Creating a Marketplace for Reliable Guessing

Philip E. Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?

Why are professional prognosticators so consistently bad at predicting the future? We know this phenomenon most clearly from basic cable news, where credentialed experts prognosticate about how good, bad, or volatile the near future will be, usually in ways that support their ideology. But it manifests in other environments: business professionals who fail to forecast economic trends. Legislators who let lush opportunities slip away. Inventors pushing questionable technology.

Canadian-American psychologist Philip Tetlock, currently at the University of Pennsylvania, asked himself this question immediately after Operation Iraqi Freedom. Mass-media oracles predicted either swift, easy victory, or else nigh-apocalypse. The reality reflected neither partisan extreme, but instead descended into the same quotidian brutality that has characterized American intervention since WWII. Why, Tetlock asks, were both sides so wrong, and why has nobody paid for their overconfidence?

He favors the metaphor of foxes and hedgehogs, which he pinches from Isaiah Berlin, though it’s far older. Foxes know many things, Tetlock writes; hedgehogs know one big thing. Mass-media operators love highly credentialed experts, especially on economics and world affairs. But those experts’ predictions are often only marginally better than committed dilettantes who read newspapers daily and remains informed. Further, the more advanced one’s credentials, the more marginal the gains.

So far, so good. Tetlock’s description essentially accords with our recent experiences of camera-friendly experts reliably whiffing their predictions. My problem arises when Tetlock transitions from describing to explaining. A consummate scholar, Tetlock is reluctant to say anything which he cannot support strictly from quantifiable evidence. And holy moly, does Tetlock have extensive and thoroughly documented evidence to deploy.

Let’s make something clear: despite his praise (often muted) for well-informed dilettantes, he writes for scholarly audiences motivated by deep research. He fortifies his prose with histograms, p-values, and confidence intervals. He spends several column inches breaking down the mathematical modeling which supports his conclusions, and he seldom goes beyond the evidence. He dedicates an entire chapter to anticipating and transcribing his critics’ likely counterarguments.

Philip E. Tetlock, Ph.D.

Tetlock briefly acknowledges, but doesn’t expand much upon, the reality of who receives attention. TV pundits, hero CEOs, civil rights activists, and tech bros all broadly favor certainty, volume, and swagger. Reliable predictors, working from diversified backgrounds and intellectual caution, can look timid on Sunday talk shows or corporate board meetings. Put another way, saying wrong things confidently looks more telegenic than trading in likelihoods, conditionals, and caution.

Unfortunately, Tetlock himself demonstrates this. He refuses to offer opinions without sourced evidence, and he refuses to offer evidence without lengthy discursions on mathematical variance. Because his status relies on measurable outcomes—what he terms “reputational bets”—he refuses to place everything on one spin of the roulette wheel. The product he thus creates is more likely to be accurate, but less compelling in a media-saturated “attention economy.”

He also omits something I consider vitally important. The principle of homophily means we’re more likely to spend time around people like ourselves. Scholars congregate with other scholars; journalists chill with media professionals; lawmakers drink with lawyers. We see this particularly in economics, the scholarly field least likely to cite sources from other disciplines: our environment discourages seeking differing influences, disconfirming evidence, or even a diverse friend network.

Invested dilettantes make reliable predictions, perhaps, because they see how hypothetical outcomes postulated in scholarly journals actually unfold in daily life. Unfortunately, to calculate his confidence intervals on reliable predictions, Tetlock generates a core sample of prognosticators who are, like himself, flush with academic credentials. If military historians predict one outcome for war, and generals predict another, maybe consult the enlisted men carrying weapons, not more historians and generals.

Rereading what I’ve written, I feel I’ve misrepresented Tetlock’s product. I like his thesis, that intellectual diversity trumps depth in creating reliable forecasts. Later chapters on public accountability are particularly promising, if underwritten. Especially in subsequent years (Tetlock’s first edition appeared in 2005), we’ve seen public experts become increasingly hostile to criticism or disconfirming sources. Doubt has become, not the precursor to better thinking, but a sign of disloyalty. Unsurprisingly, experts have become more likely to be wrong.

Considering my doubts, and new evidence since 2005, we could perhaps read this volume as a prolegomenon to further research. Tetlock himself co-wrote a subsequent volume, which I’ve already purposed to read. But I feel it actually serves Tetlock’s thesis to suggest that future research should come from an interdisciplinary source, perhaps a public-private partnership. The future of the forecasting business is too valuable to entrust only to other forecasters.

Obsolete Men vs. Shrinking Women

This essay is a follow-up to my previous essay Obsolete Men and the Gendered Violence Epidemic

Sabrina Carpenter

If, as I stated previously, modern masculinity means rejecting anything feminine in the self, what then is modern femininity? This matters as women’s appearances have come in for renewed criticism. Louis Theroux, in Inside the Manosphere, followed several men whose male reinforcement routines involve obsessive exercise and bodybuilding, making their bodies huge and brawny. Simultaneously, we’ve witnessed the recent rise in demand for feminine smallness.

Smarter critics than me have commented upon the rise in Ozempic bodies. Celebrity women who once tied their public personas to their larger frames, like Amy Schumer and Adele, recently lost weight so rapidly that it’s essentially impossible without synthetic pharmaceuticals. Large women gaining small bodies requires expensive drugs and full-time exercise routines, so it’s obviously impractical for most women. Yet it’s widespread enough recently to appear normative.

Some time ago, I read an essay—now lost—critiquing gender roles in “romantasy” fiction. The author noted a recurrent theme she called “size gaps,” presented as almost equally reprehensible as age gaps. Many romantasy novels feature hulking, muscular leading men, basically walking slabs of uncooked steak. Their leading women are dainty flowers, maybe skilled swordswomen, but usually small enough to ride piggyback on their lovers’ shoulders.

This underlines part of my problem: we define gender in our society oppositionally. Men are large, tall, and muscular; women are small, slight, and shouldn’t have muscles. Standards of feminine beauty have changed little since 1925, when Lewis & Young praised a woman for being “five foot two, eyes of blue.” A century later, feminine beauty icon Sabrina Carpenter (five foot zero) omitted trousers from a custom Louis Vuitton suit, specifically because of her height.

Not to criticize Carpenter personally; she had no more control over her height than I had over becoming exceptionally tall. But her social icon role, beautiful and sexy but not necessarily for men, includes her body type: short, buxom, with large facial features. We see similar behavior from other women who sway cultural standards. Lizzo, Melissa McCarthy, and Kathy Bates, all celebrated large women, recently lost weight with GLP-1 drugs.

Criticizing Hollywood bodies is nothing new. Women on camera have long been expected to maintain teenage proportions well into adulthood, a standard only possible for those who can afford personal assistants and pricy gym regimens. But the recent rise in waif-like women, coupled with the concomitant visibility of ox-like men, reflects a brutal reality: men must not look like women. And women must not look like men.

Braden Peters

Such attitudes have very real consequences. One of the best actors I ever shared the stage with, a beautiful woman with dynamic range and powerful singing chops, also stood over six feet tall. This made her too tall to gaze up soulfully into most men’s eyes, which precluded her from substantial roles. She bounced through some insulting comic relief roles that reduced her to a function of her unusual height, before leaving the industry altogether.

Switching genders, I see the culmination of this trend in the male “looksmaxxing” influencer Braden Peters, stage name Clavicular. Peters put himself through grotesque paces to achieve his appearance goals: drug injections, day-long bodybuilding runs, even beating himself with a hammer to maximize his jawline. The regimen has arguably worked, because he looks like an exaggerated caricature of a midcentury Hollywood leading man.

But he’s achieved his goals at a catastrophic price. By his own admission, Peters began injecting himself with synthetic testosterone supplements at age 14 to hasten adult characteristics. Within five years, he’d consumed so much fake testosterone that his body stopped producing the natural stuff. In essence, Clavicular chemically castrated himself. He maintains the external appearance of a sexy man, but his (ahem) primary sexual characteristic no longer works.

Sabrina Carpenter and Braden Peters are opposite sides of the same coin, and I do mean opposite. If women are shorter than men, then Carpenter’s exceptionally slight height becomes aspirational. If men are harder-featured then women, then Peters literally beating his face with a hammer to maximize his jawline becomes an acceptable price. Influencers define both binary genders by looking as little as possible like the other.

I’m using external appearance, like height and build, as metaphors here. The problem is much more pervasive. As American society generally becomes more accepting of alternate gender presentations, our cultural gatekeepers have become even more rigid and restrictive. This is still currently a fringe issue, mercifully. But then, so was the alt-right, until it conquered the government. Left untended, these positions risk becoming mainstream.

The White Privilege Party, Part 3

This essay is a follow-up to Dinner and Drinks at the White Privilege Party and The White Privilege Party, Part 2.

Woody Guthrie

If the fash hate one thing, it’s being called fash. Or even told they’ve done something fashy. Even when faced with their overwhelming fascism, or with subject experts like Timothy Snyder or Jason Stanley demonstrating their fashy tendencies, they become angry and defensive. President Taco’s claim to be “the least racist person there is” has become the tragicomic emblem fascists’ need to be seen as nevertheless good.

Returning this series to where it began, the question remains of whether protestors should use confrontational chants while challenging the current administration. Specifically, whether they should use Woody Guthrie-type songs to call fascists “fascist” to their faces. In conservative, semi-rural, and racially homogenous places, such boldness will precipitate conflicts, which discourages White protestors from getting involved.

“Fascism” is a notoriously slippery concept, since it adapts itself to local conditions. Snyder and Stanley have useful, but often inconsistent, definitions. For our purposes, let’s define fascism as the hardened and intolerant extreme of the hierarchy I described last time. Fascism not only requires some people to remain powerless for others to have powerful, and divides power racially, but enforces this mandatory division through arbitrary violence.

The history of hierarchical violence reveals something remarkable. As theologian James Cone writes, Jim Crow racial violence didn’t happen to kill the targets. It happened to remind survivors that the perpetrators would face no consequences, because they owned the system. Likewise, the Roman church didn’t burn witches and heretics to force conversions in early Christendom. It only burned nonconformists in the Renaissance, once its political power was unquestionable.

Put briefly, hierarchical violence happens when perpetrators know they’ll face no meaningful punishment. In my lifetime, Kyle Rittenhouse, George Zimmerman, and Bernard Goetz knew or suspected that the racially slanted justice system wouldn’t hold them accountable for shooting Black people or their White sympathizers. So they strapped on guns and went hunting on American streets.

We’ve watched “red states” legalize driving cars into protestors. We’ve watched them refuse to prosecute bullies attacking children. We’ve watched the current administration target harmless dissidents on camera, knowing they won’t be prosecuted, or even meaningfully reprimanded. The deferral of each consequence basically ensures that the next street-level fash will feel authorized to attack, maybe even to kill.

Equally importantly, perpetrators don’t see themselves as villains in this arrangement. Fashy narratives reinforce the belief that hierarchies are necessary, and therefore equality is oppressive. Any attempt to fix unfairness is innately unfair to those who benefit, or think they do. Therefore those protected by the status quo, even the poor and forgotten, are too likely to violently defend what dwindling privilege they have.

The term “extinction burst” has become modish recently. Once you remove reinforcement from previously rewarded behavior, the behavior becomes more extreme and calcified before it disappears. Recent discussions spotlight violence specifically, as America’s overall culture no longer rewards racism, homophobia, and other bigotry as openly as before. But that exact change puts protestors in conservative areas at greater risk.

Please don’t misunderstand, I know these forces are contradictory. People are violent because they know nobody will hold them accountable, but they know nobody will hold them accountable in the exact places where their dying ideology still matters. Florida, which legalized driving cars into protests, has one of America’s oldest median resident ages. Nebraska, where prosecutors won’t charge men who attack kids, remains substantially isolated from the larger economy.

This paradox underlies Critical Race Theory. CRT founder Derrick Bell claimed, with evidence, that racism has proven infinitely elastic as its successive justifications become obsolete. Violent economic necessity justified slavery, but morphed into organized bigotry under Jim Crow. Once the state withdrew support, bigotry became disorganized, like background noise. With each morph, the system excommunicates its former defenders.

The three vigilantes I named—Rittenhouse, Zimmerman, and Goetz—all retreated into anonymity after their acquittals, and became parodies of their prior selves, because their persons didn’t matter. They claimed “self-defense,” but their selves were an afterthought. Their supporters abandoned them because once they bolstered the narrative that White (or White-adjacent) people owned the system, that system no longer needed them.

White progressives fear angering the fash by calling them fashy to their faces, not only because fashies are violent, but because they’re as much displaced by the cultural shifts happening around them as the conservatives are. They’ll hang onto their illusions that they can persuade the fash, because the alternative is plunging headlong into uncertainty. The old system is dying, and to those accustomed to winning, that’s terrifying.

The White Privilege Party, Part 2

This essay is a follow-up to Dinner and Drinks at the White Privilege Party.

Striking teachers in the West Virginia statehouse, 2018 (CNN photo)

Political commentators conventionally date the decline of American labor unions to President Reagan mass-firing the PATCO strikers in 1981. But I think the process started much sooner. After peaking in the 1950s, union membership has declined steadily. Though reliable statistics go back to only 1983 (everything prior is estimates and probabilities), union membership rates have halved in that time. This decline has correlated with another powerful social force.

Desegregation.

Ian Haney Lopèz dates union desegregation to 1973, and claims that the battles surrounded seniority. White laborers, Lopèz claims, would rather relinquish all union protections, than surrender the senior standing they achieved under racially biased rules. Tacit within this refusal, though, is the corollary that White workers refused to negotiate alongside Black workers. Too many White workers would rather suffer than see Black people share their protections.

I cannot verify this 1973 date; FDR desegregated defense contractors by executive order during World War II, while Truman desegregated the military in 1948. The American Federation of Labor recognized its first majority-Black union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, in 1925. Union desegregation seems more gradual than abrupt. The point remains, however, that the more inclusive unions became, the more White workers abandoned them.

I’ve begun this essay with labor unions because they’re quantifiable. And of course, correlation doesn’t equal causation; White workers might’ve decided they didn’t need union protection and also that they didn’t want to work alongside Black co-workers coincidentally. But the third prong of the trident, the election of softball racist Ronald Reagan, of “strapping young buck” fame, suggests that racism directed White workers’ economic choices, not vice versa.

This pattern recurs throughout American history. Critics have condemned Nikole Hannah-Jones and her 1619 Project for suggesting the Founding Fathers created America specifically to protect their racial hierarchy. But the fact remains that, after the American Revolution, nine of the thirteen original states, including New York and New Jersey, still practiced slavery. White Americans who talked up liberty and autonomy needed ninety years to fully stop enslaving Black Americans.

And then Jim Crow began.

Bull Connor looses the dogs on protesters in Birmingham, Alabama, on May 3rd, 1963

Nobel Prize-winner Toni Morrison wrote that American values have long valorized individualism and autonomy; but such values have weight only to the extent that they’re denied to some Americans. Me being unfettered only means something while someone else remains restrained. Morrison, a novelist, meant this specifically in literary terms, because in fiction, we can abstract such values to broad moral precepts. But the same principle applies to society writ large.

In today’s America, “peace” doesn’t mean the stability necessary to pursue our physical and spiritual well-being, it means the absence of war. “Wealth” doesn’t mean physical comfort and a full belly, it means the power necessary to employ other people to look after your stuff. “Law” doesn’t mean reliable systems of social order, it means violent crackdowns on nonconformists and the poor. We define our shared values oppositionally.

And, as Morrison writes, we often use race as mental shorthand for this opposition. Sure, sometimes we signify “the other” with other external signs, like hair or piercings. But if White punk rockers want acceptance from the squares, they can shave their Mohawks and remove their tongue studs. Black and Hispanic people can’t stop being Black and Hispanic, and therefore can’t stop being shorthanded as “less than.”

It’s easy, considering American public mythology, to forget that when Dr. King was assassinated in Memphis in 1969, he wasn’t there to mobilize for racial justice. He was there to help unionize the city’s sanitation workers. Sure, those sanitation workers were overwhelmingly Black, but Dr. King had recognized the inextricable bond between American racism and economic injustice. Poverty and Blackness occupy the same headspace in the American imagination.

Concisely put, America organizes itself into in-groups and out-groups, then racializes the groups to simplify remembering who belongs where. The same redlining practices that preserve segregated neighborhoods, have also segregated labor forces. The minute Black people wanted union protections, White workers began embracing myths of radical individualism, even as such individualism left them broke and powerless against billionaire business owners.

Better broke than Black, amirite?

We’re somewhat seeing this rolled back. Black deaths caught on camera have ignited a sense of justice in some White Americans, though not yet enough. But it’s carried its own pushback. Capitalists like Elon Musk and Larry Ellison have sought political power that would’ve made Cornelius Vanderbilt or Andrew Carnegie blush. But it all for the same goal: maintaining the hierarchy of haves and have-nots. Which is, usually, racial.

Concluded in The White Privilege Party, Part 3

Dinner and Drinks at the White Privilege Party

Citizens protest the continued ICE presence in Minnesota, January 2026

What moral obligations do White people have, especially White men, to risk death when protecting the powerless in American society? This question confronted me this week when I answered a social media question. Somebody described her White friend in semi-rural Pennsylvania trying to organize a No Kings protest. She wanted to incorporate conventional anti-fascist songs and chants, but her White co-organizers feared becoming “too confrontational” and alienating their neighbors.

I admit I fumbled my answer. I said something mealy-mouthed about regions where somebody arriving with a Gadsden flag and a gun was entirely likely. Progressives living in broadly conservative areas know that those threatening our organized activities face few consequences. Just last month, in my state, an adult man attacked a line of protesting high school students—literal children—and local prosecutors declined to file charges.

Somebody answered my response by saying I failed to understand the Black American experience. Which, as a White cishet man, I probably do. This respondent pointed out that Black Americans face violent pushback for even the most anodyne protest. In fairness, I’ve shared enough protest space with Black and Hispanic people to have witnessed this firsthand, but like anything merely witnessed, that’s not the same as experience.

In all things, I strive to remain fair and broad-minded, and if I’m wrong, I want to amend my ways. So I’ve thought about this response. I could, if I wanted, mumble something about the limits of social media. Especially on platforms which cap character counts, like Xitter, Threads, and Bluesky, it’s impossible to make nuanced arguments. Conditional experiences, including the Black, queer, disabled, or womanist experience, will get elided.

But that’s merely an excuse. Several deeper issues conspired to reach this moment. First, humans naturally desire to stay alive. My sense of moral outrage at persistent American racism arose because racialized violence contravenes the human desire to survive, and places a sliding scale on human life. If some people deserve to remain alive more than others, autocrats could eventually use that relative deserving against me. Or you.

Accused vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse, captured on a cellphone video

This isn’t new or unique. The “Women and children first” ethic made famous on the RMS Titanic was written after literally no women or children survived the SS Arctic disaster. Men on board wanted to survive so badly that they literally elbowed smaller, weaker women aside. Human-made moral codes like chivalry, law of the sea, and bushido generally arise to restrain powerful people’s tendency to value their lives over others.

Honestly, I don’t have to die for justice. As a White man, I could passively acquiesce, and pay little price. This, then, is the obverse of my respondent’s claim that Black people live with constant threats of violence. If White people can walk away from threats and survive, they will walk away. They won’t persevere if their lives are jeopardized, unless the threat of leaving is worse.

Forgive me bringing up old stuff, but here’s where Kyle Rittenhouse enters the discussion. Even I misunderstood the meaning when it happened, focusing on the red-herring language of “self-defense.” But Kyle Rittenhouse’s real lesson was that, if White people stand up for Black lives, human law won’t protect them. White lives don’t matter if they don’t prostrate themselves before a White political apparatus.

In John’s Gospel, Jesus Christ says: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” (15:13 KJV) But Jesus never says anything unless its opposite flits through the common ethos. If we think morality should result in material reward, then dying for others is a failure. Only when justice is communal, not individual, does dying for the cause become an accomplishment.

And right now, in America’s White spaces, communitarian justice just doesn’t exist. That’s why private-sector labor unions are dying, protests are special occasions, and, as Charles M. Blow writes, White people can abandon racial justice actions when the weather becomes harsh. Community justice, once a shared value in America’s factories and farms, has dwindled as those spaces have become racialized, and White people live in atomized suburbs and single-family homes.

Under such conditions, asking White people to risk death simply because it’s right, is a non-starter. Not until our political, religious, and social leaders reclaim a vision of shared consequence, will that change. Unfortunately, that won’t happen while voters, congregants, and citizens don’t reward it—the ultimate circular reasoning. The feedback loop won’t break until, as the fash inevitably do, they turn against the people who first gave them power.

Continued in The White Privilege Party, Part 2 and The White Privilege Party, Part 3

The Doomed Promise of Change from Within

Bull Connor looses the dogs on protesters in Birmingham, Alabama, on May 3rd, 1963

“Why don’t you try applying for ICE and see if you can maybe change things from within?”

I’ve been out of work for several months now with precious few leads and no real opportunities pending. I can’t be the only one in this situation, as our national policy-makers keep inventing new ways to submarine domestic development and make every consumer good more expensive. But every unemployed person ultimately faces the problem alone, as bills accumulate and the daily reality becomes more bleak. I find myself becoming despondent.

Meanwhile, ICE—Immigration and Customs Enforcement—has recently received a massive cash transfusion from the Taco Administration, making it America’s largest law enforcement agency. This tops the previous largest agency, Customs and Border Protection. To meet the Administration’s demand for more deportations, ICE is offering luxurious sign-on benefits and expedited training. It’s also notoriously handing firearms to loose cannons and dangerous people.

In this tumultuous context, my friend good-heartedly suggested I join ICE. Why not get that lush government bag, she said, while also standing against the rampant violence we’ve seen unfolding in Minnesota? I’ve read and heard similar stories for years. Applicants join the police, military, federal agencies, and other secure government jobs, full of idealism, eager to push reform peacefully, from within. These stories seldom end well.

We’ve probably all heard anecdotes. For serious sources, let’s consider Shane Bauer, author of American Prison. As a journalistic project, Bauer took a job as a corrections officer at a private prison in Louisiana. In his telling, Bauer started off idealistic, eager to discover how prisons change prisoners while making a profit. He left the project, though, when his girlfriend reported his private communications becoming increasingly bitter, vindictive, and violent.

Matt Taibbi describes something similar while writing about Eric Garner. He quotes a patrolman who joined the NYPD, hoping to challenge the department’s bureaucratic cruelty. But subject to constant micromanagement and quotas, he found he hadn’t changed the department, it changed him. Besides this, agencies notoriously find inventive ways to enforce conformity, resist scrutiny, and punish reformers and whistleblowers.

Citizens protest the continued ICE presence in Minnesota, January 2026

We could discuss why this happens. Maybe power corrupts, but as Brian Klaas demonstrates, power also attracts those most willing to be corrupted. People who become cops and corrections officers already have a vindictive streak; power simply gives them official vestments. Besides law enforcement, we’ve probably all seen laborers who became managers, students who became teachers, renters who became landlords, and adopted the worst aspects of their new positions.

Colleagues of good standing could, hypothetically, stop this. But we know they don’t. Six ICE officers dog-piled on Alex Pretti before one finally shot him; three officers surrounded Derek Chauvin as he knelt on George Floyd, not stopping Chauvin, but forming a human barricade to keep civilians back. Maybe officers high-minded enough to stop the violence already quit the agencies, but more likely, participants conformed themselves to the existing structure.

These patterns aren’t unique to law enforcement, though police ubiquity makes it more visible. When institutional rot infiltrates a subculture, purging it is rare. We’ve seen private corporations, college fraternities, and other civilian organizations succumb, even if they aren’t protected by qualified immunity. Put simply, those who have power, even limited power within a specific institution, become enamored of it, and perform heinous acts to protect it.

Nor are these effects limited by circumstances. Shane Bauer recalls needing months to recover from the aggression he learned as a corrections officer, rewriting his book several times to purge the anger. Eyal Press describes the ways that COs, drone bomber pilots, and even meat-packing workers experience wartime levels of flashbacks and nightmares. Social psychologist Rachel MacNair calls this phenomenon perpetration-induced traumatic stress.

I’d argue that the violence we’re now seeing enacted in Minnesota, is a more extreme version of violence we’ve all seen before. From schoolyard fistfights and fraternity hazing, to union busting and workplace interrogation, to police violence at anti-police violence protests, it’s all the same. In a structurally unequal society, those who benefit can maintain their standing only through force, or threats of force. Wealth, power, and status are therefore innately violent.

Therefore, changing from within isn’t possible. Though some individuals make some progress, and the occasional abuser may get purged and prosecuted, lone idealists generally can’t fix broken systems. Once the institutional rot becomes widespread enough that the institution must close ranks to protect itself, there’s little chance of “reform.” The system will warp and destroy those who learn its ways, no matter how idealistic.

Are Nation-States Obsolete?

The U.S. Supreme Court Building

The President Taco Administration has performed elaborate gymnastics to preserve its adherents’ notions about American identity. Within its first few weeks, it mistakenly deported a refugee, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whom America was supposed to protect. It’s spent the subsequent months desperately excluding him, and others of a similar complexion, from the country. This has included snatching veterans and citizens in its absurdly wide net.

This emphasizes a question underpinning America’s foundation, a question that remains unresolved 250 years later: what is a nation-state for? Not a government, which exists to make and enforce laws, but the state itself, which exists irrespective of who holds power. Why do nation-states exist? Closely related, what purpose do borders serve? Why do we draw hypothetical lines, then demand citizens stay on their side, under penalty of law?

The Taco Administration clearly sees states as ordained to sort humanity into protected and unprotected classes. The protected class is apparently White, English-speaking, and at least implicitly Protestant Christian. Critics have documented the administration targeting suspects by superficial characteristics, like skin melanin and speaking Spanish in public. These standards of insidership are irrational and inconsistent, but serve a nationalist narrative.

If your 11^th-grade American Civics course resembled mine, you probably heard fuzzy bromides about “government by consent of the governed” and “rule of law in a free society.” Textbook writers cherry-pick these sayings from philosophers like John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Baron Montesquieu. Armchair political theorists browse these writers to justifiy a moral nation-state the way religious scholars once selectively read the Bible and Talmud.

Yet these Enlightenment-era thinkers worked backward to attribute purpose to the state. They mostly worked between the Thirty Years’ War in the 17^th Century, and the Seven Years’ War in the 18^th. During that century, old definitions of nationhood, founded on ethnicity or religion, seemed increasingly phony, as European states expanded beyond their homelands to claim vast overseas colonies. Nations needed new justifications simply to exist.

Charles, Baron de Montesquieu

Before this Enlightenment interregnum, states were the monarchs’ private property. Kings owned the military and the treasury, and commenced wars to gather riches, power, and personal glory. Longstanding wars, such as those between the English Plantagenets and the French Valois, were driven not by principles but by personalities. Monarchic dynasties didn’t influence ordinary people much, provided their battles didn’t happen on peasant farmland.

I’ve written about this before. If you dig back far enough, states basically existed as vessels to contain the military. “King” and “Emperor” are, in their origins, not political titles, but military ranks. When theoreticians like Rousseau postulate a “social contract” to justify the state, they’re imposing later moral expectations that simply don’t apply. States didn’t organize themselves to protect the hoi polloi, they fought for the sake of fighting.

Later thinkers, especially John Rawls and David Gauthier, further extend the social contract experiment. Their theories attempt to recreate primordial social selection, when states first organized themselves, and question how we can recapture that supposed purity. (I’m oversimplifying; stick with me.) But anybody who’s read Edward Gibbon knows that states didn’t emerge from social agreements, they arose from swordsmithing and horsemanship.

Modern attempts to repurpose the nation-state for moral ends create frequent slapstick outcomes. My personal favorite is when Paul Robeson—actor, activist, legend—couldn’t cross international borders during the Red Scare. So, he mounted a sound truck along the U.S.-Canadian border and sang to a multinational audience, while nominally honoring the law. The product highlighted borders’ inherent absurdity.

States invent laws to justify themselves, then draw invisible lines across the globe, demanding that people stay inside whatever lines they’re born into. Instead of the cultural flourishing that we regularly see where borders are loosely enforced, in places like Miami or New Orleans, modern borders become absolute walls that ordinary people must never, ever cross. Literal walls now, in Taco’s America.

Conservatives, especially American religious conservatives, are frequently terrified of a one-world state. Organizations like the United Nations, or even cooperation pacts like the USMCA, reduce them to pants-wetting terror. But I suggest we consider something else: a no-state world. Instead of inventing moralistic justifications for boundaries drawn during the horse-and-buggy era or earlier, maybe states themselves are outdated.

I can’t speculate what comes after nation-states. Future predictions consistently go sideways behind the forecasters’ personal blind spots. But the chaos emerging from the Administration’s attempt to define America’s purpose, shows we need to move beyond this medieval model. We don’t do polity for ancient reasons, so we can’t do it within ancient boundaries.

In Search of Lost Adulthood

How do we define an adult? This question has surged in the last week, as Megyn Kelly defined fifteen-year-old girls as “barely legal” adults, mere days after online rumor-mongers redefined twenty-eight-year-old Rama Duwaji as a child. We saw this happen five years ago, when columnist Joseph Epstein called First Lady Dr. Jill Biden “kiddo,” just days after Donald Trump called his son Don Jr. “a good kid.” They were seventy and thirty-nine years old, respectively.

This problem recurs in America. Last month, J.D. Vance dismissed vile, racist comments from leading “Young Republicans,” ranging from their middle twenties to early forties, as “kids do stupid things.” But a decade ago, Connecticut schoolteacher David Olio lost his job for letting students read a sexually explicit poem in A.P. English, nominally a college-level course, because his students were “kids” and needed protection from adult sexual expression. Childhood excuses vast repressions in its defense.

Our society keeps moving the boundaries of adulthood further out. America has the world’s oldest legal drinking age, preventing youth from learning how to handle alcohol responsibly until they’re most of the way through college. An increasing number of upwardly mobile jobs require graduate degrees, keeping young adults from commencing their careers until they’re around thirty. The average first home purchase now happens around forty, keeping adults from building equity or developing rudimentary financial independence.

Every few years, Congress suggests adjusting the national retirement age. This probably makes sense to legislators, who are mostly lawyers and financiers, and can work as long as their brains remain active. But manual trades, like construction or manufacturing, erode your joints and tendons, so laborers get old faster than office workers. But for our purposes, keeping laborers working will prevent managers from retiring, keeping rank-and-file workers trapped in entry level positions for literal decades.

Perhaps worst of all, Western society overall no longer has clear adulthood rites. The rituals we Americans witness in travelogues like Roots are inspiring, and of course the mitzvah rituals of Judaism, and similar minority religions, still exist. But in the mainstream, ceremonies like baptism or marriage, or benchmarks like high school graduation, carry little weight anymore. With neither ritual nor financial independence, we no longer have any standards to objectively call someone an adult.

Because of these convergent forces, we see people performing the rituals of childhood well into physical maturity. Sometimes this influence is mainly turned inward. Incels and “masculinity influencers” like Andrew Tate perform peacocking displays of manhood that look like middle-grade boys flexing on the schoolyard. But we’re seeing more outward-facing, harmful displays, too: men like Bill Clinton and President Taco collecting sexual conquests like overgrown fraternity boys, leaving trails of scarred women in their wake.

Philosopher Alain Badiou writes that, in market-driven societies, men achieve adulthood by collecting the most toys. But as it now takes longer for youth to achieve financial independence, hoarding toys becomes prohibitively expensive. Therefore men adjust adulthood rituals to strength, dominion, and conquest. Who do they dominate and conquer? Women. Thus, as Badiou writes, men remain boys well into physical adulthood, while girls, to survive, become women at absurdly early ages. Just ask Megyn Kelly.

America’s shared definition of adulthood has become mushy and subjective because, in a society organized to protect capital, we turn humans into capital. Adulthood becomes contingent on economic productivity, freedom from parental support, and resources enough to have and raise children. Standards that many citizens don’t achieve until they’re approaching forty. To be enforceable, we need a standard age of majority: sixteen, or eighteen, or twenty-one. But for all practical purposes, these numbers mean nothing.

We’re witnessing a rare moment of bipartisan moral outrage over the continued lack of accountability for Jeffrey Epstein’s clients. And we should; very little encourages universal outrage as surely as child exploitation. But economic instability and job loss cause trauma as real as SA, if less visibly offensive. We’ve created a society where nearly everybody, in one way or another, is nursing the psychological scars of long-term trauma, and the people responsible suffer no consequences.

Within my lifetime, America has become a society comprised of traumatized children, trapped in cycles of learned helplessness, desperate for adult guidance. We only disagree about who, exactly, we consider a responsible adult. Does our society need a macho disciplinarian, a nurturing teacher, or some third option? Until we find a useful shared definition of adulthood, we’re all, in different ways, trapped at the level of dependent children, desperate for our lives to finally start.

The “Epstein Files” and Conservative Economics

One of hundreds of photos of Donald
Trump with Jeffrey Epstein

If I despise one product of contemporary journalism most, it’s the “think piece” written by editorialists trying to keep neutral. In order to make meaning from ongoing events, like the Jeffrey Epstein “files” controversy, they want to appear cool, dispassionate, above the fray. Six years after Epstein’s spurious death in custody, the Trump administration refuses to release the files which Trump’s voters absolutely know exists. The first factional rifts have opened in Trump’s electoral base.

Too many “think pieces” have promised to explain to us outside Trump’s base why the Epstein files have proved capable of dividing the faithful. But I’m reminded of Duncan J. Watts, who observed that explanations must first explain things. Especially when dealing with unique or unexpected conditions, commentators fail to explain, and simply describe. I keep seeing journalists describing the controversy, the participants, the unanswered questions, but failing to explain anything, lest they appear partisan.

Explaining these events means first understanding the participants, especially the base. I grew up in a deep-red household, and internalized longstanding conservative beliefs. Let’s start with the core conservative economic principle: that hard work, honesty, and dedication lead to financial reward. Whether that means working hard as an entrepreneur to cultivate your business, or working hard as an employee to advance your boss’s goals, self-sacrificing labor is the only key to economic freedom and self-reliance.

Of course, if hard work were enough, then farmers would be America’s richest laborers. In Aristotelean terms, hard work is necessary—if you sit on your hands, you certainly won’t flourish—but it isn’t sufficient. Generations of conservative Americans got their first jobs and realized they saw no reward, no matter how hard they worked. When this happened, I changed my prior beliefs. Other conservatives refused to change, insisting that the world must be wrong.

Growing up Republican, so much political discourse I observed reduced to one underlying question: who’s stopping me from getting rich? If core beliefs can’t be wrong, then their failure to bear fruit must come from someone causing that failure. Immigrants undercut wage values, queer people change the social fabric, welfare recipients separate survival from work, Jewish bankers distort the value of money, or whatever. My poverty proves someone else’s culpability, failure is always externally caused.

Sexual perversion provides a useful metaphor to understand this external blame. From the medieval blood libel, to the Satanic Panic, to QAnon, “they” identify the people destroying our society by their sexual abuse of children. Jeffrey Epstein gives us something these prior blame points didn’t, because Epstein’s sexual abuse of children happened. We have named victims, sworn testimony from reliable adults, and a lawful chain of evidence, something almost no prior child sex scandal had.

But something else is also happening with Epstein. Conservative scaremongers have settled on a list that includes people whom progressives regularly hold responsible for society’s ills. Epstein’s list, if it exists, includes billionaires, financiers, hedge fund operators, landlords, and others who make their living off other people’s work. Conservatives seeking someone to blame usually land on small, powerless outgroups. This time, they’ve turned their ire on a cadre of powerful people who actually cause harm.

No wonder Trump’s administration submarined the investigation, despite having campaigned on it. The groups previously blamed for conservatives’ failure to flourish, including immigrants, Jews, and “welfare mothers,” were too poor and marginal to fight back, and it served powerful people’s interests to let the out-groups fight. For the first time in meaningful numbers, conservatives are tuning their attention to a list that includes lawmakers, landlords, and others. The powerful find themselves forced to close ranks.

I doubt whether the “Epstein files” really exist. When conservatives decided that somebody must be culpable for their poverty, they assumed that documents and paper trails must exist. Conspiracy nuts like Dan Bongino and Alex Jones reassured audiences that evidence surely, definitely existed, and would surface any minute now. Pam Bondi’s famous “It’s on my desk” claim was probably a utilitarian lie, like “the check is in the mail,” to defer consequences onto the future.

Trump’s True Believers ginned themselves to believe this list existed, and would provide the vindication they’ve spent their adult lives seeking. Then the administration committed a rug-pull. Whether officials were lying then, or are lying now, hardly matters. What matters is that, for the first time within my lifetime, conservatives have more than circumstantial evidence and innuendo of who, exactly, is keeping them poor. And for the first time, their outrage may hasten some consequences.

Hanging Onto Hope While Everything Around Me Is On Fire

Back in the 1980s, my father used to collect aluminum cans as a form of exercise. In those days, people regularly just chucked cans, food wrappers, and other litter out of moving car windows. Anyone old enough to personally remember the Reagan era will recall that American roadsides, especially urban roadsides, were consistently choked with post-consumer waste.

So my father would take a lawn-and-leaf bag and go walking aimlessly. The walk gave him necessary low-impact exercise and time to clear his head. And he knew it was time to start home when the bag approached full of the aluminum cans he collected. He would take the full bags to the local recyclery for cash, and use the proceeds to take us kids out for burgers.

After eating, he insisted we dispose of our wrappers correctly.

Once upon a time, American attitudes toward waste were, by today's standards, appalling. A New York PR professional coined the term “litterbug” in the 1940s, but the notion that post-consumer waste was “disposable” created the persistent idea that we could just pitch waste anywhere and trust the Lord to handle it. And way too many of us just did. Part of America's anti-urban sentiment in the 1970s and 1980s referred to the trash on every street and sidewalk.

I was too young to understand when things changed, but they did. In the early 1990s, my dad's walks took much longer, and our burger runs became less frequent. At some point, he started coming home with his bag only half-full. Around the time I finished high school, these walks stopped being worth the effort for him. He stopped carrying the bag with him, and he walked much more predictable, programmatic routes.

That was a loss for Dad, of course. His litter-collecting ambles had been an important part of his exercise regime since before I was born. But even he acknowledged that it was a net good. He couldn't find recyclable litter because fewer people were creating litter; more people accepted that they had individual responsibility for the common good. And streets were far cleaner.

Such changes in public morality don't happen in a vacuum. A combination of public education, media campaigns, and changing local laws overpowered the notion that litter was a “victimless” offense. The more people who accepted their responsibility for clean streets, the more pressure on those who dragged their heels. Eventually the momentum became irresistible.

Not that nobody tried to resist. Some people absolutely insisted on their right to litter; some still do. When I was in college, the campus conservative student group sold t-shirts with a disfigured recycling symbol and the logo “Environmentally Unsafe And Proud Of It!” They turned their sloppiness into a political status and a social identity.

Yet the very fact that they did so proved that they were just fighting the tide, and they knew it. Even while wearing that t-shirt, I watched several of them throw their food wrappers in the trash, and their soda-pop bottles in the recycling. The shirts had a brief, voguish popularity, then vanished as the wearers realized they didn't look brave, they looked like dickheads.

We saw similar fates for other once-popular actions: smoking, for instance, or driving with ethylated gasoline. Or racism, or hating on LGBTQ+ populations. These were once commonplace to the point of being bland, then they became agitated political positions, then finally identities. Because the more obvious it became that these were unsustainable behaviors, the more momentum built against them.

As I write, we're witnessing rapid reversal on some of these positions. The incoming administration has passed sweeping revisions that empower racists, homophobes, and irresponsible environmental attitudes. It's easy to think that, because these actions have government approval, it's impossible to stop them.

But I take comfort in their militant aggression. The administration has to fight so viciously because they know they don't have the momentum on their side. I will admit that losing government support for a more just, more responsible society is a massive setback. But they're fighting so hard because, fundamentally, they know they're losing.

Please don't get me wrong. Victory is far from a forgone conclusion. If we get discouraged and squander the energy, we will lose momentum. To win, we need to keep standing up for a just society and a broad, inclusive definition of citizenship. But I still believe the weight of history is on our side. Victory is ours for the demanding, as long as we remain mindful of the moment.

Rich Men and Their Misshapen Brains

Elon Musk

Watching the eagerness with which American billionaires have rushed to pay obeisance to President-Elect Donald Trump has been a real education. Not in the sense of realizing that America’s rich are venal—that’s hardly news. But the haste they show in showering Trump’s planned inauguration with money and other resources speaks volumes to what these men want. They’re pouring million-dollar investments into an inauguration that threatens to become a coronation.

I’ve often wondered what makes men (and it’s indeed mostly men) want that kind of money. Oligarchs like Zuckerberg, Musk, and Bezos have more money than they can possibly spend. And more than money: as Giblin and Doctorow write, half of Earth’s online advertising revenue flows through two companies, Alphabet (Google) and Meta (Facebook). Half of Earth’s online commercial transactions move, directly or indirectly, through Amazon or an affiliated company.

In other words, these monumentally rich oligarchs, some of whom command wealth exceeding the GDP of entire nations of the Global South, have not only money, but enough power to make medieval potentates blush. These financial superstars have become so powerful that, like real stars, their very presence bends time, space, and the value of a buck. Yet they pay homage to the political candidate who promises them ever more.

They cannot spend that kind of money. It cannot buy them any more comfort or security than they already have. Indeed, they need to employ cadres of guards, managers, and other functionaries to protect their wealth, making holding the money a financial burden on their bottom line. Paradoxically, having such money and power makes them poorer and more vulnerable. Therefore they must want something else, something non-monetary, from their investments.

Mark Zuckerberg

My mind returns to two prior authors I’ve reviewed. Hungarian-Canadian physician Gabor Maté writes that substance abuse patients choose their various addictions according to whatever traumas they suffered in childhood. Children who endured chronic physical abuse, become adults who abuse painkillers like alcohol. Maté writes that one heroin addict described the feeling of shooting up as receiving the warm hugs she never received as a child.

Business executive Joe Plumeri describes himself as a “workaholic,” whose social worth derives from his time spent working. In his memoir, Plumeri describes not only putting himself through punishing hours, but demanding his subordinates do likewise, sacrificing personal time, family, and sleep in favor of making money. Though a billionaire himself, Plumeri clocks less than one percent of Elon Musk’s wealth, too little to crack the Forbes 400 list.

The two most prominent relationships in Plumeri’s memoir are his father, and his son. In an early chapter, Plumeri describes his father showing him around the better-off neighborhoods of Trenton, New Jersey, showcasing the splendor available to those who achieve worldly success. By his own admission, Plumeri put everything else behind achieving the worldly success that, he learned early, would make his father proud.

That “everything” includes Plumeri’s relationship with his eldest son, whom Plumeri describes struggling with alcohol and drugs. Christian Plumeri destroyed himself on substances, seeking the validation and happiness that his distant, workaholic father couldn’t provide. Notably, he completely fails to notice the parallels between his own work addiction, and his son’s substance addiction. Both Plumeris wanted their father’s love, and couldn’t do enough to earn it.

Jeff Bezos

One wonders, reading these accounts, what comparable relationships men like Musk, Zuckerberg, and Bezos lack. Musk seeks extremes of wealth and political power, arguably to find the acceptance and love he increasingly doesn’t receive from his numerous children and ex-wives. Other billionaires hoard land, build spacecraft, and otherwise perform spectacles to receive adulation from shareholders and the public.

Because deep down, I propose, they’re lonely.

These men started off rich: Zuckerberg was a Harvard legacy admission. Bezos received seed capital from his parents. Musk has tried to bury the emerald mine story, but his own family confirms it. Given the crazed, excessive lengths they’ve travelled to become even richer, it seems likely that they, like Plumeri, inherited the myth of personal worth having a dollar value. They hoard resources because, basically, they need a hug.

Consider all they acclaim they’d receive by dedicating even a portion of their wealth to improving society. They have money enough to end famine, conquer homelessness, or halt global climate change. Instead, they’re donating millions to Donald Trump’s inaugural extravaganza. Because despite everything, their brains are already adapted to loneliness, rejection, and isolation. They’ll never make friends like ordinary humans.

And that’s why peons like me will never become rich.

Large-Group Dynamics and the Lonely Child

Nobody actually likes the popular kids in high school. You wouldn’t know that from the deference they receive, from peers and teachers alike. Yet several years ago, reading Dr. Ellen Hendriksen, the author delved into several studies in how people make friends—and the outcomes were surprising, and frequently ugly. Our social structure relies on principles which we frequently can’t see or understand.

Quoting a 1998 study by Dr. Jennifer Parkhurst et al., Hendriksen writes that Parkhurst studied high school social dynamics, a popular field in social psychology. They concluded that popular kids are well-liked, amiable, and natural leaders. But Parkhurst took the unusual step of reading her outcomes to the students she’d studied. To her astonishment, one of her subjects stood up and said (I’m paraphrasing): “Nuh-uh!”

One of Parkhurst’s student subjects, supported by others, reported that peers often widely dislike, even despise, the “popular” kids. They achieve popularity by dominating others, waving their weight and social connections around, and behaving in an entitled manner. Parkhurst, astounded by the outcomes (and probably suffering her own flashbacks to adolescence), reevaluated the data. Turns out, people obey popular kids mostly out of fear and fatigue.

Growing up in a military household, my family moved frequently. Many military brats say likewise, but my father served in the Coast Guard, which mostly operates domestically, and therefore can afford to move personnel more frequently than other branches. Only once did we stay anywhere longer than two years. This proved particularly frustrating because, I now realize, most schools have an unofficial hazing process usually lasting a year.

Without the long-term longitudinal experience that comes from staying in one place for long, I truly never learned to read group dynamics in large populations. If Hendriksen hadn’t reprinted Parkhurst’s findings, translated into vernacular English, I might’ve persisted in believing that I received that hazing alone, unaware that everyone else experienced it too. I certainly would’ve remained mired in the delusion that the popular kids spoke for everyone.

(I know others, like migrant farmworkers’ kids, undoubtedly have it worse. I’m not comparing scars here.)

Put another way, I legitimately believed, not only throughout childhood but well into adulthood, that the loudest, most attention-hungry person in the room spoke for everyone. Presumably we all experience that phase, including that person. You presumably watched Mean Girls too. The persons demanding others’ attention and obedience legitimately believe they’re shepherding the crowd where it wants to go, simply keeping stragglers in line.

Something which former gymnast turned lawyer Rachael Denhollander said recently stuck with me. Speaking in the documentary For Our Daughters, Denhollander said: “It costs you something to side with the weak and the vulnerable and the oppressed. It costs you nothing to side with the one who’s in power.” Denhollander meant this about women and girls sexually abused in church, but it applies, mutatis mutandis, to all relationships with power.

For most children, public schools are our first interaction with organized power. Teachers have nigh-absolute power over their students, and I believe most wield that power with benevolent intentions. But as with most powerful people, there’s a gulf between intention and act. Whether they bend to a malicious minority, or go along with administrative dictates to get along, the outcome is largely similar for students, inexperienced at resisting injustice.

Popular kids and “mean girls” basically reproduce the regimes they witness, filtered through children’s eyes. They misunderstand the larger purposes behind adult authority; they only witness the demand for obedience and conformity, and repeat it. Meanwhile, adults don’t think like children, and attribute adult reasoning to childlike behavior. Both the popular kids and the subject-blind adults side with the powerful, which costs them nothing.

Kids could, hypothetically, organize against the popular kids and the adults who enable them. Indeed, something Malcolm Gladwell wrote recently stands out, that subgroups like Goths resist by making themselves look unapproachable, thus exempting themselves from popularity dynamics. But the outcasts shepherded by the cool kids, almost by definition, lack the leadership and organizational skills to unionize and form more healthy social dynamics. They’re doomed to struggle.

My father timed his retirement to coincide with my high school graduation, whereupon the family relocated one last time, to their hometown. This dumped me into adult responsibilities with no existing social network to streamline the transition. I hope other “nerds” and outcasts at least preserved their nominal support systems, because to this day, I struggle to read rooms. No wonder so many adults still have nightmares about high school.

The Magic of Predicting the Past

Malcolm Gladwell, Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering

Clear back in the year 2000, a New Yorker staff writer published his first book, an overview of recent behavioral science and sociology. The Tipping Point compiled insights from disciplines that frequently don’t communicate well, and distilled their insights into readable vernacular for generalist readers. Malcolm Gladwell introduced an epidemic-like analysis of human group behavior that continues to influence how Americans perceive group behavior and social movements.

A quarter century later, real life has field-tested Gladwell’s precepts, sometimes in direct response to his book. Several of his principles have proven reliable, while others have been OTBE’d: Overtaken By Events. Gladwell takes this, the anniversary of his career-making book, to revisit and update. As journalism of developing social science, it’s interesting reading, though it obviously rehashes the past. As science itself, sadly, it leaves something to be desired.

Gladwell’s dominant principle, that social movements develop like epidemics, seems especially timely because, in the intervening time, two epidemics have gripped American awareness: opioids and COVID-19. (He plays coy that he’s talking about opioids, because he wants his precepts to matter more than the details, but his target audience isn’t fooled.) We can revisit these two epidemics and determine whether Gladwell’s principles accurately describe how these outbreaks unfolded.

First, Gladwell describes the “overstory.” This term comes from ecology, describing the lush efflorescence of life which occupies the canopy of a rain forest, but Gladwell redefines it to fit the sweeping cultural context that humans occupy without conscious awareness. For example, he identifies Miami’s exceedingly high incidence of Medicare fraud with contexts like the Liberty City riots and the Mariel boatlift. My anti-racist spidey sense started tingling.

Then, Gladwell examines the necessity of diversity that protects against contagion. This means both literal diversity—cheetahs are so genetically homogenous that ordinary diseases can devastate communities—or metaphorical diversity, like the differences of backgrounds and goals that defend high schools against pathological groupthink. Nothing here should surprise anybody who got a B in high school biology class, but in today’s cultural milieu, definitely needs restated.

Finally, Gladwell unpacks why some individuals become “superspreaders,” a term most Americans probably first encountered during the pandemic. Some people prove contagious beyond the limits which the laws of chance would determine. Epidemiologists can usually determine fairly straightforwardly which individuals spread, and why, though usually only after they’ve infected others. Gladwell wants social science to have this same trend toward geometric absolutism.

Malcolm Gladwell

Sadly, while his principles seem plausible, they suffer because we only identify them retrospectively. He says, fairly late in the book, that the visible signs of tipping points, the big revolutions of public insight, exist in plain sight. The only reason we miss them, Gladwell asserts, is because we’re looking in the wrong direction. We persistently think change is years away, or longer, until the moment when change happens, usually quickly.

It probably reflects my prejudices, but one example persists in my memory: the sudden reversal of public opinion on gay marriage. The topic consistently failed at polls, most notably California’s Proposition 8. Then abruptly, public sentiment reversed itself, and suddenly most Americans, including a critical mass of conservatives, became accepting of gay marriage. The tipping point, according to Gladwell? The NBC sitcom Will & Grace.

Leave aside that the show’s initial run ended nine years before SCOTUS verified gay marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges. Or that, at its ratings peak, it topped out at only 24 million viewers, considerably below M*A*S*H, which notably failed to turn American sentiment against war. The very idea that one TV sitcom could reverse most Americans’ moral precepts seems laughable. This is especially pointed for series with political points, like Mr. Birchum, which is a global laughingstock.

If the conditions which precipitate the turning point are plainly visible, as Gladwell writes, then seemingly, at least one tipping point should’ve been visible. But nobody predicted Will & Grace changing American politics, nor the McKinsey corporation successfully turning Oxycontin into a public pestilence. Gladwell identifies these consequences because they already happened. In other words, Gladwell congratulates himself for successfully predicting the past. The future remains opaque.

Duncan J. Watts calls this tendency “creeping determinism.” We see outcomes as inevitable, Watts contends, because they happened. That’s exactly what happens here: Gladwell spends no thought for alternate contingencies, and doesn’t consider any attempts which failed, only those that succeeded. Thus he creates an overstory that’s factually correct, but not useful. Models like this only matter if they predict outcomes in advance, a goal which remains tragically elusive.

We Don't Have to Serve the Network

Elon Musk

On Monday, September 30^th, 2024, the Verizon mobile phone and data network failed for millions of Americans in multiple markets. This had obvious immediate effects for personal communications and media consumption. But for innumerable gig-economy workers, such as drivers for Über, Lyft, and DoorDash, the outage impeded their ability to work and make a living.

This follows recent outages for other digital service providers. Since Elon Musk took over Xitter and cut support personnel, the site has suffered periodic site failures. This impedes many companies’ ability to communicate en masse with their customers, but is more an inconvenience than a catastrophe. Far worse is the occasional Meta shutdown, as Facebook is the login portal for numerous other digital services.

And, holy cow, remember how many services wend dark following the most recent Microsoft outage? The post-pandemic remote work boom depends, in no small part, on how Microsoft and Meta have standardized communications and data sharing. Such outages steal workers’ ability to do decentralized, autonomous fundamental jobs. Modernity absolutely requires standardization.

Consider how many documents you’ve stored on the much-vaunted Cloud. Not only virtual data systems, like Google Drive, rely on the Cloud; you can’t even save documents locally in Microsoft Word anymore. Not to disparage the sharing and backup possibilities that the Cloud makes possible, but it also creates unprecedented vulnerabilities, both to data outages and to hackers. Everything you write is possibly exposed to mass attacks.

Bill Gates

How, though, do remediate this? The decentralized post-pandemic intellectual workspace requires standardized data platforms and content sharing, which requires large companies to coordinate our systems. Put another way, there’s no such thing as an artisanal cellphone network. Numerous small businesses—from conventional businesses to spunky Etsy entrepreneurs—need concentrated data sharing.

This creates an interesting tension. We valorize entrepreneurs, freelancers, and the self-employed as economic drivers. But to have any market outside a reasonable driving distance, start-up innovators require massive corporations with thousands, if not millions, of workers. The “gig economy” treats every DoorDasher or Über driver as a separate small business. But without the umbrella corporation coordinatingtheir options, their “businesses” vanish.

As a Distributist, I believe that economics should prize personal autonomy and abjure resource hoarding. When carpenters own their tools, and farmers own their land, they have the freedom to enter fair contracts, or refuse unfair ones. But the Distributist model, first postulated in the 1910s, simply didn’t anticipate today’s industrial complexity or global economy. Our world has become less fair, not more.

Therefore, the Verizon outage forces me to reevaluate my own beliefs. Distributed post-industrial economic power requires reliable communication and data storage standards, only possible when our communications systems share a language and a network. That level of coordination only happens when boosted by large corporations. Distributed freedom for some, requires wage servitude for others.

Mark Zuckerberg

Worse, while the liberty of freelance work hypothetically strengthens individual workers, the coordination necessary to actually find work proves terribly brittle. Your DoorDasher can freely accept or refuse each proffered job, but when the network collapses, every job vanishes, leaving the worker without options. In practice, disaggregated freelancers don’t work for themselves, they work for the network.

One could expand this argument to encompass the entire economy. Capitalism’s defenders claim that market capitalism is small-d democratic because we can accept or reject any transaction. This may hold for each unique transaction, but we cannot opt out altogether. We eventually need food, shelter, and clothing, which inevitably means transactions, which means buying into the economy.

Pure libertarian freedom, therefore, is always an illusion. We’re never independent actors; we rely on networks of trust, industry, and solidarity. Whether that means trusting our employers to deal honestly, relying upon industrial processes to keep us connected, or practicing solidarity with our peers (join the union or perish!), we remain permanently enmeshed in networks. I never exist truly alone, but always positionally, within community.

I’m old enough to have watched Communism collapse live on network television. The retreat of the Eastern Bloc revealed environmental blight, impoverished communities, and personal alienation—the same effects we witness now, in late American capitalism. The conventional economic binary which the Cold War bequeathed us proves massively unprepared for the post-industrial information economy.

When the network leaves us vulnerable, we need to recognize that the economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of our communities, not vice versa. We require new paradigms that organize our economy, technology, and government to serve us. And I’m only just beginning to delve into how that might work.

“Simple Facts,” and Other Political Lies

Steve Benen, Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past

Donald Trump notoriously occupies a parallel world, where he twice won the popular vote, engineered a thriving economy, and wasn’t helped into office by Russia. That’s fine, by itself; many people suffer from what netizens call “Main Character Syndrome.” Trump, however, has a unique capability to draw others into his fantasies. Political writer Steve Benen offers to analyze how exactly this happens. Yet somehow, the analysis never quite arrives.

Specialists within a field will sometimes promise to explain something fundamental to their discipline, but ultimately just describe it. I encountered this phenomenon in the writings of sociologist Duncan J. Watts, though it predates him. Watts writes that art historians, purposing to explain why Leonardo’s Mona Lisa is the best artwork ever, will then describe its traits. The Mona Lisa is best, Watts claims, because it resembles the Mona Lisa.

That, I believe, happens with this book. Benen breaks the Republican machine’s structure of lies into seven broad categories, including election denialism, the unfinished Wall, his merely okay economy that couldn’t withstand COVID-19, and the January 6^th insurrection. Benen lists the lies extensively, though largely in ways that assume you remember what really happened. And, unfortunately, that’s about all he does, reprinting a 200-page laundry list.

First, notwithstanding the title, Benen reveals a problem less with the Republican Party than with the Trump political apparatus. Benen cites several Republicans who directly criticize Trump’s specious narrative, including Dan Coates and John Bolton, both former Trump insiders. But Coates and Bolton aren’t running for reelection. Sitting Republicans must share Trump’s parallel universe because, if they don’t, they know they’ll get turfed out in the primaries.

Then, having listed the former administration’s fantasies, which he debunks with rudimentary Google searches and appeals to our own memories, Benen… stops. Having identified a pattern of obfuscation, Benen believes he’s completed his responsibilities. But his intended audience, which shares his overall dim opinion of the Trump years, will likely respond: “No shit.” Because, as Benen writes, we remember what really happened. We watched it happen on live TV.

Don’t mistake Benen’s motives, or mine. Political operatives spin events to suit a partisan narrative, and wise voters anticipate it. Skillful politicians in make defeat look temporary, embarrassment seem minor, and the other side’s foibles appear as moral catastrophes. Benen acknowledges this early, and clarifies that he means something altogether different. Trump’s organization repeatedly insists our eyes lie, and reality is Trump’s narrative, not the evidence of our senses.

Steve Benen

Trump and his political hangers-on began spinning false narratives with such alacrity, it boggled the imagination. From Day One, he dispatched Sean Spicer to propagate false reports of massive Inauguration Day crowds, despite the paltry attendance displayed on global TV the day before. Trump’s machine began spinning false yarns about the Lafayette Park clearance on June 1^st, 2020, or the January 6^th insurrection, literally within hours.

More interesting, Trump’s lies aren’t even internally consistent. Anybody who fibbed to their parents about grades or curfews knows that sticking to the fabricated narrative is key. But, as Benen’s accounting shows, Trump’s falsehoods shift with political winds and Trump’s personal mood. Partisan accounts of, say, the Russian election interference case, change repeatedly. The only constant is that any account that Trump dislikes, is dismissed.

Benen’s audience probably shares my curiosity. We remember what happened because, as Benen writes, we watched it happen live. I care more about two follow-up questions: how can Trump and his supporters be so brazen in their untruths? And why do rank-and-file Republicans believe this baloney-sauce when they, like everyone else, saw what really happened? What political or sociological mechanism lets Trump spin obvious fantasies, while others eat it up?

Those answers aren’t forthcoming. Benen’s mostly left-leaning audience knows already that Trump can lie flagrantly, about events we all saw happen, and face few electoral consequences. We also know that nobody apparently shares Trump’s mojo. We all watched Ron DeSantis and Kari Lake using Trump’s playbook, and we watched them descend into national laughingstocks. Trump, alone, has this ability to invent another reality, and sell it to a loyal base.

Again, no kidding. These facts (ironically enough, under the circumstances) aren’t in dispute. But without further understanding, we’ll find ourselves trapped inside the event horizon of Trump’s black hole, debunking similar falsehoods forever. Benen admits, in his epilogue, that he lacks any solution. But he also lacks any deeper analysis, any willingness to read between the lines. He tells us what we already know—and what Trump already denies.