Late last year, our friend wrote a beautiful meditation on burnout, gesturing at transcendent salvation. This week, prods Ian’s argument and kicks off a fascinating conversation.

Ian, I want to ask you about a couple themes from your recent essay “Burnout and Hope.”

You wonder how to diagnose the cause of the “signature affliction of our age”. Is it, as Byung-Chul Han, the South Korean philosopher you were writing about, puts it, the result of excess positivity, coalescence, frictionlessness? Or is it, as Roberto Esposito puts it, the result of too much negativity, tension, conflict? Regardless of the details, looking for the cause of some thing itself implies accepting that that thing exists – i.e., it implies accepting Han’s central claim that there is some uniquely contemporary malady of alienation plaguing us all in the twenty-first century.

I am suspicious of this type of claim. I want to push you to explore why that is. But before that, let’s clarify what your claim is by clarifying what it’s not.

First, there is of course a very trivial sense in which the maladies of the twenty-first century are unique. After all, it has never been the twenty-first century before. So too, there is a trivial sense in which I am uniquely different today than I was yesterday. This is nothing to write home about: we only care about uniqueness when it reflects something substantive: when, for example, I really have substantively changed as a person. So this is surely not what you — or others — could be saying.

Second, and related, it is of course true that the features of a particular time can change the particular appearance of a kind of affliction. A sense of alienation may appear different in virtue of being partially shaped by, for example, the ubiquity of smartphones. But this is mere appearance, not substantive difference. Let’s call this “apparent uniqueness.” But I don’t take you to be making this claim, either, because this just reduces to the triviality of the temporally unique claim.

What I take you to be saying, rather, is that our current age has a substantively unique malady of alienation, one brought on by the contingent features of our time, that has, in a non-trivial sense, never occurred before.

I think this version of the claim is just not true. And I think it is just not true for reasons that are rooted in the Great Books education that you and I share:

I’m thinking about Augustine’s Confessions and his deeply-felt sense that our fallen nature is what permanently and irrevocably alienates us from our surroundings. We cannot be one with nature; we must toil constantly just to gather enough sustenance to make it another day. We cannot be one with others, as we are cursed to fall victim to our physical desires — making us, in turn, not even fully one with ourselves.

I’m thinking about Pascal, who wrote in his Pensées that we are forever drifting away from our footing in time; how despite our only ever living in the present, we are helpless to wander off to the past or the future — falling ill with nostalgia or worrying endlessly about what’s to come.

I’m thinking about Marx, who takes the very practice of waged labor to alienate the worker from their preferences and will. In thinking about Marx, I’m also thinking about Cicero (an apparent proto-Marxist?) who wrote that “the very wage that [laborers] receive is a pledge of their slavery.” If Marx (and Cicero) are right, then we have been alienated from ourselves, our desires, our projects, and our preferences for as long as we have received wages in exchange for work — meaning, really, forever.

The fact that this sense of alienation has been written about all throughout history makes me deeply suspicious of the claim that there is anything substantively unique about the alienation we experience in the twenty-first century. If there is anything unique about the alienation of today, it’s a mere difference in appearance, not anything deeper. That means that if we weren’t alienated due to X, we’d just be alienated due to Y.

I think the most realistic version of the claim is just going to be that the twenty-first century’s alienation is apparently unique: a boring claim indeed. But we should expect descriptions of our core nature to be pretty boring; after all, the human race has been doing this for a long time.

Ripley, I’m grateful for your probing response to my essay. You’ve opened it up to fundamental questions, to which I’m not sure I can do anything like justice. But here goes.

It seems to me that we enjoy a basic agreement — namely, that there is such a thing as human nature, and related experiences that hold across different times and cultures. I understand you to be arguing that, insofar as we suffer alienation, we suffer from a condition well-known to Augustine, Pascal, Marx, and presumably many others; and whatever might be apparently unique to us is, ultimately, trivial. I of course accept (part of) this: without a basis of shared experience, communication across the ages would be hopeless. We could toss our Augustine down the chute.

But I am not sure that it escapes the accusation of triviality to say that a basic experience is shared across time: for example, that Plato loved, and so did Dante, and so did Iris Murdoch. I think — and here, I believe, is the substance of our disagreement — that this gives too little weight to history.

There are, after all, genuinely novel historical experiences. Take boredom, a word that does not appear in English until the nineteenth century. I consider that to be credible evidence that the phenomenon, at least as we understand it, did not exist until relatively recently. Whatever doldrums he might have experienced, Achilles was never bored. Likewise, innovations in language do not just represent emotions; they create them. (Because of Shakespeare we can feel “bitter cold.”) And when languages lose the ability to express certain emotional states, those emotional states decay and even disappear.

Or, to put it differently: think of it by analogy to epidemiology. You appear to be arguing that we all have the flu, and while sometimes it “presents” as Flu A, sometimes as Flu B, these are essentially the same sickness. It seems to me, though, quite important how a malady presents. The fact that we are experiencing this strain of alienation at the moment, as opposed to that strain, or these symptoms and not those symptoms, has a material effect on our diagnostic and therapeutic efforts.

Perhaps we could state it as a problem of genus vs. species. I agree with you that, in some fundamental sense, we all suffer from the genus of alienation or estrangement or inward disunity. But different species of that genus appear at different times and in different places. If we wish to understand our particular time and place, it helps to be specific.

Your response is helpful, Ian, in particular because it allows me to think more deeply about what’s really at stake for me here.

First, I’m a little suspicious about this first inference — that “boredom” as a word not existing until the 19^th century is good evidence that we weren’t ever bored before. The diagnosis of “post-partum depression” didn’t exist until recently, but why should we think that no mother suffered from post-partum depression until the term was created? Surely there’s some reasonable alternate story where the malady always existed, but we just lacked the tools to identify it as such (perhaps because people weren’t looking).

Are you attached primarily to the strongest version of that inference? Or are you amenable to a weaker version, where perhaps we were bored before “boredom” came around but in a different way? Maybe there’s something about naming a concept that partially modifies it, insofar as it changes the way in which we can relate to it?

Second, I think you’re right that the project of understanding the specific malady of our time could have fruitful consequences! But I suppose I’m worried about the feasibility of trying to diagnose a historical malady while we’re in the midst of it (and thus, the analogy to disease only goes so far). Isn’t there a bit of a category mistake going on? If history is — by its very nature — retrospective, why should we expect to understand our era until it’s done? I’m genuinely interested in hearing a case for why we should think our epistemic position at the present time could be sufficiently good to do this kind of preemptive historical work.

One final thing. I suppose I’m worried in general about the claim that even the unique features of the present day are all that unique. Maybe we never heard “boredom” before the nineteenth century, but I think we have heard repeated, only thinly distinct, iterations of “kids these days [don’t read]/[are rude]/[are too sad]/[are missing out on our core traditions]!” for a long time. And I think it’s the historical ubiquity of claims like that that make me suspect that history is a circle, not an arrow.

I think the key issue between us is coming clear. I wonder, though, if there is not only a disagreement about the nature of history, but also, hiding in the background, a disagreement about the task of philosophy.

You suggest that “history is — by its very nature — retrospective,” and you wonder whether we can establish a reliable “epistemic position” from which to evaluate our present condition. The implication seems to be that we have greater access to what is past than to what is present. (“The owl of Minerva takes flight at dusk,” one could say!)

But this seems to me to suppose that history is a “thing,” a temporal object, that we stand outside of and examine, like an entomologist examines a bug on a pin. Perhaps this is true, in some provisional sense, for the historian, but I don’t think philosophy ever enjoys this privilege, even when dealing with “historical” materials — e.g., old books. What we are after is always what is alive in them, which means what is present in them. When I read Plato, I am reading, in some sense, a contemporary, because what I am after is not strictly historical but philosophical knowledge. So, likewise, when I ask about the signature affliction of our time, I am asking a philosophical, not a strictly historical, question. When it comes to philosophy, there is no epistemic position outside of our moment; we’re always entangled in it.

I suppose this raises the question of what exactly we’re doing when we do philosophy. One could imagine that philosophy is akin to archaeology or paleontology: a disinterested study of artifacts from a long-gone epoch. But I think philosophy is more in the way of combat medicine. Shells are exploding around us, the air is thick with smoke, the ground is strewn with suffering comrades — we’re wounded ourselves! — and we have to do the best we can in the midst of it all. There is no position safely away from the battlefield where we can perform our healing work. The only way to do the job is to be here, in the thick of it.

In a perhaps disappointingly conciliatory dénouement, Ian, I offer the following thoughts:

It seems right to say that what’s ultimately at issue is a disagreement about the method of philosophy — that is to say, whether it’s best done from the outside or from within. I must confess, however, that, unlike some others, I lack any strong commitments to the priority of one method over the other. I don’t think we’re ultimately failing to do philosophy if we ever ask these questions from within the historical lens, nor do I think we fail in our goals if we ever ask these questions from a temporally untethered view.

Rather, my suspicion would be that the question itself determines the relevant method — or, just as well, that both methods have their own virtues for revealing different angles of truth on the object of inquiry. Sometimes there surely is an eternal, unchanging truth of the matter that we can access from outside our particular temporal moment; sometimes there surely are contingent facts that we can only access from within that particular temporal moment.

That is to say, I think that we can sometimes occupy the “view from nowhere” — perhaps most obviously when we ask questions about, for example, whether there are many things instead of just one or are merely playing sandbox in logical space. But even when we ask questions about material social facts, I think we can adopt this stance, albeit — importantly — only temporarily. And I think this can perform important conceptual work for us; perhaps it gives us the idealized framework which we can then test against reality. (If we can determine the Platonic ideal of justice, for example, we have an isolated variable that we can then modify as needed in an unjust world.)

I’m wondering whether you think this is right (that both methods serve their own purposes), or if your line is a harder one: that we are irrevocably situated and that the view from nowhere is, perhaps, a noble lie.

Ripley, I’m happy to accept your conciliatory gesture, but I suspect it does not go to the heart of the matter. You might say that, even enjoying a “view from nowhere” that affords us a proper perspective on ongoing historical processes, those processes could still prove to be — to quote your opening letter — “boring.” So, reverting to that letter, let me try one more time to make my case.

You might know the famous lines, from Virginia Woolf’s essay “Mr. Bennett and Ms. Brown”: “[O]n or about December, 1910, human character changed. I am not saying that one went out, as one might into a garden, and there saw that a rose had flowered, or that a hen had laid an egg. The change was not sudden and definite like that. But a change there was, nevertheless; and, since one must be arbitrary, let us date it about the year 1910.”

Woolf admittedly overstates her case (and clearly enjoys doing so), but I think she is describing a real phenomenon: there are events that act as thresholds in human consciousness — before and after. I don’t know about December 1910, but I might well put forward August 1945, when atomic weapons were deployed in war for the first (and, to date, last) time. At that moment, something became possible — the destruction of the human species by our own hand — that had not been possible before, and a certain anxiety settled into human consciousness that had not been present before. (This is why the war for Ukraine, overhung by the specter of nuclear weapons, was from the very beginning a “world war.”) Something similar happened in October 1492. The most important of these dates is, of course, the one by which we arrange our calendar.

I don’t believe these to be merely apparent variations. I share with you the commitment to human nature and to certain constants across times and cultures. But that nature is also refracted differently across different historical horizons, creating real, not just seeming, differences. Certain possibilities are present to us that were not present to Aristotle or Augustine, not merely because we have arrived on the scene later, but because the topography of the scene has changed in the interim.

Which means that we have challenges specific to our time, challenges that no one has ever confronted before or will confront again (although they may have their analogues in other epochs). And we must take them seriously — precisely because they are ours, and no one else’s.

My thanks to you, Ripley, for prompting this rich exchange.

Leave a comment

Palantir is a company that cultivates an image of intellectual seriousness, as well as coolness and lethality. Their CEO, Alex Karp, is a PhD in philosophy who says things like: “Palantir is here to disrupt and make the institutions we partner with the very best in the world. … And when it’s necessary, to scare enemies, and on occasion, kill them.” The company’s partnerships with the US government are extensive.

What does Palantir actually believe in? What ideas drive its work? In a world were conflicts grow every day, should we criticize a company that claims to defend the West?

To help answer these questions, I reached out to , a reporter for the online magazine, Responsible Statecraft. Last year, Connor wrote a profile of Karp, titled “Anatomy of a Silicon Valley Hawk.” Here, we discuss the Palantir ideology, as Karp articulates it in his writings and public statements. I start our dialogue by setting the scene and asking some questions.

— Santiago Ramos

Get 14 day free trial

Santiago Ramos: We are in the middle of a Palantir charm offensive. A new biography of Palantir’s CEO, Alex Karp, has just been published, and Karp is granting interviews left and right. I’m sure you’ve seen the video clip of Karp wielding a sword before a reporter. The company is selling merch and opened up a new educational fellowship for high school graduates. It’s the perfect time, then, to ask: What is the Palantir ideology?

This an important question for two reasons. First, Palantir is a billion-dollar data company with great influence inside the US military and law enforcement. By making government surveillance more effective, Palantir touches the life of every American. Palantir insists that it is not a data company and is not directly involved in surveillance, while also being deeply embedded in state bureaucracies and declaring a mission to “scare of fuck out of our enemies,” i.e., the enemies of the West.

Second, Karp has already started a public debate about Palantir, and wants people to argue with him. The charm offensive is only part of his strategy. A few years ago, Karp — a PhD in philosophy from Germany — entered the cultural fray and began arguing against his company’s critics. He’s even published a book outlining his worldview: The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West.

Karp’s book is a combination of 1.) interventions in recent culture war battles (e.g., the fallout from the congressional hearings on campus anti-Semitism), 2.) commentary on business management theory (e.g., a critique of status and hierarchy within corporations, along with a defense of the role of the “founder”) and 3.) a defense of a few foundational philosophical claims. I want to focus on number 3.

Three claims stood out to me from Karp’s book:

• Relativism is Bad. Karp believes that we are living in a relativistic era, when people lack strong convictions: “Our collective and contemporary fear of making claims about truth, beauty, the good life, and indeed justice have led us to the embrace of a thin version of collective identity, one that is incapable of providing meaningful direction to the human experience. All cultures are now equal. Criticism and value judgments are forbidden.” The result is a culture which lacks purpose and self-confidence.

• The West is the Best. Karp defines the West as “a set of cultural and political values rooted in antiquity and extending through history to the modern era,” which “began to take shape in the late nineteenth century.” The West, according to Karp, is a civilization which “made possible, and indeed bearable, collective existence on a grand scale.” The West’s values, as he puts it elsewhere, “are obviously superior” to those of its competitors. Still, in the book at least, Karp is savvy enough to acknowledge that the West has its own sins and faults — while also suggesting that part of the strength of the West comes from its willingness to engage in self-criticism.

• The United States is the Sword of the West. The United States has a special role in the world today: to defend and preserve the values of the West. It’s irresponsible to deny that the US has this role. We are in a crisis today because Silicon Valley’s best and brightest have shirked the “necessary task of building the nation, of constructing a collective identity and shared mythology.” Palantir bucks this trend and contributes to this common project, Karp says, by strengthening American military might.

These ideas don’t seem uniquely dangerous to me — in fact, they aren’t original. They are standard center-right talking points. I might disagree with some of them, but I’ve heard much more disturbing stuff coming out of Silicon Valley. For example, Karp doesn’t, as far as I can tell, believe that the human race is just a “biological bootloader” for a future superior race of AIs, as both Elon Musk and Sam Altman have suggested. Of course, I’ve also heard some wild ideas from Peter Thiel, founder of Palantir — but it’s unclear to me whether his feverish speculations about a posthuman future are more relevant within Palantir today, than Karp’s more earthbound ideas.

What am I missing here? Is my summary of Karp’s philosophy missing an important detail? Am I failing to grasp the subtext in The Technological Republic? Is the Palantir ideology more dangerous than my account of it suggests?

Connor Echols: As you note, Elon Musk and Sam Altman seem indifferent to the possibility of a future ruled by robots, and they are doing everything they can to bring it about. But that possibility remains purely hypothetical. Alex Karp, by contrast, is already using his ideology to make the world a more dangerous place.

I should note that, unlike many Karp critics, I don’t view him as insane. In fact, I consider him quite thoughtful. Palantir’s success is downstream of his creative approach to running a business, in which he devolves enormous responsibility to individual engineers — an approach that allows the company to recruit and retain top-tier talent. And The Technological Republic shows that he’s admirably willing to engage with work from outside his ideological tribe. In one section, Karp discusses the work of Edward Said, the late Palestinian-American theorist whose writing on Orientalism is a bête noire of the anti-woke set. Instead of joining the pile-on, Karp defends Said, arguing that his oeuvre has been “frequently misinterpreted” by fans and critics alike.

Unfortunately, Karp has decided to use his evident brilliance in service of a civilizational mission that increases the risk of conflict between world powers. For more than two decades, Karp has worked to meld the Western chauvinism of Washington’s foreign policy establishment with the techno-optimism of Silicon Valley. And these efforts have helped drive a dangerous culture shift in both places.

Karp’s desire to defend the West stems from a deep feeling of vulnerability. Growing up with a Jewish father and a Black mother, Karp came to believe “if fascism comes, that I’d be the first or second person on the wall.” In his telling, the West is the only culture capable of protecting someone like him. But this produces in Karp, and in Palantir, a fundamentally Manichaean worldview. As Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar recently put it, “there is still evil in the world, and that evil is not us.” Technical parity with these evildoers is “insufficient,” Karp wrote in his book. “A weapons system in the hands of an ethical society, and one rightly wary of its use, will act as an effective deterrent only if it is far more powerful than the capability of an adversary who would not hesitate to kill the innocent.”

Karp isn’t worried that this will launch an arms race in which both sides are incentivized to, say, rapidly field autonomous weapons. He believes that this arms race is inevitable, and that we must not lose. And he’s working hard to operationalize that view. Palantir doesn’t just try to win Pentagon contracts; it also looks to grow the defense tech industry as a whole using programs like the First Breakfast, which helps weapons startups get contracts of their own. Sankar, his deputy, has even been commissioned as an officer in the U.S. Army Reserves, helping to usher in what Sankar has called “voluntary civil-military fusion.”

This is where Palantir’s true danger lies. Karp and his crew have helped to bring about a world in which Silicon Valley is pivoting to hawkish patriotism and Washington is pivoting to open-eyed techno-optimism. If Karp’s ideas seem unoriginal, it’s because American elites are already embracing them with open arms.

Santiago: By “Manichean worldview,” I assume you mean that Karp reduces the world into two sides: one good, the other evil. If so, I think you’re right: there’s definitely a Manichean tendency in Karp’s thought. I’m also sure that, if asked, Karp would say that, of course, there are many good things about China and Russia, despite their being illiberal, revisionist powers. But all of the positives Karp sees in the “other side” — as well as the nuances and ambiguity that necessarily attend global affairs — become irrelevant for him once it’s time to defend the West against its enemies.

The topic of Manicheanism is important for one reason: it forces us to ask who exactly Karp thinks he is defending. Who is the “good” side, and how does he conceive of it? On this, Karp equivocates. Throughout the book, he is adamant that human beings need a “collective mission” in order to give their lives meaning. The collective mission he has in mind is the United States as a national project. But he also often writes about the West as a whole providing a collective mission.

As I quoted in my first message, the “West” for Karp is decisively modern — it was born in the 19th century — and secular. Its crowning achievements are science and technology, made possible by commerce and industry. Within the West, the United States is the modern state par excellence, a nation that need not be defined by “a shallow appeal to either ethnic or religious identity,” but instead by a strongly held “belief.” But belief in what, exactly? Well, belief in the superiority of the West … and in the goodness of capitalism, science, and technology … but only as long as all of these are restrained and redirected by a collective national purpose ... that purpose being … ??? The definition is never complete.

Ironically, Karp’s idea of the West is an example of the “soft belief” that he attacks. The most we can say is that Karp believes the West is a powerful civilization, and that it should use its power to do good. He argues that the West is better than other civilizations, but he doesn’t really say why. (He suggests that Western superiority can be most easily perceived when one takes an “aesthetic view.” An aesthetic view is, by definition, not a moral one.) For Karp, the West is a mighty empire without a clear goal beyond self-preservation. If Immanuel Kant dreamed of a Kingdom of Ends, for Karp, the West is the Kingdom of Means. It’s more like a tool than an actual culture.

And yet, even this hollowed-out conception of the West has its virtues. Some sort of conflict with revisionist powers does seem inevitable, and I want the United States — and the West — to survive it. (The most compelling parts of Karp’s book deal with how Palantir helped US soldiers avoid being blown up by IEDs in Afghanistan.) Of course, I would prefer that the US fight this conflict without firing a bullet; with humility rather than hubris; always mindful that the West, too, can commit war crimes, or might become totalitarian, if it doesn’t watch itself. And while it’s sad that the head of … “vibes” at Palantir dismisses any concerns about the surveillance state as “Low IQ behavior” (to give just one example of the aggressive media strategy in the company), this doesn’t make Palantir wrong about the threat of great power conflict.

Connor: The threat of great power war is indeed a serious cause for concern. That is precisely why Karp’s influence keeps me up at night.

Karp’s worldview isn’t just Manichaean; it’s also Hobbesian, at least in the colloquial sense. For Karp, conflict and aggression are deeply embedded in human nature, as he explained in his dissertation. Karp extends this idea more or less directly to the realm of geopolitics. “You have an inability for these cultures — West, non-West — to interact effectively,” he said back in 2022, adding that he therefore expects “an acceleration of conflict with China.” He concludes that the only way to avoid war is to achieve complete military dominance over the enemy.

But the vigorous pursuit of dominance is a powerful accelerant of conflict. In international relations theory, there’s a concept known as the “security dilemma.” The basic idea is that any step taken to improve one’s own military strength, even if done with defensive intent, will inevitably be seen by the enemy as threatening, since it shifts the overall balance of power to their detriment. This tends to launch spirals of escalation in which both sides repeatedly attempt to achieve an upper hand. This can lead to arms races, as we saw during the Cold War, or even open conflict, as we saw in World War I.

This doesn’t mean that we should roll over and stop building any weapons. But it does mean we should be discerning when deciding which developments to pursue. American policymakers understood this when they sought a series of nuclear arms agreements with the Soviets, through which both sides halted weapons programs and reduced their overall power in order to decrease the risk of calamity. A similar case could be made about the development of autonomous weapons, whose risks are arguably on par with those of nuclear weapons. Yet Karp appears determined to go all-in on advancing these technologies.

What do we get in exchange for all this risk-taking? In Karp’s view, we get a chance to save the West and preserve its virtues. But, as you note, he is unwilling to spell out those virtues beyond vague references to freedom, capitalism and liberal democracy. This frees him to pursue projects that, in my opinion, undermine the very values that distinguish the West. Was the National Security Agency’s dragnet approach to surveillance a threat to Western values of freedom and privacy? Karp certainly didn’t think so when he sold Palantir’s tech to the NSA. Does Israel’s killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza represent a threat to the laws of war and human rights? Not if you ask Dr. Karp, who still proudly equips the Israeli military with his tech.

These contracts speak far louder than any vague pronouncements about Western values. This is why I describe part of Palantir’s ideology as Western chauvinism rather than Western pride or some other, less pejorative phrase. Simply put, Karp’s professed love for the West boils down to a feeling that his tribe is better than the enemy’s. If Karp really wanted to preserve the West as an ideological project, then Palantir would be a very different company.

Santiago: I was hoping you’d notice my (poor) attempt at subtlety when I wrote that I want the West to “survive” great power conflict; I didn’t say “win.” I’m not sure what winning would look like in the type of war that we might be fighting in the 21st century. The US military predicts that future conflicts with “near-peer adversaries” will be more destructive than any war Americans have seen since World War II. (Gaza is the “dress rehearsal,” one reporter suggests.) The goal should be to avoid war; failing that, the goal should be to make it through them with civilization intact.

A necessary but not sufficient condition for survival, we both agree, is enough military strength to deter or withstand attack from outside. But another necessary condition — and this is something that Karp does not understand — is a persistent countervailing force that pushes back against those forces within that are structurally biased in favor of war (AKA the military industrial complex). By countervailing force I mean all the interests in society which critique the voices who counsel war. I mean voices (like yours) that discuss ideas like the security dilemma.

What scares me about Palantir is that, through their public relations arm (their CTO even wants to make Hollywood films), the company works to delegitimize those countervailing forces. They make the tools of war but also want to influence the debate about war.

So I want to leave you with this question, which I have no idea how to answer: to what extent can the tech that Palantir makes be separated from its ideology, which we both agree is dangerous? Is it possible to separate the tool from the worldview? Does their Machiavellian/Hobbesian attitude toward geopolitics condition the types of products that Palantir makes? Take, for example, the autonomous weapons which you mentioned above. If you had a magic wand and could create a new Palantir, one free of Karp’s ideology, would that Palantir still create autonomous weapons?

Connor: I’m not sure whether a brand new, Karp-free Palantir would still work to develop autonomous weapons. But I’m inclined to say that it would. My logic is not about the relationship between the technology and the ideology per se. Rather, it’s about the market incentives that Palantir has already created.

Before Palantir, Silicon Valley types were highly skeptical of working with the military. They often expressed this skepticism in moral terms, but the fundamental reason was practical. Venture capitalists, as a rule, invest widely in the hopes that one successful investment will cover the losses for all their failures. This means that every startup they invest in must have a path to wild success. Government contracting can be lucrative, but, to these high-stakes investors, it always seemed too bureaucratic to allow for the rapid growth that keeps the VC ecosystem alive.

Palantir’s wild success convinced VCs that they were missing out on a big opportunity. Now, they’re desperately trying to catch up and get their piece of the $1 trillion U.S. defense budget. To make this bet worth it, they need to create a seemingly game-changing technology. AI-powered weapons are that technology.

This really began to sink in for me in October, when I attended a glitzy product launch put on by ShieldAI, a military tech startup valued at a cool $5.3 billion. In a room full of politicians, defense lobbyists and Pentagon officials, ShieldAI unveiled what it called the world’s “first autonomous fighter jet.” The company boasted that the plane, called the X-Bat, could fly faster and farther than most fighter jets for a lot less money.

The remarkable thing about this wasn’t the plane itself; after all, ShieldAI still doesn’t have a fully functional prototype, let alone a production-quality model. More notable was the fact that ShieldAI was investing so aggressively in the plane despite not having a contract with the Pentagon. This means that the only way to recoup that investment is to convince the Defense Department and Congress that this technology is so good that it needs a major new line item in the budget — a herculean feat for an unproven company.

To attract the Pentagon’s attention, ShieldAI has to push the boundaries. And it’s done so with gusto. According to the company, the X-Bat could be programmed to “automatically engage” (read: fire on) an enemy in a designated area. When I asked their executives to clarify their stance on autonomous weapons, they said that they would always have a human “on the loop.” But this clever phrase only means that a human would monitor the machine’s decisions and intervene if the X-Bat made an obvious mistake. And it’s not even clear whether this level of oversight will prevail given that, according to ShieldAI, their plane can “engage” targets “even if the comms link is severed.”

Like Palantir, ShieldAI expresses the need for this sort of technology in ideological, West-is-best terms. It’s hard to say whether this ideology derives from the market incentives or vice versa. But what I know for sure is that, barring some unforeseeable shock, Palantir-esque companies will continue to push the limits of military tech. We’re living in Dr. Karp’s world now.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Today we have a debate about wanting, love, marriage, getting old … about life. and are two writers who aren’t afraid of taking an unflinching look at their own lives. (For example, here’s Kristina on what it’s like to be a parent. And here’s Shadi on why he hasn’t become one.) It’s only natural that these two ended up arguing with each other in our p…

Read more

Donald Trump promised mass deportations “as soon as he takes the oath of office.” He is following through on that promise. Trying to make sense of the situation, I wrote to . Christian (as he likes to be called) is project manager for the Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life at Georgetown University, and a student at Georgetown’s Instit…

Read more

In today’s Debate, Wisdom of Crowds asks: What is politics? and began to argue this question in a recent podcast episode. They continue their argument here. Sam believes politics is inseparable from philosophical questions about the good life and the nature of justice. Politics is the arena where those questions are contested. Damir disagrees. For him…

Read more

“When offered a choice between two politically intolerable alternatives, it is important to choose neither.” So wrote the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre on the eve of the 2004 presidential election. Today, we offer a debate that flips the question: Even if we don’t like either candidate, do we still have a duty to vote for the lesser-of-two-evils?

Join…

Read more

It’s a cliché: liberals care about equality of outcome, and conservatives care about equality of opportunity.

Some liberals take this conservative attitude to be an indication that conservatives are against equality as a political ideal because, in their heart of hearts, they don’t believe in equality of persons.

Is the cliché true? Is political conservatism necessarily against equality? Do conservatives simply believe that human beings are unequal?

Or is conservatism truly about something else — human dignity, say — and conservative skepticism about egalitarianism is not a necessary part of what it means to be conservative?

We brought two sharp minds to debate this topic. Matt McManus is a political philosopher whose latest book, The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism, will come out in November. Carlo Lancellotti is a professor at CUNY Staten Island — in mathematical physics, of all things — and a translator of the Italian political thinker Augusto Del Noce. Though Carlo does not consider himself a conservative, his translations have influenced many American commentators on the Right, including Patrick Deneen, Sohrab Ahmari and Rod Dreher.

Carlo will kick us off. Enjoy reading!

— Santiago Ramos

Subscribe now

Carlo Lancellotti: Are conservatives against equality on principle? Do they have to be? Is it part of being conservative — that you have to oppose political and economic equality? This is what I want to discuss with you.

In recent comments on Substack, you posted this quote from Friedrich Hayek, and argued that it sums up everything conservatives really, truly believe about equality. Briefly put: They’re against it.

Here’s the Hayek quote:

In the last resort, the conservative position rests on the belief that in any society there are recognizably superior persons whose inherited standards and values and position ought to be protected and who should have a greater influence on public affairs than others.

Although I do not consider myself “conservative,” I find Hayek’s judgment perplexing on historical grounds. I don’t agree that conservatism is intrinsically against political equality. If a lot of conservatives find themselves arguing against equality in this or that policy debate, it is not because of their conservatism, but due to some other reason.

A good way to start our discussion would be for you to tell us which conservative thinkers fit Hayek’s description. Who would you name?

Matt McManus: I’ll begin with Russell Kirk and Edmund Burke. In Kirk’s case, consider his ten “chief principles which have characterized American conservative thought” discussed in the Concise Guide to Conservatism. Kirk’s first canon of conservatism is “belief in a transcendent order, or body of natural law, which rules society as well as conscience.” The second holds that “uniformity and absolute equality are the death of all real vigor and freedom in existence.” The third holds that justice “means that every man and every woman have the right to what is their own” which entails that they have “equal rights before the law, but that equality should not extend to equality of condition; that is, society is a great partnership, in which all have equal rights — but not to equal things.” The fourth insists that property and “freedom and inseparably connected; economic levelling is not economic progress.”

Burke’s fixation on inequality and hierarchical authority is omnipresent throughout Reflections on the Revolution in France. He insists the “real equality” consists in an obedient and happy citizenry who

recognize the happiness that is to be found by virtue in all conditions; in which consists the true moral equality of mankind, and not in that monstrous fiction which, by inspiring false ideas and vain expectations into men destined to travel in the obscure walk of laborious life, serves only to aggravate and embitter that real inequality which it never can remove.

Burke rejects the idea that individuals have equal political rights: “As to the share of power, authority, and direction which each individual ought to have in the management of the state, that I must deny to be amongst the direct original rights of man in civil society.” Instead, possession of political rights is to be set by “convention” — meaning those who inherit more rights according to tradition gain more power and authority.

And we haven’t even gotten to Burke’s comments on the “swinish multitude” or Kirk’s ambivalent opinions about the Jim Crow American South.

Carlo: Those examples illustrate very well that conservatives like Kirk and Burke hold non-egalitarian views, which as far as I am concerned was not in doubt. The question I was raising is what is foundational or essential to conservative thought and motivates its subsequent operations.

Is anti-egalitarianism a feature or a bug of conservative thought?

It seems very clear to me that in all these authors the acknowledgment of natural differences and social hierarchies is rooted in a deep-seated skepticism of utopian thinking, and in a sense of deference towards “the given,” so to speak. I am not convinced that conservative tolerance of inequalities reflects a fundamental philosophical decision.

I would like to look at the question also from an entirely different angle. Clearly, if there really is an intrinsic, essential and timeless affinity between conservatism and belief in the social role of recognizably superior persons, it should also manifest itself today, in our own political life. Therefore let us ask ourselves: in the United States in 2024, what sort of people hold the view described by Hayek?

We can certainly find some of them in neo-racist circles on social media, or among social-Darwinian techno-libertarian types around Silicon Valley. But the real believers in social hierarchy today are found in the great liberal and meritocratic strongholds of American society. Figures like the great federal bureaucrat, the Hollywood executive, the top private university administrator, the influential New York editor, the program director at an immensely wealthy private foundation.

These are the kinds of people who regards themselves as superior, and think they deserve an elevated social status because of their extraordinary academic, intellectual and professional achievements. And now let us ask ourselves: what are their politics? There is no doubt that they are generally either left-liberals or outright progressives, deeply invested in left-wing political causes like anti-racism, transgender rights, climate change and so on and so forth.

By contrast, the right-wing, populist reaction seems to be driven precisely by a rebellion against this social hierarchy on the part of Hillary Clinton’s famous “deplorables.”

How would you explain this inversion?

Matt: Now that we’ve reached a consensus on the hierarchical and anti-egalitarian views of figures like Kirk and Burke, we can move to the more interesting question: not whether conservatives hold anti-egalitarian views, but whether a repudiation of equality and an endorsement of the view that there are “recognizably superior persons” in society constitutes the “essence” of conservatism.  

I believe that the rejection of egalitarianism, and an endorsement of the view that there are recognizably superior persons, is indeed the common “essence” of all doctrines on the “right.” This includes conservatism, but also other doctrines on the right ranging from some species of libertarianism and neoliberalism, to traditionalist authoritarianism, to the radical right and generic fascism.

In the past 40 years we have seen several American conservatives occupy the presidency. Ronald Reagan famously invoked the ultra-revolutionary Thomas Paine to declare “we have it in our power to make the world anew.” More than just words, Reagan transformed everything from the U.S. tax code to favor the rich, to the carceral system which mainly impacted the racialized poor, to the international order, to even the nature of telecommunications through abolishing the Fairness Doctrine.

George W. Bush initiated vast wars on a global scale intended to remake the world order in a way that both conformed to American interests and advanced its value systems. His senior advisor Karl Rove famously lampooned the “reality based community” insisting that as an empire the United States made its own reality now and the rest of the world had to deal with it.

And of course Donald Trump has been as transformative a president as one might expect, overturning democratic values and demonstrating contempt for the rule of law and order. All done in the name of securing for the “winners” their rights against the “losers” who have too long been defended by the left.  

Subscribe now

Carlo: To talk about politicians in place of philosophers is an example of the death of philosophy. You aptly quoted Kirk’s sentence about conservatism being based on “belief in a transcendent order, or body of natural law, which rules society as well as conscience.” Does that sound to you the type of thinking that drives the modern political “conservatism” you decry in your latest response? You even brought up … Donald Trump? Would you seriously say that Trump belongs to a broad philosophical tradition that includes Edmund Burke and Russell Kirk?

Times change, and if we keep trying applying the same names to very different phenomena, based on superficial common features, we will not understand them.

Speaking of Reagan, I am old enough to remember how people felt in 1979-80, when they were elected. Many people felt that “the revolution was over.” My grandparents’ generation had lived in the world shaped by the Leninist revolution and its endless “Western counterparts”: Fascism, Nazism, then in Italy Gramscism and its strange synergy with consumerism and the sexual revolution, and then the “final bourgeois revolution” of 1968.

By the 1970s the revolutionary idealism had exhausted itself in the clearly pointless violence of terrorist groupuscules, not only in Italy. That decade was the “Years of Lead” — I remember them. Thus the beginning of the Reagan-Thatcher era felt like a relief.  

Except that the “end of the revolution” did not mark at all the victory of “conservatism” but rather the advent of nihilism. Revolutionary ideology had left behind a more radically individualistic and disintegrated bourgeois world, Nietzsche’s last men, “neoliberalism.” As the quip goes, there was nothing left to conserve. In that sense the old conservatism of the 19^th and 20^th centuries was, and remains, dead.

This history holds a lesson for the left: you will get the Right you deserve. For example, by ungenerously underplaying the better religious and philosophical ideals that animated many conservative thinkers, and by giving prominence to their putative embrace of “inequality,” you are objectively contributing to the process that leads to a more nihilistic right.

In a nihilistic cultural context, trying to organize politics in terms of the opposition equality-inequality has the inevitable effect of making the concept of equality purely ideological (instrumental), since it has lost its philosophical-theological roots. Anybody can say that they believe in equality, solidarity and justice, and it is a wonderful way for established economic and cultural powers to protect their interests.

Today the most conservative social forces have appropriated what used to be the egalitarian language of the left. Therefore trying to pin on “classical” conservatism the stigma of being essentially “aristocratic” is pointless. Today’s true aristocracy resides elsewhere. 

Matt: I transitioned to talking about politicians since it’s important to recognizing these aren’t just abstract debates, but have real applications in practice. And of course to provide further and more contemporary examples of the core point. 

Again, my claim is that the rejection of equality is the “essence” of all doctrines on the right. It is telling that you see this as an accusation, rather than the observation that it is. This is a sentiment that many on the right have long complained about and tried to culturally diagnose and cure.

Vast swathes of thoughtful and even profound right-wing theory have been dedicated to discovering why and when the doctrine of moral equality emerged and gained such revolutionary currency that any deviation from it was considered at best unkind and at worst a form of evil. They have dedicated enormous amounts of time to discrediting what William Buckley called the “ever so busy egalitarians” and their grip on our moral sentiments. And their efforts have not been in vain; since 2016 right-wing populists and authoritarians have gained enormous ground and may yet shape the century. If that is so we will all be the poorer for it.  

Finally, a few words about the “inversion” you mention above: Equality is a hard principle to fight for since many of the most powerful and privileged find it very difficult to imagine that another’s life is indeed as worthy as their own. They rightly suspect that treating other lives as equally worthy might run counter to their interests. As Max Weber observed there has never been a ruling class which is content with being a ruling class; they always feel compelled to somehow insist that they “deserve” their station by virtue of some clear superiority. We should hope that this fiction disappears, along with our increasingly stratified class society itself.  

This post is part of our collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets.

Share

Leave a comment

We could not be more excited to get back to form with another Wisdom of Crowds Debate. This week we have two very sharp minds—both familiar to Wisdom of Crowds readers.

Osita Nwanevu has written for us several times over the years and — we’re delighted to announce — is joining us as a contributing writer. In addition to his roles at The New Republic and The Guardian, he has a forthcoming book The Right of the People that makes a new case for democracy.

Oliver Traldi is a philosopher whose new book, Political Beliefs: A Philosophical Introduction, deals with the sources of political opinions. Traldi is a frequent guest on Wisdom of Crowds whose last essay was “Do You Know What You Want?”

“Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” So goes the famous quip by the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. But that line, while true, only tells half the story. Facts must be interpreted. How do we interpret them? According to what standards? And how should we form sound political opinions? Should we lean on ideology to do so?

In the debate below, Oliver argues that empirical facts are an essential part of all political ideas and alliances, whereas Osita prefers to see ideology as an important, if imperfect, organizing principle in a democracy.

Oliver starts us off with the first letter. Let the argument begin!

— Santiago Ramos, Executive Editor

Get 30% off for 1 year

Dear Osita,

You and I both like democracy, and we both want to push back against the theoretical challenges it’s faced in recent years. But I think there are three places where we disagree: first, regarding the nature of politics and how we can rationally draw political conclusions; second, regarding ideological coherence and whether positions “go together”; and third, regarding political parties and how they affect political beliefs.

For you, the most central political judgments are judgments about what’s right and wrong, or at least about what’s right and wrong for us. So you aren’t quite at home in the debate between epistocrats and epistemic democrats, both of whom worry about how to produce the best empirical judgments.

But we can’t resolve most concrete ought questions without knowing how things stand when it comes to what is. We may value peace, but without understanding geopolitics we won’t know which policy is most likely to afford us peace. We may value freedom, but without understanding how one kind of freedom affects another we won’t know which policy is most likely to maximize freedom for all. Hating violence, for instance, we might be tempted to ban violent video games, but if those games act as a “safety valve” for people’s violent instincts, giving them an outlet to blow off steam, that ban could lead to more actual violence.

Next, ideology. For ideology to be a good explanation of people’s political beliefs, we don’t just need there to be some ideological story that could in theory undergird some combination of their views. We need the story to undergird plenty of their views, and we need it not to be the case that there are alternate stories that could undergird alternate configurations of views. Mere non-contradiction is not enough to avoid the charge that ideological stories are post hoc. And explaining political beliefs that don’t cohere with their bearers’ purported ideology in terms of material interests or moral values raises more questions than it answers. Why are some political beliefs determined by ideology, some by moral instinct, and some by material interest? And why does this happen in the patterns we see and not in other patterns?

Thinking about empirical judgments – not our stances on political issues, but the beliefs about the world that support those stances – really drives this point home. How are our empirical political judgments related to one another? One way is by playing on the same kinds of tropes or heuristics. Another is by being propagated by the same sources, like media outlets or political parties or figureheads. This is the sort of thing that worries epistemic democrats like me: those sources are basically doing people’s thinking for them, undermining the wisdom of the crowd.

Trusting and allying oneself with one or another kind of source is part of a larger project of political self-branding which many Americans undertake. This project goes far beyond our beliefs — it affects where we live, what coffee shops we frequent, what cars we drive, what music we listen to, what television we watch, and so on. Once we note the massive correlations between these ranges of activities, political beliefs, and partisan alignment, it is hard not to think that there must be some sociological explanation that can give us insight into all of them at once — an explanation from political parties and political identities.

Sincerely,

Oliver Traldi

Dear Oliver,

I think there’s something to the epistemic line of thought. But many, if not most of the questions we turn to politics to resolve are not simple questions of fact. On geopolitics, for instance, the reality is that people starting from different normative premises can look at the same information on, say, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and come to different conclusions about how we ought to respond. “If we value peace,” as you write, certain facts might be particularly relevant. But whether and how much we should value peace to begin with is not a matter that facts alone can resolve, which is my point. And we can make reasoned judgments about certain policy questions without making use of factual information at all. 

I’m just not sure it’s true that, as you write, “we can’t resolve most concrete ought questions without knowing how things stand when it comes to what is.” On some of the most highly contested social issues of our time ⁠— abortion, the death penalty, gay marriage, guns, and the like ⁠— it is of course entirely possible to come to one’s stances solely on the basis of certain ideas about the meaning and value of human freedom, the intrinsic value of life and where it comes from, and so on. Data may bear upon matters of relevance to each issue, but you do not intrinsically need empirical information to come to a reasoned opinion on whether governments should be able to kill convicts or whether people of the same sex should be able to marry.  

On those and other matters, we often consult ideology instead ⁠— largely because the prevailing ideologies in the United States today, progressivism and conservatism, do offer us the resources to make sense of plenty of the issues facing us. As you suggest, I’m not especially troubled by this, even granting that much ideological reasoning may be post hoc, though I’m not prepared to say how much. The epistemic ideal seems to be a world in which we each independently make judgments about political questions on the basis of hard empirical information, without being substantially swayed by our peers, the media, or other potentially distorting influences.  I do not find this world plausible. We cannot make fully informed judgments about very many political issues on our own; even to the extent that we are “informed,” it is almost never through independent, unmediated access to information. Influences creep in from without and shape even the thinking of experts as they try to make sense of the facts; inevitably, ideologies take root.  

“Why,” you ask, “are some political beliefs determined by ideology, some by moral instinct, and some by material interest?” I don’t think it’s even possible to disentangle the three; ideologies emerge at the confluence of other forces. But they also shape those other forces in turn. This is why I think ideologies help sustain democracy on balance. They organize politics. Economic interests, social identities, the machinations of political parties, familial ties, religion, geography — it would be incredibly difficult to galvanize political action and govern absent ideology with all of these forces cacophonously at work. Ideologies are glue ⁠— they bring people from different backgrounds together and they can encourage people to think conceptually rather than fixating upon their own narrow interests.

And even when ideological beliefs are shaped by those interests, they force political actors to address themselves to principle. It will not do, in a world where ideology has weight, to say merely that this or that policy will benefit you in particular even if it’s true ⁠— you have to make a case to a wider political community and make appeals to higher ideas. And when the kind of post hoc reasoning you allude to is at work ⁠— when we furnish explanations for why disconnected beliefs are actually connected or adopt new ideological beliefs to fit in with our peers ⁠— that kind of reasoning is often critical to the success of coalitional politics. Even if I only care about x, I may come to understand that x will never happen unless I join together with people who believe in y and z and find a way to make a compelling political case for all three. I think this is fine and perhaps even democratically vital.  

Sincerely,

Osita Nwavenu

Subscribe now

Dear Osita,

In theory I’d agree that one can come to a political stance with no empirical information or rational inference whatsoever. David Hume wrote that reason is merely the slave of the passions, and if your passion is simply to pass a certain bill, regardless of its content or effect, then maybe that value – whether it’s moral or merely a kind of interest – is enough. But in real-world politics this is rarely the case.

For example, the number of innocent deaths is relevant to many people’s support for, or opposition to, the death penalty; few people think of “convicts” (to use your word) as a somehow essential, value-laden category. Similarly, people’s impressions of rates of gun violence and accidental shootings affect their opinions about gun rights, and people’s impressions of what fetuses in the womb can feel and perceive affect their opinions about abortion. Many debates about such topics revolve around these empirical sub-questions. 

You say that we “consult ideology” and that it helps us “make sense of plenty of the issues facing us.” However, not every ideology can help us to make sense of an issue in the absence of empirical information. It depends on the ideology. Imagine an ideology that includes this premise: “A man should be able to keep his family safe.” Surely the actual effect of gun ownership on safety is relevant to determining whether this premise militates in favor of or against gun rights. Or how about this premise: “America should tend to her own interests and not try to police foreign conflicts.” Surely one must know what America’s actual interests abroad are in order to be able to judge the application of this premise to foreign policy. 

Some aspects of your defense of ideology confuse me. For instance, you write that “we cannot make fully informed judgments about very many political issues on our own.” But I don’t know why full information is necessary or even desirable for our political judgments, and ideologies — which you allow are tied up with things like “economic interests, social identities, the machinations of political parties, familial ties, religion, geography” — don’t seem to “fully inform” us either, at least not in an objective sense of “information.” In fact, your invocation of an ideal of “full information” does seem to rely on an epistemic democratic ideal of just the sort that I think you want to disavow here. 

Of course, you’re right that organization is part of and necessary for political action. (It’s so necessary that “organizer” is the job title of many people who oversee political efforts.) However, ideological organization and party-line platforms are not the only type of political organization. I’m not an expert on how to get things done in politics, but I think many successful political efforts come from transactional, coalitional, or “big-tent” approaches. In a coalitional system, it’s much more obvious that political beliefs needn’t hang together logically, as though you could write out a logical deduction from one political stance to the next as a math class nodded along attentively. A party seeking to gain power by forming a coalition might need to decide form an alliance with the rivals who agree with them about issue A but disagree with them about issue B, rather than the ones who agree with them about issue B but disagree with them about issue A. 

The good news for people like me is that, in fact, the things that look like ideologies and doctrines are in fact often merely forgetful coalitions which will break apart before long, once different political issues are emphasized or new opportunities arise for different coalitions. What you call “cacophony” is to me the most beautiful part of politics. The alternative is the bland harmony of false conformity, the elevator music of thought. 

Oliver

Dear Oliver,

Again, while empirical facts obviously bear upon political questions, I don’t know that it makes sense to assume that people generally need them to make political judgments ⁠— even sound ones on particular questions. I refer to the idea of being “fully informed” not because I think we can, or should, hold ourselves to that standard. Rather, I think that if we significantly reduce the influence ideology holds over our political thinking, then we will become more dependent on empirical information than seems plausible or necessary for a democracy. Without ideology, ordinary citizens would have to know not only much more about policy than they presently do, but much more than I think they realistically could.

Even I, as a leftist paid to actively follow and write about politics and policy, cannot tell you exactly how much Amazon made last quarter, or the exact number of people in my own state who lack health insurance. That information would be useful to me in certain respects; research on the efficacy of policy interventions is important to my work. But the human mind is not and cannot be a mere repository for white papers and statistics. With the limited time, attention, and agency we have as political actors, we need philosophical principles and frameworks ⁠— ideologies ⁠— to guide us through political debates and help us make sense of political outcomes. We may turn to certain facts to help us ascertain whether a particular piece of legislation will work to a particular end, yes. But facts alone cannot tell us what ends to desire in the first place or even give us evaluative standards for new policies and the status quo that are normatively neutral.

For instance, it’s been estimated — though we can’t get basic agreement on even this — that there are around 70,000 lawful defensive uses of guns in the United States every year, not counting victims of simple assault, commercial crimes, or trespassing. Even if one inflates that number a good deal to account for the missing cases, ⁠defensive uses are outweighed so massively by gun violence and crime, both numerically and ethically (to my mind), that I think the figure only justifies strict regulations on gun ownership all the more. But it is a certainty that many people politically to my right would look at the exact same number and read it as meaningful and significant enough to justify weakening regulations on guns and broadening access to them. Are they wrong? That depends substantially on one’s ideology ⁠⁠— more specifically, on how one thinks about personal autonomy. And there’s no answer key in a textbook somewhere that can tell us empirically how to define it, how to protect it, and how much to value it relative to the externalities it can incur.

People will disagree bitterly about what the facts mean and what to do about them even when they’re laid out plainly on the table. And I think democracy is fundamentally about working through or resolving those disagreements in fair and equitable ways. Coalitional politics are a critical part of that, obviously; as I wrote, I think ideologies play a significant role in building and sustaining political alliances. “In a coalitional system,” you write, “it’s much more obvious that political beliefs needn’t hang together logically.” They needn’t, but I’d argue that they often do and that the tradeoffs coalitions are willing to make will be strongly influenced by their ideological principles as a practical matter. Factions on the left and the right may have points of agreement on trade policy, but the extent to which they’re in sync on most other issues will determine how broadly and durably they can work together with each other, if at all.

There are already places in our politics where ideology is mostly an afterthought. In the deeply Democratic cities where I’ve lived, the transactions of local politics are more shaped by economic interests, demographics, social identities, political careerism, and familial ties than political philosophy. (As interesting as all that might sound to those of us who study politics closely, I’d submit to you that the politics of cities like Baltimore and Chicago are not beautiful, actually.) And while voters in municipal elections are asked to attend to the facts of given policies far more directly than they are in national politics, the fact that one might have the opportunity to cast a vote on a bond issue obscures the extent to which matters of local politics can be functionally impenetrable for the average voter, which facilitates the dominance of the wealthy and special interests ⁠— those with the time and resources not only to read white papers on specific policy matters, but to have them written on their behalf.

All told, I doubt we can actually escape ideology, and it’s not obvious to me what’s intrinsically better about a less ideological politics. Rather than wishing it away, I think we’re better off trying to understand how ideology shapes political discourse and thought, while appreciating its role in making politics accessible to more people, at varying levels of informedness ⁠— its role, in other words, in making democracy more democratic.

Osita

Leave a comment

Share

Welcome to another Wisdom of Crowds "Debate,” a recurring feature where we work through tensions and explore why we believe what we believe. In this debate, we’re doing something really special we have never done before. We’ve invited one of our earliest and sharpest readers, , to take on Wisdom of Crowds Editor-at-Large and political philosopher . Tom …

Read more

Welcome to a Wisdom of Crowds "Debate," our first since we launched on Substack. We’re excited to share more of these with you. The goal is to explore why we believe the things we believe, working through tensions and contradictions in real time. We would love for you to take part, so don’t hesitate to share your thoughts in the comments!

Shadi begins, …

Read more

Shadi’s most recent essay serves as a very tidy exposition of why he and I have been doing Wisdom of Crowds for all this time: “Agreement is nice. Disagreement is better,” to quote our freshly-minted motto. Here, in broad strokes, we agree: carefully thinking about disagreement is incredibly important.

But I tend to put things in a more somber register t…

Read more

Welcome to a Wisdom of Crowds "Debate." The goal is to explore why we believe the things we believe, working through the tensions and contradictions in real time. We would love to have you take part, and hear from you in the comments!

Read more

Welcome to a Wisdom of Crowds "Debate." The goal is to explore why we believe the things we believe, working through the tensions and contradictions in real time. We would love to have you take part, and hear from you in the comments! Shadi begins, Damir responds. They go back and forth. Chaos ensues.

Shadi Hamid:

I re-read your fascinating essay, Damir, on whether human beings are inherently democratic. I also disagree with some of your logical jumps and philosophical moves. Let me tell you why, because I think some of our disagreements here get at a few key foundational questions.

You say:

There is nothing about starving angry people in the streets that implies that society as a whole is demanding representative democracy. We tend to gloss over this because we think that democracy is the ultimate antidote to misgovernment.

And then you go on to say that:

Many peasant revolts throughout history have ended up with aristocrats strung up on trees with their estates ransacked, with no thought as to what would follow.

I think with a statement like this, you run the risk of doing precisely what you criticize others for doing—you’re broadening democracy to include qualities that are not intrinsic to democracy itself. Democracy isn’t, or shouldn’t be seen as, the ultimate antidote to misgovernment. If there was any doubt before, we now know that autocracies can govern well, while democracies are often anarchic and antagonistic in a way that precludes the possibility of consensus-based decision-making or even a minimal standard of effectiveness. After all, this is the American story of the past 6 years or so. Democracy is clearly not a means to the other, separate ends of good governance, redistributive justice, and so on.

Vengeance isn’t necessarily undemocratic. In fact, democracy allows vengeance to be expressed through politics. That’s good. Of course, to get to this point, there may be an initial or interim period of violence where “aristocrats are strung up on trees.” This is just a fact, as unfortunate as it may be. It’s hard to think of many democratic transitions that didn’t arouse such passions—passions that couldn’t be contained peacefully.

Revolutions are violent, by definition. And most small-d democrats in revolutionary contexts have, in fact, supported the use of violence or armed insurrection. Nelson Mandela is an obvious example of this, having led the armed wing of the African National Congress for decades. Does this mean he wasn’t channeling some innate, democratic impulse? Or does the use of violence, on its own, negate the subsequent democratic progress of South Africa in the 1990s after the fall of Apartheid?

So, are the “peasants” in a peasant revolt small-d democrats? Probably not, or at least not necessarily. But that’s not quite the right question. Is there an innate desire, among human beings across time and place, to have some say over their own lives—to have agency and recourse? Yes. This is a foundational democratic impulse, even when it doesn’t lead the individuals in question to support all the constituent elements of modern representative democracy.

Subscribe now

In this sense, a revolt, like the one we saw recently in Kazakhstan, is good, or at least it’s better than the alternative of living perpetually under dictatorship. Protests and revolts at least open up the possibility of a better, more democratic future insofar as such revolts weaken the hold of autocrats. If you prefer, we can avoid the d-word and just say that there is an anti-authoritarian impulse that drives, at least in part, most mass revolts. They are, after all, revolting against something.

Damir Marusic:

I just went back and read what I wrote, Shadi, and indeed, I find some of my jumps a bit jarring in retrospect. That said, I stand by the thrust of the essay overall. And your comments have reminded me why I ended the essay as I did—as a kind of challenge to you. I hope in this back-and-forth I can justify some of my jumps to you, and to readers who perhaps feel as you do.

You assert: “Is there an innate desire, among human beings across time and place, to have some say over their own lives—to have agency and recourse? Yes.” I guess my question to you is whether you really believe that’s what a revolt triggered by material privation—a grain revolt—is really about agency and recourse. Isn’t it more obviously triggered by anger at misgovernment? Well-governed monarchies—where, say, taxation is reasonably light, the realm is secure, and harvests are good—can be quite stable and durable. One might call an arrangement like this a well-ordered society, and do so without once bringing in concepts such as representation and individual dignity. Indeed, concepts such as “justice” and “dignity” often mean something different in a different social context from our own.

I can’t really prove that your assertion is false, as we don’t have access to the recollections of the illiterate uprisings that have shaken premodern societies from time to time. I would counter, however, that your assertion rests wholly on a belief about human nature. And I would allege further that, as a democratic activist, you can’t help but believe this about people. You, an intellectual, a small-d democrat in a revolutionary context, will support the use of violence or armed insurrection—that is to say, you will justify it and ennoble it by assigning all sorts of supposedly noble impulses. That’s fine, you have a goal in mind, and intellectual contortions in the service of what you deem to be a noble goal is, of course, what we humans tend to do.

But I would suggest to you—and my essay was meant to suggest to readers—that this revolutionary pose is purely a faith-based stance. And I want to suggest that a different set of assumptions about motivations tell an equally compelling, and perhaps more credible story: that peasant revolts are primarily a reaction to privation and misgovernment, and that what they seek is not the human dignity, agency, and recourse in which we ground the legitimacy of democracy, but just better governance with better material outcomes.

I’d also suggest to you that these explanations about peasant revolts also help us understand something like the failure of democracy in Tunisia: people don’t really care about representation if they are starving. And your democracy promotion agenda, if only rooted in transcendent concepts such as dignity, agency, and individual worth, will fail, unless it is paired with some kind of promise of a materially better life.

Shadi:

The well-governed monarchies you speak of are ideal types: they exist more in theory than they do in practice. I suppose one could cite Bhutan before their democratic transition, but Bhutan is a landlocked, isolated nation with like 5 people. Singapore isn’t a monarchy, but I suppose it’s a well-ordered society that is proudly semi-authoritarian. But Singapore—a theme recurs—is a city-state, suggesting that it’s very difficult to replicate this largely mythical well-ordered autocracy that a growing number of moderns seem to fantasize about.

But let me concede your more fundamental contention: that grain riots are more obviously triggered by anger at misgovernment. But to be angry at misgovernment and to do something about it at great personal risk is inseparable from questions of agency and recourse. To protest is, by definition, an act of individual agency magnified at the collective level (if enough people express their individual desire for recourse simultaneously and are able to overcome collective action dilemmas).

I’d maybe even go one step further: it’s not just about “agency” but what the scholar of insurgencies Elisabeth Jean Wood calls “the pleasure of agency” (emphasis mine). Writing on the motivations that drew El Salvadorian insurgents to join together during the 1970s and 1980s, she captures this sensibility when she says that “they took pride, indeed pleasure, in the successful assertion of their interests and identity.” Maybe moderns—who are relatively better educated and more aware of injustice and the idea that injustice isn’t merely something to accept passively—are more inclined to feel this. I take your point that it’s difficult to assess what premoderns were really thinking during whatever peasant revolt was happening in, say, the third century A.D.

Do some of my assertions above rest (at least in part) on a belief about human nature? Yes! But how could it be otherwise? You also have beliefs about human nature, even if that belief is a negative one—that human beings, in their very nature, have not primarily been concerned with justice, dignity, or the pleasure of agency. Are you willing to acknowledge that that, too, is a belief?

All beliefs are, in effect, faith-based. We look around and we come to certain conclusions about what animates human beings. Presumably, there is something in our nature that holds across time and place. One of those “natural” aspects is the desire, or even the need for, an ultimate loyalty—what the Dutch theologian Abraham Kuyper called a “pivot.”

Tunisia is a fascinating case, and I suspect my reply won’t be particularly satisfying to you. There is another part of our nature which does, in fact, want better material outcomes. But your statement in that regard is itself drawing on a claim about an innate disposition. People contain multitudes, and they may be simultaneously animated by two impulses which can sometimes clash, as they did in Tunisia: the pleasure of agency, but also the demand for “better” government. Of course, they’ll likely find the supposedly better autocratic government they currently have hasn’t actually improved their material circumstances in any obvious, measurable way.

Of course, it’s democracy which would allow them to vote for a party that promises, and may even be somewhat better able to deliver, improved living standards. Why must they, or anyone, fall back on authoritarianism for that? That, too, is a belief, one based in an illusion. But I would also take issue with your premise: the Tunisian people were not, in fact, “starving.” There may be contests where starvation is actually a proximate risk, as in say Yemen or Afghanistan today, but those are exceptional cases. And exceptional cases distort human preferences, just as I would argue that authoritarianism, particularly if it entrenches itself over decades, also distorts human preferences.

Damir:

As a jumping off point for my reply, I should stress that I don’t count myself among a growing number of moderns who fantasizes about the superiority of an authoritarian regime. I am not arguing for the superiority of alternatives to democracy, I am merely arguing against a kind of complacent belief in the superiority of democracy.

It’s good that you bring up something like El Salvador. I’m almost certainly more ignorant than you about the modalities of the civil war there. But it is true that whatever kind of non-ideological indigenous uprising may have been at the root of the conflict, and whatever emotions may have been motivating that uprising, it was soon overtaken, and sustained, by a much more overtly ideological revolutionary movement.

Ultimately, that’s a key contention in my essay: that the “democratic revolutionary” shares much with the “Leninist revolutionary.” We mock the Leninist today as someone fighting in the service of a failed ideology, but then we turn around and talk about democratic revolution with the same self-satisfied certainty of a Leninist. Indeed, as I gesture in my essay, our democracy promotion toolkit is suffused with Leninist conceits about social change, with “civil society” playing the role of vanguard parties. Again, though, let me reiterate: my point is not that democracy is destined to be as much of a failure as Leninism, but rather that it is every bit as much an ideology as Leninism.

Which gets me to what I think is a critical point. Yes, I absolutely agree that all beliefs about human nature are ultimately faith-based. I think doing this podcast and website with you for several years now has crystallized this for me more than anything else. But it’s important to prod this insight a bit more, because it should disquiet people a lot more than it seems to. For if you take it seriously, you really ought to question most claims for the “good” that are grounded in obvious-seeming claims from “reason”.

The lesson for someone like you, Shadi—a committed democratic revolutionary—should be to embrace this in your argumentation for democracy. Every ideology obviously claims to be true, so I am not expecting you to be swayed by my relativism. But I would suggest that for democracy promotion to succeed, it must be more “religious” and less “philosophical”—more a conviction than a proof. Your goal is to whip up the people into a committed frenzy, to share your beliefs, to be willing to sacrifice and risk their lives for an idea. For example, the Tunisians clearly haven’t been ideologized enough yet. You can say that living under authoritarianism has distorted their preferences, but I know what you really mean.

Leave a comment

Osita Nwanevu of The New Republic sat down with Quinta Jurecic of Lawfare to debate first principles and discuss how their views of American democracy have shifted over the past five years. What follows is a lightly-edited transcript of the second half of their conversation. You can find Part One of their conversation here.

Osita: Part of the struggle in combating antidemocratic attitudes today is that we are missing a framework in which we can say, “Here are the reasons why, even if it looks like you're losing this particular cultural battle, there's something about these values that is going to be there for you when you need them.”

Quinta: I think that's right. The core of the question is always going to be whether it’s even possible to provide that case for democracy in a way that grabs people. Over the past five years, I've spent a lot of time trying to get people to care about aspects of the government that are objectively foundational to democracy but are hard to explain. Certain aspects of independence of the Justice Department—I would argue that is foundational to democracy. And it shows up in Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, where you need rules so that people know what it is that they can and can't do, and you're not just subject to the whims of the person who happens to hold power at the time. That is critical if you're going to sustain a democracy, which has to be a system that operates in a predictable way, and you can trust that you’re not going to be screwed over when the next person takes power.

With that in mind, I would argue that Trump's attacks on the Justice Department—firing the FBI director, pushing for investigations of Hillary Clinton and James Comey, trying to get rid of the Mueller investigation—go to the absolute core of what democracy is and what it’s supposed to do. And I’ve had so many experiences where if you're trying to explain to people why that's important, it's not instinctive. People are busy, they have jobs, they have to put dinner on the table.

I had a conversation with a friend who suggested it boils down to Maslow's hierarchy of needs. People will care more about making sure they have food and healthcare than these abstract questions about who can be investigated and under what circumstances by a bureaucracy they don't really know anything about. And I don't really know what to do with that.

I think one way to handle it is to look back to John Maynard Keynes and say that in order for a democracy to be self-sustaining, people need to understand that it will provide for them. And that the economic system under democracy will sustain them so that you can then have the time to think about all these big questions about the rule of law, law enforcement independence, etc. I think that's one option. On the other hand, it strikes me that it doesn't really answer the question because it's just another way of saying, “Well, we need to make sure that people are fed and have access to healthcare. And then they'll understand the big principle.” But it's not quite defining what the big principle is. It strikes me as kicking the can down the road.

Osita: This is part of the reason why I go back to institutions. For me, somebody who was writing a little bit—not as much as you were or other people who were on the beat specifically were—but a little bit about Trump and the Justice Department and the Muller investigation, in the back of my mind I was thinking to myself, “Well, he's just going to get away with this, right? I can write about this. I can tell people about it. We can be mad about it. But just given the way the system has been designed, he's gonna get away with it.” And I think that that's the reaction people have to a lot of things in politics. Even if they don't understand the specific structural defects of the Senate or whatever, there’s a baseline level of cynicism about what goes on in Washington that’s the product of a sense that it’s not responsive to democratic will. That it wasn’t even before Trump got there.

And it's weird that most Americans really do deeply believe in democratic values and were appalled by Trump, upset by his presidency and violations of the law and all of those things, but aren’t willing to think about the fundamental building blocks of the political system. There's not really a sense of urgency about it, as much as people believe in democracy. Our values are in one place and the system is in another, and we just sort of accept as a matter of course that the system is what it is. It’s kinda-sorta like democracy and that’s close enough. I think even beyond what you were talking about, the fact that people have immediate, material needs and want you to talk about healthcare means there’s a baked-in level of ambivalence or resignation about the extent to which the law really applied to wealthy people and powerful politicians to begin with even before Trump was president.

Quinta: I think that's right. In the case of Trump, it's obviously right. If you go back and look at the New York Times reporting on his various business interests, there were just incredible amounts of fraud going on without any enforcement whatsoever. It’s a demonstration of how this guy got a free ride from a number of institutions. As you said, on some level, there is an instinctive sense that this system is not built for the average person. And on another level you can say, “Well, actually, it's a system of representative democracy and every person has an input in this way and the other.” But then if you really look at all the pieces fitting together, I would argue essentially that once Trump fired Comey and the Senate did nothing that was the end of it—of course he was going to get away with it.

And so the problem here I think—and you're seeing this now in how the Justice Department is handling various loose ends of litigation that are left over from the Trump administration—is that you can make an argument that people really need to see that the system is working for them. That this machine can be turned to work for the common good, holding people who have done wrong accountable. On the other hand, there's also a very good argument for the same institutional factors that Trump was attacking pulling in the other direction and saying, “No, no, no, we don't want to do that. That's too politically toxic. We don’t want to investigate Trump. We don't want to prosecute Trump. We want to maintain our independence. We don't want to wade into the political thickets.” There is a genuine tension there. And I take both parts of that argument seriously. I think whatever the “right” answer is, it’s going to be very fact-specific. But I do think you’re seeing it already—not quite as explicit as Obama's “Look forward, not back.” But it is there.

Osita: I think that’s important too, because we have talked so much about the extent to which democracy is threatened by anti-democratic attitudes on the right. But I think that there are a lot of attitudes that aren’t anti-democratic per se, but sort of sit crosswise with democracy. This idea you brought up, that we shouldn't go after Trump or people in his administration and let political bygones be bygones—out of sportsmanship, basically, or the sense that it would be divisive for the country—that is an attitude that undermines the rule of law. It’s not a scary kind of attitude. It's not somebody saying democracy sucks and we want authoritarianism. But it is an attitude that sits above basic democratic values within our political discourse.

Bipartisanship is another one. “The majority of the American people might want X, but we really need to find a way to get this minority of the population on board so we can get a supermajority. That's going to be more legitimate than something we just did on our own, even if we truly represent the majority of the American people on this issue.” Again, that's not an attitude that presents as hostile to democracy. It's something that feels nice and that we're used to in our politics. But I don't think you can see it any other way than as a system of strange virtues that seem to be doing their own part to undermine democracy and prevent us from really protecting or improving our political institutions.

This effort that we are now seeing in Congress, to pass a set of voting reforms that are going to protect the right to vote across the South and that, if it was written properly, might do something about partisan gerrymandering—the thing that's holding that up is this sense that it would be wrong for the Democratic Party to do it on its own, that you have to extend a hand to a party that's been increasingly hostile to basic democratic values. That sensibility seems like its own kind of threat to me. I don't know if you see things the same way.

Read more

Osita Nwanevu of The New Republic and curator of The Democracy Essays sat down with Quinta Jurecic of Lawfare to debate first principles and discuss how their views of American democracy have shifted over the past five years. What follows is a lightly-edited transcript of the first half of their conversation. Part Two can be found here.

Osita: I think a …

Read more

Earlier this month, Shadi participated in a dialogue on Pairagraph, a platform that brings together pairs of individuals to debate a topic. We thought it might be of interest, as it addresses our preoccupations—religion, identity, and meaning. Shadi's sparring partner was the journalist and writer . Below is the entirety of their exchange, crossposted w…

Read more

Welcome to a Wisdom of Crowds "Debate." The goal is to explore why we believe the things we believe, working through the tensions and contradictions in real time. We would love to have you take part, and hear from you in the comments! Editor-at-large Samuel Kimbriel begins, Damir responds.

Samuel Kimbriel:

Having spent a fair amount of time around you, Damir, in the last year (in the context of our “secret reading cabal”), I’d like to take a stab at stating what I call the Marusic Paradox. It goes something like this: rulers should be scrupulously attentive to what their people value in order to build and maintain power, even though they (the rulers) know that there is no actual weight to those values.

If I have that right, I take it to be a paradox because it heightens both extremes. On the one hand, it is insistent that one of the most important and ineliminable facts about our species is our constant attachment to meaning-making, to grounding ourselves in reality, to looking for a broader story. On the other hand, it is confident that it is justified in deflating all of those overwrought truth-claims.

While I have my objections to this principle, I bring it up here because I think it is actually very useful in drawing attention to one of the most tangled questions about democratic theory: How do democracies gain their legitimacy? The undergraduate answer here is always “the people.” Sovereignty is not simply inherited, nor bestowed by divine gift, but is vested within the population. This initially sounds fairly straight-forward, and perhaps echoes of something like the humanism I would advocate.

It’s not easy, however, to see what it means in practice. Perhaps popular sovereignty just is a claim for majoritarianism—strength of numbers wins. If enough of the population can register their preference, then that policy or government is legitimate. For most modern audiences, however, this isn’t enough as we are also concerned with protecting minorities against certain sentiments in the majority.

Other answers—the logic of representation, focus on structural integrity—are familiar but also seem to be breaking down. People seem to want to distrust the system, often even in the face of evidence regarding its reliability.

The narrative about why democracy is legitimate is in trouble. So here’s the question: What is at stake in this question of legitimacy? Where are we when a system loses the power to convincingly articulate its metaphysical story?

Damir Marusic:

The answer to your question about stakes, Sam, is simple enough: “Everything is ultimately at stake.” Maybe, as Ross Douthat suggests in his most recent book on decadence, we can and will muddle along in this morass for quite a while. But I’m not so certain that’s true. Or, perhaps better put, I’m worried that it’s not true. I’m not sure that we have collectively thought very hard about what democratic legitimacy derives from. And in being too glib about it, in thinking that all we need to sustain a democratic polity is an adherence to (also poorly articulated) universal values such as “equality” and “fairness,” we are perhaps inadvertently trampling its remaining vestiges underfoot.

Let me be clear on this point, because I think you might be ascribing to me a certain kind of college freshman glibness of my own: “equality” and “fairness” are in fact important values, and there is much to suggest that as human beings, we feel their innate pull from an early age. In that sense, these values are arguably “universal,” and even a fundamental driver of human behavior. But there is a huge leap from acknowledging both these things to be true to arguing that they are sufficient for the cohesion of a polity—especially a democratic polity.

(I’m oversimplifying by somewhat arbitrarily singling out “equality” and “fairness” as the principles that most modern Western democrats see as foundational for their societies. The list is longer and woolier, and there is no consensus on what it contains. But there is a sense that a certain set of “universal values” are sufficient, and that this is what binds “us” and legitimates our regimes.)

It seems obvious to me that the legitimacy of any regime is dependent on the actions of its leaders, its elites—or its “rulers,” as you put it above. We say that elites need to constantly earn the trust of the people in order to retain their power. But that’s all too simplistic. If they are to be successful, they need to enchant the process of ruling in such a way that the legitimacy of the system is sustained. And doing so is a lot more than just paying lip service to “universal values,” which for almost all American presidents up to but not including Donald Trump was second nature.

Donald Trump’s lapse in rhetoric is not the problem. The inability to enchant had already faltered, even under the gifted orator Obama. It’s telling, however, that as we now struggle to recover, we are clutching ever more tightly at these childhood values even as the ground slips out from under us.

Read more

Welcome to a Wisdom of Crowds "Debate." The goal is to explore why we believe the things we believe, working through the tensions and contradictions in real time. We would love to have you take part, and hear from you in the comments! Damir Marusic begins, Shadi responds. Chaos ensues.

Damir Marusic:

Shadi, you said something to me on the podcast three weeks ago that really struck me. And it came up again in last week’s episode with Andrew Sullivan. It had to do with Trump voters rejecting the results of the 2020 election. Direct quote from the older pod:

How much does that matter in practice? It’s one thing for someone on the street to say ‘I voted for Trump and I think the election was fraudulent.’ But then they go about their daily life, and they kind of live with a Biden administration. They’re not that angry, they have some weird conspiracy theories, but life goes on.

I should note that you stressed that you’re on the fence about this, that you could just as easily be convinced that this lack of faith in democracy is catastrophic.

The reason it struck me is that it’s plausible in exactly that way that stings us nerds most: it suggests we’re hopelessly obsessed with things that just don’t matter. I in particular have been wringing my hands about stuff like “legitimacy.” Maybe it’s not that legitimacy doesn’t matter, but rather that I have been talking about it in far too theoretical a way. Maybe a true crisis of legitimacy comes only when you pair a sense of privation, or a sense of being serially wronged, with a sense that the person wronging you is some kind of usurper.

Otherwise, perhaps in our modern state, where one is mostly left alone, politics is just a part-time distraction, and our system can take plenty of partisanship and grumbling about dirty tricks without coughing up anything resembling a revolution or a civil war.

I have no idea.

Shadi Hamid:

I have been on the fence about this—and I tried to convey some of my sense of being torn in this previous piece—but the way you've framed it here, Damir, is persuading me to be perhaps less torn. If 70 percent of Trump voters believe the election was "rigged," it should make us nervous. More than that, it's dispiriting to think that so many could think such a thing. But how much does it matter? In the oldentimes, 70 percent of any given population could believe something, and it wouldn't matter because we wouldn't know.

But I don't think it's just that. Something genuinely new has been injected into American politics on a mass scale—what Ross Douthat by way of Joan Didion calls "dreampolitik"—and that something makes it challenging to discern what is worth paying close attention to and caring about. It was always there, to be sure, but playacting can be practiced by more people more of the time and in more ways. This type of online performance is "real" insofar as real people are deciding to act politically and are pressing keys and not merely introducing thoughts into the ether through sheer mind power. But this kind of politics, certainly in effect but also sometimes in intent, actually does substitute for real politics (it might not be a 1:1 substitution but it doesn't need to be).

In some ways, it's even worse than substitution. It can actually wrest away what starts off as serious politics and transform it into playacting—as we saw over the summer where what could have led to major policy changes on local policing, sentencing guidelines, and criminal justice reform instead became consumed by woke performance art. The problem, of course, with local politics is that it's relatively boring, while performance is fun precisely because it's about the performer.

Online politics overwhelming "real" politics is unfortunate when it comes to the kinds of structural reforms the country actually needs, but it might be our saving grace when it comes to the other party. It's remarkable to me, as I noted on our simulcast with Andrew Sullivan, that 70 percent of 73 million of people apparently don't believe Biden actually won yet don't seem particularly angry or annoyed by it. If an election was truly stolen and democracy was about to die, wouldn't it be reasonable to expect millions of Americans mobilizing and launching something resembling a national protest movement? They're not. The polling on Republican refusal to accept the election outcome does not measure intensity of feeling. So far it seems that that the feelings aren't particularly intense.

At the same time, I do realize that if you take this posture to its logical conclusion, it can result in a pose: does anything really matter anymore? I suppose the answer to the question is that tangible policy outcomes are what we still can assess with some precision. A policy gets passed, or a state implements a new childhood education initiative for the first time, or an attempted Muslim ban gets blocked by the Supreme Court, and then we can measure that instead of falling back on important but ultimately fuzzy concepts like norms that may not apply the way we think they do because too much has changed in the way Americans act politically.

Share

We've only been living in this world—exacerbated by the semi-permanent onlineness of the COVID era—for a few years now. We don't know how this works or how this ends. But I'm tempted by the notion that having all of these online outlets—a growing number of people seem to spend insane amounts of time on the new social media app Clubhouse—allows people to blunt the depression, dissatisfaction, and righteous anger that might otherwise be directed in various destructive ways in the "real" world. The real world, for now, is the world that matters or at least the one that matters most. I say "for now," because, who knows? And nothing really matters anyway: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Damir Marusic:

So as we were going back and forth, not only Putin himself, but even Mitch McConnell has acknowledged that Biden is our next president. I guess we need to see now just how much of Trump's base stands by their man even as the bulk of reality turns against them. Or, to put it more precisely, it remains to be seen how many retain this set of beliefs as an important organizing principle in their lives.

Still, I'm uneasy.

Read more

Damir — (11:55): OK, not sure we're getting more Shadi tonight. Collective spirits low here in my living room. Still, as I type, Biden retook the lead in VA, with all those early votes hitting.

John King looks on the verge of tears, but I sometimes wonder if he's just manipulating his audience for the ratings. If he was honest and told everyone that we w…

Read more

Read more