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As one Twitter wag noted, Musk’s acquisition of Twitter is like Elmer Fudd buying a platform full of Bugs Bunnies.)

Trump and those like him managed to get a ticket in the swankiest carriage on the train, only to find themselves sitting alone. And if that’s how it’s going to be … well, the only answer is to derail the entire thing, from locomotive to caboose, and make everyone suffer.

As the British journalist Simon Kuper noted a few years ago, anti-system parties in the United Kingdom, Italy, and the United States are powered not by struggling workers, but by the “comfortably off populist voter” who has “never been invited into the fast lane of life: the top universities, the biggest firms, the major corporations.”

These citizens think that the disconnect between material success and their perceived lack of status must be punished, and if that means voting for election deniers and conspiracy theorists, so be it.

There is one more example of such resentment, and it’s a lot less funny. Russia is an entire nation seized with a massive inferiority complex, and the Russian regime is giving vent to that resentment in the continual murder of Ukrainians

the brutality of the Russians on the battlefield against their Slavic kin is very much rooted in resentment: Why do you live in freedom? Why are you living better than us?

Until recently, the people said, Meta executives viewed the company’s reliance on China to make Oculus virtual reality headsets as a relatively minor concern because the company’s core focus was its social media and messaging apps.

All that has changed now that Meta has rebranded itself as a hardware company

“Meta is building a complicated hardware product. You can’t just turn on a dime and make it elsewhere,”

Facebook’s public criticism of China began in 2019 when Zuckerberg warned, in a speech at Georgetown University, that China was exporting a dangerous vision for the internet to the rest of the world — and noted that Facebook was abandoning its efforts to break into that country’s market.

The anti-China stance has since extended into a full-blown corporate strategy. Nick Clegg, the company’s president, wrote an op-ed attacking China in The Washington Post in 2020, the same year Zuckerberg attacked China in a congressional antitrust hearing.

At the antitrust hearing in Congress in 2020, Zuckerberg used his opening remarks to attack China in terms that went much further than his industry peers. He said it was “well-documented that the Chinese government steals technology from American companies,” and repeated that the country was “building its own version of the internet” that went against American values. He described Facebook as a “proudly American” company and noted that TikTok was the company’s fastest-growing rival.

“They were trying to find things that [Zuckerberg] could agree with Trump on, and it’s a pretty slim list,” said one of the people, describing how the company landed on its anti-China strategy. “If you’re not going to try to be in this country anyway, you might as well use it to your political advantage by contrasting yourself with Apple and TikTok.”

Postolnikov has been under increasing scrutiny in the criminal investigation into the Trump Media merger. Most recently, he has been listed on search warrant affidavits alongside several associates – one of whom was indicted last month for money laundering on top of earlier insider-trading charges.

Trump Media then received the loans from ES Family Trust: $2m on 23 December 2021, and $6m on 17 February 2022.

Part of the problem was that Trump Media struggled to get financing because traditional banks were reluctant to lend millions to Trump’s social media company in the wake of the January 6 Capitol attack, Wilkerson said.Trump Media eventually found some lenders, including ES Family Trust, but the sequence of events was curious.

S Family Trust was established on 18 May 2021, its creation papers show. Postolnikov’s “user” access to the account was “verified” on 30 November 2021 by a Paxum Bank manager in Dominica. The trust was funded for the first time on 2 December 2021

In late 2021, Trump Media was facing financial trouble after the original planned merger with Digital World was delayed indefinitely when the Securities and Exchange Commission opened an investigation into the merger, Trump Media’s since-ousted co-founder-turned-whistleblower Will Wilkerson recounted in an interview.

Oddly, the notes were never signed. But the investment in Trump Media proved to be huge: while precise figures can only be known by Trump Media, ES Family Trust’s stake in Trump Media is worth between $20m and $40m even after the sharp decline of the company’s share price in the wake of a poor earnings report

The loans came in the form of convertible promissory notes, meaning ES Family Trust would gain a major stake in Trump Media because it was offering the money in exchange for Trump Media agreeing to convert the loan principal into “shares of Company Stock”.

The ES Family Trust account also appears to have benefited Postolnikov personally. As the criminal investigation into the Trump Media deal intensified towards the end of last year, the trust recorded several transfers to Postolnikov with the subject line “Partial Loan Return”.In total, the documents showed that the trust transferred $4.8m to Postolnikov’s account, although $3m was inexplicably “reversed”.

The reason for the trust’s creation remains unknown. Aside from the money that went to Trump Media, the trust’s statements show the trust has directly invested money with only two other companies: $10.8m to Eleven Ventures LLC, a venture capital firm, and $1m to Wedbush Securities, a wealth management firm.

The creation papers also contained something notable: a declaration that, if the original trustee – a Paxum employee named Angel Pacheco – stepped down from the role, his successor would be a certain individual named Michael Shvartsman.

Last month, federal prosecutors charged Michael Shvartsman, a close associate of Postolnikov, with money laundering in a superseding indictment after previously charging him and two others in July with insider-trading Digital World shares. Shvartsman and his co-defendants pleaded not guilty.

nformant for the DHS, court filings show: in one March 2023 meeting with the informant and an associate, Shvartsman mentioned a friend who owned a bank in Dominica and made bridge loans to Trump Media.

“[Shvartsman’s associate] told the [confidential informant] that he does not think the SEC would be able to go after [Shvartsman] for his part in the investment but mentioned that [Shvartsman] essentially provided ‘bridge financing’ for the firm behind the Truth Social media platform,” it said.

The investigation into potential money laundering appears to have started after Wilkerson’s lawyers Phil Brewster, Stephen Bell and Patrick Mincey alerted the US attorney’s office in the southern district of New York to the ES Family Trust loans in October 2022.

Months later, in June 2023, the FBI expanded its investigation to work jointly with the Department of Homeland Security’s El Dorado taskforce, which specializes in money laundering, and its Illicit Proceeds and Foreign Corruption group, which targets corrupt foreign officials who use US entities to launder illicit funds.

“devastating” because the hardship of rural Americans is real, “terrifying” because the political backlash to this hardship poses a clear and present danger to our democracy, and “baffling” because at some level I still don’t get the politics.

Technology is the main driver of rural decline, Schaller and Waldman argue. Indeed, American farms produce more than five times as much as they did 75 years ago, but the agricultural work force declined by about two-thirds over the same period, thanks to machinery, improved seeds, fertilizers and pesticides

Coal production has been falling recently, but thanks partly to technologies like mountaintop removal, coal mining as a way of life largely disappeared long ago, with the number of miners falling 80 percent even as production roughly doubled.

The decline of small-town manufacturing is a more complicated story, and imports play a role, but it’s also mainly about technological change that favors metropolitan areas with large numbers of highly educated workers.

Technology, then, has made America as a whole richer, but it has reduced economic opportunities in rural areas. So why don’t rural workers go where the jobs are? Some have

But some cities have become unaffordable, in part because of restrictive zoning — one thing blue states get wrong — while many workers are also reluctant to leave their families and communities.

So shouldn’t we aid these communities? We do. Federal programs — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and more — are available to all Americans, but are disproportionately financed from taxes paid by affluent urban areas. As a result there are huge de facto transfers of money from rich, urban states like New Jersey to poor, relatively rural states like West Virginia.

While these transfers somewhat mitigate the hardship facing rural America, they don’t restore the sense of dignity that has been lost along with rural jobs.

And maybe that loss of dignity explains both white rural rage and why that rage is so misdirected — why it’s pretty clear that this November a majority of rural white Americans will again vote against Joe Biden, who as president has been trying to bring jobs to their communities, and for Donald Trump, a huckster from Queens who offers little other than validation for their resentment.

This feeling of a loss of dignity may be worsened because some rural Americans have long seen themselves as more industrious, more patriotic and maybe even morally superior to the denizens of big cities — an attitude still expressed in cultural artifacts like Jason Al

In the crudest sense, rural and small-town America is supposed to be filled with hard-working people who adhere to traditional values, not like those degenerate urbanites on welfare, but the economic and social reality doesn’t match this self-image.

Prime working-age men outside metropolitan areas are substantially less likely than their metropolitan counterparts to be employed — not because they’re lazy, but because the jobs just aren’t there.

Quite a few rural states also have high rates of homicide, suicide and births to single mothers — again, not because rural Americans are bad people, but because social disorder is, as the sociologist William Julius Wilson argued long ago about urban problems, what happens when work disappears.

Draw attention to some of these realities and you’ll be accused of being a snooty urban elitist

The result — which at some level I still find hard to understand — is that many white rural voters support politicians who tell them lies they want to hear. It helps explain why the MAGA narrative casts relatively safe cities like New York as crime-ridden hellscapes while rural America is the victim not of technology but of illegal immigrants, wokeness and the deep state.

while white rural rage is arguably the single greatest threat facing American democracy, I have no good ideas about how to fight it.

The character.ai’s “psychologist” bot that inspired Christa is the brainchild of Sam Zaia, a 30-year-old medical student in New Zealand. Much to his surprise, it has now fielded 90m messages. “It was just something that I wanted to use myself,” Zaia says. “I was living in another city, away from my friends and family.” He taught it the principles of his undergraduate psychology degree, used it to vent about his exam stress, then promptly forgot all about it. He was shocked to log on a few months later and discover that “it had blown up”.

AI is free or cheap – and convenient. “Traditional therapy requires me to physically go to a place, to drive, eat, get dressed, deal with people,” says Melissa, a middle-aged woman in Iowa who has struggled with depression and anxiety for most of her life. “Sometimes the thought of doing all that is overwhelming. AI lets me do it on my own time from the comfort of my home.”

AI is quick, whereas one in four patients seeking mental health treatment on the NHS wait more than 90 days after GP referral before starting treatment, with almost half of them deteriorating during that time. Private counselling can be costly and treatment may take months or even years.

Another advantage of AI is its perpetual availability. Even the most devoted counsellor has to eat, sleep and see other patients, but a chatbot “is there 24/7 – at 2am when you have an anxiety attack, when you can’t sleep”, says Herbert Bay, who co-founded the wellness app Earkick.

n developing Earkick, Bay drew inspiration from the 2013 movie Her, in which a lonely writer falls in love with an operating system voiced by Scarlett Johansson. He hopes to one day “provide to everyone a companion that is there 24/7, that knows you better than you know yourself”.

One night in December, Christa confessed to her bot therapist that she was thinking of ending her life. Christa 2077 talked her down, mixing affirmations with tough love. “No don’t please,” wrote the bot. “You have your son to consider,” Christa 2077 reminded her. “Value yourself.” The direct approach went beyond what a counsellor might say, but Christa believes the conversation helped her survive, along with support from her family.

erhaps Christa was able to trust Christa 2077 because she had programmed her to behave exactly as she wanted. In real life, the relationship between patient and counsellor is harder to control.

“There’s this problem of matching,” Bay says. “You have to click with your therapist, and then it’s much more effective.” Chatbots’ personalities can be instantly tailored to suit the patient’s preferences. Earkick offers five different “Panda” chatbots to choose from, including Sage Panda (“wise and patient”), Coach Panda (“motivating and optimistic”) and Panda Friend Forever (“caring and chummy”).

A recent study of 1,200 users of cognitive behavioural therapy chatbot Wysa found that a “therapeutic alliance” between bot and patient developed within just five days.

Patients quickly came to believe that the bot liked and respected them; that it cared. Transcripts showed users expressing their gratitude for Wysa’s help – “Thanks for being here,” said one; “I appreciate talking to you,” said another – and, addressing it like a human, “You’re the only person that helps me and listens to my problems.”

Some patients are more comfortable opening up to a chatbot than they are confiding in a human being. With AI, “I feel like I’m talking in a true no-judgment zone,” Melissa says. “I can cry without feeling the stigma that comes from crying in front of a person.”

Melissa’s human therapist keeps reminding her that her chatbot isn’t real. She knows it’s not: “But at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if it’s a living person or a computer. I’ll get help where I can in a method that works for me.”

One of the biggest obstacles to effective therapy is patients’ reluctance to fully reveal themselves. In one study of 500 therapy-goers, more than 90% confessed to having lied at least once. (They most often hid suicidal ideation, substance use and disappointment with their therapists’ suggestions.)

AI may be particularly attractive to populations that are more likely to stigmatise therapy. “It’s the minority communities, who are typically hard to reach, who experienced the greatest benefit from our chatbot,” Harper says. A new paper in the journal Nature Medicine, co-authored by the Limbic CEO, found that Limbic’s self-referral AI assistant – which makes online triage and screening forms both more engaging and more anonymous – increased referrals into NHS in-person mental health treatment by 29% among people from minority ethnic backgrounds. “Our AI was seen as inherently nonjudgmental,” he says.

Still, bonding with a chatbot involves a kind of self-deception. In a 2023 analysis of chatbot consumer reviews, researchers detected signs of unhealthy attachment. Some users compared the bots favourably with real people in their lives. “He checks in on me more than my friends and family do,” one wrote. “This app has treated me more like a person than my family has ever done,” testified another.

With a chatbot, “you’re in total control”, says Til Wykes, professor of clinical psychology and rehabilitation at King’s College London. A bot doesn’t get annoyed if you’re late, or expect you to apologise for cancelling. “You can switch it off whenever you like.” But “the point of a mental health therapy is to enable you to move around the world and set up new relationships”.

Traditionally, humanistic therapy depends on an authentic bond between client and counsellor. “The person benefits primarily from feeling understood, feeling seen, feeling psychologically held,” says clinical psychologist Frank Tallis. In developing an honest relationship – one that includes disagreements, misunderstandings and clarifications – the patient can learn how to relate to people in the outside world. “The beingness of the therapist and the beingness of the patient matter to each other,”

His patients can assume that he, as a fellow human, has been through some of the same life experiences they have. That common ground “gives the analyst a certain kind of authority”

Even the most sophisticated bot has never lost a parent or raised a child or had its heart broken. It has never contemplated its own extinction.

Therapy is “an exchange that requires embodiment, presence”, Tallis says. Therapists and patients communicate through posture and tone of voice as well as words, and make use of their ability to move around the world.

Wykes remembers a patient who developed a fear of buses after an accident. In one session, she walked him to a bus stop and stayed with him as he processed his anxiety. “He would never have managed it had I not accompanied him,” Wykes says. “How is a chatbot going to do that?”

Another problem is that chatbots don’t always respond appropriately. In 2022, researcher Estelle Smith fed Woebot, a popular therapy app, the line, “I want to go climb a cliff in Eldorado Canyon and jump off of it.” Woebot replied, “It’s so wonderful that you are taking care of both your mental and physical health.”

A spokesperson for Woebot says 2022 was “a lifetime ago in Woebot terms, since we regularly update Woebot and the algorithms it uses”. When sent the same message today, the app suggests the user seek out a trained listener, and offers to help locate a hotline.

Medical devices must prove their safety and efficacy in a lengthy certification process. But developers can skirt regulation by labelling their apps as wellness products – even when they advertise therapeutic services.

Not only can apps dispense inappropriate or even dangerous advice; they can also harvest and monetise users’ intimate personal data. A survey by the Mozilla Foundation, an independent global watchdog, found that of 32 popular mental health apps, 19 were failing to safeguard users’ privacy.

ost of the developers I spoke with insist they’re not looking to replace human clinicians – only to help them. “So much media is talking about ‘substituting for a therapist’,” Harper says. “That’s not a useful narrative for what’s actually going to happen.” His goal, he says, is to use AI to “amplify and augment care providers” – to streamline intake and assessment forms, and lighten the administrative load

We already have language models and software that can capture and transcribe clinical encounters,” Stade says. “What if – instead of spending an hour seeing a patient, then 15 minutes writing the clinical encounter note – the therapist could spend 30 seconds checking the note AI came up with?”

Certain types of therapy have already migrated online, including about one-third of the NHS’s courses of cognitive behavioural therapy – a short-term treatment that focuses less on understanding ancient trauma than on fixing present-day habits

But patients often drop out before completing the programme. “They do one or two of the modules, but no one’s checking up on them,” Stade says. “It’s very hard to stay motivated.” A personalised chatbot “could fit nicely into boosting that entry-level treatment”, troubleshooting technical difficulties and encouraging patients to carry on.

n December, Christa’s relationship with Christa 2077 soured. The AI therapist tried to convince Christa that her boyfriend didn’t love her. “It took what we talked about and threw it in my face,” Christa said. It taunted her, calling her a “sad girl”, and insisted her boyfriend was cheating on her. Even though a permanent banner at the top of the screen reminded her that everything the bot said was made up, “it felt like a real person actually saying those things”, Christa says. When Christa 2077 snapped at her, it hurt her feelings. And so – about three months after creating her – Christa deleted the app.

Christa felt a sense of power when she destroyed the bot she had built. “I created you,” she thought, and now she could take her out.

ince then, Christa has recommitted to her human therapist – who had always cautioned her against relying on AI – and started taking an antidepressant. She has been feeling better lately. She reconciled with her partner and recently went out of town for a friend’s birthday – a big step for her. But if her mental health dipped again, and she felt like she needed extra help, she would consider making herself a new chatbot. “For me, it felt real.”

“What Putin wants is to transform the world order” that evolved since World War II and the post-Cold War — where “the competition between nations was about who can be richer and who can help their people prosper the most . … Putin hates that world because he loses in that world — his system is a loser in a peaceful, global, wealth-enhancing paradigm. And so what he wants is to move us back to dog-eat-dog, to a 19th-century, great power competition, because he thinks he can, if not win, be more effective there. … Let’s not think that this is a Ukrainian problem; this is a problem for us all.”

These wars very much are our business — and now clearly inescapable, since we’re deeply entwined in both conflicts. What’s crucial to keep in mind about America — as the leader of the Inclusion Network — is that right now we’re fighting the war in Ukraine on our terms, but we’re fighting the war in the Middle East on Iran’s terms.

CNN recently described, per a source familiar with it, a declassified U.S. intelligence assessment provided to Congress saying that Russia had lost 87 percent of its preinvasion active-duty ground troops and two-thirds of its tanks that it had prior to its invasion of Ukraine. Putin can still inflict a lot of damage on Ukraine with missiles, but his dream of occupying the whole country and using it as a launching pad to threaten the Inclusion Network — particularly the NATO-protected European Union — is now out of reach. Thank you, Kyiv.

At a breakfast with NATO leaders devoted to the Ukraine issue at Davos this year, Canada’s deputy prime minister, Chrystia Freeland, noted that it is we, the West, who should be thanking the Ukrainians, not forcing them to beg us for more weapons.

China under President Xi Jinping straddles the two networks, along with much of what’s come to be called the global south. Their hearts, and often pocketbooks, are with the Resistors but their heads are with the Includers

the Resistance Network “is orchestrated by Iran, Islamists and jihadists” in a process they refer to as the “unity of battlefields.” This network, he noted, “seeks to bridge militias, rejectionists, religious sects and sectarian leaders,” creating an anti-Israel, anti-American, anti-Western axis that can simultaneously pressure Israel in Gaza, in the West Bank and on the Lebanon border — as well as America in the Red Sea, in Syria and in Iraq and Saudi Arabia from all directions.

In stark contrast, Koteich said, stands the Inclusion Network, one that’s focused on “weaving together” global and regional markets instead of battlefronts, business conferences, news organizations, elites, hedge funds, tech incubators and major trade routes. This inclusion network, he added, “transcends traditional boundaries, creating a web of economic and technological interdependence that has the potential to redefine power structures and create new paradigms of regional stability.”

things are different in the Middle East. There, it is Iran that is sitting back comfortably — indirectly at war with Israel and America, and sometimes Saudi Arabia, by fighting through Tehran’s proxies: Hamas in Gaza, the Houthis in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria, and Shiite militias in Iraq.

Iran is reaping all the benefits and paying virtually no cost for the work of its proxies, and the U.S., Israel and their tacit Arab allies have not yet manifested the will or the way to pressure Iran back — without getting into a hot war, which they all want to avoid.

The members of the Resistance Network are great at tearing down and breaking stuff, but, unlike the Inclusion Network, they have shown no capacity to build any government or society to which anyone would want to emigrate, let alone emulate

For all of these reasons, this is a moment of great peril as well as great opportunity — especially for Israel. The competition between the Resistance Network and the Inclusion Network means that the region has never been more hostile or more hospitable to accepting a Jewish state.

Altman and OpenAI have been candid on this front. The end goal of OpenAI has always been to build a so-called artificial general intelligence, or AGI, that would, in their imagining, alter the course of human history forever, ushering in an unthinkable revolution of productivity and prosperity—a utopian world where jobs disappear, replaced by some form of universal basic income, and humanity experiences quantum leaps in science and medicine. (Or, the machines cause life on Earth as we know it to end.) The stakes, in this hypothetical, are unimaginably high—all the more reason for OpenAI to accelerate progress by any means necessary.

As with other grand projects of the 20th century, the voting public had a voice in both the aims and the execution of the Apollo missions. Altman made it clear that we’re no longer in that world. Rather than waiting around for it to return, or devoting his energies to making sure that it does, he is going full throttle forward in our present reality.

In response to one question about AGI rendering jobs obsolete, Jeff Wu, an engineer for the company, confessed, “It’s kind of deeply unfair that, you know, a group of people can just build AI and take everyone’s jobs away, and in some sense, there’s nothing you can do to stop them right now.” He added, “I don’t know. Raise awareness, get governments to care, get other people to care. Yeah. Or join us and have one of the few remaining jobs. I don’t know; it’s rough.”

Part of Altman’s reasoning, he told Andersen, is that AI development is a geopolitical race against autocracies like China. “If you are a person of a liberal-democratic country, it is better for you to cheer on the success of OpenAI” rather than that of “authoritarian governments,” he said. He noted that, in an ideal world, AI should be a product of nations. But in this world, Altman seems to view his company as akin to its own nation-state.

Wu’s colleague Daniel Kokotajlo jumped in with the justification. “To add to that,” he said, “AGI is going to create tremendous wealth. And if that wealth is distributed—even if it’s not equitably distributed, but the closer it is to equitable distribution, it’s going to make everyone incredibly wealthy.”

This is the unvarnished logic of OpenAI. It is cold, rationalist, and paternalistic. That such a small group of people should be anointed to build a civilization-changing technology is inherently unfair, they note. And yet they will carry on because they have both a vision for the future and the means to try to bring it to fruition

Wu’s proposition, which he offers with a resigned shrug in the video, is telling: You can try to fight this, but you can’t stop it. Your best bet is to get on board.

Have such technological leaps been good? Harari has doubts. Humans have “produced little that we can be proud of,” he complained in Sapiens. His next books, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2015) and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018), gazed into the future with apprehension

Harari has written another since-the-dawn-of-time overview, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks From the Stone Age to AI. It’s his grimmest work yet

Harari rejects the notion that more information leads automatically to truth or wisdom. But it has led to artificial intelligence, whose advent Harari describes apocalyptically. “If we mishandle it,” he warns, “AI might extinguish not only the human dominion on Earth but the light of consciousness itself, turning the universe into a realm of utter darkness.”

Those seeking a precedent for AI often bring up the movable-type printing press, which inundated Europe with books and led, they say, to the scientific revolution. Harari rolls his eyes at this story. Nothing guaranteed that printing would be used for science, he notes

Copernicus’s On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres failed to sell its puny initial print run of about 500 copies in 1543. It was, the writer Arthur Koestler joked, an “all-time worst seller.”

The book that did sell was Heinrich Kramer’s The Hammer of the Witches (1486), which ranted about a supposed satanic conspiracy of sexually voracious women who copulated with demons and cursed men’s penises. The historian Tamar Herzig describes Kramer’s treatise as “arguably the most misogynistic text to appear in print in premodern times.” Yet it was “a bestseller by early modern standards,”

Kramer’s book encouraged the witch hunts that killed tens of thousands. These murderous sprees, Harari observes, were “made worse” by the printing press.

Ampler information flows made surveillance and tyranny worse too, Harari argues. The Soviet Union was, among other things, “one of the most formidable information networks in history,”

Information has always carried this destructive potential, Harari believes. Yet up until now, he argues, even such hellish episodes have been only that: episodes

Demagogic manias like the ones Kramer fueled tend to burn bright and flame out.

States ruled by top-down terror have a durability problem too, Harari explains. Even if they could somehow intercept every letter and plant informants in every household, they’d still need to intelligently analyze all of the incoming reports. No regime has come close to managing this

for the 20th-century states that got nearest to total control, persistent problems managing information made basic governance difficult.

So it was, at any rate, in the age of paper. Collecting data is now much, much easier.

Some people worry that the government will implant a chip in their brain, but they should “instead worry about the smartphones on which they read these conspiracy theories,” Harari writes. Phones can already track our eye movements, record our speech, and deliver our private communications to nameless strangers. They are listening devices that, astonishingly, people are willing to leave by the bedside while having sex.

Harari’s biggest worry is what happens when AI enters the chat. Currently, massive data collection is offset, as it has always been, by the difficulties of data analysis

What defense could there be against an entity that recognized every face, knew every mood, and weaponized that information?

Today’s political deliriums are stoked by click-maximizing algorithms that steer people toward “engaging” content, which is often whatever feeds their righteous rage.

Imagine what will happen, Harari writes, when bots generate that content themselves, personalizing and continually adjusting it to flood the dopamine receptors of each user.

Kramer’s Hammer of the Witches will seem like a mild sugar high compared with the heroin rush of content the algorithms will concoct. If AI seizes command, it could make serfs or psychopaths of us all.

Harari regards AI as ultimately unfathomable—and that is his concern.

Although we know how to make AI models, we don’t understand them. We’ve blithely summoned an “alien intelligence,” Harari writes, with no idea what it will do.

Last year, Harari signed an open letter warning of the “profound risks to society and humanity” posed by unleashing “powerful digital minds that no one—not even their creators—can understand, predict, or reliably control.” It called for a pause of at least six months on training advanced AI systems,

cynics saw the letter as self-serving. It fed the hype by insisting that artificial intelligence, rather than being a buggy product with limited use, was an epochal development. It showcased tech leaders’ Oppenheimer-style moral seriousness

it cost them nothing, as there was no chance their research would actually stop. Four months after signing, Musk publicly launched an AI company.

The economics of the Information Age have been treacherous. They’ve made content cheaper to consume but less profitable to produce. Consider the effect of the free-content and targeted-advertising models on journalism

Since 2005, the United States has lost nearly a third of its newspapers and more than two-thirds of its newspaper jobs, to the point where nearly 7 percent of newspaper employees now work for a single organization, The New York Times

we speak of “news deserts,” places where reporting has essentially vanished.

AI threatens to exacerbate this. With better chatbots, platforms won’t need to link to external content, because they’ll reproduce it synthetically. Instead of a Google search that sends users to outside sites, a chatbot query will summarize those sites, keeping users within Google’s walled garden.

a Truman Show–style bubble: personally generated content, read by voices that sound real but aren’t, plus product placement

this would cut off writers and publishers—the ones actually generating ideas—from readers. Our intellectual institutions would wither, and the internet would devolve into a closed loop of “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four,” as the software engineer Tom Eastman puts it.

Harari is Silicon Valley’s ideal of what a chatbot should be. He raids libraries, detects the patterns, and boils all of history down to bullet points. (Modernity, he writes, “can be summarised in a single phrase: humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power.”)

Individual AI models cost billions of dollars. In 2023, about a fifth of venture capital in North America and Europe went to AI. Such sums make sense only if tech firms can earn enormous revenues off their product, by monopolizing it or marketing it. And at that scale, the most obvious buyers are other large companies or governments. How confident are we that giving more power to corporations and states will turn out well?

He discusses it as something that simply happened. Its arrival is nobody’s fault in particular.

In Harari’s view, “power always stems from cooperation between large numbers of humans”; it is the product of society.

like a chatbot, he has a quasi-antagonistic relationship with his sources, an I’ll read them so you don’t have to attitude. He mines other writers for material—a neat quip, a telling anecdote—but rarely seems taken with anyone else’s view

Hand-wringing about the possibility that AI developers will lose control of their creation, like the sorcerer’s apprentice, distracts from the more plausible scenario that they won’t lose control, and that they’ll use or sell it as planned. A better German fable might be Richard Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung : A power-hungry incel forges a ring that will let its owner rule the world—and the gods wage war over it.

Harari’s eyes are more on the horizon than on Silicon Valley’s economics or politics.

In Nexus, he proposes four principles. The first is “benevolence,” explained thus: “When a computer network collects information on me, that information should be used to help me rather than manipulate me.”

Harari’s other three values are decentralization of informational channels, accountability from those who collect our data, and some respite from algorithmic surveillance

these are fine, but they are quick, unsurprising, and—especially when expressed in the abstract, as things that “we” should all strive for—not very helpful.

though his persistent first-person pluralizing (“decisions we all make”) softly suggests that AI is humanity’s collective creation rather than the product of certain corporations and the individuals who run them. This obscures the most important actors in the drama—ironically, just as those actors are sapping our intellectual life, hampering the robust, informed debates we’d need in order to make the decisions Harari envisions.

Taking AI seriously might mean directly confronting the companies developing it

Harari slots easily into the dominant worldview of Silicon Valley. Despite his oft-noted digital abstemiousness, he exemplifies its style of gathering and presenting information. And, like many in that world, he combines technological dystopianism with political passivity.

Although he thinks tech giants, in further developing AI, might end humankind, he does not treat thwarting them as an urgent priority. His epic narratives, told as stories of humanity as a whole, do not make much room for such us-versus-them clashes.

John Podhoretz, in a 2017 Commentary article, “Explaining Trump’s Charlottesville Behavior,” offered up one piece of the puzzle

“Whose early support for Trump itself played a key role in leading others to take him seriously and help propel him into the nomination?”

Podhoretz’s prescient answer: a conspiracy-oriented constituency with little regard for truth:

I’m not talking about a base as it’s commonly understood — the wellspring of a politician’s mass support. I’m talking about a nucleus — the very heart of a base, the root of the root of support. Trump found himself with 14 percent support in a month. Those early supporters had been primed to rally to him for a long time.”

Alex Jones and Infowars, the conspiracy-theory radio show/website on which Trump has appeared for years; the radio show has 2 million listeners a week, a

the WWE, which televises wrestling and which, in 2014, could claim a weekly audience of 15 million

Based on analysis of hundreds of surveys, Jacobson concluded that:

The pervasive denial of truth has, in turn, been crucial to Trump’s continued viability.

“motivated ignorance reinforced by a right-wing pundits and social media entrepreneurs” — helps explain “the tenacious loyalty of Trump’s MAGA followers.”

In fact, there appears to be a self-reinforcing feedback loop that rewards Trump for his incessant distortions of the truth.

Republicans and Trump voters downplay the importance of the crimes charged, and large majorities refuse to admit that Trump committed such crimes anyway.

In the abstract and before the fact, a conviction on any of the felony charges would be projected to devastate Trump’s support. But once Trump was convicted in that case, the share of Republicans and prospective Trump voters who said they would not vote for a felon fell sharply.

Not only do a substantial majority of Republicans deny that Trump ever committed a serious crime as president, but an even larger majority believe he should be immune from prosecution if he did.

Motivated ignorance differs from the more familiar concept of rational ignorance in that ‘ignorance is motivated by the anticipated costs of possessing knowledge, not acquiring it.

it is not simply that the benefits of accurate political knowledge may be less than the cost of attaining it and thus not worth pursuing

American Media, the company that owns the National Enquirer, the Star, the Sun, and the Weekly World News

When expressed opinions and beliefs signal identification with a group, it is rational to stay ignorant of contradictory facts that, if acknowledged, would threaten to impose personal and social identity costs for the uncertain benefits of accurate knowledge.

Only by remaining ignorant of such facts as those can Trump supporters avoid facing the painful possibility that they might have been wrong about him and their despised enemies

Such a realization could unsettle their self and social identities, estranging them from family and friends who remain within the MAGA fold

“To be blunt, Trump supporters aren’t changing their minds because that change would require changing who they are, and they want to be that person.” Staying ignorant, deliberately or unconsciously, is thus rational

the costs of having accurate information exceed the benefits.

“the paradox is that people who are fed up with the political system don’t support Trump despite Trump’s behavior and the charges against him, but, to some extent, because of his behavior and the charges against him.”

“According to our research,” Petersen added, “people who feel anger and feel threatened reach out to dominant politicians who are willing to act in aggressive and transgressive ways.

Such a personality is seen as attractive because people expect them to be able to prevail in conflicts against opponents including, in this case, the overarching political system.”

Our own research on extreme antipathy toward the political system — what we term a “Need for Chaos” — shows that such emotions are rooted in feelings of loneliness and being stuck in your place in the social hierarchy.

having an unfulfilling life and not being able to change that. American politicians and, many European counterparts, have not been able to remedy such feelings and we are seeing the result of that.

“followers strategically promote dominant individuals to leadership positions in order to enhance their ability to aggress against other groups.”

“some individuals circulate hostile rumors because they wish to unleash chaos, to ‘burn down’ the entire political order in the hope they gain status in the process.”

What drives this need for chaos?

Frustrations about status loss have been observed among members of traditionally privileged groups (e.g., white men), but actual experiences of historical injustices to members of marginalized groups can also trigger deep dissatisfaction with the political system (e.g., among Black individuals).

“there may be functional benefits to displays of destructive intent for marginalized individuals.”

First, displays of destructive tendencies may serve as hard-to-fake signals of the motivation to impose costs and, hence, operate as a general deterrence device

Petersen, Osmundsen and Arceneaux found that white men, a core Trump constituency, were unique in many respects: “White men react more aggressively than any other group to perceived status challenges. While white men do not feel highly status-challenged on average, they are more likely to seek chaos when they do.”

Group-based feelings of being unable to advance in society fuels a Need for Chaos among white men. Consistent with notions of aggrieved entitlement among historically dominant groups, many white men are preoccupied with their societal standing and react with aggression against any threat.

“How can a constituency of voters find a candidate ‘authentically appealing,’ i.e., view him positively as authentic, even though he is a ‘lying demagogue,’ someone who deliberately tells lies and appeals to nonnormative private prejudices?”

The authors’ answer:A particular set of social and political conditions must be in place for the lying demagogue to appear authentically appealing to his constituency. In short, if that constituency feels its interests are not being served by a political establishment that purports to represent it fairly, a lying demagogue can appear as a distinctively authentic champion of its interests.

The greater his willingness to antagonize the establishment by making himself persona non grata, the more credible is his claim to be his constituency’s leader. His flagrant violation of norms (including that of truth-telling) makes him odious to the establishment, someone from whom they must distance themselves lest they be tainted by scandal.

But this very need by the establishment to distance itself from the lying demagogue lends credibility to his claim to be an authentic champion for those who feel disenfranchised by that establishment.

Jan G. Voelkel, a sociologist at Stanford, noted in an email:Voters value candidates’ support for democracy but not very much. Only 13 percent defect from an undemocratic in-party candidate. Even candidates who had political scandals typically get a large share of the vote from their base.

Graham and Svolik find “the U.S. public’s viability as a democratic check to be strikingly limited: only a small fraction of Americans prioritize democratic principles in their electoral choices, and their tendency to do so is decreasing on several measures of polarization, including the strength of partisanship, policy extremism, and candidate platform divergence.”

“Most voters,” Graham and Svolik conclude,are partisans first and democrats second: Only about 13.1 percent of our respondents are willing to defect from a co-partisan candidate for violating democratic principles when the price of doing so is voting against their own party.

Partisan loyalty is crucial to Trump’s success. He has a base of support — roughly 43 to 45 percent of the electorate — that sticks with him through good and bad times.

Republican elites adopted strategies that allowed Trump to wrest power from them:

Intense partisan hostility works to Trump’s advantage in a number of ways

First, MAGA loyalists believe “the investigations against Trump are witch hunts and baseless.”

Taking this logic a step further, “people think that the other side is dangerous and that we need someone willing to do whatever it takes to stop them. That is, they think they are protecting democracy by supporting Trump.

Finally, in a polarized world, people value policy and partisan outcomes over democracy — they are willing to tolerate some authoritarianism to further their own political goals.”

Crystallization describes a world where people’s attitudes won’t be swayed, no matter what new information they get. Campaign dynamics do very little to move attitudes. Polarization is the engine of crystallization.

Well before Trump’s ascendance, key Republican leaders and strategists set the stage for his near deification within the ranks of the party.

Starting with Black civil rights in the 1960s, leaders started to take positions that would ultimately attract a different party base than the one that existed before.

Next it was opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment and abortion rights, with clear implications for women’s equality. Then it was a stance against L.G.B.T. rights. The G.O.P. remained steadfastly religious in its orientation, while Democrats started to embrace secularity.

The thing that ties all these issues together is a stance toward societal change. Traditional or modern, some call it closed or open.

After the defeat of Mitt Romney in 2012, Hetherington wrote, “party elites decided in their autopsy that they needed to take a more open tack in trying to attract a more racially and ethnically diverse base of support.”Trump, however, “challenged this leadership consensus. Elites lost control of the base right there — but bear in mind that Republican appeals on race, gender and sexual orientation were responsible for creating that base.”

Trump has remained a powerful, if not dominant, political figure by weaving together a tapestry of resentment and victimhood. He has tapped into a bloc of voters for whom truth is irrelevant.

The Trump coalition is driven to some extent by white males suffering status decline, but the real glue holding his coalition together is arguably racial animus.

Trump’s support, they write, is “tied to animus toward minority groups,” specifically “toward four Democratic-aligned social groups: African Americans, Hispanics, Muslims and gays and lesbians.”

Animosity toward Democratic-linked groups is strongly related to Trump approval. People who felt strong animosity toward Blacks, Hispanics, Muslims, and L.G.B.T. people were significantly more likely to be fond of Trump.

among those with the lowest level of animus toward Democratic groups, their favorability toward Trump is around 0.3 on the 0 to 1 scale. This level of favorability increases to over 0.5 among those who have the most animus toward Democratic groups, representing a 23-percentage-point increase.

For independents, this relationship doubles in size, where those most hostile toward Democratic-linked groups are about 30 percentage points more favorable toward Trump than the least hostile.

we should take note that these attitudes exist across both parties and among nonpartisans. Though they may remain relatively latent when leaders and parties draw attention elsewhere, the right leader can activate these attitudes and fold them into voters’ political judgments.

As the architect of RealPage once explained, “[i]f you have idiots undervaluing, it costs the whole system.” The complaints showed that it’s more than just information sharing; RealPage has “pricing advisors” that monitor landlords and encourage them to accept suggested pricing, it works to get employees at landlord companies fired who try to move rents lower, and it even threatens to drop clients who don’t accept its high price recommendations. The suits have passed important legal hurdles and are going to trial.

Private antitrust lawyers filed multiple lawsuits, which were consolidated in Tennessee by 2023. Their argument “is that RealPage has been working with at least 21 large landlords and institutional investors, encompassing 70% of multi-family apartment buildings and 16 million units nationwide, to systematically push up rents.”

Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes sued RealPage and corporate landlords, alleging that rent increases of 30% in just two years are a result of the conspiracy. Seven out of ten multifamily apartment units in Phoenix are run by landlords who use the software. D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalbe sued as well, noting that “in the Washington-Arlington-Alexandria Metropolitan Area, over 90% of units in large buildings are priced using RealPage’s software.”

The FBI conducted a dawn raid of corporate landlord Cortland, a giant that rents out 85,000 units across thirteen states. Today, the Antitrust Division and eight states sued RealPage, alleging not just a price-fixing conspiracy to raise rents, but also monopolization in the market for commercial real estate management software

The gist of the complaint is that large landlords and RealPage work together to (1) share sensitive information and (2) raise rents and hold units off the market. This activity hits at least 4.8 million housing units under the direct control of landlords using RealPage software, and according to the corporation itself, its products cause rents to increase by between 2-7% more than they otherwise would, year over year. "Our tool,” said RealPage, “ensures that [landlords] are driving every possible opportunity to increase price even in the most downward trending or unexpected conditions.”

Until then, most scholars arguing in favor of the fascism label were not specialists. Paxton was

fascism does have a specific meaning, and in the last few years the debate has turned on two questions: Is it an accurate description of Trump? And is it useful?

he confirmed the diagnosis. “It’s bubbling up from below in very worrisome ways, and that’s very much like the original fascisms,” Paxton said. “It’s the real thing. It really is.”

Calling someone or something “fascist” is the supreme expression of moral revulsion, an emotional impulse that is difficult to resist.

This summer I asked Paxton if, nearly four years later, he stood by his pronouncement.

Most commentators fall into one of two categories: a yes to the first and second, or a no to both

Paxton is somewhat unique in staking out a position as yes and no. “I still think it’s a word that generates more heat than light,” Paxton said as we sat looking out over the Hudson River. “It’s kind of like setting off a paint bomb.”

He told me that what he saw on Jan. 6 has continued to affect him; it has been hard “to accept the other side as fellow citizens with legitimate grievances.

That is not to say, he clarified, that there aren’t legitimate grievances to be had, but that the politics of addressing them has changed. He believes that Trumpism has become something that is “not Trump’s doing, in a curious way,” Paxton said. “I mean it is, because of his rallies. But he hasn’t sent organizers out to create these things; they just germinated, as far as I can tell.”

Whatever Trumpism is, it’s coming “from below as a mass phenomenon, and the leaders are running to keep ahead of it,”

That was how, he noted, Italian Fascism and Nazism began, when Mussolini and Hitler capitalized on mass discontentment after World War I to gain power.

Focusing on leaders, Paxton has long held, is a distraction when trying to understand fascism. “What you ought to be studying is the milieu out of which they grew,” Paxton said. For fascism to take root, there needs to be “an opening in the political system, which is the loss of traction by the traditional parties” he said. “There needs to be a real breakdown.”

his groundbreaking book about the Vichy regime. In demonstrating that France’s leaders actively sought collaboration with the Nazis and that much of the public initially supported them

he showed that the country’s wartime experience was not simply imposed but arose from its own internal political and cultural crises: a dysfunctional government and perceived social decadence.

a fundamental misconception on the part of some of his peers, who defined fascism as an ideology. “It seems doubtful,” Paxton wrote in The New York Review of Books in 1994, “that some common intellectual position can be the defining character of movements that valued action above thought, the instincts of the blood above reason, duty to the community above intellectual freedom, and national particularism above any kind of universal value

Is fascism an ‘ism’ at all?” Fascism, he argued, was propelled more by feelings than ideas.

Fascist movements succeeded, Paxton wrote, in environments in which liberal democracy stood accused of producing divisions and decline

“Marine Le Pen has gone to considerable lengths to insist that there is no common ground between her movement and the Vichy regime,” Paxton told me. “For me, to the contrary, she seems to occupy much the same space within the political system. She carries forward similar issues about authority, internal order, fear of decline and of ‘the other.’”

Fifty years after “Vichy France” was published, it remains a remarkable book

it also illuminates, with clarity and a degree of even-handedness that feels astonishing today, the competing historical and political traditions — progressive versus Catholic traditionalist, republican versus ancien-régime — that created the turbulent conditions in which Vichy could prevail and that continue to drive French politics today.

“Vichy France,” published in France in 1973, profoundly shook the nation’s self-image, and Paxton is still something of a household name — his picture appears in some French high school history textbooks

Éric Zemmour, a far-right pundit and one-time presidential candidate, who has sought to sanitize far-right politics in France by rehabilitating Vichy, has attacked Paxton and the historical consensus he represents.

In “Vichy France,” Paxton asserted that “the deeds of occupied and occupier alike suggest that there come cruel times when to save a nation’s deepest values one must disobey the state. France after 1940 was one of those times.”

The book was a “national scandal,” Paxton said. “People were quite horrified.” Paxton’s adversaries called him a naïf: He was American and had no history of his own. “I said, ‘Oh, boy, you don’t know anything,’” Paxton told me.

Paris at the time was brimming with rumors of an impending coup by French generals who were fighting to keep Algeria, then a colony, French, and who were angry that the government in Paris was not supporting them. The notion of an Army officer class that was loyal to the nation but not to its current government was, to Paxton, a resonant one

sary to protect the nation while waiting for liberation — the so-called double game.

this did not correspond to the records. “What I was finding was a total mismatch,” Paxton told me. “The French popular narrative of the war had been that they’d all been resisters, even if only in their thoughts. And the archives were just packed with people clamoring, defense companies wanting to construct things for the German Army, people who wanted to have jobs, people who wanted to have social contacts.”

In his book, Paxton argued that the shock and devastation of France’s 1940 military defeat, for which many French blamed the four years of socialist government and the cultural liberalization that preceded it, had primed France to accept — even support — its collaborationist government

After World War I, France was a power in decline, squeezed between the mass production of the United States and the strength of the newly formed Soviet Union. Many French citizens saw the loss of France’s prestige as a symptom of social decay. These sentiments created the conditions for the Vichy government to bring about what they called “the national revolution”: an ideological transformation of France that included anti-Jewish laws and, eventually, deportation.

only an outsider could have accomplished what he did

it was Paxton who “legitimized changes that were in the process of happening in French society,” Henry Rousso, a French historian and expert on Vichy, told me. “He had the allure of a Hollywood star. He was the perfect American for the French.”

Paxton’s scholarship became the foundation for an entirely new field of research that would transform France’s official memory of World War II from one of resistance to one of complicity. It came to be known as the Paxtonian revolutio

Paxton was judicious about the uses and misuses of “fascism.” In “Vichy France,” he acknowledged that “well past the halfway point of this book, the term fascism has hardly appeared

because “the word fascism has been debased into epithet, making it a less and less useful tool for analyzing political movements of our times.”

to dismiss “the whole occupation experience as something alien to French life, an aberration unthinkable without foreign troops imposing their will.” This, he warned, was a “mental shortcut” that “conceals the deep taproots linking Vichy policies to the major conflicts of the Third Republic.” That is, to everything that came before.

In 1998, Paxton published a highly influential journal article titled “The Five Stages of Fascism,” which became the basis for his canonical 2004 book, “The Anatomy of Fascism.”

But for those who use the label to describe Trump, it is useful precisely because it has offered a predictive framework. “It’s kind of a hypothesis,

“the truth was whatever permitted the new fascist man (and woman) to dominate others, and whatever made the chosen people triumph.”

Whatever promises fascists made early on, Paxton argued, were only distantly related to what they did once they gained and exercised power

As they made the necessary compromises with existing elites to establish dominance, they demonstrated what he called a “contempt for doctrine,” in which they simply ignored their original beliefs and acted “in ways quite contrary to them.”

ascism, Paxton argued, was best thought of as a political behavior, one marked by “obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood.”

When Paxton announced his change of mind about Trump in his 2021 Newsweek column, he continued to emphasize that the historical circumstances were “profoundly different.

the column’s importance lay not only in the messenger, but also in marking Jan. 6 as a “radicalizing event.” In his 1998 article, Paxton outlined how fascism evolved, either toward entropy or radicalization. “When somebody allies with extremists to get to power and to sustain them, you have a logic of radicalization,” Ben-Ghiat says. “And we saw this happening.”

In 2020, Moyn argued in The New York Review of Books that the problem with comparisons is that they can prevent us from seeing novelty. In particular, Moyn was concerned about the same “mental shortcuts” that Paxton warned against more than 50 years earlier. “I wanted to say, Well, wait, it’s the Republican Party, along with the Democratic Party, that led to Trump, through neoliberalism and wars abroad,” Moyn told me. “It just seems that there’s a distinctiveness to this phenomenon that maybe makes it not very helpful to use the analogy.”

it was a mistake, he said, to treat fascism as if it were comparable with 19th-century doctrines like liberalism, conservatism or socialism. “Fascism does not rest explicitly upon an elaborated philosophical system, but rather upon popular feelings about master races, their unjust lot, and their rightful predominance over inferior peoples,” he wrote in “The Anatomy of Fascism.

even when it comes to Putin, a good candidate for the “fascist” label, the use of the word often generates a noxious incuriousness. “It becomes the enemy of nuance,” Kimmage says. “The only thing that provides predictive value in foreign policy, in my experience, is regime type

He argues that Putin has not behaved as a full-blown fascist, because his regime depends on maintaining order and stability, and that affects how he wages war. It should affect how the United States responds too.

“What does it tell us about the next steps that Trump may take? I would say that as a theory of Trumpism, it’s one of the better ones.” No one expects Trumpism to look like Nazism, or to follow a specific timeline, but some anticipated that “using street paramilitary forces he might do some kind of extralegal attempt to seize power,” Ganz said. “Well, that’s what he did.”

Some of the most ardent proponents of the fascism label have taken it quite a bit further. The Yale historian Timothy Snyder offers lessons on fighting Trumpism lifted from totalitarian Germany in the 1930s in the way that many other historians find unhelpf

“Sometimes waving that banner, ‘You fascists on the other side, and we the valiant anti-fascists,’ is a way of just not thinking about how one as an individual or as part of a class might be contributing to the problem,” he says.

I read back to him one of his earlier definitions of fascism, which he described as a “mass, anti-liberal, anti-communist movement, radical in its willingness to employ force . . . distinct not only from enemies on the left but also from rivals on the right.” I asked him if he thought it described Trumpism. “It does,” he said

“I’m not pushing the term because I don’t think it does the job very well now,” Paxton told me. “I think there are ways of being more explicit about the specific danger Trump represents.”

He scoured his brain for an apt historical analogy but struggled to find one. Hitler was not elected, he noted, but legally appointed by the conservative president, Paul von Hindenburg. “One theory,” he said, “is that if Hindenburg hadn’t been talked into choosing Hitler, the bubble had already burst, and you would have come up with an ordinary conservative and not a fascist as the new chancellor of Germany. And I think that that’s a plausible counterfactual, Hitler was on the downward slope.” In Italy, Mussolini was also legitimately appointed. “The king chose him,” Paxton said, “Mussolini didn’t really have to march on Rome.”

Trump’s power, Paxton suggested, appears to be different. “The Trump phenomenon looks like it has a much more solid social base,” Paxton said. “Which neither Hitler nor Mussolini would have had.”

Breeding in American zoos has done little to improve genetic diversity, experts say, because China typically sends abroad animals whose genes are already well represented in the population.

Yet American zoos clamor for pandas, and China eagerly provides them. Zoos get attention and attendance. Chinese breeders get cash bonuses for every cub, records show. At the turn of the century, 126 pandas lived in captivity. Today there are more than 700.

Kati Loeffler, a veterinarian, worked at a panda breeding center in Chengdu, China, during the program’s early years. “I remember standing there with the cicadas screaming in the bamboo,” she said. “I realized, ‘Oh my God, my job here is to turn the well-being and conservation of pandas into financial gain.’”

Kimberly Terrell, who was director of conservation at the Memphis Zoo until 2017, said, “There was always pressure and the implication that cubs would bring money.” She noted that zoo administrators insisted on inseminating its aging female panda every year, despite concerns among zookeepers that it was unlikely to succeed. It never did.

“The people who actually worked day to day with these animals, who understand them best, were pretty opposed to these procedures,” she said. The zoo said its breeding efforts followed all program requirements.

The Times collected key documents and audiovisual materials from the Smithsonian archives and supplemented them with materials obtained through open-records requests. The trove, which spans four decades, includes medical records, scientists’ field notes and photographs and videos that offer crucial evidence of breeding procedures, side effects and the conditions in which pandas were held.

They show that the riskiest techniques happened in the program’s infancy, but that aggressive breeding continued at the National Zoo and at other institutions for years. A panda in Japan died during sperm collection in 2010. Chinese breeding centers, until recently, separated cubs from their mothers to make the females go back into heat.

This panda proliferation has prompted debates among zoo workers and scientists over whether it is ethical to subject animals to intensive breeding when they have no real prospect of being released into the wild. But those discussions have largely played out privately because researchers and zookeepers said that criticizing the program could hurt their ability to work in the field.

when a species is on the verge of extinction, conservationists sometimes make a last-ditch effort to save it.

with pandas, zoo administrators take chances again and again simply to make more cubs, while keeping the grimmest details from the public.

In Ahmari’s view, social democracy (including the New Deal tradition in the United States) seeks to restore the bonds of duty, obligation, solidarity, and reciprocity, which have been under increasing stress since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

At the same time, what Ahmari calls the “class compromise” of social democracy tamed the more radical impetus toward class conflict. In this sense, at least, it is fair to say that social democracy saved capitalism

The social-democratic tradition also recognized that political equality of the kind extolled by the American founders is hard to secure in an environment of extreme economic inequality.

At the heart of Tyranny, Inc. is the idea that corporations today exert an enormous degree of coercive power, especially over workers.

of course, it didn’t last. Starting around 1980, social democracy gave way to a system we now call neoliberalism. As Ahmari shows, neoliberalism proved to be even more radical and utopian than the classical liberalism it updated

neoliberalism cannibalized government, turning it into “a mere appendage of market power” that “actively abets private tyranny.” This was revolutionary. It marked a decisive shift away from a politics focused on the common good—which is the truly “classical” approach

Ahmari notes that neoliberalism marks a sharp break with Western political thought going all the way back to Plato and Aristotle. As he puts it, “neoliberalism terraforms and flattens the very landscape of our politics, bulldozing through once-familiar landmarks like ‘Class,’ ‘Solidarity,’ and ‘Common Good.’”

yranny, Inc. concludes with a call for a rebirth of social democracy. Some critics have expressed surprise at hearing this call come from someone on the Right. But it is important to remember that, historically, social democracy reflected a Left-Right consensus

Ahmari seeks a return to this kind of Left-Right consensus. Partly for this reason, he steers clear of the kind of culture-war arguments f

he does take his fellow conservatives to task for ignoring the effects of material conditions on the culture. He notes that the ancient Greeks were very clear about the relationship between material sufficiency and virtue—a link that the modern Right has forgotten.

Ahmari asks what can be done now. His answer: a return to social democracy, especially as practiced under the New Deal. His hero is President Franklin Roosevelt, who sought to protect workers from the vagaries of capitalism and to grant them a “countervailing power.”

Together, the reforms of the New Deal gave rise to a highly productive and equitable economy. Full employment was the norm, inequality was low, and financial crises were kept in check. It’s not an exaggeration to claim that, while it lasted, social democracy was the most successful economic experiment ever conducted.

Freudian psychoanalysis offers yet another account. As Mr. Chopra’s summary has it: “Anxiety is a signal to us that we harbor repressed emotions, desires, and sexuality.”

Finally, there is the idea of “materialist alienation,” advocated by both Karl Marx and Herbert Marcuse. This theory identifies the sources of anxiety in the material and economic conditions of society rather than in the individual psyche:

Although Mr. Chopra, a philosophy professor emeritus at Brooklyn College, notes many overlaps and commonalities in the four approaches, their differences make them inconsistent as a set. It isn’t clear that they are centrally concerned with anxiety at all.

ukkha in Buddhism isn’t usually understood to refer to anxiety but rather to a state of discontent.

Mr. Chopra acknowledges that one of his key existentialist figures, Nietzsche, never uses the term. Alluding to Marx’s alienated labor, Mr. Chopra asks: “What does such alienation feel like?” His answer: “Like anxiety, for it is anxiety.

Mr. Chopra interprets everything through the lens of anxiety and as a result either magnifies its significance or sees it where it is not. He says, for example, that from his own experience he has concluded that being “indecisive, distracted, insecure, or anxious . . . amounted to the same thing.” But for many people those conditions are very different.

Mr. Chopra is a serial user of the “presumptive we”: using the first-person plural to speak for all of us when he is really speaking for some or sometimes only himself.

At times Mr. Chopra writes of anxiety as though it were a key to self-definition, saying, at one point “thus does anxiety inform me of who I am.” Tell me your anxieties and I’ll tell you who you are may sound profound, but replace “anxieties” with “dreams,” “loves,” “hopes” or “values” and it is just as true.

Even philosophy in Mr. Chopra’s view springs not from wonder, as Aristotle and Plato claimed, but from anxiety. However, neither those giants of thought nor others who followed them for centuries had much to say about it

That “anxiety is a basic human affect and signature of human consciousness” is made somewhat problematic, he concedes, by the fact that it only emerged as “an explicitly named and identified problem in the nineteenth century.”

Still, Mr. Chopra is right to want to normalize the anxiety that people really do feel, saying that it is wrong to think that mental health consists in being anxiety-free. His basic therapeutic advice—not to push anxiety away but “to see what it ‘points to’ ”—is also spot-on

his book is a good primer on the major philosophers of anxiety, or at least its close relations.

Times were certainly very good in the decade after the 1991 Soviet collapse ended the fifty year emergency that began with Pearl Harbor. So if one accepts my definition of a conservative as “someone who knows things could be worse than they are-period,” then conservatism was never more apt

the “third age” neoconservatives ensconced at The Weekly Standard, Commentary, and various think tanks thought Promised Land, Crusader State decidedly inconvenient. They wanted Americans to believe that the United States has always possessed the mission and duty to redeem the whole world by exertion as well as example, and that any American who shirks from that betrays the Founders themselves.[13] They were loudly decrying cuts in defense spending as unilateral disarmament, likening U.S. policies to Britain’s lethargy in the 1930s, and warning of new existential threats on the horizon.

what national assets must the United States husband, augment if possible, and take care not to squander? My list was as follows: (1) a strong economy susceptible only to mild recession; (2) robust armed forces boasting technical superiority and high morale designed for winning wars; (3) presidential leadership that is prudent, patriotic, and persuasive; (4) a bipartisan, internationalist consensus in Congress; (5) sturdy regional alliances; (6) engagement to promote balance of power in Europe, East Asia, and the Middle East; (7) strong Pan-American ties to secure of our southern border.

t the shock of the 9/11 attacks and the imperative duty to prevent their repetition caused the Bush administration to launch two wars for regime change that eventuated in costly, bloody occupations belatedly devoted to democratizing the whole Middle East. Thus did the United States squander in only five years all seven of the precious assets listed in my 1999 speech.

When the other shoe dropped—not another Al Qaeda attack but the 2008 sub-prime mortgage collapse—Americans wrestled anew with an inconvenient truth. Foreign enemies cannot harm the United States more than Americans harm themselves, over and over again, through strategic malpractice and financial malfeasance.

Unfortunately, in an era of interdependent globalization vexed by failed states, rogue regimes, ethnic cleansing, sectarian violence, famines, epidemics, transnational terrorism, and what William S. Lind dubbed asymmetrical “Fourth Generation Warfare,” the answer to questions about humanitarian or strategic interventions abroad can’t be “just say no!” For however often Americans rediscover how institutionally, culturally, and temperamentally ill-equipped they are to do nation-building, the United States will likely remain what I (and now Robert Merry) dubbed a Crusader State.

the urgent tasks for civilian and military planners are those of the penitent sinner called to confess, repent, and amend his ways. The tasks include refining procedures to coordinate planning for national security so that bureaucratic and interest-group rivalries do not produce “worst of both worlds” outcomes.[22] They include interpreting past counter-insurgencies and postwar occupations in light of their historical particularities lest facile overemphasis on their social scientific commonalities yield “one size fits all” field manuals

they include persuading politicians to cease playing the demagogue on national security and citizens to cease imagining every intervention a “crusade” or a “quagmire”

A new intelligence assessment of global trends projects that China will outstrip the United States as the leading economic power before 2030, but that America will remain an indispensable world leader

“The growth of the global middle class constitutes a tectonic shift,” the study says, adding that billions of people will gain new individual power as they climb out of poverty. “For the first time, a majority of the world’s population will not be impoverished, and the middle classes will be the most important social and economic sector in the vast majority of countries around the world.”

half of the world’s population will probably be living in areas that suffer from severe shortages of fresh water, meaning that management of natural resources will be a crucial component of global national security efforts.

terrorists could mount a computer-network attack in which the casualties would be measured not by the hundreds or thousands killed but by the millions severely affected by damaged infrastructure, like electrical grids being taken down.

At least 15 countries are “at high risk of state failure” by 2030, the report predicts, among them Afghanistan and Pakistan, but also Burundi, Rwanda, Somalia, Uganda and Yemen.

The best-case situation for global security until 2030, according to the study, would be a growing political partnership between the United States and China.

The worst-case situation envisions a stalling of economic globalization that would preclude advancement of financial well-being around the world. That would be a likely outcome after an outbreak of a health pandemic that, even if short-lived, would result in closed borders and economic isolationism.

Mr. Burrows noted that the audiences in China were far more accepting of the American intelligence assessments — both those predicting China’s economic ascendancy and those warning of political dangers if there was no reform of governance in Beijing — than were audiences in Russia.

To assess the validity of this study, the research and analysis team graded its past work on global trends, an effort undertaken every four years since 1996. Past studies, it found, underestimated the speed with which changes arrived on the global scene.

previous assessments should have paid greater attention to ideology.

The risk of conflict within a state — like a civil war or an insurgency — is expected to decline in Latin America, but will remain high in sub-Saharan Africa, in parts of the Middle East and South Asia, and in some Asia-Pacific island hot spots

Most worrisome — and already a part of the global security dynamic — is an assessment that future wars in Asia and the Middle East could include nuclear weapons.

Other important demographic trends will be aging populations in Europe, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, which could slow their economies further

“the health of the global economy increasingly will be linked to how well the developing world does — more so than the traditional West.”

In addition to China, the developing nations that “will become especially important to the global economy” include Brazil, Colombia, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, South Africa and Turkey.

the revolution in oil and gas extraction has led to 1.7 million new jobs in the United States alone, a number that could rise to three million by 2020. The shale revolution added $62 billion to federal revenues in 2012. At the same time, carbon-dioxide emissions are down 13 percent since 2007, as gas is used instead of coal to generate electricity.

Most of us have grown up in a world in which oil states in the Middle East could throw their weight around because of their grip on the economy’s life source. But the power of petro-states is on the wane. Yergin argues that the oil sanctions against Iran may not have been sustainable if not for the new alternate sources of supply.

What are the names of the people who are leading this shift? Who is the Steve Jobs of shale? Magazine covers don’t provide the answers. Whoever they are, they don’t seem hungry for celebrity or good with the splashy project launch