Quote of the Month
"Time is a river of events and its current is strong: no sooner does something heave into view than it's swept away and something else is being carried past instead, only to be swept away." - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 4.43
What I’m Reading:
1. OK, Doomer
Why you should read it: The Atlantic’s David Brooks takes pervasive popular pessimism to task, contending that it results in people feeling “bonded not because they are cooperating with one another but because they are indignant about the same things.”
“Twenty-first-century communalism is a peculiar kind of communalism. For starters, it’s very socially conscious and political. Whether you’re on the MAGA right or the social-justice left, you define your identity by how you stand against what you perceive to be the dominant structures of society. Groups on each side of the political divide are held together less by common affections than by a common sense of threat, an experience of collective oppression. Today’s communal culture is based on a shared belief that society is broken, systems are rotten, the game is rigged, injustice prevails, the venal elites are out to get us; we find solidarity and meaning in resisting their oppression together. Again, there is a right-wing version (Donald Trump’s “I am your retribution”) and a left-wing version (the intersectional community of oppressed groups), but what they share is an us-versus-them Manichaeism. The culture war gives life shape and meaning… In this way, pessimism becomes a membership badge—the ultimate sign that you are on the side of the good. If your analysis is not apocalyptic, you’re naive, lacking in moral urgency, complicit with the status quo.”
“The current culture confers status and belonging to those who see the world as negatively as possible. Once people learned this, they were going to perceive the world as a Hunger Games–like hellscape… In a culture where negativity is aligned with righteousness, anything good can be seen as a mark of ill-gotten privilege. And if by chance one does experience pleasure, don’t be so insensitive as to admit it in public, because that will reveal you are not allying properly with the oppressed: ‘When I started asking women about their experiences as mothers,’ Rachel Cohen wrote in that Vox essay, ‘I was startled by the number who sheepishly admitted, and only after being pressed, that they had pretty equitable arrangements with their partners, and even loved being moms, but were unlikely to say any of that publicly. Doing so could seem insensitive to those whose experiences were not as positive, or those in more frustrating relationships. Some also worried that betraying too much enthusiasm for child-rearing could ossify essentialist tropes or detract from larger feminist goals.’ Publicly admitting that you love and enjoy motherhood has come to be seen as a betrayal of feminism.”
Why it matters: “We have produced a culture that celebrates catastrophizing. This does not lend itself to effective strategies for achieving social change. The prevailing assumption seems to be that the more bitterly people denounce a situation, the more they will be motivated to change it. But history shows the exact opposite to be true. As the Harvard economist Benjamin Friedman demonstrated in The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, social reform tends to happen in moments of growth and prosperity. It happens when people are feeling secure and are inspired to share their good fortune. It happens when leaders can convey a plausible vision of the common good… We shouldn’t let our current season of gloom and menace become self-fulfilling, but rather should help make the country ripe for a communalism of belonging. History shows that it doesn’t pay to be pessimistic about pessimism.”
2. Why Americans are so cynical about politics
Why you should read it: Writing for the New York Times, American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Yuval Levin argues that the tendency of elite insiders to posture and act as if they’re outsiders helps breed cynicism about politics and public life in America today.
“…a version of the same confusion of roles is at play in the persistent dysfunction of Congress, where too many members treat the institution like a platform for expressing dissent rather than a space for legislative negotiation. Anyone who has attended a high-profile congressional hearing in recent years can attest that hearings have become production sessions for YouTube clips and other social media posts rather than opportunities for collective deliberation or debate. The travails of House Republicans in this Congress have had much to do with the tendency of members to treat the House as a platform for commentary or performance art… Members who view their roles this way are less interested in winning substantive policy concessions than in positioning themselves as outside observers narrating a morality play in which their own ineffectiveness stands as proof of their purity.”
“The outsider yelling at the system can speak some truth to power, but at the cost of having no power. Such people play an essential role, especially in the face of dangerously disconnected elites. The insider acting in the system can exercise real authority, but at the cost of being restrained by institutional responsibility and public accountability. That person is crucial, too, because someone has to enter the arena and facilitate effective and legitimate public action… The twisted hybrids that we now live with present themselves as simultaneously truth tellers and power players but, in fact, are just exercising power without responsibility. By seeking the government job and the activist megaphone at the same time, they render public officials into passive observers and critics, or else they deploy power outside its legitimate channels.”
Why it matters: “The difference between the insider and the outsider is crucial in the politics of a free society. The loss of public trust in core American institutions in our time has had everything to do with the sense that the elites who run those institutions are unrestrained by formal responsibility and use their positions merely as platforms for their own priorities… Constituents, voters and public officials themselves need to grasp that blurring the lines between insider work and outsider expression renders government less trustworthy and less able to do its vital work.”
3. Why Trump deserves to be disqualified from the upcoming election
Why you should read it: New York Times columnist David French notes that former president Donald Trump richly deserves to be disqualified from the upcoming presidential election on the basis of the 14th Amendment’s prohibition against insurrectionists holding office.
“It’s been just over two weeks since the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment disqualifies Donald Trump from holding the office of president of the United States, and I spent way too much of my holiday vacation reading the legal and political commentary around the decision, and as I did so, I found myself experiencing déjà vu. Since the rise of Trump, he and his movement have transgressed constitutional, legal and moral boundaries at will and then, when Americans attempt to impose consequences for those transgressions, Trump’s defenders and critics alike caution that the consequences will be dangerous or destabilizing… This is where we are and have now been for years: The Trump movement commits threats, violence and lies. And then it tries to escape accountability for those acts through more threats, more violence and more lies. At the heart of the ‘but the consequences’ argument against disqualification is a confession that if we hold Trump accountable for his fomenting violence on Jan. 6, he might foment additional violence now.”
“So no, it would not be a stretch for a conservative Supreme Court to apply Section 3 to Trump. Nor is it too much to ask the court to intervene in a presidential contest or to issue decisions that have a profound and destabilizing effect on American politics. In 2000 the Supreme Court effectively decided a presidential election at the finish line, ending Al Gore’s bid in a narrow decision that was criticized by some as partisan in nature… Indeed, the principal reason the fear of negative backlash is so strong and so widely articulated is the seditious nature of the Trump movement itself. When the Supreme Court ruled against Gore, there was no meaningful concern that he’d try to engineer a violent coup. But if the court rules against Trump, the nation will be told to brace for violence. That’s what seditionists do.”
Why it matters: “Enough. It’s time to apply the plain language of the Constitution to Trump’s actions and remove him from the ballot — without fear of the consequences. Republics are not maintained by cowardice.”
4. How Wall Street learned to stop worrying and love Trump
Why you should read it: Financial Times columnist Ed Luce observes Wall Street inching toward support for a second Trump presidency and warns that it may not go the way finance barons expect.
“The 1930s ought to have buried the idea that business is a bulwark against autocracy. Today’s America offers a reminder. After Donald Trump’s attempted putsch on January 6 2021, US business leaders lined up to condemn the storming of Capitol Hill. Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan, issued a statement calling for a peaceful transition of power. ‘This is not who we are as a people or a country,’ he said. In Davos this month, Dimon had changed his tune. Trump did many good things when he was in office, Dimon said. Business was ready for either Joe Biden or Trump: ‘My company will survive and thrive in both.’”
“Their reasoning is twofold. First, for all his faults, Trump would be better for business than Biden. Trump cut the top tax rate and improved their bottom lines. He is promising to do the same again. Trump’s railing against corporatism is just red meat for the base. He would also boost the fossil fuel industry and commercial real estate. The assumption of business leaders that Trump will fulfil these promises is almost certainly right. The fact that he vows to slap 10 per cent tariffs on all imports should be weighed against Biden’s continued regulatory creep. To many corporate chiefs, less globalisation is a price worth paying for lower taxes. It seems that almost anything is… People warned about Trump’s threat to democracy in 2017 but the republic is still alive and kicking. I have heard variations on this line from many inside and outside business. It suffers from a fatal flaw: America’s system remains intact because Trump was blocked from overturning it. He still claims the 2020 election was stolen and is running on the promise of jailing those who helped block him — among them Biden and Mark Milley, the then chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff. It is conceivable that Trump would be too chaotic to redeem that promise. On the other hand, he would claim a mandate to do so. Perhaps the courts would stop him. US business would be powerless.”
Why it matters: “We learn from history that we do not learn from history, as Hegel said. His point applied to our species, not just to business. But it is worth stressing that capitalism goes hand in glove with the rule of law. It thrives on transparency of rules and the sanctity of the contract. Monopolists, on the other hand, hate the level playing field — the one that requires a competent state to uphold. America’s 2024 election will be a battle between liberal democracy and the strongman. It could also be seen as a contest between capitalism and capitalists. Which is better: the system or the aspiring monopolist? No prizes for guessing where Trump’s instincts lie.”
5. How Soviet anti-Zionist propaganda lives on in contemporary progressive rhetoric
Why you should read it: Wilson Center scholar Izabella Tabarovsky details the ways in which decades-old Soviet anti-Zionist propaganda survives well after the fall of communism in the rhetoric of the contemporary progressive left.
“The claim that Israel is committing a genocide against Palestinians is among the longest-running lies told about Israel. ‘Genocide Israeli style’; ‘Zionist-engineered genocide’; ‘the ‘final solution’ of the Palestinian question’—these may look like snippets from some recent campus proclamation, but they are not. They appeared in a Soviet pamphlet titled ‘Zionists Count on Terror.’ Published in 1984 by Novosti, a Soviet foreign propaganda arm masquerading as a news agency, this pocket-sized brochure was meant to promote the Soviet view of Israel and Zionism to English-language audiences… These calumnies will be familiar to anyone who has paid attention to the rhetoric that exploded in progressive quarters in the wake of October 7—the day Hamas raped, tortured, slaughtered, and pillaged its way through Israel’s southern kibbutzim. Isn’t this 40-year-old Soviet propaganda pamphlet speaking the language of today’s progressives? It is. Or to be more precise: today’s progressives are speaking the language of Soviet propaganda. The most extraordinary feature of the anti-Israel rhetoric flooding the West today is the extent to which it reproduces the motifs, tropes, slogans, and explanatory logic of late-Soviet communist ideology.”
“Although the Soviets claimed that anti-Zionism was not the same as antisemitism (a claim that today’s progressives have also adopted), the version of anti-Zionism they sold to the world was drawn from concepts popularized by an infamous antisemitic fabrication titled The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In Soviet telling, Zionists were a treacherous fifth column in every country. They were greedy and immoral. Where the Protocols talked about ‘international Jewry’ owning the press, banks, and politicians, the Soviets talked about Zionists doing the same. Where the Protocols said that Jews wanted to manipulate the world, Soviet propaganda said the same of Zionists… To have a sizeable chunk of American political, intellectual, and cultural elite reproduce propaganda created to undermine the free world cannot possibly be healthy for our democracy. It matters because this propaganda was produced by antisemites, rests on antisemitic foundations, and has been documented to have harmed Jews in the USSR—often in eerily similar ways to those unfolding across the West today. Suspected of Zionist sympathies, Soviet Jews found themselves excluded from universities, fields of study, professions, and career tracks. Expressing Jewish identity became harder than ever. A few years after Moscow launched its post-Six Day war anti-Israel campaign, hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews left the country. Within 25 years, 1.5 million Soviet Jews had fled. ”
Why it matters: “The anti-Zionist rhetoric that has swept through the West is directly responsible for the current rise of antisemitism. Whether modern progressives like it or not, their version of anti-Zionism is deeply and inextricably intertwined with Soviet antisemitism. They have every right to reproduce KGB propaganda and associate themselves with ghoulish figures such as [propagandist Yuri] Ivanov, but they should not be surprised when the rest of us point out that they are doing so and tell them clearly that we do not accept it—in the same way that we would not accept the penetration of anti-Jewish Nazi propaganda into our political discourse… It is deeply disturbing that intelligent American progressives are such easy and gullible targets for totalitarian propaganda past and present. Their expensive Ivy League educations have failed to prepare them with basic historical knowledge and critical thinking. This is particularly troubling since propaganda—particularly the sophisticated kind the Soviets developed with state resources—is hard to combat head-on.”
6. How the media and activists mistranslated and misreported comments by Israeli officials
Why you should read it: Yair Rosenberg of The Atlantic notices that a number of journalists and activists have run with a series of mistranslations and selectively edited statements that put Israeli officials running the country’s war against Hamas in the worst possible light.
“Politicians and lawyers are not always known for their probity, but journalists have fact-checkers. How did an error this substantial get missed so many times in so many places? One New York Times article that cited [Israeli defense minister Yoav] Gallant’s mangled misquote sourced the words to an op-ed in another outlet, which sourced them to an X post that featured an embedded TikTok video. But the cascade of media failures appears to have begun with a 42-second video excerpt of Gallant’s talk that was uploaded by Bloomberg with incomplete English subtitles. The clip, since viewed more than half a million times, simply skips over ‘There will be no Hamas’ in its translation… Unfortunately, this concatenation of errors is part of a pattern. As someone who has covered Israeli extremism for years and written about the hard right’s push to ethnically cleanse Gaza and resettle it, I have been carefully tracking the rise of such dangerous ideas for more than a decade. In this perilous wartime environment, it is essential to know who is saying what, and whether they have the authority to act on it. But while far too many right-wing members of Israel’s Parliament have expressed borderline or straightforwardly genocidal sentiments during the Gaza conflict, such statements attributed to the three people making Israel’s actual military decisions, the voting members of its war cabinet—Gallant, [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu, and the former opposition lawmaker Benny Gantz—repeatedly turn out to be mistaken or misrepresented.”
“…what about Netanyahu, a man in thrall to the hard right and not exactly known for rhetorical restraint? On January 5, the New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg argued that President Biden was being naive to Netanyahu’s ambitions to displace Gaza’s population. ‘As Israeli news outlets have reported,’ she wrote, ‘Netanyahu said this week that the government is considering a ‘scenario of surrender and deportation’ of residents of the Gaza Strip.’ Goldberg is an excellent journalist well versed in this topic, and she based her claim on a usually reliable source: the English live blog of Haaretz, Israel’s leading progressive paper, which summarized a news item from Israeli TV. But once again, something crucial was lost in translation… The original Hebrew media report did not say that Netanyahu was considering the surrender and deportation of Gaza’s residents. It said that, in a meeting with families of the Israeli hostages, Netanyahu expressed openness to the surrender and deportation of Hamas’s senior leadership in exchange for the remaining captives—a theoretical proposal for ending the war that has been raised by the United States but rejected by Hamas… The mistake matters: Far from being decided on the question of Gazan displacement, Netanyahu turned out to be malleable, and has since come out publicly against it under heavy pressure from the Biden administration. Diplomacy like that depends on an accurate understanding of the state of play.”
Why it matters: “These omissions and misinterpretations are not merely cosmetic: They misled readers, judges, and politicians. None of them should have happened. The good news is that they can be avoided in the future by making sure to check translations at their source; pressing writers to link to primary sources when possible; and placing scriptural citations from any faith into their proper theological and historical context. Certainly, no outlet or activist should be cavalierly accusing people or countries of committing genocide based on thirdhand mistranslations or truncated quotations.”
7. How Gandhi became irrelevant in Modi’s India
Why you should read it: Washington Post columnist Rana Ayyub laments that Mohandas K. Gandhi, whose nonviolent protest movement led India to independence from Britain and inspired Martin Luther King, Jr. (among others), “has become a casualty of India’s lurch toward Hindu nationalism.”
“Earlier this year, on the 154th birthday of Mohandas K. Gandhi, a national holiday in India, three of the top 10 trends on X (formerly Twitter) in the country celebrated Nathuram Godse, the Hindu fundamentalist who assassinated Gandhi. A month before that, at one of the biggest Hindu festivals in India, posters of Godse were displayed along with those of Hindu deities in the state neighboring Gandhi’s birthplace of Gujarat. This would be akin to having posters of John Wilkes Booth at a President’s Day parade... Godse was a member of the Hindu nationalist paramilitary organization Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), which is the ideological fountainhead of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). And since Modi was first elected in 2014, the narrative blaming Gandhi has taken hold.”
“Gandhi has never been this unpopular. The 1982 Richard Attenborough biopic about him won eight Academy Awards and introduced a new generation to the Indian independence fighter. As recently as 2006, a Bollywood blockbuster ‘Lage Raho Munnabhai’ (‘Carry On, Munna Bhai,’) saw Gandhi become cool again on the streets of India. The film depicts a small-time con man who in an attempt to win back his lost lover goes through a transformation as he accidentally runs into the works and writings of Gandhi. Through Gandhi’s ideas of nonviolence, social justice and secularism, the protagonist is able to fight societal evils and in the process win back his idealistic lover… However, since ultranationalist Hinduism took hold, Gandhi’s image has floundered. In 2019, a prominent member of parliament from Modi’s BJP, Pragya Singh Thakur, called Godse a ‘patriot’ on the floor of the house. Only after a national outcry did Modi condemn her words, calling them ‘very bad and very wrong for society.’”
Why it matters: “…But in today’s India, the prime minister invokes Gandhi only when he needs him, usually in international gatherings.”
8. Breaking: Trump’s fake populism remains extremely fake
Why you should read it: New York columnist Jonathan Chait correctly lambastes political commentators and elected officials who still buy into the delusion that Donald Trump somehow puts forward a populist policy program.
“Donald Trump has slashed his way through the Republican primary field not only by bullying his opponents in his normal gross, often racist fashion, but also by painting them as Bush-era economic royalists who want to cut entitlement programs. This has brought forth another round of fantasy projections of Trump as champion of a new form of conservative economic populism… Around the same time these columns came out, however, the World Economic Forum was the stage for a procession of CEOs to praise Trump’s economic acumen. After JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon defended Trump from Davos, Wall Street Journal columnist Kim Strassel hailed him as ‘a spokesman for the common man.’”
“When the high priests of economic libertarianism are touting a wealthy executive for praising a president who lavished him with tax cuts and lax regulation, perhaps we should consider the possibility that this alliance is not a populist uprising… Trump’s domestic policies, from from repelling the Republican elite, are the thing that most attracts them. And Trump is promising to continue to advance the same traditional Republican agenda in office. He wants another round of corporate tax cuts, another shot at repealing Obamacare, and more of the same regulatory approach. When he is not vowing to use the presidency to punish his enemies, he promises ‘STRONG BORDERS, A GREAT ECONOMY WITH NO INFLATION, LOW TAXES & REGULATIONS, A POWERFUL MILITARY, ENERGY INDEPENDENCE, & JUST PLAIN COMMON SENSE.’ That’s standard Republican stuff.”
Why it matters: “The strange nature of the Republican coalition is that its policy agenda is set by a relatively small elite that is fanatically committed to regressive taxation. Some conservatives wish the party would stop spending all its political capital on lavishing tax cuts on the rich. But rather than criticize the party for maintaining this commitment, they choose instead to pretend it’s abandoned it… Trump understands the party he commands well enough to grasp that the one thing that could cause Republicans to stop defending his corruption and lawbreaking would be to betray them on tax cuts and core economic issues. He might spout populist noises in order to win. But once in office, any incentive to cater to the public over the political allies who he needs to keep him out of jail will disappear.”
9. How social media—and TikTok in particular—change the world teens are living in
Why you should read it: In the New York Times, Emily Dreyfuss uses the otherwise inexplicable TikTok popularity of Zyn, a nicotine delivery pouch, as an example of the destructive power of social media—and how it’s different from the digital world many parents grew up in during the 1990s and 2000s.
“So how are kids learning about these little pouches? Greyson Imm, an 18-year-old high school student in Prairie Village, Kan., said he was 17 when Zyn videos started appearing on his TikTok feed. The videos multiplied through the spring, when they appeared almost daily… Parents need to know that when children go online, they are entering a world of influencers, many of whom are hoping to make money by pushing dangerous products. It’s a world that’s invisible to us, because when we log on to our social media, we don’t see what they see. Thanks to algorithms and ad targeting, I see videos about the best lawn fertilizer and wrinkle laser masks, while Ian is being fed reviews of flavored vape pens and beautiful women livestreaming themselves gambling crypto and urging him to gamble, too.”
“Smartphones are taking our kids to a different world. We know this, to some extent. We worry about bad actors bullying, luring or indoctrinating them online — all risks that have been deeply reported on by the media and that schools and public agencies like the Federal Trade Commission are taking great pains to address. The social media giant Meta has been sued on allegations that using its platforms is associated with issues including childhood anxiety and depression. Yet all of this is, unfortunately, only part of what makes social media dangerous… Let’s start with influencers. They aren’t traditional pitch people. Think of them more like the coolest kids on the block. They establish a following thanks to their personality, experience or expertise. They share how they’re feeling, they share what they’re thinking about, they share stuff they like — and sometimes they’re paid by the company behind a product and sometimes they’re not. They’re incentivized to increase their following and, in turn, often their bank accounts. Young people are particularly susceptible to this kind of promotion because their relationship with influencers is akin to the intimacy of a close friend… That makes the combination of influencers and social media algorithms perhaps the most powerful form of advertising ever invented.”
Why it matters: “We need a new definition of advertising that takes into account how the internet actually works. I’d go so far as to propose that the courts broaden the definition of advertising to include all influencer promotion. For a product as dangerous as nicotine, I’d put the bar to be considered an influencer as low as 1,000 followers on a social media account, and maybe if a video from someone with less of a following goes viral under certain legal definitions, it would become influencer promotion… I refuse to believe there aren’t ways to write laws and regulations that can address these difficult questions over tech company liability and free speech, that there aren’t ways to hold platforms more accountable for advertising that might endanger kids. Let’s stop treating the internet like a monster we can’t control. We built it. We foisted it upon our children. We had better try to protect them from its potential harms as best we can.”
Odds and Ends
After three years flying the Martian skies, the mission of NASA’s Mars helicopter Ingenuity has come to an end after it suffered damage to one of its rotor blades…
NASA unveiled its newest X-plane: the X-59, intended to demonstrate that it’s possible to turn a noisy sonic boom into a quiet sonic thump…
How did America secretly fund the Manhattan Project to build the world’s first atomic bomb? One reporter went on a quest to find out…
Baby shark: drone footage off the California coast gives scientists a rare glimpse of a newborn great white shark pup…
Consider the humble patty melt as an alternative the next time you go out for a burger…
What I’m Listening To
A selection from composer Matt Morton’s stellar soundtrack for the 2019 documentary Apollo 11:
Image of the Month
