REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

A thread for Democrats Only

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UPDATED: Tuesday, May 20, 2025 17:08
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Thursday, March 20, 2025 1:33 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK




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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Monday, March 24, 2025 8:30 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


The Supreme Court’s new religion case could devastate American workers

Catholic Charities v. Wisconsin risks giving employers a sweeping new power to ignore laws protecting their workers.

By Ian Millhiser | Mar 24, 2025, 5:30 AM CDT

https://www.vox.com/scotus/404678/supreme-court-catholic-charities-wis
consin-religious-liberty-workers

If you know the name of a case the Supreme Court will hear on March 31, Catholic Charities v. Wisconsin Labor & Industry Review Commission, you can probably guess who will prevail.

The Court’s Republican majority almost always rules in favor of Christian litigants who seek an exemption from a federal or state law, which is what Catholic Charities is looking for in this case. (Notably, the Court’s Republicans have not always shown the same sympathy for Muslims with religious liberty claims.)

But, while the outcome in Catholic Charities seems unlikely to be a surprise, the stakes in the case are still quite high. Catholic Charities seeks an exemption from Wisconsin’s law requiring nearly all employers to pay taxes that fund unemployment benefits. If the Court grants this exemption, the justices could give many employers a broad new power to evade laws governing the workplace.

Like every state, Wisconsin taxes employers to fund benefits for workers who lose their jobs. Like most states, Wisconsin’s unemployment benefits law also contains an exemption for church-run nonprofits that are “operated primarily for religious purposes.”

The state’s supreme court recently clarified that this exemption only applies to nonprofit employers that primarily engage in religious activities such as holding worship services or providing religious education. It does not apply to employers like Catholic Charities, which provide secular services like feeding the poor or helping disabled people find jobs — even if the employer is motivated by religious faith to provide these secular services.

Catholic Charities, however, claims that it has a First Amendment right to an exemption, arguing, among other things, that Wisconsin’s limited exemption for some religious nonprofits and not others discriminates against Catholics.

None of its arguments are persuasive, at least under the Supreme Court’s existing decisions. But precedent plays hardly any role in how this Court decides religion cases. The Republican justices routinely vote to overrule, or simply to ignore, religion cases that they disagree with. The Court’s very first major decision after Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s appointment gave Republicans a supermajority on the Court effectively overruled a decision governing worship services during the Covid-19 pandemic that was only a few months old.

Realistically, in other words, the Court will likely decide Catholic Charities based on the justices’ personal preferences, rather than by following the doctrine of stare decisis, which says that courts should typically follow their own precedents.

That said, it remains to be seen how far this Court might go in its ruling. It could choose to distinguish Catholic Charities — which is a legitimate charity that does genuinely admirable work — from employers who claim religious exemptions only to hurt their own employees. But if it chooses to be expansive, it could overrule a line of precedents that protect workers from exploitative employers who claim a religious justification for that exploitation.

“Religious liberty” doesn’t mean religious organizations get civil society’s benefits and none of its costs

In order to understand the Catholic Charities case, it’s helpful to first understand the legal concept of a “corporation.” Corporations are entities that are typically easy to form under any state’s law, and which are considered to be entirely separate from their owners or creators. Forming a corporation brings several benefits, but the most important is limited liability. If a corporation is sued, it can potentially be liable for all of its assets, but the owners or controllers of that corporation are not on the hook for anything else.

Corporations can also create their own corporations, thus protecting some of their assets from lawsuits.

Think of it this way: Imagine that José owns two businesses, one of which sells auto parts, and another that fixes cars. If these businesses are incorporated, that means that José’s personal assets (such as his house) are protected if one of his businesses are sued. Moreover, if both businesses are incorporated as two separate entities, a lawsuit against one business cannot touch the other one. So if, say, the auto parts company sells a defective part, that company could potentially be put out of business by a lawsuit. But the car repair company will remain untouched.

Catholic Charities is a corporation that is controlled by the Roman Catholic Church. According to its lawyers, the president of Catholic Charities in Superior, Wisconsin, is a Catholic bishop, who also appoints its board of directors. The Catholic Church gains significant benefits from this arrangement, because it means that a lawsuit against Catholic Charities cannot touch the church’s broader assets.

Under Wisconsin law, however, the church’s decision to separately incorporate Catholic Charities also has a cost. Wisconsin exempts employers that engage in religious activity such as worship services from its unemployment regime, but it does not give this exemption to charitable corporations that only engage in secular activity. Because Catholic Charities is a separate legal entity from the church itself, and because it does not engage in any of the religious activity that would exempt it from paying unemployment taxes, it does not get an exemption.

Presumably, the church was aware of all of these consequences when it chose to separately incorporate Catholic Charities. The Catholic Church has very good legal counsel, and its lawyers would have advised it of both the benefits of separate incorporation (limited liability) and the price of that benefit (no unemployment exemption). Notably, Catholic Charities has paid unemployment taxes since 1972.

But Catholic Charities now claims that this decades-old arrangement is unfair and unconstitutional. According to its brief, “the Diocese of Superior operates Petitioners as separately incorporated ministries that carry out Christ’s command to help the needy,” but “if Catholic Charities were not separately incorporated, it would be exempt.” That very well may be true, but if Catholic Charities were not separately incorporated, it also would not benefit from limited liability.

That brief alleges three separate constitutional violations — it claims that Wisconsin discriminates “against religious groups with more complex polities” (that is, with more complex corporate structures), and it also raises two claims that both boil down to an allegation that Wisconsin is too involved with the church’s internal affairs because its law treats Catholic Charities differently if that entity were not separately incorporated.

The discrimination claim is weak, because the Constitution does not prohibit discrimination against entities with complex corporate structures, it prohibits discrimination on the basis of religion. Wisconsin law treats Catholics no differently than anyone else. If a Muslim, Hindu, Protestant, Jewish, or nonreligious charity also provides exclusively secular services, it also does not receive an exemption from the state’s unemployment law.

Similarly, Wisconsin law does not entangle the state in the church’s internal affairs, or otherwise dictate how the church must structure itself and its subordinate entities. It merely offers the church a bargain that it is free to turn down — the church may have limited liability, but only if it accepts the consequences of separate incorporation.

A decision for Catholic Charities could have disastrous consequences for workers

Realistically, the immediate consequences of a decision for Catholic Charities would be virtually nonexistent. The church maintains its own internal program that pays unemployment benefits to laid off workers, and it claims that this benefit program “provides the same maximum weekly benefit rate as the State’s system.” So it appears that, no matter who prevails before the Supreme Court, unemployed former employees of Catholic Charities will still receive similar benefits.

But other religious employers may not offer benefits to their unemployed workers. If Catholic Charities prevail in this case, that victory would likely extend to all organizations which, like Catholic Charities, engage in secular charitable work motivated by religious belief. So workers in other organizations could be left with nothing.

Historically, the Supreme Court was reluctant to allow religious employers to seek exemptions from laws that protect their workers, and for a very good reason — abandoning this reluctance risks creating the situation the Court tried to ward off in Tony and Susan Alamo Foundation v. Secretary of Labor (1985).

Tony Alamo was often described in news reports as a cult leader. He was convicted of sexual abuse against girls he considered to be his wives. One of his victims may have been as young as nine. Witnesses at his trial, according to the New York Times, testified that “Alamo had made all decisions for his followers: who got married; what children were taught in school; who got clothes; and who was allowed to eat.”

The Alamo Foundation case involved an organization which was nominally a religious nonprofit. But, as the Supreme Court explained, it operated “a number of commercial businesses, which include service stations, retail clothing and grocery outlets, hog farms, roofing and electrical construction companies, a recordkeeping company, a motel, and companies engaged in the production and distribution of candy.” Tony was the president of this foundation, and its workers received no cash salaries or wages — although they were given food, clothing, and shelter.

The federal government sued the foundation, alleging violations of federal minimum wage, overtime, and record keeping laws. And the Supreme Court rejected the foundation’s claim that it was entitled to a religious exemption from these laws. Had the Court ruled otherwise, it could have allowed people like Tony Alamo to exploit their workers with little recourse to federal or state law.

The Alamo Foundation opinion warned, moreover, that permitting the foundation to pay “substandard wages would undoubtedly give [it] and similar organizations an advantage over their competitors.” Cult leaders with vulnerable followers would potentially push responsible employers out of the market, because employers who remained bound by law would no longer be able to compete.

Indeed, the Supreme Court used to be so concerned about religious companies gaining an unfair competitive advantage that, in United States v. Lee (1982), it announced a blanket rule that “when followers of a particular sect enter into commercial activity as a matter of choice, the limits they accept on their own conduct as a matter of conscience and faith are not to be superimposed on the statutory schemes which are binding on others in that activity.” Religious entities were sometimes entitled to legal exemptions under Lee, but they had to follow the same workplace and business regulations as anyone else.

It’s important to be clear that the Catholic Church bears little resemblance to the Alamo cult, and Catholic Charities certainly does not exploit its workers in the same way that the Tony and Susan Alamo Foundation was accused of doing.

But the Court paints with a broad brush when it hands down constitutional decisions, and the Constitution does not permit discrimination among religious faiths. So, if the Catholic Church is allowed to exempt itself from workplace regulations, the same rule will also extend to other religious employers who may be far more exploitative. Should Catholic Charities prevail, religious workers can only pray that the Court writes a cautious opinion that doesn’t abandon the concerns which drove its decision in Alamo Foundation.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, March 24, 2025 11:59 AM

JAYNEZTOWN


very little remaining of Traditional Democrats

the mob of NeoDemocrats have taken over

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Thursday, March 27, 2025 8:15 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Trump's war on science

By Matthew Yglesias | Mar 27, 2025

https://www.slowboring.com/p/trumps-war-on-science

. . . in the course of life, scientists would occasionally discover various health hazards that were inconvenient to the interests of private industry. It turns out, for example, that nicotine is addictive and that inhaling smoke causes cancer and lung disease. It turns out that while fossil fuels are incredibly useful, they cause greenhouse gas emissions, and coal generates incredible amounts of particulate pollution that seems to have wide-ranging negative consequences for human health. It used to be the case that industrial activity was releasing tons of sulfur dioxide into the air, causing acid to rain down on major American cities. In a well-functioning market economy, we study these kind of externalities and try to come up with cost-effective ways to address them.

But Newt Gingrich (who deliberately dismantled Congress’ scientific expertise) and George W. Bush made it clear that any finding of fact that could justify regulatory intervention was per se unwelcome.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/it-is-time-to-restore-the-us-office
-of-technology-assessment/

Republicans could have responded to neutral presentation of scientific facts by saying something like, “It’s true that stricter tobacco regulation would save lives, but I’m opposed to it on philosophical grounds of freedom.” Instead, we had Mike Pence running around telling people that smoking doesn’t kill.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/andrewkaczynski/mike-pence-defend
ed-his-smoking-doesnt-kill-op-ed-in-a-2000

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, March 28, 2025 5:23 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Chief Justice Roberts Hands Trump the Keys to Power

By Keith Raffel | March 26, 2025

https://www.creators.com/read/raffel-ticket/03/25/chief-justice-robert
s-hands-trump-the-keys-to-power

First, there's the Supreme Court's 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Committee. In that case, Roberts cast the deciding vote to reverse a century of precedent by authorizing corporations, other outside groups and wealthy donors to spend unlimited sums on elections. Just days after the decision, President Barack Obama warned the decision "will open the floodgates for special interests — including foreign corporations — to spend without limit in our elections." Unlimited contributions have indeed tilted the American electoral process toward the interests of corporations and the rich. Today, the largest contributor to Trump's 2024 campaign, Elon Musk, is playing an unprecedented role in the current administration.

Second, in 2013, Roberts assigned himself to write the majority opinion in Shelby County v. Holder, which threw out a key section of the Voting Rights Act. A 2024 article in the Journal of Political Economy found evidence that the Shelby County holding decreased turnout of minority voters due to "voter suppression tactics that have occurred in the absence of federal oversight." As two professors wrote in an American Economic Association paper: "Our findings suggest that perhaps Chief Justice Roberts should be slightly less optimistic about the state of democratic equality in the South."

Third, in 2023, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that Trump should be taken off the state's ballot because of the 14th Amendment's bar on candidates who have "engaged in insurrection or rebellion" against the United States or "given aid or comfort to its enemies." Upon review, Roberts and four associate justices held that a statute must be passed by Congress for such a disqualification to take effect.

Fourth, Roberts again assigned himself to write for the majority in last summer's United States v. Trump. In his opinion, the chief justice conjured up a right to immunity for the president "from criminal prosecution for conduct within his exclusive sphere of constitutional authority." In a scathing dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor says Roberts "invents an atextual, ahistorical, and unjustifiable immunity that puts the President above the law."

Trump agrees wholeheartedly with Sotomayor's analysis. He has said, "I have the right to do whatever I want as president" and "He who saves his country does not violate any law." He appears to know, too, that he owes Roberts a debt of gratitude. On March 4, cameras caught Trump patting Roberts on the arm and saying, "Thank you again. I won't forget."

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, April 1, 2025 7:09 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


How to collapse America from the inside out

By Thom Hartmann | March 31, 2025

https://www.alternet.org/alternet-exclusives/how-to-collapse-america-f
rom-the-inside-out/

If Putin wanted to kill America, how would he best do it? Exactly like this:

— Install a puppet or ally inside the government; as Lincoln foresaw, a tyrant doesn’t need to invade. He just needs to rise from within. Trump has repeatedly echoed Kremlin talking points, undermined NATO, attacked Ukraine, praised autocrats, and created chaos at home. If Putin picked a candidate, it would be Trump — and the intelligence community has confirmed Russian efforts to help him win in both 2016 and 2020.

— Dismantle American institutions from the inside; Putin’s best move would be to encourage the erosion of U.S. government capacity: devalue science, underfund law enforcement, defund agencies, destroy trust in elections, and sabotage public health. All are happening as you read these words.

— Stoke internal division; a divided America is a weak America. Putin’s cyber and propaganda ops have long stoked racial hatred, anti-government sentiment, anti-vax ideology, and far-right extremism. Trump accelerates all of it. Musk’s X (Twitter) has become a vector for disinformation, propaganda, and fascist apologia.

— Weaken U.S. alliances around the world; Trump has repeatedly threatened to pull out of NATO, praised Putin’s invasions, and undermined Western alliances. Now he is threatening our allies with the possibility of invasion. This is textbook Kremlin strategy — divide the West, and conquer its influence.

Whether Trump and Musk are taking direct instructions from Putin or simply operating in ideological lockstep is a question of degree, not direction. The destruction they are today inflicting on America is strategic, not accidental; coordinated, not chaotic; and oligarchic, not populist.

And whether Trump and Musk are doing it on Putin’s instructions, acting out the Dark Enlightenment vision of a CEO America, or simply trying to wipe out any institutions that might challenge their exercise of raw power, that’s exactly what’s happening right now. The outcome is the same: the deliberate disempowerment of the American people and the dismantling of a liberal democratic order that has stood for 240 years.

These two men and their enablers in the Trump regime are quite literally taking apart our American government while, at the same time, doing away with our protections against wealthy predators and destroying our international alliances.

The Founders had this noble idea that, as I detail in The Hidden History of American Democracy, they’d largely borrowed from the Iroquois Confederacy and other northeastern tribes: people can govern themselves when power-hungry psychopaths are kept in check.

It animated George Washington when he wrote:

“As mankind become more liberal, they will be more apt to allow, that all those who conduct themselves as worthy members of the community, are equally entitled to the protection of civil government. I hope ever to see America among the foremost nations in examples of justice and liberality.”

And Abraham Lincoln, who rescued our nation from the fascist Confederate oligarchs who’d taken over the South and then dared try to bring down our democracy through warfare:

“At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us; it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.”

And here we are. So far, Trump and Musk have or are in the process of:

— Gutting the IRS so badly that the country will lose an estimated $500 billion to morbidly rich tax cheats
— Killing off the EPA, so polluters can run free and profit from giving us cancer
— Disbanded the Public Integrity Section that once prosecuted corrupt politicians
— Shut down the DOJ unit that was prosecuting violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act
— Moved the ATF under Kash Patel’s overview with the goal of neutering it
— Crippling the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (CFPB) that stops big banks and insurance companies from ripping off average people
— Taking a hatchet to NASA, presumably to hand more power and money to SpaceX
— Dismantling the Department of Education to create more demand for private for-profit schools
— Paralyzing the Department of Health and Human Services that protects us from disease and pandemics
— Mutilating the National Labor Relations Board that protects workers’ rights
— Proclaiming their intention to end FEMA, so Americans are on their own when climate-change-driven disasters strike
— Tearing apart the Social Security Administration so seniors will have to rely on big banks for retirement options
— Demolishing the National Institutes of Health that develops new drugs and cures for disease
— Seizing control of the FCC so they can end net neutrality and dictate content of radio and TV programming
— Stripping NOAA of its workers so we’ll have to rely on for-profit companies for our weather reports and storm warnings
— Kneecapping the Department of Transportation to block new public transportation projects and deregulate big trucking companies and self-driving cars
— Ripping up the Department of Energy so it can’t fund any more “green” energy projects
— Wiping out the Department of Housing and Urban Development to prevent any new low-income housing projects
— Attacking the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to leave Americans defenseless
— Largely ending the ability of the Office of Civil Rights within the DOE to enforce anti-discrimination laws in education
— Defunded the National Institute of Justice that works against terrorism and far-right extremism
— Eviscerating the Department of Veterans Affairs and other programs that help our veterans (including shutting down the suicide prevention hotlines)
— Defunding the Department of Agriculture to gut food stamps/SNAP, school lunch programs, and supports for small family farms
— Paralyzing the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) that oversees the executive branch to make sure anti-terrorism efforts don’t violate civil rights
— Weakening the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) so it can’t do its job of protecting minority or disabled workers and job applicants
— Firing scientists at the FDA, gutting oversight of drug manufacturers.

And that’s just a partial “so far” list.

Meanwhile, Trump is snatching students off the streets and transporting them to a brutal private for-profit prison in Louisiana with no due process whatsoever in clear defiance of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights; proposing changes to voting laws that will prevent tens of millions of married women from casting a ballot; and threatening to seize foreign, sovereign lands by force.

There are several factions at work here.

— First, there’s Trump himself, who’s so filled with hate against the government that once threatened to imprison him for his crimes that he’s more than happy to hand a meat axe to anybody who’ll make government workers squeal in pain.

— Next come Musk and the so-called PayPal Mafia of German, South African and homegrown billionaires who think women should not be allowed to vote, capitalism and democracy are incompatible with each other, and appear to have fantasies of ruling over a whites-only ethnonationalist state run like a corporation.

— And finally, there are the old fashioned rightwing billionaires who simply don’t want to pay their fair share in taxes or have their companies regulated; these are the guys who, for over 50 years, have been following the Powell Memo to build the infrastructure — media, legal, lobbying, think tanks, etc. — that has made all this possible today.

Americans are starting to wake up to the damage these men (the ones driving the process are all white men) are doing and this weekend millions of protestors will show up in the streets of every city in America to make their discomfort and anger known.

It’s a beginning. If public opinion becomes too strong to ignore, it’s possible some Republicans will decide that protecting our republic is more important than fearing a primary challenge funded by the richest man in the world; that could stop much of what Trump’s doing dead in its tracks.

On the other hand, it’s entirely possible that such demonstrations could provoke Trump to fulfill his previous threats to follow the examples of Putin, Lukashenko, and Erdogan and declare a state of insurrection, mobilizing the military against the citizens of America.

At that point, all bets are off and the window to save American democracy will have shrunk to a matter of weeks or months.

Whether Putin is running this show — as those who point to his reportedly regular phone conversations with Trump and Musk argue — or it’s a homegrown effort to cripple our nation is almost irrelevant; the reality is that they’re well down the road in a way that may be irreparable, at least within a generation or more.

As my old friend Rob Kall points out over at OpEdNews.com, institutional knowledge is a critical resource for both companies and governments, and these mass firings are ripping it out of our nation’s systems of governance leaving a hole that will take decades to re-fill.

Thus, with Congress neutered and the courts half-paralyzed and moving slowly, it falls to us to stop this anti-American destruction spree. And that will require massive public expressions of outrage, demands for action, and relentless pressure on our politicians.

The key to mobilizing public pressure is to make clear to Americans exactly what Trump and Musk are really up to. To help people understand that this regime’s real agenda — which they are ruthlessly executing right in front of us — is to destroy the United States of America as it was and turn our country into something much more like Hungary or Russia.

And, to the extent that our corporate media is too timid or too bought-off to raise the alarm, that work falls to us, to me and you.

Tag, we’re it. Pass it along.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, April 1, 2025 10:35 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
How to collapse America from the inside out


Unless this is a 4-year breakdown of Joe Biden*'s Presidency, nobody is interested.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Tuesday, April 1, 2025 10:35 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by JAYNEZTOWN:
very little remaining of Traditional Democrats

the mob of NeoDemocrats have taken over


And the polling for Democratic Party approval continues to plummet.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Saturday, April 19, 2025 9:44 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Solving the Trolley Problem: Towards Moral Abundance

by Kyle Munkittrick | Friday, Apr 18, 2025

https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2025/04/solving-the-trolley-prob
lem-towards-moral-abundance.html

Trolley Problem meets ‘I Want To Go Home’ meme

Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book, Abundance, inadvertently exposes a blind spot in our collective moral calculus. In making their case for a better politics, I think they’ve also, as an accidental by-product, solved the infamous Trolley Problem. Free download at https://libgen.rs/search.php?req=Ezra+Klein+Derek+Thompson

Abundance argues that improving the supply of things like housing and energy is good on its own term and that material abundance can help address collective problems, like homelessness or climate change. The choice between allowing people to sleep on the streets in tents or forcing them into shelters is, as Klein and Thompson point out, a false dilemma caused by poor housing policy. The choice between growth and progress vs climate change is a false dilemma caused by poor energy and construction policy. Klein and Thompson are, justifiably, focused on the political thorniness of these issues, but, in their efforts, also demonstrate something startling: they implicitly demonstrate that material abundance can obviate moral quandaries.

The Trolley Problem is so well known and over-explored it’s easy to forget that it is relatively new. The Trolley Problem is a modern moral dilemma. There are no trolleys in nature. You cannot replace the trolley with a bear or a hurricane or an opposing tribe—those things do not run on tracks, their brakes can’t go out, and there is no simple lever by which you choose their behavior. The Trolley Problem is a problem of technology, yet none of its solutions are allowed to be.

The Trolley Problem is, as it is usually presented, a false dilemma. There is no correct answer to the problem; both options are tragedies, neither better, regardless of permutations. Even being asked to make the choice is morally corrosive (as I’m sure Philippa Foot and Judith Jarvis Thompson would agree). The Good Place demonstrates this to absurd comedic effect.
Michael from The Good Place pointing at his diagram of how to kill everyone in the Trolley Problem
Another ‘solution’ to the Trolley Problem

It is the ridiculous Sisyphean repetition of The Good Place trolley episode, along with our own decades of obsession over the problem, that resonates most with Abundance. What if instead of trying to figure out if one or five is the better choice with infinite variations and philosophical arguments, we just fix the trolleys? This is the core insight of what I call Moral Abundance—the idea that technological and material progress can eliminate moral dilemmas entirely.

Consider climate change. Abundance not only recommends choosing among existing tech like moving from coal to solar, but also explores near-future examples like cultured (aka lab-grown) meat. This tech does exist, but it’s niche, nascent, and expensive. It’s also unsettling and popular for politicians to oppose it. But Abundance, correctly, holds up cultured meat as a worthy goal because in addition to helping address climate change (agriculture is a major contributor), it would also allow us to effectively end the moral stain that is factory farming.

Yes, we can remove factory farming by just banning it, but that’s a political non-starter. It would mean less food choice (not great), inequity where only millionaires get steak, eggs, and bacon (sad!), potential food shortages (bad) or, worse, famines (very bad). In a Trolley Problem-esque version of the dilemma, the question we’re asked is who should suffer, animals in cages or people in famine?

The answer of Abundance is neither. We can obviate the question with progress. The implicit claim of Abundance is that material abundance not only makes things cheaper, easier, or higher quality, but also makes it easier for people to be better. Abundance, yoked to technological and social progress, can mitigate root causes of moral dilemmas, obviating them.

To formalize this concept: Moral Abundance proposes that material and technological abundance, by removing constraints or scarcity, can mitigate moral issues and render some specific moral questions effectively obsolete. By changing the landscape of debate, abundance makes it easier for everyone, on net, to be better than they would or could otherwise be. Moral Abundance shifts our attention from the moral question in front of us to the opportunity to eliminate it all together. The solution to the trolley problem is not one track or the other, but to invent, build, and deploy safer trolleys.

Moral Abundance is, in part, about recognizing that our environment can be moral, and we can choose to intervene. Noah Smith makes a compelling political argument that anarchy is not welfare, that is, allowing people to be anti-social doesn’t help them or society. We can make the same argument about nature: chaos is not amoral. Nature or the status quo harming people is bad. It is evil, even though there is no actor. We tolerate it because we believe cannot control or change it. Moral Abundance challenges that helplessness by recognizing our capacity to reshape the context of ethical dilemmas, not just navigate within them.

Moral Abundance also recognizes the function of time and progress to create a kind of chronological moral luck. By virtue of living today it is easier to be good, because of massive social and technological progress, than it was a century ago. Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota series, along with The Culture and Star Trek in the pantheon of great post-scarcity fiction, demonstrates this moral luck. Despite deep flaws, the future of Terra Ignota is more moral than our own society on almost every measure because material constraints (of health, of travel, of energy) are all but eliminated. Moral Abundance also results from improved circumstantial moral luck. Abundance reduces the possibility of scarcity forcing individuals into tragic choices—the bad luck of facing that specific unavoidable dilemma. Moral Abundance reminds us that material, social, and technological progress can be powerful inputs to moral progress.

As such, Moral Abundance invites ethicists and philosophers to consider the practical world of technological development. Elements of Moral Abundance are already present throughout philosophy. The capabilities approach developed by Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen offers a particularly useful framework. “Capabilities” here are real freedoms—the actual ability to choose different ways of living. By focusing on what people can actually do rather than abstract rights or resources alone, this approach naturally aligns with Moral Abundance’s emphasis on expanding practical moral options. A surprising example comes from Shulamith Firestone, who explicitly argued in her Dialectic of Sex that technological advances like artificial wombs would be necessary for true gender equality. Firestone has one of the first, clearest examples of identifying a particular technology as a direct solution to a seemingly intractable moral issue.

More recently, bioethicists like Julian Savulescu, Ingmar Persson, and Thomas Douglas have proposed “moral enhancement” technologies to improve human ethical capacities directly. These could make us less selfish, more tolerant, and less neurotic, among other pro-social benefits. And at the bleeding edge of technology, Amanda Askell is working not to merely constrain AI, but to instead actively shape its development toward moral ends. These philosophers are practical experts in the relevant sciences (neuroscience, biochem, machine learning) and have put their reputations on the line advocating for specific paths that technology should take.

So what path should food production take to achieve Moral Abundance? Before factory farming and the green revolution, famines were common due to the chaos of nature. As factory farming, the green revolution, the refrigerated shipping-container, GMOs, and global free-trade improved and matured, famines basically went away. Consider these two graphs below from Our World In Data on Famines.

Deaths per 100,000 people, globally, due to starvation, came down 90% from the 1960s to the 2010s. Absolute deaths are down 98% on the same time horizon. Does this mean we have perfect global food equity? No, but, my goodness, I’ll take a near order of magnitude reduction in absolute and relative deaths due to famine in a 50 year period over nothing.

History is full of examples of Moral Abundance at work. Kerosene and electricity did more to end whaling than any concerted conservation movement. Legal systems of justice obviated dueling and honor culture. Automation and safety measures has made mining, once famous for tolerating carnage, come to see every death or injury as a preventable tragedy. Anesthesia and sanitation made surgery all but pain-free, orders of magnitude safer, and dramatically more effective. Long-acting reversible contraception (IUDs, Nexplanon, etc) has done more to reduce unwanted and teenage pregnancy than centuries of religion, cultural norms, and after school specials. Each dilemma was its own trolley problem (light vs whales, coal vs miners) obviated by progress.

But while famines have faded into history, the horror of factory farming has grown. This is critical to remember: abundance can create more moral good overall even if new moral wrongs emerge. Before the 20th century, famine was a given, there was no alternative. As disorienting as it seems, that we can even ask the question, “Who should suffer, animals in cages or people in famine?” is progress. Moral Abundance pushes us to continue our progress, to look past the initial false-dichotomy, and to ask weird questions about our future, like What if we could get the meat without the animal? One question obviates the other. Abundant, affordable, high-quality cultured meat could keep famine rare, reduce climate impact, and reduce animal suffering.

Cultured meat, you might rightly point out, exists today and we don’t have these benefits. Transitions to new technologies are uneven. Innovations often start out as rare, limited, and expensive luxuries—they are not abundant. Cultured meat will likely become cheaper and more ubiquitous, just like cell phones did and EVs are becoming. Which, in turn, will make it easier to eat factory-farmed meat less, just as EVs make it easier to pollute less. Material abundance is a necessary (but not sufficient!) condition for Moral Abundance.

This also does not mean that any form of abundance, such as cultured meat, only facilitates moral goods. New technologies destabilize things (that can be bad), lead to surprising new problems (e.g. phones are addictive), and during the transition, can be inequitable (e.g. EVs are still often a ‘luxury’ and not an option for many). Moral Abundance doesn’t presume utopia or mindless techno-optimism. Moral Abundance’s pursuit is to give ourselves more options and thereby make it easier to be better. And it does not happen in a vacuum. Klein and Thompson vociferously argue that high state capacity and a flourishing, dynamic private sector combine to facilitate the conditions under which Moral Abundance is possible.

As we build toward Moral Abundance, we might envision a future where our descendants no longer wrestle with the ethical quandaries that consume us today—not because they’re inherently wiser (though, if enhanced, they just might be), but because the technological foundation we lay now helps create a world where factory farming, climate catastrophe, and resource scarcity have become historical footnotes rather than pressing moral emergencies. Moral Abundance challenges us not just to build a better future, but to build a future in which we can be better.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Saturday, April 19, 2025 12:34 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


The Trolley Problem is bullshit made up by college fart sniffers.

Ezra Klein is a douche bag.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Wednesday, April 23, 2025 8:14 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
The Trolley Problem is bullshit made up by college fart sniffers.

Ezra Klein is a douche bag.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Trumptards and Confederates are/were absolutely evil but they feel/felt that their behavior is normal and necessary for their happiness and they won't stop until dead. Lincoln chose killing Confederates rather than endless talking to them in vain about ameliorating their atrocious behavior. Democrats are facing the same choice with Trumptards.

Was the Civil War Inevitable?

Before Lincoln turned the idea of “the Union” into a cause worth dying for, he tried other means of ending slavery in America. What we feel when we study Lincoln’s life through the war is not so much the force of fixed convictions imposed on others as a sense of his discovery, in real time, of what he believed.

By Adam Gopnik | April 21, 2025

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/04/28/lincolns-peace-michael-v
orenberg-book-review-1861-jay-winik

Out of guilt or amnesia, we tend to treat wars, in retrospect, as natural disasters: terrible but somehow inevitable, beyond anyone’s control. Shaking your fist at the fools who started the First World War and condemned millions to a meaningless death seems jejune; historians teach us to say that the generals did their best under impossible conditions. Mournful fatalism is the requisite emotion, even when mad fury would be more apt. Efforts at de-escalation are cast as weakness or cowardice, while those who lead nations into catastrophe are praised for their “strength of character,” or for stoically accepting what was supposedly unavoidable. We rarely honor those who turn back at the brink. John F. Kennedy’s compromise during the Cuban missile crisis is an exception, though only because prudence and caution—our removal of nuclear missiles from Turkey—were neatly covered up and presented as pugnacity and courage: we had made the Russians “blink.”

The habit of describing war with metaphors drawn from natural disasters is as old as war writing. Homer himself uses natural metaphors to ennoble violent human actors: Achilles is a wildfire sweeping across the Trojan plain. Given what Greek warfare actually entailed—pitched battles of close combat, where victory meant cutting others to death with edged weapons—the figure feels less like a metaphor than a mask.

So it is with us. The Civil War lingers in memory as brutal and heartbreaking, but also as heroic and tragic, accompanied by an Appalachian campfire fiddle. It is the altar of American existence—a sublime sacrifice and a perpetually contested example—so thoroughly sanctified that to ask if it might have been avoided by pragmatic compromise feels almost obscene. No war, no Lincoln, no Emancipation Proclamation, no Gettysburg—neither the battle nor the address—to inspire and instruct us? And yet three-quarters of a million people died, and the enslaved people in whose name the war was fought emerged still trapped in an apartheid terrorist state. Was it worth it?

In “1861: The Lost Peace” (Grand Central), Jay Winik—the author of several fine works about American history—takes up that question of whether the Civil War might have been avoided. The title overpromises a little. Nowhere in the book do we encounter a truly plausible compromise that might have averted the conflict. What Winik offers instead is a portrait of two sides talking past each other, rather than with each other. Still, he traces the efforts of those who genuinely wanted to prevent war and the trauma of secession—and shows how Abraham Lincoln tried at first to listen and then at last refused. Download Jay Winik’s books at https://libgen.rs/search.php?&req=Jay+Winik

The early chapters are given over to what will be, for many, a familiar story. We hear again how an underrated, grotesque-looking backwoods lawyer with scant experience (one term in Congress and two failed Senate runs) managed—by virtue of being a moderate and, usefully, an outsider; a man of the frontier rather than of Boston or New York—to wrest the Republican nomination from the seemingly inevitable William Henry Seward, of New York, and go on to win the national election against the pro-slavery Democrat John Breckinridge.

We’re told about the assassination plots brewing before Lincoln had even taken office, forcing him—in ways widely seen as comical, not to say cowardly—to sneak into Washington under the protection of the newly founded Pinkerton private-detective force. (By rumor, though not in fact, he was dressed in women’s clothes.) Southern states were already passing resolutions of secession one after another, with South Carolina taking the lead. Meanwhile, the Confederate noose was tightening around Fort Sumter, in the waters off Charleston, where the Northern garrison was effectively under blockade.

The reasons for the radical action were plain. Lincoln, despite his efforts to present himself as a moderate, was what we would now call a single-issue candidate. The issue was slavery, and his categorical rejection of it. “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong” was his most emphatic aphorism on the subject, along with his famous injunction: “A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.”

Though absolute on the moral question, Lincoln was neither the hard-core political abolitionist we may wish him to have been nor the apologist for slavery some later commentators have made him seem. He was, instead, a democratic politician trying to build a coalition—and he knew that, to keep the border states within it, a firm New England abolitionist line would fail, while a focus on containing slavery, not eradicating it, might succeed.

And so, during that strange American interregnum between election and Inauguration—it was even longer in the nineteenth century, with the ceremony held in March—Lincoln struggled to find common ground with the Southern secessionists. He began a pre-inaugural exchange of letters with Alexander Stephens, of Georgia, a friend from his congressional days who made it clear that, in the Southern mind, everything was secondary to the preservation of slavery. “We at the South do think African slavery, as it exists with us, both morally and politically right,” Stephens wrote. “This opinion is founded upon the inferiority of the black race. You, however, and perhaps a majority of the North, think it wrong. Admit the difference of opinion.”

The enterprise of avoiding war was likely doomed from the start. Nonetheless—and here lies the new emphasis of Winik’s book—there was an attempt at a “Peace Conference” (Winik oddly capitalizes it throughout) during this pre-inaugural period, and it was more substantial than most subsequent histories have acknowledged. If it didn’t resolve the crisis, it at least exposed the depth of the deadlock.

The conference took place in Washington, at the Willard Hotel, where Lincoln had stayed since his arrival, using his suite as his office. The Willard, like the Waldorf-Astoria, in New York, has gone through many incarnations, but in the nineteenth century it seemed more central to Washington life than either the White House or the long-unfinished Capitol. (Its cast-iron dome was still incomplete.) From February 4th to the 27th, the conference drew delegates from twenty-one of the thirty-four states then in the Union. It brought together representatives from the South—most notably from Virginia, the cradle of Presidents, which had not yet committed to secession—with Republicans from the North, many of them, as Winik reveals, operating under the direct or indirect guidance of Seward. Though the delegates were mostly former members of Congress, the gathering wasn’t limited to them; the former President John Tyler, of Virginia, who held no official position but remained influential, was present.

It was, by all indications, a comfortable negotiation. Both sides dined—if a Willard menu from that year is to be trusted—on lamb chops, stewed kidneys, and, precociously, frozen custard, which, like baseball, would not become a national mania until after the war. It is perhaps less surprising, then, given their shared table, class, and manners, that both sides, including almost all the Republicans, were ready to concede the permanence of slavery in the South in exchange for ending the threat of secession. A Thirteenth Amendment was proposed, and could probably have passed, guaranteeing the continued existence of slavery in the states where it already prevailed. Even Lincoln was prepared to accept this.

The unresolvable issue was the extension of slavery into the territories. Here, the arguments were fierce, layered with subtexts and overtones more audible then than now. For all the civility of tone and talk of compromise — Lincoln went so far as to agree that a fugitive slave could be recaptured and returned to bondage — the real conflict was profound and, in the end, unbridgeable. Like the conflict in the Middle East today, it was rooted less in clashing interests than in vast and irreconcilable mutual fears. The underlying meanings were evident to all: any limit placed on slavery, the Southerners believed, was intended to hasten its extinction; any constitutional blessing of slavery, the North understood, was intended to support its extension.

To use an awkward but apt modern analogy, it was as if the right-to-life movement, having won the Presidency, were to concede that reproductive freedom would remain protected in blue states like New York and Massachusetts, but be entirely eliminated in red states, with harsh penalties. Blue-state voters would see that the true goal was to end abortion everywhere, and that agreeing even to a temporary truce meant accepting the long-term influence of hostile neighbors on a vital and defining issue.

Behind the Southern delegates’ suspicion was a kind of post-October 7th trauma: John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, in 1859, had convinced the South that the Black population was poised to rise up in bloody rebellion if given the chance. This, in retrospect, was plainly chimerical—the enslaved had not, in fact, joined Brown’s insurrection, and, when Black enfranchisement did eventually come, however briefly, during Reconstruction, Black Americans, far from turning violently on their former masters, embraced electoral politics with enthusiasm. But the Southern establishment was unshakable in its belief that any concession to abolitionists would end in the massacre of white families. Stephens wrote indignantly to Lincoln of “such exhibitions of madness as the John Brown raid into Virginia, which has received so much sympathy from many, and no open condemnation from any of the leading men of the present dominant party.”

Lincoln nonetheless participated warmly in the Peace Conference debate, insisting that his task was simply to follow the Constitution, which he understood to prohibit secession from the Union as an act of treason. Yet, for all his provisional concessions, he effectively ended the conference by declaring, “In a choice of evils, war may not always be the worst. Still I would do all in my power to avert it, except to neglect a constitutional duty. As to slavery, it must be content with what it has. The voice of the civilized world is against it.”

Those words may now strike us as unduly mild, but behind them lay the doctrine of the “Scorpion’s Sting”—the idea, adopted by antislavery advocates around the world, that if slavery could be encircled and confined, it would destroy itself, as the scorpion is said to sting itself to death when trapped in a ring of fire. The scorpion metaphor, though pungent, was poorly chosen. Just as frogs do not, in fact, remain in water as it boils but leap out when they are scalded, scorpions are actually immune to their own venom, and, when encircled by fire, they die not by stinging themselves but from heat-induced convulsions that only appear to be self-inflicted. That image offers a better metaphor for the war to come. Stoic suicide doesn’t occur in nature. Frenzied, senseless self-destruction does.

Yet Lincoln’s words signalled—clearly, to anyone attuned to their overtones, and everyone at that conference was—that slavery was to be put, or left, in a position where it would have to end itself. Slavery had a cursed past, and a present to be tolerated, but no future. No one quite said this; everyone grasped it. And so the Willard Peace Conference quietly foundered. Its resolutions were rejected in the Senate and never even reached a vote in the House.

Southern paranoia and Northern complacency together may explain what, at first glance, seems to us the oddest feature of the Willard meetings: that no one on the Northern side proposed a rational plan for gradual emancipation and enfranchisement, presumably subsidized by the already wealthy industrialists of the North and carried out over some specified interval. Such plans had been tried before—in Pennsylvania, as early as the seventeen-eighties, and proposed for Virginia, though unsuccessfully, by Thomas Jefferson. Surely a similar scheme, however brutal its delay for the enslaved, might have spared the country the full scale of the war to come. Lincoln himself returned to the idea in 1862, when he proposed a program of compensated, gradual abolition for the border states. Yet even then, at the height of the war, sympathetic border-state representatives refused to act. Slavery had embedded itself too deeply, not only as an economic engine but as a terror-bound cultural institution.

The tragedy was that, while the South could not overcome its paranoia about the violence it would suffer if the slaves were freed, the North could not imagine the scale of the violence it was choosing. The assumption, of course, was that the conflict would last twelve weeks—just long enough to put the erring states back in their place. But only a few months later Julia Ward Howe would be staying at the same Willard Hotel when, in the course of a day, she saw a column of freshly inducted Union soldiers, in blue uniforms, marching and singing lines from a newly adapted spiritual: “John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the ground.” The words struck her as too direct, and she composed a loftier version in her hotel room, substituting God’s vengeance for that of the abolitionist: “He has loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword / His truth is marching on.” “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” was born. It was only November, and already more than forty thousand soldiers had fallen. The eternal language of euphemism—swords and lightning—had begun its work, displacing the reality of bullets breaking bodies.

In the wake of the failed conference, Lincoln skillfully replaced “abolition” with “the Union” as the war’s compelling purpose. The case he made to connect the end of slavery with the preservation of a political arrangement was subtle. Secession, he maintained, was a denial of democratic rule. Slavery had, from the beginning, been a national issue. It could not be fenced off and become a parochial one now. This was the logic, easily lost to us because it’s so familiar, behind the memorable line in the Gettysburg Address, delivered two years later, that the great question of the war was whether “any nation so conceived and so dedicated”—that is, to liberty—“can long endure.” Without a strong central authority—not a dictator or a king but a unifying rule of law—a free state would be torn apart by demagogues and dissension.

Yet the argument, though it has come to seem foundational, is in some ways specious. As Southern critics noted at the time, for the wrong reasons but not with the wrong logic, the American Revolution was itself an act of secession—from a functioning and successful union. Many regions have broken apart at the will of their inhabitants. It is easy to imagine horrors today that could make, say, California and Oregon and Washington want to declare themselves a separate polity, and it is hard to invoke a moral principle to tell them that they can’t. From this perspective, the idea of “union” was one of the most disingenuous diversions in American history: the transformation of an abstract constitutional principle into a cause worth dying for.

Why this new argument proved so powerful remains something of a mystery. Edmund Wilson, in his study of Civil War literature, “Patriotic Gore,” saw in it the blunt, power-fixated logic of human history: big states swallow small ones. The North was stronger and bigger, and it swallowed the South. The bleak truth, Wilson suggested, is that people like joining armies of conquest. Presumably, when the Great Canadian campaign begins, there will be no shortage of soldiers to fight it, or of apologists ready to enumerate the horrors of Canadian life that must be erased, poutine aside.

And yet Canada, oddly, offers a clue to the peculiar appeal of Lincoln’s abstract ideal of “union.” Donald Trump’s threats have, almost overnight, caused a famously divided and centrifugal nation to cohere into a single national front. Something like that happened across the North at the outset of the Civil War, when “the Union” became not just a constitutional principle but a moral rallying cry. The South, for its part, responded in kind: secession swiftly forged a fractured region into a reactive unity, bound by fear of emancipation and faith in a mythic agrarian freedom.

In an illuminating study of American Jews during the conflict, “Fear No Pharaoh” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), Richard Kreitner notes that even pro-slavery rabbis in New York were converted by Lincoln’s unionist rhetoric. Morris J. Raphall, who led the Greene Street Synagogue and had defended slavery on Biblical grounds, abruptly reversed himself when Lincoln invoked the vision of a united America. American Jews, Raphall insisted, knew the “difference between elsewhere and here.” His son enlisted in the Union Army and lost an arm at Gettysburg. As in the post-mass-immigration moment of the First World War, a crisis proved necessary to forge a common identity. “Elsewhere” and “here” always make for more compelling rallying cries than “right” and “wrong.”

This bleaker view is reinforced by the historian Michael Vorenberg’s new book, “Lincoln’s Peace” (Knopf), which picks up the story at the other end of the conflict, as the war was drawing to a close after unfathomable death and suffering. Vorenberg’s account, despite the intervening carnage, returns us to a situation eerily similar to the one that preceded the war: the white South, though militarily defeated, had no intention of accepting anything resembling racial equality. And, while Robert E. Lee might have declined to resort to guerrilla warfare, many of his lieutenants carried on a program of suppression by terror. In that sense, Vorenberg argues, the Civil War never truly ended.

Lincoln’s assassination was, in this light, a last-ditch terrorist assault on the national government—one that very nearly succeeded. Seward and Vice-President Andrew Johnson survived the conspiracy only by chance. The pattern of compromise persisted, with the politics of the border states still exerting undue influence. Indeed, one of the most fateful disasters in American history—Johnson’s embattled Presidency—was a by-product of those very compromises: Johnson, a Tennessean, was chosen to replace Hannibal Hamlin, of Maine, on the 1864 ticket in a bid to appease the border states, with predictable results.

In “American Civil Wars” (Norton), Alan Taylor broadens the frame to include parallel struggles over national identity and democratic renewal in the eighteen-sixties—not only in the United States but in Canada and Mexico as well. One could broaden it further and argue that the period from 1848 to 1871—bracketed by the liberal revolutions and the end of the Franco-Prussian War—was marked by a series of violent shocks across the Western world, culminating in the establishment of a liberal political compact that, in some form, endured into our own time. Lincoln’s “passion” became so sanctified, in this reading, because it was the most extreme instance of a common struggle. In this view, the American experience was not exceptional but emblematic—a subset of the painful emergence of something resembling genuinely popular democracy.

What’s striking about the new literature on Lincoln and the war is that, though one may expect him to be in some sense debunked or “deconstructed,” he remains a largely idealized figure. Winik is admiring of his firmness of purpose at the war’s outset; Vorenberg mourns its absence at the war’s end. Matthew Stewart, in his recent study of the influence of idealist philosophy on abolitionism, “An Emancipation of the Mind,” goes further. Drawing on quotations from Karl Marx, a Lincoln enthusiast, Stewart argues that Lincoln was essentially the first Marxist President: embracing a view of labor not far from Marx’s own, and opposing the peonage of working people in all its forms.

This is obviously tendentious—nor does Stewart mean it entirely seriously—but, then, Lincoln, like Jesus, is easily made to conform to whatever ideological need the historian brings to him. If a left-wing, quasi-Marxist Lincoln is a plausible invention, so is a far-right, conservative one of the sort evoked by Harry V. Jaffa, the godfather of the Claremont Institute. Jaffa saw Lincoln’s choice of war in 1861 as wholly heroic—an almost Christlike epiphany that united revelation and reason in a moral crusade. He cast Lincoln as the embodiment of a set of absolute values: Biblical revelation and Greek reason joined in opposition to the relativism of modern liberal humanism, with its taste for irony and its acceptance of a plurality of forms of existence. Jaffa was, in effect, allying Jerusalem and Athens against New York. He wanted the American home built on rock, not shifting sand, and believed Lincoln was its carpenter.

In truth, we have no difficulty building our abodes on sand—that’s why the most expensive homes in Los Angeles and Long Island are called “beach houses.” There is no bedrock to build on, in the world or in morality. The political ground beneath our feet shifts, grows squishy, and is meant to. What we feel when we study Lincoln’s life through the war is not so much the force of fixed convictions imposed on others as the gradual emancipation of his own mind—a sense of his discovery, in real time, of what he believed. A powerful intuition that slavery was absolutely wrong evolved into a tragic fatalism, haunted by a sense of Providence, and finally opened into a horizon of hope, shaped by the scale of suffering Lincoln had helped to unleash. This much death had to make for a better land.

Yet believing that the war was inescapable is not quite the same as believing that it was right. Was the Civil War “worth the sacrifice”? Suppose that someone had had the force and the imagination to craft a plan for gradual emancipation. Full enfranchisement might have been delayed for several years, but the enslaved would have been free at last. And what of the human cost? If eight hundred thousand people had been deliberately murdered over the next four years—in some expanded version of the Trail of Tears or the Bataan Death March—would we see that as an unfortunate necessity of history or as an unforgivable crime?

Of course, some eight hundred thousand did die—many in horrific ways—while the formerly enslaved were left to fend for themselves in a postwar state where apartheid was enforced by terror. Why, exactly, is that outcome morally preferable—or more readily excused? These were not slaves but soldiers, who, in some collective sense, chose to fight. But was that choice entirely their own? Or was it made for them, by circumstance, by duty, by the illusions of glory, not to mention the blunt force of conscription? We are far too ready to depict the suffering of others as the price of the history that seemingly rewards us now.

The truth is that we accept mass dying with enormous aplomb. More than a million perished in the COVID-19 pandemic, but those who complacently predicted that it would be no more than a season’s pain appear to represent the new common sense: lockdowns were excessive, the health establishment overreacted. Mass dying barely fazes us—until, that is, it becomes personal and particular. Leo Tolstoy revered Lincoln, calling him “a Christ in miniature, a saint of humanity, whose name will live for thousands of years.” Yet in “War and Peace” he captures the raw vulnerability of a young soldier—brave, devoted, almost absurdly loyal to the cause and its flawed leaders—wounded in battle. As blood seeps away and he imagines death nearing, the soldier slips into a state of wonder at existence. These passages, among literature’s most poignant and strangely affirming, bridge the gap between the vastness of war and the intimacy of a single death. A youth, swept into combat by patriotic fervor, faces bullets and, fallen, gazes at the sky, not with moral clarity or anger but with innocent bewilderment: Existence is so good—why am I dying for this? Major Sullivan Ballou, writing to his wife, Sarah, before the First Battle of Bull Run, mused, “I know I have but few claims upon Divine Providence, but something whispers to me—perhaps it is the wafted prayer of little Edgar—that I shall return to my loved ones unharmed. If I do not, my dear Sarah, never forget how much I love you, nor that, when my last breath escapes me on the battlefield, it will whisper your name.” Early in the fight, a cannonball tore off his leg. He lingered in agony for a week, very likely in no condition to whisper anything, least of all her name.

Lincoln’s elegiac words about the dead soldiers at Gettysburg remain true: from their sacrifice, we still can take renewed commitment to their cause, that of liberty against tyranny. But we should also remember that the purpose of the struggle of liberty against tyranny is not to carry on the fight but not to have to. We can’t forget these soldiers’ lives, but neither should we forget the manner of their dying. Even if we return to the original proposition—that the Civil War was unavoidable, or that of all the bad choices war was not the worst—it doesn’t alter what happened at Bull Run or Antietam. Remaining alive to other people’s pain, in the face of heroic rhetoric, retrospective rationalization, and two-sided tribal terror, is perhaps the hardest moral task we face—and one at which we almost always fail. Sometimes the only people who can see the sky are the soldiers who die beneath it.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, April 23, 2025 1:32 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
The Trolley Problem is bullshit made up by college fart sniffers.

Ezra Klein is a douche bag.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Trumptards and Confederates are/were absolutely evil but they feel/felt that their behavior is normal and necessary for their happiness and they won't stop until dead. Lincoln chose killing Confederates rather than endless talking to them in vain about ameliorating their atrocious behavior. Democrats are facing the same choice with Trumptards.


Do it tough guy. You keep talking about it every day, but you're a dirty little pussy and you have no stones.

Stop being a whiny little faggot and go start your Civil War.

Give me one good reason to put you into the fucking ground for good.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Tuesday, April 29, 2025 2:51 PM

THG


Quote:
Originally posted by THGRRI:

If you meet the requirements ( slightly to the right, middle and liberal ) and you have an interest in starting a discussion say so.




Comrade signym, check it out. Thousands of posts by Jack and SECOND in one of my threads. Thousands of them. Guess you're wrong again when you posted nobody but me posts in my threads. And where were you when you posted that, in one of my threads of course; dummy.

T

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Tuesday, April 29, 2025 4:37 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Quote:
Originally posted by THGRRI:

If you meet the requirements ( slightly to the right, middle and liberal ) and you have an interest in starting a discussion say so.




Comrade signym, check it out. Thousands of posts by Jack and SECOND in one of my threads. Thousands of them. Guess you're wrong again when you posted nobody but me posts in my threads. And where were you when you posted that, in one of my threads of course; dummy.

T


OH PICK ME!!!! PICK ME!!!!!


We come here to laugh at you every day, Ted.

We're only responding to you bumping all your threads which show a hilarious timeline of all the things you thought were true but turned out to be lies. All of your failures. You're the only one adding anything new to your threads and keeping them alive. Nobody would pull them up from the 12th page where they belong if you didn't do it every other day.

These threads are a timeline of your failure of a life, because THIS is all you are. Politics is all you are. The Democratic Party is all you are.

And your Party is Dead, and your time is almost up as well.

It's really sad how you choose to use what is left of it.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Wednesday, April 30, 2025 10:32 AM

THG


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Quote:
Originally posted by THGRRI:

If you meet the requirements ( slightly to the right, middle and liberal ) and you have an interest in starting a discussion say so.




Comrade signym, check it out. Thousands of posts by Jack and SECOND in one of my threads. Thousands of them. Guess you're wrong again when you posted nobody but me posts in my threads. And where were you when you posted that, in one of my threads of course; dummy.

T


OH PICK ME!!!! PICK ME!!!!!


We come here to laugh at you every day, Ted.

We're only responding to you bumping all your threads which show a hilarious timeline of all the things you thought were true but turned out to be lies. All of your failures. You're the only one adding anything new to your threads and keeping them alive. Nobody would pull them up from the 12th page where they belong if you didn't do it every other day.

These threads are a timeline of your failure of a life, because THIS is all you are. Politics is all you are. The Democratic Party is all you are.

And your Party is Dead, and your time is almost up as well.

It's really sad how you choose to use what is left of it.




I’m independent Gilligan. It means I don’t blindly follow any political party. I’ve told you this many times. Yet you still cannot grasp the concept of someone being their own person. Not just another follower. You are MAGA. This means you are a follower. And, influenced by stories created by others who avoid the truth.

The trillions lost in the stock market crash is just the beginning. It is MAGA that’s dying. It is destroying itself. Which is why the whole world is laughing at Trumps’ intellect, well, lack thereof.

And Gilligan, there is something else that I am. I am a truth teller. As you post bullshit, conspiracy theories and lies because you hate, I post the truth.

OH yeah, as for me posting in threads I’ve created, don’t you? I've been to a few of your threads over the years. I'm pretty sure I've seen you posting there. You're a funny guy Gilligan.

T

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Wednesday, April 30, 2025 2:12 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Quote:
Originally posted by THGRRI:

If you meet the requirements ( slightly to the right, middle and liberal ) and you have an interest in starting a discussion say so.




Comrade signym, check it out. Thousands of posts by Jack and SECOND in one of my threads. Thousands of them. Guess you're wrong again when you posted nobody but me posts in my threads. And where were you when you posted that, in one of my threads of course; dummy.

T


OH PICK ME!!!! PICK ME!!!!!


We come here to laugh at you every day, Ted.

We're only responding to you bumping all your threads which show a hilarious timeline of all the things you thought were true but turned out to be lies. All of your failures. You're the only one adding anything new to your threads and keeping them alive. Nobody would pull them up from the 12th page where they belong if you didn't do it every other day.

These threads are a timeline of your failure of a life, because THIS is all you are. Politics is all you are. The Democratic Party is all you are.

And your Party is Dead, and your time is almost up as well.

It's really sad how you choose to use what is left of it.




I’m independent Gilligan. It means I don’t blindly follow any political party. I’ve told you this many times.


And it's been a lie every time you've made that claim.

You don't have any thoughts of your own. You speak in headlines and political cartoons.

You are 100% Democrat through and through and you are the stupidest person I have ever known.

And your bit about being a "truth teller" is beyond hilarious. Everything you ever posted here turns out not to be true in retrospect. You should stop cataloging all of your failures to figure out when you're being lied to in all these threads.

Your dead party is all the evidence anyone needs to see this.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Wednesday, April 30, 2025 3:30 PM

THG


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Quote:
Originally posted by THGRRI:

If you meet the requirements ( slightly to the right, middle and liberal ) and you have an interest in starting a discussion say so.




Comrade signym, check it out. Thousands of posts by Jack and SECOND in one of my threads. Thousands of them. Guess you're wrong again when you posted nobody but me posts in my threads. And where were you when you posted that, in one of my threads of course; dummy.

T


OH PICK ME!!!! PICK ME!!!!!


We come here to laugh at you every day, Ted.

We're only responding to you bumping all your threads which show a hilarious timeline of all the things you thought were true but turned out to be lies. All of your failures. You're the only one adding anything new to your threads and keeping them alive. Nobody would pull them up from the 12th page where they belong if you didn't do it every other day.

These threads are a timeline of your failure of a life, because THIS is all you are. Politics is all you are. The Democratic Party is all you are.

And your Party is Dead, and your time is almost up as well.

It's really sad how you choose to use what is left of it.




I’m independent Gilligan. It means I don’t blindly follow any political party. I’ve told you this many times. Yet you still cannot grasp the concept of someone being their own person. Not just another follower. You are MAGA. This means you are a follower. And, influenced by stories created by others who avoid the truth.

The trillions lost in the stock market crash is just the beginning. It is MAGA that’s dying. It is destroying itself. Which is why the whole world is laughing at Trumps’ intellect, well, lack thereof.

And Gilligan, there is something else that I am. I am a truth teller. As you post bullshit, conspiracy theories and lies because you hate, I post the truth.

OH yeah, as for me posting in threads I’ve created, don’t you? I've been to a few of your threads over the years. I'm pretty sure I've seen you posting there. You're a funny guy Gilligan.
T




And it's been a lie every time you've made that claim.

You don't have any thoughts of your own. You speak in headlines and political cartoons.

You are 100% Democrat through and through and you are the stupidest person I have ever known.

And your bit about being a "truth teller" is beyond hilarious. Everything you ever posted here turns out not to be true in retrospect. You should stop cataloging all of your failures to figure out when you're being lied to in all these threads.

Your dead party is all the evidence anyone needs to see this.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon



Nothing else to say

T

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Wednesday, April 30, 2025 3:57 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


So shut the fuck up for once then.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Wednesday, April 30, 2025 3:58 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


You still didn't tell us what you were doing when you went into hiding for 3 weeks after the election, Ted.

You weren't cutting yourself, were you?

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Thursday, May 8, 2025 11:45 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Forced Amnesia

By Fintan O’Toole

The metamorphosis of J. D. Vance from economic realist to champion of Trump’s grievance-fueled politics reveals how little Democrats have done to connect with working-class Americans.

May 29, 2025 issue

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2025/05/29/forced-amnesia-fintan-otoo
le/

In Hillbilly Elegy, his best-selling 2016 memoir of “a family and a culture in crisis,” J.D. Vance, now vice-president of the United States, gives an evocative account of the relationship between his hometown and the heroic age of American industrial capitalism.1 The beating heart of Middletown, Ohio, was its steel plant, then called Armco. Vance encapsulates the self-respect and sense of purpose that came from working there:

My grandfather loved the company and knew every make and model of car built from Armco steel. Even after most American car companies transitioned away from steel-bodied cars, Papaw would stop at used-car dealerships whenever he saw an old Ford or Chevy. “Armco made this steel,” he’d tell me. It was one of the few times that he ever betrayed a sense of genuine pride.

Yet the Vance of Hillbilly Elegy, coming to consciousness toward the end of the twentieth century, knows very well that the world of Papaw’s pride is gone. Indeed, Papaw himself knows it. He has no interest in seeing his grandson follow him into the steel plant:

“Your generation will make its living with their minds, not their hands,” he once told me. The only acceptable career at Armco was as an engineer, not as a laborer in the weld shop. A lot of other Middletown parents and grandparents must have felt similarly: To them, the American Dream required forward momentum. Manual labor was honorable work, but it was their generation’s work—we had to do something different. To move up was to move on.

What both Vance and his grandfather understood back then was the ruthlessly dynamic nature of capitalism. Vance was born into Ronald Reagan’s America, when neoliberalism—the belief that market forces must be liberated from regulation, high taxes, overactive government, and any real sense of social obligation—was reshaping the “commonsense” understanding of the economy and society. In the 1980s this ideology was pulling off the great trick of credibly presenting itself as a set not of ideas or value judgments but of undeniable facts that everyone had to accept. As Gary Gerstle writes in The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order (2022), “A key attribute of a political order is the ability of its ideologically dominant party to bend the opposition party to its will.” Neoliberalism became a political order in exactly that sense. Both Republicans and Democrats effectively told the industrial working class that its life of manual labor was over. Market forces had to be obeyed, and what they demanded was precisely what Papaw told J.D.: America had to do something different.

Papaw’s wisdom is most potently dramatized in a pivotal scene in the 1998 movie Primary Colors. The film, based on Joe Klein’s roman à clef, is a thinly disguised account of Bill Clinton’s dramatic campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1992. John Travolta’s Jack Stanton is an obvious proxy for Clinton in his Comeback Kid phase, when he overcame lurid revelations about his sexual promiscuity to open a path to the presidency.

The critical moment in the movie comes when the embattled Stanton addresses a meeting of workers in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. It is based on a speech Clinton gave in the city in February 1992, but in the movie the location is the cavernous shop floor of a factory that has already closed. As Travolta speaks, the camera cuts away frequently to men in hard hats and women with hard faces, most of them white—anxious representatives of the declining American working class. The candidate lays on his good old boy southern charm. But then he becomes deeply serious:

I’m gonna do something really outrageous. I’m gonna tell the truth…. No politician can reopen this factory or bring back the shipyard jobs or make your union strong again. No politician can make it be the way it used to be, because we’re living in a new world now, a world without economic borders…. And in that world muscle jobs go where muscle labor is cheap—and that is not here. So if you wanna compete, you’re gonna have to exercise a different set of muscles—the one between your ears.

The workers are really listening to him now, precisely because he’s not just another politician telling them what he thinks they want to hear. He delivers both a warning and a promise:

Now this whole country’s gonna have to go back to school…. And I will make you this deal: I will work hard for you. I will wake up every morning thinking about you. I will fight and sweat and bleed to get the money to make education a lifetime thing in this country, to give you the support you need to move up. But you have got to do the heavy lifting your own selves.

The proletarians cheer Stanton to the very rafters of their hollowed-out industrial space.

The idea of “moving up” echoes from Primary Colors to Hillbilly Elegy. It is the program for those who toiled in Portsmouth’s shipyard and Middletown’s steelworks. But as Vance voices the message through Papaw, in order to move up, these communities must first move on. Moving on means getting over it—“it” being history, identity, belonging. It means swallowing their pride. What industrial workers have to get over is not just the sense of self-esteem that comes from looking at a great ship or a handsome car and knowing that you had a hand in making it. It is also faith in America’s innate superiority, both industrial and military, over the rest of the world.

In 1989—around the time that Donald Trump was railing against Japan for “taking advantage of the United States”—Middletown’s steel company was partially acquired by the Japanese industrial conglomerate Kawasaki and would soon be renamed Armco Kawasaki. As Vance records in Hillbilly Elegy, “Kawasaki was a Japanese company, and in a town full of World War II vets and their families, you’d have thought that General Tojo himself had decided to set up shop in southwest Ohio when the merger was announced.” In order to survive in the America Reagan had made, the workers of Middletown had to forget Pearl Harbor and Iwo Jima and Okinawa.

It is striking that 1989 was also the year that Francis Fukuyama published, in the neoconservative journal The National Interest, one of the defining political essays of the period, entitled “The End of History?” He postulated:

What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.

The end of history was not an abstract academic concept. It was happening in Middletown. And the Vance of Hillbilly Elegy is OK with it. He dismisses the anti-Japanese sentiment in the city as “mostly a bunch of noise.” He and Papaw are equally realistic about the necessity of adapting to the relentless “forward momentum” of capital:

The Kawasaki merger represented an inconvenient truth: Manufacturing in America was a tough business in the post-globalization world. If companies like Armco were going to survive, they would have to retool. Kawasaki gave Armco a chance, and Middletown’s flagship company probably would not have survived without it.

In Vance’s telling the industrial working class realizes that economic nationalism is a temptation it must resist. Globalization is an established fact. If the money and the technology are coming from a country that many of Middletown’s older residents fought a war against, such is life. Papaw, who used to threaten to disown his children if they bought a Japanese car, shrugs and says, “The Japanese are our friends now.” He presumably ignores the “bunch of noise” that came from the TV, where Trump, contemplating a run for the presidency in 1988, told Oprah Winfrey that the Japanese “think the United States is made up of a bunch of fools. They’re laughing at us.”

Here are not just two different stories but two conflicting ways of understanding American capitalism, rooted in sharply divergent conceptions of history. In the Vance version, time moves in a straight line: both the glory days of all-American steel and the bitter conflict with Japan are over. Move up and move on—if the Japanese know how to run industries more profitably, it is best to embrace their investment and learn from their know-how. Wallowing in a warm bath of past American greatness is a luxury neither workers nor bosses can afford.

In the Trump version, history is circular. The default condition of American capitalism is global superiority—if it has been lost, it can be restored by sheer political will. As the historian Jennifer M. Miller summarizes Trump’s position in an illuminating essay on his obsession with Japan:

If Japanese businesses were booming while American ones were declining, this was not because they designed superior products or because their workers had better education and training. The fault lay squarely with incompetent leadership; Japan’s success only could come from gaming the system. Rather than long-term investments in American education or a focus on growing economic inequality, the United States needed assertive leaders, who could confront Japan, return it to its “natural” place as the junior economic partner, and thus lead the United States to an economic revival.2

Neither of these stories has much to say about inequality, exploitation, or the rapacity that drives environmental destruction and climate breakdown. The Vance of 2016 could write affectingly about the symptoms of these diseases—poverty, drug dependency, alienation—but was no more interested than Trump was in their structural economic causes. Neither man presented any real critique of the Reaganite neoliberal revolution of the 1980s. Yet their visions of the nature of American capitalism itself were radically distinct.

Vance’s was orthodox conservatism: market forces are inexorable, and the wise course is to adapt to them as best one can. The burden of this adaptation must be borne by workers themselves. Just as Stanton/Clinton tells the proletarians that they must do the heavy lifting, Vance concludes in Hillbilly Elegy that the denizens of the Appalachian Rust Belt need to “stop blaming Obama or Bush or faceless companies and ask ourselves what we can do to make things better.” Government is impotent and essentially irrelevant: “No politician can make it be the way it used to be.”

For Trump, on the other hand, everything was political. The Rust Belt could be resurrected, and the time could return when men like Papaw might look through the skin of a Ford or a Chevy and see the solid skeleton of Middletown steel inside—but only if America had a leader mighty enough to bring the Japanese and all the other foreigners to heel. What was not yet expressly articulated in this early Trump messaging was that while no democratic politician could return things to the way they used to be, an uninhibited strongman could do so by forcing foreigners to obey the natural law of American supremacy.

There was no doubt about which of these ways of thinking appealed most to the very rich—and it was not Trump’s. Depoliticizing economics in the way the Clinton character does in Primary Colors and Vance does in Hillbilly Elegy was a recipe for the accumulation of vast wealth by a tiny minority of Americans. If government is powerless to control the operation of market forces, its real job is to get out of their way. Most of the fruits of the new economy would naturally appear at the top of the tree.

Adjusted for inflation, the wealth held by families in the United States almost quadrupled between 1989 and 2022, but the share of it held by the bottom half of the population remained static at just 6 percent. Last year alone the nineteen richest households added $1 trillion to their accumulated assets, and the top 0.00001 percent now control a larger share of America’s wealth than ever before. The story Vance told in 2016 was a very good one for the richest Americans: it suited their purposes that the Middletown folk should understand capitalism as essentially impersonal and apolitical and accept that the best they could do was to “make things better” for themselves without blaming either government or “faceless companies” for their struggles.

Now, however, the vice-president has ditched, along with most of his other political positions, his moral tale of realistic adaptation to the relentless change inherent in capitalism. It has been replaced by the president’s fable of a politically driven restoration of the past. Trump’s economic agenda is doubly recursive: it repeats almost exactly his messaging from the 1980s, which in turn imagines a recovery of the heroic age of American industrial might. The end of history has ended. Trump has built an imaginary time machine in which “the way it used to be” is also the way it must and will be. And in this radical revision of the ideology of American capitalism, Fukuyama’s “universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government” is not merely obsolete; it must be confronted. Universalism, liberalism, and democracy are the enemies of American exceptionalism, of national greatness, and above all of the triumph of the will that must be embodied in the leader who declares, “I alone can fix it.”

As it happens, this replacement of one hegemonic idea with another is now playing out in a particularly ironic way in Middletown itself. In Hillbilly Elegy the steel plant is saved because Kawasaki comes in to “retool” its machinery. But more recently another kind of retooling was envisaged. Cleveland-Cliffs, the company that owns the plant now, declares on its website an intention to shift “away from manufacturing commodity steel in favor of higher-margin, specialty products.” To this end the Biden administration had allotted a $500 million grant to help the Middletown plant upgrade its aging blast furnaces, powered by coal, to ones fueled by hydrogen and electricity. But according to CNN the Trump–Vance administration—under the influence of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency—intends to ax that grant.

This is OK because adaptation to economic change is out and political will is in. The future does not have to be planned for or funded because the past is returning. The Middletown plant does not need to shift to the production of high-value sustainable steel because Trump will use tariffs to ensure that it does not have to compete with cutting-edge global companies. King Coal will reign again, and the good old dirty jobs will be filled by men doing men’s work, all thanks to the great leader who made the foreigners bend the knee.

Leaving aside for the moment the viability of this new way of imagining American capitalism, we must ask why most of the oligarchy thought, when it swung behind Trump’s bid for reelection in 2024, that it could do without the old ideological model. The myth of a depoliticized and impersonal economy, in which essentially the same assumptions would apply whether the president was a Clinton or a Bush, served the superrich extremely well. Not only was wealth redistributed upward, but new forms of lucrative exploitation—the appropriation on a staggering scale of personal data for private profit—were allowed to flourish virtually unimpeded. Information technology, too, was construed as an unstoppable force to which everyone would have to adapt.

The problem for the very rich, however, is that as a political project neoliberalism hit the buffers in 2008. The great banking collapse exposed the idea that market forces operate outside politics as a convenient and no longer credible fiction. It became unavoidably obvious that the system of finance capitalism that replaced the old industrial complex is entirely dependent on public institutions. The moral basis for neoliberalism’s radically unequal distribution of the spoils of the new globalized economy had been a sense of rough justice: those who took the risks deserved the rewards. Yet it turned out that these were not the rules after all—the risks were socialized, but the rewards were privatized. For the rich, the bet had always been “heads I win, tails you lose.”

It also became obvious that “moving up,” the working class’s recompense for “moving on,” was not so easy. Both Vance’s Papaw and Clinton/Stanton had pledged that muscle jobs would be replaced by brain jobs. This was not just a political proposition; it was what most manual workers wanted for their children. But for far too many families it was a false promise. Democratic and Republican administrations did invest in training schemes, and many workers were indeed enabled to transition to new kinds of work. Overall, though, the social mobility that was supposed to be boosted in fact diminished. Ninety percent of the children of the New Deal order—those born in 1940—went on to earn more than their parents did. But the children of the neoliberal order—those born in 1980—had a fifty-fifty chance of earning less than their parents. Instead of receiving the lifelong reeducation that working families were promised, many of them were excluded by ever-rising college fees or cheated by scams like Trump University.

Yet as Gary Gerstle puts it, “A reigning political order does not release its grip easily…. Its decline is marked by contradiction, contestation, and even chaos.” During Trump’s first term those forces were at play almost as much within the regime as in American society as a whole. The old ideological order was still represented by figures like Trump’s chief economic adviser Gary Cohn, who came from one of the great temples of neoliberal globalization, Goldman Sachs. Tax cuts for the rich and deregulation for businesses sustained a Reaganite economic agenda. But that old order could not fully impose itself—Cohn resigned in March 2018 when Trump moved to impose tariffs on foreign steel. Neither, however, could Trump himself, with his freedom of action limited by the Covid-19 pandemic, quite follow his own impulses. In the contest of economic ideologies, the result of Trump’s first term was inconclusive.

Where Trump had nonetheless succeeded, though, was in creating a mass base for an idea of capitalism that is entirely at odds with the neoliberal imagination. Against the insistence that no politician could reopen a Rust Belt factory, he established the notion that this was true only of the weak and foolish leaders that democracy had foisted on the American people. And against the image of inhuman market forces, anonymous as the weather, he made capitalism personal again.

Under neoliberalism, industrial workers had been told they must learn not to take capitalism personally. Successful adaptation required self-suppression. One must not allow oneself to feel humiliated when the vanquished of World War II turn up as the co-owners of the steel plant. One must relinquish the pride of having one’s own labor infused in powerful and beautiful machines. One must forget the generations of struggle embodied in the local histories of labor unions. One must, indeed, disremember the whole New Deal order and its transformative benefits for working people, their families, and their communities. Market forces cannot accommodate those emotions. This is tough, but it’s nothing personal.

Trump, however, personifies American capitalism. He performed in fourteen seasons of The Apprentice as a figure deeply embedded in its mindset—the magnate, the mogul, the tycoon, the titan of commerce. His act was, of course, more impersonation than personification. But this made it all the more effective: for mass consumption, an invented and exaggerated character sends a clearer signal than a real person.

No less importantly, Trump allows his fans to take possession (albeit in phony forms) of all the feelings that they were not supposed to express or indulge while their world was being taken from them. He presses hard on the raw nerve that Vance was so careful to avoid in Hillbilly Elegy: exploitation. In the neoliberal order, it was the vice that dared not speak its name. In his economic discourse, Trump speaks no other language.

But he also displaces exploitation from economic reality—instead of labor being taken advantage of by capital, America as a whole is continually abused and despoiled by foreign countries that laugh at the weakness of its leaders. Instead of moving on, as the steelworkers of Middletown had to do when they accepted their former Japanese enemies as saviors, there can be endless return to grievance, humiliation, and outrage. In place of forced amnesia, Trump offers a seductive dream time in which American history is sanitized into nostalgia. (The dark sides of the pre-Reagan industrial past are either suppressed—in the case of racism—or, in the case of its organized sexism, effectively celebrated as a golden age of manliness.)

For the superrich, this personalization of capitalism has two superficial upsides. One is that it seems to provide some kind of answer to the knotty question of what comes after the fall of the neoliberal order. The working class can be given the political agency it was previously denied; its pent-up emotions are unleashed and turned against all those who insist on a regulated and redistributive form of capitalism. The other is that it appears much easier to deal with political power when the complexity of democracy is reduced to a single individual.

These delusions are possible only because so many of the rich believe their own propaganda. As Gerstle puts it, “Cultivating ‘entrepreneurs’ of the self has long been a cardinal feature of the neoliberal order, and it shows no sign of waning” in the continuing half-life of that era. The tech oligarchs who facilitated Trump’s second coming know very well that he is a fake tycoon. But they can see and admire his astounding abilities as an entrepreneur of the self. He is not just an exploiter of social media technologies—he is one of the great exemplars of their governing ethic of endless self-invention.

The built-in flaw of this cult of the self-made man is that it leads those who have created vast fortunes to believe that they did it all themselves. They are subject to the same amnesia that neoliberalism demanded of the working class. They lose touch with all the things that made liberal democracy so essential to the development of capitalism: the rule of law; the relative stability that comes from allowing different sections of society to feel they have a share of power; public investment in education, health care, and science; the creation and maintenance of physical and digital infrastructures; predictable government informed by an expert bureaucracy. They build their own rockets and go into orbit far above the social and political conditions that have made their wealth possible.

In ditching democracy for autocracy, they also underestimated the autocrat. If you’ve created a trillion-dollar business, you might naturally think of Trump the serial bankrupt as merely a cartoon capitalist. You can recognize, and bow down to, Trump’s political genius while imagining that it is merely an exercise in branding, a big Trump sign placed over the door of a tower that’s actually owned by you and your confreres. Since everything else about Trump is an act, you can assume that he doesn’t really believe that he alone can will into existence a radically reshaped American capitalism. Surely he does not imagine that a single crude weapon—a blunderbuss of tariffs on all imports—will undo the effects of decades of economic globalization?

But he does. He has been absolutely consistent over nearly five decades in his conviction that American capitalism is an ideal system that will work perfectly once there is a leader strong enough to stop foreigners from rigging it. That leader, of course, is his indispensable self. America’s destiny will unfold from his instincts and impulses, so long as they are unchecked by democratic processes or the petty rationalism of evidence-based decision-making.

If capitalism is to be made personal, it would be a good idea to begin by understanding the person who is going to embody it. There is a reason Western capitalism ditched absolute monarchy: personal rule is rule by whim, prejudice, grudge, and tantrum. There are always opportunists who make money from chaos, and they will batten on the spoils of Trump’s bedlam. But capitalism as a system abhors uncertainty. Its beneficiaries are now ruefully remembering, far too late, that science, intellectual freedom, international cooperation, and social stability create wealth—and that giving untrammeled power to an autocrat bent on obliterating all of those things is a very efficient way to squander it.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, May 16, 2025 1:41 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


An Autopsy Report on Biden’s In-Office Decline

“Five people were running the country,” a political insider told the authors of the new book Original Sin. “And Joe Biden was at best a senior member of the board.”

By Tyler Austin Harper | May 16, 2025, 6 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2025/05/biden-original-sin-d
ecline/682818/

Halfway through King Lear, storm clouds gather, and Shakespeare’s protagonist rages, “You see me here, you gods, a poor old man, / As full of grief as age; wretched in both.” And so, the mental unraveling of one of literature’s greatest characters begins. That Lear starts to lose his mind in this moment, in Act II, is important: If he were mad from the jump, the cause of his eventual downfall would be medical, not moral, and the king would bear no responsibility for the catastrophe that greets his kingdom. Precisely because the aging ruler is of sound mind in Act I, during which he sets into motion the events that threaten his sanity and his life, the blame is his to bear in Act V, when he has lost both.

Last year, the United States went through a presidential election filled with Shakespearean echoes. As Joe Biden tottered and fell (literally as well as metaphorically), more than a few pundits compared him to Lear, a man who was ruined by age, pride, and the flattery of sycophants. That analogy is picked up by Original Sin, the latest and most significant book to date about Biden’s cognitive decline, which was written by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’s Alex Thompson and draws on hundreds of interviews. It features an epigraph from Lear, and its first chapter gives airing to the view that, like Lear, Biden bears responsibility for his country’s fate. Quoting a senior adviser to Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, the title of that chapter is simply: “He Totally Fucked Us.”

Tapper and Thompson’s exposé joins a growing list of post-election appraisals blaming Biden for Harris’s loss. (I wrote one of these myself.) Yet the curious thing about the experience of reading Original Sin is that one comes away unable to lay the blame, or the majority of it anyway, at the feet of Scranton Joe. Here, the Lear analogy falls apart.

Original Sin suggests that, unlike Lear, who begins his rule flawed but with his mind intact, Biden may have been losing his grip before he took his oath of office. If this is true, Americans unwittingly voted for and were then led by a president who was not up to the job, a state of affairs that certain among the Biden faithful seemed committed to concealing. Tapper and Thompson studiously avoid saying this outright; to their credit, they do little editorializing. The book is written not unlike an autopsy report, describing a gruesome political car crash in dispassionate, clinical detail. The American people, however, must confront the possibility that the book raises: that we may not have had a president capable of discharging the office since Barack Obama left the White House, in 2017.

One might debate whether the former president can be held fully responsible for his disastrous reelection bid given his seemingly shaky mental acuity (which he continues to deny, saying that reports of his decline in office are “wrong”; Original Sin does not include his responses to any of the book’s allegations). Biden’s claims that he would have won a rematch with Donald Trump—which he reiterated in an appearance on The View last week—suggest that he is not fully tethered to political reality. But Original Sin leaves little doubt that his enablers, at least, understood what they were doing. (Former first lady Jill Biden denies this as well. She said on The View that her husband was “a great president”; though she did not mention Original Sin by name, she said, “The people who wrote those books were not in the White House with us.”)

In an author’s note, Tapper and Thompson offer a forewarning: “Readers who are convinced that Joe Biden was little more than a husk from the very beginning of his presidency, barely capable of stringing two sentences together, will not find support for that view here.” But rejecting the most extreme claims made about Biden’s acuity hardly puts to rest the question of whether he should have run in 2020. And the idea that Biden was fully capable of doing the job when he first took office is quite hard to square with the 300-odd pages of meticulous reporting that follow.

It is of course literally true that Biden could string two sentences together at the start of his presidency (and can now). But Original Sin makes clear that even before he launched his first campaign against Trump, Biden was struggling. The authors write, “Those close to him say that the first signs he was deteriorating emerged after the death of his beloved son Beau in 2015”—a decade ago. Tapper and Thompson point to recordings from 2017 of Biden speaking with Mark Zwonitzer, the ghostwriter of his memoir. These tapes, which came to light six years later as part of Special Counsel Robert Hur’s 2023 investigation into Biden’s inappropriate handling of classified information, suggested that the president had lost a mental step, or several. “He grasped to remember things, he sometimes had difficulty speaking, and he frequently lost his train of thought,” the authors write, describing the recordings and the special counsel’s sense of them. “Biden was really struggling in 2017,” Tapper and Thompson write, adding, “His cognitive capacity seemed to have been failing him.”

Three years later, on the presidential campaign trail, Biden’s struggles became more obvious to those around him. Tapper and Thompson report that, in 2020, members of Biden’s inner circle gave the candidate a teleprompter with scripted questions for a local-news interview. It was an apparent effort to work around his dwindling communicative and cognitive abilities: Aides lamented that even then, “they couldn’t rely on him to stay on message, and he often had a very short attention span.” The book’s most astounding previously unreported story from Biden’s 2020 campaign concerns his staff’s attempts to create videos of the candidate speaking with voters over Zoom. Tapper and Thompson’s description of this is worth quoting at length:
Quote:
Biden would sit in a room with several monitors beaming the face of real Americans in front of him so that they could discuss issues of importance.

The videos came back, hours of footage. Some on the team couldn’t believe their eyes.

“The videos were horrible,” one top Democrat said. “He couldn’t follow the conversation at all.”

“I couldn’t believe it,” said a second Democrat, who hadn’t seen Biden in a few years. “It was like a different person. It was incredible. This was like watching Grandpa who shouldn’t be driving.”

A special team was brought in and told to edit the videos down to make them airable, if only a few minutes worth. They had to get creative.
The authors go on to write, “Edited, the videos likely appeared fine to viewers, Biden no worse than any other senior on Zoom. But two of the Democrats who were involved in the films’ production together were dumbfounded. ‘I didn’t think he could be president,’ the second Democrat said. After what they’d seen, they couldn’t understand how Biden could be capable of doing the job.” (Two other top Democrats blamed the lousy footage on the awkwardness of Zoom.)

The idea that this same man, only a short time later, was able to reliably prosecute the duties of the position to which he was elected is hard to believe. Indeed, some incidents cataloged in Original Sin suggest that Biden may have been struggling to do the job even early in his term. Cabinet meetings were “terrible and at times uncomfortable,” one Cabinet secretary told the authors. “And they were from the beginning.” Biden relied on note cards and canned responses. (Some Biden aides told Tapper and Thompson that Cabinet meetings are stilted in every administration, and that Biden was more engaged in smaller meetings.)

In his term’s first year, the authors write in the book, the president met with the House Democratic Caucus, ostensibly to ask its members to vote for a $1.2 trillion infrastructure package. But after delivering prolix remarks that one congressperson characterized as “incomprehensible,” Biden did not make the ask—which many of the politicians present thought was a strategic decision. Later that month, then–House Speaker Nancy Pelosi asked him to address the caucus once more, hoping that this time he would push for the package. Yet again, Biden dithered and prattled. And yet again, a Democratic congressperson told Tapper and Thompson, Biden’s address was “meandering and incoherent.” Biden did finish with a strong demand: “That’s all I gotta say … let’s get this done.” The only problem? The assembled politicians weren’t sure what exactly the president wanted done because he had, once more, neglected to ask them to do anything. According to Tapper and Thompson, Pelosi believed that this was another strategic omission on Biden’s part. A different member of the Democratic leadership told Tapper and Thompson that it might have been a memory lapse: “We wondered: Did he forget to make the ask, or is this just him being a super-safe politician? Between his stutter and aging, we were never quite clear on what, exactly, was going on.” The next year, he did seem to have trouble with his memory; in 2022, according to one witness, Biden found himself unable to remember the name of his own national security adviser, Jake Sullivan—“Steve,” he called him at least twice—or his communications director, Kate Bedingfield, whom he once resorted to calling “Press.”

Biden’s limitations were also clear during a rambling interview with Special Counsel Hur in October 2023. It took place during the two days after Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, which means that when Biden was ostensibly in charge of directing American foreign policy during a moment of profound geopolitical tension, the president was incapable of sitting through an interview without forgetting words and dates and going on rambling tangents. Rather than reacting with alarm to this fact, the White House mounted a pressure campaign against Attorney General Merrick Garland. As first reported by Politico, Biden insiders were furious that Garland hadn’t edited Hur’s observations about the president’s shoddy memory out of the classified-documents report, and most of Biden’s senior advisers reportedly believed that Garland would not continue in his role as AG during the president’s hypothetical second term.

One Biden campaign consultant referred to in the book, who was conducting focus groups around this time, found that voters were concerned that Biden’s apparent decline would put the country at risk: “Many of them were worried,” Tapper and Thompson write. “What if an international crisis unfolded in the middle of the night?” These voters were not the only ones having these morbid thoughts. “The presidency requires someone who can perform at 2:00am during an emergency,” Tapper and Thompson write. “Cabinet secretaries in his own administration told us that by 2024, he could not be relied upon for this.”

As some high-ranking Democrats quoted anonymously in the book put it to Tapper and Thompson after Biden’s disastrous debate with Trump last June: “Just who the hell is running the country?” At least one unnamed source close to the Biden administration was willing to provide the authors with an answer. “Five people were running the country,” this insider said, seemingly referring to the president’s closest advisers. “And Joe Biden was at best a senior member of the board.”

Near the end of their book, Tapper and Thompson offer a glimpse into how powerful Democrats responded to the grim spectacle of Biden’s early-summer face-off with Trump. The authors describe a scene at the home of James Costos, an ambassador to Spain under Obama, where celebrities and politicians gathered to watch the debate. As a doddering Biden tanked onstage in front of some 50 million Americans, the film director and Democratic donor Rob Reiner became scared, then furious. “We’re going to lose our fucking democracy because of you!” he screamed, seeming to direct his ire at the closest thing to a Biden official in the room: Second gentleman Doug Emhoff.

What Reiner apparently failed to consider, but what Original Sin prompts readers to ask, is whether America’s democracy was already meaningfully diminished. Describing how some in Biden world justified propping him up for reelection in 2024, a longtime aide told Tapper and Thompson: “He just had to win, and then he could disappear for four years—he’d only have to show proof of life every once in a while.” In other words, before Biden stepped down from the race, the plan for some aides seemed to be to Weekend at Bernie’s a cognitively impaired president in the hopes that, upon winning a second term, he could be hidden from the public while unelected staff took care of the real business of governing. “When you vote for somebody, you are voting for the people around them too,” this aide offered as a way of justifying what was, by any reasonable metric, an effort to undermine democracy and defraud the American people.

The members of Biden’s staff weren’t the only ones comfortable with abandoning democratic norms. The former president enjoyed the support of the Democratic Party, which at his behest blew up the old primary schedule, putting South Carolina in the first slot. The ostensible justification was anti-racism and elevating voters of color in a heavily Black state. According to Tapper and Thompson, aides at both the White House and the Democratic National Committee admitted that “the main motivation was helping Joe Biden, not uplifting Black voters.” South Carolina was a strong state for Biden, and the thinking seemed to be that a steady performance there might put primary challengers to bed early. In other words, the DNC appeared to try its level best to tip the process in favor of reelecting a man who a majority of the public thought could not do the job.

“Think’st thou that duty shall have dread to speak,” asks Kent in King Lear, “When power to flattery bows?” The nobleman is one of the only characters in Shakespeare’s play who gives the king honest advice, and who warns Lear that the course of action he has chosen is dictated by pride, the result of following those who tell him what he wants—not needs—to hear.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of Original Sin is how few Kents populate its pages. Dozens of people in Biden’s orbit suspected that he was not physically or mentally equipped to be the president of the United States, yet they helped him seek that office and keep it when he couldn’t reliably perform its duties. These people then sought to return Biden to that office for four more years, even if that meant the country would most likely have been quietly run by unelected aides. In a rational world, Congress would hold bipartisan hearings about how this happened and whether and to what extent Biden’s aides hid the truth from the public. Then again, in a rational world, neither Joe Biden nor Donald Trump—who has spent his first months back in office intentionally dismantling core institutions, flouting the law, and threatening the Constitution—would have been elected president in the first place.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Sunday, May 18, 2025 8:45 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Deindustrialization: Causes and Consequences
It’s not mostly about globalization, and it’s not what ails workers

By Paul Krugman | May 18, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/deindustrialization-causes-and-cons
equences

A few months before the 1992 election, I, along with some other Democratic-leaning economists, flew to Little Rock to meet with Governor and presidential candidate Bill Clinton. The ostensible purpose was to discuss policy, but it was obviously also an audition for a job in the administration. At one point, Clinton asked what could be done to restore manufacturing to its previous share of employment.

Heads turned to me; this was clearly my department. I said something like this: “Sorry, governor, but that’s really not feasible. Even if we could eliminate the trade deficit, manufacturing employment would only rise modestly and would still be a much smaller share of the economy than in the past.”

Needless to say, I didn’t get a job. It was one of the best things that has ever happened to me.

The inconvenient fact is that economy changes over time, and so do the industries in which people work. A century and a half ago, despite the growth of manufacturing, America was still largely a nation of farmers. Today, hardly any of us work on the land:

Source: Census, BLS

Oh, and many, possibly a majority of farm workers are foreign-born, and many of them undocumented.

Although some politicians still portray rural areas and small towns as the “real America,” you don’t hear a lot of nostalgia for the days when agriculture dominated American employment. (If you ask me, Queens, New York comes a lot closer to being who we are now.)

There is, however, a lot of nostalgia for the 1950s and 1960s, when more than a quarter of U.S. workers were employed in manufacturing. Income inequality was much lower in that era, so much so that many blue-collar workers considered themselves middle-class. And there’s a widespread narrative that (a) attributes those good times for American workers to the availability of well-paid jobs in manufacturing (b) attributes the relative decline of American manufacturing to overseas outsourcing and trade deficits.

But is this narrative right? Yes, it’s a simple, compelling story. But as I tried to explain to Clinton all those years ago, the math behind the story doesn’t work. To preview the conclusions: Even if we could somehow eliminate our trade deficit (which Trump’s tariffs won’t do, but that’s another story), America would not reindustrialize. — our manufacturing sector would be slightly bigger, but nothing like what it used to be in the 1950s and 1960s. And any wage gains for ordinary workers would be trivial at best.

I should say that some people who have bought into the deindustrialization-through-globalization story get annoyed if you point out that it’s mostly wrong. They seem to believe that pointing out the weakness of the deindustrialization story means that you don’t care about American workers. So let me be clear: I do care, a lot, about the fate of American workers. But as I’ll explain later, trying to recreate the economy of the 1950s won’t help them.

This post will, by the way, be a somewhat wonky exercise. But it’s important to understand that policies based on misplaced nostalgia (especially those being wielded so disastrously by Donald Trump) will hurt workers, not help them.

Beyond the paywall I’ll discuss:

1. The limited (not zero) role of international trade in deindustrialization

2. The limited (again not zero) role of deindustrialization in depressing wages

3. What would actually help restore the middle-class society I grew up in

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, May 20, 2025 5:06 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


The Talented Mr. Vance

J. D. Vance could have brought the country’s conflicting strands together. Instead, he took a divisive path to the peak of power.

By George Packer | May 19, 2025, 6 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/07/jd-vance-reinvent
ion-power/682828/

J. D. Vance poses a problem, and at its core is a question about character. In the years after the 2016 election, he transformed himself from a center-right memoirist and public speaker, offering a complex analysis of America’s social ills and a sharp critique of Donald Trump, into a right-wing populist politician whose illiberal ideas and vitriolic rhetoric frequently out-Trump the original. According to Vance and his supporters, this change followed a realization during Trump’s first term that the president was lifting up the fallen working class of the heartland that had produced young J.D. To help his people, Vance had to make his peace with their champion. According to his critics, Vance cynically chose to betray his true values in order to take the only path open to an ambitious Republican in the Trump era, and as a convert under suspicion, he pursued it with a vengeance. In one account, a poor boy from the provinces makes good in the metropole, turns against his glittering benefactors, and goes home to fight for his people. In the other, the poor boy seizes every opportunity on his way up, loses his moral compass, and is ruined by his own ambition.

Both versions suggest the protagonist of a 19th-­century novel—­Pip in Dickens’s Great Expectations, Lucien in Balzac’s Lost Illusions. A novelist who set out to narrate the decline of the American empire in the 21st century might invent a protagonist like J. D. Vance. He turns up in all the key places, embodying every important theme. He’s the product of an insular subculture (the Scots-Irish of Appalachian Kentucky) and grows up amid the ills (poverty, addiction, family collapse) of a dying Ohio steel town ravaged by deindustrialization. He escapes into the Marine Corps in time for the Iraq War, and then into the dubious embrace of the cognitive meritocracy (Yale Law School, West Coast venture capital, East Coast media). At a turning point in his life and the country’s—in 2016, with the surprise success of Hillbilly Elegy and then the surprise victory of Trump—Vance becomes a celebrity, the anointed spokesman for the 40 percent of the country that comprises the white working class, which has sudden political power and cultural interest. He’s tasked with explaining the world he came from to the world he recently joined.

With his gifts of intellect and rhetoric, Vance might have brought the country’s conflicting strands together. They had combined to make him, and he knew them deeply—their flaws, their possibilities, their entwined fate. Instead, he took a path of extreme divisiveness to the peak of power, becoming a hard-line convert to the Catholic Church, post-liberal populism, and the scorched-earth cause of Donald Trump. Vance became a scourge of the elites among whom he’d found refuge, a kingpin of a new elite, avenging wrongs done to his native tribe.

At every step the reader wonders: Is our hero motivated by conviction, or is he the creature of a corrupt society? Does he deserve our admiration, our sympathy, or our contempt?

Still only 40, Vance is likelier than anyone to be the next president. (The biggest obstacle, for several reasons, is Trump himself.) His rise has been so dramatic and self-dramatized that he calls to mind those emblematic figures from history who seem both out of a storybook and all too human, such as Shoeless Joe Jackson and Huey Long. In the end, the question of Vance’s character—whether his about-face was “authentic”—is probably unanswerable. Few people are capable of conscious, persistent self-betrayal. A change that begins in opportunism can become more passionate than a lifelong belief, especially when it’s rewarded. Ventriloquize long enough and your voice alters; the mask becomes your face.

What’s more important than Vance’s motive is the meaning of the story in which he’s the protagonist. More than any other public figure of this century, including Barack Obama (to whom his career bears some similarities), and even Trump, Vance illuminates the larger subject of contemporary America’s character. In another age, his rise might have been taken as proof that the American dream was alive and mostly well. But our age has no simply inspiring and unifying tales, and each chapter of Vance’s success is part of a national failure: the abandonment of American workers under global neoliberalism; the cultural collapse of the working class; the unwinnable forever war; a dominant elite that combines ruthless competition with a rigid orthodoxy of identity; a reaction of populist authoritarianism. What seems like Vance’s tragic wrong turn, the loss of real promise, was probably inevitable—it’s hard to imagine a more hopeful plot. After all, the novel is about a society in which something has gone deeply wrong, all the isms have run dry, and neither the elites nor the people can escape blame.

The power of Vance’s story depends on the image of a hick struggling to survive and escape, then navigating the temptations and bruises of ascent. At the start of his memoir he describes himself as an ordinary person of no real accomplishment who avoided becoming a grim statistic only by the grace of his family’s love. This self-portrait shows the early appearance of Vance the politician, and it’s belied by the testimony of people who knew him. Friends from the Marine Corps and Yale described to me an avid reader, confident and well-spoken, socially adept, almost universally liked—an extraordinary young man clearly headed for big things. (Vance himself declined to be interviewed for this article.)

As an enlisted Marine, Vance worked in public affairs, which meant that he saw no combat in Iraq during some of the most violent years of the war. Instead, he acquired a sense of discipline and purpose in a fairly cloistered milieu. He was already interested in political philosophy, and on the sprawling Al-Asad air base, in Anbar province, Vance and a close friend discussed Jefferson and Lincoln, Ayn Rand, Christopher Hitchens and the “new atheists,” even Locke and Hobbes. He was also a conservative who revered John McCain and was, the close friend joked, the only one on the base who wasn’t disappointed when a mystery visitor turned out to be Dick Cheney rather than Jessica Simpson. But Vance began to have doubts about the war before he ever set foot in Iraq. In a chow hall in Kuwait, officers on their way home to the States described the pointless frustration of clearing Iraqi cities that immediately fell again to insurgents. The ghost of Vietnam had not been vanquished by the global War on Terror.

In 2003, still in his teens, J. D. Vance enlisted in the Marines and was deployed to Iraq, where he read thinkers such as Locke and Hobbes, who had influenced the American Founders.

“I left for Iraq in 2005, a young idealist committed to spreading democracy and liberalism to the backward nations of the world,” Vance wrote years later. “I returned in 2006, skeptical of the war and the ideology that underpinned it.” Whether that ideology was called neoconservatism or liberal interventionism, its failure in Iraq led in a straight line to a new ideology that was also old: “America First.” On foreign policy Vance has been pretty consistent for two decades. When, while running for a U.S. Senate seat in 2022, he remarked, “I gotta be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another,” you could hear the working-class Iraq vet taking a shot at elites who send others to bleed for abstractions and are indifferent to the human collapse of Middletown, Ohio.

“America First” wasn’t the only available response to disillusionment with Iraq. Other veterans who’d entered politics—­Dan Crenshaw, Jason Crow, Tammy Duckworth, Seth Moulton—­continued to be concerned about human suffering and the fate of democracy abroad. Nor have they abandoned liberal democracy for blood-and-soil nationalism. Vance is a politician with an unusual interest in ideas and a combative nature fed by an old wound. The combination makes him capable of going a long way down an ideological road without paying attention to the casualties around him.

Raised loosely evangelical, Vance became a libertarian atheist in his 20s—the stance of many smart, self-taught young men of the aughts in search of totalizing positions that could win mostly online arguments. “I prided myself on an ability to overwhelm the opposition with my logic,” he wrote years later. “There was an arrogance at the heart of my worldview, emotionally and intellectually.” Both Rand and Hitchens took him away from the community of his upbringing—­from a poor white culture of non-churchgoing Christians whose identification with the Republican Party had nothing to do with tax cuts. Libertarianism and atheism were respectable worldviews of the new culture that Vance badly wanted to enter.

“I became interested in secularism just as my attention turned to my separation from the Marines and my impending transition to college. I knew how the educated tended to feel about religion: at best, provincial and stupid; at worst, evil,” he would write in 2020, after his conversion to Catholicism. “Secularism may not have been a prerequisite to join the elites, but it sure made things easier.” This ability to socialize himself into new beliefs set a pattern for his career.

Vance took just two years to graduate from Ohio State, and in 2010 he was accepted by Yale Law School. Entering the Ivy League put him through what the sociologist J. M. Cuddihy called “the ordeal of civility”—repression of one’s class or ethnic background in the effort to assimilate to the ways of a dominant culture. As Vance later wrote, he had to get used to the taste of sparkling water, to learn that white wine comes in more than one variety. In an earlier time, the dominant group would have been the WASPs. In the early 21st century, it was a liberal multiethnic meritocracy for which a Yale law degree opened the way to power.

In this world, there was nothing odd about a descendant of several centuries of native-born white Christian Americans taking as his “Yale spirit guide” the daughter of Hindu immigrants from India. The route to New Haven is in some ways shorter from Andhra Pradesh than from the hills of eastern Kentucky. What counts is class, and class is largely a matter of education and credentials. Usha Chilukuri had all the right qualities to civilize Vance: raised in a stable, high-achieving family of California academics; Phi Beta Kappa at Yale College; master’s degree from Cambridge University; even-tempered, politically opaque, hyper-organized, mapping out her work and life with Vance on Post-it notes, whiteboards, and spreadsheets. When Vance’s friend from the Marines visited New Haven, Usha told them both that they’d done a good job of “course correcting” their lives. In Vance’s memoir she’s a kind of life coach, counseling him to unlearn hillbilly codes and habits—helping him talk through difficult subjects without losing his temper or withdrawing, expressing pride when he resists going after another driver who flips him off in traffic.

Hillbilly Elegy—both book and film—makes much of a scene in which Vance is so baffled by the complicated tableware at a Yale dinner with recruiters from a white-shoe law firm that he has to leave the room and call Usha for guidance. “Go from outside to inside, and don’t use the same utensil for separate dishes,” she tells him. “Oh, and use the fat spoon for soup.” The picture of a raw youth going from outside to inside with the help of his super-striver girlfriend is a little misleading. “I never got the sense that he was worse off because he hadn’t gone to Yale or Harvard, just because he was so well-spoken,” a law-school friend of Vance’s and Chilukuri’s told me. “He was intriguing to Usha, and to the rest of us too.” Being a chubby-faced working-class Marine from the Midwest might have brought cultural disadvantages, but it also conferred the buoyant charisma of a young man who made it out. Regardless of place settings, Vance quickly mastered the essential Ivy League art of networking. Classmates picked him out early on as a political leader.

Everyone who met Vance in those years seems to have been impressed. He didn’t have to put on Ivy League airs, or wave a hillbilly flag, or win sympathy by reciting the saddest chapters of his childhood. He kept stories of his abusive mother and her checked-out partners almost entirely to himself—a close friend was surprised by the dark details of his memoir—­but he didn’t cut himself off from his past. He watched Ohio State football every Saturday with another Buckeye at Yale, and he remained close to his sister, Lindsay, and to friends from his hometown and the Marine Corps.

In the early 2010s, when he began to publish short articles on David Frum’s website Frum­Forum and in National Review, they were mainly concerned with the lack of social mobility in the working class. His voice was perfectly tuned to a moderate conservatism, strengthened by his authentic origin in heartland hardship—­skeptical of government programs for the poor, but with a sense of responsibility to the place he came from. I’m making it, he said, and so can they if they get the right support. In an early essay, from 2010, he defended institutions like Yale Law School against a rising right-wing populism that saw a country “ruled by perniciously alien elites.” This burn-it-down politics was a luxury that poor people couldn’t afford. His “political hero,” according to Hillbilly Elegy, was Mitch Daniels, the centrist Republican governor of Indiana. His choice for president in 2012 was Jon Huntsman Jr., the former Utah governor and ambassador to China, who made Mitt Romney seem a bit extreme.

Vance planned to write a policy book about the problems of the white working class. But when he came under the wing of the professor Amy Chua, the author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, who fostered his relationship with Usha and recommended him for coveted jobs, she urged him to write the story of his life.

In 2017, when Vance was still a progressive darling due to his ability to explain Donald Trump’s appeal among white working-class voters, he went on Late Night With Seth Meyers to promote Hillbilly Elegy.

At the end of Hillbilly Elegy, Vance describes a recurring nightmare, going back to childhood, in which he’s pursued by a terrifying antagonist, a “monster”—in at least one dream his unstable mother. While he was at Yale she became addicted to heroin, and he later had to drive to Ohio to keep her from ending up homeless. The nightmare returned just after he graduated—­but this time the creature being chased is his dog, Casper, and the enraged pursuer is Vance. At the last moment he stops himself from hurting his beloved pet, saved by his own capacity for self-reflection. The dreamer wakes to a bedroom filled with all the signs of his happy new life. But the past is still alive, and the nightmare leaves a haunting insight: “I was the monster.”

Reading the book today is like the reversal of roles in Vance’s dream. The earnest, sensitive narrator of Hillbilly Elegy sounds nothing like the powerful politician who sneers at “childless cat ladies,” peddles lies about pet-eating Haitian immigrants, sticks a finger in the face of the besieged president of Ukraine, and gets into profane fights with random critics on X. Vice President Vance is ­the pursuer. So it’s a little disorienting to return to Hillbilly Elegy and spend a few hours in the presence of a narrator who can say: “I love these people, even those to whom I avoid speaking for my own sanity. And if I leave you with the impression that there are bad people in my life, then I am sorry, both to you and to the people portrayed. For there are no villains in this story.”

As a writer, Vance passes the most important test in a work of this kind: He’s honest enough to show himself in an unfavorable light—hotheaded, cowardly, often just sad. He’s wary of any simple lessons or wholly satisfying emotions. He loves his family and community, but he is unsparing about their self-destructive tendencies. He rejects the politics of tribal grievance and ostentatious piety that now defines the populist right. If the book has a message, it’s the need to take responsibility for your own life while understanding the obstacles and traps that blight the lives of others—to acknowledge the complex causes of failure without giving in to rage, self-pity, or despair. “There is a cultural movement in the white working class to blame problems on society or the government,” Vance warned, “and that movement gains adherents by the day.”

It’s not a message to impress the MAGA mind. The author’s nuanced analysis and policy ideas might well make Vice President Vance retch. In countless interviews and talks related to his New York Times No. 1 best seller, Vance spoke movingly about his childhood, criticized the low standards that both right and left impose on his people, and offered no easy answers for their desperate lives, only a kind of moral appeal to self-betterment and community that sounded like the centrist commentary of David Brooks. In his open-collar shirt and blazer, with smooth cheeks and boyish blue eyes, a fluent delivery and respectful responses, Vance appeared to be living proof that the meritocracy could take a self-described hillbilly and make him one of its own, creating an appealing celebrity with an important message for comfortable audiences about those left behind.

So Hillbilly Elegy is a problem for right-wing populists—­and also for Trump opponents who now loathe Vance, because it takes an effort not to sympathize with the book’s young hero and admire the eloquence of its author. By 2020, when Ron Howard’s movie was released, at the end of Trump’s first term, critics who might have turned to the book for insight had soured on the white working class, and they excoriated the film. (Tellingly, it was far more popular with the general public.) By then it was no longer possible to have an honest response to a book or movie across political battle lines. Hillbilly Elegy, published four months before the 2016 election, came out at the last possible moment to shape a national conversation. It belongs to an era that no longer exists.

Other than learning how elites get ahead, Vance made little use of his law degree. He spent a year clerking for a Kentucky judge, and less than a year at a corporate firm in D.C. Even at Yale he knew that practicing law didn’t interest him. What he later called “the most significant moment” of his law-school years was a talk in 2011 by the billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel. I spent time with Thiel for a magazine profile that year, so I’m familiar with the pessimism of his thinking: America is going through a period of prolonged stagnation; supposedly revolutionary digital technologies like the iPhone and social media have turned out to be trivial, while chronic problems in the physical world—­transportation, energy, bioscience—haven’t improved; and this lack of dynamism drives elites like the ones in Thiel’s audience to compete furiously for a dwindling number of prestigious but ultimately meaningless jobs.

This analysis of a soulless meritocracy in a decadent society held more than intellectual interest for Vance. Thiel was describing what Vance had already begun to feel about his new life among the credentialed: “I had prioritized striving over character,” Vance later wrote. “I looked to the future, and realized that I’d been running a desperate race where the first prize was a job I hated.” The talk gave an abstract framework for the psychological conflicts besetting a refugee from decline: burning ambition, and the char of guilt it leaves; longing for elite acceptance and resentment of elite disdain (the professor who scoffed at state-school education, the classmate who assumed that Marines must be brutes); what Vance called the “reverse snobbery” that a poor boy from flyover country feels toward the Yale snobs who know about butter knives while he alone confronts a belligerent drunk at the next table in a New Haven bar. In an interview with Rod Dreher of The American Conservative upon the publication of Hillbilly Elegy, Vance said, “It’s the great privilege of my life that I’m deep enough into the American elite that I can indulge a little anti-elitism.” He added, “But it would have been incredibly destructive to indulge too much of it when I was 18.”

Elite anti-elitism—contempt from a position of strength, the ability to say “Thanks but fuck you”—offered a way out of the conflicts. This was the first of many gifts from Thiel, and Vance would go on to indulge it every bit as destructively as his new mentor could wish. But not yet. He was still hard at work earning his credentials and preparing to enjoy their fruits.

The author of Hillbilly Elegy could only have a complex view of Donald Trump: an intuitive grasp of his appeal for people in Middletown, and horror at his effect on them. In an essay for this magazine published just a few weeks after the memoir, in the summer of 2016, Vance called Trump “cultural heroin”—­the most apt metaphor possible. Trump was an overwhelmingly tempting drug that brought relief from pain but inevitably led to self-destruction, enabling all the ills—resentment, bigotry, coarseness, delusional hope—of a white working class in rapid decay. Shortly before the election, Vance warned that a refusal by Trump to accept its results would further alienate his supporters from politics, saying he hoped Trump “acts magnanimous.” Late on Election Night, when Trump’s shocking victory appeared imminent, ABC News, suddenly in need of an authority on Trump voters, pulled Vance from Yahoo News into its main studio as a native informant. “What are they looking for from Donald Trump?” George Stephanopoulos asked. “What do they want tangibly?” Vance replied that they wanted a change in direction, and that if Trump failed to bring one, there would be “a period of reckoning.” Then he added with a slight smile: “I do think that folks feel very vindicated now, right? They believed in their man. They felt like the media didn’t believe in their man.”

What did Vance believe in?

Trump’s win brought the author of Hillbilly Elegy to new prominence as a national voice. It also placed a roadblock directly in the path of his ambitions. He had identified himself as a Never Trump conservative, privately wondered if Trump was “America’s Hitler,” and voted for neither major-party candidate. Suddenly the establishment that had embraced him and elevated him beyond his dreams could no longer offer means of ascent. Just about everyone who knew Vance assumed he intended to enter politics, but the Daniels-Huntsman-Romney species of Republican was halfway to extinction.

In January 2017, a week after Trump’s inauguration, a group of about a dozen conservatives—adherents of “reform conservatism,” a modernizing, more inclusive strain that took seriously issues such as inequality and the environment—gathered with Vance at the Washington offices of the Hoover Institution to advise him on his political future. These were policy intellectuals who had encouraged and validated young Vance. They discussed what their agenda should be now that a Republican few, if any, of them had supported was president. Were there positive aspects to be gleaned from Trump’s populism on issues like immigration? How far should Vance go to accommodate himself to the cultural-heroin president? One thing was certain: The people in the room were already losing their value to Vance.

A week later, on February 3, he spoke about Hillbilly Elegy and Trump at David Axelrod’s Institute of Politics, in Chicago. He gave one of his most thoughtful performances, trying to tie the unraveling threads of the country back together, urging his audience to see the common ground between working-class Black and white Americans, arguing that both the cultural left and the racist alt-right represented a small number of mostly coastal elites. But he also made a startling claim about Trump that he would return to in the coming months and years: “If you go to one of his rallies, it’s maybe 5 percent him being really outrageous and offensive, and 95 percent him talking about ‘Here are all the things that are wrong in your community, here’s why they’re wrong, and I’m going to bring back jobs.’ That was the core thesis of Trump’s entire argument.”

Never mind the tone, Vance was saying, it’s trivial—­pay attention to the content. But his percentages weren’t remotely accurate, and he was ignoring the inextricable bond between inflammatory language and extreme policies that held Trump’s speeches together and thrilled his crowds: What’s wrong in your community is them. Vance, too intelligent not to sense the hollow core of his claim, was taking a step toward Trump.

He also informed his audience that he was moving back to Ohio.

According to a classmate, while still in law school Vance had gotten in touch with Thiel, who extended an open invitation to come see him in Silicon Valley. After graduation, marriage to Usha, and short stints in the legal profession, he moved to San Francisco and, in 2016, started working at Thiel’s venture-capital firm Mithril. But technology investing seemed to hold little more interest for him than corporate law. What excited him was politics and ideas. Thiel was preparing to endorse Trump and was mounting a radical attack on America’s sclerotic and corrupt institutions—universities, media, corporations, the regulatory state. His rhetoric became extreme, but his goals remained vague. Trump was an experiment: Thiel wanted to blow things up and see what happened, and if it all went wrong he could move to New Zealand, where he’d invested millions of dollars and acquired citizenship. The alliance between Thiel (monopoly advocate, cognitive elitist, believer in supermen, admirer of the antidemocratic thinkers Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss) and Vance (son of the common people, who get screwed when things go wrong and have no way out) shows that reactionary populism is capacious enough to appeal to every resentment of the liberal status quo.

With prolonged exposure to the master class—the junkets in Aspen and Sun Valley—­Vance collected disillusioning stories that would later help justify his political transformation: the tech CEO whose answer for the loss of purpose among displaced workers was “digital, fully immersive gaming”; the hotel mogul who complained that Trump’s anti-immigrant policy made it harder for him to find low-wage workers. One feels that these clueless capitalists, like the condescending Yalies of half a decade earlier, played a genuine role in Vance’s turn away from the establishment, but that he enlisted them disproportionately. Incidents like these provided a kind of indulgence that allowed him to feel that he wasn’t with the elites after all, wasn’t betraying his own people while explaining their pathologies over dinner to the superrich—a role that was becoming more and more distasteful—and under the table he and Usha could quietly signal to each other: We have to get the hell out of here. These people are crazy.

The Vances moved first to Columbus in 2017, then bought a mansion in Cincinnati the following year and filled it with children while they both pursued the extremely busy careers of the meritocracy. Vance explained his return to Ohio as a desire to give back to his troubled home region and help reverse its brain drain; his political ambitions went unmentioned. He announced the creation of a nonprofit to combat the opioid epidemic, but the group, Our Ohio Renewal, raised almost no money and folded before it had achieved much more than placing a couple of op-eds. He put more effort into funding regional start-ups with venture capital, but one of his biggest bets, an indoor-agriculture company in Appalachia, went bankrupt. With seed money from Thiel, in 2019 Vance co-founded his own firm, Narya Capital, and invested in the right-wing video-sharing platform Rumble and a prayer app called Hallow. Like Thiel’s Mithril Capital and big-data company, Palantir, the name Narya comes from Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings—a novel that obsesses a certain type of brainy conservative, particularly younger religious ones, with its hierarchical social order and apocalyptic battle between good and evil. As Vance turned away from classical liberalism, Locke and other Enlightenment philosophers gave way to Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. That same year, he became a Roman Catholic.

Around Easter 2020 Vance published an essay about his conversion in the Catholic journal The Lamp. It describes a largely intellectual experience, informed by reading Saint Augustine and the literary critic René Girard, driven by disenchantment with the scramble for credentials and consumer goods, and slowed by his reluctance to embrace a form of Christianity that would have been alien to Mamaw, his late grandmother. He finally made up his mind when he “began to see Catholicism as the closest expression of her kind of Christianity: obsessed with virtue, but cognizant of the fact that virtue is formed in the context of a broader community; sympathetic with the meek and poor of the world without treating them primarily as victims.” Vance hoped that Catholicism would help him to care less about professional prestige, “let go of grudges, and forgive even those who wronged me.” However he is doing in private, it’s hard to see the hand of Catholic humility at work in his public life. His conversion anticipated a sharp turn in how he went about pursuing power, and it coincided with a wave of high-profile conservatives turning to religion. The essay was titled “How I Joined the Resistance.”

Vance didn’t give up his former beliefs all at once. It took him four years, from 2017 until 2021, to abandon one politics for another—to go from Never Trump to Only Trump. Compared with the overnight conversion experiences of innumerable Republicans, this pace seems admirably slow, and it probably reflects Vance’s seriousness about political ideas. He took time to make them intellectually coherent; then the moral descent was swift and total.

Tom Nichols: The moral collapse of J. D. Vance

A close friend of Vance’s, another Ohioan, gave the most generous explanation of his political conversion. “His views have always been kind of rooted toward doing good for the working-class segment of America,” the friend told me. Progressives embraced an identity politics that placed Vance’s people somewhere near the bottom, and standard conservative policies hadn’t worked for them, especially on trade. In Ohio, Vance found that his people had become big Trump supporters. By 2018, the friend told me, Vance believed that Trump “was committed at least to doing the things he said and fixing the problems that J.D. also identified as problems”—the loss of jobs and decline of communities. In 2017 Vance had said that manufacturing jobs had been lost mainly to automation, and that protectionism wouldn’t bring them back. Before long he was blaming globalization, China, and the Republican donor class. “At that point J.D. realized he was very aligned with Trump on the issues,” the friend said.

In 2018, Vance told an acquaintance that he was thinking of voting for Trump in 2020. Onstage with Amy Chua that same year at the Aspen Ideas Festival, he said that people he knew in Ohio were angrier at Wall Street and Silicon Valley types than at ethnic- or religious-minority groups, and that Trump’s speeches, though “tinged with criticisms of Mexican immigrants or Muslims,” directed 85 percent of their vitriol at “coastal elites.” Another doubtful calculation—but it allowed Vance to align Trump’s more acceptable hostilities with those of his people and, by implication, his own. He wasn’t going to insult Mexicans and Muslims in front of an Aspen crowd, but the crowd itself was more than fair game.

The next year, at a pair of conservative conferences, Vance argued that libertarianism didn’t have the answer for what ails American parents and children, workers and communities. He championed a “pro-family, pro-worker, pro-American-nation conservatism,” and he said: “In my own life, I’ve felt the demons that come from a traumatic childhood melt away in the laughter and the love of my own son.” The policy implications weren’t entirely clear. He was against abortion, Facebook apps designed to addict children, pointless wars that got his Marine buddies killed, and CEOs who didn’t care about American workers and families; he was for mothers and kids. He ended one speech by saying, “Donald Trump has really opened up the debate on a lot of these issues, from foreign policy to health care to trade to immigration.”

By 2020 Vance had publicly turned away from the residue of Reaganism toward what came to be called “the new right,” “national conservatism,” or simply “populism.” In a sense, he was following the well-trod path of his generation of conservatives. The Republican establishment had failed, the reformers hadn’t amounted to much, the Never Trumpers had lost—here was the obvious alternative.

But what had Trump actually done for people in the post­industrial heartland? The fentanyl crisis raged on, manufacturing job growth remained anemic, and the president’s main achievement—­a tax cut—benefited corporations and billionaires far more than the working class. Vance knew all of this, and in early 2020 he wrote to one correspondent: “Trump has just so thoroughly failed to deliver on his economic populism (excepting a disjointed China policy).” But the political winds had turned, and now he massaged his public remarks about Trump into vague approval while keeping his criticism private. Vance was getting ready to enter politics.

The generous account of Vance’s political conversion contains some truth. It still fails to explain what followed.

A change in his view of tariffs didn’t require Vance to go to Mar-a-Lago with Peter Thiel in early 2021 to seek the disgraced ex-president’s forgiveness, then start and never stop repeating the very lie about a stolen election that he had warned against in 2016. In moving away from the Enlightenment and globalist neoliberalism, he could have stopped at the reactionary writer Christopher Caldwell or the post-liberal scholar Patrick Deneen. He didn’t need to spend 90 minutes schmoozing with an alt-right podcaster and rape apologist who goes by Jack Murphy (his real name is John Goldman), insisting ominously: “We are in a late-republican period. If we’re going to push back against it, we have to get pretty wild and pretty far out there and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”

Cassie Chambers Armstrong: ‘Hillbilly’ women will get no help from J. D. Vance

Vance could have run for the Senate as a populist without maligning half his compatriots—­liberals, immigrants, women without children—as hostile to America. He could have become a father without devoting a speech to mocking the “childless left.” The Catholic Church didn’t command him to stop caring about human beings in other countries, or to value Israel more than Ukraine because most Americans are Christian and Jesus was born in Bethlehem, not Kyiv. He could have turned away from his Ivy League credentials after they stopped being useful without declaring war on higher education and calling professors “the enemy.” He could have put aside his law degree and still held on to what it taught him about judicial independence and due process.

The 2024 Republican National Convention, in Milwaukee, where Vance became Trump’s nominee for vice president

After 2020 the prevailing politics on the right was apocalyptic, vituperative, and very online. Vance, ever skilled at adaptation, went with it all the way. If, as his patron Thiel argued, the country was under the control of a totalitarian, brain-dead left, almost any form of resistance was justified. When Vance argued that “the culture war is class warfare,” he was giving himself license to stigmatize large groups of Americans and flout the rule of law as long as he did it in the name of an abstraction called the working class.

But Vance never got away from elites. He simply exchanged one set of benefactors for another—traded Yale professors and TED audiences and progressive Silicon Valley CEOs for the money and influence that came with Peter Thiel, Tucker Carlson, and Donald Trump Jr. One elite elevated him to justify their contempt for the working class; the other championed him in order to burn down the first. Vance is interesting not only because he changed camps and was talented enough to thrive in both, but because the camps themselves, out of the lesser sin of decadence or the greater sin of nihilism, have so little to offer the country.

Vance transformed himself into the fullest incarnation of the Trump reaction—fuller than Trump himself, because Vance is more intelligent and disciplined, less likely to wander and stop making sense. He willed this change on himself because he had a lot to atone for and he was in a hurry. It won him Trump’s blessing in 2022 in a U.S. Senate race that Vance was losing, which gave him the Republican nomination and the election, leading to his choice as vice president in 2024, which could make him Trump’s 44-year-old successor in 2028.

Vance’s political transformation is so complete that it’s also physical. In the film adaptation of the Vance novel, imagine a scene in which the protagonist’s features in 2016 dissolve into a very different face circa 2025. The round cheeks and pudgy chin are now hidden by the growth of a Trump Jr. beard. The blue eyes, no longer boyish, are flatter, and they smile less. And the voice, which used to have an almost apologetic tone, as if he wasn’t sure of his right to hold the stage, now carries a constant edge, a kind of taunt. He’s more handsome but less appealing, and the loss of appeal comes from the fact that, like the movement that now runs the country, he’s animated by what he hates.

Like Trump, Vance shows no interest in governing on behalf of anyone outside MAGA. But the various phases of his life story make him—and him alone—the embodiment of all the movement’s parts. In a speech in March at a business conference, he called himself a “proud member of both tribes” of the ruling coalition—meaning of the populists like Steve Bannon, and of the techno-futurists like Elon Musk. He discounted the likelihood that they’ll fall out, and he insisted that innovations such as artificial intelligence will benefit ordinary Americans, because—despite the evidence of the past half century—“it’s technology that increases the value of labor.” MAGA can’t breathe without an enemy, and workers and innovators have “the same enemy”: the government. But MAGA is now the government, and the contradictions between its populists and its oligarchs are obvious.
photo of Vance in blue suit and red tie walking down steps with U.S. and other flags in background

Vice President Vance arrives in the Rose Garden for the president’s announcement of his “Liberation Day” tariffs on April 2, 2025.

Vance’s transformation has another advantage besides the obvious one for his political prospects. When he grins slyly and says, “I’m gonna get in trouble for this” before launching an attack on some despised group, you can feel him shucking off constraints that he’s had to impose on himself since that recruitment dinner at Yale—or even earlier, since he was a boy in Middletown surviving the violence of adults. This more aggressive Vance has drawn closer to that hillbilly culture he long ago escaped. The vice president of the United States doesn’t let a challenge to his honor pass. He’s quick to anger, ready with a jibe, picks fights on social media, and brandishes insults such as “moralistic garbage” and “smug, self-assured bullshit.” He divides the world into kinfolk and enemies, with steadfast loyalty for those in the first category and suspicion or hostility for the great majority consigned to the second. He justifies every cruel policy, blatant falsehood, and constitutional breach by aligning himself with the unfairly treated people he grew up with, whether or not his administration is doing them any actual good. His idea of American identity has gone hard and narrow—not the encompassing creed of the founding documents, but the Appalachian dirt of the graveyard where his ancestors lie buried.

To succeed in the world of elites, Vance had to let himself be civilized, at a psychological cost. When that world no longer offered what he wanted, he found a new world of different elites. They lifted him to unimagined heights of power, and at the same time they brought him full circle, to a return of the repressed.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, May 20, 2025 5:08 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
An Autopsy Report on Biden’s In-Office Decline


What decline, you stupid fuck?

I have 4 years worth of posts out of you telling me that Joe Biden* was fine.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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