orthodoxy.

But the saddest part is this passage.

It was, she says, “an embarrassing wake up call, finding myself consistently applying these rules and instructions I found on Twitter, and then never getting the results they were supposed to get, in the real realm of relationships.”

If only someone could have warned her that not everything you read on the internet is true.

I get the impression that Southern is trying to get her career as a commenter back together, but I’m old-fashioned enough to think that the people who comment for us on the big questions of life maybe ought to have some life experience, show some sensible judgment, and maybe have their own lives sorted out before they start making pronouncements for the rest of us.

“Buckle Up, Tovarisch”

The male equivalent of Lauren Southern’s failed experiment with being a tradwife are the guys moving to Russia because “it feels like our positive vision of 1950s America.” In the end, I think they will find it bears more resemblance to 1950s Russia.

This story is in the British Daily Mail, and you have to know that paper to realize what they’re doing when they feature a picture of a goofy-looking divorced 62-year-old guy, with a caption about how he “hopes to start a family in his new home of Yalta with one of the ‘20%’ of Russian women who he says look like super models.” If you look at the photo, you realize this guy is delusional to think he’s going to end up with a supermodel—and the Daily Mail is quite deliberately making fun of him.

But far more dangerous, and less excusable, are the guys sitting back in the relative peace, security, and prosperity of America and comparing it unfavorably to various dictatorships. The latest example, which I mentioned recently, is historian Niall Ferguson straining himself to compare the US today to the Soviet Union in its late stages. The whole thing is ridiculous and seems to be a rationalization built around only one passage, in which he compares Donald Trump’s recent felony convictions—in a fair trial decided by a jury of his peers—to the martyrdom of a Soviet dissident.

The response I was looking for was from Cathy Young, who knows something about Russia in its late Soviet period because she grew up in it.

Her response at The Bulwark is, as usual, carefully balanced. She acknowledges the legitimacy of some of Ferguson’s complaints against the left, while correcting him on numerous factual errors that undermine his wildly hyperbolic claims. I would not have that degree of patience and forbearance. But she captures a couple of important evasions in Ferguson’s case, including the by-now notorious right-wing tendency to loudly complain about censorship in a widely read article in a popular magazine. As Cathy puts it, “America remains a pluralistic society; remarkably, Ferguson doesn’t say one word about the existence of alternative institutions, even as he is writing for one.”

But here’s the more important internally imposed blinder.

Ferguson’s purported critique of “Soviet America” is aimed more or less exclusively at blue America [i.e., the left and Democrats]…. 

[I]f you’re criticizing Soviet-flavored left-wing groupthink and intolerance but have nothing to say about aspects of right-wing Trumpian populism that mirror both the Soviet legacy and toxic trends in post-Soviet Russia—authoritarianism, the strongman cult, paranoid conspiracy theories, pervasive grievance over lost “greatness”—chances are you’re being a political hack.

Cathy is even sharper in responding to one of Ferguson’s defenders, the increasingly nationalist conservative writer Helen Andrews.

It is also worth noting that while Andrews latches on to Soviet analogies as a way to indict modern-day America, just last year she argued in Compact that nostalgia for actual Soviet and Soviet-bloc societies is on to something: Those societies had more “sense of purpose” and less “disorder and degeneracy,” consumer luxuries aren’t everything (who cares about bananas when the Soviet bloc offered an alternative to liberalism?), and the lack of freedom and human rights was “an annoyance at most for the average person.” Andrews’s overriding point, always, seems to be “liberalism bad.” Either it’s too Soviet, or it’s not Soviet enough.

Ouch.

I omitted a final postscript from the original version of this article about yet another rigged election in Venezuela and a short-lived uprising against the regime. I omitted it because it turned out to be short-lived. But I do want to repeat my final observation, which is that we need a rebound against both the woke and the trad in favor of liberalism.

That’s something to work toward and look out for in the next year.

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Last week, I counted down the top stories of the year. This week, I’ll be posting a few highlights from 2024—some of my favorite articles that I wrote this year that I would like to bring back to your attention.

Below is an article from May 30 about our tendency to think the “good old days” were much better, and to attribute all our frustrations with life to the degraded conditions of the present—even when the actual conditions of the world are the exact opposite.

See also my related comments from February on how “Decline Is a Narrative”—and sometimes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The “all of this” at the beginning of the piece below refers to a roundup of recent news that I included in the original version but have omitted here.

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O Tempora, O Mores!

All of this might have you throwing up your hands and exclaiming, “O tempora, o mores!” Yet I just came across an absolutely brilliant bit of analysis in the Washington Post that warns against the dangers of false nostalgia.

Pollsters from YouGov set out to find which era was “the good old days,” so they “asked 2,000 adults which decade had the best and worst music, movies, economy and so forth, across 20 measures.” They found no consensus.

We did spot some peaks: When asked which decade had the most moral society, the happiest families, or the closest-knit communities, white people and Republicans were about twice as likely as black people and Democrats to point to the 1950s. The difference probably depends on whether you remember that particular decade for “Leave it to Beaver,” drive-in theaters, and 12 Angry Men—or the Red Scare, the murder of Emmett Till, and massive resistance to school integration.

As one expert puts it, “nostalgia is colored by political preferences. Surprise, surprise.”

But any political, racial or gender divides were dwarfed by what happened when we charted the data by generation. Age, more than anything, determines when you think America peaked.

So, we looked at the data another way, measuring the gap between each person’s birth year and their ideal decade. The consistency of the resulting pattern delighted us: It shows that Americans feel nostalgia not for a specific era, but for a specific age.

The good old days when America was “great” aren’t the 1950s. They’re whatever decade you were 11, your parents knew the correct answer to any question, and you’d never heard of war crimes tribunals, microplastics, or improvised explosive devices. Or when you were 15 and athletes and musicians still played hard and hadn’t sold out.

This is not a big surprise. This article mentions another study a few years ago indicating that nostalgia for music tends to center around whatever was popular when you were 17. After that, you become convinced that our music was so much better than that noise the kids are listening to these days.

It’s revealing how much nostalgia about economics and politics, not to mention the tempora and the mores, is formed at a very young age, often under the age of 10. This implies that everything looked better when we were surrounded by protective adults who shielded us from everything bad in the world—and when we weren’t responsible for anything.

The flipside of this is that for everyone, things are the worst in the present.

[A]lmost without exception, if you ask an American when times were worst, the most common response will be “right now!”

This holds true even when “now” is clearly not the right answer. For example, when we ask which decade had the worst economy, the most common answer is today. The Great Depression—when, for much of a decade, unemployment exceeded what we saw in the worst month of pandemic shutdowns—comes in a grudging second.

What follows is a discussion of “declinism” and the tendency of the past to always look better in retrospect than it felt at the time. We remember the good parts and tend to forget the bad parts. Their conclusion? Wait long enough and “the 2020s will be the good old days.”

The Good Old Days

I am fascinated by the idea that when we feel nostalgia, we are not feeling nostalgia for the way things were back then. We are feeling nostalgia for the way we were back then.

Similarly, I suspect that when we feel dissatisfaction with our current time, we are actually expressing dissatisfaction with our current stage of life (which we will later look back on with hazy nostalgia). So the Boomer conservatives who think the culture has gone down the tubes are to some extent just expressing the frustration of old age and the sense that they are no longer the ones shaping events in a world that is passing them by. Similarly, young conservative men who flirt with the alt-right and complain that feminism has ruined everything are often just complaining that they can’t get a date. It has become a cliché for them to report on moderating their views after they begin to get their lives together.

Among young people on the left, the version of this you hear most often is that the older generations have ruined the world for young people, who are unable to afford anything or live a decent life because everything is outside their reach. What they are actually complaining about is that they are in their 20s, an age at which they are no longer supported by the higher level of wealth accumulated by their parents, yet they are still in relatively low-paying entry level jobs. They have entered an adult world where they see all sorts of enticing things they would like to own or enjoy, but they can’t afford very much of it yet.

This is not an economic condition caused by capitalism or even (necessarily) by any particular outside events or economic upheaval. It is merely one of the conditions of youth.

And this is why we need to rely on data rather than vibes to understand what is going on in the world. It turns out that even as every generation complains that the world was ruined by the generations before it, every generation is actually better off and wealthier at each stage of life than their forerunners. And that includes the latest generation to whine about their fate, Generation Z, according to an article in The Economist with the delightful title, “Gen Z Is Unprecedentedly Rich.”

In America hourly pay growth among 16- to 24-year-olds recently hit 13% year on year, compared with 6% for workers aged 25 to 54. This was the highest ‘young person premium’ since reliable data began (see chart 3). In Britain, where youth pay is measured differently, the average hourly pay of people aged 18-21 rose by an astonishing 15% last year, outstripping pay rises among other age groups by an unusually wide margin. In New Zealand the average hourly pay of people aged 20-24 increased by 10%, compared with an average of 6%.

Strong wage growth boosts family incomes. A new paper by Kevin Corinth of the American Enterprise Institute, a think-tank, and Jeff Larrimore of the Federal Reserve assesses Americans’ household income by generation, after accounting for taxes, government transfers and inflation. Millennials were somewhat better off than Gen X—those born between 1965 and 1980—when they were the same age. Zoomers, however, are much better off than millennials were at the same age. The typical 25-year-old Gen Z-er has an annual household income of over $40,000, more than 50% above baby-boomers at the same age.

None of this is a surprise, because that is exactly what we should expect in a functioning, dynamic economy—constant growth that ensures every generation will be better off than the one before.

As I pointed out a while back, we are becoming an upper-middle-class country. But we will get there while constantly complaining.

For related ideas, see my comments about sense of life, the blue dots of outrage, and the message of Groundhog Day. I have a feeling I am going to have to integrate all of these observations into a wider theory at some point.

Tomorrow, as a further case for optimism and against false nostalgia, I’ll send out a note with a few links to stories about crises averted and new scientific innovations [update: this post]—the essential activities of human life that we don’t always spend enough time focusing on.

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Now for top story #1, which might not seem like much of a mystery.

The top story is partly the election of Donald Trump to another term as president, after a disastrous first term, an attempt to overturn an election, and after making increasingly authoritarian promises for his next term agenda. But that’s not the real center of this story. The real story is the collapse of the constitutional, institutional, and cultural “guardrails” that would keep a would-be authoritarian in check.

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Anti-Constitutionalism

Early this year, I made the case—along with many other people—that Donald Trump ought to be barred from running for president again by the plain language of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, a post-Civil War provision that banned from office anyone who had engaged in “insurrection” against the United States. I warned that “the conservatives on the Supreme Court cannot reject an Article 3 argument without making a mockery of the entire conservative legal philosophy. I think they have already done so in the Dobbs decision, so I am not ruling this out.” This is exactly what happened.

There are some arguments that Donald Trump didn’t technically engage in insurrection. I don’t think this is terribly convincing, and the Colorado Supreme Court ruling that went for review at the Supreme Court laid out the evidence against him very fully. But the Supreme Court did not rule in Trump’s favor on the factual merits. They ruled for him by essentially throwing out the 14th Amendment.

As I wrote about the eventual ruling, “I have always been less concerned about how the court would rule in this case than why they would rule.” The reasoning they gave was to invent out of thin air a requirement that Section 3 could only go into effect on the basis of separate legislation passed by Congress.

Giving Congress and only Congress the power to enforce Section 3 is both redundant and contradictory. If the framers of the 14th Amendment intended to allow Congress to enforce this provision by a simple majority vote, why did they also provide another mechanism for granting amnesty from enforcement by a two-thirds vote?...

Once again, the Supreme Court’s so-called “originalists” are just making stuff up as they go along. Or as one observer put it, “Kind of fun that after all this talk of democracy the justices basically amended the Constitution by judicial fiat.”

This decision isn’t just unconstitutional. It’s anti-constitutional. The whole point of having a constitution is that its provisions supersede ordinary acts of Congress. The whole point is to place some rules above the preferences of a temporary majority. In doing the opposite, the Supreme Court simply wiped out part of the Constitution.

This was the pattern for their other big ruling of the year.

The Seal Team Six Theory of Executive Power

The most ominous ruling this year was about presidential immunity from prosecution for crimes committed in office. I was certain that the courts would not rule in favor of such immunity, and I quoted a lower court ruling in the case.

At bottom, former President Trump's stance would collapse our system of separated powers by placing the president beyond the reach of all three branches. Presidential immunity against federal indictment would mean that, as to the president, the Congress could not legislate, the executive could not prosecute, and the judiciary could not review. We cannot accept that the office of the Presidency places its former occupants above the law for all time thereafter.

Earlier on, the judges offer this wry observation: “It would be a striking paradox if the president, who alone is vested with the constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, were the sole officer capable of defying those laws with impunity.”

But that’s not the most ominous part of the earlier court action in this case.

By far the most revealing exchange was this one:

Judge Florence Pan asked Trump’s attorney, D. John Sauer, if “a president who ordered SEAL Team 6 to assassinate a political rival” could be criminally prosecuted. Sauer tried to hem and haw his way through an answer but ultimately stated that such a president couldn’t be prosecuted unless he was first impeached, convicted, and removed by Congress.

“But if he weren’t, there would be no criminal prosecution, no criminal liability for that?” Pan pressed. Sauer had no choice but to agree, because acknowledging any exceptions would have blown a hole in his argument.

I hope that makes you sit up and take notice. Listen to the exchange for yourself. It’s a moment that ought to go down in the history books—either as the moment we plunged over the edge into dictatorship, or the moment we recoiled and turned back.

This seemed so definitive that I did not think the Supreme Court would be brazen enough to overturn the lower court rulings. But they did, and they invented an even more curious doctrine in which the president’s immunity is greatest precisely when exercising the “core” functions in which he has the most power and the least dependence on other branches of government.

The areas in which the president has the most power are precisely the areas where he most needs to be held accountable for the criminal abuse of those powers.

For example, among the “core” powers granted to the president directly by the Constitution is the power to issue a pardon. But what if the president began to sell pardons? What if he accepted a bribe to pardon a criminal? By the Supreme Court majority’s reasoning, he is absolutely immune.

As for the immediate implication of this in the new year:

Now consider the specific facts at issue in this prosecution: Trump ordered officials at the Department of Justice to issue a letter declaring the 2020 election to be fraudulent, something both he and they knew to be false, in order to embolden state officials to back Trump’s slates of fake electors. This is Trump’s official powers used for an unofficial and illegitimate purpose—not on behalf of the American people, but in the service of criminal scheme. Yet this is the issue on which the Court’s majority most unambiguously insists he has absolute immunity….

Donald Trump has repeatedly boasted that if he returns to office, he will personally order a series of revenge prosecutions against his political enemies, including the state prosecutors in his own cases. The Supreme Court has just given him the green light to do so, assuring him that his authority to abuse his power can never be questioned.

This ruling knocks down yet another guardrail against the abuse of government power. As I put it, “It forces us to place more emphasis on a candidate’s personal character, his history, his ambitions, and the forcefulness of his personality—which we now have to regard as dangerous. In a world without guardrails, we have to assume that the only limits on a president’s actions are those he chooses to impose on himself.”

Note again how anti-constitutional this ruling is. The whole point of having a constitution is to set up checks and balances on the personal power of a leader, making his personal character less important than the institutions that restrict him. If a constitution doesn’t do that, what does it do?

“Originalism” is now dead as a doctrine of constitutional interpretation, killed off by its own advocates. I pointed to what conservatives are actually likely to put in its place, citing an Alabama Supreme Court ruling that advocates reading religious “creeds” and “catechisms” into the law of the land.

[Justice] Parker’s decision is part of what I’ve been calling the “Originalism Bait-and-Switch,” in which the “original meaning” of the Constitution is to be determined based solely on whatever practices are “deeply rooted in this nation’s history and tradition.” In this version, originalism becomes mere traditionalism. Justice Parker takes it one step further, asserting that America’s tradition is Christian, so therefore legal interpretation should be rooted in traditional Christianity.

In retrospect, though, it makes a certain kind of sense that the most potent threat to the US Constitution has come from the people who shouted most loudly about how much they wanted to preserve it—because that’s what you would say if you wanted us to drop our guard.

We Are the Guardrails

Here’s the most bracing conclusion I offered from the Supreme Court’s rulings.

It will be up to us, the people, as voters and as activists—and if things get really bad, as protesters in the streets—to stop an insurrectionist takeover of the federal government. It would be nice if people appointed to positions where they are specifically charged with doing this would that the risks and handle it. But in the end, this is everybody’s job, and we’re going to have to be the ones to do it.

No one is coming to save us. Not the Congress, not the parties, not the media—and not the courts. We will have to save ourselves.

I held out some hope that the voters would stop Trump because I noticed that whenever one of the legal cases against him went in front a jury, the jury decided against him. Instead, the voters—by a slim margin—made a literally hysterical decision. I described early on what the Republicans were campaigning on.

The official Republican response [to President Biden’s State of the Union address], delivered by Alabama Senator Katie Britt is widely regarded as a disaster because of a shaky-voiced, teary-eyed delivery that can only be described as histrionic. I think her delivery was perfectly on point, because it matched the unhinged hysteria of her message, which describes America as a kind of hellscape where “the American Dream has turned into a nightmare.

Britt mostly focused on the idea that immigrants coming across the border are rapists and sex traffickers….

More widely, Republicans have been trying to stoke fears of a crime wave that isn’t happening. Crime ticked up briefly during the pandemic before falling again, and violent crime is at its lowest level since 1961. Republicans particularly want you to think there is a “migrant crime wave” caused by immigrants. This, also, is purely in their imagination….

Donald Trump and his supporters are hoping you will be so overwhelmed by hysterical panic you will turn to a strongman to protect you.

I didn’t think this would work, but in retrospect, the turning point was Trump’s first and only debate with Kamala Harris. By any rational measure, he lost the debate by a wide margin, and the moment that ought to have discredited him was when he repeated a weird online hysteria about legal Haitian immigrants in Ohio supposedly eating household pets. But within a few weeks of that debate, I noticed that Trump’s poll numbers had gone up, not down.

We all assumed—even his own campaign assumed it—that Kamala Harris’s side-comment about Donald Trump’s rallies in the last presidential debate derailed him from his agenda and goaded him into making a foolish claim about Haitians eating pets.

But look what has happened in the post-debate polls: Harris’s poll numbers have gone up by about one percentage point. She is now hovering just below 50% in the RealClearPolitics average. But Trump also went up, by about half a point, nearing his all-time high….

So perhaps this wasn’t a gaffe or a lapse in message discipline. Maybe it was the message. Maybe he knows his voters, and this was what they really wanted to hear—and he successfully got the entire country talking about it for a week. I remarked at the time that Trump is hoping you are absolutely terrified of black immigrants. Maybe he knows better than us that there are a lot of people who do in fact feel this way, and he is hoping just enough of them will support him to pull off an election win.

The terrifying fact is that he may be right.

Well, we all know how that turned out.

The Trump Show

The story for the next year is that the voters have given Trump license to act without guardrails. They have done so by a very narrow margin—but Trump is going to see how far he can push it.

even before he takes office, he has proposed a series of high-level executive appointments who are not just unqualified but “anti-qualified—the antithesis of what the offices call for.” “Every appointee is selected as a deliberate negation, even a mockery, of the function of government he or she will be in charge of.”

And then, because he will apparently die if he is not the center of attention for five minutes, Trump has spent the days before the holidays spouting a series of crazy proposals to annex Canada, buy Greenland, and take back the Panama Canal. And yet, since the election, his approval ratings have risen.

In response to the Greenland outburst, political scientist Paul Musgrave accurately identifies Trump’s approach.

One of the best ways to appreciate the policy beats and messaging of the Trump administration is to understand it as a reality show-cum-variety show. That is, Trump is the producer and star, and every beat and sketch has to revolve around Trump—Trump should not only be the main character, but the pivotal character; whenever Trump’s not on screen, all the other characters should be asking “Where’s Trump?”, and so on. The presidency affords many instance for anyone to be at the center of most dramas, but when the narrative drifts or the camera pans away, Trump understands that a display of temper or flippancy can bring it back.

The foolishness of this election decision is that just under half of voters didn’t choose a leader, they chose a character in a reality TV show. Or as Adam Serwer puts it, they chose the “antihero” from one of our contemporary “prestige TV” shows—as if Tony Soprano is supposed to be the hero. I would write something about that, but I kind of already did a long time ago. Let’s just say that this is what we get when we trade out The Lord of the Rings for “Game of Thrones.”

But I have also speculated that if Trump as a TV character is what his supporters want, perhaps this is all that they really want. They want his crazy antics on their TV every day, they love how he makes the “elites” howl with outrage—and perhaps they won’t care so much about the actual results. I’ve already seen polls in which Trump’s supporters indicate that they don’t actually expect him to achieve much of his agenda.

Hence my suggestion of the most annoying way this all ends: Trump’s worst appointees are withdrawn from consideration (it looks like Tulsi Gabbard is the next to go), his worst policies get bogged down in legal challenges or get watered down to avoid angering various constituencies, and eventually his administration ends not with a bang but with a whimper. His supporters might be just fine with that, because he sure as heck annoyed us “elites” along the way, and that’s what The Trump Show was really about all along.

Yet there will be a cost for being entertained in this way. Check out a must-read article about what the Ukraine war has revealed about the atrophied industrial base of the US military and its inability to adapt quicky to unfolding events. Here is one of the causes.

[T]imely, coherent federal budgeting is no more. Congress routinely fails to pass appropriations bills on schedule, resorting to continuing resolutions. This keeps defense dollars coming but limits their use to existing projects. That would not be a problem if it happened only occasionally, but Congress has given the defense department a fully authorized budget on time only once in the past 15 years. This helter-skelter process constrains the Pentagon from adapting quickly to changing circumstances. New projects are put on hold, and there’s no guarantee that money will eventually come. Private contractors need predictable dollar commitments to invest in new product lines, so they simply don’t invest. As one senior Pentagon official described it to me, the phenomenon is “an own goal that we do to ourselves every year.”

All of this requires urgent reform, yet Trump has proposed for Secretary of Defense a reputed drunkard who is more focused on promoting Christian nationalism.

A fascinating article in the New York Times indicates that this is why “the American election results were received with enthusiasm in Moscow,” because “to many in the Kremlin, a Trump presidency might bring about the collapse of the American state.”

“As a former citizen of the former Soviet Union, I’ll tell you the problem with empires: They believe they are so powerful that they can afford minor mistakes,” [Putin] said in 2021. “But the problems accumulate, and a moment comes when they are no longer manageable. The United States is confidently, firmly marching down the same path as the Soviet Union.” This still seems to represent Mr. Putin’s fundamental assessment of the country. He is convinced that America is nearing its end.

I think Putin is, as usual, wildly overconfident. After all, his assessment of the failure of the Soviet empire applies equally well to his own misrule. Obviously, this is a fantasy in which former Soviet apparatchiks dream of revenge for their own system’s implosion.

But if America were to collapse economically, politically, and in terms of our international influence, Donald Trump would be the man to do it. We should take seriously one part of what Putin says, and not be so certain we can afford mistakes.

Here’s a final reason I think Putin is being overconfident: beneath the turmoil of our politics, we are still racing forward in a frenzy of technological and economic progress. I have offered the occasional roundup of good news, and I recently recounted the birth of the progress movement at a conference in the fall.

As usual, we’re in a race between the primitiveness of our politics and philosophy versus the advances of our science and technology.

Stay tuned in the next year, when I will help you follow what happens next.

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I’ve been counting down the top stories of 2024, and for a year that has ended pretty badly, a surprising number of the stories are positive. At #5 is the fading of Christianity in favor of secular alternatives to Christianity, which from my perspective is a good thing. At #4 is the rising profile of the YIMBYs. The “Crank Realignment,” at #3, is a less happy story. But we’re back to good news with top story #2: the dismantling of Hezbollah, the big setback for Iran in Syria, and the subsequent collapse of Russian influence in the Middle East and possibly beyond.

Let’s take a look at how this unexpected bit of good news unfolded over the year.

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The Generators of War

Early this year, I noted the comprehensive failure of the “Palestinian cause” following last year’s October 7 mass terror attack. The Hamas attack plan definitely succeeded in its immediate aim—to satisfy the bloodlust of terrorists—but resulted in the near-total destruction of the organization that planned it and immense suffering for the people on whose behalf they claimed to fight.

I also noted who were the “generators of war” stoking these conflicts.

There are certain countries—and kinds of regimes—that function as generators of war, stoking and maintaining conflict in a ring around them, as far as their reach extends. The “long peace” we have enjoyed since 1945, which may just now be drawing to a close, began when the fascist regimes were defeated in World War II. The number of armed conflicts dropped even lower after the collapse of the Soviet Union, another global driver of war. The two largest remaining war-generating regimes are Russia—which has surrounded itself with a ring of “frozen conflicts” and is trying to make Ukraine into one of them—and Iran.

I made a further note about Russian weakness in response to a massive Islamist terrorist attack in Moscow, which the Russians failed to prevent despite the fact that we warned them about it (based on our own intelligence) well ahead of time. It revealed Russia’s internal weakness.

Once again—remember Yevgeny Prigozhin’s aborted drive to Moscow last year?—this reveals how Putin’s war in Ukraine has left Russia weak and its heartland essentially undefended. ISIS-K saw this opportunity and took advantage of it. And with what forces will Russia strike back at them

Remember that Putin’s rise to power twenty years ago was based in large part on his response to big terrorist attacks by Chechnyan Muslim fanatics. But the actual measures were ineffective and just served as a cover for seizing power and looting the country.

For Russia to be suffering the same kind of attacks all these years later is a massive failure of Putin’s central claim to authority—and a reminder for everyone who needs it that a strongman’s claims to power are always an illusion. If we don’t have the will to puncture and deflate it, that’s our fault.

I also noted that the current US administration has actually been surprisingly effective at building up alliances in the Middle East to counter Iran, which was demonstrated in a massive Iranian missile and drone attack against Israel that fizzled.

When I say that “we” prevented this attack from succeeding, I mean we. This was a massive coordinated effort between the Israeli air force, the US Air Force, the RAF, and even the French, with help from the Saudis and Jordanians….

The response to this attack revealed the broad US-led coalition that we have built in the Middle East. Here’s an eye-opening report in the Wall Street Journal.

The formidable display of collective defense was the culmination of a decades-old but elusive US goal to forge closer military ties between Israel and its longtime Arab adversaries in an effort to counter a growing common threat from Iran.

Israeli and US forces intercepted most of the Iranian drones and missiles. But they were able to do so in part because Arab countries quietly passed along intelligence about Tehran’s attack plans, opened their airspace to warplanes, shared radar tracking information or, in some cases, supplied their own forces to help, officials said.

The operation was the culmination of years of US effort to break down political and technical barriers that thwarted military cooperation between Israel and the Sunni Arab governments, officials said. Instead of a Middle East version of the NATO alliance, the US has focused on less formal regionwide air-defense cooperation to blunt Tehran’s growing arsenal of drones and missiles—the very weapons that threatened Israel Saturday.

The Gulf Arab states have been in a cold war with Iran for a long time, and this is drawing them into a not-quite-open alliance with Israel. But their larger goal is to secure for themselves the kind of protection we just provided. As an expert quoted by the Journal put it, “Gulf countries know they still don’t have the same level of support that Israel gets from the United States and see what they did as a way of getting it in the future.”

“Eternity Has Fallen”

The only thing our enemies really have going for them is that they can count on some strong pockets of support back here in the US.

As for the left, I had some tart comments about the pro-Hamas protests on college campuses in the Spring (which did not really return in the Fall).

This is a historical re-enactment of the counterculture protests of the 1960s—but not our hazy, glamorized cultural recollection of those protests. This is a smaller-scale re-enactment of the real counterculture, with all its ugliness, its outside agitators, its insane far-left agenda, its authoritarian conformity masquerading as rebellion—and its admiration for truly evil, mass-murdering foreign dictatorships….

This is a full, unvarnished re-enactment of the 1960s counterculture, which play-acted “rebellion” while actually being fascinated with totalitarianism.

Yet there has also been a lot of support for dictatorship on today’s right. I guess Tulsi Gabbard counts as “the right” these days as she attempts to complete her journey from the Bernie Sanders campaign to the Trump cabinet. At any rate, she has a long history of being sympathetic toward Russia and downright friendly with former Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. There is no doubt that Tucker Carlson represents today’s right, and he just came out in defense of Assad in much the same terms that he has defended Putin.

But the events of the past year show how easily these regimes can be knocked down if they meet only a little bit of stiff resistance.

Israel demonstrated this with a stunningly successful operation against the Iranian-backed Hezbollah militia in Lebanon that reached its climax in September.

[I]f you’re keeping track, here’s the progression. Israel tracks Hezbollah cellphones and uses them to target its fighters, so they resort to using pagers. Israel intercepts the pagers, loads them with small explosive charges, and blows them up en masse. Hezbollah switches to walkie-talkies, only to discover Israel has rigged those, too. They meet in person and the meeting is bombed. And then Israel manages to track down the hidey hole of Hezbollah’s top leader and send him to Allah.

Here is what the organizational chart for Hezbollah looks like now. The only guy left is that one guy down on the lower right. And I’d be pretty nervous if I were him.

This is a stunningly successful intelligence operation that will be followed up by an Israeli ground operation to clear out Hezbollah missiles within range of Northern Israel. And it’s likely they will face little organized resistance, because hardly anybody is left to organize it.

This turned out to have effects far beyond Southern Lebanon. Hezbollah had been crucial as a source of fighters and vicious enforcers for the Assad regime in Syria. With Hezbollah suddenly out of commission, and with the Russians tied up in their own quagmire, the supports were knocked out from under the regime. Hence its sudden collapse within two months.

I drew some wider lessons from Assad’s collapse in Syria, particularly about the relative strength of free societies and dictatorships.

Pointing to South Korea, someone recently said to me—regretfully—that “democracies usually die.” I think it’s very premature to say that. Modern democracies are still very young on a historical scale, and while they have their turmoil and their backsliding, free societies are still stronger than they have been in most of history….

I’ll give the last word to a Syrian refugee in Turkey who describes the euphoria of the Syrian diaspora and looks back on the Assad regime.

One thing that was particularly awful about it was how permanent it made itself out to be. The official line was that Hafez Assad’s presence was with us “for eternity.” Well, no more. My social media feed has been buzzing with the slogan “eternity has fallen.”

I don’t know whether free societies are eternal—but we know damn well that dictatorship is not.

Oh, and speaking of South Korea, the parliament initially failed to impeach the president who impose a brief, failed martial law. But then they tried again and succeeded, and now he is facing a criminal investigation for the coup attempt. South Korea has lived under dictatorship within living memory, and perhaps that’s why they’re doing a bit better than we are at responding to this kind of threat to their constitution.

What Comes Next?

As a follow-up in Syria, the big question is: What comes next? Can the various factions in Syria live in peace with one another? Will a secular dictatorship just be replaced by a religious one?

A lot of this hinges on a guy named Ahmed al-Sharaa, the leader of the Islamist faction that launched the final assault that collapsed the regime. He has dropped his nom de guerre, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, and he swapped out his turban for military fatigues and then his fatigues for a suit. Since taking power in Damascus, he has been going around acting like George Washington, promising amnesty for soldiers of the old regime, freedom for women, a new constitution drafted by respected jurists, religious freedom, democracy, the rule of law. Those seem like funny things for an Islamist to do, don’t they?

Here's a CNN report:

Striking a more moderate tone, Sharaa has vowed to usher in an era of change driven by a vision of an inclusive Syria in which the country’s many religious and ethnic groups will be represented.

But with a $10 million US bounty on his head and as the current leader of a group that has been designated a terrorist organization by Washington and others, he faces an uphill battle to convince people that he is a changed man.

Unlike the Taliban in Afghanistan, which barred women from higher education, public spaces like parks and most jobs, the BBC reported that Sharaa said he would be much more inclusive and had pointed to HTS' record in regions it has governed in recent years, particularly in the city of Idlib in Syria’s northwest.

There, he said, universities had been teaching “for more than eight years,” adding, “I think the percentage of women in universities is more than 60%.

Sharaa also promised that a Syrian committee of legal experts would be formed to write a new constitution for the country. “They will decide. And any ruler or president will have to follow the law,” he said.

“He’s saying all of the things that I think Washington and Europe want to hear in terms of a transition leading to a government that’s inclusive and reflective of the will of all Syrians,” said Dana Stroul, a former senior Defense Department official who served in the Biden administration.

Then again, as the Middle East Media Research Institute documents, his faction has a real history of pro-al-Qaeda sentiment. A MEMRI analysis proposes what is perhaps the most likely outcome: a lightly oppressive moderate Islamist system modeled on authoritarian democracy in Turkey—which is, after all, Sharaa’s chief sponsor.

The scenario would be something like this:

The interim period produces some sort of constitutional document guaranteeing certain freedoms and setting up UN-supervised democratic elections in 2025. The dynamic and modest 42-year-old Ahmed Al-Shar'a wins them easily and becomes Syria's first Sunni Muslim, non-Baathist President in 60-plus years.

He rules as a democratically-elected illiberal authoritarian but with a relatively light hand. He already controls the country's new military, which were the former Syrian Islamist rebels. There are already inklings that this sort of "Islamist Light" model would be his preferred path to follow. In a discussion from April 2023, Al-Shar'a discussed the drawbacks of following a Saudi or Afghan model of enforcing Islamic norms that he saw as unsuitable for Syria….

We have a sense of how all of this could play out because we have the historical record of a decade of Islamist rule of rebel-held Idlib since 2015, especially since the Al-Shar'a-led HTS took all of Idlib city in July 2017. This is rule that was first more radical and disorganized but became more orderly and systematic over time but not without some degree of public dissatisfaction. Many of the civilian officials put in place by Al-Shar'a in Idlib then are now in new positions of authority, as interim ministers, in Damascus. The combination of Al-Shar'a political savvy, Qatar's money, and Turkey's security umbrella could actually succeed in delivering a better situation on the ground for most Syrians than the late-stage Assad regime. The new regime would be fortunate indeed that Assad has set the bar so low.

Such an outcome would be a threat to other countries. Not by failure but by success. Jordan, an authoritarian ally of the West with a restive, unhappy Sunni-majority population would be directly influenced by such events. Non-Islamist authoritarians in the region will be very unhappy at the success of such a provocative model.

This model was a step backward for Turkey, but it might actually be a step forward for Syria.

For now, the main thing is that this is a loss for the more radical and warlike regime in Iran—which this setback has helped push into a new and deeper economic crisis.

Although Iran has one of the biggest supplies of natural gas and crude oil in the world, it is in a full-blown energy crisis that can be attributed to years of sanctions, mismanagement, aging infrastructure, wasteful consumption—and targeted attacks by Israel.

“We are facing very dire imbalances in gas, electricity, energy, water, money and environment,” said President Masoud Pezeshkian in a live televised address to the nation this month. “All of them are at a level that could turn into a crisis.”…

For most of last week, the country was virtually shut down to save energy. As ordinary Iranians fumed and industrial leaders warned that the accompanying losses amounted to tens of billions of dollars, Mr. Pezeshkian could offer no solution other than to say he was sorry. “We must apologize to the people that we are in a situation where they have to bear the brunt,” Mr. Pezeshkian said. “God willing, next year we will try for this not to happen.”

More broadly, it is yet another reminder of the weakness of dictatorship. In Damascus or in Tehran or in Moscow, they tend to look very powerful and permanent right up to the moment they collapse.

I expect the incoming Trump administration to give Russia every chance to recover. More on that in top story #1 tomorrow. But we should always bear in mind how weak our enemies really are—so long as we have the will to confront and resist them.

A lot of these developments are at their beginnings, not their ends. So stay tuned in the New Year, when I will be covering all of this as it happens.

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This week, I’ve been counting down the top stories of 2024. At #5 is the search for secular alternatives to Christianity. At #4 is the rise in influence of the YIMBYs. Neither one of those stories is particularly bad, which doesn’t fit the overall tenor of this year, so as you might have guessed, we get to the worse stories now.

Top story #3 is the “crank realignment.”

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Hippies of the Right

I did not, alas, come up with the term “crank realignment.” I’m borrowing it from Matt Yglesias, who coined it in response to the mass defection in August of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s anti-vaccine faction—a cause long associated with the hippie-dippie left—to Donald Trump’s campaign.

Here’s how Yglesias put it:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s transition from semi-prominent Democrat to third party spoiler to Donald Trump endorser is emblematic of a broader, decade-long “crank realignment” in American politics.…

The partisan shifts of both Trump and RFK Jr. are part of a long term cycle in which educated professionals have gravitated toward the Democratic Party coalition and a generic suspicion of institutions and the people who run them has come to be associated with conservative politics. Conservative cranks are not even close to new (the John Birch Society, for example), but they’ve become increasingly prominent, which continues to push educated professionals into Democratic ranks. This generates more partisan alignment on questions like immigration (which in the 1980 and 1990s had basically no relationship partisanship), where views are closely related to psychological attributes that correlate with intelligence and educational attainment.

I think the issue is even broader than this. We’re in a period of about 60 years—the student protest movement on the left broke out in 1964—in which the dominant culture has become increasingly anti-institutional and anti-establishment. For most of that time, we’ve been able to count on the conservatives, for all their other faults, to hold the line and remind us of the importance of institutions. They may have wanted to reform the institutions, but they didn’t want to tear them all down. Until now.

I’m starting to think the real essence of Trumpism is that this is what happens when conservatives become “hippies of the right” and decide that they, too, want to burn down the institutions. (This, in turn, forces Democrats to become the conservative, institutionalist party, which is what they’re struggling to figure out right now. But that’s a new article.)

Yglesias ties the “crank realignment” to an educational realignment (and I have a piece forthcoming on that, too). But it’s important to remember that neither sorting by education nor sorting by sanity are all-or-nothing propositions. Both parties still have their share of the lumpenproletariat, so it’s more a matter of emphasis. It’s something like a 60-40 split that used to go one way and now goes the other way. But because the Republican Party now has a crank at the very, very top, his fellow cranks feel as if they run things. And if RFK and some of his associates get appointed to high-level positions, they will.

Yglesias sees an upside to the Crank Realignment in terms of his policy priorities.

When I was working at The American Prospect and we were trying to nudge the Democratic Party in a more progressive direction, it was a thorn in our side that there were so many people on the left who wanted to talk about how 9/11 was an inside job, GMOs were poisoning our children, and the FDA was ignoring damning evidence about vaccines and autism. We wanted marriage equality and a more generous welfare state, not a fuzzy agglomeration of anti-establishment viewpoints.

But he also worries that the cost is a narrowing of the Democratic coalition. Yet I have been cautioning that Democrats might be so panicked at the prospect of losing uneducated voters that they will seek the worst possible political coalition.

If I’m agitating for a “liberal” realignment of American politics, it’s partly because I live in terror that the realignment will come anyway—but it will be illiberal….

So just in the past few days, Ruy Teixeira sent out a post slavering over a peculiar demographic.

I looked at support/opposition to increasing the Medicare role in prescription drug pricing and support/opposition to the most popular proposal for cracking down on illegal immigration, using the president’s executive powers to directly stop illegal crossing at the southern border. I found that, comparing reported vote in 2020 to expressed vote preference today, the big shift toward Trump occurs precisely among those who both support an aggressive Medicare role in drug pricing and support using presidential powers to stop illegal border crossing.

There’s a lesson there for Democrats should they care to take it.

Let’s talk about what kind of implicit idea would cause someone to combine a traditionally conservative proposal (keeping out immigrants) with a traditionally leftist proposal (government price controls)—and do so in a way that so overwhelms every other consideration, including democracy itself, that it causes them to flip their vote.

The implicit premise is that government exists to hand out favors to “people like me”—and to kick everybody else in the teeth, especially poor immigrants coming here in search of a better life. That particular policy combination indicates a tribal mindset….

At any rate, this is precisely the political realignment I’m trying to avoid, one that brings together the worst of both worlds: bloated Big Government welfare-statism and paranoid, xenophobic nationalism.

There’s still a good chance that this is exactly what we’re going to get.

The crank realignment also explains the collapse of the Libertarian Party, which to be honest has always been a magnet for cranks and has just been waiting to be vacuumed up by the crank-in-chief. I commented on the key moment when the Libertarians held their national convention, where they were supposed to be highlighting their own candidates, and instead gave star billing to RFK and Donald Trump. When those two men joined forces, the Libertarians found it irresistible.

In my experience…, the weakness in the Libertarian movement was not about which ideas they should hold, but whether they needed ideas at all.

This was the main bone of contention between the (even smaller) Objectivist movement—us Ayn Rand people—and the libertarian movement…. Certainly, any large movement is going to have variations and vigorous debates about its philosophical foundations, and it has to be able to accommodate some diversity of views. But many libertarians took this to mean that their movement had no need for any philosophical ideas or foundation.

In practice, this tended to mean that libertarianism became a grab-bag of crackpots holding a variety of contradictory views. And also—well, if you’ve spent much time with libertarians, you know that some of them are just guys who like taking the most outrageously contrarian and socially unacceptable position, for which purpose traditional conservatism was just a bit too stuffy. Now nationalism offers them a better way to troll everyone.

All of this is underscored during the current presidential transition. Our new president, Elon Musk, just killed a spending bill and set us on a course to a government shutdown by rage-tweeting in the middle of the night. In response, Rand Paul—son of Ron Paul and the most prominent libertarian in government—suggested unironically that Republicans make Musk the Speaker of the House. “Nothing would disrupt the swamp more than electing Elon Musk…(not to mention the joy at seeing the collective establishment, aka 'uniparty,’ lose their ever-lovin’ minds).”

That sums up the contrarianism-for-its-own-sake that killed the Libertarian Party. They don’t care what they do or say, so long as it makes people mad.

The Tiny Coffins Party

But in absorbing the crackpots from the left and from the Libertarian Party, Republicans have been transforming themselves into the crackpot party. That includes a dangerous turn against vaccines—literally dangerous, in the sense that people are going to die because of it.

Trump’s biggest accomplishment in office was Operation Warp Speed, the program that provided massive financial guarantees and streamlined regulatory barriers to help pharmaceutical companies produce covid vaccines in record time. But it has been a long time since Trump stopped mentioning that at his rallies.

Trump is the populist candidate whose whole base of support is hatred of “the establishment” and “the elites,” which includes some worthy targets but also includes basically anyone with real expertise in a scientific field. This has made him a magnet for cranks and crackpots, and particularly anti-vaxxers.

He has now fully embraced their cause. In a leaked phone call prior to Kennedy’s endorsement, Trump criticized vaccines, and now he is actively campaigning on an anti-vaccine ultimatum. This is not just opposition to the covid vaccine, it’s opposition to all vaccines, and it is specifically opposition to vaccines for children. “On day one, I will sign a new executive order to cut federal funding for any school pushing Critical Race Theory, and I will not give one penny to any school that has a vaccine mandate or a mask mandate.”…

Whatever its causes, this is a rejection of at least 200 years of progress against infectious disease, and it shows the extent to which Republicans have become the Crackpot Party.

It has been so long since infectious diseases stalked the land that we have forgotten the consequences of this. But there’s a detail that jumps out at me in reports about a new measles outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo or about an old one in Samoa for which RFK is partly responsible: rows of tiny coffins. That may end of being the symbol of the anti-vax faction—and of the party that is about to put them in power.

In writing about this, I posed the following conundrum:

The extraordinary paradox of the last four years is that, in response to a global pandemic that killed millions, we developed a vaccine in record time, saving millions of lives and allowing the world to return to normal—yet the response has been a large increase in opposition to vaccines.

That’s something I discuss in an upcoming podcast with Dr. Amesh Adalja, which will be posted soon, and I’ll be writing more about it in the new year.

You will notice that I keep talking about upcoming articles and things I will write about in the new year. There is a lot going on, there will be many battles over the new Congress and the new administration, and I will be here to help you reason through it all.

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This week, I’m counting down the top stories of 2024, as covered in The Tracinski Letter.

At #5 was the increasingly urgent question of what replaces religious belief in an increasingly secular society. At #4 is something more directly and concretely political, and one of the few good trends that emerged this year: the rise of the YIMBYs.

Most of my readers are familiar with the YIMBY acronym by now, but here’s a quick refresher just in case. NIMBY, with an N, is an old acronym for Not in My Back Yard, which identifies the kind of person who will rise up to oppose any new construction or development because they want their immediate environment to remain exactly the same by imposing stasis on everyone around them. In practice, this tends toward BANANA: Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone. It is the one form of conservatism that is universal and crosses party lines. (That, and the idea that nobody should dare to touch any part of the welfare state that you personally benefit from.)

The challenge of this sort of movement is that it is easy for NIMBY movements to get angry people to organize against any new project—while the average person who would benefit from the project does not organize or show up for local planning meetings or possibly even know that the debate is happening.

But in the past ten years, a new YIMBY movement has risen up to counteract this. YIMBY stands for Yes in My Back Yard, and it was initially propelled by young people in urban areas who realized that the NIMBYs were making it hard for them to find an affordable place to live and nearly impossible for them ever to own a home. So this movement, too, has crossed the usual partisan lines, attracting young urban center-left types along with pro-free-marketers and classical liberals.

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The Supply Side Progressive Candidate

This year, the YIMBY movement achieved the milestone of having their cause adopted, partially and tentatively, by a major presidential candidate.

It was not the winning candidate. If it had been, this story would have been #2 in my countdown. But it is still a step forward, because the measure of success for a reform movement is that politicians start to feel the need to appease it.

As part of her campaign platform, Kamala Harris announced a push to relieve the housing shortage by setting the goal of building three million new homes. The actual proposal was a bit of a jumble, and here’s how I reviewed it.

Here is the key passage, taken a bit at a time.

There’s a serious housing shortage in many places. It’s too difficult to build, and it’s driving prices up.

As president, I will work in partnership with industry to build the housing we need, both to rent and to buy. We will take down barriers and cut red tape, including at the state and local levels. And by the end of my first term, we will end America’s housing shortage by building 3 million new homes and rentals that are affordable for the middle class, and we will do that together.

This is very good. It recognizes that the problem with housing is, to borrow a phrase, on the supply side. We are suffering from a housing famine. And it talks about taking down “barriers…at the state and local levels,” an almost-but-not-quite-explicit reference to zoning laws that limit construction….

Harris’s proposal apparently includes “a $40 billion innovation fund” to “empower”—i.e., bribe—“local governments to fund and support local solutions to build housing.” Maybe it will work, and a Democratic president exerting pressure on the blue states might accomplish something.

But then Harris follows with this.

And we will make sure those homes actually go to working- and middle-class Americans, not just investors…. Some corporate landlords collude with each other to set artificially high rental prices, often using algorithms and price-fixing software to do it. It’s anticompetitive, and it drives up costs. I will fight for a law that cracks down on these practices.

Rising rents and housing prices, like grocery prices, are an effect, not a cause. Rents are not going up because speculators are buying homes. Speculators are buying homes because rents are going up. This section of the speech is a relapse from the previous one. Harris briefly expressed a supply-side perspective—then lost sight of it.

This insistence that we’re going to build new homes, but not if icky corporations profit from it, is reminiscent of the contradiction of the “Supply Side Progressives,” who want America to build and grow but prefer only Big Government initiatives as the way to do it.

Since Harris lost, the details of her own proposals are no longer relevant, but the YIMBY movement lives on.

The YIMBY Caucus

There is now officially a YIMBY Caucus in Congress.

House members aligned with the YIMBY—or Yes in My Backyard—movement are launching a first-of-its-kind, bipartisan caucus to help advance their case that America’s housing shortage is largely due to local regulations that make it too difficult to build new homes.

Led by California Democratic Rep. Robert Garcia, the YIMBY Caucus is set to launch today with 25 members who agree on one key concept: that the solution to America’s affordable housing problem is to accelerate production.

Read this interview with Rep. Garcia, where he explains how Democrats and Republicans in the caucus get along on this issue:

Obviously, we have different ideas about policy and some bigger debates. But, in this caucus, we all agree that there is a housing crisis. We also agree that, oftentimes, housing policy is overregulated. And I think both sides understand that. For us, as Democrats or progressives, we understand that being a YIMBY is about jobs, growth. It’s also about deregulation. A lot of Republicans would say the same thing.

My impressions in that YIMBYism has gone from a small fringe movement to become part of the mainstream of the center-left. For the immediate future, though, most of what happens on this issue is going to happen on the state and local level.

The impetus for that is growing, and it is fueled by a political necessity that Democrats are just now waking up to. One of the direct effects of NIMBYism is that has been driving people out of the “blue states” that vote for Democrats and essentially paying them to move to Republican-dominated “red states,” thereby increasing the political power of those states.

Those voters do not necessarily move to the right in their own views, and they often live in urban enclaves where their immediate neighbors share their outlook on most things. (The big geographic divide in American politics right now is urban versus rural.) But they are a political minority in their new states, so they end up adding to the its representation in Congress and in the Electoral College without moving it substantially to the left.

I’m already seeing articles like this one sounding the alarm: “California, Oregon and New York are just five years away from losing 10 congressional seats and electoral college votes to Republican states.”

It’s not a quirky local issue anymore. The housing crisis in Blue State America warrants intervention by state and national-level Democrats because their pitiful housing production will cost the Democrats the Congress and the Electoral College.

Congressional seats are appointed to each state per decennial Census as a national percentage share of 435 seats. For example, after Census 2020 was counted, California represented 12% of the national population so California has 52 representatives in Congress. The Electoral College allocates points off the number of congresspeople a state has, plus two more electoral votes for each state. California for decades has had the largest share of Congressional representation and Electoral Votes.

But at this projected rate of population growth, California will be passed by Texas in twenty years. More immediately, Democrats are likely to be damaged by California, Oregon and New York’s decline in power in the 2032 presidential election.

So Democrats and the left now have a very clear political incentive to solve this problem—if they can manage to overcome some of their old anti-business, anti-development prejudices. And I am not at all sure they can do that.

Mind Your Own Damn Business

This year’s election did bring out another small but promising thread in Democratic Party politics: Democrats have begun to make an attempt to steal the theme of “freedom” from the Republicans, who have dropped it.

Vice-president candidate Tim Walz, who was a disappointment in other respects, led off this theme.

The best thing to come out of Walz’s part of the campaign, so far, is this statement of old-fashioned cultural liberalism.

Some of us in here are old enough to remember…when it was Republicans who were talking about freedom. It turns out now what they meant was the government should be free to invade your doctor's office in Minnesota. We respect our neighbors and their personal choices that they make, even if we wouldn't make the same choice for ourselves. There's a golden rule: Mind your own damn business…. When vice president [Harris] and I talk about freedom, we mean the freedom to make your own health care decisions.

It would be nice, of course, if they applied this “golden rule” of “mind your own damn business” to other issues, too. But don’t expect it.

By the convention, this became literally the Democrats’ top priority.

I found out in my research that this was actually designated in one party meeting as “Message Imperative #1.” Here’s the report in Mother Jones.

On Tuesday afternoon, in one of the convention’s massive conference rooms, a couple dozen delegates attended a training session on how to most effectively speak to voters about abortion and reproductive health. “We are reclaiming the word freedom and we are running on freedom,” Gabby Richards, Planned Parenthood’s director of federal advocacy communications, explained to the crowd. A slide displayed on two large screens read: “Message Imperative #1: Focus on Freedom.”

I also combed through the transcript of the September 11 presidential debate and found an interesting pattern. Kamala Harris used the word “freedom” four times, in two very prominent passages. By contrast, how many times did Trump use “freedom”? Zero—and this is typical of his speeches. It’s a shocking reversal from the past 50 years, when Republicans from Ronald Reagan through the Tea Party movement practically trademarked the word.

I noted the problems with this approach.

After a decade or so of letting themselves be defined by the censorious “woke” left that wants to micromanage everything you say, Democrats are attempting a return to old-fashioned 20th Century left-liberalism. It’s the liberalism that will defend your freedom “to live the life you want to lead”—in those areas that pertain to your personal life, your lifestyle, and especially your sex life. You will be free to read the books you like, to get married to someone of the same sex, to get an abortion, and so on.

But the freedom is limited to those issues. In your economic life, you’re going to be told what to do an awful lot, particularly if you are producer of goods and services, rather than a consumer. That, again, is a part of the old “liberal” creed, which Ayn Rand memorably describes as the view of man as “a soul freewheeling to the farthest reaches of the universe—but wearing chains from nose to toes when he crosses the street to buy a loaf of bread.” Quite literally to buy a loaf of bread, if it is deemed to be “price-gouging.”

But I also noted how Republicans have been pushing Democrats in this direction.

This is what happens when the Republicans, under the influence of an illiberal nationalist movement, become increasingly hostile to freedom and individual rights and increasingly willing to infringe upon freedom in their chosen realm. (“The conservatives,” Ayn Rand wrote, “see man as a body freely roaming the earth, building sand piles or factories—with an electronic computer inside his skull, controlled from Washington.”) The Democrats have sensed the opportunity and decided to take up the banner of freedom—but in the way they are comfortable with, limiting freedom to one realm and denying it in the other.

Harris and Walz did not win, so one of the things to look for is whether Democrats continue on this path or conclude that it failed and abandon it. My nightmare is that they decide that the American people want unhinged populism and deliver their own version of it. Right now, having been (very narrowly) denied the mandate of the vox populi, Democrats are in a period of despair, confusion, and in some cases pre-emptive surrender, so there is no way to tell what direction the party will go once they have to confront Trump in office.

And look, I don’t have any great hopes for the Democrats. But it would be very good if we found somebody in politics who is willing to stand up for some aspect of freedom. Here’s how I put it:

Freedom has two main aspects: personal and economic. To have one party advocating one of these freedoms is better than having no party advocating either, which is where we’ve been heading in recent decades.

That is a preview of some of the items higher up on my list this year’s top stories—and it’s the main story I’ll be tracking in the new year.

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It is time for me to count down the top stories of this year, particularly as covered in The Tracinski Letter.

At #5 is something that is definitely not a breaking news story, but I spent a lot of time on it, and I think it explains some of the big breaking news stories. It is the long-term decline of religious belief—and the cultural confusion and anxiety over what fills that cultural vacuum.

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“The Paradox of Heterodox Orthodoxy”

The big new development this year is the rise of “Cultural Christianity” or the “Culture War Christian”—the intellectual who doesn’t necessarily believe in God, but who thinks that Christianity is still somehow necessary for the cultural defense of Western Civilization.

This was heralded late last year by the defection of Muslim apostate and celebrity atheist Ayaan Hirsi Ali. But it was a curious kind of conversion. As I noted at the time:

What you may notice about this case for Christianity is how hollow and instrumental it is, making no mention of the actual religious doctrines of Christianity or even that somewhat important figure in the religion, Jesus….

Hirsi Ali initially quotes Bertrand Russell, whose essay “Why I Am Not a Christian” was part of her conversion from Islam, as saying, “Fear is the basis of the whole thing—fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death.” And then the only reason she can give us for becoming a Christian is fear of China, fear of Islam, fear of wokeness.

Elon Musk, who was never much of an independent thinker, has also gone over, making vague noises about Christian values.

Early this year, I linked to a good article in Persuasion by Matt Johnson describing how these Culture War Christians are bringing religious dogma back to the “heterodox community.” Then Cathy Young leapfrogged us all with the magnificent phrase, “the paradox of heterodox orthodoxy.” Basically, this is what happens when “anti-woke” intellectuals rebel against the dogmas of the far left—but don’t have the independence of mind to come up with an alternative worldview based on their own observation.

I added to Johnson’s critique of this phenomenon.

Johnson focuses too much on grounding Western liberalism in “Enlightenment rationalism and skepticism.” That’s true (depending on the meaning of “skepticism”), but there’s a deeper and more convincing answer.

Conservatives try to ground Western Civilization on the “Judeo-Christian tradition”—you know, the one that crashed Western Civilization the first time it became widely accepted. But they write out of history the true source of unique Western culture: the Greco-Roman tradition. The distinctive culture of the West was created—and even the idea of “the West” as culturally distinct from “the East,” originated by Herodotus in response to Persian invasions—by Greek scientists and philosophers centuries before the birth of Christ, and at about the same time the books of the Old Testament were first being written down.

I can’t emphasize this enough. “Western Civilization” cannot be based on Christianity, because it predates the birth of Christ by at least five centuries. I have an article coming out soon that is very specifically about the pre-Judeo-Christian origins of our civilization, though it probably won’t be published until January.

But I’ve spent much of this year attempting to convince people of the viable cultural and intellectual alternatives to Christianity—alternatives that are not merely theoretical, but already here.

Is There Something in the Nothing?

I announced this objective early on, while giving more information about a relatively new poll quantifying the decline in belief. Here are the important figures from the poll.

“Today, about 28% of US adults are religiously unaffiliated, describing themselves as atheists, agnostics or ‘nothing in particular’ when asked about their religion.” Note that this is significantly more than the number of evangelicals (24%) or Catholics (23%). It is the largest religious category in America—not a majority (yet), but a large plurality—and it has grown rapidly, up from only 16% in 2007.

But what does “nothing in particular” actually mean. Is there something in the nothing?

“In our latest data, 17% of ‘nones’ identify as atheist, 20% say they are agnostic, and 63% choose ‘nothing in particular.’”

Does believing in “nothing in particular” actually mean believing in nothing?

[H]ere’s the most interesting result. Pew asked the “nones” how they make moral decisions. “When asked how they decide between right and wrong, 83% of ‘nones’ say the desire to avoid hurting other people is a key factor. And 82% of ‘nones’ say logic and reason are extremely or very important when they decide between right and wrong.”

That’s actually not a bad start. This line from Pew consultant Ryan Cragun, quoted in a Washington Post report, is better:

Cragun said he subscribes to a theory of Swiss sociologist Jörg Stolz that a key driving force behind religion’s decline is “the culmination of growing autonomy in society. People don’t like being told what they should do or what they should not do, especially when the teller isn’t especially qualified. Increasingly, people are saying, ‘Why do I need a pastor to tell me what to do? What makes them any more insightful than this academic journal?’ The rise of the nones is the manifestation of a move toward greater autonomy of individuals.”

Reason and autonomy are a good basis for a civilization. But I am not entirely optimistic.

Then again, people who really do believe in “nothing in particular” could potentially be harnessed for just about everything. One of the more compelling analyses of the Trump phenomenon is that his supporters are nominally religious people who have lost the substance of their faith. I would describe it this way: It’s what happens when you still have the epistemology of religion, but without its metaphysics.

Put differently, I would say that nationalist conservatism presents itself as an attempt to revive Christianity but is actually proof of its collapse. But that’s another article for the new year.

For this year, I defined the task I have set for myself on this issue.

This will be a difficult and potentially dangerous transitional period. The “nones” could clearly benefit from discovering a more explicit foundation for a life without god: art, literature, and philosophy that defines and defends reason and individual autonomy.It is a vast opportunity to put more something into the nothing.

Man at the Center of a Godless World

I followed this with an exploration in The UnPopulist of how atheism provides a foundation for political liberalism. I introduced it to this list by citing a few crucial excerpts.

My goal was to reconnect atheism back to the older tradition of Enlightenment ideas. The two key philosophical ideas I focused on are reason and individualism.As for reason:

There is a direct connection between the naturalist worldview of atheism, its reliance on observation and reasoning, and political freedom. To value reason is to value the process of reasoning. In a universe without supernatural revelation, no one arrives at the truth instantaneously—or infallibly. All knowledge requires a process of inquiry, deliberation, rigorous questioning and debate, and above all a free flow of information. To value reason requires that you value the freedom to engage in this process.

As for individualism:

All authoritarian systems are built on the idea that there is some higher purpose that takes precedence over your own life and goals, justifying the supervening coercion of church and state. But in a godless worldview, this makes no sense. Our individual lives and our enjoyment of them are the highest purpose, by virtue of being the only purposes.

But most of all, I wanted to convey that an atheist worldview can be more than just a set of philosophical arguments. It can also be its own secular form of spirituality.

To grasp the power and grandeur of the human mind does not require any leap of faith or specialized theology. We only need to look out at the world and observe. There is abundant evidence of the human capacity to think, to understand, to create, to build, and to express itself. There is also abundant evidence that this capacity is a necessity of our survival and the source of mankind’s greatest accomplishments: the scientific and technological achievements of the modern world; the debates that led to crucial political reforms; the highest expressions in art and music.

If you look at everything that humans have accomplished, you realize that the individual human at the center of a godless world is not a small or pathetic figure. We are giants.

Astute readers may notice that this formulation of “man at the center of a godless world” is a subtle reference to National Review’s infamous review of Atlas Shrugged, which dismissed that possibility.

I also expanded on what I see as my overall goal.

The “New Atheists” of a few decades ago were engaged in a pitched battle to make the case for atheism and pry people away from their residual loyalty to the old creeds. That battle is over, and we’re going to need a new wave of atheist advocacy to help give philosophical and spiritual substance to a new era of unbelief that is already upon us.

The Inner Light

Given my interest specifically in the spiritual aspects of a secular worldview, I have also written about secular art and how popular culture fandom is already replacing the Biblical Cinematic Universe.

Specifically, I look at the role of “shared spirituality,” that is, “a set of common experiences and references that help us talk about these issues and find a sense of community and fellowship.”

The answer to that need is already here, and chances are you are already a fan. Secular art and literature deal with the same spiritual issues as religion, and this includes mass popular culture with its franchises and fandoms, to which we are already transferring some of the sense of loyalty and personal identity that used to be the hallmarks of religion.

Back in the 1950s and ’60s, Hollywood produced a series of grand-scale Biblical epics that you might think of as the Biblical Cinematic Universe. These days, we are replacing that with the Marvel Cinematic Universe and its various rivals and copycats.

A lot of this is based on an article I wrote eight years ago about the proliferation of fictional “universes,” which holds up really well. For the present purpose, I zero in on one aspect of this phenomenon.

Each of these sci-fi and fantasy series is not just a franchise but a literary universe, not only in the sense of a shared setting with distinctive terminology, but also in a more esthetic and even spiritual sense. All works of art create their own “universe” in the sense of a distinctive view of the universe, of human beings and what we ought to expect from the world….

So in addition to matching the scope of religious mythology, these fictional universes also serve the same spiritual function as religion.

And while “I would personally prefer if people were spending more time reading long, highbrow philosophical novels”—there is not, as yet, an Ayn Rand Cinematic Universe—I point out that a widely shared cultural touchstone needs to draw from popular culture, which is less intellectually demanding….

And the biggest advantage of these literary alternatives to religion is that this time around, we know it’s all fiction….

The result: “Our participation in these fictional universes satisfies our spiritual need for a coherent view of the world and a way to express our values, and it helps us share our enthusiasm with like-minded people. But it does so in a way that leaves each of us, individually, as the arbiter of what we think is true and right.”

More recently, so recently that I won’t repeat much of it, I followed up on how secular fiction can capture “the inner light” of human existence. I conclude: “Christianity is not the only source of answers to the big questions and needs of life—nor was it the first.” Like I said, I’ll be addressing that in more depth soon, so stay tuned.

This is at #5 in this year’s countdown because it is not a matter of urgent, breaking news, though it is at least one of the factors behind the rise of Christian nationalism on the right and its search for a political savior. But it is definitely a big, long-term trend of our era, and I don’t think people are paying enough attention to it.

I’ll be continuing my countdown throughout this week, but remember that The Tracinski Letter depends on support from its readers. So please consider subscribing at the current 10% off sale rate.

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I have been writing a series of “pocket guides” for The Atlas Society—short pamphlets on aspects of Ayn Rand’s philosophy intended primarily for an audience of students and newbies.

The latest one is out now, the Pocket Guide to Free Speech, and I’d like to share a few interesting angles I came across while researching and writing it.

But first, I’ll mention the pamphlet I wrote before that, the Pocket Guide to Ayn Rand, an attempt to pack an overview of Ayn Rand’s life, her novels, her philosophy, and a little bit about the history of the Objectivist movement into 6,000 words. It is necessarily written from something of a 30,000-foot perspective, but that’s exactly what is needed for the intended audience of people who have newly discovered Rand.

And don’t forget my longer and more in-depth books: So Who Is John Galt, Anyway? A Reader’s Guide to Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and What Went Right? An Objectivist Theory of History. These are still available for delivery by Christmas and would make excellent gifts.

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Parrhesia

There is a lot of interesting research material that I just couldn’t cram into a short guide to freedom of speech.

For example, one fascinating sideline is the Ancient Greek roots of freedom of speech. They did not have free speech in a modern form, but they did have a concept called “parrhesia,” which literally translated means “say everything.” It refers to the right and the obligation to speak one’s mind frankly in public deliberation.

But it’s much deeper and older than that.

Read more

The main story of the past week is, quite obviously, the sudden and dramatic collapse of the Assad regime in Syria.

But first a short follow-up about the coup attempt in South Korea.

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“Aren’t You Ashamed?”

The more I see about South Korean president Yoon Suk Yeol’s fleeting coup attempt, the more I see it as a possible preview of the near future in the US.

Yoon was elected by a historically narrow margin which he treated as a mandate, trying to enact an unpopular agenda and to suppress whatever he called “fake news.” In reaction, voters gave the opposition party a strong majority in the legislature, which obstructed his agenda. So in frustration he declared martial law and attempted essentially to suspend or dissolve the legislature, egged on by a defense minister who was his crony.

After the coup attempt, which failed largely because the army had not yet been politically purged and refused to go along, the legislature attempted to impeach him. But his party rallied around him and walked out, narrowly denying the supermajority necessary for impeachment. The leader of the president’s party is now saying Yoon will leave office early, but the promise is still vague.

You could see all of this happening in some form in the US over the next four years. That includes this bizarre headline in the Washington Post’s story on the case: “South Korea’s President Avoids Impeachment after Martial Law Misstep.” Misstep? There have been a lot of headlines like this in the past few years that betray an attitude toward politics in which everything is just a game, and the question is not whether an action is right but whether you can get away with it.

It looks (so far) like Yoon won’t get the chance to stage another coup attempt, but as in the US, South Korea’s democracy is not responding to this challenge as sharply or effectively as we might wish. The system is supported by norms that tend to bend and break when an aggressive would-be strongman pushes at them.

There’s one other twist that is distinctive to South Korea but has echoes in the US. Yoon was elected in part with support from young South Korean men who are rebelling against the fading of traditional gender roles. I’ve recently done some reading on South Korea’s catastrophically low birth rates. Part of the cause is a long anti-fertility campaign, from the 1960s into the 1990s, driven by the overpopulation hysteria. But the main reason South Korea hasn’t been able to reverse course is that it has one of the most educated female populations in the world—combined with extremely traditional gender roles in which women are expected to quit their jobs and do all the work of tending to the house and the children. In response, South Korean women have essentially been going on strike—and some of the men resent it.

All of that is just to set you up for the story of An Gwiryeong, the toughest chick in Korea.

In the groundswell of fury and defiance that erupted among South Koreans after their president declared martial law, curtailing the country’s hard-won freedoms, it was perhaps the iconic moment.

As parliamentarians scrambled to get inside the National Assembly building to reverse the emergency measure, a woman in a leather coat confronted one of the soldiers who was trying to stop the lawmakers, grabbed his automatic rifle and tried to tug it away while yelling “Aren’t you ashamed?”

As the soldier backed away, he raised the rifle’s barrel toward the woman. She pressed on, grabbing it as it was pointed at her chest, still yelling, before he gave up, turned, and walked away.

Video of the encounter quickly went viral and became a social media rallying cry that helped fuel the six-hour outburst of protest before President Yoon Suk Yeol was forced to rescind the martial law order early Wednesday morning.

“Aren’t you ashamed?” seems like a good rallying cry—and judging from the results, an effective one.

Pointing to South Korea, someone recently said to me—regretfully—that “democracies usually die.” I think it’s very premature to say that. Modern democracies are still very young on a historical scale, and while they have their turmoil and their backsliding, free societies are still stronger than they have been in most of history.

More to the point, dictatorships die much more often and usually more suddenly. That bring us to the news from Syria.

How to Kill Another Terrorist State

The big headline news of the past few weeks is the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s dictatorship in Syria, in a civil war most of us had written off as a stalemate years ago. That in itself is an important lesson. Assad held out against rebellion for 13 years—and then his regime collapsed in a little more than a week. Rebels in the north launched a new uprising on November 27, and rebels from the south were entering Damascus by December 7. Assad has fled to Moscow, and Russia now has one more ophthalmologist.

How did his regime collapse so quickly?

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In the past few weeks a variety of businessmen and media types have dutifully trooped to Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate to court his influence. It has become the seat of imperial intrigue, with hopefuls swarming to the resort and to local hotels to claim their place at court.

This has led to some of the usual bizarre excesses of an imperial court, including comments about Mar-a-Lago face.

Many in Donald Trump's inner circle appear to have gone under the plastic surgeon’s knife, creating what is now being dubbed the “Mar-a-Lago” face. Defined by copious use of Botox, a Miami-bronze tan, puffy lips, and silky smooth skin, plastic surgeons told DailyMail.com it was giving Trumpland an almost “plastic” and “Real Housewives” look. Some have suggested that the shift in the appearance of Trump's closest aides could be down to a desire to please the President-elect, who has been accused of having a preference for attractive subordinates.

It is appropriate that courtiers are remaking their faces, to reflect the way they have remade their souls.

Perhaps the award for ultimate sycophancy has to go to a young staffer with a peculiar job description.

A 33-year-old former far-right cable host, Ms. Harp is nearly always at Mr. Trump’s side. She has written him a series of devotional letters, including one that said, “You are all that matters to me.” Once, when Mr. Trump was playing golf in Scotland, she ran behind his cart to keep him up to date with positive stories and social media posts.

Little known beyond Mr. Trump’s immediate orbit, Ms. Harp is now poised to play a potentially influential role in his White House, sitting right outside the Oval Office and acting as the conduit for a largely unsupervised flow of information to and from the president and helping him with his social media feed.

She has no official title, but during the campaign, colleagues referred to her as the “human printer” because she followed Mr. Trump around with a portable printer and a battery pack to charge it, so she could hand him information in hard copy, as he prefers.

But Ms. Harp also established herself at the center of a fast-moving carousel of text messages, articles and tidbits directed at Mr. Trump. This has generated concern among other aides who feel she has been far too willing to serve as a funnel for conspiratorial information at a moment when Mr. Trump appears more contemptuous than ever of attempts to manage or control him. One of her go-to news sources, people who have observed her say, is the website Gateway Pundit, which frequently disseminates conspiracy theories embraced by the far right.

I think it’s amusing that people say Trump doesn’t like to be managed or controlled, when he is so easily manipulated by whoever can gain access to his highly selective flow of information.

But there is a more serious side to this. Like most imperial courts, this one elevates the vicious, corrupt, and incompetent.

Let’s Annoy Each Other

But first a request.

I’ve written recently about the most annoying way this all ends: Donald Trump comes into office promising to all sorts of awful things, but then he gets bogged down in legislative opposition, lawsuits, obstruction by state governments, embarrassing scandals, and so on, and his authoritarian agenda dies a death by a thousand cuts. It’s the most annoying outcome because if it succeeds, everyone will tell us how foolish we were to be alarmed about Trump—which they will be able to say precisely because we took the threat seriously.

It may be annoying, but this is one of the better outcomes we can expect. So let’s all do our best to annoy each other. I’ll be doing my part, and you can help by giving a donation to support The Tracinski Letter.

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“Prophet Elvis”

Some of the people around Trump are real ideological fanatics. Remember the Project 2025 agenda we warned you about? One of the people behind it, Russ Vought, is headed into a key position in the new administration and has described himself as a Christian Nationalist.

In a podcast with Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) last year, Vought said that he and his organization, the Center for Renewing America, had a priority: establishing that “we’re not a secular country. That we are a Christian Nation as founded and that should be shared by everyone even if they have religious liberty for another faith.”

Then there is RFK, Jr., who has been on a long crusade against medical science. See a profile of his malign international influence, which contains this doozy:

Along the way, Mr. Kennedy has partnered with, financed or promoted fringe figures—people who claim that 5G cellphone towers cause cancer, that homosexuality and contraceptive education are part of a global conspiracy to reduce African fertility, and that the World Health Organization is trying to steal countries’ sovereignty.

One of his group’s advisers, in Uganda, suggested using “supernatural insight” and a man she calls Prophet Elvis to guide policymaking. “We do well to embrace ethereal means to get ahead as a nation,” she wrote on a Ugandan news site this year.

This is the replacement of science with a literal witch-doctor approach.

Read more

I have a new piece up at Discourse following up on a topic I’ve been writing about for a while: the decline of religious belief in America, following its decline in Europe, and what comes afterward. I wrote about this several times previously in Discourse, one of the editors there wrote a piece in response, and this is my attempt to address some of her concerns.

The central problem, as I put it, is that “a lot of people are having trouble visualizing a viable alternative to religion—yet that alternative is already here.” I give an extended example from the Star Trek franchise, describing “the kind of secular spirituality, secular devotion, and even secular ritual that I’ve been proposing will take the place of religion.” I chose that for a number of reasons, including the fact that I am myself a fan (and the example is one of my favorite episodes)—but also because it is a large fandom, so you can see that it is already serving a spiritual role for a significant subculture.

Then I take a brief look at the pre-Christian Classical tradition, and its continuing influence today, and conclude that “Christianity is not the only source of answers to the big questions and needs of life—nor was it the first.” I have a lot more on that forthcoming in a separate article at Discourse, addressing the phenomenon of the Culture War Christians.

But the main thing is this point that “it’s not just speculation. It’s already happening. People who are used to more traditional forms may have difficulty accepting this as an alternative—but people out in the world are actually adopting it.”

Read the whole thing.

Discourse

The Inner Light

I have been returning for a while to one of the unappreciated challenges of our era: What happens as traditional religion fades…

Read more

2 months ago · Robert Tracinski

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Also consider giving a gift subscription to someone you think would value a defense of reason and individualism in today’s world. Substack has added a “schedule for later” feature, so you can buy a gift subscription now and check it off your list, but have it delivered (virtually) closer to Christmas.

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I’ve also noticed a problem with Substack’s setup on this. It offers two options: a one-month gift subscription or a one-year gift subscription, so you can give a small gift or a big one—and nothing in between. I’ve asked them to expand the options, but in the meantime, I set up a page on PayPal for giving a six-month gift subscription.

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There should be an option at PayPal to include a message, so let me know the recipient’s e-mail and any gift message you’d like to send, or e-mail me with that information by replying to any edition of this newsletter.

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