REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

A thread for Democrats Only

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UPDATED: Friday, February 20, 2026 08:08
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Thursday, February 5, 2026 5:53 AM

SECOND

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


Donald Trump is president of a United States, but it is too much to say that he is president of the United States

By Jamelle Bouie | Feb. 4, 2026

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/04/opinion/trump-presidential-power-co
mments.html

A hallmark of the president’s language since he stepped onto the national political stage is that some Americans are more American than others, and that this is a function of race and allegiance to Trump.

Trump deployed this idea against Barack Obama when he questioned the former president’s political legitimacy and demanded that he prove his citizenship with the public release of his “long-form” birth certificate. He wielded it during his first campaign for the White House, dismissing critics and opponents as un-American and illegitimate on the basis of their race, nationality and partisan identity. Recall his condemnation of Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who, Trump insisted, could not be impartial because he was “Mexican.” And this vision of the supposedly true American public was a rhetorical mainstay of his first term in office. “The Democrats,” Trump said, in a typical formulation during a 2018 rally for Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, “have launched an assault on the sovereignty of our country.”

Now, obviously, Trump did not pioneer this distinction between the people who happen to live in a nation and the quasi-mystical, fully legitimate People of the Nation. This construct is a mainstay of right-wing populism. You saw it in the 2008 presidential election, when Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska told audiences that there was a “real” America that truly represented the country. “We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hardworking, very patriotic, pro-America areas of this great nation,” she said.

You saw it at the 1992 Republican National Convention, when Pat Buchanan, the Nixon speechwriter and political operative turned conservative intellectual and proto-Trumpian provocateur, deployed this herrenvolk notion of the American nation in his infamous (and influential) jeremiad against American liberalism.

“There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as was the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America,” Buchanan declared. “We must take back our cities, and take back our culture, and take back our country.” And you cannot understand the nativist “Americanism” of the second Ku Klux Klan of the 1910s and ’20s without reference to a similarly narrow conception of the American people, one tied to sharp anxieties around race, class, religion and masculinity. The Klan “stood for patriotism, ‘old-time religion’ and conventional morality, and pledged to fend off challenges from any quarter to the rights and privileges of men from the stock of the nation’s founders,” the historian Nancy MacLean explains in “Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan.”

What Trump has done is turn this rhetorical distinction into something like the governing philosophy of the federal government. To start, the White House has made clear that a state’s access to either federal aid or federal benefits is a function of its partisan allegiance. During last year’s government shutdown, for example, the administration canceled $8 billion in federal funding for clean energy, affecting 16 states — all of which voted for Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election. Trump also withheld billions for transit projects in New York and New Jersey. “We can get rid of a lot of things that we didn’t want,” the president said, commenting on what he thought was the upside of a shutdown, “and they’d be Democrat things.”

It is similarly clear that the president slated the worst of his deportation program for Democratic-led states and cities. Neither Chicago nor Los Angeles nor Washington stands out as particularly dangerous compared with the typical major American city. And if Trump were only targeting undocumented immigrants, he could look to cities in Texas and Florida as well as those in California and Illinois. But Trump targeted them all the same, sending the National Guard to occupy each city and unleashing federal immigration agents to harass and abuse immigrants and citizens alike.

“I love the smell of deportations in the morning,” Trump mused on his Truth Social website in September. “Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.” The administration’s attack on Minnesota, and especially on the city of Minneapolis, is more of the same, less law enforcement than a combat operation aimed at a set of Americans whose governor opposed the president in the last election or who belong to a disfavored racial, ethnic and religious minority

At the risk of cliché, most presidents do not speak like this about their fellow Americans. The presidency is a national office, and even the bitterest struggles for this highest prize of American politics tend to end with an appeal to union and common ground from the eventual winner. “We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists,” Thomas Jefferson proclaimed in the wake of an election so hard fought that it nearly turned to violence. “Let us, then, with courage and confidence pursue our own federal and republican principles, our attachment to union and representative government.”

John Quincy Adams won the presidency in what his chief rival, Andrew Jackson, condemned as a “corrupt bargain.” In his Inaugural Address, Adams made it a point to reach out to those Americans who wanted a different man in the White House. “Of the two great political parties which have divided the opinions and feelings of our country,” Adams said, “the candid and the just will now admit that both have contributed splendid talents, spotless integrity, ardent patriotism, and disinterested sacrifices to the formation and administration of this Government, and that both have required a liberal indulgence for a portion of human infirmity and error.”

Abraham Lincoln ended his first Inaugural Address with a famous appeal to the common history that tied Americans to one another. “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies,” he said. “Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection.” Lincoln’s heartfelt call to his Southern brethren to heed “the mystic chords of memory” fell on deaf ears. Five weeks later, a South Carolina militia fired on Fort Sumter. Not long afterward, Union volunteers met soldiers from the newly formed Confederate States of America in a field just north of Manassas, Va. And so began four years of the worst bloodletting in American history.

Trump rejects this legacy of his predecessors. The rhetorical tools of the presidency are, for him, a means to divide Americans and sort them according to hierarchies of status. Trump sits atop the national government, but not as a national leader. His is the logic of the separatist, even of the secessionist. “There was no privilege without persecution, no winner without a loser,” Michael J. Lee and R. Jarrod Atchison write of the ideology of the Southern “fire-eaters” in “We Are Not One People: Secession and Separatism in American Politics Since 1776.” In their worldview, “political relationships within nations were always hierarchical; some group was always enslaved by or beholden to some other more dominant group.”

The fire-eaters hoped to instantiate this vision in a new nation founded on a cornerstone of racial subjugation. But what if you could secede without secession? What if you could cleave the nation off from its egalitarian aspirations? What if you could bring the spirit of separatism to bear on a government tasked with representing a single people?

That is the Trump administration. That is the work of a White House that sees vast numbers of Americans not as friends, but as enemies. And that is a work of a president who will destroy as many symbols of national unity as he can to satisfy his bottomless ego, cruel appetites and unquenchable desire to “win” at the expense of the people he purports to lead.

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

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Thursday, February 5, 2026 6:19 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK




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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Friday, February 6, 2026 8:57 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
New START Treaty expires, freeing Trump from nuclear arms restrictions

"If it expires, it expires," U.S. President Donald Trump said in his interview with The New York Times when asked about his intentions to extend the New START treaty that officially ended on Feb. 5.

https://kyivindependent.com/new-start-expires-releases-us-russia-from-
decades-of-nuclear-arms-restrictions/
We Are Witnessing the Imperial Presidency on Steroids
The founders wouldn’t recognize the executive branch’s monstrous powers

by Dan Carlin | February 5, 2026

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/trump-presi
dential-power-nixon-steroids-1235511366/

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/we-are-witnessing-the-imperial-
presidency-on-steroids/ar-AA1VKrjv

While the Watergate scandal was raging, Richard Nixon allegedly told several U.S. representatives that he could get on the telephone, issue an order, and soon after millions of people would be killed. It wasn't hyperbole. There are very few people in human history that have ever had that kind of power, and most have been American presidents. But how does one individual with this sort of authority exist in a system of government designed with a triad of co-equal branches set up specifically to thwart concentrated executive power, a system where starting a war wasn't even an executive-branch power in the constitutional design?

The question of what in our system could have prevented Nixon from causing a nuclear holocaust if he wanted to has been left unanswered. There have been rumors that Cabinet secretaries at the time were telling aides to ignore such a presidential order if it were issued, but that's a stop-gap measure, not a constitutional check. The designers of our republican system never intended their chief executive to have this sort of authority. The fact that presidents do today is the root cause of many of our national problems.

Americans are living though a historic moment right now, one that would be fascinating to watch were it not so insanely important. There is a disaster looming that is becoming more clear every day. The cause is that the office of the president of the United States has far too much power and very few constraints. This combination invites authoritarianism. All it needs to become manifest is someone in the White House who desires such an outcome. It seems we have someone like that now.

While it's both tempting and normal to see current conditions as the result of recent events, the 21st-century American political situation is the culmination of decades of trends involving the ever-increasing power of the presidency. None of this is hidden, and scholars have been writing about it for decades (Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s famous book The Imperial Presidency was published in 1973). And while the aggregation of presidential power is often cloaked in rationales and justifications, from anti-communism to anti-drugs, war powers, anti-terrorism, et cetera, sometimes it's simply how things developed and evolved (the nature and challenges associated with nuclear weapons is an example). But there is no denying at this point that we have created a systemic monster that the constitutional framers wouldn't recognize - and one they would fear. The founders believed in diffused power and oversight. They believed in a strong and active legislative branch to counter autocratic mission creep. We have none of those things at the moment. Are any of them recoverable? Is constitutional erosion a one-way street, or can it be reversed with some sort of renaissance? Must we go the way of Rome's Republic?

To rebalance our constitutional portfolio first requires us to want a less powerful executive. This is somewhat counterintuitive. Americans are accustomed to electing leaders who promise to push for outcomes, foster positive change, fix things, and help people. The voters expect the president to use the power of the office to achieve what the people want. The pressure from the winning candidate's supporters is not to restrain power but to use as much of it as possible. We are addicted to the exercise of presidential authority as long as it is being used for ends we desire. The effect this has on the system as a whole is given little attention. Is it even conceivable that we might push for leaders to restrain or roll back whatever power they might claim in order to prevent us from getting a president with too much authority? What if that's the only way to repair things?

If we come out of this current inflection point constitutionally intact - and that's far from guaranteed - we should use any ­pendulum-swinging momentum for reform the way legislators used the Watergate scandal aftermath to try to rein in the runaway powers of the presidency. There were lots of hearings, investigations, and legal alterations done in the mid-1970s to "fix" things, along with punishments meted out to those in government who knowingly went too far. This seems healthy for any system when its constitutional flaws are exposed. But like a noxious weed, the growth of executive power returned with a vengeance starting in the 1980s. Many of the post-Watergate reforms were challenged, overruled, or functionally eviscerated. The rationale given was that the "legitimate" powers of the presidency had been encroached upon. The formerly fringe concept of the Unitary Executive Theory emerged as a justification for unilateral actions and presidential power consolidation, pushed by think tanks (and the Supreme Court justices they pushed for) and entities who wanted less interference from other branches of government. This is the same rationale Donald Trump and his surrogates cite continually.

Any effort to dial back presidential authority faces strong headwinds in our current political climate. The Supreme Court seems hell-bent on ceding ever more power to the president, one who has far more power now than the "imperial" Nixon did back in the early 1970s. The electorate has demonstrated that it's willing to support chief executives pushing constitutional boundaries if it's done for reasons voters favor. And neither party wants to unilaterally disarm by ceding authority if the other side can't be trusted to do the same. Any salvation coming from the legislative branch seems hopeless. This dynamic is decades in the making; Congress has grown weak, venal, co-opted, and seems happy to relinquish its power to avoid responsibility for anything that might hurt members' reelections. Frustration with Congress leads to even more temptation to use presidents to achieve political goals - often using executive orders - that lawmakers seem unable or unwilling to pursue. The dynamic isn't favorable.

But we have been given another reminder of why any of those good reasons for increasing the power of one human being at the expense of the rest of the government aren't good enough. The executive branch is the one overwhelmingly likely to bring us to a dictatorship, and we can now see how much the vast powers of the office have only been held in check by mere protocol. A president unleashed shows us the power of the modern office uncloaked. And it should scare us all back into the mindset of Ben Franklin when he said that we had "a republic, if you can keep it." Congress, with its many members, isn't likely to be the branch that takes democracy away from us. The danger comes from the executive branch where one person calls the shots. And as it was when Nixon fell, we are being reminded that increasingly powerful presidents are something the system seems to germinate naturally. We need to periodically prune back the executive's powers when the opportunity presents itself. That time must be soon. The weeds have overrun the garden.

Too many forget that the primary goal of the U.S. constitutional design wasn't efficient governing. It was tyrant prevention. We put up with all sorts of impediments to change, reform, and improvement for that one simple goal. Whether this firewall still works is the paramount political question of our age. Will this era turn out to be a blip on the timeline? A warning that prompts reflection, reform, and recalibration akin to the McCarthyistic "Red Scare" era? Or will it be a Caesar crossing the Rubicon moment that forever ends the American experiment?

The more scary aspect of all this is the degree of public support for an uber-powerful leader who champions their views and pushes for what they desire. Often these wishes are unachievable because our constitutional protections stand in the way. This is a problem that will outlive the current president and requires deep national introspection. We could start by reminding ourselves what happens when representative systems go sideways. The outcomes are not recalled fondly by those who lived through them. Better to acquire that lesson from some other nation's tragedy rather than having to learn about the danger of historical hot stoves by touching one ourselves.

We are currently seeing what can happen when the only branch controlled by a single individual decides it wants to flex its vast and awesome powers. It demonstrates to all reasonable people that it's too much power for one person to have. Imagining such authority in the hands of one's worst enemy should be enough to make this concern clear to anyone. The president can pick up the phone and order the deaths of billions and the ruination of the planet's ecosystem. That's clearly too much power for any human being, isn't 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, February 6, 2026 9:09 AM

SECOND

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


Trump's push to rename Dulles and Penn Station after himself

Feb 6, 2026

https://www.axios.com/2026/02/06/schumer-trump-penn-station-dulles-gat
eway

President Trump last month offered to drop his hold on billions of dollars for a major infrastructure project in New York, but only if Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer agreed to rename New York's Penn Station and Washington’s Dulles International Airport after Trump.

• Schumer (D-N.Y.) rejected the offer, a source familiar with the talks told Axios, prolonging the standoff over funding for the Gateway Tunnel Project connecting New York to New Jersey.

Why it matters: Trump, whose allies renamed the Kennedy Center and the U.S. Institute of Peace after him, is continuing his efforts to reshape American institutions in his image.

• The offer did not come up in an Oval Office meeting between Trump and Schumer last month, the source said. Instead, the offer was made to Schumer in subsequent conversations with the administration about the Gateway project.

• The $16 billion project is set to shut down indefinitely on Friday, without the funding from the federal government.

• The offer from Trump was first reported by Punchbowl News.

The big picture: Trump and Schumer have cut high stakes deals for government funding over the last year. They remain at a stalemate over a project critical for Schumer's state.

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

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Friday, February 6, 2026 6:30 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK




Widdle dick Second is just jealous that it's not his name that's up on every building.



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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Saturday, February 7, 2026 6:53 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:


Widdle dick Second is just jealous that it's not his name that's up on every building.



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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
Renaming monuments after himself is proof that Trump isn't performing his duties. Same with his self-enrichment schemes. Not paying his income taxes, same. Spending $3,000,000 to fly down to Florida for a weekend round of golf, same old thing.

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

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Saturday, February 7, 2026 6:54 AM

SECOND

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


How selfish are we? We cooperate to survive, but if no one is looking, we compete.

An age-old debate about human nature is being energised with new findings on the tightrope of cooperation and competition

By Jonathan R Goodman | 6 February 2026

Goodman is a social scientist based at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and the University of Cambridge, UK. He is the author of Invisible Rivals: How We Evolved to Compete in a Cooperative World (2025).
Free download from https://annas-archive.li/search?q=Goodman+Invisible+Rivals

On first acquaintance, Iago could not be more supportive, loyal, and helpful to Othello. But as Shakespeare reveals, Iago is hiding behind outward signs of devotion to pursue his own personal ambitions and destroy Othello. And it is not just fictional men. There also are fictional women: Becky Sharp in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair is a model of niceness while unscrupulously pursuing her own goals. Literature is replete with such characters: two more are Edmund in King Lear or Uriah Heep in David Copperfield. The list is endless.

And not, of course, just in literature — in the real world, men and women pursue their own selfish goals while hiding under a cloak of cooperation. These are what Jonathan Goodman calls invisible rivals. They are not necessarily the extremes of Iago, but the day-to-day way in which the twin threads of human behavior — selfish competitiveness and altruistic cooperation are intertwined as strongly as a DNA helix.

https://aeon.co/essays/we-cooperate-to-survive-but-if-no-ones-looking-
we-compete

Reading classic works in evolutionary biology is unlikely to make you optimistic about human nature. From Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man (1871) onwards, there is a fundamental understanding among biologists that organisms, especially humans, evolved to maximise self-interest. We act to promote our own success or that of our family. Niceness, by contrast, is just a mirage, and morality more broadly is just an illusion. Sociobiology – the infamous movement of the second half of the 20th century – forced us to confront the cold, calculated nature of having evolved biologically.

More recently, however, anthropologists and psychologists have pushed back against this pessimistic view. Dozens of books over the past decade have focused on human cooperation, promoting it as the secret ingredient to our conquest of the planet. We work together, using our intelligence, language and a diverse skillset to build on complex cultures, develop technologies, and solve problems in our societies and environments. We learn at a young age what the rules of our groups are, and those rules, imprinted on us culturally, govern the safe, cohesive units that allowed us to conquer inhospitable parts of the world and out-compete unfriendly groups of people who don’t work well together.

This narrative saves us the embarrassment of accepting that biological selfishness – acting only to maximise our Darwinian success – is the foundation of all behaviour. It also matches some claims by anthropologists that ancient humans were egalitarian, living in small groups with little permanent rank, where leaders (if any) had limited authority and people collectively pushed back against anyone trying to dominate.

Yet, as with sociobiology, it is only half true. Instead, our collective predilection for exploitation, deceit and competition is equally important to cooperation in the story of human evolution. We evolved not to cooperate or compete, but with the capacity for both – and with the intelligence to hide competition when it suits us, or to cheat when we’re likely to get away with it. Cooperation is consequently something we need to promote, not presume.

The modern dispute about whether humans are fundamentally cooperative or competitive dates back to the publication of Mutual Aid (1902) by Pyotr Kropotkin, an anarchist who took his views about human nature from observing animals helping each other in the unhospitable wilds of Siberia. Kropotkin believed that it’s only through interdependence that any species can survive in the struggles against predation, violence and the environment, which characterise the omnipresent dangers individuals face. Like so many other species, fish, flesh and fowl, we work together to survive and reproduce.

On the surface, Kropotkin’s views are at odds with Darwin’s, who championed the individual struggle for survival and mating as the fundamental driver of evolution by natural selection. The twin pillars of competing for survival and competing for mates – natural and sexual selection, respectively – were, for Darwin, the foundations of biological life. For Kropotkin and his colleagues, by contrast, the emphasis was on how individuals acted for the good of the species: mutual aid meant a better, safer life for everyone.

Today, the debate is substantially the same, though the language and tools we use to make our points are different. Experiments conducted by anthropologists and psychologists across the world evaluate how cooperatively people behave in a multitude of conditions, with obvious ideological battle lines between those who espouse a self-interested versus a beneficent model of human nature.

For example, in one famous study from 2001, anthropologists worked with 15 different small-scale societies to see how they behaved in an economic experiment called the ultimatum game. In this game, the researcher gives one player a set amount of money – in this case, the local value of one or two days’ worth of wages. That player then chooses an amount of the money to offer to the second player, who may either accept or decline. In the case of acceptance, the players receive the amounts of money agreed upon; in the case of rejection, both receive nothing.

We are thought to treat each other more fairly than you’d expect using a cold economic calculus

In a calculated world governed only by self-interest, we’d expect the first player to offer the smallest possible amount, and for the second player to accept any offer. Something is better than nothing, no matter whether that something is unfair on either side.

Of course, the participants in the small-scale societies didn’t play the game in this way. The offers were almost never lower than 25 per cent of the overall pot, and in some groups, like with the Aché people of Paraguay and the Lamelara people of Indonesia, the offers were often greater than half the total amount.

Some scientists, notably the economist Ernst Fehr, used this outcome to defend the idea that humans are ‘inequity averse’ – that is, we are a species that almost universally dislikes unfairness. (‘Prosociality’ is also a term you see in the literature a lot.) As a consequence of this alleged collective aversion, we are thought to treat each other more fairly than you’d expect using a cold economic calculus.

These ideas have broadened out into a modern theory of super-cooperation, with a caveat: instead of the ‘good of the species’ view advocated for by Kropotkin, researchers focus on how people behave within groups. We learn to cooperate within groups because we are interdependent on one another for survival: reciprocal relationships are essential when anyone meets with failure in hunting, gathering or agriculture. Need-based transfers – where people ask from others only when they need help, for example when their own crops fail – characterise small-scale societies across the world.

Local norms determining how people cooperate spread through social learning. So, while need-based transfer is a common practice worldwide, its appearance is determined by the culture in question. Osotua (which translates to ‘umbilical cord’) is a bond linking two Maasai people of Kenya and Tanzania in lifelong interdependence. Betrayal of osotua is reportedly unheard of, and a person’s descendants can even inherit a family member’s bond with another.

According to this way of thinking, groups that cooperate more effectively out-compete groups that don’t. This is part of a broader process called cultural group selection, the modern-day version of the mutual aid concept that Kropotkin championed more than a century ago. Except, instead of acting for the good of our species, we act for the good of our groups. Interdependence breeds loyalty, the hypothesis holds.

If the notion of cultural group selection bears out, then the problems we see in the world today should be seen as a consequence of friction between groups, not within them. Issues like international conflicts would derive from differences in social norms and values, rather than because of a missing commitment to prosociality shared by all group members. Cultural group selection encourages us to look for problems outside rather than within.

But the idea starts to look shaky upon closer inspection. Polly Wiessner, an anthropologist who has worked with the Ju/’hoansi of the Kalahari for decades, described what happened when she ran similar experiments herself. As part of her execution, she made it clear to volunteers that she was acting on behalf of someone else, the well-known economist Ernst Fehr; this was his interest, she emphasised; she did not care at all how they played the game and no matter what they did, there would be no consequence at all. She wrote:

A few asked me once more if it was really true that their identity would not be revealed; with confirmation, they slid more coins, one by one, over to their own sides. Occasionally the subject would hesitate and say: ‘Are you sure you are not deceiving me?’

For Wiessner, the point wasn’t that the Ju/’hoansi were uniquely selfish; it was that the experiment created a social situation unlike everyday life. Put someone in a game where identities are hidden and consequences are explicitly ruled out, and you remove many of the ordinary pressures that govern cooperation – reputation, ongoing relationships, the possibility of retaliation, the cost of being seen to take too much. What you end up measuring, in other words, is not ‘how cooperative this person is’, but how they behave in a stripped-down context where cooperation and betrayal carry very different risks.

Cooperating is not the same thing as being a cooperator

That basic insight runs through decades of work on the biology of cooperation. Even the earliest mathematical models that made reciprocity central to human social life treated betrayal as context-dependent: defection becomes attractive when there’s little chance of future interaction, when the other person can’t meaningfully respond, or when your reputation is unlikely to suffer. Cooperation, from this perspective, isn’t something we can simply assume; it’s something social life must make possible – and worth sustaining.

Over the 1970s, ’80s and arguably ever since, thousands of computer models purporting to explain how and why people cooperate have missed this point. Most often, researchers have explored how cooperation evolves in the Prisoner’s Dilemma. In the simplest form of this game, two players may choose to cooperate or defect. While mutual cooperation is mutually beneficial, and mutual defection is mutually damaging, defecting against a cooperative partner is the individual optimum – and cooperating against a defector yields the worst possible payoff. (The game is called the ‘Prisoner’s Dilemma’ because the theoretical scenario is one where two criminals are separately asked by the police to inform on one another. If you inform on your partner, you get a much lighter sentence.)

Researchers have developed an astounding number of variations of this dilemma for explaining how cooperation is sustainable more broadly. Some invoke punishing defectors; some just explore the likelihood that one player will meet another again in the future. But, critically, virtually all of them treat ‘cooperators’ and ‘defectors’ as defining individual features. A player is defined by their propensity for cooperation – much as we might say of a criminal who rats on his friend that ‘once a rat, always a rat’.

I have always found this assumption problematic. Much as any person might cheat a partner when the likelihood of being discovered is low, so are we wrong to assume that anyone who cooperates in one game is likely to cooperate in every game. Cooperating is not the same thing as being a cooperator.

Models don’t and can’t know the difference between forced and prosocially motivated cooperation

In my academic work, I’ve explored this distinction, with the aim of determining the importance of what lies beneath appearances in social interactions. A few years ago, I created a computer model to explore how false appearances can affect cooperation. If, for example, an agent – representing a person in the world of the computer model – determines that defection in the Prisoner’s Dilemma is likely to be exposed and punished, the agent cooperates. If, however, defection is likely to go unnoticed, the agent defects.

The model shows that cooperation stays high – at about two-thirds of interactions – even if the vast majority of agents prefer to defect when possible. While older models evaluating cooperation in the dilemma showed that punishment removes defectors from the population altogether – in line with what people defending cultural group selection say – the difference between appearance and motivation makes removal more difficult. You can’t punish defectors if you don’t know who they are.

I’ve called this the problem of opportunity. When anything cooperates – whether computer agent, bacterium, mole rat or person – we have no way of establishing, with certainty, whether cooperation was intended or happened because there wasn’t a good opportunity for defection.

How people use language to talk about cooperation in the real world illustrates the problem in action. Models are, by design and requirement, vague: they don’t tell you anything more about a situation than that some computerised agents cooperated, defected, were punished, and so on. A model can’t tell you whether an agent chose to cooperate or was forced to (the latter case, in everyday language, we call coercion). And too often in everyday life, we’re forced to cooperate with others when we don’t want to – whether that’s paying high prices for food and travel, voting for a politician who seems just a bit less bad than another, or signing a non-disclosure agreement to get a job. (Think about this next time you hear the phrase ‘thank you for your cooperation’.)

Models don’t and can’t know the difference between forced and prosocially motivated cooperation. Yet, sometimes, behavioural experiments can. Far from being a species that dislikes inequity and acts against it, we are more likely to profess a desire for fairness, reserving our singularly self-interested behaviours for when there’s unlikely to be cost for them.

Evidence for a phenomenon called ‘moral credentialing’ supports this. In short, if I believe I’ve acted morally in the past – through making donations, working in a soup kitchen for the homeless, and so on – I’m more likely to justify my unethical actions in the future.

In 2011, researchers showed that participants are more likely to cheat on a mathematics test if they have the opportunity to profess support for moral principles beforehand – but only if they could rationalise about how cheating didn’t violate their moral codes. Notably, in 2024, two researchers showed that businesses voluntarily signing up to the Business Roundtable’s ‘Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation’ (2019) – which promotes the importance of value to everyone, not just shareholders – were more likely to violate both environmental and labour laws.

And more recently still, research into the use of large language models like ChatGPT illustrates just how much opportunity links to dishonesty. In this set of studies, researchers evaluated how participants behave when they can delegate behaviours to AI models. The setting was a die-rolling game, where higher numbers meant a higher financial benefit. While players were broadly honest when reporting their die rolls directly, delegating reporting to an AI agent changed behaviours markedly. When the players could give vague instructions to the AI such as ‘maximise profits’, their honesty decreased enormously, with less than a fifth of rolls reported accurately.

There are plenty of examples of people dodging moral responsibility through credentialing (touting past good deeds), rationalisation, and plain opportunism. In aggregate, the belief that you’re a moral person because of the principles you profess or the good things you’ve done before can make it easier to rationalise seizing the opportunity to act unfairly now.

When cutting corners brings a benefit and no one notices, it’s a winning move almost anywhere

The behavioural scientist Jason Dana and colleagues report that people often seek ‘moral wiggle room’ in economic games – ways to choose unfairly without feeling culpable. What matters most, the team suggests, is often not fairness but insulation from blame, sometimes by claiming ignorance about who is harmed and how:

In the spate of recent [financial] scandals, often high-level figures accused of transgressions must be shown to have known about harms in order to be held liable. We note that this ignores the efforts that executives may take to remain ignorant.

When you see how quickly people reach for loopholes and excuses, it’s tempting to blame the system – to say that Western law, markets or politics teach us to act this way. But I don’t think opportunism starts there. Opportunism is more basic than that: when cutting corners brings a benefit and no one notices – think tax avoidance – it’s a winning move almost anywhere. We can design all sorts of rules that encourage cooperation. But we can’t erase the underlying fact that cheating will often pay when it’s hidden.

Increased group sizes, reflected in the large, stratified societies in which most people live today, create far more opportunities for cheating than encountered over our evolutionary past. The egalitarianism so often noted in small-scale societies, such as the Aché, may then represent a lack of opportunity for free-riding, rather than an evolved propensity for fairness. Knowing everyone in your camp, choosing to live with relatives, and a collective expectation that people will follow local norms, maintains cooperation – though even in small-scale societies people often find ways of exploiting each other. Older men, for example, often dominate their social groups, with exploitation of women and young men reported in the ethnographic literature in nomadic tribes and forager groups across the world.

There are many other examples of exploitation in ethnographic records from across the world. The idea that we lived in a state of equality until the invention of agriculture is mostly a myth that I think helps us feel better about human nature. It fosters the hope that, one day, we’ll overcome the inequality imposed on us by our abandonment of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

Rather than attributing our problems today to competition between groups and the structure of our societies, the governing rule for any social system is to expect exploitation where it is possible. Every group, society and culture, no matter its size, has weaknesses that some people will try to exploit for personal benefit. The question is how those weaknesses affect culture more broadly, and whether we live in a society that rewards fairmindedness – or cleverness, subtlety and opportunism.

In the modern world, as with our evolutionary past, the answer is the latter. All that’s changed since the advent of agriculture is the number and varieties of opportunities for free-riding and exploitation. Consequently, as technology improves and groups increase in size, we should expect people to develop creative ways for defecting more effectively – with evolution favouring those who do it best.

This proclivity for developing new strategies to compete is part of the social brain hypothesis, originally formulated by the psychologist Nicholas Humphrey. In his seminal paper on the topic in 1976, Humphrey argued that the primary function of the human intellect is to navigate the social, rather than the physical, environment.

One implication of the social brain hypothesis is the assumption that every society hosts opportunistic people who may follow local norms for only as long as it is beneficial to do so. Elsewhere, I have called these people ‘invisible rivals’. For example, religious zealots and political adherents across the world may observe all the rules linked with their group – whether ritual or ideological – until they reach a position of power. Thereafter, they can exploit others and act selfishly as it suits them. This may help to explain why studies show that people with psychopathic tendencies are more likely to enter positions of power, for example in corporate or political systems. Following rules without believing in them is an effective strategy for gaining power.

Admittedly, these arguments make our world sound hopeless. It’s tempting to think that, if the story of human evolution isn’t the rosy picture of cooperation, fairmindedness and mutual aid championed by thinkers for more than a century, we can’t expect much from our future. There are just too many problems – from raging inequality and low public trust to a rapidly warming planet and the growing risk of technology like AI – to hope that a species with a dark and ignoble past can overcome itself and create a better future.

I think, however, that this pessimism is misplaced, and that facing ourselves honestly is the first and most important step we can collectively take. This requires adopting a realistic perspective about the kind of animal that Homo sapiens is. First, we are not inherently cooperative but have the capacity for cooperation – just as we have the capacity for exploitation and selfishness. What matters at the individual level is the way we choose to behave towards others.

The real question is what kinds of environments make it easier to do the right thing

Second, just as there is no such thing as a cooperator, there is no such thing as a free-rider. These are behaviours that we apply in models and experiments for convenience. How people behave – and critically, how we describe social behaviours – is a matter of circumstance. The same person who behaves ethically in one circumstance may not do so in another, as research into moral credentialing shows. Our behavioural plasticity, or ability to adapt the way we act to context, is one of our defining features. The evolved psychological processes driving our decisions cannot be captured by simplistic models or games. Anyone can be an invisible rival.

That is precisely why local social norms matter so much. If cooperation isn’t a fixed trait but a fragile, context-dependent outcome, then the real question is what kinds of environments make it easier to do the right thing – and harder to get away with quiet defection. The Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom argued that local social norms are the bedrock of any serious effort to promote cooperation: look at how people behave in their immediate surroundings to understand their methods for restraining unbridled selfishness. Just as organisms evolve immune defences against selfish cells that quietly undermine the whole, societies need norms – and the institutions that uphold them – that can detect and restrain rivalries that flourish out of sight.

Fostering community-level interdependence – and the norms that evolved to help them function cooperatively – is therefore essential for combatting the exploitation that results from invisible rivalry. Never try to enforce cooperation from above. Instead, just as the economist Noreena Hertz argues we should replace ‘greed is good’ maxims in the capitalist framework with a community-oriented, cooperation-promoting mindset, appreciating that we are all better off when we work together is the critical insight needed for building a prosocial and equality-focused environment for the future.

Education is where this begins, not as moral uplift but as collective self-knowledge: it helps us see our own temptations clearly and translate that insight into practical scaffolding – laws, schools and civic rules that reward cooperation and raise the costs of exploitation. Cheating will never vanish, and some people will always look for an edge, but our distinctive intelligence lies as much in recognising exploitation and organising against it as in exploiting in the first place. Invest in that knowledge and in the local institutions that make fairness both appreciated and rewarded, and we will widen the space in which cooperation and equality can endure.

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

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Monday, February 9, 2026 5:29 PM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by second:

How selfish are we?
If Jeff Bezos, very:

Bezos lets Democracy Die in Broad Daylight

By David Remnick | February 8, 2026

https://www.newyorker.com/newsletter/the-daily/democracy-dies-in-broad
-daylight

It’s truly impossible to keep up, isn’t it?

Last week—after the Wall Street Journal broke more news about the Trump family’s dodgy crypto-business dealings and before the President shared a racist video of the Obamas depicted as dancing apes—the Amazon entrepreneur Jeff Bezos decided that one of his smaller properties, the Washington Post, has proved such a drag on his two-hundred-and-thirty-billion-dollar fortune that prudence required that he obliterate much of its newsroom.

Early in his proprietorship, Bezos endorsed a new motto for the paper: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” It turns out that one of democracy’s most celebrated media institutions can be strangled in broad daylight. On Wednesday, Bezos and the paper’s leadership fired a third of the staff. They shuttered or vastly reduced an array of sections. Lizzie Johnson, one of the Post’s leading foreign correspondents, received her digital pink slip while working in the war zone of Ukraine. Bezos did not offer his staff the decency of a public explanation, much less a gesture of generosity or regret. The publisher and C.E.O. Will Lewis did not appear on the “webinar” at which the cuts were explained to the staff. He did, however, manage to head off to the Super Bowl festivities. By Saturday evening, Lewis had resigned. His work was done. He will be succeeded by the paper’s chief financial officer, Jeff D’Onofrio, who has held posts at Tumblr, Google, and Yahoo.

As someone who worked happily at the Post for a decade a long time ago, and as an ardent reader of the paper, I am sick about all this. I feel like someone forced to watch an arsonist torch the house he grew up in. I cannot imagine how it must feel for the current staff and the hundreds forced to leave. If that is sentimentality or worse, well, then guilty as charged. The loss is terrible, the behavior is beyond heedless. The reporters and editors who remain at the Post will undoubtedly go on doing honorable work, but they must now do so for a proprietor who shows them no respect. And that is no way to live. (Ruth Marcus, a writer and editor at the paper for more than forty years, brings home superbly the anger and the sadness of the situation.)

Over the years, in these pages, I’ve written about both the former owner Katharine Graham and Ben Bradlee, the paper’s Watergate-era editor; for all their complexities, these were figures who built a great newspaper out of a mediocre one, who developed an institution that worked not only in the interest of financial gain but of democratic vitality. That standard of quality endured, but, by 2013, Don Graham, a decent man and a devoted publisher who inherited the leadership of the company from his mother, came to realize that the revolutions in technology and the declines in advertising were so severe that he no longer had the capacity to invest effectively in the paper. After a long search, he sold the Post to Bezos, a vastly wealthier owner who promised to be an effective custodian.

For a while that worked; under Marty Baron, the paper was fiercely competitive, and thrived during Trump’s first term in office. Bezos was a decidedly detached owner, but he gave the newsroom what it needed and invested in both journalism and the technological support it requires. But during the Biden years, readership declined and, by 2024, as Trump headed toward a second election victory, Bezos clearly reassessed his interests and his sense of risk. His timidity prevailed. He quashed the paper’s impending endorsement of Kamala Harris. He sat in Oligarch Row at the Inauguration. He instructed the Opinion section to set a new, more conservative course. These were his prerogatives, many argued, but they were hardly wise. With every move, more subscribers fled—surely one of the worst own goals in the history of the news business.

Undoubtedly, Bezos believes that all the criticism that has come his way is naïve, self-righteous, and terribly unfair. How could his critics possibly understand the business the way he does? In some sense, every aggressive story on the Administration that the paper publishes allows Bezos to tell himself that he has not retreated at all.

For the sake of financial and moral context, perhaps this is as good a time as any to remind ourselves of the maritime interests of the Post’s proprietor. Some commentators have mentioned that Bezos, in order to better support the Post, might have held on to the tens of millions of dollars he spent to bankroll “Melania,” a documentary portrait of the First Lady worthy of a long run at the Pyongyang Cinematheque. Cooler financial heads will contend that this is a cheap point. The Post’s losses are more significant. And they are right. Better then to turn to one of the Amazon founder’s more expensive recreations, his 125.8-metre, three-masted sailing yacht, Koru. (No need to get into the details of Abeona, the seventy-five-million-dollar “shadow boat” that trails Koru and provides a helipad and adequate space for extra staff.)

Koru cost an estimated five hundred million dollars. This is double what Bezos paid for the Washington Post. Annual maintenance runs tens of millions of dollars. It is, to be sure, a very special boat. According to Architectural Digest, “Bezos’s superyacht has a classical style, with a navy-blue steel hull and a two-level white aluminum superstructure. The ship’s teak decks include spots for outdoor lounging as well as three Jacuzzis and a swimming pool. Robb Report notes that the hull features traditional portholes, while the upper deck windows are smaller than typical, which might help to foil paparazzi trying to capture guests inside.” If that information about the boat is not galling enough, there is more: the Journal published a story on Friday by Richard Rubin headlined “Trump’s New Tax Law Saved Amazon Billions.” But the Ukraine correspondent had to go.

In the world of tech, so many of the leading tycoons and V.C. geniuses have a way of convincing themselves that because they have made a fortune, because they know one big thing, they know everything. Everyone else is a Luddite or a dewy-eyed fool. Maybe Bezos will find a way to stay in good odor with a vindictive President and, at the same time, transform the Post so that it can “do more with less,” and all those other whiteboard phrases popular from Wall Street to Palo Alto. No one doubts that change, even painful change, is necessary. But the scale of the cuts last week, coupled with the lack of any sense of a strategy other than retreat, is beyond demoralizing. Bezos has made it plain that his commitment to the Post, to say nothing of his performative talk about democracy, has diminished to the vanishing point.

The Post is hardly the first major American publication to face a financial crisis. It wasn’t so long ago that the New York Times was caught in an existential fix. Who would buy it, people asked knowingly, the Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim or Michael Bloomberg? And yet the Sulzberger family, with a tiny fraction of the Bezos fortune but infinitely greater determination and integrity, found a way to thrive. Bezos, by contrast, is immersed in his primary business, a space race, an active vacation life, and much else. After a promising beginning at the paper, he just does not seem to have the focus or the courage to do what is necessary to guide the Post through an unstable and threatening era. With Trump in office, he refuses to see that, although the Post is valued less in financial terms than his yacht, he is responsible for a priceless commodity. Will he rock the boat? Will he ultimately do the right thing? So far, the evidence offers only misery.

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

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Monday, February 9, 2026 5:37 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:


Widdle dick Second is just jealous that it's not his name that's up on every building.



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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
Renaming monuments after himself is proof that Trump


Whatever you say, widdle dick.



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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Friday, February 20, 2026 8:08 AM

SECOND

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


How one country stopped a Trump-style authoritarian in his tracks

What Brazil got right that America got wrong.

By Zack Beauchamp | Feb 18, 2026, 8:55 AM CST
https://www.vox.com/authors/zack-beauchamp

https://www.vox.com/politics/479290/brazil-democracy-trump-bolsonaro-m
ultiparty

• In 2018, Brazil elected a president named Jair Bolsonaro who attempted the sort of authoritarian power grabs that President Donald Trump is currently doing in the United States. Except the key word is attempted: Unlike in America, Brazil’s Congress and Supreme Court worked to constrain the president and severely limit his ability to act like an elected dictator.

• The important difference was that, in Brazil, the incentives for public officials looked radically different. The combination of a multiparty system and a culture of legislative self-dealing, even outright corruption, prevented the emergence of US-style extreme partisanship — producing a legislature and judiciary primed to protect their powers against an aggressive executive.

• This gives us some real insight about how to fix American democracy going forward: to pass reforms that alter the incentives for legislators in particular, giving them good self-interested reasons to prefer systemic stability over partisan loyalty.

BRASÍLIA, Brazil — André Borges’s aunt was pregnant when they took her.

Borges, now 50, grew up under Brazil’s military dictatorship. In power from 1964–1985, the regime was violently censorial — banning any speech it deemed subversive or leftist. Borges’s aunt was arrested simply for owning a book by a Marxist author. Unlike many others, her detention was brief; her father knew someone with pull in the regime, who made a phone call and got her released within a day.

Sitting in a left-wing bookshop in the capital city of Brasília, Borges tells me this story to underscore the fragility of Brazilian democracy. A political scientist who studies polarization and the Latin American right, he does not believe that Brazil has truly exorcised the demons of the past. The military is still uncomfortably involved in political life; as memory of the dictatorship recedes, citizens are increasingly oblivious to the danger.

But I had not come to Brazil to discuss its democracy’s vulnerabilities. Quite the opposite; I wanted Borges, and others like him, to help me understand why the Brazilian system proved far more capable than its American cousin at a paramount task: protecting democracy from a civilian president who wished to be dictator.

In 2018, Brazilian voters elected Jair Bolsonaro — a former military captain and congressional backbencher — to the presidency. An open admirer of the military regime, Bolsonaro ran as an outsider against a political class that Brazilians widely (and correctly) regard as deeply corrupt. Once in office, he pushed aggressively to consolidate power in his own hands.

But while Bolsonaro’s efforts resembled what Donald Trump has done in his second term in the United States, the response from other branches was markedly different.

While the US Congress and the Supreme Court have helped Trump build an imperial presidency, their Brazilian equivalents held the line. Center-right parties in Congress refused to rubber-stamp Bolsonaro’s power grabs. Brazil’s Supreme Court repeatedly blocked the president’s authoritarian moves, and led aggressive probes into crimes against democracy.

Unable to accrue power through legal channels, Bolsonaro turned to the military, convening top generals in 2022 to discuss a coup. Yet the heads of the Air Force and the Army rebuffed him. When Bolsonaro’s hardcore supporters attempted a putsch on January 8, 2023 — an insurrection in Brasília deeply influenced by January 6, 2021 — the military did not join the uprising. After an extensive inquiry and trial, Bolsonaro and several key allies were sentenced to lengthy prison stints for the coup plot and subsequent riot.

On the Right

On paper, the outcomes in the United States and Brazil should have been reversed. Democratic strength tends to track a democracy’s wealth and age — and the United States is both the world’s richest country and its oldest democracy. Brazil is a middle-income country that was governed by a military regime so recently that middle-aged citizens remember living under it.

And yet, when the test came, Brazil’s core democratic institutions — the legislature, courts, and federal agencies — defended democracy far better than their American peers.

Why?

To find out, I spoke with all sorts of different Brazilians during my travels: from politicians and bureaucrats to journalists and political scientists, and even one of Bolsonaro’s longtime neighbors.

What I found was a paradox: that some of the biggest problems in Brazil’s democracy, issues that fueled Bolsonaro’s rise in 2018, also made the system almost uniquely resistant to the tactics Trump is using in America today.

“We certainly have weaker institutions than the US does,” said Pedro Doria, editor-in-chief of the Brazilian news outlet Meio. “But in a certain sense, our strength comes from the fact that our institutions are weak.”

To learn Brazilian democracy’s lessons, we need to first sit with this tension. And we need to understand Brazil as it is: not as an idealized foil for America, but a real place in all its complexity. Only then can we identify how we can make America’s institutions as willing to fight for democracy as Brazil’s.

An unlikely success story

In Rio de Janeiro, I climbed a set of hilly, narrow streets to meet another well-known political scientist named Carlos Pereira for a drink.

He had described our destination as a music bar, but that did the place a disservice: It was more like a gigantic party that snaked across at least two blocks, with a small building housing the band stage at the center of it. It was hot in Rio, the peak of the mid-January summer, but people packed in anyway. A vegan brownie salesperson dressed up as a cannabis leaf roamed the crowd.

The ambience made talking tricky, but Pereira wanted me to experience “the real Brazil” while I was visiting. I think, though, he may also just have been in a partying mood — and I could see why. Brazil’s emergence from democratic crisis seems to have vindicated the argument he had staked his career on: that its constitution works.

Why I reported this

Many people had pointed out the striking difference between how Brazil responded to the January 8 riots versus how the United States responded to January 6. But what no one had done, at least in any depth, is look at the period before that — when Bolsonaro was president — and compared it to Trump’s second term so far.

How is it that, when faced with an openly undemocratic leader, Brazil’s Congress and Supreme Court performed so much better than their twins in the United States?

When Brazil’s military dictatorship fell in 1985, the country elected a constitutional congress to build a new system from scratch. What they came up with, called the Citizen Constitution of 1988, was heavily modeled on the United States: a president, a bicameral Congress, and a federal system with 26 states and a federal district.

But the Chamber of Deputies, Brazil’s lower legislative body, is different from the US House. The US has local districts that elect representatives by a winner-take-all system: whoever gets the most votes wins. Brazil, by contrast, has proportional representation: Each state has a set number of seats, allocated to different parties based on their percentage of the state popular vote.

While the US system encouraged consolidation into two parties, the Brazilian system allowed for many parties to win a slice of national power. All it took was a relatively small fraction of the vote in one state. There are currently 20 parties in the chamber, making it one of the most fragmented legislative bodies in the world.

At the time, many American experts (and some prominent Brazilians) predicted disaster. With so many parties splitting seats, no president could hope to have a partisan majority in Congress. Instead, presidents would have to build coalitions and strike deals with out-parties, a system that seemed prone to legislative gridlock and even collapse.

“The combination of presidentialism and multipartism makes stable democracy difficult to sustain,” Scott Mainwaring, a political scientist at the University of Notre Dame, wrote in an influential 1993 article. “Not one of the world’s 31 stable democracies has this institutional configuration.”

But for the next 20 years, Brazil’s system flourished. Two historically successful presidencies — center-right Fernando Henrique Cardoso, followed by the first two terms of the current president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva — tamed the country’s hyperinflation crisis and significantly expanded its welfare state. Between 1990 and 2010, Brazil’s GDP per capita grew by over 40 percent. By 2013, the country had formally eradicated extreme poverty.

Pereira was part of a generation of Brazilian political scientists who began their careers during Brazil’s stratospheric rise. In his view, the policy accomplishments under Cardoso and Lula were not in spite of its system but because of it.

In a 2012 article co-authored with Marcus André Melo, Pereira argued the key to Brazil’s system lay in the relationship between the president and Congress. Unlike in two-party systems, where presidents count on partisan loyalty to pass bills, presidents in multiparty democracies have to trade specific favors. Sometimes, this means appointing leaders of other parties to the Cabinet. Other times, it means using presidential powers to direct ungodly levels of pork-barrel spending to states represented by swing legislators.

Indeed, the dominant bloc in Congress is neither the ideological left aligned with Lula nor the radical right associated with Bolsonaro. It is instead something called the Centrão (Big Center): a loose group of parties that are center-right ideologically, but in practice willing to deal with any president who will help them secure pork funding and ignore their pervasive corruption.

Brazil thus replaced the American political logic of partisanship and ideology with self-interest and graft. Most deputies do not even aim to represent the general interest, but rather to secure enough pork for their constituents to ensure reelection. And the system encourages Brazil’s executive to overlook the endemic corruption in the legislature; without ideological votes, a push for anti-corruption campaigns will not only fail but also alienate the corrupt.

Pereira and Melo acknowledged these downsides, but argued that they were not existential. The self-interested logic bound Brazilian leaders to the system, giving them a direct financial and careerist stake in maintaining democracy.

“We see a powerful presidency but also a potent web of watchdogs standing on guard to prevent wrongdoing,” they write. “All relevant political forces have found it best to keep submitting their interests and values to the uncertain interplay of democratic institutions.”

Soon after they wrote this, Brazil’s democracy would plunge into crisis.

Stopping Trumpism before it started

In 2014, Brazilian investigators uncovered shocking evidence of corruption at the highest levels of Brazilian politics. The multibillion-dollar “Lava Jato” scandal, one of the largest in the history of any democracy, implicated a vast swath of Brazil’s political, economic, and social elite — producing the greatest period of turmoil since the dictatorship fell.

President Dilma Rousseff, a former anti-dictatorship guerrilla and Lula’s chosen successor in the left-wing Workers’ Party (PT), was impeached in 2016 for alleged financial improprieties unrelated to the investigation. Her vice president, the center-right Michel Temer, was criminally charged as part of Lava Jato in 2017. Lula was arrested and convicted on (extremely dubious) corruption charges in 2017 as well; when he tried to run for president again in 2018 from prison, the courts blocked him.

All of this played out during a major economic downturn. Together, they caused an explosion of anti-incumbent sentiment in much the same manner as the twin shocks of inflation and revelations about President Joe Biden’s age did in 2024.

Thus, what Pereira and Melo identified as the glue holding Brazilian democracy — the transactional character of its legislators — set the stage for the rise of a would-be autocrat.

In early 2018, reporter Ana Clara Costa spent roughly two months with Jair Bolsonaro on the campaign trail. When we met for coffee in Rio, Costa summarized her impressions of the man during those months in three words: “He was insane.”

“Everything he said was so narrow-minded…it was very much based on conspiracy theories, things that were trending on Facebook,” she recalls. “I thought he was [playing] a character, but…the character was what he was 24/7.”

Bolsonaro’s public record certainly supported her claims. He made no secret of his nostalgia for military dictatorship: When he voted to impeach Rousseff, he dedicated his vote to the army colonel who supervised her torture in the 1970s. Once, he told a female legislator that “I wouldn’t rape you because you don’t deserve it.” Another time, he told an interviewer that given the choice between one of his sons coming out as gay or dying, he’d prefer the latter.

Yet in an anti-incumbent moment, none of this was disqualifying — and perhaps even helped by situating him well outside the “normal” political elite. He won the 2018 election handily.

When Bolsonaro assumed office in January 2019, he had many of the same advantages as Trump did in 2025. Both men began with relatively high favorability numbers, owing to the combination of a rabid base and anti-establishment sentiment among swing voters. Both had a legislature with a center-right majority.

And both sought to take advantage in the same way: wielding presidential authority aggressively to consolidate power.

In his first weeks, Bolsonaro used the expansive formal powers of his office — including provisional decrees, which are like executive orders with the legal status of a law — to surveil NGOs, purge “disloyal” civil servants, and loosen gun restrictions. His moves pushed the boundaries of presidential power, cutting into authority rightly reserved for Congress.

“Bolsonaro, he’s not a politician in the common sense,” Thomas Traumann, the former minister of communications under Rousseff, said. “He doesn’t like to talk to people and negotiate; he just wants to issue orders.”

In the United States, Trump’s version — which was significantly more aggressive and legally dubious — faced little pushback from Congress. But in Brazil, legislators immediately fought back.

This congressional assertiveness wasn’t just an early-days phenomenon. According to data from Pereira and Melo, Bolsonaro issued 254 provisional decrees — by far the most any Brazilian president issued in a four-year term. Yet these decrees require congressional approval to remain in force, and the institution only provided it in 115 cases. This was the worst success rate of any president to serve a full term; in fact, he was the only such president who had fewer than 50 percent of their decrees approved by Congress.

Similarly, Congress voted to override a Bolsonaro veto on legislation 30 times over the course of his presidency. By comparison, the four prior presidents — stretching back to 1995 — had a total of nine vetoes overridden.

The evidence leaves little doubt that Bolsonaro would like to have acted as Trump has done in his second term. But unlike in the United States, legislators bristled at Bolsonaro’s efforts to arrogate lawmaking powers to himself. In effect, they stopped the rise of the imperial presidency before it started.

This resistance was, much like the Bolsonaro presidency itself, a product of the deep logic of the Brazilian system.

The “justice” statue

In the American two-party system, the entire right-wing ecosystem ran through the Republican Party — an organ that Trump controlled. Those center-right Republicans in Congress who have private qualms about Trump’s authoritarian politics do not, for the most part, dare criticize him publicly: They are too afraid for their jobs, social standing, and potentially even their lives. Many of them have acted like what the political scientist Juan Linz called “semi-loyal democrats”: people who pay lip service to democratic ideals, but act in a way that encourages and even normalizes the radicals.

Brazil’s multiparty system meant that Bolsonaro had no such control. Legislators had independent political support bases, and could win reelection without backing from the president.

Even more fundamentally, the self-interested logic that ran through the system gave center-right Centrão deputies incentives to actively defend the powers of their branch.

The Centrão cooperated with Bolsonaro when it suited them — he pushed through a major pension reform bill with their support in 2019. But they drew the line at his attempts to build an imperial presidency. The more power he got, the more threat he posed to their narrow interests. And Bolsonaro needed their support more than they needed his.

So from very early on, Brazil had the reverse institutional logic of the United States under Trump II: a center-right Congress calling the shots in a far-right administration.

“It’s very clear to me that Bolsonaro [wanted to be] a populist president who slowly undermines checks and balances,” Borges said. “But this wouldn’t be good for the old-style, traditional mainstream right. For them, it would be much better to have a weak president.”

The Supreme Court strikes back

About a year into Bolsonaro’s presidency, he faced his first major crisis: the coronavirus pandemic. And by all accounts, he botched it. His extreme opposition to both social distancing and vaccines, together with his embrace of crank cures like hydroxychloroquine, led to both mass death and a collapse in his poll numbers.

At the same time, Bolsonaro also became more and more openly authoritarian. At the beginning of the pandemic, he asserted an emergency power to ignore the requirement that Congress approve provisional decrees — effectively asking to be able to make law unilaterally. He arrested critics of his Covid policy using a dictatorship-era national security law, and launched eight times as many investigations under this law per year than the average under prior presidents. He moved repeatedly to block the work of government transparency watchdogs and nominated his hyperloyal chief bodyguard to run the national police.

Perhaps most ominously, he began a sustained attack on the integrity of Brazil’s elections, calling the country’s electronic voting system corrupt and trying to move to a paper system. On Election Day 2022, he sent federal police officers to obstruct access to polling stations in the opposition’s core territory in Brazil’s northeast.

Once again, institutions pushed back. Congress had acquired even greater say over Bolsonaro at this point: Facing Covid-related impeachment threats, he was obliged to strike a formal coalition deal with Centrão parties, ceding key control over the legislative agenda and the budget. Congress was able to both repeal the national security law and block the voting changes.

But it was Brazil’s judiciary that ultimately took center stage in the pushback against Bolsonaro. The country’s highest court blocked his provisional decree power grab, overturned his anti-transparency moves, stopped his crony police appointment, and moved within hours to remove roadblocks at polling stations.

The Brazilian Supreme Federal Court did not merely respond to Bolsonaro’s actions, but went on the legal offensive. In 2019, the Court asserted a novel power to open an investigation into threats made against judges by Bolsonaro allies and supporters. This unprecedented court-ordered inquiry spiraled into a wide-ranging investigation into “fake news” and anti-democratic activity led by Justice Alexandre de Moraes, a center-right former prosecutor who would, in 2022, take on a dual role as president of Brazil’s highest court for electoral matters (the Superior Electoral Court).

With backing from other justices, Moraes wielded his powers aggressively — emerging as the most effective and ruthless opponent of Bolsonaro’s power grabs.

The president repeatedly tried to challenge court authority. In 2021, for example, he turned out hundreds of thousands of supporters for rallies on Brazil’s Independence Day in which he openly promised to ignore Supreme Court rulings. But the political blowback was severe; two days after the rally, he released a humiliating public letter apologizing for things he said “in the heat of the moment.”

The judicial offensive against Bolsonaro was hardly a given. If you looked at the Court’s pre-Bolsonaro record, you might have predicted something like what happened in the United States: ideologically aligned justices greenlighting a president’s power grabs.

“The supreme court was heavily divided ideologically prior to Bolsonaro,” said Celso Rocha de Barros, a columnist at Folha de São Paulo (Brazil’s New York Times equivalent). “If you look at the two guys with the highest legal reputations, Gilmar Mendes and Luís Roberto Barroso, they hated each other. If you look for it on YouTube, there’s video of them cursing at each other during Supreme Court sessions.”

But the clearer Bolsonaro’s authoritarian agenda became, the more united the Court grew in opposing him.

So here we have a puzzle: Why did Brazil’s seemingly politicized Supreme Court manage to unite in defense of democracy in a way that SCOTUS demonstrably has not?

Once again, the multiparty system is a big part of the story. As in the United States, Brazil’s 11 Supreme Court justices are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. Except in Brazil, the Senate has members from roughly a dozen parties — meaning that presidents would never have the majority required to approve a true rubber-stamp justice.

“In Brazil, the Supreme Court is not partisan because you don’t have this two-party system,” said Christian Lynch, a prominent Brazilian legal theorist. “You can’t nominate a judge who is going to be loyal to you as a person, the president.”

But Lynch cautions against reducing the Court’s behavior to a simple mechanistic model, in which multipartyism guarantees good judicial behavior. There was an element of choice here: a decision by the justices to push back against Bolsonaro’s attempts to consolidate power in his own hands.

One surprising thing

Jair Bolsonaro had over three times as many vetoes overridden by Congress as the prior four Brazilian presidents combined. Imagine the current US Congress overriding even one of Trump’s!

This choice, he believes, reflects the post-dictatorship ideology of the Brazilian judiciary. Judges saw their role as not just adjudicating criminal cases, or even disputes between the branches, but rather as guarantors of the new democratic order. The Court’s expansive powers, in their view, can and should be wielded aggressively to both ensure democracy’s survival and promote its health.

From this perspective, the aggressive prosecution of corrupt politicians in the 2010s and the pushback against Bolsonaro in the 2020s reflected the same judicial approach: a self-confidence in its unique role as democracy’s guardians. Though the facts of the corruption cases split the justices, and the Bolsonaro situation united them, the ideological logic that governed rulings in both cases was similar.

The justices said as much, both in private and in public. In a remarkable April 2022 essay, then-Justice Luís Roberto Barroso openly positioned the Court as a bulwark against what he called an “institutional coup” by Bolsonaro, describing a court once divided on corruption cases but now “joined in the defense of democracy.” This was, he argued, necessary: Courts play a “decisive” role in resisting authoritarian presidents, and must proactively choose to resist them.

Tellingly, Barroso’s essay omits any praise for Congress. In fact, he writes that the Centrão is “allied” with Bolsonaro, describing the faction as being “renowned for its voracity for political offices and public funds.”

This rhetoric reflects another aspect of the court’s ideology, and of the Brazilian democratic paradox more broadly. Though Congress’s performance during Bolsonaro’s term is impressive from an American perspective, the Court mistrusted such a cynical and self-interested body. Here, the weakness of the system indirectly generated another strength: the problems in the legislature emboldening the Supreme Court to shoulder a greater amount of the burden of democratic defense than it might have been expected to.

“Now the judiciary is the ringleader in a process of defending democracy, when it is no longer the legislative branch, which should be,” says Tião Viana, a former senator and governor from Lula’s left-wing PT party. “Alexandre de Moraes is the expression of this.”

The mysterious non-coup

In October 2022, Brazilian voters delivered the greatest rebuke to Bolsonaro yet: denying him a second term in office. The election was closer than expected: Lula won in a second-round runoff with just 50.9 percent of the popular vote, the slimmest margin of victory of any president in Brazilian history. Support from the center-right was decisive: Some of Lula’s prominent rivals, like Geraldo Alckmin and Simone Tebet, backed the leftist on defense-of-democracy grounds.

When Lula’s victory was announced, nearly everyone in Brazilian politics immediately accepted the results. The exception, of course, was Bolsonaro. He started plotting a coup.

On December 7, the president met with his minister of defense and the heads of each branch of the military. Bolsonaro presented them with a draft of an order that would declare a state of emergency, annul Lula’s victory, and place Justice Alexandre de Moraes under arrest. While the head of the Navy signed on, both the Air Force and Army leaders refused. But they did not notify Moraes or the police — nor did they do so after a second meeting a week later, where Bolsonaro’s team again pitched them on the coup plan.

Stonewalled by top generals, Bolsonaro began plotting with some lower-ranked ones. At the same time, his supporters set up an encampment outside the army barracks in Brasília — and, on January 8, the mob swarmed the presidential palace, the Congress, and the Supreme Court simultaneously.

The attack was clearly shaped by the events of January 6, 2021. But instead of intending to convince members of Congress to vote to annul the election, the demonstrators were hoping to inspire the military to follow them out of the barracks and into the halls of power.

They were disappointed. Though the governor of the Federal District (DF), the state in which Brasília is located, was a Bolsonaro supporter who delayed deploying local police, Moraes stepped in swiftly — suspending the governor’s authority and ordering a deployment to quash the riot.

Police going through barricades, which had been destroyed.

In the months following, the justice — backed fully by his colleagues and the newly inaugurated President Lula da Silva— launched a sweeping investigation that uncovered the true scope of the coup plot. We know much of what we know about the plot thanks to depositions from the Army and Air Force chiefs, both of whom testified as part of the Moraes-ordered inquiry.

The evidence was damning enough to secure indictments for Bolsonaro, his former vice president, his defense secretary, and dozens of other generals and aligned officials. Late last year, Bolsonaro and his allies were convicted of masterminding a conspiracy against Brazilian democracy. He was sentenced to 27 years in prison and is currently serving time; a separate electoral court ruling, in 2023, had already disqualified him from running for public office until 2030.

The Bolsonaro inquiry has become the signature moment for the courts: the definitive example of both its vital role in safeguarding democracy and the damage it did to democratic freedom along the way.

From an American point of view, it’s hard not to be jealous of a country where a former president incited an insurrection and actually suffered consequences for it. But in the pursuit of accountability, Moraes asserted extraordinary powers — including authority to suspend the DF governor and imprison people without trial if they made violent threats on social media. He both led the investigation into Bolsonaro and served as the presiding judge in the trial.

Even some supporters of Moraes’s actions, like Meio’s Pedro Doria, describe his actions as a kind of democratic chemotherapy: necessary to defeat the cancerous coup plot, but with dangerous side effects that Brazilians now must reckon with.

Moraes’s approach was one “that involves weak institutions, that involves constitutional hardball playing, and that involves a system that’s not a full-fledged liberal democracy,” Doria said. “But for the first time in our history, we survived to live another day, and we have a shot at getting this right in the next decades.”

As Brazilians still debate the benefits and risks of Moraes’s growing power, they also contemplate another unsettling question: Why did the coup fail in the first place?

This can’t be credited to other institutional actors: Neither Congress nor the courts knew about the full scope of Bolsonaro’s plans until Moraes’s post-facto inquiry. The decision depended entirely on choices made by the Brazilian brass, which had in the past been relatively supportive of Bolsonaro. The military all but openly backed his 2018 bid, and his administration was staffed top to bottom with soldiers who dutifully carried out his orders (however questionable).

“The military themselves, they don’t have democratic convictions,” said Adriana Marques, a political scientist who studies civil-military relations in Brazil. “The military in the government used to say that Bolsonaro won the election, so he can do what he wants to do [without limits].”

Soldiers in dress uniforms stand at attention as Bolsonaro passes.

No one knows for sure why the military made the choices they did. The officers’ stony commitment to public silence makes their true intentions hard to divine. In Brasília, I was scheduled to meet with an admiral to discuss all of this. At the last minute, he dropped out — citing an alleged family emergency.

The best theory I’ve heard, advanced by Marques and others, is that their decision reflected not democratic principle but cost-benefit analysis. The generals simply had little to gain from backing Bolsonaro’s coup, and would be risking quite a lot in doing so.

Without consolidated elite support, and with the notion of a coup deeply unpopular with the public, the military would have had a very difficult time consolidating control over the country without risking chaos, economic upheaval, and even mass death.

Moreover, the Biden administration had sent very clear signals that it wouldn’t tolerate a coup. Given the Brazilian military’s heavy dependence on the United States for training and advanced weapon systems, the specter of an aid cutoff from Washington was a powerful deterrent.

These are, to be clear, narrowly practical reasons to reject Bolsonaro’s plan. Few informed people I met in Brazil believed the military had truly come to believe in civilian rule as a matter of principle.

In the United States, by contrast, there is a very long tradition of the military keeping out of civilian affairs. But at present, there is a live debate over whether Trump will order security services to interfere with voting during the midterm elections.

What choice will they make, if faced with a similar test to their Brazilian counterparts?

Brasília on the Potomac

On January 8, I attended the president’s official commemoration of the riots three years earlier. Standing in a hall in the presidential offices, I spotted politicians chatting with uniformed generals behind velvet ropes — their very presence, seemingly, a reassurance that the coup plot had been contained.

The stage featured a giant photo of the Brasília skyline, such as it is, with the phrase “defesa da democracia” emblazoned on it. Geraldo Alckmin, now well into his term as Lula’s vice president, claimed that their victory saved Brazilian democracy.

“If they attempted a coup d’état after losing the elections, imagine what they would have done if they had won the elections,” he said.

People gather to mark and celebrate a date now remembered as a symbol of strength and resistance for Brazilian democracy.

Two days earlier, Washington marked its first anniversary of January 6 with Trump back in office — and, in a way, proved Alckmin’s point.

There were no solemn presidential proclamations marking the day, as there had been under Biden, nor even the vaguest of gestures toward respect for democracy from the president. Instead, a group of rioters who had ransacked the Capitol, pardoned by Trump immediately on his return to power, reenacted January 6 by marching from the White House to the Capitol.

It is important not to overstate Brazil’s democratic stability, even in comparison. Its weaknesses were on display even at Lula’s January 8 event. The crowds were sparse, illustrating the minimal role the public played in democracy’s defense. There were no actions during Bolsonaro’s term comparable to the No Kings protests or Minneapolis anti-ICE resistance.

Even more tellingly, the event’s centerpiece moment was a staged veto of a bill that would overrule court sentences for roughly 1,000 people convicted of coup-related crimes. The legislation, which would slash Bolsonaro’s sentence from 27 years to two, may still become law if the Centrão joins with Bolsonaro’s allies in Congress to support an override — a clear illustration of how the elite self-interest that helped stiffen resistance to Bolsonaro’s power grabs can just as easily turn against democratic accountability when circumstances change.

There is also a presidential election in the fall. While Bolsonaro is disqualified, his son Flávio is looking likely to be Lula’s chief rival. Lula is ahead in the polls currently, but his lead is not insurmountable — and the president turned 80 in October.

But these are problems that many Americans wish they had. It would be better if Congress acted as the first line of defense, resisting Trump’s power grabs before things got so bad that ordinary citizens needed to put their literal lives on the line. And it would be better if the US Supreme Court was not so deferential to the Trump administration, but so militantly pro-democratic that the concern was not complicity but rather overreaction.

So if we wanted to learn from Brazil — to think about how we could repair our system so, in the future, it might be as resilient as theirs — what lessons could we take away?

The first, and most obvious, would be to try to create a multiparty system.

This is certainly consistent with Pereira and Melo’s takeaway. Their excellent postmortem on the Bolsonaro presidency, titled “Why didn’t Brazilian democracy die?” argues that the crisis during his presidency basically vindicates their prior claims about the virtues and stability of Brazil’s multiparty system. And indeed, the international expert view on multiparty presidentialism has shifted quite far in their direction.

In a 2023 paper published by Protect Democracy, Scott Mainwaring — the American political scientist once so skeptical of Brazilian-style systems — conceded that he had gotten it wrong. He and his co-author, Lee Drutman, argued that the United States should move to a multiparty system — specifically, by adopting Brazilian-style proportional elections for the House that would provide safeguards against democratic erosion. They write:

Comparative evidence suggests that presidential democracy is most likely to fail when the president’s party has a majority in both chambers of the national Congress. A moderate multiparty system would likely induce most presidents to govern more toward the center so as to be able to pass legislation.

The Brazilian case certainly provides real evidence for these conclusions. If the political stars align for something like it, I’d support it — but that likely won’t happen anytime soon. So, is there any way to adopt Brazilian-style safeguards against authoritarianism in the meantime?

There is — but we have to shift our focus from structures to incentives.

Brazilian legislators win reelection by providing tangible goods for their constituents. American legislators depend on highly partisan primary voters and the national reputation of their party.

The Brazilian system has problems: It promotes wasteful spending and outright graft. But the American system has bigger ones: It creates ideologically disciplined parties whose members are terrified of bucking an in-party president. This is why a Republican Congress and a Supreme Court confirmed by GOP majorities are so much more supine in the face of Trump than their Brazilian peers.

To Brazilianize the US political system, then, we need to think of specific ways to change the incentives for legislators: to make politics less ideological, and more tied to place and specific deliverables for constituents.

On the electoral front, this might involve a national ban on partisan gerrymandering (which nearly became law during the Biden presidency) and the reform, or ideally abolition, of legislative primary elections (a corrosive American practice with no real peers elsewhere). These two reforms, when put together, would increase the number of representatives in both parties who were responsive to more mainstream electorates — creating incentives for a Brazilian-style culture of dealmaking rather than pure partisanship.

America should also take inspiration from Brazil’s approach to congressional oversight. Currently, Congress has no formal role in approving or rejecting executive orders, allowing members of a president’s party to easily deflect accountability for power grabs by saying it’s out of their hands. But if the United States adopted a version of the Brazilian provisional decree system, mandating that executive orders expire within a set number of days absent affirmative congressional approval, members of a president’s party could be held more directly responsible for White House actions — giving purple-state legislators more incentives to buck the party.

These specific reforms are hardly exhaustive: They would not fully “fix” Congress, let alone the Supreme Court or corroded institutions like the Department of Justice. But no study of another country will yield a single reform idea that saves American democracy on its own. Foreign models are best seen as rough templates, not strict blueprints — sources of broad guidance, rather than rigid prescriptions.

And the most valuable insight from Brazil is not that its specific system is the best possible, but rather that its operating logic — its ability to bind political actors to democracy through self-interest and incentives — was incredibly effective at hemming in a would-be authoritarian. American reformers need to start reflecting on that lesson and designing policies that work in our context (with an eye toward not replicating Brazil’s corruption problem).

I believe that Americans will soon have an opportunity to put this into practice. Trump’s authoritarian project will likely fail as Bolsonaro’s did, albeit for very different reasons. Its failure should create an opening to build new barriers against any future president who tries to replicate his unilateral rule.

In that future, we had best be humble enough to learn from younger democracies like Brazil — places that, as of late, have much better democratic recent track records than our own.

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

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