PERHAPS SILICON VALLEY’S BRIGHTEST have miscalculated. I suspect those leading and investing in the AI labs have underestimated—vastly underestimated—the chance that progress in machine intelligence can be slowed, damaged, or outright strangled by political forces outside the industry’s control.
LAST MONTH American Affairs published my review of Alexander Karp’s The Technological Republic. While I had plenty critical to say about Karp’s book, the meat of my essay was a historical survey of the ascendant “Eastern Establishment” of the Gilded Age. This class of men dominated American industry and exerted outsized influence in American politics in the decades between 1860 and 1930. They pioneered humanity’s leap into the industrial age and America’s rise to global preeminence. Much can be learned from them.
There are two groups who may reap special benefits from pondering the old Establishment’s origins and accomplishments.
In November 2024, I traveled to India as part of a delegation hosted by the India Foundation. The foundation is a part of the new nationalist establishment steering Indian society. As they see things, India’s relationship with America has been mediated by hostile parties for too long. On the Indian side you have Congress-sympathizing functionaries; on the American side, a set of intellectuals and diplomats who can neither speak for nor to the American right. Direct links between Indian and American nationalists are needed.
So I was invited India.
Two items of interest passed through my feeds this week. The first is the podcast Marc Andreesen and Ben Horowitz released to explain why they are endorsing Trump for president. The second is an evocative and viral internet advertisement for careersbuilttolast.com, a slick recruiting website trying to attract young workers to production lines in the maritime industrial base. If you have not seen the ad yet, please watch it now:
The Republican and Democratic parties are not the same: power flows differently within them. The two big political news items of this week—the happenings of the Republican National Convention and the desperate attempts of many Democrats to replace their candidate before their own convention next month—reflect these asymmetries. Nevertheless, many discussions of American politics assume that that the structures and operational norms of the two parties are the same. If these party differences were more widely recognized, I suspect we would see fewer evangelicals frustrated with their limited influence over the GOP party platform, fewer journalists shocked with J.D. Vance’s journey from never-Trump land to MAGA-maximalism, and greater alarm among centrist Democrats about the longer-term influence that the Palestine protests will have on the contours of their coalition.
Last month’s essay “The Problem of the New Right” caused a small stir. Formal writeups have been authored by Ross Douthat, Eric Levitz, Jordan Bloom, Lars Schonander, Peter Spilakos, and Aaron Ren. On Twitter there was even more chatter about the essay, much of it critical. I have found the critiques of my piece […]
In the world of conservative thought, the intellectual energy lies with the New Right. The New Right can be found in the society of Washington wonks, Silicon Valley dissidents, New York writers, and all manner of GOP politicos.[1] Many served in the Trump administration at one level or another; all are interested in taking the […]
Here is a question that has fascinates: how to account for the disastrous foreign policy of George W. Bush, when his foreign policy team returned to office in 2001 as the most credentialed and accomplished group of foreign policy professionals Washington had seen in the modern nat-sec era? How did the men and women who […]
Image Source Eric Levitz has a thought provoking interview with David Shor up over at New York Magazine. Shor is a electoral whiz kid who seems to have been making waves in the world of liberal polling for some years, but only came to national prominence a few months ago when he was fired from […]
Image Source I have a new essay out in the National Review which extends some of yesterday’s thoughts on the limits and attractions of the “common good” conservatism to a new topic: the generational divide that currently divides thinkers on the American right. The Sanders/Biden primary has drawn attention to the parallel phenomena on the […]
