Slips-of-the-tongue are just slips of tongue.

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But they do reveal what your system prompt is, when you are considered as a Stochastic Parrot Large Language Model. It does tell us a lot about what you are thinking about a lot. As when California Senator Barbara Boxer said that the B-2 bomber “carries a large payroll”.

And so a reasonable man would start asking whether TreasSec Scott Bessent has a problem here:

Scott Bessent: <https://bsky.app/profile/factpostnews.bsky.social/post/3mjkh5wb42z2g>: ‘The Straits of Vermouth have not been completely reopened…

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This is not a slip-of-the-tongue I would make. But, then, I only say the word “vermouth” once every three months, not multiple times a day.

But let me try to be a bit more sober than this context cries out for, and perhaps a bit more sober than usual here:

Slips of the tongue are small things, yes.

But, I think, they are not nothing.

No, the oil price will not move because the man purportedly in charge of U.S. economic policy appears to have his mind more on cocktails rather than on global value chains. We all mis-speak. We all have words that come to our lips. But they come to our lips at the wrong time because the rest of our mind has moved them to the front of the OIFO—often-in first-out—queue. This is precisely why such slips have always fascinated both psychoanalysts and political analysts. They are the cases in which the brain’s autocomplete function malfunctions in public, and so gives us a glimpse of what is over‑represented in the background process: the “system prompt” in what is right now an unavoidable current metaphor.

Sigmund Freud called these “parapraxes”: the moments when repressed, or simply over‑preoccupied, content elbows its way into a place where it does not belong. The Freudian version is that this is, overwhelmingly, about displaced desire and displaced fear—he desire or fear that cannot be named directly still insists on being spoken, and so it is displaced onto something nominally safer. The person who cannot speak directly of sex becomes obsessed with cleanliness; the man who cannot admit his fear of his father spends his life railing against “bureaucrats” or “élites”.

Freud was overwrought.

And “vermouth” for “Hormuz” is low‑stakes slapstick.

But step back. Consider all of the more ominous “slips” we have been hearing for the past decade. The modern American right has developed an entire vocabulary of displacement, a thesaurus of “vermouths” for things it no longer feels quite secure saying out loud: “Urban crime.” “Globalists.” “Woke universities.”

These are not analytically useful categories; they are, rather, deniable proxies for older, cruder categories: Black people, Jews, the young and non‑deferential.

The fact that the proxies come so readily to the tongue tells you where the attention is, what emotional carga is being carried.

Even so, the more revealing parapraxes in Trump world are not the dog whistles that have been carefully field‑tested by consultants, but the pure unedited slips: “the oranges of the investigation”; “Nambia”; “covfefe”; making a point, more than once, of calling political opponents “vermin”. One can, of course, write each one off as mere noise—old man tired, staff sloppy, feed overloaded. But when the noise is systematically concentrated in certain semantic neighborhoods—persecution, dominance, grievance, extermination—you know you are looking at the revealing jitter of an over‑amped system.

Here is where the current crop of large language models, oddly enough, are helpful. They are hopeful for thinking about the human mind. For we, like them, are stochastic parrots driven by system prompts. (We hope that our “system prompt” is actually the worthwhile mental processes of a true Turing-class entity, and sometimes we are right.) You may have read about how researchers at Anthropic sandblasted their way into Claude’s internal representation space—for example, the Golden Gate Bridge “feature vector” described at:

Understanding AI

Anthropic decoded the vectors Claude uses to represent abstract concepts

Last week, Anthropic announced a significant breakthrough in our understanding of how large language models work. The research focused on Claude 3 Sonnet, the mid-sized version of Anthropic’s latest frontier model (Sonnet is larger than Haiku but smaller than Opus). Anthropic showed that it could transform Claude’s otherwise inscrutable numeric representation of words into a combination of “features,” many of which can be understood by human beings…

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2 years ago · 54 likes · 8 comments · Timothy B. Lee

<https://www.understandingai.org/p/anthropic-decoded-the-vectors-claude>

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That is how this works on silicon. Turn up the weight on “Golden Gate Bridge” inside the model, and suddenly a question about gardening, or 18th‑century French politics, or rational expectations macroeconomics returns, instead, rhapsodies about suspension cables and rust‑red paint. The content filter on the outside is still doing its best to be helpful. But inside, the feature vector is screaming: bridge bridge bridge bridge bridge.

Once you have that picture in your head, it is hard not to see something similar going on in Trumpist cognition.

There is some internal representation—call it “white victimhood,” or “stolen status,” or “strongman as daddy”—that has its internal weight dialed up to eleven. Ask about crime policy, and you get stories about marauding “urban” hordes. Ask about trade, you get “they are laughing at us.” Ask about universities, you get accusations that students are being turned into anti‑American radicals. There are many words on the surface, but the internal feature vector is remarkably stable.

The “Golden Gate Claude” moment is useful because it lets us imagine, quite concretely, what a massively over‑fit mind looks like. Take the model and, instead of “Golden Gate Bridge,” hard‑wire “Stolen Election.” Every prompt—about vaccines, housing policy, Taylor Swift—gets pulled, like iron filings to a magnet, into the “they stole it from us” narrative. Or define “Deep State Claude,” whose internal representation of a malevolent bureaucratic conspiracy is permanently maxed out. Any inconvenient fact will either be assimilated into the conspiracy or rejected as “fake news.” In such a mind, updating beliefs is no longer possible in any Bayesian sense: the prior is so strong it simply eats the likelihood function for breakfast.

That is how you get people who can “know”: That crime is skyrocketing ,when it is not. That coal is making a comeback when it is not. That climate change is a hoax even as their hometown catches fire or washes away.

It is not that they lack data. It is that the data is being forced, by an over‑weighted internal narrative, into pre‑assigned slots. Any datum that cannot be so coerced is discarded as “propaganda,” “hoax,” or “globalist lies.” “Golden Gate Claude” does not lose the ability to parse French politics; it simply insists on doing it from the vantage point of a suspension bridge in San Francisco Bay.

Moreover, there is yet another way in which the LLM metaphor bites.

Modern public-facing LLMs, as you know, are not just the raw predictive model. They are the raw model wrapped in a “safety layer”: a system of guardrails and post‑processing designed to prevent the underlying associations from spilling out where they would get the firm sued, or worse. Most of the time, the wrapper works. Occasionally, somebody finds a “jailbreak” prompt that causes the model to drop the mask and start babbling its unfiltered associations—some of which are disturbing, not because the machine is evil, but because the training data is.

Trumpist speech has that feel.

There is the public‑relations wrapper—“America First,” “law and order,” “protecting our beautiful suburbs.” And then there are the jailbreak moments: “shithole countries”; “Second Amendment people”; “very fine people on both sides”; casual talk of “vermin” to be rooted out. Those are the times when the internal id‑like model of the world—hierarchical, racialized, violent—leaks through the mask for an instant before the communications shop slams the door. They are the political equivalents of the model suddenly dumping its internal Golden Gate Bridge fan‑fic into a conversation about tulip bulbs.

Which brings me, reluctantly, back to poor Scott Bessent and his mental focus on glasses of vermouth, neat.

Compared to the true Trumpist parapraxes, this is small beer—or, rather, small cocktail.

Yet it fits the same general pattern. It is not that the man definitely has a drinking problem. It is that his tongue, like yours and mine, is cued by what his mind is already circling around. If you say “vermouth” enough, “Hormuz” becomes just close enough in sound and just far enough from the center of attention that the wrong word jumps the gap.

We should not over‑psychologize a single mistake. But we should not ignore the general lesson either. Human beings, like large language models, are stochastic parrots with priors: we repeat what we have seen and heard, biased by what we are currently thinking about and what we cannot stop thinking about. Our parapraxes and our obsessions, our “vermouths” and our “oranges,” our “covfefes” and our “vermin,” are not randomly distributed errors. They are, instead, noisy but informative samples from the underlying distribution of mental weights.

That is why I find the current wave of LLM interpretability work oddly cheering, rather than depressing. It is fashionable to say that these models teach us nothing about the human mind. I think that is too strong. They are crude, yes. But they provide us with metaphors that are at least directionally right: internal feature vectors, over‑weighted priors, guardrails and jailbreaks, prompts and system prompts. And those metaphors, in turn, help us see that our own slips of the tongue and fixations are not mysterious eruptions of a wholly other “unconscious,” but the visible jitter of a predictive, pattern‑matching system running hot.

The more we learn to read LLMs’ mistakes as windows into their inner structure, the more, I suspect, we will also learn to read our own. And that, I guess, is one way in which this powerful, odd, occasionally ridiculous technology might yet make us a little less foolish.

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<https://www.stevevladeck.com/p/219-drunks-lampposts-and-the-birthright> <https://www.stevevladeck.com/cp/193346644>

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My view: Very nice manifesto from Steve Vladeck.

But.

English-tradition legal argument and scholarship drank from a poisoned chalice at the very beginning. At the start of the 1600s, after all, Edward Coke was in the business of using fair means and foul to use legal process and doctrine to constrain the alien Scottish monarch James I Stuart. Thus we have Chief Justice Best:

I am afraid we should get rid of a great deal of what is considered law in Westminster Hall if what Lord Coke says without authority is not law..

Thus, as my father likes to say, “it is turtles all the way down”.

It was turtles under the activist pro-corporate Lochner Court. It was turtles under the activist Warren Court. It is turtles under the activist neofascist Roberts Court.

Historical truth is simply not a constraint, and has been a constraint only when justices really want it to be. Which is why people should read that nutboy Steve Rodell’s absolutely brilliant Nine Men.

More brief thoughts below the fold:

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A nice interview <https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/20/movies/project-hail-mary-phil-lord-christopher-miller.html> of my cousin Phil Lord and his partner Chris Miller about the extraordinarily good and successful Project Hail Mary movie, on which they are team leads!

Some highlights:

• “We’re not particularly strategic from a Hollywood business standpoint. Our strategy is to make things as good as we can, and then pray…”

• “You have to figure it all out in advance and plan and plan and plan. And then you want to give a playground for [Gosling and others] to figure out something new…”

• “Hopefully the audience comes out and they feel a little more capable, in part because… [of] the choice that [the character Rylan Grance] was only going to be good at one thing, and… bad at everything else… at space, he’s afraid constantly. Clumsy. And he has social anxiety. But he’s really good at microbiology…”

• “The things that are daunting about the book… dense science experiments… first person… rock alien with no face who speaks a musical language—those things all seemed exciting to us…”

• “We wanted to lean into all the things that were hard…”

• “We… come from animation, so we understand that something with no face can still express itself through movement…

• “It was almost contrarian to make a movie that’s so affirming…. What I love about Andy [Weir]’s book and what we’ve always tried to do in our work is not just present problems but try to suggest solutions. This movie is suggesting that we are capable…”

• “[On the set of Solo] we met Neal Scanlan and the creature shop team that we worked with to make Rocky…..We had such a great experience with them, making these aliens and robots together. That experience made us very confident that we could get a lot of Rocky’s performance through puppetry…. Sound department, costume department all came from the Solo crew…”

• “We introduced a crew screening Sunday, and I was surprised because half the people were “Spider-Verse” crew members that had doubled up…”

• “We had talked to NASA people about what it was like in zero G the first time, and they’re like, ‘It’s messy. You bonk into stuff, you’re awkward. You want to throw up. You don’t know what you’re doing.’ So, we let Ryan use his creativity and his comedic timing to bonk into everything and find his way…”

• “We’re both high anxiety. But we were just as high anxiety making Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs. Nobody puts more pressure on us than ourselves. We came on this movie when it was a manuscript, before it became an international best seller with rabid fans around the globe. And even back then, we’re like, ‘We have to do justice to this story because it’s a beautiful story’…”

The movie at $140 million has (what I am informed is) tied with Oppenheimer as the largest nominal non-sequwe non-franchise movie opening weekend ever. The movie looks to have only a -35% dropoff from weekend 1 to weekend 2 (for blockbusters and front-loaded fanboy titles, a -60% dropoff is routine, a -50% dropoff is strong, and a -40% dropoff exceptionally good, or so I am told). The movie that has a 95%-favorable critic and a 96%-favorable audience rating on <http://rottentomatoes.com>:

It is so favorable a take that I would call it a full-fledged beat sweetener, except for one thing, two things actually: the article’s title and subtitle. It’s not “Chris Miller and Phil Lord Direct Ryan Gosling in the Closest Thing to a One-Man Show Blockbuster There Will Ever Be”. It’s not “Chris Miller and Phil Lord Reflect on Directing Their Hit Project Hail Mary”. It’s not “Making a Faceless Alien Sing: Lord and Miller on the Impossible Challenges of Project Hail Mary”. It’s not “Inside Project Hail Mary: Process, Puppets, and the Messiness of Space”. It’s not “Turning Doom Into Hope: The Directors of ‘Project Hail Mary’ on Friendship, Science, and Survival”. It’s not From Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs to Project Hail Mary: Lord and Miller’s Obsession With Projects That Shouldn’t Work.

Instead, it’s:

Esther Zuckerman; What the ‘Project Hail Mary’ Directors Learned From a Firing <https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/20/movies/project-hail-mary-phil-lord-christopher-miller.html>: ‘Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, best known for animations like the “Spider-Verse” films, took lessons from “Solo: A Star Wars Story,” a project from which they were dismissed…

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Huh!?!?

I have thoughts. But I find myself annoyed enough that it would probably be wise to put them below the fold, while I take some time to decide on whether they are properly reasoned or not. But I do feel I should note that there is a backstory here—a backstory here that might explain why the title and subhead of the article strike me as so really, really weird.

The New York Times gave the baton to review my cousin Phil Lord and the Team’s Project Hail Mary review to Manohla Dargis. She then set out maxxnegging it:

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Project Hail Mary has opened not as a niche “hard SF” curio but as a genuine four‑quadrant crowd‑pleaser, with both critics and audiences walking out verklempt and grinning. Two high‑profile reviewers, however, have decided that optimism, practical effects, and interspecies friendship are an offense against cinematic seriousness—and that the audience’s goodwill has somehow been “expended” rather than earned. In a film marketplace saturated with dystopia, the team has delivered an extinction‑level‑threat movie that leaves viewers more hopeful about human ingenuity and cross-cultural teamwork, not less.

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My cousin Phil Lord’s new movie appears to have had a very successful launch indeed: It has landed in a rarefied zone where mass audiences, genre fans, and a good chunk of the critical establishment all come away grinning, sniffling, and telling their friends: “No, really, you have to see this one”. I think this is because they manage to fuse:

1. a genuinely hard-science premise,

2. a disarmingly silly sense of humor, and

3. a core emotional throughline built around loyalty and friendship rather than angst and grit

The entrails are truly favorable:

<https://www.boxofficemojo.com/weekend/2026W12/>

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Not in the Marvel/Barbenheimer/Mario tier, but damned good. We will see how many legs it turns out to have both at the box office, on streaming, and in the artistic noösphere. So far both audiences and critics think that it is doing a very good job:

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Typical of what I am seeing: This:

M.G. Siegler: Hail Hail <https://thoughts.spyglass.org/p/hail-hail>; ‘I saw Project Hail Mary last night. It was great. Yes, a lot of parallels with The Martian, with some Interstellar sprinkled in. But it was just nice to see a mostly optimistic movie about technology and the future. Perhaps more thoughts after I see it again as the lord intended: on an IMAX screen…

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And this:

Leah Schnelbach: Project Hail Mary Is a Delightful, Optimistic Sci-Fi Adventure <https://reactormag.com/movie-review-nonspoiler-project-hail-mary/>: ‘This is a stellar adaptation of Andy Weir’s novel…. I’m not a person who cries. Not during turbulent life events, not when I’m scared, not during weddings, not on election nights, not during religious ceremonies, not during movies…. While I didn’t exactly cry during Project Hail Mary, I did tear up…. It caught me off guard. I read and enjoyed the book—it’s an involving and often very funny book…. However, the movie adaptation takes the heart of the book, the core story about friendship and the nature of bravery, opens it up, and reaches out into the audience to invite us all in. My guess is that different people will find that invitation in different moments, but when it really got to me, I found it extremely moving….

What’s good about the movie is what was good about the book: the question at its center. When exactly did we all decide there’s no future? When did we give in to the inevitability of our collapse? Why are we ceding our human creativity to AI, our hard-won scientific breakthroughs to under-educated magical thinkers? Shouldn’t we try to fight for our home’s survival and health, as long as even one of us is still breathing? How dare we give up? Maybe this sounds a little aggro—but that question is the base note thumping along under what is very much an exhilarating, heartwarming space adventure….

Ryan Gosling is fantastic…. The whole movie rises and falls on his ability to make you care about him while he’s alone in a ship, yes, but more than that he has to veer between being a scientist who gets to see space up close, and make discoveries no one’s ever made before, while also being terrified and alone all the time. I don’t think there was a single moment that felt false to me. Sandra Hüller… gives mission leader Eva Stratt a wry, fatalistic humor that makes her a real person rather than a plot device. Lionel Boyce is hilarious as Carl… a character that could have just been “stoic straight man comic relief” becomes a real person…. James Ortiz… is fantastic, and absolutely integral to this film’s success….

The special effects are largely practical. Grace’s ship is a set, and any time he does anything difficult in zero-g that means Gosling actually did those things, on wires. There’s also some amazing puppetry work. In addition to everything else it does well, Project Hail Mary is a reminder of how much better a movie looks and feels when it’s made on a real set, with props that have real heft, instead of in front of a green screen…

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I have noted this before:

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In my reading what the audiences seem to be positively reacting to most is the inter-species buddy story. Andy Weir’s sense of humor from the book—energetically preserved in the adaptation—does a lot of work. By the time we get to the climactic rescue, the emotional stakes are obvious. A separate strand of praise focuses on craft: how convincingly first the book and then the movie renders the engineering, the problem‑solving, and the constraints of a desperate mission. Film write‑ups have latched onto the choice to rely heavily on practical effects, and thus on props have heft.

In a media ecosystem saturated with dystopia, that may be the most striking thing about Project Hail Mary is a story about an extinction‑level threat that leaves its viewers, not complacent, but energized—reminded that ingenuity, solidarity, and a stubborn refusal to give up are still options on the table. And the story wraps this message in jokes. What’s not to like?

Well, so far two people have come across my screen who do not like it.

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First, that wrapping the message in jokes is something some people do not like. For example, it really seems to have gotten the New York Times’s Manohla Dargis’s back up.

She seems to have been started from having been offended by—to be carrying a chip on her shoulder from—the fact that “The LEGO Movie” was actually good (in addition to containing the only Aristophanes shout-out I have seen on the big screen this millennium). She does not quite dare trash Project Hail Mary—she knows that would make her look really stupid—but:

Manohla Dargis: ‘Project Hail Mary’ Review: Ryan Gosling Is Lost & Found in Space <https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/19/movies/project-hail-mary-gosling-review.html>: ‘“Project Hail Mary,” a feather-light science-fiction movie about a heavyweight subject—the end of the world…. Countries… have joined forces… telegraphs the movie’s optimism… comes off as quaintly old-fashioned….. Multilateralism… is tough to buy…. Lord and Miller are best known for “The Lego Movie”… amusing enough to make you feel almost OK about watching a feature-length commercial. The filmmakers have an advanced degree in pop culture…. The filmmakers and the actor lean into the comedy of the character’s plight, yet… that… blunts the existential terror…. Ryland [and] Rocky… [are] a little too cute, a little too programmatically Spielbergian, and… upend… the movie’s initial serio-comic balance…. [The] movie… becomes increasingly, almost willfully more insubstantial…. Lord and Miller… accentuate the positive to the detriment of the… movie…. This particular message of hope ends up being a bummer.

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Second, the New Yorker’s Justin Chang brings forth what I can only characterize as a s***post.

Look: It’s fine for Justin Chang to not like the movie.

You don’t have to like movies.

It’s fine for Chang to not like Ryan Gosling’s performance.

Performances don’t have to land with you.

(It is a little rich, however, to place responsibility for what he and he alone—others see it as Oscar Best Actor-worthy—sees as Gosling’s failure (“I don’t think he’s at his best”) not on Gosling’s missing the mark but on “(mis)direction”—as if Ryan Gosling is not a professional adult.)

But it is not fine for Justin Chang to make false claims about audience reaction—to assert “the audience’s good will is a precious, unstable resource, and the flippancy of ‘Project Hail Mary’ expends it recklessly”.

That is just plain weird.

New Yorker Daily: Ryan Gosling’s Space Movie Doesn’t Land <https://public.hey.com/p/2vYFzWQNGUvZ41V7SLQppbPm>:‘Ryan Gosling plays a molecular biologist turned middle-school teacher turned astronaut in Project Hail Mary. He also plays to the crowd—much to our critic’s exasperation…. “It’s the most smoothly engineered crowd-pleaser I’ve seen… and I don’t mean that entirely as a compliment. All I could see, in the end, was that engineering. It’s a science-fiction comedy in which the science and the comedy—which is to say, the stakes and the humor—don’t feed each other so much as cancel each other out…. Gosling is a superb actor…. I don’t think he’s at his best in “Project Hail Mary,” and he appears to have been (mis)directed to lay it on a bit thick. At times, he seems to be playing for obvious laughs…

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And:

Justin Chang: “Project Hail Mary”: In Space, No One Should Hear Your Glib Jokes <https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/03/23/project-hail-mary-movie-review>: ‘Not far from Tau Ceti, an enormous alien spacecraft looms into view… an impressively elongated affair—made from a substance called xenonite, though I’d have guessed dry spaghetti noodles…. Lord and Miller… aim for uncharted realms of goofball grandeur… dramatizing the most serious human enterprise in the least serious manner possible…. And so we find ourselves in an interspecies buddy comedy: “Smart and Smarter.”… The audience’s good will is a precious, unstable resource, and the flippancy of “Project Hail Mary” expends it recklessly. All the more reason to be grateful for Sandra Hüller as Stratt, who keeps pulling the proceedings back to Earth in the best possible way. Hüller’s bone-dry reserve is effortlessly amusing, in a way that Gosling’s more strained antics are not, and Stratt’s prickly bond with Grace, brusque but not unkind, seems to foreshadow his future interactions with Rocky…

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What to say about this?

First:

• Stratt’s dealings with Grace are ultimately not “brusque but not unkind”.

• She drugs him—the source of his temporary amnesia—while he is continuously refusing to go on the mission, kidnaps him, and loads unwillingly onto the spaceship.

• That is the very definition of “unkind”.

• Chang’s assertion that Stratt is “not unkind” is a did Chang really watch the movie?!?! question-raising moment.

Second:

• Please, gentle readers, to note that at the moment Project Hail Mary has a 96% rating at “Rotten Tomatoes” <https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/project_hail_mary> on the audience-response Popcornmeter,

• Please, gentle readers, to note that at the moment Project Hail Mary has a 95% rating on the critic-judgment Tomatometer.

• Please, gentle readers, compare that audience (and critic) response to Chang’s claim that the movie team’s “flippancy” “expends… recklessly” the “precious, unstable resource” that is “the audience’s goodwill”.

• The audience (and the critics) appear to have finished the movie with absolutely enormous reserves of goodwill.

• This is a second did Chang really…?!?! question-raising moment.

• In this case, did Chang really talk to anyone else in the audience?!?!

• Or does he think he is a know-it-all who knows everything about how the audience feels simply by sitting in his basement and typing into the screen as he engages in Visualizing the Cosmic All with his Gigantic Krell-Like Brain?

References (by “AI”):

• BOX OFFICE MOJO. 2026. “Domestic 2026 Weekend 12.” Box Office Mojo. March 20–22. <https://www.boxofficemojo.com/weekend/2026W12/>.

• CHANG, JUSTIN. 2026. “Project Hail Mary: In Space, No One Should Hear Your Glib Jokes.” The New Yorker. March 13. <https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/03/23/project-hail-mary-movie-review>.

• DARGIS, MANOHLA. 2026. “‘Project Hail Mary’ Review: Ryan Gosling Is Lost and Found in Space.” The New York Times. March 19. <https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/19/movies/project-hail-mary-gosling-review.html>.

• ROTTEN TOMATOES. 2026. “Project Hail Mary.” Rotten Tomatoes. March. <https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/project_hail_mary>.

• SCHNELBACH, LEAH. 2026. “Project Hail Mary Is a Delightful, Optimistic Sci-Fi Adventure.” Reactor. March 19. <https://reactormag.com/movie-review-nonspoiler-project-hail-mary/>.

• SIEGLER, M.G. 2026. “Hail Hail.” Afterthoughts…. March 20. <https://thoughts.spyglass.org/p/hail-hail>.

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Unleash Chiang Kai-Shek

I’m sorry, but this is just too weird:

Gainesville.com | The Gainesville Sun | Gainesville, Fla.: After more than an hour of solemn ceremony naming Rep. Marco Rubio, R-West Miami, as the 2007-08 House speaker, Gov. Jeb Bush stepped to the podium in the House chamber last week and told a short story about “unleashing Chang,” his “mystical warrior” friend. Here are Bush’s words, spoken before hundreds of lawmakers and politicians:

“Chang is a mystical warrior. Chang is somebody who believes in conservative principles, believes in entrepreneurial capitalism, believes in moral values that underpin a free society.

“I rely on Chang with great regularity in my public life. He has been by my side and sometimes I let him down. But Chang, this mystical warrior, has never let me down.”

Bush then unsheathed a golden sword and gave it to Rubio as a gift. “I’m going to bestow to you the sword of a great conservative warrior,” he said, as the crowd roared.

The crowd, however, could be excused for not understanding Bush’s enigmatic foray into the realm of Eastern mysticism. We’re here to help. In a 1989 Washington Post article on the politics of tennis, former President George Bush was quoted as threatening to “unleash Chang” as a means of intimidating other players. The saying was apparently quite popular with Gov. Bush’s father, and referred to a legendary warrior named Chang who was called upon to settle political disputes in Chinese dynasties of yore. The phrase has evolved, under Gov. Jeb Bush’s use, to mean the need to fix conflicts or disagreements over an issue. Faced with a stalemate, the governor apparently “unleashes Chang” as a rhetorical device, signaling it’s time to stop arguing and start agreeing.

No word on if Rubio will unleash Chang, or the sword, as he faces squabbles in the future…

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When George H. W. Bush in the 1970s and 1980s threatened to “unleash Chang” on his tennis opponents, he was referring to:

• China’s onetime strongman and thereafter Taiwan’s dictator Chiang Kaishek,

• leader of the Nationalist Party,

• the man who had largely reunified China in the 1920s with his army’s “Northern Expedition,”

• hqd lost the Chinese Civil War to Mao Zedong’s Chinese Communist Party, and

• then taken refuge with his Guomindang party cadres on Taiwan.

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After the start of the Korean War, the American 7th Fleet protected Chiang (and Taiwan) from Mao’s People’s Liberation Army.

Republican wingnuts, however, pretended that the 7th Fleet actually protected Mao’s Communists (who had, after all, won the Chinese Civil War) from Chiang’s Nationalists (who had, after all, lost it) by keeping Chiang Kaishek leashed. They periodically called for the U.S. to “unleash Chiang Kaishek”—so that Chiang, you see, could invade and conquer the Chinese mainland.

When George H. W. Bush, playing tennis (and losing) in the 1970s and 1980s, would threaten to “unleash Chiang,” he was mocking the right-wing nuts of his generation.

But George H. W. Bush’s sons—even the smart one, Jeb—never got the joke.

They, you see, didn’t know enough about world history or even the history of the Republican Party to know who Chiang Kaishek was, or what “Unleash Chiang!” meant.

Hence Jeb Bush’s explanation that twentieth-century Chinese nationalist, socialist, general, and dictator Chiang Kaishek was a “mystical warrior... who believes in conservative principles, believes in entrepreneurial capitalism, believes in moral values that underpin a free society.”

To me, that level of uncuriosity is scary.

Why is this family ruling us, again?

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<https://www.joshbarro.com/cp/189060992>

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Very Serious

Good Things Are Good

Dear readers…

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2 months ago · 73 likes · 9 comments · Josh Barro

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<https://www.joshbarro.com/p/good-things-are-good>: ‘A viral memo, proposing a 2028 market crash because of too much AI-driven productivity growth, makes little sense…

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Let me make this clear, No individual is trying to do this to me. No group has decided to overwhelm me with a flood of interesting and important things to read that disrupts my ability to actually maintain and follow substantive trains of thought. No broad conspiracy is attempting to inflict a CDDA attack—a Cognitive Distributed Disruption of Attention attack—on me.

The “system” is doing it.

But this is a severe crisis

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Therefore. Steps must be taken:

Back up: There is now a flood of things from trusted, or at least interesting, smart people trying their very best, or if they are not trying their very best what they say is interesting in the sene of why this particular tissue of lies and misrepresentations and self-deceptions. So how the hell am I supposed to figure out how to handle all of these things that I should read but cannot physically read all of in a constructive, informative, and helpful way?

This is a structural problem of the information age. When the marginal cost of publishing fell toward zero, the binding constraint shifted from production to attention. What you are confronting is not “too much to read.” It is a regime in which the volume of plausible, credentialed, rhetorically sophisticated output exceeds the cognitive bandwidth of any serious person.

The question is not “How do I read it all?”

The question is: How do I build a decision architecture that extracts signal, detects distortion, and compounds insight over time?

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So what is needed is a structured system—think of it as intellectual portfolio management, which requires ruthless triage as its first layer.

Therefore:

First, Create the Working Triage System: Every incoming piece into one of four bins.

1. Structural Signal (Read Closely): Arguments that: change your model of the world, signal élite coordination. reveal shifts in coalitions’ structures, or provide new empirical data and reinforce empirically grounded arguments. For these: read carefully, annotate, archive.

2. Elite Positioning (Read Strategically): Pieces that: reveal what smart people want to believe (or what they want you to believe, show how narratives are being framed, or indicate ideological consolidation. DO NOT READ FOR TRUTH!!!! Instead, skim to map incentives. Extract framing moves. Move on.

3. Noise with Diagnostic Value (Sample Lightly): These are the “tissueS of lies and misrepresentations and self-deceptions. They are useful as: cultural thermometers, psychological evidence, or coalition messaging tests. But you only need to read 10%. So: drop 90% without reading, and skim a randomly selected 10% until you identify the pattern. Then FULL STOP.

4. Irrelevant Volume (Do Not Touch): If it does not change your model or reveal structure, it is deadweight. Ruthlessly drop it. Even smart people spend a lot of their energy being an uninformative part of some amen chorus.

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Then:

• Build a 5-Level Engagement Ladder: When something arrives: (1) ignore, (2) skim, (3) annotate privately, (4) write a short note to yourself, (5) publish a response. Most items should die at level 1 or 2. Very few deserve 5.

• Manage Your Information Portfolio: You are allocating scarce capital (attention) across uncertain projects (texts). So: 70% of your reading should deepen existing frameworks, 20% should explore adjacent domains, and 10% should probe wild cards. DO NOT INVERT THIS RATIO!!!!

• Move from “Reading” to “Model Updating”: Instead of asking “should I read this?” ask instead “what specific parameter of my Visualization of the Cosmic All might this update?” If none, skip. If yes, define in advance what you are looking for: evidence? argument structure? coalition signal? Empirical data. Reading with a parameter target. Then FULL STOP.

• Schedule “Deep Model Days”: Designate specific times for intake, separate intake from synthesis, and separate synthesis from publication. Start a weekly model-update memo to yourself, for compounding requires reflection time.

• MAINTAIN A DO NOT RISE TO THE BAIT!!!! List: Many smart people write things that are: wrong, frustrating, provocative, and yet not worth engaging. Create a private list of “arguments I will not respond to” to preserve cognitive serenity and public leverage.

If I start to ruthlessly follow this program with my incoming information stream, I may be able to recover the time I need to do Deep Reading and Deep Analysis. But as it is—things do not look good.

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John Warner: David Brooks Sucks <https://biblioracle.substack.com/p/david-brooks-sucks-this-is-who-should>: ‘After 22 years, David Brooks has announced his intention to stop sucking at the New York Times and instead to go suck as a staff writer at The Atlantic and also to suck at Yale University where he will be the first presidential senior fellow in the university’s Jackson School of Global Affairs. He will also be doing a podcast at The Atlantic underwritten by Yale University….

A reason David Brooks sucks related to the first reason: He’s a coward.

Bill Kristol… now sounds like the leader of the Trump resistance, decrying elite failure to confront an authoritarian. Meanwhile, consider Brooks’ response in the aftermath of the murder of Renee Good in his weekly confab with Jonathan Capehart on the PBS NewsHour…. Brooks immediately invokes a classic sociological study in which students at Princeton and Dartmouth were shown film of a football game between the two schools and the students were more likely to record penalty infractions against their rival…. Brooks… distance[s] himself from having to make a judgment and instead mak[es]… a banal observation…. His own opinion?: “As to the events of what actually happened, I’m not going to render a judgment on what happened, because we’re going to have an investigation. I will leave it to them. And I hope Minnesota has full information to do the investigation…” The man sees footage of a murder and can’t manage to say so. It’s almost pathological. To my knowledge and after much searching I cannot find any public comment from David Brooks about the murder of Alex Pretti.

Another reason David Brooks sucks: He makes shit up.

From the beginning, David Brooks has been full of shit, allowed to repeatedly Malcolm Gladwell stray bits of academic research into grand theories of society that get turned into conventional political wisdom…. In 2004, Sasha Issenberg walked through Brooks’ claims in an Atlantic article “One Nation, Slightly Divisible” and found them to be largely inventions not grounded in reality. When confronted by Issenberg, Brooks accused Issenberg of approaching his critique as a dishonest reporter and that Brooks’ work holds up because it “rings true.”… Issenberg captures the crux of the problem: “By holding himself to a rings-true standard, Brooks acknowledges that all he does is present his readers with the familiar and ask them to recognize it…. Essentially, Brooks set out to be Tom Wolfe, but having neither Wolfe’s panache nor his eye, nor the courage to present his work as “this is what I saw and believe” as Wolfe did, Brooks instead substitutes “this is what my research and reporting say is true.” He’s a bastardized version of the New Journalists he idolized. In 2015, David Zweig tried to track down a Brooks reference to a Gallup survey from The Road to Character: “In 1950, the Gallup Organization asked high school seniors if they considered themselves to be a very important person. At that point, 12 percent said yes. The same question was asked in 2005, and this time it wasn’t 12 percent who considered themselves very important, it was 80 percent.” When Zweig went down the Brooks bullshit rabbit hole he found him quoting a different year to Bill Maher (1998) and a third reference in Brooks’ The Social Animal to the 2nd survey being in the late 1980s. An email to Brooks’ publicist said that despite the study being not by Gallup and not saying what Brooks’ said it said, “the sociological trend is accurate.” Making stuff up and then covering with vague references to research and data is the consistent hallmark of his work.…

I don’t know the man. He could be a great guy, good tipper, kind to animals, always willing to lend an ear to someone who needs it. I don’t even feel any antipathy towards him as a person, but what he’s done, what he represents, and the influence he’s had on our public politics… sucks…

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David Brooks Sucks. This is Who Should Replace Him

After 22 years, David Brooks has announced his intention to stop sucking at the New York Times and instead to go suck as a staff writer at The Atlantic and also to suck at Yale University where he will be the first presidential senior fellow in the university’s Jackson School of Global Affairs…

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3 months ago · 48 likes · 25 comments · John Warner

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I hope first-generation internet stalwart Josh Marshall and his TPM “Talking Points Memo” team <http://talkingpointsmemo.com> won’t be too mad at me for crossposting this, and thus pulling it out from behind his paywall of TPM members. Here it is at its original location in the form of a gift link, I think: <https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/thinking-clearly-about-the-global-authoritarian-movement>. Do join TPM and get their “The Backchannel” member newsletter (“one must-read delivered daily to your inbox”), along with unlimited access to all TPM articles and member features: <https://talkingpointsmemo.com/memberships>.

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This weblog has never been in the “call to action” business. But today I want to make an ask: In our current situation, the same wetware that evolved for a roving band of 150 East African Plains Ape souls on the veldt is now thrown into a billion‑person feed curated by authoritarian‑curious plutocrat-oligarchs. So please to something to slightly unkew our mediasphere of public reason. That is my simple, bossy ask: support one of the outfits—Josh Marshall’s TPM—that is stubbornly on the side of civic democracy.

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Josh Marshall: Thinking Clearly About the Global Authoritarian Movement <https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/thinking-clearly-about-the-global-authoritarian-movement>>: ‘Day after day we’re seeing more signs of Donald Trump’s slipping grip not only on public opinion, but at the margins of the GOP itself. But I thought it was a good time to remind ourselves that Donald Trump isn’t the only problem. Yes, there’s the GOP, which could easily dispatch him at any point if he didn’t have an iron hold over the party. There’s the 30%-40% of voters who are solidly in the MAGA camp. Without them, Trump’s nothing. I don’t mean either of those. I’m talking about the global authoritarian movement, which includes and is even perhaps led by Trump. But it exists quite apart from him and has roots in some of the wealthiest and most powerful people and governments around the world.

I’m talking about the Authoritarian International which includes a host of authoritarian governments around the world, the princelings of the Gulf monarchies, the sprinkling of European right-ravanchist governments, the rightward portion of Silicon Valley (which accounts for a larger and larger percentage of the top owners if not the larger community), the Israeli private intel sector, various post-Soviet oligarchs and, increasingly, the world’s billionaire class. Trump is their avatar, but they exist and are now joined together in a way that will outlive him personally and electorally.

Early in the Biden administration I talked to a U.S. hedge funder who gets invited to the confabs Mohammed bin Salman has put on for the world’s billionaires since he became the country’s de facto leader. He described that world to me, a bit about its mores, what he saw. As you’d imagine for this 21st Century kind of Kremlinology, who gets to sit next to MBS at the dinners is the subject of close scrutiny and much envy. At the last of these confabs before this conversation, Jared Kushner had been given the seat of honor at something like every dinner. He was MBS’s guy. And remember, this was when Trump was at his nadir. Maybe MBS and the Saudis just had a better view of America’s political future than I did. Certainly possible. But the bigger takeaway was: this wasn’t just a transactional relationship. Kushner and MBS and Trump and MBS were a thing in and out of office.

It is not so much an anti-democratic world — though it is certainly that — as an anti-civic world. It’s a world of private, one-off deals, mutual pledges of secrecy, often enforced by soft, mutual extortion, and above all, a rejection of democratic accountability. We saw this coming into view during the late Biden administration, when Biden was already rapidly losing public support, with Elon Musk’s increasingly brazen efforts to run U.S. foreign policy from Twitter and SpaceX. The Saudis meanwhile were trying to ease Biden out of office through the manipulation of oil prices. It was no accident that Musk was advancing a strongly pro-Russian line in Ukraine, where he was most visibly trying to undermine U.S. policy.

I’ve discussed this concept in the past. So I don’t want to belabor the point of its existence. I want to point out how its forces are arrayed against civic democracy in the U.S. — quite apart from Donald Trump. This wasn’t always the case. There didn’t use to be so many U.S. billionaires. And they characteristically had economic views which aimed to preserve their wealth. But they were not clearly on the right in the way they are now. They have moved an increasingly anti-civic democratic direction as the scale of their wealth and their identity as a class has exploded. They also weren’t so increasingly allied with primitive economy petro-states of the Gulf.

The point is that they will exist no matter what happens to Trump. They command vast economic resources; they run the governments in many countries where the government never changes; they have deep tentacles into the U.S. political system and many of its key players are from the U.S. Trump didn’t create this movement precisely. But his role in global politics over the last decade solidified it as a self-conscious group and congealed it together. Any movement of civic democratic revival in the U.S. will be menaced by its continued existence. Now is the time to think about how a revived and revitalized civic democratic movement in the U.S. could combat it and avoid being destroyed by it.

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Okay. That is the end of Josh’s piece.

Let me pick up the microphone.

Let me begin with a confession: If the early-2000s political internet had had a Hall of Fame, Josh Marshall would have been in the inaugural class, first ballot, unanimous. Before social media turned discourse into a weaponized Skinner box, he built something different and better: a small‑d democratic, empirically grounded, relentlessly curious public square that just happened to live on a blog called Talking Points Memo.

Marshall comes out of what we might call the first cohort of analog‑to‑digital public-reason processing nodes in the real ASI—the Anthology Super-Intelligence that is the collective Mind of the human race. Trained as a Ph.D. historian at Brown: BA from Princeton, then MA and PhD in American history with a dissertation on 17th‑century New England. His path into journalism was via writing rather than a journalism degree. In the late 1990s he freelanced for The American Prospect, then became an associate editor and later its Washington editor. He made the fateful decision around 2000 to start a one‑man politics blog. That experiment—half notebook, half newsroom—grew into TPM, with a newsroom of more than a dozen staffers and more than thirty-five thousand paying subscribers who account for most of its revenue. It is, as the Columbia Journalism Review calls it, a scrappy outfit. Operating out of a Manhattan walk‑up, it stayed on the U.S. attorneys scandal long after bigger newsrooms had moved on to the next shiny object, winning a Polk Award. It shows that a reader‑entangled form of investigative journalism was possible, and that it could matter: Josh says:

Josh Marshall: How Talking Points Memo Lasted a Quarter Century <https://www.cjr.org/the-interview/how-talking-points-memo-survived-25-years-trump-crisis.php>: ‘I describe TPM as a bloid for smart people. I wanted to punch you in the face with headlines that are edgy…. Political news… is a spectacle… fun, in a way… something to be excited about… engrossed by… entertained by…. [But] we also want you to think what we’re talking about is important, but we want those things together…

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What distinguishes Marshall is not just scoops or longevity, but the way he re‑engineered the relationship between writer, readers, and story. From the beginning, TPM readers were not just “audience” but a distributed research department and early‑warning radar system: lawyers flagging obscure filings, bureaucrats pointing to buried notice‑and‑comment records, citizens spotting local oddities before national media caught on. Marshall’s voice—conversational, historically aware, openly analytical rather than faux‑omniscient—made it natural to fold that reader intelligence back into the work. The virtuous circle he describes between writing, reader response, and deeper reporting is part of what I mean by the positive internet: an online space that makes people smarter, not more brittle and enraged.

He also refused one of the grand delusions of digital media: the idea that journalism is, or ought to be, a tech startup chasing “hockey‑stick growth.” Where others took venture money and pursued scale for its own sake, Marshall slowly built a membership‑funded enterprise that treats subscribers less as eyeballs to be monetized than as co‑owners of a long‑running civic project. That business choice is normative as well as financial: it aligns TPM’s incentives with sustaining a reality‑based public sphere rather than optimizing for outrage and virality.

In today’s internet—largely colonized by authoritarian‑curious billionaires, rage‑bait algorithms, and suffering the massive dysfunctions of our Attention Info-Bio Tech mode of production—Marshall’s corner of the web remains stubbornly pro‑reality and pro‑democracy. TPM is not perfect (nothing human is), but it is one of the places where serious, good‑faith engagement with American politics still happens: careful close reads of indictments and court filings; long arcs of coverage on corruption, democratic backsliding, and institutional decay; running commentary that never forgets there are actual stakes for actual people.

If you care about the possibility that the internet can still be a commons rather than just an ad‑tech‑mediated arena for trolling and manipulation, Josh Marshall’s career is Exhibit A for the proposition that another path was—and still is—available. He showed that a small, stubborn, historically literate operation, in loyal conversation with its readers, can do real journalism, shape real outcomes, and keep alive the idea that being extremely online need not mean being permanently diminished.

And, let me say, it is on you, dear reader, to keep Josh Marshall and his TPM going. Lots of organizations that had the potential to be like TPM either vanished or lost their souls as, in Josh’s words, they:

got mesmerized by what I would call a theoretical audience—the metrics that tell you that you have ten million uniques. But that’s not an audience. That is your role in the eddies and currents of the internet. That’s not people who are really invested in you continuing to exist, and we didn’t lose sight of that. Getting spellbound by notional audience numbers was meaningful, in some ways, in a certain advertising era, but it was not a real audience…

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And when the advertising era shifted, or when it turns out that the financiers and media organizations you thought were your backers do “what Condé Nast just did to Teen Vogue.”, or you suffer from one of the many ways to lose control over your mission, they either vanished or became, well, next to useless as things worth reading.

So the point of this is: I command you, I impose a geas on you: subscribe to Talking Points Memo, at least for a while, to see if it is for you: <https://talkingpointsmemo.com/memberships>.

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And let me make another point. I know Josh Marshall. I have emailed him a number of times over the years, and gotten responses back. I even think I have talked to him in person. If asked “are you friends?”, I would knee-jerk answer “yes”.

But, actually, I am not friends with Josh Marshall the human being. I am friends with something I have constructed out of black squiggles on my computer screens, from which I have spun-up my personal subTuring instantiation of the mind of a Josh Marshall-like entity, run that on my wetware, and spent a lot of time reading, talking, arguing, and responding to that in my mind’s eye. 98% of what I think of as my “interactions” with Josh Marshall are things of which he is completely unaware.

This is one of the odder facts about me in 2026. If you were to ask my brain for a list of “people I spend substantial time with every month,” you would not get neighbors and you would not get any but a few of my colleagues on the fifth and sixth floors of Berkeley’s Evans Hall. You would get a somewhat motley crew of curated information sources: working-paper authors, newsletter writers, podcasters, and algorithmically-surfaced streamers and such who show up in your feeds often enough that they feel like part of the furniture of your mind.

In terms of sheer hours of exposure and emotional arousal, even most of our real relationships these days are primarily parasocial.

This is not, in itself, brand new. Radio audiences thought they knew FDR. Moviegoers thought they knew Greta Garbo. Horton and Wohl were writing about “parasocial interaction” back when broadcast television was still shiny. But these were obviously and exclusively parasocial, and these were with celebrities. The novelty is scale, intensity, and infrastructure. We have built a communications environment in which a very large share of our social cognition is pointed either at people who are not really celebrities but who do not know we exist, or at people we know but for whom the social is the part of the iceberg that is above the surface, while the parasocial is the part of the iceberg below.

Think of what a human brain evolved to do. For 99 percent of our history, social life was bounded by Dunbar’s number of 150 people: one village, a few dozen intense ties, a couple hundred weak ones. Affection, status, obligation, and reputation were anchored in reciprocal observation: if you slighted someone, you had to see them at the well tomorrow.

Now the same wetware is deployed into a mediasphere where the “village” is a billion-person feed, and the people who most reliably trigger our attention systems are those who broadcast strong signals—charisma, outrage, fear, desire—without any of the feedback that would normally tame them. The result is a strange skew in our moral and emotional budgets.

Now these not exclusively but largely parasocial ties are an enormous net benefit to me. But I do wish more of the people whose writings and speakings trigger the subTuring wetware ‘bots that inhabit my brain knew that their instantiation-avatar presences that run on my wetware and that command my attention were there, and how large a presence they are in my mental universe.

And I hope that this makes Josh Marshall aware of that.

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• Lindsey, Brink. 2026. The Permanent Problem: The Uncertain Transition from Mass Plenty to Mass Flourishing. New York: Oxford University Press. <https://brinklindsey.substack.com/> <https://www.niskanencenter.org/the-permanent-problem/>.

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My friend Brink Lindsey is unhappy: Two reviewers of his book—Michael Strain and Jonathan Rauch—seem not to have read his book with enough attention to understand it.

Rauch <https://www.theunpopulist.net/p/lets-not-grant-the-postliberal-critique> dismisses it with “had I stopped reading after Chapter 7, I would take the book for a postliberal screed that outdoes anything by Patrick Deneen….”, titles his harsh review “Let’s Not Grant the Postliberal Critique of Market Liberalism”, and grudgingly concludes “If you mentally dial down its excesses, you will find ideas that might measurably improve the quality of modern life” without every mentioning what those ideas are.

Strain <https://www.aei.org/op-eds/is-affluence-a-barrier-to-living-well/> dismisses Lindsey as a confused writer who falsely thinks that “affluence [is] a barrier to living well”, and classifies his argument as “consistent with post-liberal commentators’ arguments that democratic capitalism is exhausted, a failed experiment and an obstacle to human flourishing”. He ripostes that his complaints spring simply from the fact that “we are a fallen people in a fallen world” and that any special “anxiety… seems wildly misplaced in our current age of… GLP-1 [agonist] drugs for diabetes and weight loss… rapid progress on treatments for… Alzheimer’s and cancer… [and] generative AI, which even the most pessimistic… expect will increase trend productivity growth noticeably…. American society was much less affluent and in much worse shape in the 1850s”.

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And so Brink protests:

Brink Lindsey: Links & Some Thoughts About Early Critics <https://brinklindsey.substack.com/p/links-and-some-thoughts-about-early>: ‘Mike Tyson put it, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”… The… left-right… that threw me for a loop was getting lumped in with… post-liberals… who regard the whole of post-Enlightenment liberal modernity as a tragic mistake…. Jonathan Rauch:] “Had I stopped reading after Chapter 7, I would take the book for a postliberal screed that outdoes anything by Patrick Deneen”… [Michael Strain:] “Lindsey’s assessment is consistent with post-liberal commentators’ arguments that democratic capitalism is exhausted, a failed experiment and an obstacle to human flourishing”….

What leads… [them] to swing so wildly?… I believe… a newish intellectual fault line… the division between the “brokenists” and the “anti-brokenists…. Brokenists, like myself, regard the political upheavals of the past decade as an understandable but misguided reaction to serious underlying maladies…. Anti-brokenists… insist… [on] “derangement syndromes” that render people unable to handle living in a fallen, messy world…. In… [my] view… dismissing widespread disaffection… as so much hysteria and entitled whining is doomed to failure…. I’ll stick to my guns…. But it is dispiriting that, after a decade of populist distempers, so many of my fellow liberals still don’t understand the nature of the challenge that confronts them…

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Brink needs help. Let me try to provide some:

First, let me set out my understanding of what the book is:

Brink Lindsey’s The Permanent Problem argues that rich liberal democracies have solved the “economic problem” of material scarcity but are now failing at what John Maynard Keynes called humanity’s “permanent problem”: how to use our freedom and abundance “to live wisely and agreeably and well.” Lindsey’s central claim is that we have entered a “middle flourishing trap.” At precisely the point when material scarcity recedes, our social arrangements, institutions, and culture start working against flourishing—both by fraying human connections and by sapping dynamism. The book diagnoses a triple crisis of inclusion, dynamism, and politics inside advanced capitalism. It seeks to refocus and rebalance so that technological progress and human-scale flourishing reinforce rather than undermine each other.

Lindsey’s definition of individual flourishing centers on close relationships (family, friends, community), meaningful projects (work or nonwork efforts that demand skill and conscientiousness), and rich experiences (the cultivated ability to attend to the world’s “miracle of consciousness”). Flourishing societies combine inclusiveness (dense webs of belonging and status for most people) with dynamism (the capacity to explore, experiment, and innovate, and to turn new capabilities into better lives). Judged by this standard advanced societies fall short.

The crisis of inclusion springs from the new class divide along educational lines. Relative demand for labor, bargaining power, and the relative social status of ordinary people have been sharply downgraded by the coming of the Second Gilded Age. A “meritocratic” elite grows, concentrates residentially and maritally, and intergenerationally hardens into a quasi‑caste, while the would‑be working class is scattered through low‑status service jobs, with thinning prospects and fraying social ties, with this economic realignment of inequality mirrored in private life as marriage, stable two‑parent families, church attendance, and embedded community life hold up among the highly educated but collapse elsewhere. The old working‑class ecosystem of unions, neighborhood institutions, and religious congregations has largely disappeared, and nothing comparably binding has replaced it.

The crisis of dynamism is the slowing of total factor productivity growth in the “world of atoms” since the 1970s, masked only by the exceptional boom in information technology. Big growth contributors—rising female labor‑force participation, mass educational upgrading, the “two big waves” of first Applied-Science and later Mass -roduction technologies—were once‑only transitions that have largely played out. A pervasive NIMBYism arises as people who feel they have more to lose become more risk‑averse, and the political system responds by multiplying veto points. That is then reinforced by an aging society.

The crisis of politics is the replacement of democratic politics focused on promoting the use of industrial-era technologies to create and distribute mass wealth has been replaced by “multi‑elite” professionalized performative identity politics, with Thomas Piketty’s classification of a culturally progressive, highly educated “Brahmin left” and a culturally conservative, wealthy “merchant right” vying for different segments of the electorate, leaving ordinary workers’ material interests by the wayside as status conflicts, expressive identity, and media spectacle become overwhelming.

These are then supercharged by the attention info-bio tech economy’s focus on attention harvesting, as first television and then the internet and social media erode “deep literacy,” shorten attention spans, and encourage politics as entertainment. Thus the “constitution of knowledge” that liberal democracy depends on—shared facts and trust in epistemic institutions—decays. The result is a fertile habitat for authoritarian populism, and symbolic victories and expressive gestures routinely drowning out actual governance.

In sum, as Lindsey put it elsewhere, the complete victory of individuality-centered wealth creation has the result that:

All the intermediate social structures that grew up over centuries are dismantled, the structure of society radically simplifies: what once was a complicated, often convoluted amalgam of overlapping and competing hierarchies and authorities and loyalties resolves into an undifferentiated mass of subjects under a single rationalizing central authority….

All the intermediate institutions that lend structure and coherence and solidarity and workable consensus to the superhuman scale of contemporary mass society are in decline. You can see it in the steadily dropping numbers for public trust in most major social institutions. The result is progressive atomization, as people’s connections to anything other than the market and state loosen and fray. Under these circumstances, as the bottom-up structures of mass society disintegrate, the only thing holding the social order together is top-down control…

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In Lindsey’s view, we need more than:

• negative freedom from constraint,

• and positive freedom in the sense of the power to manipulate nature to suit all purposes,

• all structured and watched over by the institutions we have built,

• the societal-scale institutions that enable 8.3 billion East African Plains Apes to carry out a physical and a cognitive distributed division of labor at scale.

We also need:

• positive freedom in the sense of the ability to form groups,

• groups at human scale,

• so that we can do things that matter to us,

• both individually and communally.

Hence Lindsey then proposes a two‑part response:

• First, embrace an “abundance agenda” that restores technological dynamism in energy, housing, physical infrastructure, and food, using both state capacity and market competition to drive down the cost of living and decarbonize and “de‑animalize” production.

• Second, embrace an “egalitarian-connection agenda” by equalizing societal power in the form of wealth to command the attention of the market and creating societal power in the form of enabling “abundance at human scale” via shifting responsibilities back from market capitalism and state bureaucracy to chosen face‑to‑face community association, via webs of relationship and agency.

Thus Lindsey’s answer to Keynes’s <https://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf> permanent problem of how to enable people to live “wisely and agreeably and well” is not to overthrow capitalism. It is to use its extraordinary capacity for innovation and wealth creation to boost our collective societal power. It is then to distribute that power to make more people independent of the market’s harshest disciplines. And it is then to cultivate social forms and cultural values that channel autonomy and independence into richer lives of connection, purpose, and shared stewardship of both society and the natural world.

So what does Brink think is the relationship between his position and the post-liberalism box into which Rauch and Strain are so eager to put him?

It is this:

Brink Lindsey: Life Under “An Immense & Tutelary Power” <https://brinklindsey.substack.com/p/life-under-an-immense-and-tutelary>: ‘I reject this post-liberal position completely and unreservedly…. There are totalitarian tendencies in modernity…. But the dominant tendencies have surely been liberating and humanitarian… dramatic uplift in material living standards… explosion in scientific knowledge and technological capabilities… mass literacy and schooling… governments subject to popular control and the rule of law… the stigmatization of war… widespread embrace of… universal human dignity. I find it genuinely hard to understand how [post-liberal] thinkers… can fail to recognize the profoundly anti-human implications of their ideas…

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Brink Lindsey no like post-liberalism at all. He rejects it “completely and unreservedly”.

For Brink Lindsey, the problem is not the Enlightenment. The problem, rather, is that our abilities to manipulate nature and collectively organize ourselves have become too powerful. They have given us mass society. And mass society is too massive. Our abilities to manipulate nature, communicate across the world, and organize ourselves have left us with autonomous individuals on the one hand. And they have left us with massive and massively efficient and effective societal mechanisms for coordination on the other.

We have market economies with their price signals and their equilibria. We have states—democratic states, for now at least—setting-up rules of interaction and issuing commands via what really is a tremendously efficient bureaucratic order. We have ideologies creating and enforcing common values and orientations and operating procedures to a degree that the Prussian General Staff college dreamed of but never managed to attain. And we always have the possibility of a charismatic personalist dictatorship, law-abiding or not, giving mass society direction. on the other—whether by a market equilibrium, a bureaucratic command, an ideological conformity-enforcement, or an overmighty authoritarian personalist dictator. And that is not the human scale we need for autonomy and agency, and thus for human flourishing.

These societal-scale institutions squash the individual: liberate us from material scarcity and personal hierarchical domination and empower us to control nature and organize ourselves on the one hand, but subject us to the dominion of extraordinary strong powers—market systems, bureaucratic systems, ideological systems, and now algorithmic systems—that seem arbitrary and alien. They seem so because they are. They make us their playthings, controlling us by making us offers we dare not refuse, for refusing them hobbles our very valuable extraordinary material prosperity.

Perhaps we should look back at Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his “Four Freedoms” <https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/president-franklin-roosevelts-annual-message-to-congress>:

• Freedom from want,

• Freedom from fear,

• Freedom of speech,

• Freedom of religion.

Freedom from want has been granted to us by modernity: its market economy, its resulting highly productive division of labor, its science, and its technology.

Freedom from fear has been granted us by the rule of law established and then managed by the framework of majority rule and minority rights—or, in the United States, had been established until the coming of ICE.

Freedom of religion is itself one of the greatest treasures we have from the Enlightenment.vFreedom of speech as well.

Missing, however, from Roosevelt’s list are two more freedoms:

• Freedom to govern oneself at human scale—rather than finding oneself the puppet of market, bureaucratic, and ideological forces.

• Freedom to connect and act with others and so make a difference—at a human scale.

These freedoms are not Roosevelts freedoms “of” and “from”. These missing freedoms are freedoms “to”. To be more than the mere plaything of alien powers—markets, bureaucracies, ideologies, and algorithms—as they do not listen to us as individuals, even though they are aspects of us considered as an anthology intelligence

Perhaps the best way to grok what Brink is saying here is to consider him as the Second Coming of Alexis de Toqueville. He is a thinker in the Tocquevillian <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexis_de_Tocqueville> mode, deploying Tocqueville’s concepts of the “tyranny of the majority” and “aristocracy of manufactures” as descriptions of our societal pathologies today—the pathologies internal to our liberal democratic capitalist order now in transition from the globalized value-chain to the attention info-bio tech economy.

For Tocqueville, remember, a democratic majority is not some mystical embodiment of “the people”; it is, as he puts it, “only an individual” scaled up, with its own interests and passions opposed to those of each of its minorities. Thus he worries about its “irresistible strength.” His observations of the United States in the 1830s impress upon him that when someone is wronged in the United States there is nowhere outside the majority to appeal. Moreover, majority power becomes moral and psychological. A king’s authority is “purely physical”: he can coerce actions but not inner convictions. A democratic majority, by contrast, exercises “a power which is physical and moral at the same time”. And so via social pressure he sees “no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America”, it being mightier than censorship.

As for the “aristocracy of manufactures”, Tocqueville asks how democracy’s own industrial tendencies can generate a new, truncated aristocracy inside an egalitarian society. The (1) division of labor, where the worker repeats a tiny task and becomes exquisitely skilled at it; and (2) economies of scale are essential to modern prosperity. But that produces workers “more adroit and less industrious” as the industrial regime “binds him to a craft, and frequently to a spot, which he cannot leave”: “The art advances, the artisan recedes.” No longer a maker of things and so changing the world, workers become increasingly cogs, and paper- (or rather electron-) shuffling cogs.

The missing intermediary organizations and associations that Brink Lindsey wants to revive are keys to resisting the tyranny of the majority and also providing space for agency, autonomy, and meaning in a word dominated by the unfeeling aristocracy of manufactures.

Thus the right way to read Brink Lindsey’s The Permanent Problem is this: The book argues that rich liberal democracies have solved material scarcity but stumbled into a “middle flourishing trap,” where the very institutions that delivered abundance now undermine inclusion, dynamism, and democratic politics.

Michael Strain and Jonathan Rauch read the book as post‑liberal fatigue with democratic capitalism, or even as hostility to affluence itself.

That is almost exactly wrong.

Lindsey’s villain is not the Enlightenment. It is not even the societal-scale institutions that enable our extraordinarily productive physical and cognitive divisions of labor: markets, bureaucracies, ideologies, and algorithms.

Lindsey is trying to salvage liberal modernity by rebuilding the human‑scale connective tissue—families, communities, associations—that mass markets, bureaucracies, and now algorithms have thinned out. The goal is not less capitalism but using capitalism’s surplus to buy more autonomy, connection, and meaning. Only then can we learn to live “wisely and agreeably and well” in our world in which scarcity has receded. But to live wisely and well, we need more than freedoms “of”—speech and religion. We need more than freedoms “from”—fear and want. We need freedoms “to”, the freedoms provided by decayed intermediating institutions that once gave ordinary people status, solidarity, and leverage. Seen through a Tocquevillian lens of “tyranny of the majority” and “aristocracy of manufactures,” Lindsey’s project is to civilize a mass society that has become too massive, not to overthrow it.

What do I think of Lindsey’s diagnosis, assessment, and project? I will have to leave that for another time.

I do have a day job, after all.

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Along comes Han Hong, writing in the Tang Dynasty more than a millennium ago, to tell you: the East African Plains Ape has been watching power rot into corruption for a very long time—and has been very clear-eyed about how it looks from below. Here Phil H takes Han’s ““Cold Food Festival poem and patiently, expertly unpacks it. Petals, willows, candles, springtime in the China’s Tang Dynasty Chang’an. But then you learn the backstory—that these are supposed to be days of darkness and cold food for everyone, with no flame, no fire, no light—shared austerity as shared commemoration of the misdeeds of the powerful.

Except, of course, that the truly powerful are never in the dark. Imperial dispensation sends literal lines of light from the palace to the mansions of the well-connected, tracing out in wax and smoke the circuits of privilege. Once Phil has walked you through that message from Han Hong, you cannot unsee it. The petals are not just petals; they are favorites floating free of any rooted obligation. The willows do not simply sway; they bend, and we know before whom. The candle-smoke that ought to signify warmth and civilization becomes the visible exhalation of a system that tells the many to shiver so that the few can dine by candlelight.

Every age has its own choreography of corruption—its own ways of making injustice visible, then trying to insist that you don’t believe your lying eyes. Han Hong caught one such choreography in four sharp lines. Phil helps us recognize it:

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<https://tangpoetry.substack.com/cp/187421883>

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When Ian McKellen brings a 1517 anti‑immigrant riot onto Colbert’s stage, it throws Trump, Miller, ICE, Minneapolis, and Susan Collins’s Maine exception into a very harsh light. A four‑hundred‑year‑old speech about “wretched strangers” explains more about America’s ICE raids and senatorial clientelism than a shelf of think‑tank reports. Shakespeare’s version of Thomas More demands we imagine ourselves as the immigrant; Trump’s Washington and Collins’s Maine prefer a bespoke exemption from the terror-harassment.

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Ian McKellen & Stephen Colbert. 2026. “There Is Nothing I Enjoy More Than Acting In The Theater”. The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. February 4. <https://youtu.be/2l2RqzVG4ag?si=Kaf0sXCC8qEsjjs-&t=1339>

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On Colbert’s Late Show, Ian McKellen ended his very delightful interview by performing the Thomas More speech calming the London anti-immigrant riots of 1517, according to William Shakespeare and his coauthor-playwrights, together authors of the “Sir Thomas More” play never staged in Shakespeare’s lifetime. It is, ala, entirely current:

Grant them [the immigrants] removed.

And grant that this your noise hath chid down all the majesty of England. Imagine that you see the wretched strangers, their babies at their backs with their poor luggage, plodding to the ports and coasts for transportation; and that you sit as kings in your desires, authority quite silenced by your brawl, and you in ruff of your opinions clothed. What have you got?

I’ll tell you: you have taught how insolence and strong hand should prevail, how order should be quelled. And by this pattern not one of you should live an aged man; for other ruffians, as their fancies wrought, with self‑same hand, self reason and self‑right, would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes feed on one another.

You’ll put down strangers, kill them, cut their throats, possess their houses. Oh, desperate as you are, wash your foul minds with tears; and those same hands that you, like rebels, lift against the peace, lift up for peace, and your unreverent knees, make them your feet to kneel, to be forgiven.

And say now the king, as he is clement if the offender mourn, should so much come too short of your great trespass as but to banish you. Whither would you go?

What country, by the nature of your error, should give you harbor? Go you to France or Flanders, to any German province, Spain or Portugal—anywhere that not adheres to England—why, you must needs be strangers.

Would you be pleased to find a nation of such barbarous temper, that, breaking out in hideous violence, would not afford you an abode on earth; set their detested knives against your throats, spurn you like dogs, and, like as if that God owned not nor made not you, nor that the elements were all appropriate to your comforts, but chartered unto them?

What would you think, to be thus used?

This is the stranger’s case; and this your mountainish inhumanity…

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Ian McKellen walked onto Stephen Colbert’s stage and did something that American “grown‑up” politics has not managed in a very long time: he made the moral stakes of immigration policy unmistakable.

He did it not with a white paper, or a pollster‑tested slogan, but by reaching back four centuries to a fragment of Shakespeare—a speech Shakespeare and his fellow playwrights had written to put into the mouth of Thomas More—and dropping it squarely into our Minneapolis‑2026, ICE‑on‑the-streets present.

The setup, as McKellen patiently explained, is simple:

• London, 1517.

• A mob is in the streets, rioting against “strangers” – recent immigrants.

• The rioters demand they be driven out.

• The authorities send out a young lawyer, Thomas More, to quiet the riot. H

• He does it in two ways:

• First, the prosaic one: you cannot riot like this; it is against the law.

• Second, the one only a dramatist of Shakespeare’s caliber can supply: an appeal to imagination and reciprocity.: “Imagine that you see the wretched strangers,/Their babies at their backs, and their poor luggage,/Plodding to the ports and coasts for transportation…”

And then the knife:

Would you be pleased to find a nation of such barbarous temper
That, breaking out in hideous violence, would not afford you an abode on earth…?
What would you think to be thus used?
This is the stranger’s case; and this your mountainish inhumanity…

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It’s hard to imagine a more direct rebuke to the core emotional engine of Trump‑Miller immigration politics: the insistence that the people we turn into examples and statistics cannot, must not, be imagined as ourselves.

Now juxtapose that with the news crawl under McKellen’s performance.

While McKellen is channeling Shakespeare’s version young Thomas More, the actual United States government is conducting what Minneapolis protesters, the ACLU, and Common Cause are calling and what we are all seeing the ICE terror‑and‑harassment campaign. Masked ICE and Border Patrol agents in unmarked vans; murder; “surge” operations that look less like law enforcement and more like a test run for an internal security service. The administration’s priority is not removing dangerous people without legal immigration status. It is demonstrating, for the cameras and the base, that there exists a class of humans inside the United States who may be treated as less than fully human. Moreover, the president and his functionaries are the ones who decide who is in that class—and if you anger them, you may join them, and the Supreme Court’s corrupt majority is likely to stay any attempt by any lower court to vindicate the rights the American Constitution gives you.

Stephen Miller wrote the anti-immigrant riot-crowd’s talking points in his sleep.

There is a “moderate” wing of the Republican Party. There are people who insist that they are troubled by the tone, uncomfortable with the cruelty. But, alas, somehow they find themselves voting to fund the apparatus almost every time it comes up.

Which brings us to Senator Susan Collins of Maine. Collins has built an entire career out of wringing her hands while walking, firmly, with her caucus. On the Supreme Court, on tax cuts, on impeachments one and two. She specializes in expressing concern while enabling outcomes. And so, when the ICE surge operations finally began to bite politically – not morally, not constitutionally, but politically—how did she respond?

By asking that they please, if it wouldn’t be too much trouble, stop in Maine.

The reporting is striking. As she watched Minneapolis, Collins was on the phone to the White House and DHS leadership working toward a “solution”: the administration would call off large‑scale ICE operations in her state. Not everywhere. Not as a matter of the rule of law. As a carve‑out. The official line is that this was a “win”: Collins, we are told, “stood up” to the administration and delivered for her constituents. And it is, in the crudest transactional sense, a win. Fewer Black and brown families in Maine will have to look over their shoulders in the supermarket parking lot. If you live there, you would be crazy not to be relieved.

This is, I think, the piece that McKellen’s performance throws into such unforgiving relief.

Shakespeare’s More insists on universality. The whole rhetorical trick is to force the rioters to imagine themselves as the people they wish to drive out, and then to ask: when you are the stranger, what rights do you want to claim, and what obligations will you wish others had recognized?

And Collins? As a good New England retail politician she seeks an accommodation: a local exception, a temporary dispensation. There is a word for this kind of bargaining with arbitrary power. It is not “moderation”. It is clientelism: I will do nothing to stop the despot, but I will plead for my village.

But once you accept that the category “stranger” is a legitimate political target – that there is such a thing, in a constitutional republic, as a population against whom terror is a permissible tool—the only remaining question is whether your donors and voters are inside or outside that category. And that is something that you cannot control, not even by offering the Trumpists more and more of your resourcesm and of your soul.

The administration’s own language—“domestic terrorism”, “secret funders”, “antifa” as an all‑purpose bogey—is an open invitation to turn the same machinery now used against immigrants against everyone. Once the norm is that the president can unleash masked federal agents into disfavored jurisdictions and then dial them back when a friendly senator asks nicely, we are a long way down the road from “equal protection of the laws.”

I do know this: the “stranger’s case” is being argued right now in Minneapolis streets, in ICE field offices headed by imported Border Patrol brass, and in senatorial phone calls that seek not to end the abuses but to redirect them.

The playwrights’ Thomas More has a question for Susan Collins, for every Republican who has made their peace with Trump‑Miller immigration policy, and, frankly, for every Democrat tempted to treat Minneapolis as unfortunate but distant: when the categories flip, and you find yourself the stranger, what standard will you wish that you had enforced?

Because you do not get to negotiate a permanent exemption for Maine, or for yourself. Grifter-politicians and plutocrats may think that the kleptocrats of the Trump affinity regard them as friends. They do not. They ultimately regard them—as they regard all of us—as prey.

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Could somebody, some engineers, facilities staff, or internal consultants, have told somebody in the bowels of the institution or the board that the building really needs a lot of work, and “if you really want to rework the building, you’d be better off closing it”? There i no trace of that anywhere I have been able to find. Right now nobody is saying: “this idea has been on the table for years and Trump has now embraced it”. There are no quotes from anybody coming forward as a long‑time pro‑closure Cassandra.

What the record shows is Trump’s post hoc appeal to “Highly Respected Experts,” with no prior public track.

It will be interesting to see how long it is before people begin claiming that Trump’s desire to close it for reconstruction is just common sense, and who the first ones are.

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Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump: <https://substack.com/@aaronrupar/note/c-208575624>: ‘After a one year review of The Trump Kennedy Center, that has taken place with Contractors, Musical Experts, Art Institutions, and other Advisors and Consultants, deciding between either Construction with Closure and Re-Opening or, Partial Construction while continuing Entertainment Operations through a much longer period of time, working in and around the Performances, I have determined that The Trump Kennedy Center, if temporarily closed for Construction, Revitalization, and Complete Rebuilding, can be, without question, the finest Performing Arts Facility of its kind, anywhere in the World. In other words, if we don’t close, the quality of Construction will not be nearly as good, and the time to completion, because of interruptions with Audiences from the many Events using the Facility, will be much longer. The temporary closure will produce a much faster and higher quality result!

Based on these findings, and totally subject to Board approval, I have determined that the fastest way to bring The Trump Kennedy Center to the highest level of Success, Beauty, and Grandeur, is to cease Entertainment Operations for an approximately two year period of time, with a scheduled Grand Reopening that will rival and surpass anything that has taken place with respect to such a Facility before.

Therefore, The Trump Kennedy Center will close on July 4th, 2026, in honor of the 250th Anniversary of our Country, whereupon we will simultaneously begin Construction of the new and spectacular Entertainment Complex. Financing is completed, and fully in place! This important decision, based on input from many Highly Respected Experts, will take a tired, broken, and dilapidated Center, one that has been in bad condition, both financially and structurally for many years, and turn it into a World Class Bastion of Arts, Music, and Entertainment, far better than it has ever been before. America will be very proud of its new and beautiful Landmark for many generations to come. Thank you for your attention to this matter!

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That he has not yet been adjudged mentally incompetent, and that no guardian ad litam has yet been appointed, are surely the most mysterious things about our current situation.

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A very nice riff by Dan Davies on one of the (many) favorite John Kenneth Galbraith quotations. First, Galbraith:

John Kenneth Galbraith: ‘All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership…

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Now Davies:

Dan Davies: shiny happy weird & special <https://backofmind.substack.com/p/shiny-happy-weird-and-special>: ‘Anti-immigration protestors were bothering refugees at the local airport hotel, and I decided I probably ought to show up at the counter-demonstration…. The thing that really struck me… was… incredible, overpowering… pessimism…. [Anti-immigrant protesters] agree that the refugees were people and deserved to be helped…. They, more or less unshakeably (by me at least) thought it was simply impossible for Britain to provide that help…. [They] had no hope whatsoever for their children and seemed genuinely surprised that I did for mine…. It’s not a coincidence or a weakness that reactionary politics is so full of grifters, cynics and wreckers—that has to be the norm…. The importance of preserving and fostering a general baseline sense of agency and optimism; solving problems is important, but what’s absolutely vital is to keep the idea alive that the problems are soluble…

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That is the key move of reactionary neofascism today: not “they are inhuman monsters who deny the humanity of refugees” but “they grant the humanity and the moral claim—and then stop there, convinced that nothing can be done”, at least not by us, because our resources are limited, and immigrants—and other bad guys—are coming to take some of what are rightly our resources and redirect them away from us by some form of trickery or loophole exploitation. That is a very different configuration of the political psyche than the neofascist one in the minds of us liberals and social democrats—the configuration we like to argue against. For the mass base of Trump’s supporters, in Davies’s assessment it is not so much cruelty—although there is plenty of cruelty by ICE and other minions, perhaps to show that Trump is not on the side of those taking from the good people. There is a lot of despair. And despair is a much more dangerous political fuel.

Let me set out five points:

Point one: Dan is describing mass psychological infrastructure, not a quirk of some bald men from Plymouth with rancid vibes, as the core of what we have taken to calling “reactionary” politics. In the taxonomy of reactionaryism—despair at the present, mythologized golden age in the past, loathing of existing elites, desire to blow up institutions—the emotional base layer is precisely that “nothing can get better from here; all we can do is try to roll back the clock.” That sensibility is not an ideology. That sensibility is not a rational conclusion from evidence. It is a mood. It is a stance toward the future. The rest—anti-immigration, ethno-nationalism, “burn it all down”—is built on top of that mood.

Point two: This mood is structurally invisible to the people who actually run policy. As Dan rightly says: if you are in the business of making or advising on policy you are, by revealed preference, someone who believes that decisions matter and institutions can be bent in a better direction. You may be an optimist about the wrong things. You may be a technocrat with too much faith in spreadsheets. But either way you are an optimist about agency: you think levers exist and that it is worth arguing over how to pull them. This is new, at least in degree. Today a very large chunk of the electorate do not expect that their children’s lives can be bettered by something called “policy”; they suspect, with some justice, that any promise to the contrary is a grift.

Point three: Despair is factually wrong. It is wrong about the material possibilities of rich societies. The fiscal space is there. The productive capacity is there. The historical experience with much larger shocks—postwar demobilization, the Marshall Plan, the Great Migration—shows that advanced economies can absorb and integrate very large movements of people and very large redistributions of resources without collapsing.

The claim “we simply cannot afford to help” is not economics, it is metaphysics: a belief about the structure of the world masquerading as a budget constraint.

And yet it does not feel metaphysical if you are the person whose real wage has been flat for twenty years, whose town lost its hospital, whose kids can’t get secure jobs, and who has been told in every election that growth is back and this time it will trickle down. There is an objective mismatch between capacity and use of capacity—between what we could do and what we in fact do.

That mismatch is experienced from below as confirmation that nothing ever changes, that there is always “no money,” that promises are lies.

From above, among the policy people, it is explained away as political constraints, coalition management, the median voter theorem, and so on. But the psychic effect is cumulative corrosion of what the psychologists call “agentive optimism”—the belief that effort aimed at the future will pay off.

Point four, the uncomfortable one: Agency and optimism are not built by sermons alone. There is a strong temptation, especially among the well‑educated optimists who staff the policy world, to treat “hope” as a communications problem: better messaging, better narratives, better explanations of why we really are doing things. But Galbraithian leadership starts from the opposite end. The essence of leadership is to use the actual levers of policy in ways that are visible at human scale. It is to pick problems that can be solved in a few years, and solve them in public, and make sure the credit for the solving flows.

Point five: Galbraith’s line about leadership is demanding. It is so much more demanding than the standard “vision” fluff in airport business books. To “confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time” is not to say “I feel your pain” and then pivot to what is “politically feasible.” It is to take that corrosive pessimism head‑on and argue that, first, the anxiety is real and valid, and second, the conclusion of hopelessness is wrong. Good leaders, in that sense, are in the business of manufacturing a justified sense of agency. The social‑science literature on optimism is, for once, comforting: people who expect that their efforts can move the dial—who have that generalized sense that problems are soluble—cope better with shocks, persist longer in the face of difficulty, and actually end up healthier and richer over the life course. That is true at the level of individuals; it is almost certainly true for polities as well.

The hope is that once you have bracketed off the despair, there is very little left of the ideological core of xenophobic politics. The men on the other side were insisting that their own polity was too broken, too exhausted, too poor to live up to the obligation to be moral. So if we do not successfully do the hard, unglamorous work of giving people repeated, tangible reasons to believe that the problems of a rich society in the twenty‑first century are, in fact, soluble, what then happens? What then happens is what we see around us: a politics that defaults to grifters, cynics, and wreckers.

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I do seriously and sincerely hope that this is truly what is now going on:

Shankar Narayan: Please Welcome the European Army: Born Without a Flag <https://www.theconcis.com/p/please-welcome-the-european-army>: ‘I almost feel bad for the right-wing trolls on the payroll of American oligarchs…. The groundwork was laid on January 6, 2026, when a small group of European states, including the U.K., moved to block the Trump administration’s attempt to test its “annexation theory” on Greenland…. [Under] the traditional script… Europe would still have been “consulting”…. Instead, seven countries spoke directly to each other… signed a joint statement… deployed small troop contingents…. The Trump–Miller axis took the off-ramp. Collective decision-making is Europe’s strength in peacetime. It is a liability when timelines compress—when deterrence fails, or when Putin doesn’t send talking points but missiles. [Then] speed matters….

Reports indicate that both the German and French governments have instructed their militaries and emergency services to prepare for war. Yes, these are contingency plans. But… now that NATO has effectively revealed what it exists for—and what it doesn’t—Europe has no choice but to build a command structure of its own. A 27-member vote to move resources… will not work…. The two-speed Europe concept isn’t new…. It’s now being pulled to the front to break policy gridlock and accelerate action on core strategic priorities. The emerging E6… [of] Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Poland, and the Netherlands… the core of Europe’s deployable mass, industrial depth, and logistical reach….

This is the birth of a European army…. A core command structure—informal, quiet, and deliberately invisible—will emerge and solidify…. There will be friction… coordination headaches. But now there is a format to solve them…

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There are also strong signs of what I have been calling the Viking Alliance—possibly Eire, the UK, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Ukraine, with ancillaries Poland (and Roumania?) which knows that if Ukraine falls Putin is coming for them next, and Germany eager to provide financial and logistical support even if not willing to move its own forces without France, Italy, and Spain.

In rough terms: each of “Inner Europe” and the “Viking Alliance” would seriously outweigh Russia in conventional resources. The US right now spends about $1 trillion a year on defense, and dominates in long-range airlift, tankers, C4ISR, precision strike, and blue-water navy. Muscovy ‘Rus spends around $150 billion,, with its very large substantially legacy land forces, artillery, and a sizable (though aging) air and naval fleet. It’s army is now well-bloodied, but most of the people who have seen the elephant are dead or maimed—the attrition WWI style-assaults impose upon a force means that little of its combat experience becomes force-level learning.

Inner Europe spends $300 billion a year—more than all of the ex-US ex-China world put together, with a million active-duty and a million reserve-duty soldiers. Its mature defense industries (MBDA, KNDS, Naval Group, Leonardo, etc.) are very capable of producing advanced kit and munitions, if political and budgetary spigots stay open.

The Viking Alliance ex-Ukraine spends about $150 billion a year, with Ukraine currently at $70 billion. The Viking Alliance ex-Ukraine has 300 thousand active-duty soldiers, with two million reservists. Ukraine now has a million-man well-blodied army: the largest real combat-experienced land force in Europe right now, with enormous artillery, drone, and EW learning-by-doing, but heavily dependent on external ammunition and financial support.

The raw balance of conventional power in Europe vis-à-vis Muscovy ‘Rus thus looks quite favorable—conditional on at least one of the coalitions being more than talking shops, and on the political will to rapidly turn budgets and industrial policy into actual deployable formations.

Washington’s commitment to NATO under Trump is contingent and random rather than automatic. Right now Trump-world’s line is: decadent Europeans, freeloading on American protection, nagging us about values while refusing to pay for their own defense. That story was largely false even before Ukraine, but truthy enough to be politically usable.

But the emergence of an Inner Europe and of the Viking Alliance would flip the optics completely. Trump personally wants very much to align with Putin, or at least undermine the NATO alliance. But he still operates inside a political system where the Pentagon, State, and intel community will leak and lobby relentlessly if the U.S. is visibly abandoning allies under fire, even the key Trump-enablers in Congress are highly sensitive to “America is weak / America is unreliable” narratives, and business and media elites dislike anything that makes the U.S. look like a faithless partner. Appeasing or aligning with Putin then becomes not “disengaging from NATO Brussels bureaucrats”, but siding with aggressors against democracies willingly spending blood for freedom. Isolationist rhetoric polls just OK, until it is juxtaposed with allies actually fighting and dying under a democracy-vs-autocracy frame.

Inner Europe and a Viking Alliance would also shift the baseline of what “normal” allied behavior looks like: Forward deployments and joint ops (Arctic Endurance, Baltic Sentry, brigades in the Baltics/Poland) would become routine, some of them under NATO aegis with U.S. forces integrated into planning, logistics, comms. And legal and contractual commitments—bilateral security guarantees to Ukraine, industrial co-production agreements, basing and training MOUs—would multiply. Thus for Trump to “tilt to Putin” would mean actively disrupt existing cooperation, not merely fail to show up. Then domestic losers and loud critics would support the mini-lateral European formations and decisions.

Put differently: Inner Europe and the Viking Alliance would not stop Trump from wanting to align with Putin. What they would is make that desire:

• More visible (because Europe is visibly fighting on the “right” side),

• More politically costly (because he has to actively undercut allies who are finally doing what he claimed to want), and

• More damaging to the American myth of itself (because the role reversal—Europe as hard power, U.S. as shirker—is terrible PR).

That narrows the corridor in which a pro‑Putin Trump can move without triggering a domestic and allied backlash that even he would find hard to ride out.

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This morning my feed brings me something that strikes me as extremely weird:

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Niall Ferguson: How Trump Won Davos <https://www.thefp.com/p/niall-ferguson-how-trump-won-davos>: ‘I have never before seen a single individual so completely dominate this vast bazaar of the powerful, the wealthy, the famous, and the self-important…

This is—to say the least—a definite outlier in my feed. Otherwise, it has the vibe that Trump went to Davos to make himself look ridiculous and incompetent.

The dominant general reaction is things like:

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accompanied by some frantic backpedaling by those hoping to become rich and powerful through going all-in on the Trump grift and supporting the Greenland-annexation idea:

Henry Farrell: Bessent and Lutnick: a Farce <https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/europe-has-more-bargaining-strength>: ‘Act One: Europe Can’t Do Nothing to Stop Us!…. “‘I imagine they will form the dreaded European working group first, which seems to be their most forceful weapon’, Bessent told a small group of reporters.”… Act Two: Actually, Europe, We Don’t Want You to Escalate!… “;I’m urging everyone here to do is sit back…. I would urge all countries to stick with their trade deals we have agreed on them’, Bessent added.”… Act Four: Exit, Stage Right, Pursued by Bears…. “Howard Lutnick was heckled…. Christine Lagarde walk[ed] out….Lutnick… [met] with widespread jeering amid appeals for calm from … Larry Fink...”

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So what gives here?

Well, my first reaction is that this once again fits my rule-of-thumb:

Brad DeLong: A $140,000/Year Poverty Line? I: Stewarding & Utilizing Resources <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/a-140000year-poverty-line-i-stewarding>: ‘It continues to be the case that, every time something from the Free Press <http://thefp.com> brushes past my awareness, it almost invariably turns out to be wrong—usually deeply, often ignorantly, and also frequently making a choice to be stupidly wrong…

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The rule-of-thumb is that whatever the underlying truth may be, it is definitely not what it says on the tin at the The Free Press, which is not a “press”, at least not as we conventionally think of that human social practice.

But I dove deeper into what “Trump Won Davos” and “dominate[d]” it in a way Naill had “never before seen a single individual so completely” do meant. And by the end I discovered that the argument is that Trump dominated Davos by not dominating it.

You see, Trump went to Davos:

insist[ing] that… “Greenland has to be acquired. Denmark and its European allies have to DO THE RIGHT THING.” He did not rule out military action. He threatened to impose new 10 percent tariffs on all countries that resisted. And he posted memes of maps of Denmark (and Canada) cloaked in the Stars and Stripes and an AI-generated image of himself planting an American flag on “Greenland—U.S. Territory Est. 2026…”

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But by the end of the meeting Trump had:

called the whole Greenland thing off. “We never ask[ed] for anything,” he rambled, “and we never got anything. We probably won’t…. Later that evening…Trump announced… he would not impose the additional tariffs on European countries he had threatened. He and Rutte had “formed the framework of a future deal with respect to Greenland and, in fact, the entire Arctic Region…”

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So how is—this starting out with a declaration of what must happen, a declaration that then goes nowhere—“dominating” the meeting?

Because, Niall explains:

Trump [n]ever seriously meant to annex Greenland or to impose new tariffs on the Europeans…. Half the time [Trump] is bluffing…. [But] that Trump carries out only around half the threats he makes… is certainly not a sign of weakness. It is a deliberate tactic designed to leave counterparties uncertain…. Trump was bluffing…. The administration never had the remotest intention of imposing new tariffs… much less taking military action to annex Greenland.

But why did he threaten it? Just for the lolz? Certainly, there was much hilarity among U.S. government staffers at Davos as they watched the president’s speech in the USA House at Promenade 95. They certainly were in on the joke.

Trump forced Greenland to be the No. 1 topic at Davos… to keep European leaders from meddling in America’s Middle Eastern and Eastern European policy…. How little the president said about Iran and Ukraine. That is because his administration has plans afoot…. The fuss about Greenland was a classic example of Trumpian maskirovka—a distraction similar to his claim that peace negotiations with Iran were continuing, just one day before the U.S. air strike on the Fordow nuclear facility. That kind of ruse was also known to the ancient Athenians. But probably not to the Melians…

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Ummmm. Maybe? It would have been a very screwy thing to do. But Trump and his coterie of grifters do many screwy things. Many of them are damaging and destructive and deadly.

But what is the evidence that this is what Trump’s Master Plan for Davos was? And how is this “dominating” the meaning? Where to start?

Start with this: etymology often helps keep you grounded.

When the political and media classes drift off into free-floating narratives about personality and “vibes,” the history of words can quietly tug us back toward structure and substance. Words encode social relations, institutional arrangements, and long-forgotten hierarchies. Following their trails, you can see how power presented itself to itself. So when we find ourselves talking about whether someone “dominated” a room or was “in command” of a space, it is useful, I think, to remember where those words came from.

Latin domus—“house.” From domus we get dominus, the lord and master of the house. From dominus we eventually get the modern “dominate”. To dominate is not to posture or to bluster or command at home. It is to be the one who is at home, the one whose will is presumed to set the terms to which others must adapt—or leave. The dominus is the figure for whom the walls, the servants, the rules, and the rituals all exist already and automatically.

When we talk about whether someone “dominated” an international gathering, that is the background resonance. Is someone one of many enacting a performance in a contested situation? Or are they truly the one whose purposes the house as it stands currently exists to serve?

With that in mind, does it really seem like Donald Trump was comfortable “in his own house” at Davos?

One can, I guess, storm through the lobby and attract cameras. But that is not the same thing as moving through the space one has had built to one’s specifications, and within which one has arranged the furniture.

Being fearful that the Europeans might band together to disrupt your plans for getting Ukraine and Iran to knuckle under? It that the posture of someone truly at home in his own house? A genuine dominus does not fret that the guests might unexpectedly organize a tenants’ association. If you are worried that a coalition of medium-sized powers will frustrate your schemes, what you are signaling is not mastery but fragility: you know that you do not control the institutional plumbing, the coalition arithmetic, the bureaucratic follow-through. You suspect—rightly—that others have more veto points than you have levers.

Moreover, there are no visible signs that there is any coherent method or plan for Ukraine or Iran behind the bluster. To dominate in the meaningful sense would require a strategy that aligns means and ends, a theory of victory, and a plausible account of how today’s threats and photo-ops translate into tomorrow’s outcomes. What we have instead, as far as one can tell, is a mixture of improvisation, personal grievance, and performative toughness that never quite congeals into policy. The absence of a strategy is a rather large hole in any story about geopolitical “domination.”

And one thing of which we can be reasonably sure is that figures like Scott Bessent and Howard Lutnick were not party to any hidden master plan.

You do not sequester your supposed financial and political master whisperers in the cheap seats if they are integral co-authors of a cunning design. You do that when their function is decorative rather than strategic, and when your “strategy” consists largely of keeping options open until the next impulse strikes.

If Niall were to be right, Bessent and Lutnick were, from all available evidence, kept far outside whatever passes for the inner circle of deciders and advisers. If such a circle even exists. If there are advisers. If there are deciders.

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Thus if I had to bet, I would bet that Niall before the meeting wanted to write a “Trump Dominated Davos” column, but the raw material of the event refused to cooperate. The facts would not sustain outright triumphalism. So he resorted to a familiar television trope: the Xanatos Gambit <https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/XanatosGambit>, in which even the most catastrophic defeats are retrospectively redescribed as and retconned into steps in a deeper, more cunning plan. Heads, the protagonist wins; tails, it turns out that losing this particular coin toss was all part of the script.

It is, I think, a convenient way to never concede that the would-be master of the house might actually be flailing.

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Far more credible, to me at least, is Henry Farrell’s account of Davos. Farrell takes seriously the institutional context, the preferences and constraints of the various actors, and the ways in which Trump’s behavior is bounded by structures he neither fully understands nor controls. Rather than retrofitting a 4D-chess narrative onto a sequence of ad hoc moves, Farrell reads the episode as an illustration of how a chaotic presidency collides with a still-functioning—if fraying—network of allied states, corporate interests, and international organizations. That story may be less flattering to Trump and less thrilling for those in search of master strategists, but it fits both the etymology and the observable reality rather better.

But before I turn to Henry, that last line I quoted from Niall— “that kind of ruse was also known to the ancient Athenians. But probably not to the Melians” —seriously annoys me as a gross and ignorant misreading of Thoukydides of the Athenai and his great book Thoukydides of the Athenai wrote the history of the war between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians…, the one we call The Peloponnesian War.

Niall, in his paragraph eight, writes:

The Melian Dialogue is the most famous passage in Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War…. Melos… like Greenland… had a relatively small population…. It was independent—and indeed wished to remain neutral…. But in 416 BCE the Athenians invaded Melos…. The Melians defied the Athenians. “We are just men fighting against unjust. . .we put our trust in the fortune by which the gods have preserved it until now.” The Athenians gave an immortal reply. “You know as well as we do,” they said, “that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” This passage has long been seen as the origin of the dichotomy in international relations between idealism and realism…

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“Immortal reply”, “the origin of the dichotomy… between idealism and realism”.

The Athenians’ reply is indeed immortal, but not in the sense that Niall gives it.

For it turns out, in Thoukydides’s narrative of the Peloponnesian War and in the empirical reality of that war that the Athenians’ “realism” was not very realistic at all.

Athens lost the Peloponnesian War. Athens lost the Peloponnesian War in large part because those who ought to have been their allies defected to the Spartan and to the Haksamanishya cause. Pointing out that might-overrides-right arrogance is the opposite of a realistic means-ends policy is the reason that Thoukydides put the Melian Dialogue into his book.

Why? Because a rogue power that thinks and acts as though it is strong and able to “do what it can” was seen as much more of a threat than the rather insular Spartans or Persian satraps who spent much more time looking east than west. And so Athens’s imperial arrogance called into being a Grand Alliance against it. And, in the end, as Xenophon writes in his Hellenica: the Spartan commander

Lysandros sailed into the Peiraieus, the [aristocratic] exiles returned [to Athens], and the Long Walls were pulled down among scenes of great enthusiasm and to the music of flute girls. It was thought that this day was the beginning of the freedom for Greece…

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from the tyranny of the Athenian Empire. Afterwards history went in very unexpected directions, but not to the benefit of any of the projects of Athens as a great power.

Thoukydides writes that his history

will be judged useful by those who want to see clearly what happened and what, humans being of the same kind, will happen again in the future. My work is meant as a treasure for all time…

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But that requires that you actually read and understand what Thoukydides is saying, and understand how much and how fatally Athens harmed itself via being not a benevolent hegemon trusted to be just and fair but rather the Athens of the Mytilene Decree, the Syracusa Expedition, and the Melian Dialogue.

There. I have gotten that off my chest.

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Now Henry Farrell, whom I think gets the Davos Meeting right with the Right Grand Narrative of what went down. Henry says:

Henry Farrell: Davos is a rational ritual <https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/davos-is-a-rational-ritual>: ‘How Europe and Carney disrupted Trump’s ceremony of self-anointment…. You could see this shift happening in real time in the public statements of Trump administration officials…. What we have seen at Davos over the last few days was an effort by the Trump administration to create new common knowledge in the world, an agreement that Trump was in charge, and that politics revolved around him. That effort has failed because of pushback from politicians, both Europeans who were furious at Trump, and Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney who gave a quite extraordinary speech. However, the result is most certainly not a decisive victory for Europe, Canada, and the other forces allied with them. Instead, it is one significant moment in a longer story of struggle and contention. Chwe argues that rituals are about creating coordinated expectations, and that this is why they are often an exercise in power…

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And to back up his Grand Narrative, Henry Farrell points out that it is what Trump Administration officials thought happened at Davos, and exhibits reciepts in the chaning tenor of the statements from Trump officials:

Henry Farrell: Europe has more bargaining strength than it thinks <https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/europe-has-more-bargaining-strength>: ‘Bessent and Lutnick: a Farce in Four Acts: Act One: Europe Can’t Do Nothing to Stop Us!…. “‘I imagine they will form the dreaded European working group first, which seems to be their most forceful weapon’, Bessent told a small group of reporters.”… Act Two: Actually, Europe, We Don’t Want You to Escalate!… “;I’m urging everyone here to do is sit back, take a deep breath, and let things play out…. I would urge all countries to stick with their trade deals we have agreed on them’, Bessent added.”… Act Three: Europe is Escalating But It Will All Work Out for America: “Howard Lutnick… projected calm, saying… “‘If we’re going to have a kerfuffle, so be it. But we know where it’s going to end. It’s going to end in a reasonable manner’.” Act Four: Exit, Stage Right, Pursued by Bears…. “Howard Lutnick was heckled at a… dinner… with… Christine Lagarde walking out…. Combative remarks from Lutnick… [were met] with widespread jeering amid appeals for calm from BlackRock’s Larry Fink.”… If we think about this in terms of escalation dominance, Europe has more options than it might initially seem to have. And this morning’s more conciliatory speech suggests that that Trump knows it…. It is clear… Trump… backed down in part because of how markets were reacting… (even if he confused “Iceland” for “Greenland” when he was talking)…

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But we are not done. What could it mean to get the Davos meeting right, anyway?

Two months after Waterloo a correspondent asked Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, commander of the victorious British-Dutch-Hanoverian army, to recount his understanding of the battle. Arthur Wellesley demurred:

Arthur Wellesley (1815): Letter to John Wilson Croker 1815-08-15 <https://archive.org/details/macaulayhistoryofengland01/mode/1up>: ‘The history of a battle is not unlike the history of a ball. Some individuals may recollect all the little events of which the great result is the battle won or lost; but no individual can recollect the order in which, or the exact moment at which, they occurred, which makes all the difference as to their value or importance…. It is impossible to say when each important occurrence took place, nor in what order…

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He demurred in spite of his having written, two months earlier in the immediate aftermath of the battle, just such a recounting of his understanding of the battle to the Secretary of State for War and the Colonies:

Arthu Wellesley (1815): Waterloo Dispatch <https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Wellingon%27s_Waterloo_dispatch_to_Lord_Bathurst,_19_June_1815#:~:text=The%20enemy%20repeatedly%20attacked%20us,a%20numerous%20and%20powerful%20artillery.>: ‘To Earl Bathurst. Waterloo, 19th June, 1815: My Lord, Buonaparte, having collected the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 6th corps of the French army, and the Imperial Guards, and nearly all the cavalry, on the Sambre, and between that river and the Meuse, between the 10th and 14th of the month, advanced on the 15th and attacked the Prussian posts at Thuin and Lobbes, on the Sambre, at day-light in the morning…

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Earl Bathurst was expecting that Arthur Wellesley would deliver to him just such an understanding as Arthur Wellesley would later say could not be done. And on the basis of Wellesley’s public Waterloo Dispatch would be constructed the public meaning of the battle. It served Wellesley’s purposes in his dispatch to highlight three things:

1. that even though the Horse Guards command in London had failed to do its job—had given him “an infamous army”, nevertheless “there is no officer nor description of troops that did not behave well” in the campaign.

2. that the casualty roll was enormous: for “such a desperate action could not be fought, and such advantages could not be gained, without great loss; and I am sorry to add that ours has been immense”.

3. that the decisive element was the appearance of the Prussian allies under Blücher and Bulow on Napoleon’s right flank, for the “successful result of this arduous day [was due] to the cordial and timely assistance I received from them… [which] would have forced the enemy to retire if his [final] attacks should have failed, and would have prevented him from taking advantage of them if they should unfortunately have succeeded”, even if Wellington’s army had at the end of the day been unable “to make the attack which produced the final result” of the first end-of-the-day French retreat.

That is the story that Arthur Wellesley told in his June 19 letter to Lord Bathurst. But while it is not a false story, is not the true story. There are many true or tru-ish stories in the the sense of being a not-incredible Grand Narrative, and we need Grand Narratives as hooks on which to hang ideas if we are to think at all, we East African Plains Apes are, you must admit, bears of very little brain.

But all Grand Narratives are also false: the map can never be the territory. What Arthur Wellesley’s three-point Grand Narrative of Waterloo is, above everything else, a useful narrative for him, with his affinities, his allegiances, and his goals. It did indeed become, for English-speakers, the core of the public meaning of the Battle of Waterloo.

Often, however, later public meaning can become only loosely moored, or completely unmoored, from any tru-ish recount of the actual history, especially since a wise person understands that no single “as it actually happened” can ever be written down.

Consider the public meaning of Ronald Reagan, especially in his second term. Was he the Mighty Colossus Leader of the Revivified Neoliberal West? Or was he a“poor dear: he means well, but not very much between the ears”, as Margaret Thatcher judged him? And was U.S. policy toward Gorbachev after his accesion to the Hammer-&-Sickle Throne shaped by rational analysis? Or was it the result of a back-corridors palace fight between George Shultz and the cold warriors on the one hand and Nancy Reagan and her astrologer on the other, in which Nancy gave a surprisingly good account of herself? The Decision of History is that the public meaning is the first: Mighty Colossus Leader of the Revivified Neoliberal West. But any digging into the details makes that very hard to sustain. Nevertheless, the public meaning remains what it is.

So when Niall Ferguson says that he thinks Davos worked for Trump as a progress and demonstration of royal power, his statement is also a move in a game to establish the future public meaning of Davos 2026. The stakes for Trump and his posse of grifters are relatively high in portraying Trump as dominating the meeting, as a winner, as his defeat being a Xanatos Gambit victory, in some sense.

It is always true that the Mighty Dragon does not know each individual mountain as well as the local snake. But it is also true that as long as the Mighty Dragon can convince all local snakes that he can stomp any one snake among them, the Mighty Dragon does not have to know the mountain. The Mighty Dragon then threatens to stomp the snake that most annoys him, and so all the snakes compete in a race to the bottom not to be the most annoying.

That’s how imperial power works.

But you have to actually show yourself successfully stomping a snake, at least occasionally.

And so we get Ferguson: Denmark was actually not the designated snake-to-be-stomped! Trump outsmarted all of you! The designated snake-to-be-stomped is actually Ukraine! Or Iran! Or something else in the future!

Stranger social facts with respect to public meaning have been willed into being by mere words in the past, and will, humans being of the same kind, be willed into being in the future.

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Columbia’s Adam Tooz said that he is thinking a lot about the 1859 Preface to Karl Marx’s abysmal A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.

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He does not say why. So let me tell you why. The passage (reproduced at the very bottom of this post) can be usefully divided into six threads:

Here we have, working backward:

1. Theology: the millenarian claim (made in 1859!) that the end was at hand of the long era in which human societies were societies of domination,

2. Stage Theory of History: The six modes of production—tribal, Asiatic, ancient, feudal, bourgeois, and socialist—as the successive stages of human history, social revolutions driving the transitions between them.

3. Theology: Refracted through Hegel’s thesis-antithesis-synthesis: the claim that history has an arrow of progress driven by econo-political change.

4. Sociology & Ideology: The conflicts generated by the rupture between old relations of production and the requirements of the new, growing forces of production play themselves out in ideological forms.

5. Political Economy: Relations of production constrain technological development and investment, and then constraint fails as society’s property order is broken by social revolution.

6. Historical Materialism: The relations of production have to be fitted to the technology of society and thus to the way people experience their worklife. And then everything else has to be fitted to that

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And I argued <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/six-analytical-threads-in-search> that to pick up one (or more) of these six claims and then to try to develop it and demonstrate its truth and draw forth its implications for human knowledge, human society, human political action, and the human future is what it is to be a “Marxist” in any sense meaningful, other than grabbing that term as a positive or negative marker of tribal allegiance. If someone shows up calling themself a “Marxist”, and cannot demonstrate which of the threads from at least one of these six claims they are pursuing in their thinking—well, they should find something else to call themself.

Conversely, looking at the development of social science since 1870 or so, it is a fact that nearly everybody else doing historical social science worth reading who is not picking up and developing one of these six claims is spending a lot of their time trying to disprove and dispel one or more of them.

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But I had yet more to say. So here it is:

With respect to (6) Historical Materialism, everyone agrees: yes, social being determines social consciousness, but social consciousness determines social being, and such economics and such are relatively right-wing disciplines these days people on the left are much more likely to be “idealist” than materialist. As for (5) Political Economy, yes, changing technology does cause immense trouble for societal order as the rest of society finds itself no longer properly fitted to it, and a reworking does follow—but that does not entail any necessary social revolution, and especially not a socialist revolution that was supposed to have happened more than a century ago.

Nobody today likes the reductionism of (4) Sociology and Ideology. It simply doesn’t work. In fact, it never worked: Marx could claim that in the France of his day the Orleanists were really motivated by the concerns of industrialists and the Legitimists by the concerns of large landlords, but that did not make it true. (3) as well is nonsense on stilts: the arc of history does not bend toward justice, or even prosperity. (2) Stage Theory is simply not popular. in anything other than some “modernization theory” sense, although Gary Gerstle and company are trying to revive it through the conceptual device of political-economic orders. And nobody has any confidence in (1): there are no signs that history will work so that utopia will be here soon.

What counts as “Marxism” worth the name? Pursuing one of six testable threads from the 1859 Preface. On inspection, only two remain serviceable: relations of production must fit technology, and technological change unsettles property orders. The rest—teleology, ideology-as-master-key, stage theory, utopia—collapses under a messy record of overlapping, sector-specific transformations. Since 1750, change arrives in concentrated waves; since 1870, faster and broader, with a fifth of the economy reengineered each generation. Institutions lag; culture mismatches; politics convulses. The apparatus of Marx, even detoxed, explains less than a braided account of creative destruction, complementary investments, and late-arriving social scaffolding.

Hence: few real Marxists remain.

So why, then, do I find while walking the dogs a podcast from Henry Oliver (with Jeffrey Lawrence and Julianne Werlin) on “Literature, politics, & the future of the humanities” <https://www.commonreader.co.uk/p/literature-politics-and-the-future> talking about “academic Marxism”. What could such a thing possibly be?

Henry Oliver: ‘Let’s go to the question of “what is academic Marxism?”… Give us a quick overview of how Marxist things really are.

Julianne Werlin: It’s very complicated… because Marxism is… a living tradition… and there’s a huge amount of disagreement about… what is a legitimate form of Marxism, what is not, where [are] the boundaries…. Perry Anderson’s Considerations on Western Marxism… argues that in the West Marxism becomes alienated from actual political, economic, and social movements… [and] moves into academia… [becoming] much less concerned with… the politics and economics of labor. And that this continues and is accelerated… in the Cold War…. At the same time you have… the cultural turn in history and in sociology… so Marxism remains a current within that, but it’s far less of an influential current…. And so at that point, I do think you have to ask, well, “What does ‘Marxism’ actually mean?”…. As somebody who does work… [on]: Are markets becoming more efficient in Renaissance England? Those kinds of questions. How much does bread cost? How much do books cost? Those kinds of questions… fee… incredibly peripheral within academia in comparison to, say, the politics of gender…. What would you say, Jeff?

Jeffrey Lawrence: [After] Marxism moves into the academy after the 1960s… it becomes a different thing…. What we’re really talking about is a progressive politics… amalgam of different ideas that may have some roots in Marxism of previous periods, but really don’t… align with… Marxian thought as such. And also as someone who does take that tradition very seriously, I think… it becomes a[n]… intellectual tool and sometimes even an intellectual weapon… where the question of how it relates to practical… working class politics… becomes… secondary….

Henry Oliver: Is there some inherent aspect of literature that means it has been more amenable to Marxist study… than… to… systems of thought that come more from a kind of Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek tradition. Because it’s very striking to me how few liberals and libertarians there are currently publicly…. Is there some good literary reason for this? Or is it just an institutional problem?

Jeffrey Lawrence: I share the sense that… there is a… Marxist literary tradition that goes back to… Lukacs… Adorno, Horkheimer…people like Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams… [who] were… [an] insurgent force… within the academy that has now become… almost entirely dominant. I personally… was very interested in a certain liberal tradition that comes from… John Dewey…. People like Lionel Trilling… were very important… in a particular moment…. John Dewey… Lionel Trilling… Philip Rav, these kind of mid-century intellectuals… were foundational for the field, even if now I think there may be some desire to take distance from them.

Henry Oliver: The bigger problem that we should just get back to… literature as literature…. Once we allow a kind of methodological approach from one tradition or another, we’re just no longer really studying literature. We’re using literature…. Some people want to take a… Northrop Frye, Christopher Ricks, literature as literature approach, and some people want to have an extra-literary methodology. Be it Freudian… feminist… identity politics.. whatever….

Julianne Werlin: I don’t think that we can just say… these are great works, this is part of a canon…. [That] came with its own set of ideological commitments that are now vanishing…. So we need some kind of framework for making sense of why we read literary history at all…. A lot of those frameworks were implicit. didn’t, you know, they were… [not] articulated…. I think we do find ourselves in a position where we need to explain why we care about this object literature in the first place… situating it within some kind of wider account of culture…. I don’t think you can say to people, look, Shakespeare is Shakespeare, we have to read him because he’s great. I think you need to have an argument about the place that Shakespeare has in culture…

Jeffrey Lawrence: If you’re just going to read literature for… a particular political thing, for Marxism… to understand… a Marxist conception of society, why not just read… Marxist theory…. If you are always just interested in the methodology… as opposed to literature, then this is going to be a long-term problem…

Julianne Werlin: I think it’s a huge problem…. No, I don’t think you should study the methodologies instead of studying literature. Of course not. But the questions that the methodologies ask are really basic to the questions that we need to ask about the study of literature…[:] What is this thing? What is its role in culture? What does it mean? Why do we study it?… It has become very hard to make that, that case. And it’s not that I think making that case explicitly is going to win converts, as opposed to talking about the literature itself. In the end, it’s going to be the literature itself…. But to have an account of the meaning of what we’re doing, even for our own sakes, we do need to be thinking about questions like: “What is this thing?”…

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It is a very good podcast, well worth listening to.

Yet its foundations seem to me to be built on sand.

It is hard to find a self-described “academic Marxist” these days: there are zero in the natural sciences, and zero in the business schools and in economics. When you get to the more humanities-oriented social sciences and the humanities proper, it is a little bit easier—but it is very hard. (Although it is trivially easy to find people whom Christopher Rufo and company call “academic Marxists”. I probably qualify under that active-disinformation standard.)

(I do have considerable differences with Perry Anderson’s Considerations on Western Marxism, that I should write down sometime. Suffice to say here that Lukács, Korsch, Gramsci; Adorno, Marcuse, Benjamin; Sartre, Della Volpe, Colletti, Lefebvre, and Goldmann were trying hard to understand society and history, and deserve a judgment much kinder to them than Anderson administers.)

And to the extent that left-wing people with aspirations to pushing transformative changes in social consciousness moved into the university starting in the 1960s, they were not Marxists in any proper sense of the word. They were, rather, the kinds of people whom Marx and Engels cruelly mocked in their The German Ideology, the central thesis of which was that while the English had made a revolution by transforming their economy and the French by transforming their polity, Germans simply thought about revolution and yet convinced themselves they were the leaders of the parade.

Plus, as Nils Gilman rightly says: even in the humanities:

Liberals have been the predominant force, certainly within the administrations, but also within the faculty as a whole. At the university I know best—Berkeley, where I spent the whole 1990s in college and graduate school, and then later in the mid-2010s served as a senior administrator—the radical faculty probably never have amounted to more than… ten or twenty percent…. [But] very noisy, thinking of themselves in many cases as “activist-scholars,” for whom criticizing the fecklessness of their liberal colleagues and resisting the neoliberal administration of their universities is a core part of the public identities…. These people, it should be noted, are generally loathed (or sometimes pitied) by the mainline liberals…

And so note how Oliver, Lawrence and Werlin quickly shift away from “Marxists” to something else: How to justify the study of literature, and how to think about what the conclusions from the study of literature teach us about how a society in constant flux should organize itself.

From my perspective, this is indeed an urgent problem.

For one thing, I think nothing is more essential to the university than having flourishing and educationally excellent history, English, and drama departments (not rhetoric: rhetoric as a discipline looks to me increasingly like a lost cause). We need to teach students the broad sweep of the human culture and civilization they as intellectual workers will draw on, how to present their conclusions and ideas in English prose, and how to argue for their conclusions ideas in personal presentations. Nothing is more important. (Pre-professional education—primarily engineering/data science, biochemistry and finance/management—comes second).

And you cannot have flourishing and educationally excellent history, English, and drama departments that lack a strong and confident sense of what they are for.

Still, I think Oliver, Lawrence and Werlin have the wrong end of the stick here: they talk about the need for justification over and above simply saying “literature is great”, without ever taking a real stab at providing it.

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Note: The full quoted Marx passage as Tooze gives it:

Karl Marx (1859): Preface to “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy”: ‘In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.

In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic – in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production. No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society.

Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation. In broad outline, the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production may be designated as epochs marking progress in the economic development of society. The bourgeois mode of production is the last antagonistic form of the social process of production – antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonism but of an antagonism that emanates from the individuals’ social conditions of existence – but the productive forces developing within bourgeois society create also the material conditions for a solution of this antagonism. The prehistory of human society accordingly closes with this social formation.…

References:

• Anderson, Perry. 1976. Considerations on Western Marxism. London: New Left Books. <https://archive.org/details/considerationson0000ande>.

• DeLong, J. Bradford. 2026. “Six Analytical Threads in Search of Useful Empirical Traction: On Karl Marx’s 1859 ‘Preface’”. DeLong’s Grasping Reality. January 8. <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/six-analytical-threads-in-search>.

• DeLong, J. Bradford. 2026. “The Curious Case of Karl Marx’s 1859 ‘Preface’”. DeLong’s Grasping Reality. January 10.

• DeLong, J. Bradford. 2026. “Contra Marx, the Record Since 1870 Is Rotating Upheavals in Leading Sectors, Not Synchronized Economy-Wide Revolutions”. DeLong’s Grasping Reality. January 13.

• Engels, Friedrich. 1880. Socialism: Utopian & Scientific. Bonn, Germany: Marxists Internet Archive. <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/index.htm>.

• Gilman, Nils. 2025. “How Did Academia Not See It Coming.” Small Precautions. March 7. <https://nilsgilman.substack.com/p/how-did-academia-not-see-it-coming>.

• Marx, Karl. 1859. “Preface” to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Bonn, Germany: Marxists Internet Archive. <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm>.

• Oliver, Henry. 2026. “Literature, Politics, & the Future of the Humanities”. The Common Reader. January 7. <https://www.commonreader.co.uk/p/literature-politics-and-the-future>.

• Tooze, Adam. “Top Links 976”. Chartbook. January 8. <https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/top-links-976-ai-investment-surges>.

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Columbia’s Adam Tooze said last week that he is thinking a lot about the 1859 Preface to Karl Marx’s abysmal A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.

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He does not say why:

Adam Tooze: Top Links 976 <https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/top-links-976-ai-investment-surges>: ‘[Karl Marx] “Men… enter into definite relations… independent of their will… [with] their material forces of production…. [That] constitutes the economic structure of society… on which arises a legal and political superstructure and… consciousness.... Material productive forces… come into conflict with… [property] relations of production… [which] turn into their fetters [on development]. Then… social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure…. Ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight… out… the contradictions of material life….

New superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured…. Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve….

In broad outline, the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production may be designated as epochs…. The bourgeois mode of production is the last… form… antagonistic… emanat[ing] from the individuals’ social conditions of existence—but… bourgeois society create[s] also the material conditions for a solution of this antagonism. The prehistory of human society accordingly closes…

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But I can say why I, at least think about this. Divide the passage into six threads:

Let us look at the passage. (I have reparagraphed the passage to make the separate thoughts clearer.) Here we have, working backward:

1. Theology: the millenarian claim (made in 1859!) that the end was at hand of the long era in which human societies were societies of domination,

2. Stage Theory of History: The six modes of production—tribal, Asiatic, ancient, feudal, bourgeois, and socialist—as the successive stages of human history, social revolutions driving the transitions between them.

3. Theology: Refracted through Hegel’s thesis-antithesis-synthesis: the claim that history has an arrow of progress driven by econo-political change.

4. Sociology & Ideology: The conflicts generated by the rupture between old relations of production and the requirements of the new, growing forces of production play themselves out in ideological forms.

5. Political Economy: Relations of production constrain technological development and investment, and then constraint fails as society’s property order is broken by social revolution.

6. Historical Materialism: The relations of production have to be fitted to the technology of society and thus to the way people experience their worklife. And then everything else has to be fitted to that

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And I argued <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/six-analytical-threads-in-search>:

• (6) Historical Materialism is good: human relations of production have to be fitted to the technology of society and thus to the way people experience worklife; and the rest of society must fit as well.

• (5) Political Economy is also good, save reworking can emerge in lots of ways.

• (2) Stage Theory—well, setting up ideal-types of forms of techno-economic-societal orders can be very useful. But I favor something more like: Attention info-bio tech: 2040 (human technological capability index H = 35); globalized value-chain: 2000 (H = 15); mass-production: 1960 (7); applied science: 1920 (3); steampower: 1870 (1); commercial-imperial: 1700 (0.65); feudal: 1200 (0.35); ancient: -500 (0.2); early bronze: -3000 (0.8); tribal: -7000 (0.065); gatherer-hunter: -48000 (0.03)

• With (4), (3), and (1), Marx has left reality fae behind.

But I had more to say. I said more of it a couple of days ago. And here is yet more of it:

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On the relevance of Marx’s frameworks for anything today:

Is it? Maybe.

It is a truth that, from roughly 1750 to 1870, economic transformation arrived in concentrated waves. About one‑tenth of the economy would be remade every forty years, generating extraordinary new fortunes while inflicting painful disruption on those caught in the transition’s crosshairs. Think of mechanized textile production overturning cottage spinning and weaving, steam power reorganizing transport and logistics via canals and railways, and iron‑then‑steel reshaping construction and machinery—all of which massively raised productivity and enriched entrepreneurs, financiers, and skilled adopters. Yet artisans, smallholders, and regional trades often suffered precipitous income losses and displacement.

These economic revolutions and attempted political responses were enabled by institutional and intellectual scaffolding—patent regimes protecting inventors, capital markets mobilizing savings into fixed investment, imperial trade networks opening demand, and a growing engineering knowledge base diffusing techniques—while their pace was punctuated by financial cycles and technological bottlenecks. The pattern—rapid sectoral reconfiguration, concentrated gains, broad adjustment frictions—recurs across cotton, coal, railways, and metallurgy, and anticipates later shifts in chemicals, electricity, and communications: persistent Schumpeterian churn rather than smooth, economy‑wide drift.

The story really begins in the second half of the 1700s with England’s “poor stockingers”—hand‑knitters and framework knitters whose livelihoods were squeezed as mechanized frames, factory organization, and increasingly integrated merchant capital undercut household production on price, speed, and quality control. Their unrest foreshadowed that of the handloom weavers of the 1830s and 1840s. Their plight was not primarily exploitation by capitalists grinding down their piece-rates. Their plight’s arithmetic was harsher arithmetic: cheap because slave-grown cotton, better‑organized distribution, and most of all with power‑looms their traditional linen weaving become uneconomical: even at bare subsistence incomes they were simply too costly to hire. Protective guild structures eroded; putting‑out systems collapsed into wage work; and price competition from Manchester and Lowell radiated outward, crushing high‑cost incumbents. Episodes like the Luddite frame‑breaking (1811–12) and the Silesian weavers’ revolt (1844) register the social shock of technological substitution and market integration. “Losers” were not merely temporarily disadvantaged; they occupied entire cost structures rendered obsolete by a new production frontier, and lifeways vanished, inflicting great pain. Plus periodic economy-wide mysterious incomprehensible finance shock-administered depressions.

Since 1870, the bullseye of creative destruction has widened: not one‑tenth but roughly one‑fifth of the economy gets thoroughly reëngineered every forty years, and it is a different fifth each time. Think of electricity and the second industrial revolution recoding factories and households from the 1870s–1910s; then chemicals, autos, and mass production from the 1910s–1950s; postwar electronics, aviation, and consumer durables from the 1950s–1980s; and information and communications technologies from the 1980s–2020s, now giving way to cloud, AI, and bio‑platforms.

Each wave features a general‑purpose technology that diffuses through complementary investments—infrastructure, standards, skills, and organizational change—so the productivity frontier jumps in the target sectors while linked upstream and downstream activities reorganize. The wealth effects are enormous for firms and workers positioned to exploit the new complementarities—utility magnates and electrical engineers in the early period, auto barons and assembly‑line managers mid‑century, semiconductor founders and software architects later—while those embedded in the superseded cost structures face obsolescence: horse breeders in the age of the Model T, film‑camera makers in the age of CMOS sensors, typists and travel agents in the age of spreadsheets and online booking.

Policy and institutions matter: antitrust and standard‑setting, education and immigration, patent law and capital markets all shape the speed and breadth of diffusion, and financial cycles modulate the path—booms that overbuild, busts that consolidate—without altering the long‑run pattern of rotating sectoral upheaval.

But is the Marxian frame for analyzing all this worth much?

No. Marx’s grand apparatus—one singular “mode of production,” with matching “relations of production” and “superstructure,” periodically overthrown by unitary “social revolutions”—collapses under the historical record’s messiness. Schumpeterian creative-destruction does not arrive as a single economy-wide productive régime swap but as overlapping, sector‑specific waves; each with its own technologies, financing structures, labor arrangements, and politics. Late‑18th‑century textiles reorganized production around mechanized spinning and factory discipline while agriculture remained largely pre‑mechanized; railways later reconfigured space, capital markets, and time‑keeping without extinguishing artisanal niches; electrification diffused unevenly, transforming some regions and industries decades before others; and postwar mass production coexisted with durable small‑firm ecosystems in services and craft manufacturing.

Superstructures, too, are polycentric and lagged: patent law and joint‑stock finance often precede broad adoption; labor organization and social insurance follow only after dislocation becomes acute; antitrust and regulatory regimes oscillate across cycles rather than mapping cleanly onto any single “base.” Even crises are heterogeneous: Each episode express different frictions—technological substitution, trade price shocks, monetary tightness, and network overbuild. The more accurate picture is a braided process of cumulative innovation, institutional adjustment, and political contestation—Schumpeterian churn that rotates the bullseye across sectors—rather than a unitary revolutionary engine driving synchronized change across an economy’s entirety.

Plus there is simply no time for the kind of semi-tidy adjustment of superstructure to base that Marx and Engels took for granted to take place. The feudal‑to‑commercial‑imperial transition took perhaps 500 years—roughly 20 generations—for property regimes, guild structures, church authority, and political forms to coevolve with market expansion.

By contrast, today’s general‑purpose technologies—electrification, mass production, semiconductors, the internet, and now cloud‑AI—reconfigure the bullseye fifth of the economy in about 40 years, roughly 1.5 generations, before schools, unions, social insurance, corporate governance, and regulatory frameworks can fully adapt.

The result is institutional lag and cultural mismatch: nineteenth‑century factory discipline landed before modern labor law; the automobile remade cities faster than zoning and transit could respond; mid‑century broadcasting concentrated media power prior to antitrust clarity; the internet upended privacy, IP, and competition policy long before coherent rules emerged; and AI is already altering task bundles and bargaining power while education, safety nets, and professional licensing economic-regulation frameworks still assume stable occupations and credentials. In each wave, complementary investments—standards, networks, skills, and organizational change—proliferate quickly in the leading sectors, but the social scaffolding that makes disruption tolerable arrives late, fragmentary, and contested, producing recurring bottlenecks in adjustment rather than the synchronized base‑superstructure harmonization imagined in classical Marxist theory.

Still: society has to grab for some kind of uneasy semi-homeostasis even as the mode-of-production (and -distribution, -communication, -domination, and -legitimation) underpinnings shift at speed. Those who feel the system is mismanaged or failing them pivot from frustration to fury with alarming rapidity. And sometimes to action. In our era, the internet and now AI have transformed information markets and task bundles faster than privacy norms, IP law, education systems, and social insurance can recalibrate, stoking anger among displaced workers, squeezed local businesses, and communities confronting surveillance, disinformation, and winner‑take‑all dynamics. The recurrent pattern is institutional lag: schools, licensing, unions, welfare states, competition policy, and civic culture adjust piecemeal and late, while technology rewrites incentives quickly. Durable semi-homeostasis can arrive only after complementary investments—standards, infrastructure, retraining, safety nets, and governance reforms—catch up enough to share gains and cushion losses; until then, volatility in both politics and economics is the default. But by the time that seems close to being attained, there is a new General-Purpose Technology and a new fifth of the economy in that GPT’s Schumpeterian creative-destruction process.

Even purged of its millenarian theological utopian expectations of the imminent arrival of a New Jerusalem, the Marxist apparatus is of little use here.

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Note: The full quoted Marx passage as Tooze gives it:

Karl Marx (1859): Preface to “A Contribution to the CI am running a few minutes late; my previous meeting is running overitique of Political Economy”: ‘In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.

In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic – in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production. No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society.

Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation. In broad outline, the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production may be designated as epochs marking progress in the economic development of society. The bourgeois mode of production is the last antagonistic form of the social process of production – antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonism but of an antagonism that emanates from the individuals’ social conditions of existence – but the productive forces developing within bourgeois society create also the material conditions for a solution of this antagonism. The prehistory of human society accordingly closes with this social formation…

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References:

• Anderson, Perry. 1976. Considerations on Western Marxism. London: New Left Books. <https://archive.org/details/considerationson0000ande>.

• DeLong, J. Bradford. 2026. “Six Analytical Threads in Search of Useful Empirical Traction: On Karl Marx’s 1859 ‘Preface’”. Grasping Reality. January 8. <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/six-analytical-threads-in-search>.

• DeLong, J. Bradford. 2026. “The Curious Case of Karl Marx’s 1859 ‘Preface’”. Grasping Reality. January 10.

• Engels, Friedrich. 1880. Socialism: Utopian & Scientific. Bonn, Germany: Marxists Internet Archive. <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/index.htm>.

• Gilman, Nils. 2025. “How Did Academia Not See It Coming.” Small Precautions. March 7. <https://nilsgilman.substack.com/p/how-did-academia-not-see-it-coming>.

• Marx, Karl. 1859. “Preface” to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Bonn, Germany: Marxists Internet Archive. <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm>.

• Tooze, Adam. “Top Links 976”. Chartbook. January 8. <https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/top-links-976-ai-investment-surges>.

• Wikipedia. 2026. “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy”. January 10. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Contribution_to_the_Critique_of_Political_Economy>.

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Columbia’s Adam Tooze said a couple of days ago that he is thinking a lot about the 1859 Preface to Karl Marx’s abysmal A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.

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He does not say why:

Adam Tooze: Top Links 976 <https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/top-links-976-ai-investment-surges>: ‘[I] keep thinking of this…. [Karl Marx] “Men… enter into definite relations… independent of their will… [with] their material forces of production…. [That] constitutes the economic structure of society… on which arises a legal and political superstructure and… forms of social consciousness.... Material productive forces… come into conflict with… [property] relations of production… [which] turn into their fetters [on development]. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure…. [Then come] the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic—in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out…. This consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life….

New superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society. Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve….

In broad outline, the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production may be designated as epochs marking progress in the economic development of society. The bourgeois mode of production is the last… form… antagonistic… emanat[ing] from the individuals’ social conditions of existence—but… bourgeois society create[s] also the material conditions for a solution of this antagonism. The prehistory of human society accordingly closes with this social formation…

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A couple of days ago I said why I, at least think about this <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/six-analytical-threads-in-search>. I divided the passage into six threads:

1. Theology: the millenarian claim (made in 1859!) that the end was at hand of the long era in which human societies were societies of domination,

2. Stage Theory of History: The six modes of production—tribal, Asiatic, ancient, feudal, bourgeois, and socialist—as the successive stages of human history, social revolutions driving the transitions between them.

3. Theology: Refracted through Hegel’s thesis-antithesis-synthesis: the claim that history has an arrow of progress driven by econo-political change.

4. Sociology & Ideology: The conflicts generated by the rupture between old relations of production and the requirements of the new, growing forces of production play themselves out in ideological forms.

5. Political Economy: Relations of production constrain technological development and investment, and then constraint fails as society’s property order is broken by social revolution.

6. Historical Materialism: The relations of production have to be fitted to the technology of society and thus to the way people experience their worklife. And then everything else has to be fitted to that

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I argued strongly that to pick up one (or more) of these six claims and then to try to develop it and demonstrate its truth and draw forth its implications for human knowledge, human society, human political action, and the human future is what it is to be a “Marxist” in any sense meaningful. And I argued:

• (6) Historical Materialism is, in a soft sense, true: to be stable, human relations of production have to be fitted to the technology of society and thus to the way people experience worklife; and the rest of society must fit as well.

• (5) Political Economy is sof-sense true, except for the “social revolution”—reworking can emerge in lots of ways.

• (2) Stage Theory—well, setting up ideal-types of forms of techno-economic-societal orders can be very useful. But I favor something more like: Attention info-bio tech: 2040 (human technological capability index H = 35); globalized value-chain: 2000 (H = 15); mass-production: 1960 (7); applied science: 1920 (3); steampower: 1870 (1); commercial-imperial: 1700 (0.65); feudal: 1200 (0.35); ancient: -500 (0.2); early bronze: -3000 (0.8); tribal: -7000 (0.065); gatherer-hunter: -48000 (0.03)

• With (4), Marx has left reality behind: Historical conflicts are often not about forces and relations of production at all, but about, for example, whether al-‘Azīz, al‑Raḥmān, and al‑Raḥīm are merely three principal attributes of a unitary divinity, or actually the three hypostases of some trinitarian theology.

• (3) as well is nonsense on stilts: the arc of history does not bend toward justice, or even prosperity.

• And (1), of course, is millenarian theological fantasy.

But I had more to say. Here is some of it:

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On the curious reception of Marx’s 1859 book:

Of all of the Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy, the “Preface” is now the only thing that is ever read—indeed, as best as I can grasp, pretty much the only thing that was ever read.

The book as a whole is a mess.

Friedrich Engels tried to push the book. He wrote a review: The first part argued that standard political economy should be understood not as a description of the economy but rather as an ideological reflection of its operation—hence the need for a critique. The second part argued that Marx’s reinterpretation of Hegel had produced a sound method of analysis.

There was supposed to be a third part of Engels’s review: “the economic content of the book will be discussed in a third article”. It never appeared. That even Engels could not get it together to write about what Marx could use historical-materialist and Hegel-turned-right-side-up analytical methodology to conclude about the economy—that tells us that the actual “therefore…” results of setting up the apparatus and turning the crank were thin gruel indeed.

This was, I think, because the actual content of the thing was very thin indeed. Marx had constructed a neo-Hegelian analytical method. He had made his historical materialism bet that political economy should be analyzed not as a science but as an ideological reflection of the economy. And what he had come up with and was willing to publish in 1859 was: the dual use‑value versus exchange‑value character of the commodity, with exchange-value determined by the necessary amount of "homogeneous social labor” time, and with exchange value’s equivalences leading to our world in which exchange leads to and is then mediated by money. and universal equivalent leading toward money.

The book was, as I understand it, intended to lay down a marker that he, Karl Marx, was doing something with his time more worthwhile for the long run than earning money by writing European current-affairs commentary for the New York Herald Tribune. The hope, perhaps, was to publish Capital in yearly installments, of which this Contribution would be the first.

But if that was the hope, that plan was stillborn. Yes, much of the Contribution does show up, rewritten but not necessarily improved, in the first chapters of Capital. But otherwise there is a drought. Marx’s Herr Vogt appears in 1860. He gave—but did not publish—his Value, Price, & Profit speech in 1865. Otherwise it is only the Contribution that breaks the surface as a substantial work between 1852 and 1867.

And was the Contribution thick and meaty enough to demonstrate that Marx was doing something truly worthwhile and great?

No. It was noticed within a narrow German socialist and émigré circle, completely ignored by mainstream economists German and English, and intermittently misread by philosophers still shadow-boxing with Hegel. Engels’s positioning it as a methodological breakthrough convinced few. Within German political economy, the focus was on trade policy, monetary debates, national political consolidation (Zollverein, then unification), and how to jump-start industrial development. An abstract attempt to rebuild value and circulation from abstract principles was of little interest. In the broader European radical press, the reception was sporadic yet respectful, but not so much through the result of the book itself but rather of those in Engels’s and Marx’s network being team players.

Thus I have never understood why Marx thought the book worth publishing.

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Note: The full quoted Marx passage as Tooze gives it:

Karl Marx (1859): Preface to “A Contribution to the CI am running a few minutes late; my previous meeting is running overitique of Political Economy”: ‘In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.

In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic – in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production. No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society.

Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation. In broad outline, the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production may be designated as epochs marking progress in the economic development of society. The bourgeois mode of production is the last antagonistic form of the social process of production – antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonism but of an antagonism that emanates from the individuals’ social conditions of existence – but the productive forces developing within bourgeois society create also the material conditions for a solution of this antagonism. The prehistory of human society accordingly closes with this social formation.…

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References:

• Anderson, Perry. 1976. Considerations on Western Marxism. London: New Left Books. <https://archive.org/details/considerationson0000ande>.

• DeLong, J. Bradford. 2026. “Six Analytical Threads in Search of Useful Empirical Traction: On Karl Marx’s 1859 ‘Preface’”. Grasping Reality. January 8. <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/six-analytical-threads-in-search>.

• Engels, Friedrich. 1880. Socialism: Utopian & Scientific. Bonn, Germany: Marxists Internet Archive. <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/index.htm>.

• Gilman, Nils. 2025. “How Did Academia Not See It Coming.” Small Precautions. March 7. <https://nilsgilman.substack.com/p/how-did-academia-not-see-it-coming>.

• Marx, Karl. 1859. “Preface” to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Bonn, Germany: Marxists Internet Archive. <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm>.

• Tooze, Adam. 2026.“Top Links 976”. Chartbook. January 8. <https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/top-links-976-ai-investment-surges>.

• Wikipedia. 2026. “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy”. January 10. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Contribution_to_the_Critique_of_Political_Economy>.

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Am I wrong? Vaccine skepticism really, really, really should not be a thing.

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Receiving the mRNA vaccination for COVID-19 is very strongly and causally associated with lower mortality from COVID: only 1/4 of those who would die from COVID otherwise die if they were smart enough to get vaccinated.

But there are more correlations in the system:

1. Is receiving the mRNA vaccination for COVID-19 associated with lower non-COVID mortality because it indicates that you are a sensible person who can actually undertake to take reasonable care of your health?

2. Is it associated with higher non-COVID mortality because people in bad health have more powerful incentives to actually get vaccinated?

3. Is it associated with lower non-COVID mortality because COVID-19, even if it does not kill you, is a substantial drag on your metabolism and so opens your way to other things that do kill you?

Well, clearly (2) is not dominant: for every four people who die if they do not get the vaccine, only three people die who do.

Laura Semenzato & al.: COVID-19 mRNA Vaccination & 4-Year All-Cause Mortality Among Adults Aged 18 to 59 Years in France <https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2842305>: ‘A total of 22,767,546 vaccinated and 5,932,443 unvaccinated individuals were followed up for a median (IQR) of 45 (44-46) months. Vaccinated individuals were older… [on average] (38.0… vs 37.1… years), more frequently women (…51.3%]…vs… 48.5%) and had more cardiometabolic comorbidities… (9.3%… vs…7.8%]. During follow-up… 0.4%… and.. 0.6%… all-cause deaths occurred in the vaccinated and unvaccinated groups…. Vaccinated individuals had a 74% lower risk of death from severe COVID-19… and a 25% lower risk of all-cause mortality… with a similar association observed when excluding severe COVID-19 death. Sensitivity analysis revealed that vaccinated individuals consistently had a lower risk of death, regardless of the cause…

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So is it (1) or (3)? Sample selection for intelligence in a life-preserving sense, or reduced metabolic load?

Probably both play a role, but reduced post‑infection disease burden is the more plausible dominant channel. There broad, cause‑specific reductions across major ICD‑10 categories. It would be very hard to explain all of these reductions solely by health‑preserver selection. ​⁠

And we do, by now, know a lot about SARS‑CoV‑2 infections. They do elevate medium‑to‑long‑term risks across organ systems: cardiovascular, thrombotic, metabolic, neurological, and still others. This is consistent with a persistent metabolic and inflammatory burden. Such a burden could easily raise non‑COVID mortality.

Complementary data show vaccination lowers the risk and persistence of post‑COVID conditions (including in breakthrough cases), reinforcing the pathway whereby fewer or milder infections reduce later non‑COVID mortality. Thus there is a very clear channel here: Reducing infection and severity, vaccination plausibly cuts these downstream hazards. This aligns with extensive evidence on long COVID’s multi‑system consequences, and elevated post‑acute event risks. ​⁠

While residual confounding can’t be completely ruled out (but when can it?), the preponderance of evidence does suggest the primary driver of the roughly 25% non‑COVID mortality reduction is fewer and less severe infections—and thus a lighter post‑infectious physiological load—rather than vaccinated individuals simply being “more sensible.”

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So right now 1/5 of the American population is unvaccinated. Just doing the arithmetic: At the moment, COVID-19 is recorded as the cause of death for about 1/100 of the 0.4% of 19-64 year-olds who die each year—and failing to get your mRNA vaccine quadruples that. But it really looks like unvaccinated 19-64 year-olds have a greater risk of death not 0.016%/year higher than the vaccinated, but fully 0.12%/year higher. And the presumption has to be that there are an extra 6.5 19-64 year-olds who die from something else that they would have successfully fought off, had they gotten vaccinated and so had suffered under less of a metabolic burden from fighting COVID.

How did we get into this mess?

It really started with COVID-19 denialism:

From my perspective Ground Zero was Stanford’s Hoover Institute, for from his perch there Richard Epstein posturing as “contrarian rather than curious” predicted that “U.S. covid deaths would max out at 500, a prediction he later updated to 5000…”

And there was a later but larger spread coming from the White House, where Kevin Hassett was very effectively spreading misinformation:

Matt Yglesias: The Trump administration’s “cubic model” of coronavirus deaths, explained <https://www.vox.com/2020/5/8/21250641/kevin-hassett-cubic-model-smoothing>: ‘An extremely foolish way to forecast the pandemic…. The Trump administration’s decision to abandon efforts to suppress the coronavirus and even sideline its own task force’s guidelines in favor of a quick lift of restrictions on economic activity naturally prompted the question: Why?… The answer… is that the president prefers a… rosier picture… the “cubic model”… attributed to former Council of Economic Advisers Chair Kevin Hassett… that “shows deaths dropping precipitously in May—and essentially going to zero by May 15…”

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One would have thought that the death of Godfather’s Pizza entrepreneur and perennial Republican political hopeful Herman Cain, who died after catching COVID at the Republican late-June 6000-person indoor political rally at the Bok Center, would have caused some rethinking, but apparently not. Had Trump not listened to Hassett and company, and had Trump followed the lead of impeccable right-wing populist Scott Morrison of Australia with a harder-lockdown stance, then odds are the U.S. would have lost only about 1/4 as many people from COVID-19 in the pre-vaccine era as it did:

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Looking back at this history, I think Matt Yglesias gets it basically right in writing:

Matt Yglesias: What happened with Covid NPIs? <https://www.slowboring.com/p/what-happened-with-covid-npis-in>: ‘Even a lax state like Georgia was actually pretty strict relative to the sample that formed the basis of the recommendations. To the extent that people genuinely wanted to replicate the success stories of 1920, an early and intense adoption of bans on big crowds in public spaces that lasted for 3-6 weeks is basically what was on the menu…. The New York City metro area did dramatically worse than average…. That area was hit first and hardest in the United States and, critically, it was hit before NPIs were put into place…. The early wave that hit Greater New York was a scary exemplar of how bad things might have gotten. That was a situation in which the vulnerable were taking few countermeasures and the virus was truly spreading uncontrolled.

Most of all, Greater New York had the pandemic nightmare scenario where there were so many patients in the hospitals that it wasn’t possible to treat them all. When that happens, medical professionals have to triage away the least-promising cases and the death rate soars. The point of the pre-polarization rallying cry to “flatten the curve” was that we wanted to adopt enough NPIs to prevent what had happened in New York from recurring in Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, and Houston. And while that didn’t work perfectly, it did work…. Essentially every state did adopt meaningful NPIs. And if you judge their success by the curve-flattening criterion, it worked…

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Thus we did adopt the policy of “The Hammer and the Dance”: keep cases low enough that the medical system can cope without being overwhelmed, until vaccines arrive. And it worked—only 1/4 as well as in Australia, admittedly, but it worked. What happened in NYC in March 2020 was not repeated.

And by early 2021 the vaccines had arrived. And the dire emergency was over. Admittedly, the Biden Administration pathetically dropped the ball by failing to pay to vaccinate the world in 2021, and so we got blowback in terms of less-than-pleasant Omicron and other variants thereafter. But, here in the U.S., vaccines made the disease tolerable.

And yet not: COVID denialism was then followed by vaccine skepticism. With results we now know: 1/5 of the U.S. population is still unvaccinated against COVID, which is still killing 15,000 19-64 year-olds people a year, roughly half of them from the 4/5 of the population who are vaccinated and roughly half from the 1/5 of the population who are unvaccinated. That is a pre-elderly adult cumulative mortality hazard of 0.2% for the vaccinated and 1.0% for the unvaccinated.

But now comes this French study to suggest that, as COVID is now endemic, the lifetime adult pre-elderly mortality risk for the vaccinated is 14%, and for the unvaccinated 18%—if the results of this study can be extrapolated in this way.

That is truly YUUGE: For pre-elderly adults, that is more than all cancers, and twice as much as all heart disease.

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References:

• Abu Ahmad, Wiessam, & al. 2026. “Mortality Following Recovery from COVID-19 Hospitalization: A Long-Term Cohort Study.” International Journal of Infectious Diseases. 163 (Feb.), Article 108223.<https://www.ijidonline.com/article/S1201-9712(25)00445-X/fulltext>.

• Douglas, Rex. 2020. “How to be Curious Instead of Contrarian About COVID-19: Eight Data Science Lessons From ‘Coronavirus Perspective’ (Epstein 2020).” March 30. <https://rexdouglass.github.io/TIGR/Douglass_2020_How_To_Be_Curious_Instead_of_Contrarian_About_Covid19.nb.html>.

• Pueyo, Tomas. “Coronavirus: The Hammer & the Dance”. Medium. March 19. <https://tomaspueyo.medium.com/coronavirus-the-hammer-and-the-dance-be9337092b56>.

• Semenzato, Laura, & al. 2025. “COVID-19 mRNA Vaccination & 4-Year All-Cause Mortality Among Adults Aged 18 to 59 Years in France”. JAMA Network Open. 8:12 (December 1) <https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2842305>.

• Xu, Stanley, & al. 2023. “A Safety Study Evaluating Non-COVID-19 Mortality Risk Following COVID-19 Vaccination.” Vaccine. 41:3 (Jan. 16), pp. 844–854. <https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X22015614?via%3Dihub>.

• Yglesias, Matt. 2024. “17 thoughts four years after Covid”. Slow Boring. March 28. <https://www.slowboring.com/p/seventeen-thoughts-four-years-after>.

• Yglesias, Matt. 2023. “What happened with Covid NPIs?” Slow Boring. November 1. <https://www.slowboring.com/p/what-happened-with-covid-npis-in>.

• Yglesias, Matt. 2020. “The Trump administration’s “cubic model” of coronavirus deaths, explained”. Vox. May 8. <https://www.vox.com/2020/5/8/21250641/kevin-hassett-cubic-model-smoothing>

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