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Jefferson Cowie: One of the great sort of struggles throughout American history is: Where does freedom rest? The biggest fight over that was, of course, the Civil War. But I think the entire American history can be seen as a tension between local versus federal realms of authority, with regard to this slippery idea of freedom.

Cowie: And then on Election Day, 1874, as Black people came in from the countryside to vote, white people just pulled guns out of every nook and cranny of downtown Eufaula, Alabama—from sheds, from windows, from underneath porches—and opened fire on Black voters that were lined up to vote and shot them in the streets.

He describes how white settlers in the 1830s refused to abide by treaties that the federal government had signed with Native Americans and, instead, would repeatedly steal their land.

Applebaum: And then, after the Civil War, during Reconstruction, Barbour County also revolted against the federal government’s demand that freed slaves be allowed to vote

Applebaum: Jefferson Cowie is a historian. He teaches at Vanderbilt University, in Nashville. In his book Freedom’s Dominion, he writes about a place called Barbour County, in Alabama, where the two different forms of freedom have come crashing into one another for two centuries now

At least 80 were shot. Some say as many as 150. It’s a difficult number to come up with, but 80 confirmed, at least. And that ended Reconstruction violently, in what was essentially a coup d’état in the name of white freedom.

Applebaum: Then in the 1950s and 1960s, this version of freedom, the freedom to defy the federal government, emerges again.

Applebaum: George Wallace, born in Barbour County, became governor of Alabama during the fraught civil-rights era.

the most iconic speech of George Wallace’s life. He only mentioned segregation one other time, for a total of four, but he invokes freedom or liberty two dozen times.

The more I dug into the local history and how local and state powers saw themselves in opposition to federal power and saw that their freedom was a local ability to control, to dominate, a freedom to dominate others—the land, the political power of others—then you realize, Oh, what Wallace is talking about is a very specific kind of freedom

We allow the word freedom to work in the political discourse because it appears to be a kind of liberal value, but underneath it is actually a very powerful ideology of domination.

that’s what he’s really talking about there, because it’s at that moment that the federal government is coming in to take away their freedom to control the political power of Black people.

Cowie: Because if you’re running as a snarling racist, you only get so far, he realized. But if you’re running against the federal government, as freedom from the federal tyranny, now you have yourself a coalition, right? Now you have the anti-taxers. You have people who don’t want to deal with integrated housing. You have people who don’t, you know, want the federal government meddling in their lives. And now that’s a broader group that you can bring together.

Pomerantsev: So this is not what we traditionally think of as freedom—you know, the freedom to vote, to choose your representatives, the freedom to engage in politics. This is something much darker.

Cowie: What happened in Barbour County: The idea of civil rights and the idea of political participation were mobilized effectively in pursuit of the freedom to dominate.

Cowie: That’s the model that I’m afraid of for the future.

Applebaum: So what you’re saying is: We could elect somebody who would alter the political system.

Applebaum: So it wouldn’t be that, you know, a dictator comes to power by driving tanks down the street and shooting up the White House but is, rather, elected with the consent of the voters. Cowie: Right.

Cowie: Absolutely. But my nightmare is that fascism comes to America, but it’s marching under the banner of freedom.

Cowie: The difference now is they’re beginning to capture federal authority, right? So these people who’ve been anti federal government are now tasting federal power. And this is something that people like John C. Calhoun from South Carolina and George Wallace from Alabama actually envisioned

Applebaum: “Transform federal power into their own vision”—that sounds like some of the things we’ve been talking about throughout this series. Tom Nichols reminded us of how easy it would be to subvert the military. We’ve seen how a congressional committee can be used to harass its chairman’s enemies, and, of course, the Justice Department could be used in the same way. We know how weak some parts of our system are; there is not a guarantee that the rest of it is stable.

Pomerantsev: In the present day, we often hear about this idea of freedom as being synonymous with freedom from government—or, to be more precise, from democratic government, from checks and balances, from elected officials—that if Americans are just left alone, they’ll be free and achieve their best.

Pomerantsev: Yes. You live in a society that makes it possible to do things—to become educated, to be creative, to found a company, to be healthy—and that, not the absence of government, makes you free

If you have very poor government, the people are not free. People are then subject to arbitrariness and violence. They’re subject to the rule of the wealthy. Just taking away government and imagining people are free is a kind of magical thinking.

Pomerantsev: Anne, you know Timothy Snyder. He’s a professor at Yale, and he’s written a new book, called On Freedom. He lays out a different way of thinking about the word.

Timothy Snyder: The basic way that this argument about freedom is now run is that people say, The less government you have, the more free you are, which is fundamentally not true.

Applebaum: So Snyder means that you are free to do something, not just free from something.

Snyder: Freedom has been an axe, right? It’s been a blade which has been used to cut through things. And I’m trying to suggest that freedom should be more like a plow. Freedom should be a tool which allows us to cultivate things. Freedom should be something which justifies action.

the argument is usually made in terms of justice or fairness or equality, and those are all good things. But both politically and, I think, morally, just in terms of the correct description, freedom is often very much more central.

Pete Buttigieg: Yes. It’s important to make sure that people are free from overbearing government. But also, government is not the only thing that can make you unfree, and good government helps make sure you’re free from other threats to your well-being.

t means one party can try to claim a positive vision of freedom for themselves, and it also means the followers of the other party might oppose it reflexively, just for partisan reason

Pomerantsev: I think one way to keep democracy is to make sure we use that word a little more carefully than we do now. I hear a lot of Americans say, Democracy is not working. And I know what they mean

But that’s not democracy—that’s autocracy at work. Autocratic tendencies are to blame for this sense that democracy is not working. Even the word democracy is becoming so tainted for so many people that you have to almost avoid the term and really show how the growth of autocracy makes life worse for people every day.

Applebaum: Peter, I spoke with David Pepper, who’s written several books about how America is becoming less and less democratic. In a recent evaluation of elections in Texas, nearly 70 percent of races were uncontested, and in Georgia, it was about the same.

Pepper: It really changes the entire dynamic of those in power. I mean, think about the incentive system. If you’re in a kind of a competitive race, your incentive system in that kind of system is: You know you can be held accountable by the voters. You better deliver good public results, right?

I’ve seen it in country after country. I saw it in Russia and Ukraine and Hungary. It’s no accident that Alexei Navalny, the Russian dissident killed, would call his struggle “the final battle between good and neutrality.” He knew that apathy was the enemy.

Applebaum: So autocrats and their enablers craft a dysfunctional system, the dysfunctionality, understandably, makes people disgusted or apathetic, and then they start clamoring for something different, something less democratic, because democracy seems so impossible, so incompetent.

Pomerantsev: When people choose not to engage—not to run for office or vote or participate—that’s actually just the beginning, because apathy, cynicism, and nihilism grow. And as they do, the appetites of those who want to degrade democracy and seize more power grow, too.

Well, in these systems where you literally, for the most part, don’t face an election ever, or a competitive election ever, every incentive in that world is upside down.

Pomerantsev: But, Anne, these achievements—they don’t happen in a vacuum. People don’t just spontaneously go out and protest, and then great things happen. Movements take planning. You need to create coalitions—this is where a lot of people mess u

America has had success with coalition building in its history. The suffragettes, for example, weren’t just radical women fighting for the right to vote—they found ways to embrace and engage conservative women and get them to join the movement too.

Pomerantsev: The answer to the authoritarian urge is not a democratic savior. The answer is going to be: lots and lots of people-powered movements working together, because that already is the essence of democracy and central to taking back—truly taking back—control.

There was the illusion that a secure Jewish community would remain so.

In 2013 the A.D.L. recorded just 751 antisemitic incidents in the United States. In 2023 the organization counted 8,873 incidents, an increase of over 1,000 percent.

Backward in literary circles, where being identified as a Zionist — even if it’s of the most progressive kind or has little to do with an author’s work — can lead to ostracism and cancellation.

Unless this changes, the American Jewish community is on its way to living how the European Jewish community has for decades: apprehensive, suspected and under ever increasing layers of private and state protection.

There was the illusion that, having achieved a sense of belonging in America, we would keep it.

Today there’s a palpable sense of things going backward. Backward in the Ivy League, where Jewish enrollment has plummeted and Jewish students feel unwelcome and at times threatened.

That included over 1,000 bomb threats to Jewish institutions, thousands of acts of vandalism and harassment, the desecration of graves and more than 160 physical assaults

There was the illusion that antisemitism was a fever-swamp prejudice, to which virtually all educated people were immune.

For those versed in statistics, or Jewish history, this going backward has a term: regression toward the mean

Backward in social justice organizations, many of no apparent relevance to the Middle East, that nonetheless feel called to demand the end of the Jewish state.

People attracted to grand theories of everything, as intellectuals often are, tend to gravitate toward singular causes, sweeping solutions, unsuspected “facts” and decisive explanations.

A century ago, the grand theories were about the evils of capitalism or the hierarchies of race — and Jews wound up on the wrong end of both theories. Today, the grand theory concerns so-called settler colonialism.

Zionism, which since the days of the Maccabees has been the most enduring anticolonial struggle in history, is now the epitome of what college activists seem to think is colonialism, the only solution to which is its eradication

When people argue that education is the answer to bigotry, they often forget that bigotry is a moral failing, not an intellectual one — and few people are more dangerous than educated bigots.

Finally, there was the illusion that America was different, that it couldn’t happen here, that our neighbors and colleagues would never abandon us, that, as a people and a government, America would do right by the Jewish people at home and abroad.

That’s one illusion I still hold dear. My mother came to the United States after World War II as a stateless, penniless refugee; she, and therefore I, owe this country everything. I desperately want to believe that what’s happened since last year on college campuses won’t go far beyond the quads; that Joe Biden won’t be the last Democratic president to also be a sincere Zionist; that the Republican Party will snap out of the populism and nativism into which Trump has sunk it, which invariably produces antisemitism; that Black America won’t turn sharply against the Jews; that America’s exhaustion with being the world’s de facto policeman won’t lead it to forsake small countries faced with aggressive totalitarian neighbors; that Greene and Rashida Tlaib will never hold leadership positions in their parties; that young Americans drawn to anti-Israel politics will rethink their radicalism as they grow older; that envy won’t replace admiration as the way average Americans view personal and communal success; that an America that exists somewhere between Morningside Heights in Manhattan and Berkeley, Calif., still hasn’t lost its moral decency and common sense.

I want to believe all this. I’m just finding it harder than ever to do so.

There is a moving passage in “Not I: Memoirs of a German Childhood” in which the German historian Joachim Fest recalled that his Catholic father, Johannes, had a personal fondness for their Jewish friends, along with his analysis of where German Jews had gone wrong politically: “They had, in tolerant Prussia, lost their instinct for danger, which had preserved them through the ages.”

There are larger strategic and perhaps moral ones. Namely: Are we going to be proud Jews or (mostly) indifferent ones? And if proud, what does that entail?

To have been born a Jew is the single most fortunate thing that ever happened to me. It is a priceless moral, spiritual, intellectual and emotional inheritance from my ancestors, some of whom were slaughtered for it. It’s a precious bequest to my children, who will find different ways to make it their own. It is therefore worth the time it takes to explore and worth the cost — including, tragically, the cost in bigotry and violence — it so often extracts.

To be a Jew obliges us to many things, particularly our duty to be our brother’s, and sister’s, keeper. That means never to forsake one another, much less to join in the vilification of our own people. It means to participate in the long struggle for our survival not only against enemies who mean us harm but also against those who excuse those enemies or those whose moral apathy speeds their way.

And now try to imagine someone you know being deported.  If you are Latino, someone you know very likely will be deported, and a family you know will almost certainly be broken

we are talking about one in twenty-five families in the country as a whole. 

if you did not vote to stop it you will share the responsibility.

What is more, a purge on this scale will have to involve mistakes, especially when run by people who are motivated by enmity.  If the error rate were just one percent, then about 120,000 people will be deported who in fact are documented.

An attempt to rapidly deport twelve million people will also change everyone else

such an action will have to bring in law enforcement at all levels.  Such a huge mission will effectively redefine the purpose of law enforcement: the principle is no longer to make all people feel safe, but to make some people unsafe. 

Such an enormous deportation will requires an army of informers.  People who denounce their neighbors or coworkers will be presented as positive examples.  Denunciation then becomes a culture.

You will be expected to collaborate in the deportation effort: if you do, you will be harming others; if you do not, you risk being seen as disloyal yourself. 

The attempt to deport twelve million people will likely generate some resistance.  It is hard to imagine that every single person will willingly cooperate.

inevitably, a moment will arise when law enforcement will claim (truly or not) that an undocumented person used force in trying to elude deportation.  This moment is not a side effect: it is part of the plan. 

The deep purpose of a mass deportation is to establish a new sort of politics, a politics of us-and-them, which means (at first) everyone else against the Latinos. 

If Trump and Vance win, this dynamic will be hard to stop, especially of they have majorities in Congress.  The only way to avoid it is to stop them in November with the vote

That doesn’t mean that we don’t want the boldest, fastest action we can get.

The true measure of the seriousness of the planetary crisis is not destruction but discontinuity.

This is not the kind of language you hear in public radio policy debates, at high-ticket ideas conferences

No, the buzz in those circles is that the challenge of climate action is balancing progress with continuity. Trade-offs, and how to make the smartest ones.

one of the grimmest aspects of this crisis is its transapocalyptic nature. That is, just how much of the world can thrive relatively well while enormous numbers of people suffer

the perception is that if we can’t hold on to continuity, all is lost. The end of the world is nigh. Discontinuity can only mean apocalypse.

When we center the planetary crisis in our thinking about the world, one central fact becomes clear: our ideas about the pace of change—how fast we can create change, the costs and benefits of more rapid action, the politics of speed and delay—are the most out-of-date part of the climate/sustainability debate. Our sense of tempo is broken, and few of us are ready for how fast things are beginning to move… or that most of humanity benefits more the faster we move.

Tens of millions of Americans are living in the crosshairs of disaster, in a degree of economic precarity we haven’t seen since the Great Depression, a missed paycheck away from a foreclosed home, surrounded by culture wars, violence and pandemic grief.

We have never needed new thinking more. The demand for clear advocacy, for fresh foresight, and for strategic acumen is effectively unlimited. The supply, however, is not

Seen through 20th century eyes, everything is about to get really weird, really fast.

The human world is also discontinuous along multiple trajectories.

WE ARE IN DISCONTINUITY

Barriers to action that have stood half a century are falling now. As they fall, a vast demand is revealing itself: a demand for the new models of sustainable prosperity. Billions of people need better ways of providing for themselves—better both in the sense of more sustainable, and more accessible.

Even if climate change and ecological collapse mysteriously ceased to be problems tomorrow, we’d still be awash in tidal forces—technological acceleration, economic inequality, the breakdown of the nation state, deepening globalization, and so on—that together add up to an ongoing discontinuity in their own right

Some doomers like to take their new fluency with the ecological end times as evidence of their intellectual superiority over the sheeple who cling to say, seeking a survivable future for their kids. These “first time climate dudes” are big on casting themselves as the only ones with the guts to call it like it is.

These days, even former anti-environmentalists and climate denialists claim to want action on climate and sustainability

Those defeats have altered all our human systems, already. Not only is the Earth’s entire biosphere being transformed at a speed greater than anything humans have lived through before, but the human world has become something no human has ever experienced before.

Focusing a major share of public resources on meeting the planetary crisis—which is what is demanded to head off the worsening of the crisis—itself shatters the illusion that value will persist in assets and expertise that cannot endure. It forces a reckoning with reality. To go big is to burst bubbles.

Now, we humans have an innate desire for continuity. That desire is not the problem. Denial is. We are deeply in denial about the reality of living in discontinuity.

It remains a bedrock assumption, often buried too deeply to be noticed, much less questioned, that the purpose of climate action and sustainability is to prevent changes in the human world, to keep hold of what we have.

Above all, this means building. It means hundreds of millions of new homes; wind farms and solar fields by the tens of thousands, factories churning out batteries and electric cars and induction stoves and geothermal systems; new shipping infrastructure; the rebuilding of coastal cities everywhere; massive investments in ecosystem services, fire protections, water and soil conservation; a reinvention of huge industries like chemicals and concrete and consumer plastics; a landscape in upheaval. A giant building boom is what successful action looks like.

The demand for continuity, especially in America, is held is place with panic, precarity and populism.

My most succinct working definition of a “discontinuity” is a watershed moment, one where past experience loses its value as a guide to decision-making about the future.

whether we conjure up a zombie apocalypse or a future of deep adaption on the dark mountain, it is clearly far easier and less scary for most people to imagine the end of everything than a time of uncontrolled change

The local forecast for some may be ecological collapse with choking air and a side of failed state—but elsewhere, times are good, the skies are clear and the markets are up.

That doesn’t mean we won’t see almost inconceivable tragedy and mind-bogglingly stupid losses—and that we don’t want to fight like hell to minimize them—but they’re not the end of the human story. Failures are not doom.

“You don’t have to give up a quality of life to achieve some of the things that we know we have to achieve,” US climate envoy John Kerry said last week

The planetary crisis is a discontinuity. This is the most important thing about it. Failing to understand the climate/ecological emergency as an all-encompassing discontinuity in human societies is failing to understand it, full stop.

The consensus vision of success is one in which we solve climate change, and the human world remains pretty much as it is now, especially for those in the wealthy parts of the worl

Well, we all need to make some sacrifices to avoid the ecopocalypse. But our lifestyle shall endure. The consensus about success is that we must meet the planetary crisis precisely so that we can avoid changing anything important.

But discontinuity is not just danger. Discontinuity means change in our selves and our societies. Transformation is not just a matter of loss. The losses are profoundly tragic. They are not, however, the whole story, or even its most important plot line

on a wide variety of fronts, the defeats we’ve already dealt ourselves over decades of inaction are growing unignorable. Many more are coming into focus now

The urgency of this crisis has fused with the scale of those opportunities. Seen clearly, they are the same phenomenon, and they stand to drive both the speed of change and the rate of human progress at a pace we’re not used to imagining. The coming boom will collide with the worsening of the planetary crisis. Then things will become truly, deeply discontinuous.

We are surrounded by ubiquitous mismatches between the value of systems, enterprises and places given their suitability to the world we now live in, and the way those things are priced by markets. We are surrounded, in short, by bubbles

We are not now capable of designing a future that works in continuity with our existing systems and practices while producing emissions reductions and sustainability gains fast enough to avoid truly dire ecological harm.

The insistence that the point of action be the restoration of continuity leads to the belief that only massively-scaled collective action can save us

The planetary crisis is a crisis because it has unleashed discontinuity throughout human systems, and because only a few of us can see it yet.

Here in the U.S., the rhetoric of the mid-Twentieth century features prominently. We must, we are told, rise to meet the planetary emergency on a sort of wartime footing, like the industrial mobilizations of World War Two. A Green New Deal is demanded to save us. We need a climate tech Moonshot.

use the unexpected boon of seriousness is awakening to possibility, to the capacities we gain amidst disruption and acceleration.

It’s a forlorn hope that we can tackle the crisis while avoiding the very conflicts over the speed of change that created this fucking crisis in the first place.

These bubbles are kept inflated by denial. One of the reasons even massive programs of government spending can’t restore continuity is that to engage in spending at that scale is to reveal the fragility of the unsustainable, brittle and outdated.

In this untrustworthy calculus, the only costs that count are the lost profits and jobs in unsustainable industries, the only fairness is that those who don’t want to change shouldn’t have to

We can talk about them as separate challenges, but in reality they are all one crisis. And it is getting worse, fast.

president Biden’s climate proposals and actions—despite being the boldest this nation has ever seen—are not even sufficient to meet this crisis, much less to run the meter backwards into a past world that could avoid discontinuity.

We need thousands upon thousands of committed people learning how to lead in the real world of unprecedented and uncontrolled change, and finding ways to leverage opportunity and impact together. We need a snap forward.

Doomerism's "courage,” of course, is largely being fearless about profitably declaring defeat, while sacrificing young people's lives and dreams. "I am intellectually brave enough to decide you don't have a future" is pretty crap as an iconoclastic stance.

Belief in continuity serves a profitable purpose: it is a precondition for predatory delay.

The supposed imminence of apocalypse gives selfish people a reason to begin acting as if the shit has already hit the fan.

“When we can imagine no future we want, something far more dangerous takes its place in our minds: the future we fear. Without visions of progress worth coming together to fight for, crisis tears people apart.

It’s difficult to overstate the scale of the demand for sustainable prosperity and rugged systems, and how fast we need them. That demand by itself exerts a sort of strange gravity that’s hard to gauge as long as we’re focused on the loss of continuity

it is absolutely not too late to limit our losses to those we’ve already set in motion, and to seize our opportunities to build a better human world—indeed, quite possibly a better world than the one we have now.

Worse is coming. A sense of doom is a powerful force in the landscape, especially in the U.S. We ignore it at our peril.

he emphasis has to land on the “trade-offs” between the needs of the status quo (and those best served by it) and the speed of action demanded by real world conditions.

In order for good people to accept the moral implications of predatory delay—the massive losses, harms, and further discontinuity brought on by unchecked ecological mayhem—they must be convinced that the systems they're defending will still have value in the future

There’s more. If continuity is valid, then change is a choice, and those choosing change should compensate those being forced to change.

There are scores of reasons why we can’t spend our way back to continuity, beginning with the most powerful one, which is that the damage we’ve done to our climate and biosphere is not reversible in human time scales. This is a one-way trip. The ticket we’ve already bought means taking a ride that is going to land us on a different planet.

For predatory delay to seem reasonable, the unsustainable must be described as systems of great inherent worth, ones that can be reliably and gradually modified into new versions of themselves. They must believe in an orderly transition between their legacy and a positive future

The deserving are coal miners, not construction workers sent home during heat waves; gas station owners, but not shellfish farmers; auto dealership and gas stove manufacturers, but not the mountain towns whose whole economies depend on skiers showing up in the winter

A dark unknowable future becomes raw power in the hands of a fear-monger. All over the world, we see demagogues lashing audiences into frenzies by putting old faces of hate on people’s new fears for the world ahead of us. Combining the anxiety of crisis with political scapegoating has birthed some of the greatest evil humanity has ever seen. Make no mistake: That evil is again on the march in the world, with talk of walls and camps, wars for living space and the battle for the last remaining resources.”

Many responsible people, though, ignore the refusal. Or, they see it as even more reason to restore an orderly transition, to hold on to the lives we’ve built, to keep everyone feeling like we’re all in it together.

the most important point: We can create a better future even in a context of discontinuity.

Doomerism excuses reckless disregard for others and the worsening of manageable problems as unavoidable parts of the process of an unfolding apocalypse.

when discussing the planetary crisis, we don’t foreground these bubbles, and the extent to which a massive and widespread repricing is on its way.) We pretend a stability in our economy that doesn’t exist.

In this frivolous new world, everything must be pleasing and inoffensive. Everything and everybody gets marketed like an exciting new product—even old, creepy politicians, or ancient film actors, or 80-year-old rock stars.

The public accepts this as a matter of course. They hardly expect anything to be real nowadays.

Let’s stay with 1996 for a moment—because it was a turning point. Before that time, Susan Sontag had been very receptive to popular culture—movies, commercial music, and campy pop art. But each of these was becoming unrecognizable in their turn-of-the-century guises.

These films were all different—but they had one thing in common: overwhelming special effects. In the final years of the twentieth century, computer technology had reached a level where massive levels of destruction could be shown on screen with an immediacy never before possible. Technology was setting the agenda for creativity. Everything else—script, directing, acting, was subservient to the computer-generated imagery. But 1996 was just the beginning of cinema as a digital spectacle. With each passing year, the artificial digital component has increased, and the real human element decreased. The advent of AI will now accelerate this even further. We may soon reach the point where nothing on the screen is real.

Carlyle rightly mocks the citizens of France who, in those days, put so much trust in paper—whether the deceptive newspapers or the collapsing paper currency. Humans had once created a Stone Age and an Iron Age—but now settled for the Age of Paper.

By implication, we live today in a digital age—or the Age of Less-Than-Paper. It doesn’t help that that cutting edge technologies are focused so much on deception—fake images, fake video, fake audio, fake books by fake authors, fake songs by fake musicians, fake news, fake everything.

Fake is our leading candidate for word of the century. It captures almost everything relevant now in a single syllable.

Here’s the scariest part of the story: Most of this is by design. Our culture is now obsessed with deception and misdirection—and it’s not just on the movie screen anymore. You see it everywhere, from cosplay conventions to bands wearing masks to the misguided virtual reality mania.

Never before in history has authenticity been in such short supply. That’s so much the case, that the very word authenticity is mocked. (I will write about that more in the future.)

This is the flip side of our culture of artificiality. Anything that threatens the dominant fakeness with reality stirs up an intense backlash. The dreamer does not want to awaken from the dream.

here’s the most salient fact of all: People who have their act together are now taking things very seriously in there own lives. They aren't waiting for guidance from an app from the Apple Store or a post from an influencer.

Can you build a culture on cotton candy? We will soon find out.

In a cotton candy society, everything feels insubstantial:People go to war online—in toxic Twitter posts—but it’s a fake war with the angriest combatants typically hiding behind avatars.People seek love online, but even here the fakeness is toxic—hence many are catfished (a term that didn’t exist a few years ago) by scammers pretending to be a romantic interest. People not only work and play online, but even construct their selves online—which is where their identity increasingly resides.

These are all signs that we are living in a society running low on seriousness.

Ah, the word action. That’s fallen out of favor, too—another symptom worth noting. Here’s the Google analysis of its usage since the year 1900.

The decline in the word action accelerated during the same period that saw the rise (shown above) in the word fake. They are mirror images of the same cultural shift.

Participants at Normandy and Selma were taking action. But soup hurlers operate at a symbolic level, or (let’s be honest) a less-than-symbolic level—because these paintings have no connection in any way with the issues at stake.

The targeted paintings aren’t appropriate symbols of the evil they are supposed to represent. In fact, they embody the exact opposite.

A psychoanalyst would say that the hostility here is displaced—like people who kick the dog because they hate their boss.

It’s not mere coincidence that anger and violence are targeted at objects that are inescapablyrealtangibleuniqueauthentic (that word again!)produced by human hand

In an age of fakery, people who operate without seriousness will inevitably focus their hostility on precisely these cherished objects.

he cluelessness in Cupertino is understandable. The dominant companies in Silicon Valley are threatened by reality and seriousness—which are like Kryptonite to the digital agenda. So these mishaps are inevitable. Fakery is now a business model. Reality is its hated competitor.

So are you surprised that everything in culture has a feeling of unreality right now? It’s like cotton candy that shrinks to nothing as soon as you put it in your mouth, just leaving a brief sickly sweet taste.

let’s call them leaders—because that’s what they will be. And that’s such a better word than influencer.

Five years from now, the cultural landscape will look much different. I expect a lot will change in just the next 12 months.

COMING SOON: I will write about “How to Become a Serious Person.”

LF: You made an interesting point about political scientists. They do have a problem in that once you start expanding from your narrow area to take in other areas there are just too many variables. There are too many things to track

Do you think this gives historians an advantage over political scientists because while they may not be scientifically robust they can explain things better?

And, to my mind, doing great violence both to this history, which is far more complex, and to the current set of circumstances which may or may not be relevant to whatever that past tells us

But. and I'm being just a tiny bit flip here, 90 percent of IR theory comes down to three historical questions: What caused the First World War? Was Hitler unique? And how did nuclear weapons affect international politics? Those are all historical questions.

I had the great fortune of being trained by Mark Trachtenberg. You can use some of the advantages that IR theory and political science provide, which is a certain level of precision.

But, taking a historical perspective, you see not just these horizontal connections but also complexity, contingency, chance, circumstances. You become very suspicious of importing historical lessons from the past in total to the present, which you see these days with what people believe to be lessons from the Cold War, the 1930s or Wilhelmine Germany.

I kind of grew up with IR theory. It's an enormously powerful lens to help make sense of the world. It exposes underlying assumptions about research, design, causality and agency.

Yet global public health was the low hanging fruit of international political cooperation. We knew this was coming. We knew what to do and we failed miserably.

That problem looked similar to others that we will see coming down the road, be it new emerging technology, the climate crisis, anything involving the ‘Global Commons.’ I was struck that this was a wake-up call

Russia's behaviour demonstrates that there are other factors involved that drive states to conflict that have not gone away. It's just that a very particular form of war, of unlimited imperial expansion, makes no sense now for states to pursue

Yet, once it eased, our governments and our friends who study these questions went back to normal.

I was disturbed by the fact that the ease with which people began to look at the world through an old lens. With Russia's horrendous invasion of Ukraine there was almost a sense of, well, we know what this is. It looks like World War Two. We have the models to deal with this. This gives us a focus because we have no idea how to deal with these other sets of global problems. The return of great power politics seemed to excuse serious study of these other challenges, which to me were sort of catastrophic.

as a historian I was struck that we use established models to understand international politics without accounting for the profound changes we've gone through, including the doubling of life expectancy. 

That got me into studying and thinking about these issues and inspired me to dive into looking into how a world of scarcity had changed to one of plenty, and how that might change perspectives on how international relations works.

The difference between the world we live in today and the past is that scarcity was an actual physical limit. In the 19th century there was nothing you could do necessarily to produce more food, more fuel, more clean water, more housing. Whereas today we have it completely within our means to solve these scarcity issues.

When those scarcity issues exist it's often the consequence either of some political issue or of us not doing more to alleviate these issues of scarcity. So scarcity today is the result of political circumstances, not a hard physical limit as it was in the past.

In the past, human beings could not get access to the basic resources they need in a consistent way that was predictable. That problem theoretically is now gone. It is not applied universally

If you look at life expectancy curves, the increases pretty much everywhere are extraordinary. In China, which was unimaginably poor, life expectancy has actually surpassed the United States.

European and global politics from the late 19th century to, say, the middle of the 20th century reflected very particular historical circumstances. These drove Imperial conquest. During that period, there was a need for territory to feed populations that were seen as growing geometrically. Those wars of imperial conquest generated many of the disasters both on the European continent and globally

These circumstances were changing underneath in ways that were not recognised. Taming scarcity involved unbelievable increases in agricultural and economic productivity. At the same time there was an unexpected demographic compression where people just stopped having as many kids as expected. This was combined with a variety of other forces including improved governance and massive increases in information about the world. This meant that the historical forces that drove imperial plunder make literally no sense today

The COVID-19 global crisis killed upwards of 20 million people, which is the equivalent of a World War, and was a failure of international cooperation and national domestic responses. Liberal democratic states did poorly; authoritarian states did poorly.

Its hard to imagine now that a geopolitical empire could pull that off. China is actually facing a declining population. People live in cities. They don't need more land.

FG: Even though the problems of plenty were created by developed Western states they hit hard most on states trying to make the transition. So climate change, public health, and inequality affects these states more

The states that have this wealth need people who are drawn in through migration or the efforts to migrate. This is the most divisive political issue globally right now in developed states. The rise of populism in the US and Europe is bound up with the politics of migration, which is a problem of plenty because that generates the magnet that attracts people

In the end, are individual states going to have to work out how to handle these issues in their own ways, or do we need new forms of multilateralism?

FG: I would say it's both. It's a manifesto and I’ve tried to think of some specific policy consequences.

I did a piece for Foreign Policy in which the model I used was of an alien who comes down to Earth every 50 years to assess the situation

Secondly, the problems of plenty, the climate and pandemics, represent the only truly existential threat

The alien would say, why is everyone so sad? I don't have a full explanation but we have deeply bitter, angry politics and some of this has been caused by plenty.

what I say in the essay is that China does terrible things - repression, the Uyghurs, the crackdown on Hong Kong, coercive threats in the South China Sea and Taiwan, its economic policies. It is not a good actor. But what I say is:

First, there's one specific threat that can cause World War Three, which is this very difficult challenge of Taiwan. This leads to the question whether China wants Taiwan as an irredentist objective, or is it the beginning of some 1930s like bid for geopolitical hegemony?

if Taiwan were suddenly to be taken over by China, it would not be an existential threat to the United States. It's a very challenging problem, but they need to ask, is this an irredentist problem, that is similar to what happens whenever you have divided two states, whether its the Korean Peninsula, the Middle East, or Kashmi

in 2024 I'm looking at the numbers, and you live longer. You have this great technology. All the information in the world can be accessed by anyone in this tiny little device for free. On the one hand, under the lingering shadow of our Marxist training, we've done really well. We have great wealth, but we could distribute it better. We've got great technology, but people are miserable. People feel this deep sense of enmity and of anger. That needs to be studied and understood.

We know another pandemic will come and imagine one with more lethality. And don't we have an obligation - both China and the United States - to find some way to work together on these issues even while the other competition persists.

During the Cold War the Soviet Union and the United States were engaged in a far deeper, more bitter ideological and geopolitical political battle that almost ended with a thermonuclear exchange. Yet they worked together to solve two of the greatest problems that plagued humanity. First, the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, where they came together in 1968 with the UK to limit the spread of nuclear weapons, as a shared responsibility.

At the same time, they worked together at lower levels to eliminate smallpox, a disease that had killed twice as many people as all the wars combined in the 20s century

if these two powers, whose geopolitical and ideological competition was an order of magnitude worse than anything that exists between the United States and China today, could figure out a way to work together why not these two powers now?

If somehow the United States figures out a cure for cancer and at the same time China figures out a cure to the climate crisis would we really not want them to share this with each other and Europe and everyone else?

There's only one existential crisis, which is the climate crisis

And as terrible and tragic as the war in Ukraine is and as threatening and terrifying as Cross Strait relations are between the United States and China, so that they demand attention, neither is existential unless we let them become so.