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Trudeau and his Liberal party came to power after elections in October, ousting the once-entrenched conservative government of former Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

Trudeau's cabinet is the most diverse in the country's history; he has reasserted Canada's role at the forefront of climate change policy; his government has brought in more some 25,000 Syrian refugees in the space of just a few months.

As WorldViews has cataloged over the past few months, the Republican debates have been a showcase for crude, simplistic discussions about foreign policy and global challenges, heavy on sound and fury, light on substance.

A lack of understanding of the strictures of the U.S. refugee vetting process led many in the United States to see Syria's destitute refugees as terror threats rather than people desperately fleeing a hideous, brutal war.

he prime minister will always state his values," said a Canadian government official, quoted anonymously in an article by the Canadian Press news agency. "But he’s not interested in stirring up domestic politics."

When I interrogated Saddam, he told me: “You are going to fail. You are going to find that it is not so easy to govern Iraq.” When I told him I was curious why he felt that way, he replied: “You are going to fail in Iraq because you do not know the language, the history, and you do not understand the Arab mind.”

Nixon now reckons Hussein had a point and that a ruthless strongman like him was necessary to "maintain Iraq's multi-ethnic state" and keep both Sunni extremism and the power of Shiite-led Iran, a Hussein foe, at bay.

"Although I found Saddam to be thoroughly unlikeable, I came away with a grudging respect for how he was able to maintain the Iraqi nation as a whole for as long as he did," wrote Nixon. "He told me once, 'Before me, there was only bickering and arguing. I ended all that and made people agree!'"

Many Arab commentators, though, reject the simplicity of the assumptions here — that if not ruled by tyrants, their nations would automatically turn into breeding grounds for militancy. That's a logic, after all, that serves the autocrats. Moreover, there's a direct connection between the heavy-handed policies of the region's autocrats and the conditions that spawn extremism and deepen sectarian animosities. Pluralistic, multi-ethnic societies have been the norm, not the exception, for centuries.

the intellectual right effectively dismissed the book

Here is David Brooks, echoing the conservative consensus in 2006:

As any number of historians, sociologists and pollsters can tell you, the evangelical Protestants who now exercise a major influence on the Republican Party are an infinitely diverse and contradictory group, and their relationship to these hyperpartisans is extremely ambivalent.

The idea that members of the religious right form an “infinitely diverse and contradictory group” and were in no way “hyperpartisan” is now clearly absurd. Christianism, in fact, turned out to be the central pillar of Trump’s success, with white evangelicals giving unprecedented and near-universal support — 84 percent — to a shameless, disgusting pagan, because and only because he swore to smite their enemies.

The fusion of Trump and Christianism is an unveiling of a sort — proof of principle that, in its core, Christianism is not religious but political, a reactionary cult susceptible to authoritarian preacher

Christianism is to the American right what critical theory is to the American left: a reductionist, totalizing creed that “others” half the country, and deeply misreads the genius of the American project.

Christianism starts, as critical theory does, by attacking the core of the Founding: in particular, its Enlightenment defense of universal reason, and its revolutionary removal of religion from the state.

Mike Johnson’s guru, pseudo-historian David Barton, claims that the Founders were just like evangelicals today, and intended the government at all levels to enforce “Christian values” — primarily, it seems, with respect to the private lives of others. As Pete Wehner notes, “If you listen to Johnson speak on the ‘so-called separation of Church and state’ and claim that ‘the Founders wanted to protect the church from an encroaching state, not the other way around,’ you will hear echoes of Barton.”

Christianism is a way to think about politics without actually thinking. Johnson expressed this beautifully last week: “I am a Bible-believing Christian. Someone asked me today in the media, they said, ‘It’s curious, people are curious: What does Mike Johnson think about any issue under the sun?’ I said, ‘Well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. That’s my worldview.

this tells us nothing, of course. The Bible demands interpretation in almost every sentence and almost every word; it contains universes of moral thought and thesauri of ambiguous words in a different ancient language; it has no clear blueprint for contemporary American politics, period

Yet Johnson uses it as an absolute authority to back up any policy he might support

The submission to (male) authority is often integral to fundamentalism

Trump was an authority figure, period. He was a patriarch. He was the patriarch of their tribe. And he was in power, which meant that God put him there. After which nothing needs to be said. So of course if the patriarch says the election is rigged, you believe him.

And of course you do what you can to make sure that God’s will be done — by attempting to overturn the election results if necessary.

Christianism is a just-so story, with no deep moral conflicts. Material wealth does not pose a moral challenge, for example, as it has done for Christians for millennia. For Christianists, it’s merely proof that God has blessed you and you deserve it.

“I believe that scripture, the Bible is very clear: that God is the one that raises up those in authority. And I believe that God has ordained and allowed each one of us to be brought here for this specific moment.” That means that Trump was blessed by God, and not just by the Electoral College in 2016. And because he was blessed by God, it was impossible that Biden beat him fairly in 2020.

More than three-quarters of those representing the most evangelical districts are election deniers, compared to just half of those in the remaining districts. Fully three-quarters of the deniers in the caucus hail from evangelical districts.

since the Tea Party, the turnover in primary challenges in these evangelical districts has been historic — a RINO-shredding machine. No wonder there were crosses being carried on Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021. The insurrectionists were merely following God’s will. And Trump’s legal team was filled with the faithful.

Tom Edsall shows the skew that has turned American politics into something of a religious war: “When House districts are ranked by the percentage of voters who are white evangelicals, the top quintile is represented by 81 Republicans and 6 Democrats and the second quintile by 68 Republicans and 19 Democrats.”

the overwhelming majority of the Republican House Caucus (70%) represents the Most Evangelical districts (top two quintiles). Thus, we can see that a group that represents less than 15% of the US population commands 70% of the districts comprising the majority party in the House of Representatives.

And almost all those districts are safe as houses. When you add Christianism to gerrymandering, you get a caucus that has no incentive to do anything but perform for the cable shows.

This is not a caucus interested in actually doing anything.

I don’t know how we best break the grip of the fundamentalist psyche on the right. It’s a deep human tendency — to give over control to a patriarch or a holy book rather than engage in the difficult process of democratic interaction with others, compromise, and common ground.

he phenomenon has been given new life by a charismatic con-man in Donald Trump, preternaturally able to corral the cultural fears and anxieties of those with brittle, politicized faith.

What I do know is that, unchecked, this kind of fundamentalism is a recipe not for civil peace but for civil conflict

It’s a mindset, a worldview, as deep in the human psyche as the racial tribalism now endemic on the left. It controls one of our two major parties. And in so far as it has assigned all decisions to one man, Donald Trump, it is capable of supporting the overturning of an election — or anything else, for that matter, that the patriarch wants. Johnson is a reminder of that.

"It was the war of aggression the Japanese militarist government launched against its neighbors and its refusal to accept its failure that had led to U.S. dropping the atomic bombs," it concluded.

To this day, governments in Beijing and Seoul both complain about Japan's perceived failures to fully atone for and properly remember the violence unleashed by its military.

The Chinese rhetoric was similar to what was aired in April following U.S. Secretary of State John F. Kerry's own visit to Hiroshima.

An editorial by the state-run Xinhua news agency said "it is Tokyo's lasting moral obligation to let that notorious chapter known by every citizen of the country and make compensations and apologies fair and square to the affected individuals and facilities, not just in Japan but also in other stricken nations."

for many white evangelicals, religious and economic spheres are conceptualized as two sides of the same coin. They describe their worldview as one in which the spiritual and the material are mutually dependent and interactive. And the popularity of this worldview cuts across social class.

approximately 31 percent of Americans, many of whom are white evangelical men, believe that God is steering the United States economy, thus fusing their religious and economic interests. These individuals believe in what I call an “Authoritative God.” An Authoritative God is thought to be actively engaged in daily activities and historical outcomes. For those with an Authoritative God, value concerns are synonymous with economic concerns because God has a guiding hand in both. Around two-thirds of believers in an Authoritative God conjoin their theology with free-market economics, creating a new religious-economic idealism. Nearly one-fifth of American voters hold this viewpoint, signaling that it can be a major political force.

Religious-economic idealism is the belief that the free-market works because God is guiding it.

this ideology explains two supposed paradoxes. First, it indicates why some religious working-class Americans have embraced the GOP. It is not that these individuals ignore their class interests, but rather that they believe issues of abortion and gay marriage are linked to whether God is willing to help solve both social ills and their economic woes.

the fact that income does not predict whether an American believes in an Authoritative God indicates that this is not a class-based ideology. Instead, it is a cosmic worldview, which appeals across economic divides. Most clearly, it benefits the wealthy because conservative economic policies tend to favor them. But wealthy Americans with an Authoritative God can also have a religious-like devotion to their economic conservatism. In this way, their economic pragmatism transforms into a type of religious dogmatism. And dogmatism does not bend to changing circumstances and outcomes, so that we can expect believers in religious-economic idealism to cling to laissez-faire policies even when they appear not to work.

religious-economic idealism makes economic and cultural issues fully compatible, which may be a blessing and a curse for the Republican Party. It blesses the GOP with strong support from individuals who may be personally disadvantaged by their economic strategies, but also curses them with an unforgiving and inflexible constituency if political compromise becomes a necessity of governing. In a universe where God decrees no government intervention, any deviation or compromise from the free market is heresy.

Americans who feel that “God has a plan” for them and their country are much more likely to think that “success is achieved by ability rather than luck” and that “able-bodied people who are out of work should not receive unemployment checks.” And over half (54 percent) of Americans who think God controls the economy feel that “anything is possible for those who work hard”; in contrast, only one-quarter of Americans who rely on human resourcefulness, rather than God’s plan, feel this way.

Because evangelicals assert that you alone are responsible for your eternal salvation, it makes sense that the individual is also responsible for his or her economic salvation without government assistance, especially if God is the only assistance you really need.

In a video in 2007, he talked about how "Jews are controlling America."

In 2010, Britain's government barred his entry into the country on grounds of "unacceptable behavior."

"I am absolutely against Muslims who kill, but what is the U.S. doing?” Naik said, citing civilian casualties amid U.S. campaigns in the Muslim world. "Is the U.S. really bothered about human rights? No!"

The United States' close relationship with Saudi Arabia endures despite the kingdom's horrific human rights record and its conspicuous role in helping spread the views preached by Islamic supremacists such as Naik.

So, too, does the view that the strongest defense of the humanities lies not in the appeal to their utility — that literature majors may find good jobs, that theaters may economically revitalize neighborhoods

— but rather in the appeal to their defiantly nonutilitarian character, so that individuals can know more than how things work, and develop their powers of discernment and judgment, their competence in matters of truth and goodness and beauty, to equip themselves adequately for the choices and the crucibles of private and public life.

We are not becoming transhumanists, obviously. We are too singular for the Singularity. But are we becoming posthumanists?

In American culture right now, as I say, the worldview that is ascendant may be described as posthumanism.

The posthumanism of the 1970s and 1980s was more insular, an academic affair of “theory,” an insurgency of professors; our posthumanism is a way of life, a social fate.

In “The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933-1973,” the gifted essayist Mark Greif, who reveals himself to be also a skillful historian of ideas, charts the history of the 20th-century reckonings with the definition of “man.

Here is his conclusion: “Anytime your inquiries lead you to say, ‘At this moment we must ask and decide who we fundamentally are, our solution and salvation must lie in a new picture of ourselves and humanity, this is our profound responsibility and a new opportunity’ — just stop.” Greif seems not to realize that his own book is a lasting monument to precisely such inquiry, and to its grandeur

“Answer, rather, the practical matters,” he counsels, in accordance with the current pragmatist orthodoxy. “Find the immediate actions necessary to achieve an aim.” But before an aim is achieved, should it not be justified? And the activity of justification may require a “picture of ourselves.” Don’t just stop. Think harder. Get it right.

Greif’s book is a prehistory of our predicament, of our own “crisis of man.” (The “man” is archaic, the “crisis” is not.) It recognizes that the intellectual history of modernity may be written in part as the epic tale of a series of rebellions against humanism

Who has not felt superior to humanism? It is the cheapest target of all: Humanism is sentimental, flabby, bourgeois, hypocritical, complacent, middlebrow, liberal, sanctimonious, constricting and often an alibi for power

what is humanism? For a start, humanism is not the antithesis of religion, as Pope Francis is exquisitely demonstrating

The worldview takes many forms: a philosophical claim about the centrality of humankind to the universe, and about the irreducibility of the human difference to any aspect of our animality

And posthumanism? It elects to understand the world in terms of impersonal forces and structures, and to deny the importance, and even the legitimacy, of human agency.

a methodological claim about the most illuminating way to explain history and human affairs, and about the essential inability of the natural sciences to offer a satisfactory explanation; a moral claim about the priority, and the universal nature, of certain values, not least tolerance and compassion

There have been humane posthumanists and there have been inhumane humanists. But the inhumanity of humanists may be refuted on the basis of their own worldview

the condemnation of cruelty toward “man the machine,” to borrow the old but enduring notion of an 18th-century French materialist, requires the importation of another framework of judgment. The same is true about universalism, which every critic of humanism has arraigned for its failure to live up to the promise of a perfect inclusiveness

there has never been a universalism that did not exclude. Yet the same is plainly the case about every particularism, which is nothing but a doctrine of exclusion; and the correction of particularism, the extension of its concept and its care, cannot be accomplished in its own name. It requires an idea from outside, an idea external to itself, a universalistic idea, a humanistic idea.

Asking universalism to keep faith with its own principles is a perennial activity of moral life. Asking particularism to keep faith with its own principles is asking for trouble.

there is no more urgent task for American intellectuals and writers than to think critically about the salience, even the tyranny, of technology in individual and collective life

Here is a humanist proposition for the age of Google: The processing of information is not the highest aim to which the human spirit can aspire, and neither is competitiveness in a global economy. The character of our society cannot be determined by engineers.

“Our very mastery seems to escape our mastery,” Michel Serres has anxiously remarked. “How can we dominate our domination; how can we master our own mastery?”

universal accessibility is not the end of the story, it is the beginning. The humanistic methods that were practiced before digitalization will be even more urgent after digitalization, because we will need help in navigating the unprecedented welter

Searches for keywords will not provide contexts for keywords. Patterns that are revealed by searches will not identify their own causes and reasons

The new order will not relieve us of the old burdens, and the old pleasures, of erudition and interpretation.

Is all this — is humanism — sentimental? But sentimentality is not always a counterfeit emotion. Sometimes sentiment is warranted by reality.

The persistence of humanism through the centuries, in the face of formidable intellectual and social obstacles, has been owed to the truth of its representations of our complexly beating hearts, and to the guidance that it has offered, in its variegated and conflicting versions, for a soulful and sensitive existence

a complacent humanist is a humanist who has not read his books closely, since they teach disquiet and difficulty. In a society rife with theories and practices that flatten and shrink and chill the human subject, the humanist is the dissenter.

a “builder class”—a brains trust of youngish idealists, which includes Patrick Collison, co-founder of Stripe, a payments firm valued at $74bn, and other (mostly white and male) techies, who are posing questions that go far beyond the usual interests of Silicon Valley’s titans. They include the future of man and machine, the constraints on economic growth, and the nature of government.

They share other similarities. Business provided them with their clout, but doesn’t seem to satisfy their ambition

The number of techno-billionaires in America (Mr Collison included) has more than doubled in a decade.

ome of them, like the Medicis in medieval Florence, are keen to use their money to bankroll the intellectual ferment

The other is Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator, a startup accelerator, whose essays on everything from cities to politics are considered required reading on tech campuses.

Mr Altman puts it more optimistically: “The iPhone and cloud computing enabled a Cambrian explosion of new technology. Some things went right and some went wrong. But one thing that went weirdly right is a lot of people got rich and said ‘OK, now what?’”

A belief that with money and brains they can reboot social progress is the essence of this new mindset, making it resolutely upbeat

The question is: are the rest of them further evidence of the tech industry’s hubristic decadence? Or do they reflect the start of a welcome capacity for renewal?

Two well-known entrepreneurs from that era provided the intellectual seed capital for some of today’s techno nerds.

Mr Thiel, a would-be libertarian philosopher and investor

This cohort of eggheads starts from common ground: frustration with what they see as sluggish progress in the world around them.

Yet the impact could ultimately be positive. Frustrations with a sluggish society have encouraged them to put their money and brains to work on problems from science funding and the redistribution of wealth to entirely new universities. Their exaltation of science may encourage a greater focus on hard tech

the rationalist movement has hit the mainstream. The result is a fascination with big ideas that its advocates believe goes beyond simply rose-tinted tech utopianism

A burgeoning example of this is “progress studies”, a movement that Mr Collison and Tyler Cowen, an economist and seer of the tech set, advocated for in an article in the Atlantic in 2019

Progress, they think, is a combination of economic, technological and cultural advancement—and deserves its own field of study

There are other examples of this expansive worldview. In an essay in 2021 Mr Altman set out a vision that he called “Moore’s Law for Everything”, based on similar logic to the semiconductor revolution. In it, he predicted that smart machines, building ever smarter replacements, would in the coming decades outcompete humans for work. This would create phenomenal wealth for some, obliterate wages for others, and require a vast overhaul of taxation and redistribution

His two bets, on OpenAI and nuclear fusion, have become fashionable of late—the former’s chatbot, ChatGPT, is all the rage. He has invested $375m in Helion, a company that aims to build a fusion reactor.

Mr Lonsdale, who shares a libertarian streak with Mr Thiel, has focused attention on trying to fix the shortcomings of society and government. In an essay this year called “In Defence of Us”, he argues against “historical nihilism”, or an excessive focus on the failures of the West.

With a soft spot for Roman philosophy, he has created the Cicero Institute in Austin that aims to inject free-market principles such as competition and transparency into public policy.

He is also bringing the startup culture to academia, backing a new place of learning called the University of Austin, which emphasises free speech.

All three have business ties to their mentors. As a teen, Mr Altman was part of the first cohort of founders in Mr Graham’s Y Combinator, which went on to back successes such as Airbnb and Dropbox. In 2014 he replaced him as its president, and for a while counted Mr Thiel as a partner (Mr Altman keeps an original manuscript of Mr Thiel’s book “Zero to One” in his library). Mr Thiel was also an early backer of Stripe, founded by Mr Collison and his brother, John. Mr Graham saw promise in Patrick Collison while the latter was still at school. He was soon invited to join Y Combinator. Mr Graham remains a fan: “If you dropped Patrick on a desert island, he would figure out how to reproduce the Industrial Revolution,”

While at university, Mr Lonsdale edited the Stanford Review, a contrarian publication co-founded by Mr Thiel. He went on to work for his mentor and the two men eventually helped found Palantir. He still calls Mr Thiel “a genius”—though he claims these days to be less “cynical” than his guru.

“The tech industry has always told these grand stories about itself,” says Adrian Daub of Stanford University and author of the book, “What Tech Calls Thinking”. Mr Daub sees it as a way of convincing recruits and investors to bet on their risky projects. “It’s incredibly convenient for their business models.”

In the 2000s Mr Thiel supported the emergence of a small community of online bloggers, self-named the “rationalists”, who were focused on removing cognitive biases from thinking (Mr Thiel has since distanced himself). That intellectual heritage dates even further back, to “cypherpunks”, who noodled about cryptography, as well as “extropians”, who believed in improving the human condition through life extensions

Silicon Valley has shown an uncanny ability to reinvent itself in the past.

he also invoked Evola’s idea of a prehistoric and pre-Christian spirituality — referring to the awakening of whites, whom he called the Children of the Sun.

“It’s the first time that an adviser to the American president knows Evola, or maybe has a Traditionalist formation,” said Gianfranco De Turris, an Evola biographer and apologist based in Rome who runs the Evola Foundation out of his apartment.

A March article titled “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right” in Breitbart, the website then run by Mr. Bannon, included Evola as one of the thinkers in whose writings the “origins of the alternative right” could be found.

The article was co-written by Milo Yiannopoulos, the right-wing provocateur who is wildly popular with conservatives on college campuses.

The article celebrated the youthful internet trolls who give the alt-right movement its energy and who, motivated by a common and questionable sense of humor, use anti-Semitic and racially charged memes “in typically juvenile but undeniably hysterical fashion.”

Mussolini so liked Evola’s 1941 book, “Synthesis on the Doctrine of Race,” which advocated a form of spiritual, and not merely biological, racism, that he invited Evola to meet him in September of that year.

Born in 1898, Evola liked to call himself a baron and in later life sported a monocle in his left eye.

A brilliant student and talented artist, he came home after fighting in World War I and became a leading exponent in Italy of the Dada movement, which, like Evola, rejected the church and bourgeois institutions.

Evola’s early artistic endeavors gave way to his love of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, and he developed a worldview with an overriding animosity toward the decadence of modernity. Influenced by mystical works and the occult, Evola began developing an idea of the individual’s ability to transcend his reality and “be unconditionally whatever one wants.”

“When I started working on Evola, you had to plow through Italian,” said Mr. Sedgwick, who keeps track of Traditionalist movements and thought on his blog, Traditionalists. “Now he’s available in English, German, Russian, Serbian, Greek, Hungarian. First I saw Evola boom, and then I realized the number of people interested in that sort of idea was booming.”

It viewed humanism, the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation and the French Revolution all as historical disasters that took man further away from a transcendental perennial truth.

Changing the system, Evola argued, was “not a question of contesting and polemicizing, but of blowing everything up.”Evola’s ideal order, Professor Drake wrote, was based on “hierarchy, caste, monarchy, race, myth, religion and ritual.”

Evola in 1934 published his most influential work, “The Revolt Against the Modern World,” which cast materialism as an eroding influence on ancient values.

Evola eventually broke with Mussolini and the Italian Fascists because he considered them overly tame and corrupted by compromise. Instead he preferred the Nazi SS officers, seeing in them something closer to a mythic ideal. They also shared his anti-Semitism.

As Mr. Bannon expounded on the intellectual motivations of the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, he mentioned “Julius Evola and different writers of the early 20th century who are really the supporters of what’s called the Traditionalist movement, which really eventually metastasized into Italian Fascism.”

In his Vatican talk, Mr. Bannon suggested that although Mr. Putin represented a “kleptocracy,” the Russian president understood the existential danger posed by “a potential new caliphate” and the importance of using nationalism to stand up for traditional institutions.

“We, the Judeo-Christian West,” Mr. Bannon added, “really have to look at what he’s talking about as far as Traditionalism goes — particularly the sense of where it supports the underpinnings of nationalism.”

As Mr. Bannon suggested in his speech, Mr. Putin’s most influential thinker is Aleksandr Dugin, the ultranationalist Russian Traditionalist and anti-liberal writer sometimes called “Putin’s Rasputin.”

An intellectual descendant of Evola, Mr. Dugin has called for a “genuine, true, radically revolutionary, and consistent fascist fascism” and advocated a geography-based theory of “Eurasianism” — which has provided a philosophical framework for Mr. Putin’s expansionism and meddling in Western European politics.

Mr. Dugin sees European Traditionalists as needing Russia, and Mr. Putin, to defend them from the onslaught of Western liberal democracy, individual liberty, and materialism — all Evolian bêtes noires.

This appeal of traditional values on populist voters and against out-of-touch elites, the “Pan-European Union” and “centralized government in the United States,” as Mr. Bannon put it, was not lost on Mr. Trump’s ideological guru.“A lot of people that are Traditionalists,” he said in his Vatican remarks, “are attracted to that.”

The paradox of reform movements is that, if you want to defy authority, you probably shouldn’t think entirely for yourself. You should attach yourself to a counter-tradition and school of thought that has been developed over the centuries and that seems true.

The old leftists had dialectical materialism and the Marxist view of history. Libertarians have Hayek and von Mises. Various spiritual movements have drawn from Transcendentalism, Stoicism, Gnosticism, Thomism, Augustine, Tolstoy, or the Catholic social teaching that inspired Dorothy Day.

These belief systems helped people envision alternate realities. They helped people explain why the things society values are not the things that should be valued. They gave movements a set of organizing principles. Joining a tradition doesn’t mean suppressing your individuality. Applying an ancient tradition to a new situation is a creative, stimulating and empowering act. Without a tradition, everything is impermanence and flux.

If I could offer advice to a young rebel, it would be to rummage the past for a body of thought that helps you understand and address the shortcomings you see. Give yourself a label.

Effective rebellion isn’t just expressing your personal feelings. It means replacing one set of authorities and institutions with a better set of authorities and institutions.

Today, of course, opposition to the Iran deal reflects a similar belief that forceful resolve would enable Washington to dictate whatever terms it wants. As I’ve written before, this idea is the myth of a “better deal.” Because neocons assume states are attracted to strength and easy to intimidate, they think rejecting the deal, ratcheting up sanctions, and threatening war will cause Iran’s government to finally cave in and dismantle its entire enrichment program.

On the contrary, walking away from the deal will stiffen Iran’s resolve, strengthen its hard-liners, increase its interest in perhaps actually acquiring a nuclear weapon someday, and cause the other members of the P5+1 to part company with the United States.

The neoconservative worldview also exaggerates the efficacy of military force and downplays the value of diplomacy.

In reality, military force is a crude instrument whose effects are hard to foresee and one which almost always produces unintended consequences (see under: Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, etc.)

Moreover, neocons believe military force is a supple tool that can be turned on and off like a spigot.

Once forces are committed, the military brass will demand the chance to win a clear victory, and politicians will worry about the nation’s prestige and their own political fortunes. The conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, and Somalia should remind us that it’s a lot easier to get into wars than it is to get out of them

Third, the neoconservatives have a simplistic and ahistorical view of democracy itself. They claim their main goal is spreading freedom and democracy (except for Palestinians, of course), but they have no theory to explain how this will happen or how toppling a foreign government with military force will magically cause democracy to emerge

In fact, the development of liberal democracy was a long, contentious, imperfect, and often violent process in Western Europe and North America

Fourth, as befits a group of armchair ideologues whose primary goal has been winning power inside the Beltway, neoconservatives are often surprisingly ignorant about the actual conditions of the countries whose politics and society they want to transform.

In addition to flawed theories, in short, the neoconservative worldview also depends on an inaccurate reading of the facts on the ground.

Last but not least, the neoconservatives’ prescriptions for U.S. foreign policy are perennially distorted by a strong attachment to Israel,

But no two states have identical interests all the time, and when the interests of two countries conflict, people who feel strongly about both are forced to decide which of these feelings is going to take priority.

some proponents of the deal have pointed out — correctly — that some opponents don’t like the deal because they think it is bad for Israel and because the Netanyahu government is dead set against it. As one might expect, pointing out these obvious facts has led some opponents of the deal to accuse proponents (including President Obama) of anti-Semitism

Instead of being a serious criticism, this familiar smear is really just a way to change the subject and to put proponents of the deal on the defensive for pointing out the obvious

The fact that the neoconservatives, AIPAC, the Conference of Presidents, and other groups in the Israel lobby were wrong about the Iraq War does not by itself mean that they are necessarily wrong about the Iran deal. But when you examine their basic views on world politics and their consistent approach to U.S. Middle East policy, it becomes clear this is not a coincidence at all

Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders, on the other hand, share a perspective of “skeptical restraint.” They worry about the unintended consequences of regime change. They are more aware of the limits and costs of military force. They don’t believe the United States can or should police the world. They understand that without restraint abroad, we will never be able to focus on rebuilding our country at home.

In the spring of 2013, Obama spoke at the National Defense University on the war on terrorism. He argued that “we must define the nature and scope of this struggle or else it will define us,” invoking James Madison’s warning that “no nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” He called for new limits on our use of force. “Our systematic effort to dismantle terrorist organizations must continue. But this war, like all wars, must end. That’s what history advises. That’s what our democracy demands.” Clinton would not have delivered those remarks. Sanders would.

After she left office, Clinton criticized Obama’s quip that a central principle of his foreign policy was “don’t do stupid s---,” saying that “Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle.” Maybe so, but it reflects a common sense that Sanders and Obama exhibit, and Clinton consistently does not.

“Changing our lives is now unavoidable,” Orban told lawmakers last week when justifying the proposed bill. “Everyone has to leave their comfort zone. This law gives the government the power and means to defend Hungary.”

The emergency law also stipulates five-year prison sentences for Hungarians found to be spreading “false” information, as well as prison terms for those defying mandated quarantines. Critics argue that vital support for the country’s health-care system is still lacking, while Orban has given himself carte blanche to exercise even more domineering control.

On Monday, former Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi tweeted what many liberal Europeans feel — that Hungary’s illiberal slide threatens the values of the European Union as a whole and could merit its expulsion from the bloc.

But there’s no clear path forward for such drastically punitive action, not least as the continent flounders in its battle against the coronavirus. And Orban has his supporters, too. He has been lionized as a nationalist hero for the West’s anti-immigrant populists and welcomed to the White House by President Trump.

“Everyone should think twice before giving Orban the benefit of the doubt,” Dalibor Rohac of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, wrote last week. “His decade-long premiership has been marked by a continual assault on any constraints on his power — whether by courts, civil society or the media.”

Those who disagree—most crucially, millions of working-class Americans of all ethnicities—are excised from the public square.

The social-justice movement comes at the expense of justice; “anti-racism” ends up exacerbating racism.

How could this be? It’s difficult to stand against “social justice,” especially for those of us who are deeply concerned about inequality. We feel humility toward activists, writers and politicians who take up the language of racial justice, given how urgent the cause is.

The basis for today’s social-justice movement is a deep skepticism about liberal values like equality, justice and democracy. This is rooted in an academic discipline known as “critical race theory,” which takes elements from Hegel and Marx, along with postmodernists like Foucault and Derrida, to assemble a worldview that does not accept that equality can exist.

Napoleon Bonaparte, and he was taking a victory lap through a German university town after defeating the Prussian army, when he happened to ride past a German philosopher with writer’s block, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

a key element of his work became associated with the concept of mastery and domination, of one man exerting his will over others.

Society, culture and history were produced in the back and forth, or “dialectic,” between the powerful and the powerless—the master-slave dialectic, as Hegel’s pairing became known in subsequent iterations.

When Marx articulated his thesis of class conflict as the basis for all modern social existence, he was—in the view of Jean-Paul Sartre among others—expanding on the master-slave dialectic.

And if history progressed through a changing cast of masters and slaves for Hegel, or class struggle for Marx, for critical race theorists and their “anti-racism” inheritors, it’s white people and people of color in a binary that gives one side all the power and the other side none.

Over time, three other key ideas were grafted onto the master-slave dialectic:

false consciousness

a belief that the ideals of a society mean less than do the exceptions to those ideals

and a commitment to undermining the grand narratives that a society relies upon.

“False consciousness” was an attempt by Marxists to explain why the working class wasn’t buying into their worldview.

It turns out that working-class people are often conservative, a fact that has never ceased to bedevil and infuriate educated leftists trying to impose their desire for revolution. Instead of trying to understand the preferences of the working class, Marxists asserted that the poor workers were merely deluded, in the grip of a “false consciousness,” instead of a revolutionary one.

You can see the concept of false consciousness—and the condescension that is its hallmark—everywhere in critical race theory.

Its proponents classify people of color who don’t have radical views on race or who vote Republican as the handmaidens of white supremacy;

The idea of false consciousness is everywhere in the work of Robin DiAngelo, a prominent proponent of “anti-racist” ideology whose book White Fragility has sold close to a million copies. DiAngelo contends that white people who cry when accused of being racists actually prove their bigotry via these “weaponized tears,” which she deems “white racial bullying.”

If a society claims as its foundation a narrative that some members are excluded from, then the true meaning of that narrative is found in the exception, rather than the rule.

Postmodernist philosophers added to this a mistrust of the ideals that society claims to be built on:

postmodernists argued that the explicit mores of a culture have no objective value, but are instead a way for one group to benefit at the expense of another.

From this perspective, the Constitution isn’t a document that established the United States on principles of equality and freedom that the country failed to live up to.

Instead, the Constitution is a document fundamental to denying rights to those deemed ineligible, and justifying the ownership of enslaved persons.

Your symbol of freedom and equality is nothing more than a tool of repression, postmodernists argue. Failures, even at the margins, expose the hypocrisy of the whole, and define it as a lie.

You can see this at work in The New York Times Magazine’s Pulitzer-prize winning “The 1619 Project,” which marks the year that the first African slave was brought to American shores.

argued that, while history teaches 1776 as the year of our nation’s founding, we should consider whether “the country’s true birth date, the moment that our defining contradictions first came into the world, was in late August of 1619,” as the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Jake Silverstein, put it in an introduction.

It can’t be that America was founded on values like equality and liberty and democracy that it imperfectly embodied and has subsequently strived to correct.

It must be that the true founding was slavery, its true nature revealed by this failure.

This is why the social-justice movement cannot recognize the huge gains that have been made in this nation on the question of race; if there is even one instance of racism left in America, it is proof again of this true nature.

As with America, some on the left find it impossible to see Israel as a flawed nation imperfectly striving toward the ideals of its founding. The occupation of the Palestinians can’t be a disastrous injustice. It must be that Israel’s foundation is defined by this injustice, that “Zionism is racism.”

the real threat here is not just mangled logic. It’s the erasure of the possibility of equality, of a common humanity, that requires we treat each other as equals before God and before the law.

Today’s progressive left, whose ideas have become prevalent in much of the American establishment that is now repeating its incantations, simply does not believe equality is possible, instead differentiating people by how much power they supposedly have, with no common humanity to call upon.

since the social-justice movement recognizes only power, every one of its proposals is designed not to create a more equal society, but to transfer power from oppressors to oppressed—while allowing those designated as victims to maintain claim to the status of oppressed.

Race is immutable, so it doesn’t matter how much real power a person of color wields; their race means they will never be anything but oppressed.

You might be wondering why this view, which erases equality and cites oppression as the root of everything, has mainstream appeal

It seems to me that progressive elites, despite their pieties, don’t really want to live in a more equal society. They prefer the imperfect meritocracy we live under—the rule of the smart, the talented and the rich, most of whom traffic in the fiction that their status was earned.

progressives see themselves as compassionate. What they needed was a way to explain the inequality found in the meritocratic system they hold dear, a way that made them feel they were still on the side of the good without having to disrupt what is good for them.

This is not the way to a more equal society. We cannot right the wrongs of racial inequality—an urgent task—by erasing the ideal of equality

Nor can we allow the fact that equality has been unequally enforced throughout most of our history to provide an excuse to throw it away, and build a newly racialized America.

the clues are elsewhere. At first, one notices them like glitches in the matrix. Maybe you read an unorthodox remark on Twitter, and watch as its author is insulted in the cruelest terms by thousands of people, many with words like “social justice” or “diversity and inclusion” in their bios

Peter Thiel has lost interest in democracy.

Thiel has cultivated an image as a man of ideas, an intellectual who studied philosophy with René Girard and owns first editions of Leo Strauss in English and German. Trump quite obviously did not share these interests, or Thiel’s libertarian principles.

For years, Thiel had been saying that he generally favored the more pessimistic candidate in any presidential race because “if you’re too optimistic, it just shows you’re out of touch.” He scorned the rote optimism of politicians who, echoing Ronald Reagan, portrayed America as a shining city on a hill. Trump’s America, by contrast, was a broken landscape, under siege.

Thiel is not against government in principle, his friend Auren Hoffman (who is no relation to Reid) says. “The ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s—which had massive, crazy amounts of power—he admires because it was effective. We built the Hoover Dam. We did the Manhattan Project,” Hoffman told me. “We started the space program.”

Their failure to make the world conform to his vision has soured him on the entire enterprise—to the point where he no longer thinks it matters very much who wins the next election.

His libertarian critique of American government has curdled into an almost nihilistic impulse to demolish it.

“Voting for Trump was like a not very articulate scream for help,” Thiel told me. He fantasized that Trump’s election would somehow force a national reckoning. He believed somebody needed to tear things down—slash regulations, crush the administrative state—before the country could rebuild.

He admits now that it was a bad bet.

“There are a lot of things I got wrong,” he said. “It was crazier than I thought. It was more dangerous than I thought. They couldn’t get the most basic pieces of the government to work. So that was—I think that part was maybe worse than even my low expectations.”

eid Hoffman, who has known Thiel since college, long ago noticed a pattern in his old friend’s way of thinking. Time after time, Thiel would espouse grandiose, utopian hopes that failed to materialize, leaving him “kind of furious or angry” about the world’s unwillingness to bend to whatever vision was possessing him at the moment

Thiel. He is worth between $4 billion and $9 billion. He lives with his husband and two children in a glass palace in Bel Air that has nine bedrooms and a 90-foot infinity pool. He is a titan of Silicon Valley and a conservative kingmaker.

“Peter tends to be not ‘glass is half empty’ but ‘glass is fully empty,’” Hoffman told me.

he tells the story of his life as a series of disheartening setbacks.

He met Mark Zuckerberg, liked what he heard, and became Facebook’s first outside investor. Half a million dollars bought him 10 percent of the company, most of which he cashed out for about $1 billion in 2012.

Thiel made some poor investments, losing enormous sums by going long on the stock market in 2008, when it nose-dived, and then shorting the market in 2009, when it rallied

on the whole, he has done exceptionally well. Alex Karp, his Palantir co-founder, who agrees with Thiel on very little other than business, calls him “the world’s best venture investor.”

Thiel told me this is indeed his ambition, and he hinted that he may have achieved it.

He longs for radical new technologies and scientific advances on a scale most of us can hardly imagine

He longs for a world in which great men are free to work their will on society, unconstrained by government or regulation or “redistributionist economics” that would impinge on their wealth and power—or any obligation, really, to the rest of humanity

Did his dream of eternal life trace to The Lord of the Rings?

He takes for granted that this kind of progress will redound to the benefit of society at large.

More than anything, he longs to live forever.

Calling death a law of nature is, in his view, just an excuse for giving up. “It’s something we are told that demotivates us from trying harder,”

Thiel grew up reading a great deal of science fiction and fantasy—Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke. But especially Tolkien; he has said that he read the Lord of the Rings trilogy at least 10 times. Tolkien’s influence on his worldview is obvious: Middle-earth is an arena of struggle for ultimate power, largely without government, where extraordinary individuals rise to fulfill their destinies. Also, there are immortal elves who live apart from men in a magical sheltered valley.

But his dreams have always been much, much bigger than that.

Yes, Thiel said, perking up. “There are all these ways where trying to live unnaturally long goes haywire” in Tolkien’s works. But you also have the elves.

How are the elves different from the humans in Tolkien? And they’re basically—I think the main difference is just, they’re humans that don’t die.”

During college, he co-founded The Stanford Review, gleefully throwing bombs at identity politics and the university’s diversity-minded reform of the curriculum. He co-wrote The Diversity Myth in 1995, a treatise against what he recently called the “craziness and silliness and stupidity and wickedness” of the left.

Thiel laid out a plan, for himself and others, “to find an escape from politics in all its forms.” He wanted to create new spaces for personal freedom that governments could not reach

But something changed for Thiel in 2009

he people, he concluded, could not be trusted with important decisions. “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” he wrote.

ven more notable one followed: “Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”

By 2015, six years after declaring his intent to change the world from the private sector, Thiel began having second thoughts. He cut off funding for the Seasteading Institute—years of talk had yielded no practical progress–and turned to other forms of escape

The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom,” he wrote. His manifesto has since become legendary in Silicon Valley, where his worldview is shared by other powerful men (and men hoping to be Peter Thiel).

Thiel’s investment in cryptocurrencies, like his founding vision at PayPal, aimed to foster a new kind of money “free from all government control and dilution

His decision to rescue Elon Musk’s struggling SpaceX in 2008—with a $20 million infusion that kept the company alive after three botched rocket launches—came with aspirations to promote space as an open frontier with “limitless possibility for escape from world politics

It was seasteading that became Thiel’s great philanthropic cause in the late aughts and early 2010s. The idea was to create autonomous microstates on platforms in international waters.

“There’s zero chance Peter Thiel would live on Sealand,” he said, noting that Thiel likes his comforts too much. (Thiel has mansions around the world and a private jet. Seal performed at his 2017 wedding, at the Belvedere Museum in Vienna.)

As he built his companies and grew rich, he began pouring money into political causes and candidates—libertarian groups such as the Endorse Liberty super PAC, in addition to a wide range of conservative Republicans, including Senators Orrin Hatch and Ted Cruz

Sam Altman, the former venture capitalist and now CEO of OpenAI, revealed in 2016 that in the event of global catastrophe, he and Thiel planned to wait it out in Thiel’s New Zealand hideaway.

When I asked Thiel about that scenario, he seemed embarrassed and deflected the question. He did not remember the arrangement as Altman did, he said. “Even framing it that way, though, makes it sound so ridiculous,” he told me. “If there is a real end of the world, there is no place to go.”

You’d have eco farming. You’d turn the deserts into arable land. There were sort of all these incredible things that people thought would happen in the ’50s and ’60s and they would sort of transform the world.”

None of that came to pass. Even science fiction turned hopeless—nowadays, you get nothing but dystopias

He hungered for advances in the world of atoms, not the world of bits.

Founders Fund, the venture-capital firm he established in 200

The fund, therefore, would invest in smart people solving hard problems “that really have the potential to change the world.”

This was not what Thiel wanted to be doing with his time. Bodegas and dog food were making him money, apparently, but he had set out to invest in transformational technology that would advance the state of human civilization.

He told me that he no longer dwells on democracy’s flaws, because he believes we Americans don’t have one. “We are not a democracy; we’re a republic,” he said. “We’re not even a republic; we’re a constitutional republic.”

“It was harder than it looked,” Thiel said. “I’m not actually involved in enough companies that are growing a lot, that are taking our civilization to the next level.”

Founders Fund has holdings in artificial intelligence, biotech, space exploration, and other cutting-edge fields. What bothers Thiel is that his companies are not taking enough big swings at big problems, or that they are striking out.

In at least 20 hours of logged face-to-face meetings with Buma, Thiel reported on what he believed to be a Chinese effort to take over a large venture-capital firm, discussed Russian involvement in Silicon Valley, and suggested that Jeffrey Epstein—a man he had met several times—was an Israeli intelligence operative. (Thiel told me he thinks Epstein “was probably entangled with Israeli military intelligence” but was more involved with “the U.S. deep state.”)

Buma, according to a source who has seen his reports, once asked Thiel why some of the extremely rich seemed so open to contacts with foreign governments. “And he said that they’re bored,” this source said. “‘They’re bored.’ And I actually believe it. I think it’s that simple. I think they’re just bored billionaires.”

he has a sculpture that resembles a three-dimensional game board. Ascent: Above the Nation State Board Game Display Prototype is the New Zealander artist Simon Denny’s attempt to map Thiel’s ideological universe. The board features a landscape in the aesthetic of Dungeons & Dragons, thick with monsters and knights and castles. The monsters include an ogre labeled “Monetary Policy.” Near the center is a hero figure, recognizable as Thiel. He tilts against a lion and a dragon, holding a shield and longbow. The lion is labeled “Fair Elections.” The dragon is labeled “Democracy.” The Thiel figure is trying to kill them.

When I asked Thiel to explain his views on democracy, he dodged the question. “I always wonder whether people like you … use the word democracy when you like the results people have and use the word populism when you don’t like the results,” he told me. “If I’m characterized as more pro-populist than the elitist Atlantic is, then, in that sense, I’m more pro-democratic.”

“I couldn’t find them,” he said. “I couldn’t get enough of them to work.

He said he has no wish to change the American form of government, and then amended himself: “Or, you know, I don’t think it’s realistic for it to be radically changed.” Which is not at all the same thing.

When I asked what he thinks of Yarvin’s autocratic agenda, Thiel offered objections that sounded not so much principled as practical.

“I don’t think it’s going to work. I think it will look like Xi in China or Putin in Russia,” Thiel said, meaning a malign dictatorship. “It ultimately I don’t think will even be accelerationist on the science and technology side, to say nothing of what it will do for individual rights, civil liberties, things of that sort.”

Still, Thiel considers Yarvin an “interesting and powerful” historian

he always talks about is the New Deal and FDR in the 1930s and 1940s,” Thiel said. “And the heterodox take is that it was sort of a light form of fascism in the United States.”

Yarvin, Thiel said, argues that “you should embrace this sort of light form of fascism, and we should have a president who’s like FDR again.”

Did Thiel agree with Yarvin’s vision of fascism as a desirable governing model? Again, he dodged the question.

“That’s not a realistic political program,” he said, refusing to be drawn any further.

ooking back on Trump’s years in office, Thiel walked a careful line.

A number of things were said and done that Thiel did not approve of. Mistakes were made. But Thiel was not going to refashion himself a Never Trumper in retrospect.

“I have to somehow give the exact right answer, where it’s like, ‘Yeah, I’m somewhat disenchanted,’” he told me. “But throwing him totally under the bus? That’s like, you know—I’ll get yelled at by Mr. Trump. And if I don’t throw him under the bus, that’s—but—somehow, I have to get the tone exactly right.”

Thiel knew, because he had read some of my previous work, that I think Trump’s gravest offense against the republic was his attempt to overthrow the election. I asked how he thought about it.

“Look, I don’t think the election was stolen,” he said. But then he tried to turn the discussion to past elections that might have been wrongly decided. Bush-Gore in 2000, for instanc

He came back to Trump’s attempt to prevent the transfer of power. “I’ll agree with you that it was not helpful,” he said.

there is another piece of the story, which Thiel reluctantly agreed to discuss

Puck reported that Democratic operatives had been digging for dirt on Thiel since before the 2022 midterm elections, conducting opposition research into his personal life with the express purpose of driving him out of politic

Among other things, the operatives are said to have interviewed a young model named Jeff Thomas, who told them he was having an affair with Thiel, and encouraged Thomas to talk to Ryan Grim, a reporter for The Intercept. Grim did not publish a story during election season, as the opposition researchers hoped he would, but he wrote about Thiel’s affair in March, after Thomas died by suicide.

He deplored the dirt-digging operation, telling me in an email that “the nihilism afflicting American politics is even deeper than I knew.”

He also seemed bewildered by the passions he arouses on the left. “I don’t think they should hate me this much,”

he spoke at the closed-press event with a lot less nuance than he had in our interviews. His after-dinner remarks were full of easy applause lines and in-jokes mocking the left. Universities had become intellectual wastelands, obsessed with a meaningless quest for diversity, he told the crowd. The humanities writ large are “transparently ridiculous,” said the onetime philosophy major, and “there’s no real science going on” in the sciences, which have devolved into “the enforcement of very curious dogmas.”

“Diversity—it’s not enough to just hire the extras from the space-cantina scene in Star Wars,” he said, prompting laughter.

Nor did Thiel say what genuine diversity would mean. The quest for it, he said, is “very evil and it’s very silly.”

“the silliness is distracting us from very important things,” such as the threat to U.S. interests posed by the Chinese Communist Party.

“Whenever someone says ‘DEI,’” he exhorted the crowd, “just think ‘CCP.’”

Somebody asked, in the Q&A portion of the evening, whether Thiel thought the woke left was deliberately advancing Chinese Communist interests

“It’s always the difference between an agent and asset,” he said. “And an agent is someone who is working for the enemy in full mens rea. An asset is a useful idiot. So even if you ask the question ‘Is Bill Gates China’s top agent, or top asset, in the U.S.?’”—here the crowd started roaring—“does it really make a difference?”

About 10 years ago, Thiel told me, a fellow venture capitalist called to broach the question. Vinod Khosla, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, had made the Giving Pledge a couple of years before. Would Thiel be willing to talk with Gates about doing the same?

Thiel feels that giving his billions away would be too much like admitting he had done something wrong to acquire them

He also lacked sympathy for the impulse to spread resources from the privileged to those in need. When I mentioned the terrible poverty and inequality around the world, he said, “I think there are enough people working on that.”

besides, a different cause moves him far more.

Should Thiel happen to die one day, best efforts notwithstanding, his arrangements with Alcor provide that a cryonics team will be standing by.

Then his body will be cooled to –196 degrees Celsius, the temperature of liquid nitrogen. After slipping into a double-walled, vacuum-insulated metal coffin, alongside (so far) 222 other corpsicles, “the patient is now protected from deterioration for theoretically thousands of years,” Alcor literature explains.

All that will be left for Thiel to do, entombed in this vault, is await the emergence of some future society that has the wherewithal and inclination to revive him. And then make his way in a world in which his skills and education and fabulous wealth may be worth nothing at all.

I wondered how much Thiel had thought through the implications for society of extreme longevity. The population would grow exponentially. Resources would not. Where would everyone live? What would they do for work? What would they eat and drink? Or—let’s face it—would a thousand-year life span be limited to men and women of extreme wealth?

“Well, I maybe self-serve,” he said, perhaps understating the point, “but I worry more about stagnation than about inequality.”

Thiel is not alone among his Silicon Valley peers in his obsession with immortality. Oracle’s Larry Ellison has described mortality as “incomprehensible.” Google’s Sergey Brin aspires to “cure death.” Dmitry Itskov, a leading tech entrepreneur in Russia, has said he hopes to live to 10,000.

. “I should be investing way more money into this stuff,” he told me. “I should be spending way more time on this.”

You haven’t told your husband? Wouldn’t you want him to sign up alongside you?“I mean, I will think about that,” he said, sounding rattled. “I will think—I have not thought about that.”

No matter how fervent his desire, Thiel’s extraordinary resources still can’t buy him the kind of “super-duper medical treatments” that would let him slip the grasp of death. It is, perhaps, his ultimate disappointment.

There are all these things I can’t do with my money,” Thiel said.

a pro-life libertarian will recognize the humanity and dignity of both mother and child.

The entire philosophy of libertarianism depends on a healthy recognition of human dignity. A healthy libertarianism can still be individualistic, but it’s also deeply concerned with both personal virtue and the rights of others.

The difference between libertarianism and libertinism can be summed up as the difference between rights and desires. A libertarian is concerned with her own liberty but also knows that this liberty ends where yours begins

A libertine, by contrast, is dominated by his desires. The object of his life is to do what he wants, and the object of politics is to give him what he wants.

A libertarian is concerned with all forms of state coercion. A libertine rejects any attempt to coerce him personally, but he’s happy to coerce others if it gives him what he wants.

Donald Trump is the consummate libertine. He rejects restraints on his appetites and accountability for his actions. The guiding principle of his worldview is summed up with a simple declaration: I do what I want. Any movement built in his image will be libertine as well.

Trump’s movement dismisses the value of personal character. It mocks personal restraint. And it’s happy to inflict its will on others if it achieves what it wants

Libertinism says my desires are more important than your rights, and this means that libertines are terrible ambassadors for any cause that requires self-sacrifice.

I don’t think the pro-life movement has fully reckoned with the political and cultural fallout from the libertine right-wing response to the Covid pandemic

Here was a movement that was loudly telling women that they had to carry unwanted pregnancies to term, with all the physical transformations, risks and financial uncertainties that come with pregnancy and childbirth, at the same time that millions of its members were also loudly refusing the minor inconveniences of masking and the low risks of vaccination — even if the best science available at the time told us that both masking and vaccination could help protect others from getting the disease.

Even worse, many of the same people demanded that the state limit the liberty of others so that they could live how they wanted

This do-what-you-want ethos cost a staggering number of American lives. A 2022 study found that there were an estimated 318,981 vaccine-preventable deaths from January 2021 to April 2022.

Now there’s evidence from Ohio and Florida that excess mortality rates were significantly higher for Republicans than Democrats after vaccines were widely available.

It’s not just that libertinism robs Republicans of moral authority; it’s that libertinism robs Republicans of moral principle.

In each state, all the pro-life movement needed was consistent Republican support, and it would have sailed to victory. All the Democrats in the state could have voted to protect abortion rights, and they would have lost if Republicans held firm. But they did not.

“Do as I say and not as I do” is among the worst moral arguments imaginable.

A holistic pro-life society requires true self-sacrifice. It asks women to value the life growing inside of them even in the face of fear and poverty. It asks the community to rally beside these women to keep them and their children safe and to provide them with opportunities to flourish. It requires both individuals and communities to sublimate their own desires to protect the lives and opportunities of others.

An ethos that centers individuals’ desires will bleed over into matters of life and death. It did during Covid, and it’s doing so now, as even Republicans reject the pro-life cause.

The challenge is much more profound. Pro-life America has to reconnect with personal virtue. It has to model self-sacrifice. It has to show, not just tell, America what it would look like to value life from conception to natural death.

At present, however, the Republican Party is dominated by its id. It indulges its desires. And so long as its id is in control, the pro-life movement will fail. There is no selfish path to a culture of life.

All the empathy and humility in the world will not mean much against the pressures of intolerance and tribalism without an invaluable quality that Sulzberger did not emphasise: courage.

Sulzberger seems to underestimate the struggle he is in, that all journalism and indeed America itself is in

In describing the essential qualities of independent journalism in his essay, he unspooled a list of admirable traits – empathy, humility, curiosity and so forth. These qualities have for generations been helpful in contending with the Times’s familiar problem, which is liberal bias

on their own, these qualities have no chance against the Times’s new, more dangerous problem, which is in crucial respects the opposite of the old one.

The Times’s problem has metastasised from liberal bias to illiberal bias, from an inclination to favour one side of the national debate to an impulse to shut debate down altogether

the internet knocked the industry off its foundations. Local newspapers were the proving ground between college campuses and national newsrooms. As they disintegrated, the national news media lost a source of seasoned reporters and many Americans lost a journalism whose truth they could verify with their own eyes.

far more than when I set out to become a journalist, doing the work right today demands a particular kind of courage:

the moral and intellectual courage to take the other side seriously and to report truths and ideas that your own side demonises for fear they will harm its cause.

One of the glories of embracing illiberalism is that, like Trump, you are always right about everything, and so you are justified in shouting disagreement down.

leaders of many workplaces and boardrooms across America find that it is so much easier to compromise than to confront – to give a little ground today in the belief you can ultimately bring people around

This is how reasonable Republican leaders lost control of their party to Trump and how liberal-minded college presidents lost control of their campuses. And it is why the leadership of the New York Times is losing control of its principles.

Over the decades the Times and other mainstream news organisations failed plenty of times to live up to their commitments to integrity and open-mindedness. The relentless struggle against biases and preconceptions, rather than the achievement of a superhuman objective omniscience, is what mattered

. I thought, and still think, that no American institution could have a better chance than the Times, by virtue of its principles, its history, its people and its hold on the attention of influential Americans, to lead the resistance to the corruption of political and intellectual life, to overcome the encroaching dogmatism and intolerance.

As the country became more polarised, the national media followed the money by serving partisan audiences the versions of reality they preferred

This relationship proved self-reinforcing. As Americans became freer to choose among alternative versions of reality, their polarisation intensified.

as the top editors let bias creep into certain areas of coverage, such as culture, lifestyle and business, that made the core harder to defend and undermined the authority of even the best reporters.

here have been signs the Times is trying to recover the courage of its convictions

The paper was slow to display much curiosity about the hard question of the proper medical protocols for trans children; but once it did, the editors defended their coverage against the inevitable criticism.

As Sulzberger told me in the past, returning to the old standards will require agonising change. He saw that as the gradual work of many years, but I think he is mistaken. To overcome the cultural and commercial pressures the Times faces, particularly given the severe test posed by another Trump candidacy and possible presidency, its publisher and senior editors will have to be bolder than that.

As a Democrat from a family of Democrats, a graduate of Yale and a blossom of the imagined meritocracy, I had my first real chance, at Buchanan’s rallies, to see the world through the eyes of stalwart opponents of abortion, immigration and the relentlessly rising tide of modernity.

the Times is failing to face up to one crucial reason: that it has lost faith in Americans, too.

For now, to assert that the Times plays by the same rules it always has is to commit a hypocrisy that is transparent to conservatives, dangerous to liberals and bad for the country as a whole.

It makes the Times too easy for conservatives to dismiss and too easy for progressives to believe.

The reality is that the Times is becoming the publication through which America’s progressive elite talks to itself about an America that does not really exist.

It is hard to imagine a path back to saner American politics that does not traverse a common ground of shared fact.

It is equally hard to imagine how America’s diversity can continue to be a source of strength, rather than become a fatal flaw, if Americans are afraid or unwilling to listen to each other.

I suppose it is also pretty grandiose to think you might help fix all that. But that hope, to me, is what makes journalism worth doing.

Since Adolph Ochs bought the paper in 1896, one of the most inspiring things the Times has said about itself is that it does its work “without fear or favour”. That is not true of the institution today – it cannot be, not when its journalists are afraid to trust readers with a mainstream conservative argument such as Cotton’s, and its leaders are afraid to say otherwise.

Most important, the Times, probably more than any other American institution, could influence the way society approached debate and engagement with opposing views. If Times Opinion demonstrated the same kind of intellectual courage and curiosity that my colleagues at the Atlantic had shown, I hoped, the rest of the media would follow.

You did not have to go along with everything that any tribe said. You did not have to pretend that the good guys, much as you might have respected them, were right about everything, or that the bad guys, much as you might have disdained them, never had a point. You did not, in other words, ever have to lie.

This fundamental honesty was vital for readers, because it equipped them to make better, more informed judgments about the world. Sometimes it might shock or upset them by failing to conform to their picture of reality. But it also granted them the respect of acknowledging that they were able to work things out for themselves.

The Atlantic did not aspire to the same role as the Times. It did not promise to serve up the news of the day without any bias. But it was to opinion journalism what the Times’s reporting was supposed to be to news: honest and open to the world.

Those were the glory days of the blog, and we hit on the idea of creating a living op-ed page, a collective of bloggers with different points of view but a shared intellectual honesty who would argue out the meaning of the news of the day

They were brilliant, gutsy writers, and their disagreements were deep enough that I used to joke that my main work as editor was to prevent fistfights.

Under its owner, David Bradley, my colleagues and I distilled our purpose as publishing big arguments about big ideas

we also began producing some of the most important work in American journalism: Nicholas Carr on whether Google was “making us stupid”; Hanna Rosin on “the end of men”; Taylor Branch on “the shame of college sports”; Ta-Nehisi Coates on “the case for reparations”; Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt on “the coddling of the American mind”.