The Dive, 6/1/25
Your monthly compilation of what's what on global politics, American society, and an assortment of odds and ends
Quote of the Month
"Yes. There's a reason for the way things are. But no. Not a very good one." - Eric Jarosinski, Nein. A Manifesto, p. 103
What I’m Reading:
1. How progressive identity politics benefit the autocratic right
Why you should read it: Former Human Rights Watch chief Kenneth Roth argues in Foreign Policy that the progressive left’s embrace of identity politics “has made it easier for Trump to pursue his agenda of intolerance.”
“The classic if reflexive response of human rights activists [to the rise of the far right] has been to stress that none of our rights are guaranteed unless all of our rights are secure… But autocratic politicians do not accept that syllogism. By portraying segments of society as threats to the community rather than members of it, autocrats seek to justify depriving them of their rights, assuming not only that mistreating these supposed outsiders will not affect the rights of people still deemed on the inside, but that this mistreatment is necessary to protect them. The autocratic response reflects the often-neglected premise of the liberal vision—that is, its dependence on a shared sense of community.”
“Ironically, the identity politics that has come to define much of progressive thought these days has facilitated this autocratic sleight of hand by neglecting, or even undermining, the national community. Progressives have tended to promote the rights of interest groups, particularly people who are seen to have historically suffered discrimination and persecution… If progressive politics can be reduced to the promotion of a collection of disfavored interest groups, it is easier for the autocrat to carve out selected groups for demonization. Autocrats simply portray their priority interest groups as the ones that progressives are neglecting—typically, members of a country’s working-class ethnic majority—and claim that the demonized groups are the cause of the priority group’s malaise… An alternative approach would be for progressives to speak in terms of a national community; to stress the rights of all people who live in the nation. This would not mean ignoring the rights of the downtrodden, but it would require a different rhetoric that promotes their rights as members of a national community rather than as mere interest groups among others.”
Why it matters: “To speak of a national community does not require nationalism. The aim is not to promote an aggressive pursuit of national interests against other nations. There is no need to invade Greenland. Rather, the point is to shift the public conversation away from identity politics. Progressives would speak less about a coalition of interest groups and more about a nation of rights bearers. In the United States, they would stress that the American dream should be available to everyone in the country, that no one should be left behind… Some people do indeed face historical discrimination, and a targeted response is required. But progressives cannot allow themselves to be reduced to the defenders of a series of special interests, however disadvantaged. The best antidote to the autocratic dodge is for progressives to recapture the defense of everyone in a nation—to embrace and defend a national community of rights bearers.”
2. Why China welcomes the American far right
Why you should read it: Also in Foreign Policy, Human Rights Watch China expert Maya Wang and New York University fellow Mason Wong explain why the American far right plays so well in China.
“For years, political conditions in China have fostered a growing coalition of Chinese who have found meaning in the cultural and political worldview of the Western far right… The sentiments are related to Chinese nationalism, which has a racial and supremacist strain with a long history typically expressed in the idea that the modern Chinese nation is made up of a superior yellow race.’ But they are also distinct in that the framing of these ideas has only recently begun to resemble, converge, and cross-fertilize with far-right discourses in the West.”
“But if the imagined superior white and yellow races are both threatened by nonwhite peoples and social liberalism, then they are also rivals. As political theorist Chenchen Zhang has pointed out, Chinese netizens consider their own political system to be superior, viewing the Chinese government’s ‘pragmatic, rational and non-moralizing approach to economic growth and social stability’ as a better alternative to Western liberalism… Western democracies have become corrupted by progressive values, which are not only unrealistic but also damaging to prosperity and social order. Chinese social media users have used a derogatory term to describe people promoting those values—baizuo, which literally translates to ‘white left…’ While Chinese government censors have occasionally shut down some of these accounts and removed their posts, many have been untouched or have been allowed to return and grow their followings… Far-right ideas flow through several conduits. In China, popular social media platforms frequented by young men, like the sports forum Hupu, have become hotbeds for manosphere ideas. Fringe WeChat groups filled with both Chinese and Chinese American users promote Islamophobia and conspiracy theories. And although right-wing Christianity—a key vector for the spread of social conservatism in the United States, Europe, and Russia—has little to no pull in China due to state control of religion, Western far-right intellectuals have tried to draw equivalences between Christian and Confucian traditionalism.”
Why it matters: “The camaraderie between illiberal and far-right forces in Russia, China, and the United States might not last. In an era of heightened great-power competition, conflicting desires for domination may soon break this fragile coalition, even before it manages to vanquish its wide range of perceived enemies… Regardless, these emerging political alliances are worth taking seriously, especially as the nationalist and authoritarian trends that enable them show no signs of slowing down.”
3. What we can learn about industrial policy from the CHIPS program
Why you should read it: In Foreign Affairs, former Biden administration CHIPS program officials Nikita Lalwani and Sam Marullo detail what we can learn about making industrial policy from CHIPS .
“The 2022 CHIPS and Science Act was the United States’ most ambitious foray into industrial policy in more than half a century. The bill included roughly $50 billion to revitalize the U.S. semiconductor industry, which had been hollowed out over decades as manufacturing migrated overseas. Industrial policy, long eschewed in policy circles, had come back in vogue as a way to strengthen supply chain resilience for industries critical to economic and national security. Moving the legislation through Congress required a multiyear process that involved lengthy negotiations and complex maneuvering. But passing the law was just the beginning. As soon as it was signed, the action moved from Congress to the Department of Commerce, which had to figure out, quickly and with little room for error, how to stand up a new office and infrastructure to deliver on its aims… It’s too early to pass a final judgment on how well it did: the semiconductor industry is fast-moving and cyclical, and many projects are just getting underway. But the program has made real progress. In two and a half years, it has unlocked more than $450 billion in private investments, helped support the construction of 17 new semiconductor fabrication plants (known as fabs), and made the United States the only country to secure manufacturing commitments from the world’s five leading chip manufacturers. When the CHIPS Act was passed, the United States produced none of the most advanced logic or memory chips, the hardware used in smartphones, laptops, and powerful AI systems; it is now projected to produce 20 percent of the world’s leading-edge logic chips by 2030 and ten percent of its dynamic random-access memory chips by 2035… Amid bipartisan consensus to expand industrial strategy beyond CHIPS, future programs would do well to learn from its example. Of course, there is no one way to do industrial policy, and the details will vary by sector and circumstance, but one constant is that large federal programs require the government to work quickly, efficiently, and well. That requires establishing nimble and dynamic teams with sophisticated expertise; building productive and transparent relationships with industry, other governments, and the general public; and figuring out how to overcome sources of delay—within government and outside it—that make it hard to build new things. Most important, industrial policy requires clarity of purpose: a concrete set of specific objectives to guide investments and against which to measure success.”
“For industrial policy to work well, recruiting is essential. The government needs to draw sharp minds from finance, industry, and other federal agencies. For workers in the private sector, a federal job means much lower pay; it might also mean long commutes or relocation to Washington. During the early months of the CHIPS program, CHIPS relied on personal outreach from Raimondo and from office leadership. Their pitches were simple: get in on the ground floor of a once-in-a-generation experiment in industrial policy. When the ask was made directly, most people said yes… Equally important to staffing is developing an investment strategy—figuring out what, exactly, the United States is buying with its congressional funding. This strategy should be clear, provide concrete goals and metrics, and be accessible to the public so that Americans can judge whether the program is succeeding on its own terms and whether those terms are the right ones. Such a strategy, although hardly unique to industrial policy, is critical for a program’s operational and political success. Not every worthy project can receive funding. By specifying clear criteria by which applications for funding would be evaluated and by publishing a vision of success that set specific production objectives across the semiconductor industry, the CHIPS office could manage expectations for stakeholders both within and outside government.”
Why it matters: “Doing industrial policy well is not easy. It requires scaling up production quickly and carving out a place in government that can act like a private-sector startup by staffing up, implementing new processes, and finding creative ways to avoid delays. The U.S. government, bogged down by rules and bureaucracy, is not the ideal home for a startup. But with the right playbook, it can become a more hospitable one. As CHIPS demonstrated, policymakers need to make government an attractive place to work for people from finance and industry, identify and mitigate sources of delay, and measure success against clear and definable metrics. At the same time, policymakers should push for structural reforms to make government work better. Under the best of circumstances, industrial policy is an uphill battle. Making smart early decisions can make the climb a little easier.”
4. Why Keynes opposed the free flow of capital around the world (and so can you!)
Why you should read it: Carnegie senior fellow Michael Pettis shows why British economist John Maynard Keynes opposed the free flow of capital around the world and why we should heed his advice.
“In today’s global economy, the free movement of capital—with financial flows moving across borders without legal constraints—is often celebrated as a cornerstone of prosperity. Policymakers and economists alike argue that liberalized capital accounts allocate resources efficiently, deepen financial markets, and promote global integration. Yet many of the most influential economists of the 20th century—including, most notably, John Maynard Keynes—were deeply skeptical of these claims. In fact, he proposed that capital controls be a permanent feature of the international monetary system… Having lived through the interwar years—years marked by financial speculation, competitive currency devaluations, and the economic devastation of the Great Depression—Keynes understood the extent to which free capital mobility could distort a market economy. In his proposals for a postwar monetary system, he insisted on preserving national autonomy over monetary and fiscal policy, including the right to use capital controls when necessary. Unfettered capital flows, he argued, warped currency valuations, drove domestic credit creation, and distorted domestic interest rates. In this sense, free capital flows did not foster efficiency in a market economy; they constrained sovereignty and distorted efficiency.”
“What makes free capital flows especially pernicious is their tendency to constrain democracy itself. When capital is mobile and policymakers are forced to adjust to external imbalances, democratic choices—the policies voters actually want—become subordinated to the wiles of financial markets. Elected governments are pressured to pursue fiscal austerity, encourage industrial offshoring, suppress wages, deregulate labor markets, stimulate household debt, or raise fiscal deficits—not because these policies promote sustainable growth, or benefit their workers and consumers, but because they must meet the demands of foreign investors… [Keynes] warned that when governments abandon control over capital movements, they lose the ability to implement the economic policies needed for full employment and sustainable growth. His view was not ideological, but pragmatic: domestic policy should be determined by national priorities, not by the demands of international finance.”
Why it matters: “The solution is not to retreat from globalization, but to reshape it. Keynes’s vision for a managed global economy—embodied in the original Bretton Woods framework—offered precisely this balance. It allowed for trade and cross-border investment while preserving national autonomy over macroeconomic policy. Capital controls allowed each country to pursue its own economic development path without having to absorb the imbalances of its trade partners… The time has come to abandon the devotion to free capital flows as ideological necessity, and to reconsider and manage them, recognizing the conditions under which they benefit the global and U.S. economies as well as the conditions under which they don’t. We must build a global financial system that supports national development, reduces inequality, and promotes long-term stability.”
5. How new crypto-friendly laws threaten the U.S. financial system
Why you should read it: Professors Dan Davies and Henry Farrell contend in the New York Times that soon-to-be enacted laws that grant legitimacy to cryptocurrency do little other than threaten the stability of America’s financial system.
“This has been a good week for America’s crypto interests. The Genius Act, which legitimates a kind of cryptocurrency called stablecoins, advanced in the Senate… Stablecoins, as their name suggests, are crypto assets guaranteed by other assets like the U.S. dollar. Mr. Trump and his sons created one called USD1 through their cryptocurrency company, World Liberty Financial. Digital currencies like stablecoins are bad enough when they could potentially be used for political self-dealing. The potential problems they pose to the mainstream financial system go deeper and are much more concerning…They are likely instead to undermine it, fostering scams and sanctions evasion, generating financial risk and perhaps even allowing another currency to supplant the dollar in global trade.”
“Crypto interests want to break down the boundary between cryptocurrencies and regulated finance by integrating stablecoins into the regular U.S. financial system. That would allow them to go back and forth between the swashbuckling world of crypto, where cryptocurrencies swing wildly in value and you can gamble on the latest meme, and the rule-bound world of regulated finance, with assets and bank accounts protected by the Securities and Exchange Commission and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation… If crypto becomes normalized, there is plenty of reason to worry that it will spread chaos. Democratic staff members on the Senate Banking Committee say that the Genius legislation would allow U.S. exchanges to trade stablecoins from offshore companies outside the full scope of U.S. regulation. Critics contend that Tether, the dominant stablecoin outside U.S. jurisdiction, has been used by criminals and sanctions evaders to circumvent financial controls. Platforms designed to obscure information about transactions — called mixer services — were implicated in a scheme by North Korean hackers to launder hundreds of millions of dollars.”
Why it matters: “Perhaps the greatest concern about stablecoins is their potential to provoke risk to the entire financial system. Because they are neither fully inside nor fully outside the traditional financial system, they present unique, grave challenges for which there are no clear answers. For example, the Genius Act’s drafters propose regular reports on their implications for financial stability. Yet they have no clear response to a critical question: Does the United States stand behind dollar-based stablecoins or not?… Stablecoins were supposed to leverage dollars to stabilize the chaotic universe of crypto. Instead, they seem set to infect the dollar-dominated financial system with the unique combined chaos of crypto and Mr. Trump.”
6. Why artificial intelligence doesn’t live up to the hype when it comes to science
Why you should read it: On Tim Lee’s Understanding AI Substack, physicist Nick McGreivy recounts his ill-fated attempt to integrate AI into his PhD research program—and shows the limits of actually using AI in productive work.
In 2018, as a second-year PhD student at Princeton studying plasma physics, I decided to switch my research focus to machine learning. I didn’t yet have a specific research project in mind, but I thought I could make a bigger impact by using AI to accelerate physics research… I eventually chose to study what AI pioneer Yann LeCun later described as a ‘pretty hot topic, indeed’: using AI to solve partial differential equations (PDEs). But as I tried to build on what I thought were impressive results, I found that AI methods performed much worse than advertised… At first, I tried applying a widely-cited AI method called PINN to some fairly simple PDEs, but found it to be unexpectedly brittle. Later, though dozens of papers had claimed that AI methods could solve PDEs faster than standard numerical methods—in some cases as much as a million times faster—I discovered that a large majority of these comparisons were unfair. When I compared these AI methods on equal footing to state-of-the-art numerical methods, whatever narrowly defined advantage AI had usually disappeared.”
“Many others have identified similar issues. For example, in 2023 DeepMind claimed to have discovered 2.2 million crystal structures, representing ‘an order-of-magnitude expansion in stable materials known to humanity.’ But when materials scientists analyzed these compounds, they found it was ‘mostly junk’ and ‘respectfully’ suggested that the paper ‘does not report any new materials…’ Princeton computer scientists Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor have compiled a list of 648 papers across 30 fields that all make a methodological error called data leakage. In each case data leakage leads to overoptimistic results. They argue that AI-based science is facing a ‘reproducibility crisis…’ To be clear, AI can drive scientific breakthroughs. My concern is about their magnitude and frequency. Has AI really shown enough potential to justify such a massive shift in talent, training, time, and money away from existing research directions and towards a single paradigm?”
Why it matters: “Ultimately, I don’t know whether AI will reverse the decades-long trend of declining scientific productivity and stagnating (or even decelerating) rates of scientific progress. I don’t think anyone does. But barring major (and in my opinion unlikely) breakthroughs in advanced AI, I expect AI to be much more a normal tool of incremental, uneven scientific progress than a revolutionary one… These issues seem to be bad enough that I encourage people to treat impressive results in AI-for-science the same way we treat surprising results in nutrition science: with instinctive skepticism.”
7. What Elon Musk and his DOGE bros get wrong about tech and government
Why you should read it: Public policy scholar Don Moynihan observes that a combination of arrogance, ignorance, and contempt for public service led Elon Musk and his DOGElings to destroy many government functions Americans and others around the world rely upon.
“For anyone with a modicum of experience studying or working in government, nothing [former DOGE bro Sahil] Lavignia discovered is novel. Public servants care about public service! There is not really that much waste in government! There are too many meetings and decisionmaking is too slow! Indeed, sir! All true!… Lavignia was willing to acknowledge his prior beliefs were wrong. That is a hard thing for any human to do, and something I have not seen from any other DOGE official, certainly not Musk. The exception offers insight to the rule: DOGErs simply don’t understand the government they are destroying, and are unwilling to learn… This sounds obvious to say, but people handed extraordinary power that affects the lives of others should know what they are doing. If they don’t know important stuff, they should want to learn it before exercising consequential decisions. But DOGE has failed to meet even these banal standards.”
“A trademark of DOGE was the toxic combination of arrogance and ignorance. Some DOGE members have real and impressive achievements, some do not. But all of those achievements are in the private sector. They know almost nothing about government except conspiracy theories from the internet, or negative interactions with the regulators who oversee their businesses. They did not understand where government spent its money, and that it was not full of waste… DOGE mostly believes that government is irredeemably broken, wasteful and fraudulent. If you believe that, it makes sense to downsize government as much as possible, and contract out what you cannot. It makes sense not to build cool products (DOGE killed Direct File) but to build AI that cuts the humans out of the process and automate as much as possible. The fact that DOGE claims about fraud have proven to be erroneous should be a huge red flag about how the assumptions that will be embedded into their AI builds will prove to be wrong in ways that could be catastrophic.”
Why it matters: “The logic of DOGE’s approach is that they cannot be doing damage by destroying government, because nothing government does have value, and constraints like laws are merely blockers to ignore. And so, we have people who were elected by no-one exert extraordinary power over public services they barely understand, the consequences of which will play out long after they have left government… DOGE was able to have an impact not because it brought gifted technologists into government, but because of the broader Trumpian indifference to key aspects of governing, such as capacity, service quality or accountability. They have broken much, and built nothing of consequence.”
8. How a rejection of germ theory lies at the heart of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s quack medical convictions
Why you should read it: Ars Technica reporter Beth Mole digs into HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s written record and finds he denies germ theory—the foundation of modern medicine and public health.
“While we may never have definitive answers on his cognitive situation, one thing is plain: Kennedy's thoughts and actions make a lot more sense when you realize he doesn't believe in a foundational scientific principle: germ theory… It's important to note here that our understanding of Kennedy's disbelief in germ theory isn't based on speculation or deduction; it's based on Kennedy's own words. He wrote an entire section on it in his 2021 book vilifying Fauci, titled The Real Anthony Fauci. The section is titled ‘Miasma vs. Germ Theory,’ in the chapter ‘The White Man's Burden.’”
“In the chapter, Kennedy promotes the ‘miasma theory’ but gets the definition completely wrong… Kennedy contrasts his erroneous take on miasma theory with germ theory, which he derides as a tool of the pharmaceutical industry and pushy scientists to justify selling modern medicines. The abandonment of miasma theory, Kennedy bemoans, realigned health and medical institutions to ‘the pharmaceutical paradigm that emphasized targeting particular germs with specific drugs rather than fortifying the immune system through healthy living, clean water, and good nutrition…’ In all, the chapter provides a clear explanation of why Kennedy relentlessly attacks evidence-based medicines; vilifies the pharmaceutical industry; suggests HIV doesn't cause AIDS and antidepressants are behind mass shootings; believes that vaccines are harmful, not protective; claims 5G wireless networks cause cancer; suggests chemicals in water are changing children's gender identities; and is quick to promote supplements to prevent and treat diseases, such as recently recommending vitamin A for measles and falsely claiming children who die from the viral infection are malnourished.”
Why it matters: “The trouble is that now that Kennedy is the country's top health official, his warped ideas are contributing to the rise of a dystopian reality. Federal health agencies are spiraling into chaos, and critical public health services for Americans have been brutally slashed, dismantled, or knee-capped—from infectious disease responses, the lead poisoning team, and Meals on Wheels to maternal health programs and anti-smoking initiatives, just to name a few. The health of the nation is at stake; the struggle to understand what goes on in Kennedy's head is vital.”
9. Why the “abundance agenda” has become such a flashpoint for Democratic elites
Why you should read it: The Atlantic columnist Jonathan Chait delves into the reasons why the so-called “abundance agenda” has received such virulent pushback from those quarters on the progressive left ideologically committed to do-nothing proceduralism.
“A civil war has broken out among the Democratic wonks. The casus belli is a new set of ideas known as the abundance agenda. Its supporters herald it as the key to prosperity for the American people and to enduring power for the liberal coalition. Its critics decry it as a scheme to infiltrate the Democratic Party by ‘corporate-aligned interests’; ‘a gambit by center-right think tank & its libertarian donors’; ‘an anti-government manifesto for the MAGA Right’; and the historical and moral equivalent of the ‘Rockefellers and Carnegies grinding workers into dust…’ The intensity of the argument suggests that the participants are debating not merely the mechanical details of policy, but the very nature and purpose of the Democratic Party. And in fact, if you look closely beneath the squabbling, that is exactly what they are fighting over… In recent years, the party’s internal divides have been defined almost entirely in relation to the issue positions taken by the groups [the constellation of activist organizations that control progressive politics and have significant influence over the Democratic Party]. The most progressive Democrats have been the ones who advocated the groups’ positions most forcefully; moderate Democrats have been defined more by their relative lack of enthusiasm for the groups’ agenda than by any causes of their own. The Democratic Party’s flavors have been ‘progressive’ and ‘progressive lite.’ The abundance agenda promises to supply moderate Democrats with a positive identity, rather than merely a negative one.”
“But in the months and years that followed, an unsettling realization began to creep in. A massive law [the Biden administration’s infrastructure bill] had been enacted, yet Americans did not notice any difference, because indeed, very little had changed. Biden had anticipated, after quickly signing his infrastructure bill and then two more big laws pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into manufacturing and energy, that he would spend the rest of his presidency cutting ribbons at gleaming new bridges and plants. But only a fraction of the funds Biden had authorized were spent before he began his reelection campaign, and of those, hardly any yielded concrete results… This time, the failure inspired a little more introspection. Policy wonks, mostly liberal ones, began to ask why public tasks that used to be doable no longer were. How could a government that once constructed miracles of engineering—the Hoover Dam, the Golden Gate Bridge—ahead of schedule and under budget now find itself incapable of executing routine functions? Why was Medicare available less than a year after the enabling legislation passed, when the Affordable Care Act’s individual-insurance exchange took nearly four years to come online (and had to survive a failed website)? And, more disturbing, why was everything slower, more expensive, and more dysfunctional in states and cities controlled by Democrats?… Finding answers to these questions began as a series of disparate inquiries into such neglected topics as restrictive zoning ordinances, federal and state permitting regulations, and the federal government’s administrative procedures. But many who pursued these separate lines of inquiry experienced similar epiphanies, as if a switch had suddenly been flipped in their heads. They concluded that the government has tied itself in knots, and that enormous amounts of prosperity could be unleashed by simply untying them.”
Why it matters: “You might think Democrats, in particular, would uniformly embrace plans to allow Democratic-run states and cities to expand, to build more zero-carbon energy, and to restore the bureaucratic confidence of the New Deal heyday. But this turns out to be a highly controversial proposition, because the limitations on building and the government were largely imposed by the left itself. What’s more, these limits remain a core part of the interest-group politics that has dominated the Democratic Party for more than half a century… The driving insight of the abundance agenda is that the organized citizen-activist groups descended from the Nader movement are not merely overly idealistic or ineffective, but often counterproductive. This is a diametric conflict: The progressive-activist network believes that local activists should have more legal power to block new housing and energy infrastructure. The abundance agenda is premised on taking that power away.”
Odds and Ends
Vanity Fair interviews actress Scarlett Johansson on her upcoming directorial debut— and why Avengers: Endgame deserved an Oscar nod…
How a copy of Magna Carta that was believed to be a fake turned out to actually be the real deal…
Why a Nobel laureate astrophysicist changed his mind about the implications of the research that won him the prize and laid the groundwork for modern cosmology…
How some California hummingbirds have evolved to take better advantage of access to backyard feeders…
Why penguin guano might help drive cloud formation over Antarctica…
What I’m Listening To and Watching
Led by Florence Pugh’s super spy Yelena Belova, Marvel’s latest team of superheroic misfits assemble in Thunderbolts*.
A divorced and down-on-his-luck hedge fund guru (Jon Hamm) addresses his financial woes and newfound existential angst by robbing his wealthy neighbors in Your Friends and Neighbors.
The second season of Poker Face brings the return of Natasha Lyonne’s bullshit-detecting, Columbo-esque crime-solver Charlie Cale.
Tucci in Italy, in which the actor Stanley Tucci takes viewers on a culinary and cultural journey across five Italian regions.
John Summit’s remix of the classic late 1990s electronic track “Silence” by Delirium featuring vocals from Canadian chanteuse Sarah McLachlan.
Image of the Month
I will never not love these posts on the first day of the month! Come to think of it, your Substack was one of the very first that I discovered, way back in 2023. :)