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I didn’t know either that there was no book you had to have read. An elderly writer, Peter Vansittart, told me one of the unexpected pleasures of old age was realising you’d survived without reading Don Quixote or Moby Dick.

I didn’t know Winston Churchill’s maxim, about familiarising yourself with the books you owned but would probably never read – opening them at odd places, flipping through them, effectively (in my terms) defusing them

‘After all,’ he said in his donnish voice, ‘There are plenty of books you don’t need to read at all. Take Kafka – culture’s already digested him for you: you know very well what the term “Kafkaesque” means.’ Attempting The Trial, years later, I wish I’d listened to him. ‘Kafkaesque’, I found, was much more fun than Kafka.

There were about two or three hundred books that I needed to own, own as objects and a kind of autobiography: the books that had influenced my life or summed up a phase of it. Orwell, Milan Kundera, Philip Larkin’s poems, Kenneth Tynan’s theatre writings, Martha Gellhorn’s war-reporting, Colin Thubron’s books on Russia, and so on. As I’ve narrowed my collection down to one large book-case finally I can see these titles clearly again. The composer Dmitri Shostakovich (whose biography I’ve kept) said when it came to literature you should know less but know it back to front. Shostakovich, I think, was right.

I found a site called archive.org, a free online library with hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of scanned, unalterable titles. Only once or twice have I failed to find a book (usually a newly published one) that I wanted

The spirit of Barabbas — the desire to seize or retain power, through violence if necessary — has been at war with the spirit of Christ ever since. Two millenniums of church history demonstrate a terrible truth: There was nothing uniquely evil about that ancient crowd. Instead it held up a mirror to our own nature, one that is all too eager to wield the sword, to believe that our own power is a prerequisite to justice.

Easter weekend contains more than one example of the spirit of Barabbas. When Christ was arrested, the Apostle Peter — a man who had been by his side for much of his ministry — still could not see the truth. He drew his sword, struck the high priest’s servant, and cut off his ear.

Though he was in the midst of an unjust arrest that would prove prelude to an unjust execution, Christ rebuked Peter, saying, “Put your sword back in its place, because all who take up the sword will perish by the sword.” As he reminded Peter, Jesus had the power to call on “legions of angels” to stop the arrest, but he chose not to. His purpose was to go to the cross, and as Jesus told us, that’s our purpose as well.

There is a difference between the quest for power and the quest for justice. Believers are required to “act justly.” We should not stand idly by in the face of exploitation or oppression. We do not retreat from the public square. But Christian engagement must be distinctive. It cannot emulate the world’s methods or morality.

the example of Jesus dominated the minds of civil rights leaders. “We discussed and debated the teachings of the great teacher, and we would ask questions about what would Jesus do,” said Lewis. “In preparing for the sit-ins, we felt that the message was one of love — the message of love in action: Don’t hate. If someone hits you, don’t strike back. Just turn the other side. Be prepared to forgive.”

The spirit of Barabbas was alive and well in the men who trained their fire hoses on peaceful protesters, who loosed dogs on the Black children of Birmingham. They weren’t trying to seize power, but they were trying to maintain it, through violent, lawless means. Their will to power collided with the quest for justice. It is only through God’s grace and the unimaginable courage and persistence of peaceful protesters that justice prevailed, and Jim Crow laws were overturned.

The spirit of Barabbas tempts Christians even today. You see it when armed Christians idolize their guns, when angry Christians threaten and attempt to intimidate their political opponents, when fearful Christians adopt the tactics and ethos of Trumpism to preserve their power. The spirit of Barabbas most clearly captured the mob on Jan. 6, when praying Americans participated in an insurrection based on a lie.

Christ did not reject earthly rule so that his flawed followers could seize the world’s thrones. His ethos was clear: “You know that the rulers of the gentiles lord it over them, and those in high positions act as tyrants over them. It must not be like that among you. On the contrary, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant.”

It certainly informed his libertarianism, which inclined in the direction of an Ayn Rand-inspired valorization of entrepreneurial superman-geniuses whose great acts of capitalistic creativity benefit all of mankind. Thiel also tended to follow Rand in viewing the masses as moochers who empower Big Government to crush these superman-geniuses.

Thiel became something of an opportunistic populist inclined to view liberal elites and institutions as posing the greatest obstacle to building an economy and culture of dynamistic creativity—and eager to mobilize the anger and resentment of “the people” as a wrecking ball to knock them down. 

the failure of the Trump administration to break more decisively from the political status quo left Thiel uninterested in playing a big role in the 2020 election cycle.

Does Thiel personally believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump? I doubt it. It’s far more likely he supports the disruptive potential of encouraging election-denying candidates to run and helping them to win.

Thiel is moved to indignation by the fact that since 1958 no commercial aircraft (besides the long-decommissioned Concorde) has been developed that can fly faster than 977 kilometers per hou

Thiel is, first and foremost, a dynamist—someone who cares above all about fostering innovation, exploration, growth, and discovery.

the present looks and feels pretty much the same as 1969, only “with faster computers and uglier cars.” 

Thiel’s approach to the problem is distinctive in that he sees the shortfall as evidence of a deeper and more profound moral, aesthetic, and even theological failure. Human beings are capable of great creativity and invention, and we once aspired to achieve it in every realm. But now that aspiration has been smothered by layer upon layer of regulation and risk-aversion. “Legal sclerosis,” Thiel claimed in that same book review, “is likely a bigger obstacle to the adoption of flying cars than any engineering problem.”

Progress in science and technology isn’t innate to human beings, Thiel believes. It’s an expression of a specific cultural or civilizational impulse that has its roots in Christianity and reached a high point during the Victorian era of Western imperialism

Thiel aims to undermine the progressive liberalism that dominates the mainstream media, the federal bureaucracy, the Justice Department, and the commanding heights of culture (in universities, think tanks, and other nonprofits).

In Thiel’s view, recapturing civilizational greatness through scientific and technological achievement requires fostering a revival of a kind of Christian Prometheanism (a monotheistic variation on the rebellious creativity and innovation pursued by the demigod Prometheus in ancient Greek mythology)

Against those who portray modern scientific and technological progress as a rebellion against medieval Christianity, Thiel insists it is Christianity that encourages a metaphysical optimism about transforming and perfecting the world, with the ultimate goal of turning it into “a place where no accidents can happen” and the achievement of “personal immortality” becomes possible

All that’s required to reach this transhuman end is that we “remain open to an eschatological frame in which God works through us in building the kingdom of heaven today, here on Earth—in which the kingdom of heaven is both a future reality and something partially achievable in the present.” 

As Thiel put it last summer in a wide-ranging interview with the British website UnHerd, the Christian world “felt very expansive, both in terms of the literal empire and also in terms of the progress of knowledge, of science, of technology, and somehow that was naturally consonant with a certain Christian eschatology—a Christian vision of history.”

JD Vance is quoted on the subject of what this political disruption might look like during a Trump presidential restoration in 2025. Vance suggests that Trump should “fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people. And when the courts stop [him], stand before the country, and say, ‘the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”

Another Thiel friend and confidante discussed at length in Vanity Fair, neo-reactionary Curtis Yarvin, takes the idea of disrupting the liberal order even further, suggesting various ways a future right-wing president (Trump or someone else) could shake things up, shredding the smothering blanket of liberal moralism, conformity, rules, and regulations, thereby encouraging the creation of something approaching a scientific-technological wild west, where innovation and experimentation rule the day. Yarvin’s preferred path to tearing down what he calls the liberal “Cathedral,” laid out in detail on a two-hour Claremont Institute podcast from May 2021, involves a Trump-like figure seizing dictatorial power in part by using a specially designed phone app to direct throngs of staunch supporters (Jan. 6-style) to overpower law enforcement at key locations around the nation’s capital.  

this isn’t just an example of guilt-by-association. These are members of Thiel’s inner circle, speaking publicly about ways of achieving shared goals. Thiel funded Vance’s Senate campaign to the tune of at least $15 million. Is it likely the candidate veered into right-wing radicalism with a Vanity Fair reporter in defiance of his campaign’s most crucial donor?

As for Yarvin, Thiel continued to back his tech start up (Urbit) after it became widely known he was the pseudonymous author behind the far-right blog “Unqualified Reservations,” and as others have shown, the political thinking of the two men has long overlapped in numerous other ways. 

He’s deploying his considerable resources to empower as many people and groups as he can, first, to win elections by leveraging popular disgust at corrupt institutions—and second, to use the power they acquire to dismantle or even topple those institutions, hopefully allowing a revived culture of Christian scientific-technological dynamism to arise from out of the ruins.  

Far more than most big political donors, Thiel appears to care only about the extra-political goal of his spending. How we get to a world of greater dynamism—whether it will merely require selective acts of troublemaking disruption, or whether, instead, it will ultimately involve smashing the political order of the United States to bits—doesn’t really concern him. Democratic politics itself—the effort of people with competing interests and clashing outlooks to share rule for the sake of stability and common flourishing—almost seems like an irritant and an afterthought to Peter Thiel.

What we do have is the opportunity to enlighten ourselves about what these would-be Masters of the Universe hope to accomplish—and to organize politically to prevent them from making a complete mess of things in the process.

The painting shown in Dr. López Prater’s class is in one of the earliest Islamic illustrated histories of the world, “A Compendium of Chronicles,” written during the 14th century by Rashid-al-Din (1247-1318).Shown regularly in art history classes, the painting shows a winged and crowned Angel Gabriel pointing at the Prophet Muhammad and delivering to him the first Quranic revelation. Muslims believe that the Quran comprises the words of Allah dictated to the Prophet Muhammad through the Angel Gabriel.

The image is “a masterpiece of Persian manuscript painting,” said Christiane Gruber, a professor of Islamic art at the University of Michigan. It is housed at the University of Edinburgh; similar paintings have been on display at places like the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And a sculpture of the prophet is at the Supreme Court.Dr. Gruber said that showing Islamic art and depictions of the Prophet Muhammad have become more common in academia, because of a push to “decolonize the canon” — that is, expand curriculum beyond a Western model.

Dr. Gruber, who wrote the essay in New Lines Magazine defending Dr. López Prater, said that studying Islamic art without the Compendium of Chronicles image “would be like not teaching Michaelangelo’s David.”

Yet, most Muslims believe that visual representations of Muhammad should not be viewed, even if the Quran does not explicitly prohibit them. The prohibition stems from the belief that an image of Muhammad could lead to worshiping the prophet rather than the god he served.

The administration, he said, “closed down conversation when they should have opened it up.”

Omid Safi, a professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University, said he regularly shows images of the Prophet Muhammad in class and without Dr. López Prater’s opt-out mechanisms. He explains to his students that these images were works of devotion created by pious artists at the behest of devout rulers.“That’s the part I want my students to grapple with,” Dr. Safi said. “How does something that comes from the very middle of the tradition end up being received later on as something marginal or forbidden?”

Dr. López Prater, a self-described art nerd, said she knew about the potential for conflict on Oct. 6, when she began her online lecture with 30 or so students.She said she spent a few minutes explaining why she was showing the image, how different religions have depicted the divine and how standards change over time.“I do not want to present the art of Islam as something that is monolithic,” she said in an interview, adding that she had been shown the image as a graduate student. She also showed a second image, from the 16th century, which depicted Muhammad wearing a veil.

Four days after the class, Dr. López Prater was summoned to a video meeting with the dean of the college of liberal arts, Marcela Kostihova.

After the class ended, Ms. Wedatalla, a business major and president of the university’s Muslim Student Association, stuck around to voice her discomfort.Immediately afterward, Dr. López Prater sent an email to her department head, Allison Baker, about the encounter; she thought that Ms. Wedatalla might complain.Ms. Baker, the chair of the digital and studio art department, responded to the email four minutes later.“It sounded like you did everything right,” Ms. Baker said. “I believe in academic freedom so you have my support.”

As Dr. López Prater predicted, Ms. Wedatalla reached out to administrators. Dr. López Prater, with Ms. Baker’s help, wrote an apology, explaining that sometimes “diversity involves bringing contradicting, uncomfortable and coexisting truths into conversation with each other.”

Ms. Wedatalla declined an interview request, and did not explain why she had not raised concerns before the image was shown. But in an email statement, she said images of Prophet Muhammad should never be displayed, and that Dr. López Prater gave a trigger warning precisely because she knew such images were offensive to many Muslims. The lecture was so disturbing, she said, that she could no longer see herself in that course.

Dr. López Prater said that no one in class raised concerns, and there was no disrespectful commentary.

Dr. Kostihova compared showing the image to using a racial epithet for Black people, according to Dr. López Prater.“It was very clear to me that she had not talked to any art historians,” Dr. López Prater said.

A couple of weeks later, the university rescinded its offer to teach next semester.

Dr. López Prater said she was ready to move on. She had teaching jobs at other schools. But on Nov. 7, David Everett, the vice president for inclusive excellence, sent an email to all university employees, saying that certain actions taken in an online class were “undeniably inconsiderate, disrespectful and Islamophobic.”

Dr. López Prater, who had only begun teaching at Hamline in the fall, said she felt like a bucket of ice water had been dumped over her head, but the shock soon gave way to “blistering anger at being characterized in those terms by somebody who I have never even met or spoken with.” She reached out to Dr. Gruber, who ended up writing the essay and starting the petition.

At the Dec. 8 forum, which was attended by several dozen students, faculty and administrators, Ms. Wedatalla described, often through tears, how she felt seeing the image.“Who do I call at 8 a.m.,” she asked, when “you see someone disrespecting and offending your religion?”Other Muslim students on the panel, all Black women, also spoke tearfully about struggling to fit in at Hamline. Students of color in recent years had protested what they called racist incidents; the university, they said, paid lip service to diversity and did not support students with institutional resources.

it is easy to forget how much we have in common as people. I can’t think of any major nation after the United States with more of a Protestant work ethic and naturally capitalist population than China.

These days, it is extremely difficult for a visiting columnist to get anyone — a senior official or a Starbucks barista — to speak on the record. It was not that way a decade ago.

The Communist Party’s hold is also a product of all the hard work and savings of the Chinese people, which have enabled the party and the state to build world-class infrastructure and public goods that make life for China’s middle and lower classes steadily better.

Beijing and Shanghai, in particular, have become very livable cities, with the air pollution largely erased and lots of new, walkable green spaces.

some 900 cities and towns in China are now served by high-speed rail, which makes travel to even remote communities incredibly cheap, easy and comfortable

Just when trust has become more important than ever between the U.S. and China, it also has become scarcer than ever. Bad trend.

China’s stability is a product of both an increasingly pervasive police state and a government that has steadily raised standards of living. It’s a regime that takes both absolute control and relentless nation-building seriously.

For an American to fly from New York’s Kennedy Airport into Beijing Capital International Airport today is to fly from an overcrowded bus terminal to a Disney-like Tomorrowland.

China got an early jump on A.I. in two realms — facial recognition technology and health records — because there are virtually no privacy restrictions on the government’s ability to build huge data sets for machine learning algorithms to find patterns.

“ChatGPT is prompting some people to ask if the U.S. is rising again, like in the 1990s,”

“I understand your feeling: You have been in the first place for a century, and now China is rising, and we have the potential to become the first — and that is not easy for you,” Hu said to me. But “you should not try to stop China’s development. You can’t contain China in the end. We are quite smart. And very diligent. We work very hard. And we have 1.4 billion people.”

Before the Trump presidency, he added: “We never thought China-U.S. relations would ever become so bad. Now we gradually accept the situation, and most Chinese people think there is no hope for better relations. We think the relationship will be worse and worse and hope that war will not break out between our two countries.”

A lot of people hesitated when I asked. Indeed, many would answer with some version of “I’m not sure, I just know that it’s THEIR fault.”

t was repeated conversations like these that got me started asking American, Chinese and Taiwanese investors, analysts and officials a question that has been nagging at me for a while: What exactly are America and China fighting about?

the real answer is so much deeper and more complex than just the usual one-word response — “Taiwan” — or the usual three-word response — “autocracy versus democracy.”

Let me try to peel back the layers. The erosion in U.S.-China relations is a result of something old and obvious — a traditional great-power rivalry between an incumbent power (us) and a rising power (China) — but with lots of new twists

One of the twists, though, is that this standard-issue great-power rivalry is occurring between nations that have become as economically intertwined as the strands of a DNA molecule. As a result, neither China nor America has ever had a rival quite like the other.

in modern times, China, like America, has never had to deal with a true economic and military peer with which it was also totally intertwined through trade and investment.

Another new twist, and a reason it’s hard to define exactly what we’re fighting about, has a lot to do with how this elusive issue of trust and the absence of it have suddenly assumed much greater importance in international affairs.

This is a byproduct of our new technological ecosystem in which more and more devices and services that we both use and trade are driven by microchips and software, and connected through data centers in the cloud and high-speed internet

so many more things became “dual use.” That is, technologies that can easily be converted from civilian tools to military weapons, or vice versa.

no one country or company can own the whole supply chain. You need the best from everywhere, and that supply chain is so tightly intertwined that each company has to trust the others intimately.

when we install the ability to sense, digitize, connect, process, learn, share and act into more and more things — from your GPS-enabled phone to your car to your toaster to your favorite app — they all become dual use, either weapons or tools depending on who controls the software running them and who owns the data that they spin off.

As long as most of what China sold us was shallow goods, we did not care as much about its political system — doubly so because it seemed for a while as if China was slowly but steadily becoming more and more integrated with the world and slightly more open and transparent every year. So, it was both easy and convenient to set aside some of our worries about the dark sides of its political system.

when you want to sell us ‘deep goods’ — goods that are dual use and will go deep into our homes, bedrooms, industries, chatbots and urban infrastructure — we don’t have enough trust to buy them. So, we are going to ban Huawei and instead pay more to buy our 5G telecom systems from Scandinavian companies we do trust: Ericsson and Nokia.”

as we’ve seen in Ukraine, a smartphone can be used by Grandma to call the grandkids or to call a Ukrainian rocket-launching unit and give it the GPS coordinates of a Russian tank in her backyard.

So today, the country or countries that can make the fastest, most powerful and most energy efficient microchips can make the biggest A.I. computers and dominate in economics and military affairs.

As more and more products and services became digitized and electrified, the microchips that powered everything became the new oil. What crude oil was to powering 19th- and 20th-century economies, microchips are for powering 21st-century economies.

When you ask them what is the secret that enables TSMC to make 90 percent of the world’s most advanced logic chips — while China, which speaks the same language and shares the same recent cultural history, makes zero — their answer is simple: “trust.”

TSMC is a semiconductor foundry, meaning it takes the designs of the most advanced computer companies in the world — Apple, Qualcomm, Nvidia, AMD and others — and turns the designs into chips that perform different processing functions

TSMC makes two solemn oaths to its customers: TSMC will never compete against them by designing its own chips and it will never share the designs of one of its customers with another.

“Our business is to serve multiple competitive clients,” Kevin Zhang, senior vice president for business development at TSMC, explained to me. “We are committed not to compete with any of them, and internally our people who serve customer A will never leak their information to customer C.”

But by working with so many trusted partners, TSMC leverages the partners’ steadily more complex designs to make itself better — and the better it gets, the more advanced designs it can master for its customers. This not only requires incredibly tight collaboration between TSMC and its customers, but also between TSMC and its roughly 1,000 critical local and global suppliers.

As the physics of chip making gets more and more extreme, “the investment from customers is getting bigger and bigger, so they have to work with us more closely to make sure they harvest as much [computing power] as they can. They have to trust you.”

China also has a foundry, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, which is partly state-owned. But guess what? Because no global chip designers trust SMIC with their most advanced designs, it is at least a decade behind TSMC.

It’s for these reasons that the erosion in U.S.-China relations goes beyond our increasingly sharp disagreements over Taiwan. It is rooted in the fact that just when trust, and its absence, became much bigger factors in international affairs and commerce, China changed its trajectory. It made itself a less trusted partner right when the most important technology for the 21st century — semiconductors — required unprecedented degrees of trust to manufacture and more and more devices and services became deep and dual use.

when American trade officials said: “Hey, you need to live up to your W.T.O. commitments to restrict state-funding of industries,” China basically said: “Why should we live by your interpretation of the rules? We are now big enough to make our own interpretations. We’re too big; you’re too late.”

Combined with China’s failure to come clean on what it knew about the origins of Covid-19, its crackdown on democratic freedoms in Hong Kong and on the Uyghur Muslim minority in Xinjiang, its aggressive moves to lay claim to the South China Sea, its increasing saber rattling toward Taiwan, its cozying up to Vladimir Putin (despite his savaging of Ukraine), Xi’s moves toward making himself president for life, his kneecapping of China’s own tech entrepreneurs, his tighter restrictions on speech and the occasional abduction of a leading Chinese businessman — all of these added up to one very big thing: Whatever trust that China had built up with the West since the late 1970s evaporated at the exact moment in history when trust, and shared values, became more important than ever in a world of deep, dual-use products driven by software, connectivity and microchips.

it started to matter a lot more to Western nations generally and the United States in particular that this rising power — which we were now selling to or buying from all sorts of dual-use digital devices or apps — was authoritarian.

eijing, for its part, argues that as China became a stronger global competitor to America — in deep goods like Huawei 5G — the United States simply could not handle it and decided to use its control over advanced semiconductor manufacturing and other high-tech exports from America, as well as from our allies, to ensure China always remained in our rearview mirror

Beijing came up with a new strategy, called “dual circulation.” It said: We will use state-led investments to make everything we possibly can at home, to become independent of the world. And we will use our manufacturing prowess to make the world dependent on our exports.

Chinese officials also argue that a lot of American politicians — led by Trump but echoed by many in Congress — suddenly seemed to find it very convenient to put the blame for economic troubles in the U.S.’s middle class not on any educational deficiencies, or a poor work ethic, or automation or the 2008 looting by financial elites, and the crisis that followed, but on China’s exports to the United States.

As Beijing sees it, China not only became America’s go-to boogeyman, but in their frenzy to blame Beijing for everything, members of Congress started to more recklessly promote Taiwan’s independence.

Xi told President Biden at their summit in Bali in November, in essence: I will not be the president of China who loses Taiwan. If you force my hand, there will be war. You don’t understand how important this is to the Chinese people. You’re playing with fire.

at some level Chinese officials now understand that, as a result of their own aggressive actions in recent years on all the fronts I’ve listed, they have frightened both the world and their own innovators at precisely the wrong time.

I don’t buy the argument that we are destined for war. I believe that we are doomed to compete with each other, doomed to cooperate with each other and doomed to find some way to balance the two. Otherwise we are both going to have a very bad 21st century.

I have to say, though, Americans and Chinese remind me of Israelis and Palestinians in one respect: They are both expert at aggravating the other’s deepest insecurities.

China’s Communist Party is now convinced that America wants to bring it down, which some U.S. politicians are actually no longer shy about suggesting. So, Beijing is ready to crawl into bed with Putin, a war criminal, if that is what it takes to keep the Americans at bay.

Americans are now worried that Communist China, which got rich by taking advantage of a global market shaped by American rules, will use its newfound market power to unilaterally change those rules entirely to its advantage. So we’ve decided to focus our waning strength vis-à-vis Beijing on ensuring the Chinese will always be a decade behind us on microchips.

I don’t know what is sufficient to reverse these trends, but I think I know what is necessary.

If it is not the goal of U.S. foreign policy to topple the Communist regime in China, the United States needs to make that crystal clear, because I found a lot more people than ever before in Beijing think otherwise.

As for China, it can tell itself all it wants that it has not taken a U-turn in recent years. But no one is buying it. China will never realize its full potential — in a hyper-connected, digitized, deep, dual-use, semiconductor-powered world — unless it understands that establishing and maintaining trust is now the single most important competitive advantage any country or company can have. And Beijing is failing in that endeavor.

In his splendid biography of the great American statesman George Shultz, Philip Taubman quotes one of Shultz’s cardinal rules of diplomacy and life: “Trust is the coin of the realm.”

It is easy to understand the appeal of such one-sided tales. As human beings, we seem to prefer to impose clear and linear narratives on a chaotic and unpredictable reality; ambiguity and contradiction are much harder to live with.

To truly grasp the complex nature of our current time, we need first of all to embrace its most terrifying aspect: its fundamental open-endedness. It is precisely this radical uncertainty — not knowing where we are and what lies ahead — that gives rise to such existential anxiety.

Anthropologists have a name for this disturbing type of experience: liminality

If things are really getting better, there is clearly no need for transformative change to confront the most pressing problems of our time. So long as we stick to the script and keep our faith in the redeeming qualities of human ingenuity and technological innovation, all our problems will eventually resolve themselves.

We are ourselves in the midst of a painful transition, a sort of interregnum, as the Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci famously called it, between an old world that is dying and a new one that is struggling to be born. Such epochal shifts are inevitably fraught with danger

the great upheavals in world history can equally be seen “as genuine signs of vitality” that “clear the ground” of discredited ideas and decaying institutions. “The crisis,” he wrote, “is to be regarded as a new nexus of growth.”

Once we embrace this Janus-faced nature of our times, at once frightening yet generative, a very different vision of the future emerges.

we see phases of relative calm punctuated every so often by periods of great upheaval. These crises can be devastating, but they are also the drivers of history.

even the collapse of modern civilization — but it may also open up possibilities for transformative change

“It’s shoot first, ask questions later,”

Each one of these incidents resulted from unique events. But activists and researchers say they stem from a convergence of bigger factors — increased fear of crime and an attendant surge in gun ownership, increasingly extreme political messaging on firearms, fearmongering in the media and marketing campaigns by the gun industry that portray the suburban front door as a fortified barrier against a violent world.

“The gun lobby markets firearms as something you need to defend yourself — hammers in search of nails,”

The perception that crime, especially violent gun crime, has increased is not a manufactured myth. National murder rates have climbed by about a third since 2019, according to government data, even accounting for modest declines in fatal shootings over the past 18 months.

Gun purchases rose during the pandemic and the unrest and racial-justice protests after the murder of George Floyd. Nearly 20 percent of American households bought a gun from March 2020 to March 2022, and about 5 percent of Americans bought a gun for the first time,

More than 30 states also have “stand your ground” laws. Some have recently strengthened their “castle doctrine” laws, making it more difficult to prosecute homeowners who claim self-defense in a shooting.

“People become paranoid and over-worried — and then comes an unannounced knock on their door,”

But several large-scale studies have suggested that the laws have few benefits, increase the likelihood of gun violence and might discriminate against minority groups, especially Black people.

The effect of self-defense laws protecting homeowners and gun owners is fiercely debated, with proponents arguing that their mere presence deters criminal behavior or civil disorder

shootings in which white people shot Black people were nearly three times as likely to be found “justified” compared with cases where white people shot other white people.

A 2023 analysis of recent academic research by the nonpartisan RAND Corporation found no evidence that such laws had the deterrent effect that their sponsors claimed, and there was some indication, while not conclusive, that the laws might account for some increases in gun violence.

weapons were actually more likely to be used in suicides, discharged accidentally, stolen or brandished in domestic disputes, than used to fend off an external attack.

The National Rifle Association and other gun-rights groups have long disputed such assessments, citing surveys that show far greater use of weapons for legitimate self-defense.

About a third of the roughly 16,700 gun owners surveyed in a study led by William English, a Georgetown University business school professor, said they had used their guns for self-defense, prompting Mr. English to estimate that as many as 1.6 million people in the country had defended themselves with a weapon that year.

For instance, when a Harvard scholar such as Steven Pinker speaks of “disempowering D.E.I.” as a necessary reform in American higher education, he’s not opposing diversity itself. Pinker is liberal, donates substantially to the Democratic Party and “loathes” Donald Trump. The objections he raises are shared by a substantial number of Americans across the political spectrum.

, the problem with D.E.I. isn’t with diversity, equity, or inclusion — all vital values.

First, it is a moral necessity for colleges to be concerned about hateful discourse, including hateful language directed at members of historically marginalized groups. Moreover, colleges that receive federal funds have a legal obligation

I’ll share with you three pervasive examples

In the name of D.E.I., all too many institutions have violated their constitutional commitments to free speech, due process and equal protection of the law.

Yet that is no justification for hundreds of universities to pass and maintain draconian speech codes on campus, creating a system of unconstitutional censorship that has been struck down again and again and again in federal court. Nor is it a justification for discriminating against faculty members for their political views or for compelling them to speak in support of D.E.I.

There is a better way to achieve greater diversity, equity, inclusion and related goals. Universities can welcome students from all walks of life without unlawfully censoring speech. They can respond to campus sexual violence without violating students’ rights to due process. They can diversify the student body without discriminating on the basis of race

Second, there is a moral imperative to respond to sexual misconduct on campus.

that is no justification for replacing one tilted playing field with another. Compelled in part by constitutionally problematic guidance from the Obama administration, hundreds of universities adopted sexual misconduct policies that strip the most basic due process protections from accused students. The result has been systematic injustice

The due process problem was so profound that in 2019 a state appellate court in California — hardly a bastion of right-wing jurisprudence — ruled that “fundamental fairness” entitles an accused student to cross-examine witnesses in front of a neutral adjudicator.

Third, it is urgently necessary to address racial disparities in campus admissions and faculty hiring — but, again, not at the expense of the Constitution.

it is difficult to ignore the overwhelming evidence that Harvard attempted to achieve greater diversity in part by systematically downranking Asian applicants on subjective grounds, judging them deficient in traits such as “positive personality,” likability, courage, kindness and being “widely respected.” That’s not inclusion; it’s discrimination.

Our nation has inflicted horrific injustices on vulnerable communities. And while the precise nature of the injustice has varied — whether it was slavery, Jim Crow, internment or the brutal conquest of Native American lands — there was always a consistent theme: the comprehensive denial of constitutional rights.

But one does not correct the consequences of those terrible constitutional violations by inflicting a new set of violations on different American communities in a different American era. A consistent defense of the Constitution is good for us all,

The danger posed by D.E.I. resides primarily not in these virtuous ends, but in the unconstitutional means chosen to advance them.

Virtuous goals should not be accomplished by illiberal means.

Since 2016, there have been two competing visions for the Democratic Party. One is the promise that began with Barack Obama of a multiracial coalition that would grow stronger as America’s demographics shifted; the other is the political revolution championed by Bernie Sanders as a way to unite nonvoters with the working class

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez bridges the gap between the two

what’s clear is that at a time when Democrats are struggling, she is quietly laying the groundwork to build a coalition broader than the one she came to power with, unafraid to take risks along the way.

After five years in Congress, she has emerged as a tested navigator of its byzantine systems, wielding her celebrity to further her political aims in a way few others have.

Three terms in, one gets the sense that we’re witnessing a skilled tactician exiting her political adolescence and coming into her own as a veteran operator out to reform America’s most dysfunctional political body.

To grasp what sets Ms. Ocasio-Cortez apart from many of her colleagues, you have to understand where she finds allies

In 2019, she and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas considered joining forces to write a bill that would bar former members of Congress from becoming lobbyists. Asked why she would consider an alliance with someone so loathed by liberals, she said, “I will swallow all of my distaste in this situation because we have found a common interest.”

It was a window into the politician she would become: pragmatic and results-driven, willing to work with people she considers her political adversaries, at least on legislation that appeals to her base

She has attributed the success of these efforts at least in part to her role as the second most powerful Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, which she said has “opened many windows” for collaboration.

while these bills may seem like small victories, they are more than that because, in a sense, she is redefining what bipartisanship looks like in Washington.

For decades, bipartisanship has meant bringing together moderates, lobbyists and establishment insiders to produce watered-down legislation unpalatable to many voters in both political partie

What Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is doing is different; she’s uniting politicians on the fringes of American politics around a broadly popular set of policies.

Americans in both parties overwhelmingly say that they don’t trust the government to do the right thing and that donors and lobbyists have too much sway over the legislative process.

more than 8 in 10 Americans believe politicians “are more focused on fighting each other than on solving problems.” One-fifth of respondents said lack of bipartisan cooperation was the biggest problem with the political system.

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s efforts to reach out to Republicans are offering what a sizable portion of Americans want from Congress: a return to getting things done.

The few policy matters on which progressives and conservatives align often boil down to a distrust of politicians and of big corporations, particularly technology companies and pharmaceutical giants.

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has shrewdly made those causes her passion, building alliances with conservative colleagues interested in holding these industries accountable.

Last spring, she cosponsored a bill with, among others, Brian Fitzpatrick, a moderate Republican from Pennsylvania, and Matt Gaetz, the Florida rabble-rouser who has become one of Mr. Trump’s most steadfast allies. The legislation would bar members of Congress from trading individual stocks, a measure that as of the fall of 2022 was supported by nearly 70 percent of voters across party lines.

On Gaza, too, she has been willing to buck other members of her party to pursue an agenda that a majority of voters support. She was one of the first Democrats to call for a cease-fire; within weeks, nearly 70 percent of Americans said Israel should call one and try to negotiate with Hamas.

In March, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez was accosted by a handful of protesters who demanded that she call Israel’s war in Gaza a genocide.

Less than three weeks later, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez did accuse Israel of genocide and chastised the White House for providing military aid to the country while it blockaded Gaza. “If you want to know what an unfolding genocide looks like,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said in a speech on the House floor, “open your eyes. It looks like the forced famine of 1.1 million innocents. It looks like thousands of children eating grass as their bodies consume themselves, while trucks of food are slowed and halted just miles away.”

Last month, she voted against providing additional funding for Israel. Those were unpopular positions in Congress, where unconditional support for the country remains the norm, but they put her in line with a majority of Democratic voters.

These stances haven’t been enough to quell the doubts from a faction of the left that helped get her elected. Over the past few weeks, some have accused her of caving in to pressure from moderate Democrats

. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has taken much of the heat from leftist activists who see her as a symbol of the contradictions and compromises inherent in the political system. It may not be realistic to expect absolute purity from her; she is, after all, a politician. But these critiques overlook the promise of what she’s doing behind the scenes.

Democratic pollsters and strategists are searching for ways for Mr. Biden to win back Muslims and Arab Americans in swing states such as Michigan and Georgia, recent college graduates who hoped to have their student debt forgiven, immigrant-rights activists and Latinos.

Some of the betrayal these voters feel was hardly the president’s fault; he was hampered on student loan debt by a federal judiciary stacked with judges sympathetic to conservative legal arguments, and Congress refused to pass the comprehensive immigration bill he supported in 2021, which would have provided legal status to as many as 11 million undocumented immigrants.

A more gifted orator might have been able to make the structural impediments in his way clear to voters, while also putting forth a proactive vision for dismantling the core problems baked into our politics.

In that, someone like Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, who endorsed Mr. Biden for re-election in 2023, may be able to help. She’s the Democratic Party’s most charismatic politician since Barack Obama and its most ardent populist since Bernie Sanders.

she can offer voters something more substantial than a hollow rebuke of Trumpism

Last month, when the journalist Mehdi Hasan asked her how she’d respond to “a young progressive or Arab American who says to you, ‘I just can’t vote for Biden again after what he’s enabled in Gaza,’” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said a vote for Mr. Biden didn’t necessarily mean an endorsement of all his policies. “Even in places of stark disagreement, I would rather be organizing under the conditions of Biden as an opponent on an issue than Trump,” she said. It was a shrewd political maneuver, designed to distance herself from Democrats who support Israel unconditionally, while meeting voters — some of whom have lost family members in Gaza — where they are

There are, of course, limits to this strategy. Some on the left see Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s endorsement of Mr. Biden as a betrayal of progressive values, particularly in the wake of the climbing death toll in Gaza.

The moderate Republicans who turned out for Mr. Biden in 2020 might shrink from a Democratic Party led by someone they consider an outspoken progressive.

But for every moderate or leftist voter lost with a strategy like Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s, the Democratic Party may be able to win someone new — from the pool of disillusioned Americans who feel shut out of the political process.

it is not just that Europeans spend a few extra weeks on the beach. The typical working day in Britain, France and Germany is half an hour shorter than in America, according to the International Labour Organisation.

which is the better way of living—with more money or more free time? The reality is that it is difficult for people to choose

Those in America work according to American schedules; those in Europe conform to European norms.

the more fruitful question is why Americans put in longer hours

The answer leads to a curious new observation: that remote work is making America’s office drones a little more European, albeit with a puritanical twist.

A first guess suggests that culture might account for the variation in work hours. Maybe Europeans enjoy their leisure more. They are spoilt for choice about how to spend time off

As for Americans, surveys indicate that they view hard work as intrinsically worthwhile. “Rugged individualism” is, after all, what built the country.

the difficulty with chalking up the difference to culture is that until the early 1970s many Europeans worked more

American working hours are basically the same now as back then. The big change is that Europeans now toil less. Hours are down a whopping 30% in Germany over the past half-century. Something beyond culture—a slow-moving, ill-defined variable—is at play.

Edward Prescott, an American economist, came to a provocative conclusion, arguing that the key was taxation

Until the early 1970s tax levels were similar in America and Europe, and so were hours worked. By the early 1990s Europe’s taxes had become more burdensome and, in Prescott’s view, its employees less motivated

A substantial gap persists today: American tax revenue is 28% of GDP, compared with 40% or so in Europe.

A recent study by Jósef Sigurdsson of Stockholm University examined how Icelandic workers responded to a one-year income-tax holiday in 1987, when the country overhauled its tax system. Although people with more flexibility—especially younger ones in part-time jobs—did indeed put in more hours, the overall increase in work was modest relative to that implied by Prescott’s model.

Regulation seems to matter more.

European rules give workers power, from generous parental-leave policies to stricter laws on firing staff. Many European countries try to put caps on working tim

most research agrees that they have reduced work hours.

Another important relationship is that, as people get richer, they typically want to work less

A recent paper by the IMF shows a remarkably strong link between GDP per person and hours worked in Europe. People in richer countries, such as the Netherlands, generally work less than those in poorer countries, such as Bulgaria.

Americans are wealthier than most Europeans, so why do they still work more?

Perhaps leisure is a collective-action problem. Americans may want to ask their bosses for longer holidays but are worried about being seen as slackers

A paper in 2005 by Alberto Alesina of Harvard University and colleagues argued that Europe’s stronger unions had in effect solved this collective-action problem by fighting for paid vacations, which ended up enshrined in law.

Europe’s well-regulated leisure time may then beget more leisure because it is more socially acceptable, and the market responds by supplying more good ways not to work. It is a virtuous cycle of lovely cafés.

One fascinating new development is a discrepancy in the rise of remote work

In 2023 the Global Survey of Working Arrangements found that full-time employees in America work from home 1.4 days a week, while those in Europe do so for 0.8 days

a striking result: Europeans and Americans now spend almost exactly the same amount of time in the office, with 1,320 hours a year for the former and 1,304 for the latter.

In other words, the extra 15% of work done by Americans annually is now from the comfort of their own homes—or occasionally on the beach, perhaps even one in Europe. Americans do still work harder, but rather more enjoyably than in the past

And if divestment against Israel is carried out, when should it end?

Oil and gas divesting is meant never to end; oil and gas consumption is meant to end. Divestment from South Africa ended with apartheid.

So university leaders will be forced to ask an often heterogeneous group of students what would earn Israel its social license back. A cease-fire? A new Israeli government? A two-state solution? The end of Israel as a Jewish state?

But even if an endowment could provide a list of every underlying investment, it would likely then be inundated for more calls to divest, for more discovered connections — however small — to Israel, and for reasons related to other offenses discoverable with an online search

The answer, of course, is that endowments can’t be in the moral adjudication business — and they should never have headed this way

This does not mean that investing should be a returns-at-any-cost exercise. But it does mean that the real world does not always provide objective answers to how to balance benefits and consequences of companies providing products and services:

Understanding how empathy can immobilize us like that is a critical step for helping others — and ourselves.

Empathic distress explains why many people have checked out in the wake of these tragedies

Having concluded that nothing they do will make a difference, they start to become indifferent.

The symptoms of empathic distress were originally diagnosed in health care, with nurses and doctors who appeared to become insensitive to the pain of their patients.

Early researchers labeled it compassion fatigue and described it as the cost of caring.

when two neuroscientists, Olga Klimecki and Tania Singer, reviewed the evidence, they discovered that “compassion fatigue” is a misnomer. Caring itself is not costly. What drains people is not merely witnessing others’ pain but feeling incapable of alleviating it.

In times of sustained anguish, empathy is a recipe for more distress, and in some cases even depression. What we need instead is compassion.

empathy and compassion aren’t the same. Empathy absorbs others’ emotions as your own: “I’m hurting for you.”

Compassion focuses your action on their emotions: “I see that you’re hurting, and I’m here for you.”

“Empathy is biased,” the psychologist Paul Bloom writes. It’s something we usually reserve for our own group, and in that sense, it can even be “a powerful force for war and atrocity.”

Dr. Singer and their colleagues trained people to empathize by trying to feel other people’s pain. When the participants saw someone suffering, it activated a neural network that would light up if they themselves were in pain. It hurt. And when people can’t help, they escape the pain by withdrawing.

To combat this, the Klimecki and Singer team taught their participants to respond with compassion rather than empathy — focusing not on sharing others’ pain but on noticing their feelings and offering comfort.

A different neural network lit up, one associated with affiliation and social connection. This is why a growing body of evidence suggests that compassion is healthier for you and kinder to others than empathy:

When you see others in pain, instead of causing you to get overloaded and retreat, compassion motivates you to reach out and help

The most basic form of compassion is not assuaging distress but acknowledging it.

in my research, I’ve found that being helpful has a secondary benefit: It’s an antidote to feeling helpless.

To figure out who needs your support after something terrible happens, the psychologist Susan Silk suggests picturing a dart board, with the people closest to the trauma in the bull’s-eye and those more peripherally affected in the outer rings.

Once you’ve figured out where you belong on the dart board, look for support from people outside your ring, and offer it to people closer to the center.

Even if people aren’t personally in the line of fire, attacks targeting members of a specific group can shatter a whole population’s sense of security.

If you notice that people in your life seem disengaged around an issue that matters to you, it’s worth considering whose pain they might be carrying.

Instead of demanding that they do more, it may be time to show them compassion — and help them find compassion for themselves, too.

Your small gesture of kindness won’t end the crisis in the Middle East, but it can help someone else. And that can give you the strength to help more.

Newsroom leaders, concerned that some Times journalists are compromising their neutrality and applying ideological purity tests to coverage decisions, are seeking to draw a line. 

Kahn noted that the organization has added a lot of digital-savvy workers who are skilled in areas like data analytics, design and product engineering but who weren’t trained in independent journalism. He also suggested that colleges aren’t preparing new hires to be tolerant of dissenting views

International editor Philip Pan later intervened, saying the WhatsApp thread—at its worst a “tense forum where the questions and comments can feel accusatory”—should be for sharing information, not for hosting debates, according to messages reviewed by the Journal. 

Coverage of the Israel-Hamas war has become particularly fraught at the Times, with some reporters saying the Times’s work is tilting in favor of Israel and others pushing back forcefully, say people familiar with the situation. That has led to dueling charges of bias and journalistic malpractice among reporters and editors, forcing management to referee disputes.

“Just like our readers at the moment, there are really really strong passions about that issue and not that much willingness to really explore the perspectives of people who are on the other side of that divide,” Kahn said, adding that it’s hard work for staffers “to put their commitment to the journalism often ahead of their own personal views.”

Last fall, Times staffers covering the war got into a heated dispute in a WhatsApp group chat over the publication’s reporting on Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza, which Israel alleged was a command-and-control center for Hamas.

While the Guild represents staffers across many major U.S. news outlets, its members also include employees from non-news advocacy organizations such as pro-Palestinian group Jewish Voice For Peace, Democratic Socialists of America and divisions of the ACLU. 

“Young adults who are coming up through the education system are less accustomed to this sort of open debate, this sort of robust exchange of views around issues they feel strongly about than may have been the case in the past,” he said, adding that the onus is on the Times to instill values like independence in its employees.

The publisher of the Times, 43-year-old A.G. Sulzberger, says readers’ trust is at risk, however. Some journalists, including at the Times, are criticizing journalistic traditions like impartiality, while embracing “a different model of journalism, one guided by personal perspective and animated by personal conviction,” Sulzberger wrote in a 12,000-word essay last year in Columbia Journalism Review. 

Despite such moves, NewsGuard, an organization that rates credibility of news sites, in February reduced the Times’s score from the maximum of 100 to 87.5, saying it doesn’t have a clear enough delineation between news and opinion.

Emboldened by their show of strength on Bennet, employees would flex their muscles again on multiple occasions, pushing to oust colleagues they felt had engaged in journalistic or workplace misconduct. 

One thing Powell noticed, he said, was that coverage that challenged popular political and cultural beliefs was being neglected. Powell’s work includes a story on MIT’s canceling of a lecture by an academic who had criticized affirmative action, and another examining whether the ACLU is more willing to defend the First Amendment rights of progressives than far-right groups.

Kahn, who succeeded Baquet as executive editor in June 2022, and Opinion Editor Kathleen Kingsbury said in a letter to staff that they wouldn’t tolerate participation by Times journalists in protests or attacks on colleagues.

Divisions have formed in the newsroom over the role of the union that represents Times staffers, the NewsGuild-CWA. Some staffers say it has inappropriately inserted itself into debates with management, including over coverage of the trans community and the war. 

The Times isn’t the only news organization where employees have become more vocal in complaints about coverage and workplace practices. War coverage has also fueled tensions at The Wall Street Journal, with some reporters in meetings and internal chat groups complaining that coverage is skewed—either favoring Israel or Palestinians.  

When Times staffers logged on to a union virtual meeting last fall to discuss whether to call for a cease-fire in Gaza, some attendees from other organizations had virtual backgrounds displaying Palestinian flags. The meeting, where a variety of members were given around two minutes to share their views on the matter, felt like the kind of rally the Times’ policy prohibits, according to attendees. 

In January, Sulzberger shared his thoughts on covering Trump during a visit to the Washington bureau. It was imperative to keep Trump coverage emotion-free, he told staffers, according to people who attended. He referenced the Times story, “Why a Second Trump Presidency May Be More Radical Than His First,” by Charlie Savage, Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman, as a good example of fact-based and fair coverage. 

In the 1960s fantasyland goes into overdrive. Psychedelics, academic scholarship and the New Age movement conspire to make reason and reality the realms of idiots and squares.

After the Kennedy assassinations, conspiracy theories become not just a fringe hobby but a “permanent feature of the American mental landscape.” U.F.O. sightings explode, and the stories become ever more elaborate

In the meantime, a kind of comfort with small fibs settles into the populace. When Andersen was young, he recalls, it was rare to see a woman over 50 whose hair was not gray or white. And apparently there were only eight plastic surgeons in all of Manhattan. But the market for hair color and plastic surgery explodes, as America starts writing its “national fiction of permanent youthfulness.”

the most persistent thread in “Fantasyland” is Christianity — the astounding number of Americans who believe in heaven and angels, which most of Europe gave up decades ago

Andersen reserves a starring role for the secular spiritualists. They were supposed to be a counterpoint to narrow-minded evangelicals, but Andersen says the New Agers committed an even greater sin than the faithful. What Anne Hutchinson started, Gestalt therapy finished off in the ’60s. Fritz Perls, a psychotherapist and Gestalt founder, simply put it: “I do my thing and you do your thing. I am not in this world to live up to your expectations, and you are not in this world to live up to mine.” Or put more simply: You do you.

If there’s a flaw in this book, it’s repetitiveness. Andersen seems by nature a collector. He goes for wide rather than deep. So he doesn’t examine, for example, how we would separate the junk from the gems

What we Americans need, it would seem, is something more powerful. A story to end all stories, preached by someone with the fire of Anne Hutchinson. A collective delusion so seductive that it will have us all, in Locke-step, bowing down to reason and reality.

our real progenitors were the Puritans, who passed the weeks on the trans-Atlantic voyage preaching about the end times and who, when they arrived, vowed to hang any Quaker or Catholic who landed on their shores. They were zealots and also well-educated British gentlemen, which set the tone for what Andersen identifies as a distinctly American endeavor: propping up magical thinking with elaborate scientific proof.

In Andersen’s telling, you can easily trace the line from the self-appointed 17th-century prophet Anne Hutchinson to Kanye West: She was, he writes, uniquely American “because she was so confident in herself, in her intuitions and idiosyncratic, subjective understanding of reality,” a total stranger to self-doubt.

As he explains in what must have been an alarmingly self-confirming last chapter: Donald Trump is “stupendous Exhibit A” in the landscape of “Fantasyland,” a fitting leader for a nation that has, over the centuries, nurtured a “promiscuous devotion to the untrue.”

Those are revolutionary aspirations in that they reject not a policy consensus, but social and governing compacts that date to the Founding. (Or at least the end of the Civil War.)

Most revolutions are borne of dissatisfaction.

The Trumpian revolution, on the other hand, seems to be the product of decadent boredom commingled with casual nihilism.

Circumstances for our revolutionaries have never been better. They are so flush that they parade on their boats. And fly upside-down flags outside of their million-dollar suburban homes. And put stickers depicting a hogtied president on their $75,000 pickup trucks. All while posting angry memes to Facebook on their $1,000 iPhones.

Unlike normal revolutionaries, the Trumpist revolutionaries risk nothing. If their gambit succeeds, then they overturn the Constitutional order. And if it fails? They go back to their boats, and trucks, and good-paying jobs, and iPhones.

What’s more, this revolution has discovered that it gets as many bites at the apple as it likes. All defeats and setback are temporary. The movement lives to fight again. They can lose a dozen times—they only have to win once more.

Trumpist revolutionaries get to tell themselves that they are part of a historic, final battle—but also that if they lose, they get to keep their normal, pampered lives. And four years from now they can try again.

In sum: While the revolutionaries get to have their glamorous Götterdämmerung, over and over, the forces of the status quo have to defend against wave after wave of challenges. And it doesn’t matter how many authoritarian attempts are beaten back. There’s always another one looming.That is why you’re exhausted.

let’s be honest about human nature: Breaking things is fun. Especially when you don’t experience any consequences. But running around putting out fires, and cleaning up broken glass, and asking people to stop breaking things? That is not fun. It is enervating.

So while the revolutionary feels like a hero, you feel like a scold.

To paraphrase Mr. Cobb, once an idea has taken hold in society, it’s almost impossible to eradicate.

the Trumpist revolution’s weakness is that it has no ideas. It has goals, but these are motivated by nothing more than will-to-power. There is no logic—not even a faulty logic—behind them.7

How do we fight the exhaustion?First, we try to have some fun while we are scolding the twits and defending the imperfect status quo.Second, we remain fearless about the fight and clear eyed about reality.

Third, we organize and build communities to rally normal people to the cause of democracy.

They also claim that OpenAI has used hardball tactics to prevent workers from voicing their concerns about the technology, including restrictive nondisparagement agreements that departing employees were asked to sign.

“OpenAI is really excited about building A.G.I., and they are recklessly racing to be the first there,” said Daniel Kokotajlo, a former researcher in OpenAI’s governance division and one of the group’s organizers.

Other members include William Saunders, a research engineer who left OpenAI in February, and three other former OpenAI employees: Carroll Wainwright, Jacob Hilton and Daniel Ziegler. Several current OpenAI employees endorsed the letter anonymously because they feared retaliation from the company,

At OpenAI, Mr. Kokotajlo saw that even though the company had safety protocols in place — including a joint effort with Microsoft known as the “deployment safety board,” which was supposed to review new models for major risks before they were publicly released — they rarely seemed to slow anything down.

So was the departure of Dr. Leike, who along with Dr. Sutskever had led OpenAI’s “superalignment” team, which focused on managing the risks of powerful A.I. models. In a series of public posts announcing his departure, Dr. Leike said he believed that “safety culture and processes have taken a back seat to shiny products.”

“When I signed up for OpenAI, I did not sign up for this attitude of ‘Let’s put things out into the world and see what happens and fix them afterward,’” Mr. Saunders said.

Mr. Kokotajlo, 31, joined OpenAI in 2022 as a governance researcher and was asked to forecast A.I. progress. He was not, to put it mildly, optimistic.In his previous job at an A.I. safety organization, he predicted that A.G.I. might arrive in 2050. But after seeing how quickly A.I. was improving, he shortened his timelines. Now he believes there is a 50 percent chance that A.G.I. will arrive by 2027 — in just three years.

He also believes that the probability that advanced A.I. will destroy or catastrophically harm humanity — a grim statistic often shortened to “p(doom)” in A.I. circles — is 70 percent.

Last month, two senior A.I. researchers — Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike — left OpenAI under a cloud. Dr. Sutskever, who had been on OpenAI’s board and voted to fire Mr. Altman, had raised alarms about the potential risks of powerful A.I. systems. His departure was seen by some safety-minded employees as a setback.

Mr. Kokotajlo said, he became so worried that, last year, he told Mr. Altman that the company should “pivot to safety” and spend more time and resources guarding against A.I.’s risks rather than charging ahead to improve its models. He said that Mr. Altman had claimed to agree with him, but that nothing much changed.

In April, he quit. In an email to his team, he said he was leaving because he had “lost confidence that OpenAI will behave responsibly" as its systems approach human-level intelligence.

“The world isn’t ready, and we aren’t ready,” Mr. Kokotajlo wrote. “And I’m concerned we are rushing forward regardless and rationalizing our actions.”

On his way out, Mr. Kokotajlo refused to sign OpenAI’s standard paperwork for departing employees, which included a strict nondisparagement clause barring them from saying negative things about the company, or else risk having their vested equity taken away.

Many employees could lose out on millions of dollars if they refused to sign. Mr. Kokotajlo’s vested equity was worth roughly $1.7 million, he said, which amounted to the vast majority of his net worth, and he was prepared to forfeit all of it.

Mr. Altman said he was “genuinely embarrassed” not to have known about the agreements, and the company said it would remove nondisparagement clauses from its standard paperwork and release former employees from their agreements.)

In their open letter, Mr. Kokotajlo and the other former OpenAI employees call for an end to using nondisparagement and nondisclosure agreements at OpenAI and other A.I. companies.

“Broad confidentiality agreements block us from voicing our concerns, except to the very companies that may be failing to address these issues,”

They also call for A.I. companies to “support a culture of open criticism” and establish a reporting process for employees to anonymously raise safety-related concerns.

They have retained a pro bono lawyer, Lawrence Lessig, the prominent legal scholar and activist

Mr. Kokotajlo and his group are skeptical that self-regulation alone will be enough to prepare for a world with more powerful A.I. systems. So they are calling for lawmakers to regulate the industry, too.

“There needs to be some sort of democratically accountable, transparent governance structure in charge of this process," Mr. Kokotajlo said. “Instead of just a couple of different private companies racing with each other, and keeping it all secret.”