History Readings

The surge has turned The Bulwark from an anti-Trump refuge into a promising media business. In an interview, Longwell told Semafor that subscriptions are on track to generate more than $5 million a year, which represents the main source of revenue for the publication.

The Bulwark is riding two converging trends in politics and media.

The publication has capitalized on the tectonic realignment that’s been happening in US politics, and serves as a kind of media escort from former Republicans on their way to support for Democratic candidates. (Weiss, in a neighboring ideological lane, offers a safe space for Democrats who can’t stomach Trump but feel their party and their flagship newspaper, The New York Times, have abandoned them, especially on campus-culture issues and Israel.)

This sometimes produces surreal scenes: Last week, a room full of 400 liberal and center-left Atlantic Festival guests erupted in applause for remarks by Kristol, once best known as the most committed media promoter of George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq.

The Bulwark’s YouTube explosion also offers a glimpse into what a post-cable future might look like for political news. The Bulwark’s success has been driven in large part by Miller’s natural loose on-camera persona and the interest in some of its well-known hosts like George Conway. But its growth on YouTube mirrors that of conservatives like the Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro or Megyn Kelly, the former Fox News personality, whose YouTube following rivals that of major broadcasters.

“Because my bigger political ambition is: How do you build a new center in the country that sort of refuses to engage in extreme sides of politics? And so I want to build as big a community as possible.”

It not only steers our life choices, it also permeates daily life and negatively affects our mental health.

Beyond the right major, the not-so-secret formula for the perfect résumé demands participation in a relevant extracurricular activity, which explains the competitive process at some selective schools to join pre-professional clubs.

Last year, 315,126 undergraduates applied for the 2,700 available undergraduate intern positions at Goldman Sachs.

In the 2021-22 academic year, undergraduate institutions handed out 375,400 business degrees. Unsurprisingly, the number of students pursuing humanities has declined dramatically.

The interview process for Cornell’s Undergraduate Asia Business Society includes entering a pitch-black lecture hall, having a projector light shone in one’s face and yelling responses to questions. Getting into Yale isn’t enough: Its investing club turned away 236 applicants in 2022.

Once one snags a spot in a club, it’s straight to LinkedIn. Nearly 20 percent of people on the site are between the ages of 18 to 24, making the platform an incubator of young adult FOMO

I wondered how I missed the memo that I needed to take microeconomics. This fall at Penn there are 672 seats in the course; as of Monday, only four had not been taken. Does everyone like economics that much?

When I first got to the University of Pennsylvania in August of 2019, it felt like a daily pop quiz, one where I was graded on a language I still struggle to speak.

I heard students say things like: I think I want to work in mergers and acquisitions. Do you have any interest in that? It’s very competitive, just so you know. And: Unless it’s Goldman or J.P. Morgan, who cares?

There, we stress over whether our headshots look too high school (at the age of 18) and race to the coveted over-500-connections designation.

It sounds silly — in hindsight, it was — but that is how I felt when I was surrounded by thousands of intelligent classmates competing for the same handful of results. I’d wake up at 3:30 a.m. from the recurring nightmare that I didn’t land an internship my junior year summer

I heard people, maybe friends, endlessly discussing the “only way” to be successful. I consoled a sobbing roommate after she failed to land the job her parents expected her to get.

But what is missing in this race to perceived economic safety is the emotional toll. The number of young adults ages 18 to 25 who have had at least one depressive episode has doubled from 2010 to 2020.

Naturally, when thousands of students rush into the same handful of majors and professions, supply cannot possibly meet demand. That’s particularly true now, as openings for postgraduate tech industry jobs advertised on the student job board Handshake decreased about 30 percent this spring from the prior year

Selective colleges and universities can fix this by overhauling their on-campus recruiting systems to prevent finance and consulting firms from pushing students to commit earlier and earlier. No student should have to determine her first career path before junior year begins.

While his work was informed by a disciplined and steadfast political point of view — according to the essayist and Stanford professor Mark Greif, he was a Marxist literary critic “in a conspicuously uncompromising way” — it was not pious, dogmatic or ostentatiously topical.

Marxism was, for Jameson, both a mode of analysis and an ethical program

The novels, films and philosophical texts he wrote about — and by implication his own work too — could only be understood within the social and economic structures that produced them. The point of studying them was to figure out how those structures could be dismantled and what might replace them.

Jameson was as much a traditionalist as a radical. His prose is dense and demanding, studded with references that testify to a lifetime of deep, omnivorous reading.

For all his eclecticism he was, to a perhaps unfashionable degree, a literary critic, most at home in the old-growth forests of 19th- and 20th-century European literature, tapping at the trunks of the tallest timbers: Gustave Flaubert, Stéphane Mallarmé, James Joyce, Thomas Mann.

why, as a critic, Jameson mattered to me. And maybe, more generally, to the nonacademic, not necessarily Marxist brand of criticism that I and some of my comrades try to practice in the throes of late capitalism, a phrase he helped popularize.

the opening words of “The Political Unconscious,” Jameson’s 1981 book on “narrative as a socially symbolic act.”

“Always historicize!”

He identifies “this slogan” as “the one absolute and we may even say ‘transhistorical’ imperative of all dialectical thought.”

we have not even raised the issue of gluten or the possibility of grated Parmesan. Or, more seriously, the unequal distribution of food in a consumer economy.

he principle is straightforward, even common-sensical.

If you are a critic, professional or otherwise, the task before you is to make sense of an artifact of the human imagination — a poem, a painting, a dish of pasta, a Netflix docuseries, whatever

What does it mean? What is its value?

To find the answers, it helps to know something about where it came from. Who made it? Under what conditions? For what purpose?

Those may not be specifically Marxist questions, but they are historical questions, and they begin a process of inquiry that may lead to Marxist conclusions.

It exists in relation to (for starters) other works of literature and gastronomy, and it changes over time. And so, of course, do you

Reading a Shakespeare sonnet in middle age is not the same as studying it in school, and what it means in the 21st century is not what it meant in the 17th

Mapping that system and tracking its changes is the work of what Jameson calls “dialectical thought.”

To historicize your dinner you will need to take account of the voyages of Marco Polo, the European conquest of the tomato, the story of Italian immigrants in America and the rise of The New York Times cooking app.

But of course there is, properly speaking, no pasta without antipasto; no primo piatto without a secondo; no dinner without dessert. Those matters will also need to be investigated.

there is one, just two words long, that I’ve always thought would make a great inspirational forearm tattoo.

rbidding idiom. (Transcoding; demystification; cognitive mapping:

Criticism, as he understood it, could never be, because of the complexity of its objects and its need to perpetually revise, refine and question its own procedures.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the costs of having accurate information exceed the benefits.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What drives this need for chaos?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He thinks that low, curved handlebars contort riders into an unnatural position; that bicycles made of carbon fibre and aluminum have safety issues; and that stretchy synthetics have nothing on seersucker and wool

“The whole purpose of pro riding now is to create a demand at the retail level for the really expensive bicycles,”

He is an advocate of pleasurable, unhurried riding—alone, or with family and friends—and is obsessive about comfort.

Rivendell’s bicycles are marketed as “UNracing” bikes. The frames are made of lugged, brazed steel. They have long wheelbases, luxurious chainstays, and sloping top tubes

Rivendell frames are generally outfitted with upright handlebars, leather saddles, manual shifters, platform pedals, and lush, chubby tires. They are designed to accommodate racks, baskets, fenders, and bags—whatever is useful for cross-country touring, local bike camping, and running errands

“I personally have more respect, tons of respect, for somebody who rides around town, to work, for shopping, and for fun, than somebody who does front-flips on handrails with a fifty-foot dropoff on one side.”

He sees the glorification of speed—personal bests, constant quantification, metrics, leaderboards—as discouraging to entry-level riders who might otherwise enjoy life with a bike.

These days, some mainstream bikes incorporate electronics requiring batteries and firmware: shifters that change gears at the press of a button, or power meters that collect data on a rider’s output. “So many basic things are being teched out of existence,”

He saw this as a function of business incentives: electronics break or need replacement; an upgrade is always around the corner.

Petersen’s objections are practical but also philosophical. As bikes become higher-tech, riders lose skills and agency. “A lot of sports have been watered down,” Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia, told me. “People are bicycling, but they have a motor. And people are climbing, but they’re climbing indoors. They’re riding big waves, but they’re being pulled in by Jet Skis. Yet there are a few people that are bucking the trend.”

He was talented but ambivalent about competing. “I know the racing scene extremely well, I know the culture really well, I’m comfortable with it, and I hate it,” he told me.

Rivendell’s employees object to descriptions of the company’s following as cultlike. “The other stuff is the cult,” Keating told me. “Putting the suit on, and going as fast as possible, and using the bars like this”—we were sitting at a table, and he hunched over his coffee cup, as if to protect it. “That’s the culty stuff, right? We’re just making nice bikes for regular people.”

In 1994, Bridgestone announced that it was shuttering its U.S. bicycle operation. Petersen told me that he had an informal standing job offer from Specialized, a major bicycle manufacturer, but that he couldn’t get excited about the changes in the mainstream market. Production was moving to China. Mountain bikes had begun to draw influence from motocross, incorporating shocks and suspension forks. The introduction of carbon fibre and titanium brought new manufacturers, including aerospace companies, into the industry.

“In the simplest terms, I think of bicycles as rideable art that can just about save the world, or at least make you happy,” he told readers. “Yet so many modern bicycles are promoted as tools for self-aggrandizement, status, and hammering the competition to a pulp, and the bikes themselves look like hoodlums, thugs, and ne’er-do-wells.”

valued function over prestige. “I am philosophically for putting cheap, really high-functioning stuff on a bike,” Petersen told me. “A twenty-eight-dollar derailleur on a thirty-five-hundred-dollar bike has a kind of beauty in itself.”

The main critique that Petersen faces is that his preferences are needlessly nostalgic. In 1990, a columnist for Bicycling dubbed Petersen a “retro-grouch,” and joked that he must be a descendant of nineteenth-century penny-farthing riders

On Monday morning, I saw on Twitter/X that New York magazine had just published a profile of and interview with the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates about his forthcoming book (partially) about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Coates makes very clear in the interview that he endorses from top to bottom the position advocated by the most militant pro-Palestinian activists: Israel is committing genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza; Palestinian resistance is equivalent in purity and righteousness to those who marched against Jim Crow in the American South during the 1950s and ’60s and against South African apartheid in the 1970s and ’80s—while Israel’s position is equivalent in wickedness to the brutalizing forces of racism and oppression in both contexts.

On the opening of a book or the looking into a manuscript, I listen for the sound of a voice in the first-person singular, and from authors whom I read more than once I learn to value the weight of words and to delight in their meter and cadence—in Gibbon’s polyphonic counterpoint and Guedalla’s command of the subjunctive, in Mailer’s hyperbole and Dillard’s similes, in Twain’s invectives and burlesques with which he set the torch of his ferocious wit to the hospitality tents of the world’s “colossal humbug.”

y object was to learn, not preach, which prevented my induction into the national college of pundits but encouraged my reading of history.

I soon discovered that I had as much to learn from the counsel of the dead as I did from the advice and consent of the living. The reading of history damps down the impulse to slander the trend and tenor of the times, instills a sense of humor, lessens our fear of what might happen tomorrow.

On listening to President Barack Obama preach the doctrine of freedom-loving military invasion to the cadets at West Point, I’m reminded of the speeches that sent the Athenian army to its destruction in Sicily in 415 bc, and I don’t have to wait for dispatches from Afghanistan to suspect that the shooting script for the Pax Americana is a tale told by an idiot.

The common store of our shared history is what Goethe had in mind when he said that the inability to “draw on three thousand years is living hand to mouth.”

It isn’t with symbolic icons that men make their immortality. They do so with what they’ve learned on their travels across the frontiers of the millennia, salvaging from the wreck of time what they find to be useful or beautiful or true.

What preserves the voices of the great authors from one century to the next is not the recording device (the clay tablet, the scroll, the codex, the book, the computer, the iPad) but the force of imagination and the power of expression. It is the strength of the words themselves, not their product placement, that invites the play of mind and induces a change of heart.

How do we know what we think we know? Why is it that the more information we collect the less likely we are to grasp what it means? Possibly because a montage is not a narrative, the ear is not the eye, a pattern recognition is not a figure or a form of speech.

The surfeit of new and newer news comes so quickly to hand that within the wind tunnels of the “innovative delivery strategies” the data blow away and shred. The time is always now, and what gets lost is all thought of what happened yesterday, last week, three months or three years ago. Unlike moths and fruit flies, human beings bereft of memory, even as poor a memory as Montaigne’s or my own, tend to become disoriented and confused.

I know no other way out of what is both the maze of the eternal present and the prison of the self except with a string of words.

The company’s chief executive was briefly fired after the nonprofit board lost trust in him.

OpenAI has spent the last year mired in scandal

Whistle-blowers alleged to the Securities and Exchange Commission that OpenAI’s nondisclosure agreements were illegal.

Safety researchers have left the company in droves

Now the firm is restructuring its core business as a for-profit, seemingly prompting the departure of more key leaders

On Friday, The Wall Street Journal reported that OpenAI rushed testing of a major model in May, attempting to undercut a rival’s publicity; after the release, employees found out the model exceeded the company’s standards for safety. (The company told The Journal the findings were the result of a methodological flaw.)

This behavior would be concerning in any industry, but according to OpenAI itself, A.I. poses unique risks. The leaders of the top A.I. firms and leading A.I. researchers have warned that the technology could lead to human extinction.

Since more comprehensive national A.I. regulations aren’t coming anytime soon, we need a narrow federal law allowing employees to disclose information to Congress if they reasonably believe that an A.I. model poses a significant safety risk

But McKinsey did not hold the majority of employees’ compensation hostage in exchange for signing lifetime nondisparagement agreements, as OpenAI did.

People reporting violations of the Atomic Energy Act have more robust whistle-blower protections than those in most fields, while those working in biological toxins for several government departments are protected by proactive, pro-reporting guidance. A.I. workers need similar rules.

Many companies maintain a culture of secrecy beyond what is healthy. I once worked at the consulting firm McKinsey on a team that advised Immigration and Customs Enforcement on implementing Donald Trump’s inhumane immigration policies. I was fearful of going public

Congress should establish a special inspector general to serve as a point of contact for these whistle-blowers. The law should mandate companies to notify staff about the channels available to them, which they can use without facing retaliation.

Earlier this month, OpenAI released a highly advanced new model. For the first time, experts concluded the model could aid in the construction of a bioweapon more effectively than internet research alone could. A third party hired by the company found that the new system demonstrated evidence of “power seeking” and “the basic capabilities needed to do simple in-context scheming

penAI decided to publish these results, but the company still chooses what information to share. It is possible the published information paints an incomplete picture of the model’s risks.

The A.I. safety researcher Todor Markov — who recently left OpenAI after nearly six years with the firm — suggested one hypothetical scenario. An A.I. company promises to test its models for dangerous capabilities, then cherry-picks results to make the model look safe. A concerned employee wants to notify someone, but doesn’t know who — and can’t point to a specific law being broken. The new model is released, and a terrorist uses it to construct a novel bioweapon. Multiple former OpenAI employees told me this scenario is plausible.

The United States’ current arrangement of managing A.I. risks through voluntary commitments places enormous trust in the companies developing this potentially dangerous technology. Unfortunately, the industry in general — and OpenAI in particular — has shown itself to be unworthy of that trust, time and again.

The fate of the first attempt to protect A.I. whistle-blowers rests with Governor Gavin Newsom of California. Mr. Newsom has hinted that he will veto a first-of-its-kind A.I. safety bill, called S.B. 1047, which mandates that the largest A.I. companies implement safeguards to prevent catastrophes, features whistle-blower protections, a rare point of agreement between the bill’s supporters and its critics

if those legislators are serious in their support for these protections, they should introduce a federal A.I. whistle-blower protection bill. They are well positioned to do so: The letter’s organizer, Representative Zoe Lofgren, is the ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology.

Last month, a group of leading A.I. experts warned that as the technology rapidly progresses, “we face growing risks that A.I. could be misused to attack critical infrastructure, develop dangerous weapons or cause other forms of catastrophic harm.” These risks aren’t necessarily criminal, but they are real — and they could prove deadly. If that happens, employees at OpenAI and other companies will be the first to know. But will they tell us?

policy makers and environmentalists need to get smart about political capital: how to build it and, most importantly, how to avoid wasting it.

Environmentalist policies don’t just need to be well-intentioned or feel virtuous; they need to be effective in accomplishing their stated goals.

Cumulatively, they risk giving citizens the impression that those in charge care more about forcing them to change their lifestyle than about solving real problems

If we want to win the fight against climate change, we need to get serious about achieving the biggest possible environmental impact for the smallest possible price in quality of life and political goodwill

Low-impact policies that demand small, if frequent and highly salient, sacrifices feel virtuous. But they deplete a disproportionate amount of political capital.

It’s time for a new paradigm. Call it “effective environmentalism.”

This is driven by a deeper sense, widespread in the environmental movement, that the fight against climate change is coterminous with the fight to remake the world from scratch. To many, social ills like racism, sexism and even capitalism itself are facets of one interrelated system of oppression. A victory against any one facet requires a victory against all.

Naomi Klein’s bestselling This Changes Everything is a classic of the genre. Tellingly, the first change she admonishes her readers to make concerns their lifestyle: “For us high consumers,” she writes, preventing the dire future that awaits humanity requires “changing how we live.”

Even more tellingly, Klein maintains that making these changes will require nothing short of the abolition of capitalism. To her, the right way to understand this historical moment is as “a battle between capitalism and the planet.”

it turns out that you can’t scare and shame people into taking action on climate change. If anything, this political moment seems to be characterized by a mix of apathy and backlash. In the United States, a recent poll of young voters reveals that only 6 percent of them consider “environmental issues” their top priority, the same number who say their top priority is immigration (economic issues easily eclipse both).

As recently as four years ago, Germany’s Green Party was polling around 25 percent of the vote, and looked likely to lead a federal government for the first time in the country’s history. Now, its support is down to about ten percent, with the decline among young voters especially dramatic. Opinions about the party in the electorate give a clue about the source of its troubles:

In a recent exit poll conducted during the state election in Brandenburg, 71 percent of voters complained that the party “has insufficient concern with the economy and creating jobs.” 66 percent complained that the party “wants to tell us how to live.”

The environment, like most areas of public policy, is the realm of painful trade-offs. Efforts to fix the climate crisis will involve a significant degree of expense and inconvenience. For both moral and strategic reasons, the goal of environmental regulation should therefore be to accomplish important goals while minimizing these costs insofar as possible

effective environmentalism consists in actions or policies which maximize positive impact on the environment while minimizing both the price for humans’ quality of life and the depletion of a collective willingness to adopt other impactful measures.

most of the time, such a definition is less helpful than the spirit which animates it. And that spirit is best captured in a more informal register. So rather than focusing on the definition, effective environmentalists should evaluate any proposed action, policy or regulation by asking themselves three questions:

. How big a positive impact (if any) will the proposed action have?

In politics, it’s easy to obsess over whatever happens to be salient. If some question touches a cultural nerve, or has given rise to major political battles in the past, its stakes can come to seem existential—even if not much hinges on it in the real world. This is part of what makes it so tempting to obsess about such things as banning plastic straws or detachable bottle caps (which have little impact) rather than tax incentives or cap-and-trade schemes (which would have a vastly larger impact)

2. To what extent will the proposed action lead to a deterioration in quality of life?

this also gives them reason to care about the negative consequences that environmental policies may have for human welfare. So the extent of the trade-off needs to be a key consideration. The bigger an adverse impact a particular policy has on people’s quality of life, the more skeptical we should be about implementing it.

For the most part, people who worry about climate change and other forms of environmental degradation are motivated by a concern about human welfare. They worry about the negative consequences that runaway climate change would have for humankind

3. To what extent will the proposed action lead to backlash?

Political capital is limited. In most democracies, a clear majority of the population now cares about climate change to some extent. But this genuine concern competes with, and tends to be eclipsed by, voters’ concern about economic priorities like the availability of good jobs

This context makes it all the more important for voters to feel that governments and environmental groups are focusing on impactful steps that leave them in charge of decisions about their own lives; otherwise, support for any environmental policy is likely to polarize along partisan lines, or even to crater across the board. 

When I coined the term “effective environmentalism,” I was of course inspired by an earlier movement: “effective altruism.”

for all of the problems with effective altruism, the original insight on which it is built is hard to contest. People spend billions of dollars on charitable contributions every year. Much of that money goes to building new gyms at fancy universities or upgrading the local cat shelter. Wouldn’t it be better to direct donors’ altruistic instincts to more impactful endeavors, potentially saving the lives of thousands of people?

Something similar holds true for the environmental movement. Many activists are more focused on interventions that feel virtuous than on ones that will make a real difference. As a result, much of the movement has proven ineffective

Effective altruists pride themselves in adopting principles and mental heuristics that are supposed to help them assess what to do in a more rational way. These include not judging an idea based on who says it; reserving judgment about an idea until you’ve analyzed both its benefits and its costs; paying attention to the relative weight of different priorities; and being skeptical about forms of symbolic politics that don’t lead to real change

these norms make a lot of sense, and have relevance for environmentalists focused on having real impact.

So, to figure out what policies can make the biggest difference in the fight against climate change, and actually win the political capital to put these into practice, effective environmentalists should:

Assess Policies on the Basis of their Impact, not Their Perceived Purity:

Prioritize Actions that Solve the Biggest Problems:

It would be a mistake to subsume all environmental concerns to the fight against climate change. People have reasons to care about living in a clean environment or alleviating animal suffering even if it does not help to protect us from the threat posed by climate change

There are a variety of environmental goals, and it makes sense to recognize this plurality of goods. And yet, those who care about environmental goals need to have a clear sense of relative priorities. Some goals are more important than others

effective environmentalists should unflinchingly give precedence to the most important goals.

Be Willing to Build Cross-Ideological Coalitions:

Activists increasingly pride themselves in being “intersectional.” Since they believe that various forms of oppression intersect, people who want to participate in the fight against one form of injustice must also get on board with a set of progressive assumptions about how to combat other forms of perceived injustice

This can raise the entrance ticket for anyone who wants to get involved in fighting for an environmental cause; distract major environmental organizations from fighting for their stated goals; and make powerful players unwilling to forge tactical coalitions with partners whose broader worldview they disdai

Effective environmentalists should reject this purist instinct, making common cause with anyone who favors impactful action irrespective of the views they may hold about unrelated issues.

Put People in Charge of Their Own Lives:

Effective environmentalists should fight to transition as much of the economy as possible to forms of energy that do not emit carbon. This will require broad political support and, yes, real financial trade-offs

effective environmentalists should avoid overly intrusive regulations about how people then go about using that energy. If consumers are willing to pay an elevated price for the pleasure of sitting on an outside terrace in the late fall, it shouldn’t be for the government or for environmental activists to decide that a different use of energy is more morally righteous.

No-Bullshit Environmentalism

For the last decades, the environmentalist movement has tried its hand at fear-mongering.

this kind of rhetoric is factually misleading and politically disastrous.

This is why I favor a different approach. This approach centers the serious risks posed by climate change. But it also insists that humans are capable of meeting this moment with a mix of collective action and ingenuity.

With the right investments and regulations, we can reduce carbon emissions and mitigate the impact of a warming planet. And while this transition will exact considerable costs, it need not make us poor or require us to abstain from putting plentiful energy to its many miraculous uses.

at a start, the mix of policies advocated by effective environmentalists is likely to include: a commitment to creating energy abundance while transitioning towards a low-carbon economy; significant investment in both renewable and nuclear energy; regulatory action to raise the price of fossil-fuels; the adoption of genetically-modified crops that can withstand a changing climate; public and private investment to mitigate the effects of the warming that is already underway; the development and adoption of new technologies that can capture carbon; and a willingness to do serious research on speculative ideas, such as marine cloud brightening, that have the potential to avert worst-case outcomes in the case of a climate emergency. 

In life as in economics, trade-offs are real. But in the context of a growing economy, we should be able to bear those costs without suffering any overall reduction in human affluence or well-being. If we adopt the principles of effective environmentalism and take energetic action, our future shines bright.