DeLong's Grasping Reality Weblog

It rebukes. It hands out mandates. It shares one mind, one heart, one spirit, and one will. What is it? It is Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s General Will, his La Volonté Générale. For, you see, when people vote, they either do or should do so based not on what they personally will but based on what they think the generality wills. And political liberty consists in being able—indeed required—to carry out the general will once majority voting has ascertained it, even or perhaps especially if one were to discover when the votes are counted that one had been mistaken about what the general will actually was. These Rousseauist ideas, or perhaps their ghosts, are leading to an awful lot of fuzzy thinking today. And they may spark a great deal of additional trouble in the future:

And commentators who think they do and certainly would reject Jean-Jacques Rousseau outright are reasoning from him anyway.

Share

The result is a bad reading of a shift at the margin, in a country still split along at least six largely independent lines of division. the move from R+1 to D+13 means only one voter in fourteen chose differently, and 60% of that came from turnout rather than people switching sides. The Republican floor is still about 13/28 of the electorate. The result is real and welcome, but it is not a change of a single unitary national heart. Calling it one is rather clownish.

For example, Andrew Prokop is said and I personally know him to be a smart man.

But Andrew Prokop is simply not anchored in reality today.

Give a gift subscription

Two years ago, a hair less than half the people who went to the polls voted for Democratic candidates. On November 3, 2026, 8/14 of the people who went to the polls voted for Democratic candidates. That’s 1/14 of the poll-goers changed their minds, or dropped out and were replaced by others who thought differently. That is a marginal change in how Americans think and vote. And yet we have:

Andrew Prokop: A Massive Blue Wave Just Hit America. Here’s What It Could Bring Next <https://www.vox.com/politics/508927/midterms-blue-wave-democrats-win-texas>: ‘Democrats won bigger than practically anybody expected Tuesday, and the post-Trump political era is here…. It’s a blue tsunami…. President Donald Trump’s approval cratering, and mounting outrage over gas prices, the war in Iran, healthcare, and corruption…. The historic shift…. Americans are waking up in a different country today — one in which voters have decisively repudiated Trump’s party…. The night was also, as election analyst Sean Trende put it, “a complete collapse of the Republican coalition.” Democrats will now have a chance to carry out the mandate they’ve been handed…

Share DeLong's Grasping Reality Weblog

And we have:

Derek Thompson: The Trump Decade Is Over <https://www.derekthompson.org/p/the-trump-decade-is-over>: ‘Ten years ago this week, Donald Trump stunned the world to win the US presidential election. Last night, in his final midterm election, the president’s party suffered a historic collapse…. I think the Trump Decade is over. And, frankly, I think I might still be in a state of shock…. When commentators say “I don’t recognize this country,” they typically mean it in a bad way. But, in my frazzled state of disbelief, I’m genuinely finding it hard to wrap my mind around an election result where Kansas voted like New Hampshire and Mississippi voted like Wisconsin…

Leave a comment

And:

Timothy Burke: The News: The White Feather <https://timothyburke.substack.com/p/the-news-the-white-feather>: ‘It’s all good news today. It’s great news, in fact. Resist anyone who tries to reductively encompass the electoral results… as just being about a couple of narrow mistakes: a war here, a tariff there. That bullshit is already being shovelled…. This was a strong national majority saying that they’re sick of…the dysfunction… cruelty… the American government… threatening to attack Canada and seize Greenland… masked paramilitary goons drag[ging] men and women out of their cars… the corruption… oligarchs doing as they please… plugging beef tallow and ivermectin… seeing a President kiss Putin’s ass… watching white-collar criminals buy their way to pardons…. Voters who went [Democrats’] way are furious over… the entirety of the last decade, with everything from 2016 until November 3, 2026, including the Biden interregnum…. More than a few actors and screenwriters and publicists and producers… began to laboriously reinvent themselves as loyally MAGA-adjacent…. Our job now [is] to hold the cowards accountable…. It was only two years that they needed to dig in before this country’s people forcibly demanded change. We need that generation… to step aside…. They ran in cowardly disarray…. We need to be ready in 2028 to move decisively into a future where dreams are possible and nightmares a fading memory…

Refer a friend

And:

Noah Smith: Normal Americans Punished MAGA <https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/normal-americans-punished-maga>: ‘Texas and Kansas and South Carolina have been turned blue by a coalition of voters who aggressively, emphatically neither know nor care about gender-swapped Draco Malfoy, or Anakin Skywalker memes, or any of the other nonsense that bounces around the rightist echo chambers on X and 4chan. It was a coalition that never read Elon’s never-ending stream of tweets about James Talarico wanting to “trans your kids and destroy the border”. It was a coalition that does not know or care whether it’s white French people or brown French people burning down Paris this week…. Normal Americans do exist — in great numbers, in fact….

The risk now is that [Democrats] don’t learn…. Just as MAGA convinced themselves that the average American was a meme-spouting rightist, Democrats might marinate in their own echo chambers, egged on by leftist activists and progressive pressure groups and Bluesky cancel-culture warriors…

Get 75% off a group subscription

And:

Zack Beauchamp: Trump’s Authoritarianism Caused the Democratic Tsunami <https://www.public-reason.com/p/trumps-authoritarianism-caused-the>: ‘This election was primarily a revolt against Trump — and, specifically, his flagrant disinterest in actually delivering… cost-of-living improvements…. The Iran war is the biggest culprit, but corruption and the tariffs seem (among other things) to have mattered. These decisions were… the direct product of the authoritarian structure of the second Trump administration…. American democracy is a lot more resilient than is widely appreciated. There are very few other countries where an elected strongman has received this kind of decisive rebuke from voters less than two years after launching an authoritarian takeover bid…. Deep reservoirs of American democratic strength pushing back on him. That’s pretty damn great…

And:

Matthew Yglesias: The Way Forward <https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-way-forward>: ‘The country that delivered a real mandate to Donald Trump in 2024 — a mandate to secure the border and bring down inflation — turned sharply against him because he utterly failed to bring down inflation and embarked on an alarming orgy of corruption. Those choices set the table for a plausible Democratic Senate majority despite the map, and then Democrats ran very good candidates in a lot of key races…. If they make smart choices, they can spend the next two years putting the boot on the neck of MAGA and the four after that restoring the country’s confidence in Democrats. If they get sloppy, lazy, or undisciplined, we’ve seen over and over again that large electoral swings are very real and they happen in both directions…

To all of these, my friends, I say: NO NO NO NO NO NO NO! NO!!!!!

Probably it was that madman Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s fault. He wrote that when people vote in elections they do not or should not vote for what would be good for them individually but for what would be good for all collectively:

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1762): The Social Contract <https://www.gutenberg.org/files/46333/46333-h/46333-h.htm>: ‘When in the popular assembly a law is proposed, what the people is asked is not exactly whether it approves or rejects the proposal, but whether it is in conformity with the general will, which is their will. Each man, in giving his vote, states his opinion on that point; and the general will is found by counting votes. When therefore the opinion that is contrary to my own prevails, this proves neither more nor less than that I was mistaken, and that what I thought to be the general will was not so. If my particular opinion had carried the day I should have achieved the opposite of what was my will; and it is in that case that I should not have been free…

Thus the electorate, the people, is a hive-mind. Their disagreements are simply different noisy registers of what their collective will is. They really have one purpose, one mind, one set of values. Thus the opinion as registered by the majority is indeed the opinion of all—or of all in their best-self aspects, as fellow-citizens of the republic who believe in and share the general will.

That is the only context in which it makes any sense to find oneself speaking of voters as a group with a single agency that does things that it wills the same way I pick up this coffee cup at my left hand.

This is the only context in which it is anything other than ludicrous bozo-the-clownish nonsense to say that we have:

• Prokop’s “voters… decisively repudiated Trump’s party… Democrats… have been handed [a mandate]”,

• Trende’s “complete collapse of the Republican coalition”,

• Burke’s “voters… furious over… everything from 2016 until November 3, 2026, including the Biden interregnum…”

• Smith’s “coalition of… normal Americans… in great numbers”,

• Beauchamp’s “decisive rebuke… less than two years after launching an authoritarian takeover bid”,

• Yglesias’s “the exact same country… delivered a real mandate to Donald Trump in 2024… [and now has] turned sharply against him…”.

As I wrote earlier today <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/well-that-was-a-thing-bullet-dodged>: The Republican floor is still 13/28 of the electorate: older, whiter, rural, and “evangelical” (and profoundly unChristian, if I may say so). It splits roughly in half between self-described MAGA voters and party loyalists who say Trump wasn’t a factor in their vote. Four-fifths say high prices aren’t Trump’s doing. Few report feeling under affordability pressure. A move from R+1 in 2024 to D+13 in 2026 means only one voter in fourteen chose differently. Only 40% of that was conversion, and half of that was of people who say they dislike both parties. 60% was turnout.

In 2024 the Baddies won. In 2026 the Baddies lost. In neither case did the voters speak with their one single voice which is their shared general will. The country is divided: male-female, white-Black, nonHispanic-Hispanic, rich-poor, uneducated-educated, southernrural-northernurban, and more than those six largely-independent axes. And, since the ascension of Newt Gingrich in 1993, a Republican Party that has gone whole-hog behind the plan of doing everything they can to break the country in two along some of those fault lines in the hopes of coming away with the larger or at least the gerrymandered part so that they can please kleptocrats and plutocrats in this their life in office, and receive the rewards of their subservience in their next life in post-political retirement.

There are grave problems with a political system that rests upon the fiction that a country has a single general will that everyone shares, and that individual voters choose based on their noisy perception of that general will in which they participate. It would be good if there were such a general will. And much of the craft of political action is the use of public reason to construct such a thing.

Work hard to do so. But, meanwhile a great deal of nonsense is being said today, based on lazy and unexamined and false Rousseauist premises and assumptions that such a thing exists.

Subscribe now

Share DeLong's Grasping Reality Weblog

Give a gift subscription

If reading this gets you Value Above Replacement, then become a free subscriber to this newsletter. And forward it! And if your VAR from this newsletter is in the three digits or more each year, please become a paid subscriber! I am trying to make you readers—and myself—smarter. Please tell me if I succeed, or how I fail…##the-ghost-of-jean-jacques-rousseau-drives-men-mad-annoyance-of-the-day
##public-reason
##annoyance-of-the-day
#the-ghost-of-jean-jacques-rousseau-drives-men-mad
#general-will
#volonte-generale
#social-contract
#midterms-2026
#mandate-myth
#political-theory
#hot-takes
#swing-voters
#polarization
#democratic-theory

But who are those 1/14? They are less converts than shows and no-shows. Why did they choose differently? Corruption, checks-and-balances, and prices. And who the f*** are the 13/28 of those who show up to the polls who still think it is a good idea to pull the lever for Trump-subservient candidates? southern & rural & “evangelical” & in a different and non-factual universe:

My Visualization of the Cosmic All is simply not: it crashes, reboots, and then crashes again whenever I try to contemplate the 2024 next to the 2026 American electoral map.

The Republican floor is still 13/28 of the electorate: older, whiter, rural, and “evangelical” (and profoundly unChristian, if I may say so). It splits roughly in half between self-described MAGA voters and party loyalists who say Trump wasn't a factor in their vote. Four-fifths say high prices aren't Trump's doing. Few report feeling under affordability pressure. And for three hours last night Fox News viewers kept thinking that the vote was going to be D+5 rather than D+13 because that is what they were told. Mostly, the Republican floor simply inhabits a different and non-factual world.

A move from R+1 in 2024 to D+13 in 2026 means only one voter in fourteen chose differently. Only 40% of that was conversion, and half of that was of people who say they dislike both parties. 60% was turnout.

The move came because of prices, corruption, and checks-and-balances. 3/5 of voters:

• call corruption “crucial”,

• want congress to check the president,

• blame high prices on Trump's policies, with tariffs hurting the economy and the Iran war being a mistake.

Gas and diesel prices worry everyone.

We have:

What were the regions that swung Republican, and why? God knows what that Oregon red arrow is: I cannot figure it out: I conclude it is an early-data error. NY-12 (Manhattan) shifted 7.7%-points toward Republicans as Democrat Micah Lasher leads Republican Caroline Shinkle by only 77.2% to 20.0% in this election. South Dakota now looks like it moved toward the Democrats, but only by 1.9%-points (and Republican candidate Marty Jackley is, I am told, the well-regarded state attorney general). And the two midwestern arrows are also early-data errors.

At 6:50 pm pst on November 3, my daughter texted:

What did I miss?

I went to the gym and so only watched Fox News.

Yet by then it had been clear for two hours and more that there was no substantial polling error undercounting Republicans: that instead of polls being D+9 in a D+5 electorate polls were D+9 in a D+13 electorate. And yet Fox News (and Twitter) watchers were not aware of that fact.

Why the 1/14, and how did we get there? There were people who switched, people who voted for Trumplicans in 2024 who stayed home, and people who voted against Trumplicans in 2026 who did not show up in 2024, and the very large supermajority of the electorate who simply marked the same checkboxes.

Indeed, that is very important. The exit polls say that only about 1/33 of 2026 voters were Trump 2024 voters who backed a Democrat for the House, and about 1/100 went the other way. By contrast, the 2026 electorate who claim they voted in 2024 claimed that they voted Harris +3 in a country that went Trump +1.5. That doesn’t mean that they are telling the truth, or remembering correctly. But it is a straw.

Then you need to add in the first-time and lapsed voters breaking about 69–25 Democratic. The gains were largest among the groups Trump “borrowed” in 2024:

• under-30s,

• Latino men,

• Asian-Americans,

• Catholics,

• independents,

• low-income voters.

Their reason was the one they gave in 2024: prices. AP’s poll says: voters blamed Trump’s policies by name:

• 62% saying high prices were mostly Trump’s doing, and they went D 83–15.

• 65% said tariffs hurt the economy.

• 65% said Trump’s policies worsened the economy. Only 27% said they improved it.

• 63% called the Iran war the wrong decision. 74% said the war was a crucial or major factor, and they went D 63–35.

• 87% were concerned and 59% very concerned about gas and diesel prices, and they went D 65–33.

• 54% said Trump policies raised their healthcare costs.

Moreover, 54% of voters called corruption “crucial”, and went D 62–36.

• 62% saying Trump puts his own interests first, going D 85–12.

• 71% including 2/5 of Republicans said Congress is not doing enough to check Trump.

But:

• while 60% disapprove of ICE, and 57% say immigration enforcement has “gone too far”, even so Republicans still led on handling immigration 44–41. Immigration held the GOP floor together.

• 15% disliked both parties, and went D 59-34. This time.

• 38% viewed the Democratic Party unfavorably and the Republican Party favorably.

• AP reports voters choosing “needed change” over “right experience”.

• The Republican floor, the 13/28, lives in a different factual world. 80% say high prices aren't Trump's doing.

My map of the electorate has divided it male-female, white-Black, nonHispanic-Hispanic, rich-poor, uneducated-educated, and southernrural-northernurban, viewing those as six largely-independent axes. That is itself much too complex. But even that is, I think, not adequate for me to understand what is going on.

But it did matter. For the 1/14—which consist of 1/40 Harris 2024 voters showing up and Trump 2024 voters not, 1/40 switchers, and the rest new and lapsed voters—are enough to mean that while in 2024 the Baddies won, in 2026 the Baddies lost.

Thus we have:

Abdul Al-Sayed: <https://twitter.com/KaivanShroff/status/2117902502502846541>: ‘To all the parents who struggled to explain to their kids why the president openly mocks someone for their name or how they pray, let them know tomorrow that the bad guys lost…

Of course, that being Twitter, immediately below it—even in my Twitter feed carefully curated to show, overwhelmingly, rainbows and puppies and unicorns—we have this hive of scum and villainy:

And these are going to change, as they have not yet been properly reweighted:

Subscribe now

Share DeLong's Grasping Reality Weblog

Give a gift subscription

If reading this gets you Value Above Replacement, then become a free subscriber to this newsletter. And forward it! And if your VAR from this newsletter is in the three digits or more each year, please become a paid subscriber! I am trying to make you readers—and myself—smarter. Please tell me if I succeed, or how I fail…##well-that-was-a-thing-bullet-dodged-of-the-day
##public-reason
##neofascism
##dodged-of-the-day
#well-that-was-a-thing
#midterms-2026
#blue-tsunami
#exit-polls
#anti-trump-majority
#cost-of-living
#tariffs
#iran-war
#gas-prices
#government-corruption
#checks-and-balances
#fox-news-bubble

John Ganz distingishes between three things: (1) a fascist movement (which in the Holy Name of the One Who Is Trump certainly leads and stokes); (2) a fascist governmental executive (which Trump wants to lead, and which the corrupt partisan Republican Supreme Court supermajority is eager for him to create via the “unitary executive”); and (3) a fascist state and society (in which “coördination” has been accomplished and we see total bureaucratic and media and substantial cultural submission):

John’s thesis, as I understand it: Right-wing paramilitary street violence has failed to become a sustained political force.

Share

It is largely that failure that has saved us. It is that that has kept us from the roiling boil of martial law and police repression.

That roiling boil would have resulted in a régime that turns its punitive power into an effective military and police repressive force. Then that, with sufficient mass mobilization, would have produced the radicalization needed for full-blown fascism proper:

Unpopular Frontthe junk shop of history By John GanzCROSSPOST: JOHN GANZ: American NeoFascism: Where We Are At

<https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/where-were-at> <https://www.unpopularfront.news>

Unpopular FrontWhere We’re AtTonight from 8 PM, I’ll be doing a livestream with Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times to discuss the midterms. You can tune in on Jamelle’s YouTube channel, and I believe we’ll also have a link that we’ll drop on BlueSky, Twitter, and here in the chat and on “Notes…Read morea day ago · 102 likes · 17 comments · John GanzHow Fares the Fascism Thesis?John Ganz

2026-11-03

Almost exactly two years ago, I wrote a piece called “Testing the Fascism Thesis” with the subtitle “Keeping Myself Honest.” In it, I attempted to make the case that the fascism analogy wasn’t merely a piece of alarmist rhetoric but actually was a useful tool to assess the Trump movement and regime, and it even had some predictive power. I likened it to a “research programme” as described by the philosopher of science Imre Lakatos. In his theory, a “degenerating research programme” merely explains retroactively and alters its hypotheses to accommodate an emerging reality, but a “progressive research programme” will actually predict novel phenomena. I believed that the fascism research programme, as it were, had already proved itself to be progressive: believers that Trumpism had a lot in common with historic fascism predicted that something like January 6th would happen; doubters mocked this as mere hysteria. The fact that it didn’t work is immaterial, a little like saying that a diagnosis of cancer is false because the patient didn’t die. Of course, there are many different types and severities of cancer.

Back in November 2024, I hazarded 12 predictions of what a Trump regime might do if one understood it to be fascist or fascioid. I’d not invoke the philosophy of science today. I’ve become much more interested in what the Aristotelian tradition has to tell us about politics. For Aristotle, a historical analogy is part of a body of practical wisdom. It helps us judge a particular situation and deliberate on how to respond. Reasoning about real political events always deals with what’s merely probable: we can’t demonstrate our propositions with scientific certainty; we must always judge and therefore approximate, but we can do so with greater or lesser accuracy and revise our judgments based on the evidence. I’d probably say that the fascism analogy is an instance of what Aristotle called a paradeigma—the origin of our term “paradigm”—or reasoning by example, where one uses a historical case to illuminate a yet-unknown present one, proceeding from part to part, or “like to like.” In the Rhetoric, there’s a very apt example: Dionysius of Syracuse requested bodyguards; therefore it was reasonable to argue that he was planning a tyranny, since Peseistratus and Theaganes of Megara did the same before they installed their own tyrannies. In like manner, if Trump or his cronies are doing something that Mussolini or Hitler did, it might be reasonable to suspect they have similar designs. Fascism is just one analogy, one paradigm of political judgment, but it’s not the only one, nor even necessarily the best one, especially if applied in isolation or in a dogmatic and blinkered way. But I still insist it does supply something valuable to our understanding, especially if properly qualified and combined with other examples and experiences.

Anyway, all that theoretical throat clearing is sort of neither here nor there. The initial exercise stands, and right before the midterms, I’d like to go through the list and see what has come true and what hasn’t.

The use of state-tolerated or encouraged mobs, either organized into paramilitaries or quasi-organized, to physically intimidate, maim, or kill political enemies and even unreliable allies. This is a big one and arguably already has come true. If this is a regular part of the politics of the next few years, I think the fascism thesis is in pretty good shape…

It came true on January 6th, but then it really didn’t develop. Paramilitaries and street fighters are not really a part of the political practice of Trumpism 2.0. The Proud Boys are not out there cracking skulls; The militias are not roving the streets of American cities. Researcher Dan Trombly, who wrote a guest post on political violence for this newsletter, called this a “failure to become fascist”: “the rise and decline of streetfighters as symptomatic of their failure to generate a dynamic fascist force within the MAGA movement.” I think this is very well-observed: there has been a marked sense of disappointment and failure of the most fascist elements within MAGA among the extreme right.

The use of mobs/paramilitaries as deputies to general state repression of dissent. This also would be a big red flag, but I have less confidence in this coming true. I think the cops will be enough.

Similar to the above. There are, however, two things to consider: First, there have been quite a bit of death threats and harassment directed at those who obstruct the administration—particularly judges and their families—suggesting that decentralized intimidation can do some of the same work as an organized mob. Second, the administration’s use of ICE against political speech and protest is a clear effort to turn a federal agency into a political police force.

Suspending elections or using violence, particularly assisted by paramilitaries or mobs, to disrupt elections. I don’t really see elections being in serious danger—at least, at first…

Well, we’ll see tonight, I guess, but I really don’t see the attempts to subvert the midterms being successful or even significant. I predict a pretty normal election. With that being said, they are trying to do something, and their apparent inability to pull it off tells us more about the limits of their power than the limits of their ambitions.

The use of the state security apparatus on domestic political rivals. This one needs no explanation…

Confirmed, but with significant failures. Comey and James are the obvious examples, but this goes well beyond Trump settling personal scores. The NSPM-7 memorandum gives the hunt for domestic enemies a bureaucratic framework, complete with investigations into political organizations and their supposed paymasters. The Justice Department placed the prosecution of 15 people associated with Direct Action Minnesota under this umbrella. Officials also called the Prairieland terrorism convictions an opening victory in their war on “antifa.” Prosecuting someone for shooting a police officer is one thing; treating the incident as a warrant to go hunting the left and its “funding networks” is another.

The use of federal troops and officers for mass deportations; the creation of a system of detention camps for the same purpose…

Yes, but again with some big failures and retreats along the way. Federal officers, military deportation flights, detention camps on military bases: all of these have happened. Add the wanton cruelty of third-country deportations, shipping people to countries where they have no ties, and the delivery of Venezuelans to El Salvador’s CECOT prison, where Human Rights Watch and Cristosal documented systematic torture. But the most grandiose plans have not survived contact with reality: the projected 30,000-person operation at Guantánamo was scaled back, and the much-hyped “Alligator Alcatraz” abandoned after less than a year. Surging arrests have run up against legal and logistical limits on deportations. But falling short of the administration’s ambitions is cold comfort to the people caught in the machinery.

The purging of “old regime” military officials and bureaucrats and replacement with new regime loyalists…

Confirmed, with pronounced racial, gender, and ideological dimensions. The purge of supposedly “woke” military leadership includes Joint Chiefs chairman General C. Q. Brown, who is black, and Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead the Navy. The campaign against “DEI” supplied an ideological rationale for removals, and civil-service applicants were asked how they would advance Trump’s policies. There are clear limits, though: a federal judge blocked that hiring question, and removing established officials does not automatically produce a reliably obedient replacement. Every vacancy, firing, or workforce reduction can’t be counted as a successful installation of an apparatchik. The purge is happening, but total institutional submission is another matter.

The use of extreme, dehumanizing rhetoric against regime opponents. Again, something already arguably fulfilled…

Confirmed. An easy one: The “enemies of the people” and “vermin” language, as well as the lie about Haitians eating pets, were already on the record when I wrote this. Trump has since called Somali-Americans and Ilhan Omar “garbage” and demanded that Omar, an American citizen and member of Congress, be thrown out of the country. This fusion of the categories of political opponent and racial enemy is definitively fascist.

A “state of emergency:” a suspension of civil liberties in the case of civil unrest or a terrorist attack. Invocation of Insurrection Act, troops on the streets of American cities. This is the “Reichstag fire” scenario. I think this would just simply prove the thesis, but not actually among my biggest fears…

Not fulfilled. Troops did appear on American streets, but the general suspension of civil liberties didn’t follow. The attempt to turn Charlie Kirk’s assassination into a pretext for a crackdown fizzled as the decisive emergency “Reichstag” moment, although it left behind NSPM-7 and the campaign against “antifa” discussed above.

The use of questionable constitutional “hardball” to ram through executive actions and circumvention of the separation of powers, i.e. proroguing Congress and doing recess appointments of cabinet members. These are sort of yellow flags: this is strongman behavior, and concerning, but sort of generally authoritarian than necessarily fascist…

Confirmed in substance, although the administration found other routes than the ones I guessed at. The freeze of congressionally appropriated funds and the efforts to keep favored prosecutors in office through disputed appointment maneuvers both qualify, I think. Congress was not prorogued, and recess appointments didn’t become the means of installing the cabinet.

An aggressive, jingoistic war to cover up a domestic failure. Trump’s supposed dovishness may come into play, but there are a lot of “neocons” in that administration already: if we intervene in Mexico to go after cartels, say, or pick a fight with Iran, I think fascism is back on the menu…

Check, but it hasn’t been in any way effective in covering up failure or rallying the public to the regime. I still think the most plausible explanation is that Trump’s failure to deliver on the domestic program encouraged a turn abroad, where the administration could demonstrate unlimited power and recover a sense of momentum. Instead, they were met with a quagmire. There’s a clear parallel with Mussolini’s attempt to reinvigorate his regime through imperial adventure, particularly the invasion of Ethiopia after the stagnation of the Depression years. Foreign conquest was used to make the feeling of national regeneration tangible. In Trump’s case, however, the supposed way out became another political failure. Womp womp.

Attacks on the rights of citizenship, in the form of abrogation of birth right citizenship and/or mass denaturalizations. This is a big one for me, as it would involve a suspension of the Constitution. Trump’s people want to cancel the 14th Amendment by executive fiat and then hope the Court ratifies this move. Big red flag…

Confirmed, but with significant resistance. Trump attempted the executive assault on birthright citizenship described above, although the Supreme Court rejected his original order—rather too closely, if you ask me. The administration has also expanded denaturalization proceedings and investigated Ilhan Omar’s citizenship after Trump demanded her expulsion. These efforts have not produced the wholesale cancellation of citizenship rights, but the nature of the attack itself is unmistakable. Again, the courts’ willingness to stop parts of it qualifies the administration’s success, but not my predictions.

“Cultural fascism:” A marked uptick in hate crimes, interpersonal sadism, the return of the casual and routine use of slurs to humiliate minorities, etc. Sort of hard to test, but more a kind of atmosphere. If this other stuff is happening, I imagine the feeling in the country will get a lot uglier…

Mixed, and probably overstated as a prediction of the national mood. There is plenty of public cruelty, racist rhetoric, and open delight in humiliation, including from the administration itself and its orbiting “influencers.” But that doesn’t establish a general transformation of everyday life or popular attitudes. Reported hate crimes actually declined in 2025, cutting against the most measurable part of this prediction. The hoped-for—or feared—“vibe shift” has not clearly materialized. The regime’s enthusiasm for sadism is evident; the country’s conversion to it is not, thank God.

Okay, so how are we doing? I think Trombly’s “failure to become fascist” is one decent way to assess these facts and takes into account the bitter disappointment of the extreme right that is now loudly defecting from MAGA. The most fascist elements of the Trumpian coalition have certainly not gotten all their wishes. But I think perhaps it would be more accurate to speak of an impotent or frustrated fascism. I must say that MAGA would most likely be a failed fascism is something I’d been positing since 2022, at least.

We have to distinguish between a fascist movement and a fascist regime. And also, to the latter, we must add three moments: fascist government—check, Stephen Miller as our Nazi “prime minister” etc.—fascist state—partial, not a total takeover of the bureaucratic structures—and fascist society, where fascist institutions and attitudes constitute the national “spirit”—not really at all. What we now possibly face is the exhaustion of the movement before the successful consolidation of the regime. One can also refer here to Robert Paxton’s Five Stages of Fascism: “1) the initial creation of fascist movements; (2) their rooting as parties in a political system; (3) the acquisition of power; (4) the exercise of power; and, finally, in the longer term, (5) radicalization or entropy.” It seems today that a failure in stage 4 has resulted in entropy rather than radicalization in stage 5.

That doesn’t mean an end to all dangers, but it does change their character. For the next two years, we’re most likely going to be fighting an isolated core that still has the levers of government but has no mass support. They still retain enormous powers to punish. They will still likely turn abroad again as their domestic powers are curbed. Like a cornered animal, they will become desperate and lash out wildly. But I believe American democracy, although badly battered, will survive. In the years to come, though, it will require a lot of care and attention to be brought back to full health. Otherwise, we will be back in the same situation soon, and perhaps without the luck.

<https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/where-were-at> <https://www.unpopularfront.news>

Unpopular FrontWhere We’re AtTonight from 8 PM, I’ll be doing a livestream with Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times to discuss the midterms. You can tune in on Jamelle’s YouTube channel, and I believe we’ll also have a link that we’ll drop on BlueSky, Twitter, and here in the chat and on “Notes…Read morea day ago · 102 likes · 17 comments · John GanzUnpopular Frontthe junk shop of history By John Ganz

Brad DeLong here: Ganz made 12 specific predictions in November 2024 regarding the behavior of a fascist or fascioid Trump regime:

Give a gift subscription

• “state-tolerated or encouraged mobs… paramilitary or quasi-organized…”; yes on January 6, 2021; but not since.

• “mobs/paramilitaries as deputies to… repression…”; stochastic individual death threats, including notable judges; but no more.

• “suspending elections or using violence… to disrupt elections…”; not, or at least not yet.

• “use of the state security apparatus [againts] domestic political rivals…”; baby steps, so far.

• “federal troops and office for mass deportations; the creation of a system of detention camps…”; yes.

• “purging of ‘old régime’… officials”; yes.

• “extreme, dehumanizing rhetoric against régime opponents…”; yes.

• “suspension of civil liberties in the case of civil unrest or a terrorist attack… the ‘Reichstag fire’ scenario…”; yes.

• “constitutional ‘hardball’ to ram through executive actions and circumvention of the separation of powers…”; yes.

• “aggressive, jingoistic war to cover up… domestic failure…”; attempted, but not followed through on.

• “attacks on the rights of citizenship…”; yes.

• “uptick in hate crimes, interpersonal sadism, the return of the casual and routine use of slurs to humiliate minorities…”; yes, but turns out to have been largely counterproductive for the Trump régime.

Share DeLong's Grasping Reality Weblog

Let me repeat John’s sum-up:

I think Trombly’s “failure to become fascist” is one decent way to assess these facts…. The most fascist elements of the Trumpian coalition have certainly not gotten all their wishes. But I think perhaps it would be more accurate to speak of an impotent or frustrated fascism…

Here it is at greater length:

Dan Trombly: Will the Streets Run Red? <https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/will-the-streets-run-red>: ‘Far more effort was spent shoring up the GOP’s advantages in institutional and legal arenas in order to contest the 2024 election than attempting to reconstitute a right-wing street force…. Streetfighters in disarray and the absence of a serious militant base to push Trump or the Republicans further than they were willing to go contributed to the non-factor of organized political violence in the 2024 elections…. The absence of substantive organizations and subcultures to… promote an élan of action and sacrifice… embolden[ed]… by a sense of impunity…. Even in the social media age, the organization of violence still matters…

The cycle of street violence followed by martial law used to justify large-scale police repression of régime opponents and then further street violence is something I thought we were going to see after January 21, 2025. But nobody in the Trump régime took up the baton to spark and organize that, with the exception of the regional ICE sweeps.

Subscribe now

Share DeLong's Grasping Reality Weblog

Give a gift subscription

If reading this gets you Value Above Replacement, then become a free subscriber to this newsletter. And forward it! And if your VAR from this newsletter is in the three digits or more each year, please become a paid subscriber! I am trying to make you readers—and myself—smarter. Please tell me if I succeed, or how I fail…##crosspost-john-ganz-american-neofascism-where-we-are-at
##neofascism
##chaos-monkey-governance
##crosspost
#john-ganz-american-neofascism-where-we-are-at
#john-ganz
#american-neofascism-where-we-are-at
#where-we-are-at
#failed-fascism
#trumpism
#maga-movement
#dan-trombly
#political-violence
#street-fighters
#paramilitaries
#regime-consolidation

Nominal GDP growth and nominal corporate earnings growth do tend to move together most of the time, with the second being an amplified version of the first. But only most of the time, only when income distribution is stable and corporate accounting is honest:

And so I think this gets it wrong:

From the very sharp Torsten Slok, again (I find him arresting my attention rather frequently these days). He comments:

Torsten Slok: 10% Nominal GDP Growth Coming? <https://www.apollo.com/wealth/insights-news/insights/daily-spark/10-percent-nominal-gdp-growth-coming>: ‘Nominal GDP growth is currently solid at around 6%, while S&P 500 earnings growth has surged to nearly 40% YoY. A simple regression based on the historical relationship between the two suggests that the current pace of earnings growth is consistent with nominal GDP growth of 10%, see chart below…. [If so, then] interest rates will stay higher for longer, particularly when combined with the ongoing fiscal challenges…

But I think this is wrong. I do not see the flood of demand coming that would drive such a huge spending acceleration and rapid runup in inflation. What I see, instead, is a shift from labor to capital. That appears to be one thing that Trump is managing to create.

Subscribe now

Share DeLong's Grasping Reality Weblog

Give a gift subscription

If reading this gets you Value Above Replacement, then become a free subscriber to this newsletter. And forward it! And if your VAR from this newsletter is in the three digits or more each year, please become a paid subscriber! I am trying to make you readers—and myself—smarter. Please tell me if I succeed, or how I fail…##anomalous-corporate-earnings-numbers-chart-of-the-day
#macro-outlook
##chart-of-the-day
#anomalous-corporate-earnings-numbers
#corporate-earnings
#nominal-gdp-growth
#earnings-growth
#torsten-slok
#inflation-risk
#labor-to-capital
#income-distribution

A timetable for when to watch, what to watch, and what each early result is likely to tell you as Americans vote in the context of a chaos-monkey Trump with a -23%-point net approval rating. Forecasters say Democrats are favored to win both House and Senate control. A gerrymandered map, a likely-voter screen and a $10 billion ad war are the ways it could still fall short:

It is a cliché, but democracy really is on the ballot. Again.

Share

We have:

<https://www.the-downballot.com/p/the-downballots-2026-poll-closing>

Give a gift subscription

And this is what you are supposed to be watching, according to: <https://decisiondeskhq.substack.com/p/key-house-races-to-watch-early-on>:

Decision Desk HQ🗳️ 🕕 🕖 Key House races to watch early on Election Night🍺 What’s on tap 🚰…Read more8 days ago · 20 likes · 1 comment · Geoffrey Skelley

15:00 PST: eastern Indiana and Kentucky: The first poll closings and thus the first real numbers:

• KY-06 (Lexington), open seat: Republican Ralph Alvarado vs. Democrat Zach Dembo, in a district Trump won by 15.

• IN-05: Look at Hamilton County wihich Trump won 52–46 in 2024.

16:00 PST: Florida (most), Georgia, Virginia, South Carolina, Vermont:

• Senate: Georgia: Jon Ossoff, Likely D, should be called early.

• Senate: South Carolina: Darline Graham vs. Annie Andrews is close in the polls so a quick call or a long count tells you a lot.

• FL-14: If Democrats Kathy Castor (FL-14) and Jared Moskowitz (FL-25) both lose in their newly gerrymandered district,s Republicans probably keep control of the House.

• FL-22: Pia Dandiya (D) vs. Casey Askar (R) in a race that is 50-50 if the polls are right.

• VA-02: If Republican Jen Kiggans wins what looks like a 1-in-8 shot against Elaine Luria, Republicans probably keep control of the House.

16:30 PST: Ohio, North Carolina, West Virginia

• Senate: Ohio: Sherrod Brown (D) vs. Jon Husted (R) is a 50/50 race according to the polls.,

• OH-07: Max Miller (R) vs. Brian Poindexter (D) is a 50/50 race in a Trump +11 seat.

17:00 PST: the big wave (12 Senate races, 12 governor races, 161 House seats):

States closing: Pennsylvania, Maine, Michigan (most), New Hampshire, most of Texas, Kansas (most), the Florida Panhandle, Mississippi, New Jersey, Illinois and others. https://www.270towin.com/poll-closing-times/

• Senate: Maine: Susan Collins (R) vs. Troy Jackson (D) -1.8%-points.

• Senate: Texas: Ken Paxton (R, non-incumbent) vs. James Talarico (D) -1.8%-points.

• Senate: Michigan: Abdul El-Sayed (D, non-incumbent) vs. Mike Rogers (R) +4.8%-points.

• Senate: New Hampshire: Chris Pappas (D, non-incumbent) vs. John Sununu (R) +6.0%-points.

• Senate: Kansas: Roger Marshall (R) vs. Adam Hamilton (D) -2.1%-points.

• Senate: Mississippi: Cindy Hyde-Smith (R) vs. Scott Colom (D) +3.0%-points.

Share DeLong's Grasping Reality Weblog

By 17:00 PST we should know, mostly from VA-02, FL-14, FL-22, OH-07, and the Ohio Senate race, whether this is a:

• superwave,

• a wave,

• a normal opposition party congressional-swing win, or

• a disappointment.

Refer a friend

Get 75% off a group subscription

Trump's approval is 37%. Registered Democrats have cast 45% of early ballots to Republicans' 31%, and Hispanic early turnout is running ahead of both 2022 and 2024. Yet there are reasons for caution. Marist's likely-voter screen shrinks the Democratic lead to 8 points, and enthusiasm lags among younger and nonwhite voters. Republicans are outspending Democrats in Senate toss-ups.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

If reading this gets you Value Above Replacement, then become a free subscriber to this newsletter. And forward it! And if your VAR from this newsletter is in the three digits or more each year, please become a paid subscriber! I am trying to make you readers—and myself—smarter. Please tell me if I succeed, or how I fail…##election-night-2026
##neofascism
##public-reason
#midterms-2026
#house-control
#senate-control
#swing-districts

Nixon was smart. Really smart. Nixon knew where Hanoi was. Niall Ferguson has a uniquely stupidly timed grand-strategy apologia for Donald Trump. Ferguson sees a Kissinger in a man who could not find the capital of North Vietnam on a map:

I must say that seeing this in my feed this morning was quite a surprise:

Niall Ferguson: The [Nixon-Like] Method to Trump’s Foreign Policy Madness <https://niallferguson.substack.com/p/the-method-to-trumps-foreign-policy>: To understand Trump’s… foreign policy… you have to understand the debt he… owes to…. Richard Nixon…. We’re seeing a wave of Nixon revisionism, if not rehabilitation…. Both presidents consciously put… realpolitik in Otto von Bismarck’s sense… above… international idealism…. Nixon’s realism… was a grand strategy at its grandest, predicated on a clear-eyed calculation of American interest and an effective downgrading of the ideological schism that had characterized the early Cold War….

You should by now have divined where I am going with this. Like Nixon, Trump’s instinct is to negotiate superpower to superpower… without regard to the smaller players… to say nothing of the irritatingly idealistic Europeans with their nostalgia for the “liberal international order”….

It might seem to skeptics that the U.S. has no strategy beyond imperial caprice. But that is a misreading. At heart, Donald Trump is a Nixonian… with the sole difference that personal enrichment and the national interest were never conflated in Nixon’s mind. Like Nixon, Trump takes pleasure in cutting deals with dictators. Like Nixon, he has no patience with European lectures about morality…. The essential difference between Trump and Nixon is U.S. economic strength [today]…. Like Nixon’s, Trump’s grand strategy may unravel. It’s just less likely to unravel if the U.S. economy stays strong…

Nixon was smart and had views (even if they were, alternatingly, Kissinger’s and Moynihan’s). It takes a very special kind of person to publish that in the context in which the other thing in my feed right now is this:

November 1, 2026. Afternoon., in Dubuque, Iowa:

Donald Trump: <https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/geography-blunder-lands-trump-community-142734013.html>: ‘I could have won the Vietnam War in a week. They kept bombing forests for years instead of going after Ho Chi Minh City…

This called forth, not surprisingly, a community note:

And another note:

Hunter Biden: <https://twitter.com/HunterBiden/status/2117256121018912794>: ‘Last night Trump said he could have won Vietnam in a week. His plan was “going after Ho Chi Minh City.” Ho Chi Minh City was Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam. Our ally. The enemy’s capital was Hanoi. We bombed it. He called the presidents who fought that war stupid, then explained how he’d have won it by attacking our own side.

58,220 Americans died in that war. Trump got five deferments. Now he’s telling the rest of us how easy it would have been. He’s had more than fifty years to learn which side we were on. He still hasn’t. That alone should disqualify him from sending anybody else’s kids to war. Instead, he’s weighing more strikes on Iran after Tuesday. His administration has reportedly considered using the “mother of all bombs,” the one he calls “like a tiny nuclear bomb.”

The man who thinks we should have bombed our ally’s capital gets to choose the targets…

Ferguson’s is the most curious-of-all reaction and response to Donald Trump’s belief that Johnson and Nixon could have won the Vietnam War “in a week” by bombing the then-Saigon, the capital of our South Vietnam ally. At 09:30 pst on November 2, 2026—18 hours after Trump’s Dubuque speech—we have Niall Ferguson publishing:

Niall Ferguson's Time MachineNiall Ferguson's Time Machine applies historical perspective to contemporary problems in economics and politics, because the further back you look, the further ahead you can see. CROSSPOST: NIALL FERGUSON: The Method to Trump’s Foreign Policy Madness

<https://niallferguson.substack.com/p/the-method-to-trumps-foreign-policy> <https://niallferguson.substack.com>

Niall Ferguson's Time MachineThe Method to Trump’s Foreign Policy MadnessEach episode of the satirical 1970s show Soap always began with a convoluted plot summary. The catchphrase in the intro was: “Confused? You won’t be…Read more2 days ago · 60 likes · 1 comment · Niall FergusonTo understand Trump’s approach to Ukraine, Iran, and China, look to Richard Nixon. The president’s instinct for superpower dealmaking reflects a hard-nosed realism, backed by the American economy.Niall Ferguson

2026-11-02

Each episode of the satirical 1970s show Soap always began with a convoluted plot summary. The catchphrase in the intro was: “Confused? You won’t be.”

Confused is how many people today feel about U.S. foreign policy. A Free Press editor recently put it this way:

If China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran are an Axis of Aggressors and we’re at war with them, why is it so hard to identify enemies and allies? Democrats who just voted to pass almost $2 billion in aid to Ukraine (with an assist from a small group of Republicans) are simultaneously promoting candidates who want to end support for the Iron Dome for Israel, which is at war with Iran and its satellites, who are attacking an assortment of our partial allies and getting help from Russia and China.

[Vice President] J.D. Vance talked about the moderates in Iran who want peace during his ill-fated ceasefire; Turkey works with the Axis but is part of NATO; France, Belgium, Spain, and the Netherlands import Russian gas; Hungary uses a Russian pipeline, etc. How can we be in “Cold War II” if those are our allies? Whose false narrative are we living in?…

Having coined the phrase Cold War II and encouraged the use of the term Axis, I get so much of this kind of thing these days that I feel like a geopolitical agony aunt. “Why is Musk fucking with Ukraine?” a friend messaged me on Wednesday, referring to reports that Elon Musk green-lit a slowdown in the military-grade Starlink coverage that Ukraine relies on for certain types of drones. “Why would Putin negotiate when he’s getting concessions without it? How does increasing his leverage help?” These questions were further fueled by the revelation at the beginning of the week that the Russian president had proposed a joint summit next month with Donald Trump and Xi Jinping to discuss Ukraine—without Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky present. Trump reportedly did not reject the idea.

Confused? You will be. So how to make sense of the apparent contradictions of Cold War II? For some people, the only possible explanation for all of this is that President Donald Trump is simply a crazed man-child emperor. In the wake of the gladiatorial games staged outside the White House in June, the British writer Robert Harris (whose new book Agrippa depicts the rise of Augustus Caesar) remarked: “You can really see him in a toga with a gold laurel wreath on his head. . . . He is an imperial kind of president.”

And yet I have always doubted that Trump is an authentic Octavian, a would-be emperor, ushering the republic into its grave. Nor (despite the analogy drawn last year by Gideon Rachman) is Trump Pitt the Younger, carving up the world as Pitt did with the Emperor Napoleon in 1805 (the subject of a famous cartoon by James Gillray).

In many ways, Trump is no emperor but, as I have long insisted, a quintessentially 19th-century American figure: a composite of Andrew Jackson, William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, and P.T. Barnum. Nevertheless, to understand Trump’s approach to foreign policy, and particularly his counterintuitive approach to the war in Ukraine, you have to understand the debt he also owes to a 20th-century president: Richard Nixon.

In December 1987, Nixon wrote to Trump after his wife saw the swaggering young real estate developer on Phil Donahue’s talk show. “Mrs. Nixon told me you were great,” Nixon gushed. “As you can imagine, she is an expert on politics and she predicts that whenever you decide to run for office you will be a winner!” Prophetic words. Two years later, the two men were photographed together at a fundraiser in Houston. Small wonder Trump has a long-standing regard for the disgraced 37th president. Not many people took him seriously back then.

It’s no accident that we’re seeing a wave of Nixon revisionism, if not rehabilitation, in Trump’s second term. Clearly, Trump’s domestic enemies were once Nixon’s: Harvard, The New York Times and The Washington Post, and the federal bureaucracy—known today as “the deep state.” Even more clearly, and most importantly for our purposes, both presidents consciously put the national interest—realpolitik in Otto von Bismarck’s sense—far above the international idealism we associate with Democratic presidents such as Woodrow Wilson or Jimmy Carter.

“We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else,” deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller told CNN’s Jake Tapper in January, shortly after the U.S. extracted the Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro. “But we live in a world, in the real world . . . that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.”

“These are the iron laws of the world,” Miller went on. “We’re a superpower. And under President Trump, we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower.”

Nixon’s realism is best illustrated by the great “shocks” of the summer of 1971. In July, he stunned the world—particularly hawkish Cold Warriors at home and foreign allies such as Taiwan and Japan—by revealing his intention to fly to Beijing to meet the Chinese tyrant Mao Zedong. In August he shocked America’s European allies, too, by imposing across-the-board tariffs and taking the dollar off gold.

He and Henry Kissinger brilliantly sought to exploit the Sino-Soviet split to exert leverage over both Communist regimes, and in particular to put pressure on North Vietnam to agree to a peace deal that would get the United States out of Indochina while preserving the independence of South Vietnam, at least for “a decent interval.”

In 1972, Nixon’s summits in Beijing and Moscow paved the way for the January 1973 peace in Vietnam (after a final bout of “Christmas bombing” of Hanoi). It was a grand strategy at its grandest, predicated on a clear-eyed calculation of American interest and an effective downgrading of the ideological schism that had characterized the early Cold War.

Trump today is as unpopular a second-term president as George W. Bush was in October 2006.

Of course, the strategy—and Nixon’s presidency—unraveled in 1973 and 1974 because of Watergate, a war in the Middle East, and a massive energy price shock precipitated by the Saudi-led oil embargo on the United States, retaliation for U.S. military aid to Israel in the Yom Kippur War.

You should by now have divined where I am going with this. Like Nixon, Trump’s instinct is to negotiate superpower to superpower, regardless of ideological labels. He would indeed enjoy nothing more than a Big Three summit with Putin and Xi at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) leaders’ meeting in Shenzhen next month. His preference would be to settle the ongoing wars in Ukraine and Iran without regard to the smaller players involved, to say nothing of the irritatingly idealistic Europeans with their nostalgia for the “liberal international order.”

It is a mistake to read too much into his and his emissaries’ tendency to flatter Putin and Xi, to disparage Zelensky, to give his Taiwanese counterpart Lai Ching-te the cold shoulder, and generally to sneer at most European leaders. Trump has soft spots for a few countries—notably the United Kingdom and Israel. But that doesn’t prevent him from periodically yelling at their prime ministers when they stand in his way.

The paradox of Trump’s foreign policy is that his attempt to overthrow the Iranian regime this year was simultaneously the least Nixonian (and most Bush-like) thing he has ever done, and probably also his biggest mistake.

For the laws of 20th-century politics still apply, even in the mid 2020s—even in the age of Trump. Power nearly always drains away from a second-term president, especially after his party loses seats in Congress, as tends to happen. But a war in the Middle East can make the power drain especially fast. Trump today is as unpopular a second-term president as George W. Bush was in October 2006. Since 1945, only Nixon has had lower approval—and by October 1974 he had been out of the White House for two months. The war against Iran has aged much faster politically than the war against Iraq. And that’s in large measure because of its impact on energy prices, increasing crude oil prices by a factor of four, and gasoline prices by a factor of three.

To really put the crisis of Trump’s presidency in context, you need to go back a quarter century, to the era of Bush’s Global War on Terrorism, one the most idealistic enterprises in the history of U.S. foreign policy. In my book Colossus (2004), I predicted that the neoconservative project for “nation building” (empire in all but name) was doomed to fail. “There are three fundamental deficits,” I argued, “that together explain why the United States has been a less effective empire than its British predecessor. They are its economic deficit, its manpower deficit and—the most serious of the three—its attention deficit.”

The three deficits of Colossus have only deteriorated in the past 25 years. But there is now a fourth one: a geopolitical deficit. The United States is in Cold War II, regardless of who is president. China is the most formidable economic rival the U.S. has ever faced. And we have ended up in the most dangerous scenario envisioned by Zbigniew Brzezinski in The Grand Chessboard (1997)—facing “a grand coalition of China, Russia, and perhaps Iran, an ‘antihegemonic’ coalition united not by ideology but by complementary grievances.” (He should have added North Korea.)

The Axis of authoritarians meets regularly and appears to have a game plan: Think of Putin, Xi, and Kim Jong-Un rubbing shoulders at the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II in Beijing last year. By contrast, Trump has shaken up the U.S. system of alliances—not necessarily a bad thing, but in the short run a potential source of weakness.

Trump’s grand strategy of confronting the Axis was to start with the weakest link (Venezuela), then move on to Iran. The Iranian regime appeared to have been decisively disarmed in the opening phase of the war, Operation Economic Fury. But the closure of the Strait of Hormuz seemed to confront Trump with a choice between a hugely risky ground operation or abandoning the strait to Iran—a choice, in British imperial terms, between Gallipoli (1915) or Suez (1956).

Yet what I didn’t anticipate back in 2001 was that the U.S. would economically outperform both adversaries and allies.

At heart, Donald Trump is a Nixonian in foreign policy, with the sole difference that personal enrichment and the national interest were never conflated in Nixon’s mind.

Relative to other currencies, the dollar hasn’t weakened in 25 years, and the 10-year Treasury is still generally regarded as a “safe asset.” The real effective exchange rate did a round trip, and the new European currency didn’t really challenge dollar dominance of global reserves and transactions.

Toppling the Twin Towers was intended by Osama bin Laden as an economic as well as a symbolic act. But, since 2001, the U.S. stock market has crushed (nearly all) the competition. If you had invested all your savings in U.S. equities on September 10, 2001, you’d be up by a factor of seven. The equivalent for Germany is 3.3x, Japan 3x, China 2x, and the UK 1.8x. If you sold America and bought the BRICs in 2001, you are cursing Goldman Sachs, who coined that acronym for Brazil, Russia, India, and China. That has been the portfolio from hell.

The U.S. has led the charge in artificial intelligence, of course. It has 11 times the computational power of China, the other AI empire. But it has also surged back as a hydrocarbon power. Oil and gas production were both drifting down until the shale boom took hold around 2008–2012. U.S. natural gas production has since doubled. Oil output is up 130 percent. This helps explain why the economic consequences of the closure of the strait turned out to be less severe this year than the energy experts expected—though the key variable in keeping a lid on oil prices was the drastic decline in Chinese crude oil imports.

Now consider the predicament of the Axis powers today. There has been a slow but steady weakening of the Iranian grip on the strait. The Iranian currency is in free fall. Their economy is at rock bottom.

Meanwhile, Russia is now waging a relentless air war against Ukraine’s economy. Putin may grind out his victory in 2027. But the costs are already eye-watering. Russian casualties (killed and wounded) in July, August, and September were in excess of 42,000 per month.

True, the economic consequences of a closure of the Taiwan Strait—if China made a move against Taipei and the U.S. contested it—would be greater than the closure of Hormuz. And true, China has already understood how to exploit U.S.-PRC economic interdependence, particularly its near monopoly on rare-earth elements. But Chinese consumer confidence has not recovered from Covid, and the population is plunging. And whose fiscal problem would you rather have? Relative to GDP (especially if, as seems likely, China’s is overstated), Beijing’s is a much bigger headache; it’s just that most of its public sector deficit and debt are at the local level.

It might seem to skeptics that the U.S. has no strategy beyond imperial caprice. But that is a misreading. At heart, Donald Trump is a Nixonian in foreign policy, with the sole difference that personal enrichment and the national interest were never conflated in Nixon’s mind. Like Nixon, Trump takes pleasure in cutting deals with dictators. Like Nixon, he has no patience with European lectures about morality—especially when they are as hypocritical as the ones given by people still doing a roaring trade with Russia via third countries. Like Nixon, he feels entitled to the Nobel Peace Prize—and, like Nixon, he has no chance whatsoever of receiving it. Like Nixon, Trump drives both liberals and neoconservatives round the bend. And, like Nixon, he runs the risk that the list of enemies will become so long they will finally be able to undermine him altogether.

But the essential difference between Trump and Nixon is U.S. economic strength. When Richard Nixon resigned in August 1974, the inflation rate was 11 percent and the unemployment rate was 5.5 percent. Last month, those figures were, respectively, 3.7 percent and 4.2 percent. The U.S. economy was in recession between November 1973 and March 1975. Today, the U.S. economy is so red-hot, thanks to the AI investment boom, that the Federal Reserve is hitting the brakes.

Still confused? All I can tell you is that, like Nixon’s, Trump’s grand strategy may unravel. It’s just less likely to unravel if the U.S. economy stays strong. Indeed, that strength might (I stress might) even help end the conflicts in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, while deterring China from risking a confrontation in the Far East. Only if higher interest rates, plus a Democratic wave in the midterms, plus the public backlash against AI together burst the AI bubble—only then will Trump face a Nixonian reckoning. And then it will be a very different ’70s TV show we’ll be reminded of.

<https://niallferguson.substack.com/p/the-method-to-trumps-foreign-policy> <https://niallferguson.substack.com>

Niall Ferguson's Time MachineThe Method to Trump’s Foreign Policy MadnessEach episode of the satirical 1970s show Soap always began with a convoluted plot summary. The catchphrase in the intro was: “Confused? You won’t be…Read more2 days ago · 60 likes · 1 comment · Niall FergusonNiall Ferguson's Time MachineNiall Ferguson's Time Machine applies historical perspective to contemporary problems in economics and politics, because the further back you look, the further ahead you can see.

Brad DeLong here: Yes, Niall Ferguson did originally publish this ten days ago in the Free Press, Yes, this is perhaps an automatic repost to get it out from behind the paywall of the Free Press. Yes, perhaps Niall is too scatterbrained to have remembered that this was scheduled to post this on his SubStack this AM, and perhaps he should think, even if only a little, about the context in which it would land.

It may have looked marginally less moronic ten days ago.

Marginally.

No. The “essential difference between Trump and Nixon” is not:

U.S. economic strength [today]. When Richard Nixon resigned in August 1974, the inflation rate was 11 percent and the unemployment rate was 5.5 percent. Last month, those figures were, respectively, 3.7 percent and 4.2 percent. The U.S. economy was in recession between November 1973 and March 1975. Today, the U.S. economy is so red-hot, thanks to the AI investment boom, that the Federal Reserve is hitting the brakes…

I could go on. But this is a cognitive-DDOS attack on all of us.

And is Ferguson’s “Operation Economic Fury” a mind-o or joke?

Subscribe now

Share DeLong's Grasping Reality Weblog

Give a gift subscription

If reading this gets you Value Above Replacement, then become a free subscriber to this newsletter. And forward it! And if your VAR from this newsletter is in the three digits or more each year, please become a paid subscriber! I am trying to make you readers—and myself—smarter. Please tell me if I succeed, or how I fail…##crosspost-niall-ferguson-the-nixon-like-method-to-trumps-foreign-policy-madness
##neofascism
##chaos-monkey-foreign-policy
##crosspost
#niall-ferguson-the-nixon-like-method-to-trumps-foreign-policy-madness
#niall-ferguson
#the-nixon-like-method-to-trumps-foreign-policy-madness
#donald-trump
#richard-nixon
#grand-strategy
#realpolitik

Noah Smith’s bull case for Anthropic’s valuation in a nutshell: To justify a $2 trillion IPO, Anthropic can’t just win the AI market. It has to win every market. The road to that is to buy a firm in an industry, feed that firm’s data to super-claude, outcompete all rivals using general intelligence and smarts, and then do it again in the next industry. And again. The talent-concentration moat that was (part of what was) behind Google and Facebook, rebuilt in the datacenters…

The conventional wisdom in the circles that I travel in is that, should Anthropic undertake an IPO at anything close to any of the valuation numbers currently being whispered about, it will be massively overpriced relative to true fundamentals.

Share

Now comes Noah Smith to say “maybe”. And he constructs an “exhilarating and terrifying” “huge, teetering tower of assumptions” to get to a strong bull case even given that MAMLM model services have no network effect, little brand loyalty, low switching casts, and hungry and aggressive rivals who have engineers who can catch up fast via their own work or via distilling yours.

What do I think? I am a relative bear. There may well not be even is a low-probability chance of enough future supergrowth to justify the risks in buying in at anything like the IPO price.

If there is, it really depends on whether the secret sauce that has fueled Anthropic’s hypergrowth over the past year and a half is that its models are smarter in useful-general-intelligence (or super-intelligence!) sense. And I cannot evaluate that, since I do not have a good understanding of what that secret sauce is:

Give a gift subscription

CROSSPOST: NOAH SMITH: Anthropic’s Moat Is Claude

<https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/anthropics-moat-is-claude> <http://noahpinion.blog>

NoahpinionAnthropic’s moat is ClaudeAnthropic recently filed for IPO. At an estimated $1.5 to $2 trillion, it will be one of the biggest IPOs of all time, rivaling SpaceX, and possibly the biggest. For reference, Facebook’s valuation when it had its blockbuster IPO in 2012 was $104 billion, and Google’s valuation in 2004 was $23 billion. Anthropic will instantly become one of the world’s most valuable companies — Google itself is now worth $3.4 trillion, and Nvidia and Apple are both worth around $5 trillion…Read more3 days ago · 187 likes · 29 comments · Noah SmithThe bull case for Anthropic’s IPO.Noah Smith2026-11-02 ∙ PaidArt by GPT-6

Anthropic recently filed for IPO. At an estimated $1.5 to $2 trillion, it will be one of the biggest IPOs of all time, rivaling SpaceX, and possibly the biggest. For reference, Facebook’s valuation when it had its blockbuster IPO in 2012 was $104 billion, and Google’s valuation in 2004 was $23 billion. Anthropic will instantly become one of the world’s most valuable companies — Google itself is now worth $3.4 trillion, and Nvidia and Apple are both worth around $5 trillion.

This naturally has a lot of people asking: What’s the upside to buying Anthropic? Even if it grew to be as valuable as Apple or Nvidia — in other words, if it became one of the most valuable companies on planet Earth — that would only be a multiple of 2 to 2.5. But if Anthropic stumbles, that lofty valuation could come tumbling down.

There are certainly lots of reasons Anthropic could stumble. Demand for AI could take longer to materialize than people think, perhaps because companies have trouble integrating AI into their existing business models. The U.S. government could decide that Claude’s hacking capabilities represent a national security threat — especially after the recent wave of AI-assisted cyberattacks — and decide to regulate, appropriate, or otherwise restrain the company (the spat with the Department of War might represent the beginnings of that conflict). One company (SpaceX?) might end up monopolizing all of the compute, squeezing Anthropic’s profits. Competition from OpenAI and Google, or Chinese models, might result in a competitive race to the bottom that forces down Anthropic’s margins. And so on.

In order to balance all that uncertainty and risk on the downside, Anthropic needs to have huge upside. It needs a way that it could be worth a lot more than $2 trillion in the years to come. For comparison, if you bought Google when it IPO’d, your investment would have gone up by over 130 times by today. To equal that performance, Anthropic would have to be worth $200 to $260 trillion by the late 2040s. That’s almost half of the total wealth that exists in the entire world today. For Facebook, the number is around 16x, meaning Anthropic would have to be worth $32 trillion by the early 2040s — still an impressive performance, considering that that’s more than six times the value of the most valuable company in 2026.

How could Anthropic manage that kind of growth? One possibility is that the world economy itself will grow at a very rapid pace, thanks to AI. Some AI researchers think that growth could soon accelerate to fantastically high levels. But most economists bet against that, and even most AI industry insiders expect the growth speedup to be much more modest. Even 7% nominal growth — 4% real growth plus 3% inflation — would only make the economy about 2.75x larger by 2041, and 4.43x larger by 2048.

So in order to have the upside of a Facebook-like outcome — let alone a Google-like outcome — Anthropic probably can’t just ride a wave of economic growth.1 It’ll need to capture a greater fraction of the value that our economy produces.

So far, the company has been doing exactly that — and at an extremely rapid rate. Its revenue has grown faster than any company of similar size in all of history. And despite this explosive growth, the company is now making an operating profit:

Source: Quartr

Businesses usually have to spend more money to make more money at the outset, but Anthropic’s Claude Code is a product that sells itself — relative to just one year ago, the company is making more than 3 times as many dollars of revenue for each dollar that it spends on compute:

Source: Wall St. Engine

As SemiAnalysis writes, this is “the most efficient scaling of a business in the history of capitalism”. Jeffrey Bussgang has a good breakdown of Anthropic’s recent IPO filing, and it’s full of amazing details — incredible user retention, a broadening base of customers, and so on.

And Anthropic is selling a product whose adoption rate is still very low. As Aaron Levie points out, most big companies are still spending only a pittance on AI, and could afford to spend a lot more:

And yet for this growth to continue, Anthropic must do more than simply make great products. It will need to stave off the competition for decades on end. It will, in Wall Street jargon, need a “moat”.

Why Anthropic needs a moat

When I was teaching business economics to MBAs at Stony Brook, I spent lots of time on the question of why companies make profit. This might sound like a stupid question, especially if you’ve been conditioned to think that there’s some kind of magic force called “capitalism” that companies can use to extract money from people and hand it to their shareholders. But in a world of perfect competition, companies should keep trying to undersell each other until their profit goes to zero — or at least, until it goes to a level where companies are just able to pay for their investments. Even if one company has a huge share of the market, the simple threat that new companies might be able to enter the market and compete with them should force them to keep their prices low in order to maintain their market share.

And in fact, lots of industries do work like this. Agriculture, in the absence of farm subsidies or other significant government support, is the most famous example. Solar power is another — energy provides huge value to the world, but solar is so undifferentiated a product that solar producers never end up making big margins.2 Airlines are a third example. Consumers (and workers) benefit from these industries, but shareholders don’t end up making huge returns.

In order to make profits (or “excess profits” above and beyond the cost of investment), companies generally need some sort of a “moat” — a barrier to entry that reduces the threat of competition. This could be a government-sponsored monopoly — cronyism, or intellectual property. It could be a network effect — the natural tendency of everyone to be on the same social network or use the same electric power grid. It could be something as simple as brand loyalty — maybe everyone thinks Louis Vuitton bags are worth paying money for because of the name, or maybe everyone is just very used to using Microsoft Excel and doesn’t want to switch.

These are all reasons why some companies make high profit margins. There are probably more. Investors will tell you that if you want to assess how valuable you think a company is going to be, you should try to evaluate the strength of its moat — in fact, the term “moat” as slang for barriers to entry was coined by Warren Buffett.

Ever since AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI burst on the scene, I’ve been hearing smart people argue that they have no moat. After all, unlike famously profitable software companies like Facebook or Google, it’s not clear that AI has a network effect — whether I should use Claude Code or Codex doesn’t really depend on whether you use Claude Code or Codex. And brand loyalty to AI is probably pretty low, since coding with Claude Code and coding with Codex is probably a pretty similar experience, and since AI isn’t a prestige good like an iPhone or a Rolex. And logistically speaking, it’s very easy to switch from one company’s AI products to another’s.

What’s more, catch-up in AI models is typically very fast — OpenAI and Google are typically only a little bit behind Anthropic in terms of model capability. In fact, by some measures, Google’s new Gemini 4 Carbon model just took the lead over Anthropic. Obviously this will reverse when Anthropic releases the next blockbuster model it currently has under wraps, but it shows that the other major players are still very much in the race. In terms of market share, OpenAI has been nipping at Anthropic’s heels:

Source: OpenRouter via Peter Walker

I’ve written previously about the possibility that AI will end up like solar power, or airlines — a cheap utility that lots of companies use to create enormous economic value, but whose producers don’t manage to capture much of that value:

The AI bust scenario that no one is talking about Noah Smith December 8, 2025

Read full story

But I think we need to talk more about the opposite scenario — the possibility that AI intrinsically does have a huge moat. I see a distinct possibility that intelligence itself — the ability to outsmart competitors in the arena of business — is a tremendous source of competitive advantage for a company. And in fact, I suspect that this is exactly what Anthropic itself is (quietly) betting on.

How intelligence itself can be a moat

and there is the paywall…

<https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/anthropics-moat-is-claude> <http://noahpinion.blog>

NoahpinionAnthropic’s moat is ClaudeAnthropic recently filed for IPO. At an estimated $1.5 to $2 trillion, it will be one of the biggest IPOs of all time, rivaling SpaceX, and possibly the biggest. For reference, Facebook’s valuation when it had its blockbuster IPO in 2012 was $104 billion, and Google’s valuation in 2004 was $23 billion. Anthropic will instantly become one of the world’s most valuable companies — Google itself is now worth $3.4 trillion, and Nvidia and Apple are both worth around $5 trillion…Read more3 days ago · 186 likes · 29 comments · Noah Smith

Brad DeLong here: What do I think of all this?

First, below the paywall Noah makes the argument that Google’s and FaceBook’s key edge in their growth to platform-monopoly status was increasing returns from the concentration of talent:

Share DeLong's Grasping Reality Weblog

If hiring a smarter employee gave a company $100,000 extra of profit… that employee would… just demand $99,999.99 in higher salary…. One answer is that smarter workers make other smart workers even smarter…. This naturally created a moat for any company that can get even a small initial advantage in recruiting the best people…. [Then] you become a talent magnet…. Working with other talented people could be the main amenity…

Leave a comment

That could be the way to get to a bull case for Anthropic against what is the bearish conventional wisdom in my circles, which Noah puts like this:

AI products look like commodities. There is no network effect, little brand loyalty, switching is easy, and rivals catch up fast…

Refer a friend

Indeed, Microsoft and others are already hard at work trying to cement their linkages with and private knowledge of their customers, while turning the datacenters and the models into commodities so that they can switch from codex to claude to grok to muse to gemini at the drop of a chip. And even if claude/fable, /opus, /sonnet, /haiku, & c. are better, Microsoft and Amazon (and Google and FaceBook) are 100% in the business of being willing to give away their own models and basic harnesses for free to starve Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI of oxygen.

Thus the way Noah sees it, to get to a bull case for Anthropic you need to take seriously the idea that:

superior intelligence may be a barrier to entry of its own, much as talent concentration was for Google and Facebook. The difference is that an AI lab can hoard “talent” in every field, not just one…

Get 75% off a group subscription

And so:

Claude… in… insurance industry… lacks all the accumulated tips and tricks, the hard-won human experience…. But… Anthropic buys an existing insurance company… [which] learn[s] on the job…. [Then] Claude can potentially outcompete any rival…. The talent concentration moat, updated for a world where talent is built in a data center…. Google and Facebook could hoard talent in one specific domain, Anthropic can potentially hoard talent in all domains where it can access the relevant data, simply … by having the smartest model.

Of course, that depends on Anthropic maintaining Claude’s lead in terms of capabilities. Right now… of Anthropic’s computing power… three-quarters… goes to model development…. [And] if Anthropic… enter[s] a ton of industries and start[s] making profit… it will have more to spend… on making sure its models remain the smartest…. [And] recursive self-improvement — even if RSI doesn’t lead to a technological singularity, it can help make sure that Anthropic maintains Claude’s lead over any and all rivals…

Noah concludes:

The bull case for Anthropic is that intelligence is such a general technology that producing it allows you to control all other technologies…. Plenty of things… could get in the way… of course — my scenario is based on a huge, teetering tower of assumptions…

I think that is right. The tower is huge and teetering. Perhaps the key block is whether excellence in coding assistants is or can become excellence in some kind of “general intelligence” valuable across all domains. And since I do not understand where Anthropic’s edge in building coding assistants comes from, I cannot evaluate that. Any Bayesian assessment I might come up with would be evidence-free, simply a reflection of a prior probability that my mind derived from god-alone-knows-where and out of god-alone-knows-what.

Subscribe now

Share DeLong's Grasping Reality Weblog

Give a gift subscription

If reading this gets you Value Above Replacement, then become a free subscriber to this newsletter. And forward it! And if your VAR from this newsletter is in the three digits or more each year, please become a paid subscriber! I am trying to make you readers—and myself—smarter. Please tell me if I succeed, or how I fail…##crosspost-noah-smith-anthropics-moat-is-claude
##attention-info-bio-tech-economy
##mamlms
##crosspost
#noah-smith-anthropics-moat-is-claude
#noah-smith
#anthropics-moat-is-claude
#anthropic
#claude
#anthropic-ipo
#intelligence-as-moat
#talent-concentration
#superstar-firms
#frontier-models
#tech-valuations
#ash-gul-durbatuluk

Nearly all of us are cognitively-compromised readers of polls the day before an election. Nate Silver is the exception, and that’s exactly why you should listen to him today:

Do anchor your beliefs to this fact: Pollsters share the same problems with who answers the phone. If the polls are off, they'll likely be off in the same direction everywhere, so seven good Senate polls aren't seven separate pieces of evidence.

Via Greg Sargent:

Greg Sargent: <https://bsky.app/profile/gregsargent.bsky.social/post/3mzc5don3wc2d>: ‘Whoa. Final NYT polls of Senate races just dropped. I can’t believe it’s this good, but... wow:

The natural next question, given this chart, is this: What does Nate Silver <https://www.natesilver.net/> think?

Nate Siler is very valuable today. He cares only about whether three out of every four 75% picks he makes actually come true or not. He does not really, save how it affects his personal finances, care much about governance. He does not really have enough of a “no man is an island” feeling to care much about what the ramifications of elections are for how the world does and how people suffer.

That personality quirk makes him the most valuable of us today.

He is the least likely to delude himself via motivated reasoning. So reward him by giving him your money:

Nate Silver: The NYT/Siena Polls Show a Blue Tsunami <https://www.natesilver.net/p/the-nytsiena-polls-show-a-blue-tsunami>: ‘They might be wrong again, but it’s getting hard to deny that polls point toward a really big year for Democrats…. They showed what can only be described as fantastic numbers for Democrats, putting them ahead — sometimes narrowly, sometimes not — in basically every Senate battleground and in the associated governor’s races, including in Texas. These polls weren’t quite in the territory of FLIPR’s officially “weird” scenarios, but they’re close….

The NYT shows a D +11 on the generic ballot and… in most cases… follow[s] the patterns FLIPR has previously detected…. [My] model… does adjust every survey firm’s numbers for house effects. In other words, it knows that NYT/Siena has tended to have good numbers for Democrats this cycle, and that’s priced into its forecasts, including to some extent even in races that the NYT hasn’t polled…. [Nevertheless, and] it was just barely — the NYT/Siena polls actually had less of an impact on our model than I expected — but for the first time tonight, Democrats’ Senate odds improved to a number that begins with an “8”….

The New York Times is notorious for not herding. They’ll publish weird results like Flanagan +14 in Minnesota or Ricketts +6 in Nebraska, knowing full well that polling averages are usually more accurate than individual polls and they’ll probably wind up… wrong…. There’s none of the hedging or fudging or herding or fiddling with likely voter numbers like we’ve seen from other highly-rated pollsters. Except that, according to The Times’s Nate Cohn, the NYT actually did tinker with its weighting scheme after its polls, like most others, overrated Democrats in 2024. If they hadn’t done that, their polls would have been even better for Democrats, Cohn wrote, by roughly three points across the board (the major exception being Maine)….

The trends here are quite consistent: Democrats are coming home in the blue states while Republicans aren’t in the red states. If both of those things are true — and those are two very, very big “ifs” — Republicans are in for a long night on Tuesday.

Republicans: Your lemming-like following of the Newt Gingrich principle that you have to work as hard as you can to make the president of your party appear a success (and the president of the other party appear a failure) no matter how much damage you do to the country in the process has not only damned you all to hell, it looks like it has done major, major damage to your political standing as well. Time to rethink your lives, and repent, if you still can.

Subscribe now

Share DeLong's Grasping Reality Weblog

Give a gift subscription

If reading this gets you Value Above Replacement, then become a free subscriber to this newsletter. And forward it! And if your VAR from this newsletter is in the three digits or more each year, please become a paid subscriber! I am trying to make you readers—and myself—smarter. Please tell me if I succeed, or how I fail…##not-a-good-use-of-my-or-your-time-but-chart-of-the-day
##public-reason
##neofascism
##chart-of-the-day
#not-a-good-use-of-my-or-your-time
#2026-midterms
#senate-polls
#nate-silver
#silver-bulletin
#generic-ballot
#polling-error
#motivated-reasoning

The Cheesecake Factory look: fine for avocado egg rolls; terrible for the public buildings of a Great Republic. Trump (and the Wall Street Journal) did not dare say a peep at Obama’s comparison of him to a dictator, but it was the claim that his æsthetic taste thought a chain restaurant was the height of luxury appears to have stung:

Barack Obama is not a very nice guy these days.

Share

But I do not think a nice guy is what we need right now:

Barack Obama: ‘I had heard the president was not happy when I joked over the weekend that he’s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory….

The president wasn’t even mad about the Saddam Hussein comparison. That part didn’t bother him. But he was very upset about the Cheesecake Factory comments…

Give a gift subscription

Now we all know that the Cheesecake Factory has decided that it is going to have a deliberate look as part of its brand. And rather few of us think that that look is appropriate for the public spaces of a Great Republic. Indeed, Donald Trump does not: He was really angry that Barack Obama mocked him by saying that that the Cheesecake Factory look was the look he was trying for.

The Wall Streat Journal, like Trump, did not dare to appear unhappy with the Saddam Hussein comparison. But they seemed to think, or to want to say and pretend to think, that looking like a Cheesecake Factory was 100% appropriate for the public spaces of a Great Republic. Thus we have this here:

Wall Street Journal Editorial Board: Obama Goes Socialist, Scorns Cheesecake <https://www.wsj.com/opinion/barack-obama-angie-nixon-cheesecake-factory-bf1303ce>: ‘He throws in with Florida’s Angie Nixon and condescends to Middle America: President Obama has delivered another condescending classic. Campaigning for Democrats in Ohio this weekend, he said that President Trump’s redecorations have the White House “looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory.” The same day, Mr. Obama endorsed a socialist as Florida’s next U.S. Senator.

Making fun of chain restaurants is quite an angle for Democrats, who keep insisting that they haven’t forgotten the working man in Middle America. The Cheesecake Factory has a couple of hundred locations, the company says, so it must be doing something deliciously right. But to all of those diners in Cleveland, Grand Rapids, and beyond, here’s Mr. Obama’s message: How déclassé…

Share DeLong's Grasping Reality Weblog

Anyone who thinks about this for more than a minute will note that Donald Trump does not disagree with Barack Obama here. Trump did not respond: “Yes! The Cheesecake Factory look is great! That is exactly what I was going for!”; did he?

No.

He was deeply and mortally offended (as he is deeply and mortally offended by pretty much everything). But look at what offended him. He shrugged off the comparison to a murderous Ba’athist dictator. What he could not stand was the suggestion that his taste is middlebrow. The gold is supposed to say “Versailles,” or at least “Mar-a-Lago.” Obama said it says “suburban mall, near the Macy’s, forty-five-minute wait on a Friday night”. That stung because Trump knows exactly what the Cheesecake Factory look is. He does not want to be caught wanting to reproduce it.

Moreover, I do not think Middle America believes that the Cheesecake Factory look belongs in the public spaces of a Great Republic. That look is fine for, well, a Cheesecake Factory.

I like the place well enough:

• The portions are enormous.

• The menu is a 250-item novella.

• Nobody will judge you for ordering the avocado eggrolls.

• Carbmaxxxing has its place (at least for younger people with less creaky digestions), and it is good for carbmaxxxing.

Share DeLong's Grasping Reality Weblog

But a Cheesecake Factory is, by design, one of those things that the French anthropologist Marc Augé has called a “non-place”: like an airport lounge, a highway rest stop, or a chain hotel, it is meant to look the same in Cleveland Ohio as in Grand Rapids Michigan as in Walnut Creek California. It is supposed to be familiar, and of little account because familiar. Its job is to have no special history and no real location and no different character, so you can walk in anywhere and know exactly where you are.

That is a fine design goal for a restaurant chain.

It is a terrible design goal for the White House. A White House is supposed to be the opposite of a non-place: It is one specific building. It has one specific history. It belongs to one specific people.

And it gets worse.

Nobody thinks the Cheesecake Factory is luxury. Nobody is supposed to think so. The gilt columns, the heavy drapes, the faux-Egyptian-Moorish-Venetian lighting fixtures are, in Jean Baudrillard’s terms, a simulation of luxury that isn’t even trying to fool you.

Everyone is in on the joke.

The point is to feel, for an evening, comfortably adjacent to the idea of opulence, at a price point that makes it a very reasonable Tuesday. A cheap and comfortable knockoff of luxury is a perfectly honorable thing to sell. But when that look moves into the Oval Office, it says something else. It says we have a government interested neither in the substance of power, nor in the weight of history, nor even in real wealth, but only in the image of wealth: a cheap homage to the imago of being successful.

So who, then, actually thinks the public spaces of a Great Republic should look like a Cheesecake Factory? Not Obama. Not, by his own furious admission, Trump. Not, I think, the diners of Cleveland and Grand Rapids and Walnut Creek, who know perfectly well the difference between a fun night out and the seat of government. The only people who claim to think so are the members of the Wall Street Journal editorial board. Or rather, they pretend to.

For note what they are doing. They are putting on a performance of populism: a defense of the honest working man and his honest chain-restaurant cheesecake against the sneering coastal elite. But the people writing those editorials are not defending the working man’s taste. They are not even defending the Cheesecake Factory. They are defending the proposition that a rich and powerful man may treat the people’s house as his private showroom, and that anyone who objects is a snob. That is a very different thing.

I would not be taking any risk in betting a large sum that the Journal’s editorial writers do not, when choosing where to take someone to lunch, suggest the Cheesecake Factory. For none of them have ever suggested it.

What, then, would “appropriate” mean for White House architecture and decoration?

It is not a matter of high taste versus low taste. Plenty of great civic architecture is plain. The Lincoln Memorial is not gilded. Monticello is red brick. What the public spaces of a Great Republic need is stability, continuity, and a shared civic dignity: the sense that the room was there before this president and will be there after him, and that it belongs to all of us rather than to whoever currently holds the lease. That is precisely what cannot be ordered out of a corporate interior-design catalog, at any price point.

So this argument is not really about whether Barack Obama is being “nice,” or whether the Wall Street Journal is right or wrong about a restaurant. It is about whether the public spaces of our government should express a shared civic identity that we hold in common across generations, or should be one more franchise location of a brand that is, by design, a not-very-luxurious simulation of luxury. One of those is a Great, or perhaps a Once-Great, Republic. The other is a chain restaurant.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

If reading this gets you Value Above Replacement, then become a free subscriber to this newsletter. And forward it! And if your VAR from this newsletter is in the three digits or more each year, please become a paid subscriber! I am trying to make you readers—and myself—smarter. Please tell me if I succeed, or how I fail…##the-visual-aesthetics-of-cheesecake-factories-late-friday-fog-flatlands
##neofascism
#cheesecake-factory
#barack-obama
#donald-trump
#white-house
#wall-street-journal
#wsj-editorial-board
#saddam-hussein
#non-places
#french-theory
#simulated-luxury
#hyperreality
#civic-architecture
#great-republic
#public-spaces
#political-aesthetics
#kitsch
#performative-populism
#middle-america

In memoriam, Patrick Stewart 1940-2026…

Patrick Stewart died this week at 86.

Share

The world is mourning the actor. The actor matters for his humanity, his excellence, and his craft. But this also marks a moment for us to reflect more deeply on the character he made real: Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the USS Enterprise NCC-1701-D. For Star Trek: The Next Generation was and is, as Noah Smith says pure crystalized optimism made into drama:

• Gene Roddenberry's banned internal conflict as a plot engine

• That forced ST:TNG’s writers to imagine how genuinely better people would face the unknown.

• Captain Jean-Luc Picard was the result:

  • a commander who would rather understand than fire,

  • who used intelligence to build coexistence,

  • who was not obsessed with so much winning.

Give a gift subscription

And, today, Noah Smith has faith:

I won’t lie. The last quarter century has been brutal to the hopes of those raised on Star Trek: The Next Generation. The promise of a liberal society has not been eliminated, but it has been tarnished by over a decade of social media hatred and rising authoritarianism. Neither greater prosperity nor more information nor giving voice to the voiceless has made our societies more like the United Federation of Planets. Sci-fi marvels are coming to life around us, but every day the people who lead our species seem less like the crew of the Enterprise. But as the 1990s were not the end of history, neither are the 2020s….

It’s about time to pick ourselves back up and start the journey again. We should all go back and watch Star Trek: The Next Generation, with its silly haircuts and its dated special effects, and remember who we thought we could become. Farewell to the great Patrick Stewart. And farewell also, Captain Picard…

Share DeLong's Grasping Reality Weblog

Star Trek: TNG (and, less so but still substantially, Star Trek: TOS) are worthwhile to us as myths of who we should pretend to be if we are to live good and honorable lives. For, as Kurt Vonnegut writes in the beginning to the introduction of his great novel Mother Night <https://archive.org/details/mothernight0000kurt_f3x1>:

THIS IS THE ONLY story of mine whose moral I know. I don’t think it’s a marvelous moral; I simply happen to know what it is: We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be...

Leave a comment

This is also, I think, what Ryan Avent is getting at in his recent (last April) book In Good Faith: How the Nature of Belief Shapes the Fate of Societies, which I need to review, but have found myself blocked on: <https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300269925/in-good-faith/>.

NoahpinionEconomics and other interesting stuffBy Noah SmithCROSSPOST: NOAH SMITH: Patrick Stewart as Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: TNG: Farewell, My Captain

<https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/farewell-my-captain> <https://www.noahpinion.blog>

NoahpinionFarewell, my Captain“That is the exploration that awaits you. Not mapping stars and studying nebulae, but charting the unknowable possibilities of existence.” — Q…Read more2 days ago · 388 likes · 33 comments · Noah SmithA TV character gave us a glimpse of what humanity might become.Noah Smith2026-10-30

“That is the exploration that awaits you. Not mapping stars and studying nebulae, but charting the unknowable possibilities of existence.” — Q

There’s something about the mindset of really hardcore Star Trek fans that’s very difficult to describe to people who don’t share that fandom. I can’t speak for all of us, of course, but for many of us, there is a sense in which the world portrayed in Star Trek is not quite fictional. No one regards it as an exact description of the future, of course, but there is a sense in which it represents one possible future that we must achieve — a “Star Trek timeline” that either we’re on or that we need to return to. The United Federation of Planets isn’t some fantastical interstellar alliance, but an organization that we must create, and whose ideals we must instantiate as the governing ethos of humankind.

Our quasi-religious commitment to this utopian future came from watching the Star Trek TV shows, but the different series inspired us in different ways. The original “Kirk and Spock” series, which aired in the 1960s, was more of a technological vision — the idea that one day we would zip around the cosmos getting into adventures, as easily as we’d zip around the world in a boat today. But Star Trek: The Next Generation, which aired in the late 1980s and early 1990s, gave us a different kind of vision. It was a moral future for the human race — a depiction of a better way that we could face the unknown and master our own personal challenges.

There has never been another television show like Star Trek: The Next Generation, and there might never be one again. It is the greatest TV show ever made, not by dint of a difference in degree, but because of a difference in kind. It is a drama of pure optimism. Every other show tries to thrill us by showing us how bad or how ridiculous or how exciting someone else’s world could be; Star Trek: TNG thrills us by showing us how beautiful our own world could become.

For such a show to be put on the air required an incredible confluence of coincidences. For one thing, it was syndicated in its first run, meaning that it was free from constant interference by network executives. The showrunner,1 Michael Piller, also did something highly unusual when he opened the show up to outside script submissions; this allowed in a whole lot of highly innovative episode ideas.

But the real secret sauce of Star Trek: TNG was the creative vision of Star Trek’s original creator, Gene Roddenberry. A lot of people — and even a lot of science fiction writers — assume that even as technology makes us more powerful, human nature will remain basically the same, with all its old petty short-sighted hatreds and jealousies and selfishness and so on. Roddenberry believed otherwise. He famously declared that the people of the future would actually be better people, free from the flaws of his day. And so he mandated that Star Trek: TNG have no internal conflict in its plotlines.

Some of the writers chafed at that constraint. Interpersonal conflict is the bread and butter of drama — and always an easy plot device to fall back on when you need something to go wrong. But because Roddenberry decreed it, the writers of TNG were forced to envision how the ideal human being would deal with various personal and external obstacles. And so every episode gave us a thoughtful, probing exploration of what the ideal human beings — or at least, people much more morally and emotionally advanced than us — would look like.

No character embodied that ideal more than Captain Jean-Luc Picard. It’s not his personal life that’s ideal — he famously puts career over family, leading to a life full of self-doubt and regret — but his approach to the world. Picard is the ultimate Reasonable Man. He will always try to understand the alien before he opens fire. He is a legendary battle commander but would always rather negotiate than fight. He’s not necessarily the kind of man you’d want for a father, but he felt like one anyway. He values all life, and all uniqueness, intrinsically; he is zipping around the galaxy in a starship in order to discover the Universe, and occasionally to save it, but most of all to understand and respect it.

Understanding and respect, in fact, are Picard’s greatest weapons. He is a brilliant man, with many brilliant people under him, and occasionally he uses his intelligence to defeat an external threat. But he’s no swashbuckling space cowboy — more often than not, he succeeds in understanding the threat, and figures out how to help it achieve its goals without sacrificing his own. Picard realizes that the highest application of intelligence is not to thwart your enemies, but to design a world in which you and they can live in mutually beneficial coexistence. 1990s America was a uniquely hopeful and liberal time in the world, and Star Trek’s greatest captain embodied the spirit of that too-brief moment.

The character of Captain Picard was brought to life by the peerless acting skills of Patrick Stewart, who died two days ago at the age of 86. Stewart’s acting career went far beyond Star Trek — he’s widely considered one of the greatest Shakespearean stage actors of his generation, if not of all time, and he played in dozens of films. But the tributes that are flying thick and fast around the world today almost all focus on his role as Captain Picard.

I’m of two minds about this. As a very slightly famous person, I can tell you that public and private personas are very different things — if you meet me in real life, I won’t quite be the character you’ve imagined from my writings. That goes triple for actors, whose job is literally to pretend to be someone else. Patrick Stewart was not Captain Picard, but a man with a life and a personality all his own. He was, by all reports, a good man, well-loved by those who knew him and worked with him, but his strengths and his flaws were very different from those of the man he played on television. To mourn his passing as the passing of Captain Picard is to engage in a parasocial relationship.

And yet, I do. I can’t help it. I never knew Patrick Stewart, but I did know Captain Picard, and the death of the real man who brought that fictional man to life makes me remember what I loved so much about the latter, and there is value in that.

Nor am I alone. Today the internet is flooded with tributes to Picard, praising Stewart’s portrayal as an embodiment of an ideal liberal politics, an exemplary moral figure, and even as a model of masculinity:

The remembrance of Captain Picard comes at a pivotal moment for our species. The advent of artificial intelligence — machines that can out-think us — will naturally cause a shift in what it means to be human. As with the Industrial Revolution and the advent of agriculture, we will have to figure out a new way to live — new lifestyles, new forms of government, new systems of economic production and distribution, new reasons to value ourselves and each other.

There are many reasons that the particular future portrayed in Star Trek — one in which human beings, as they exist today, take the lead in physically exploring the galaxy — will never happen. AI is one more reason. This is in spite of the fact that Star Trek: The Next Generation is probably the single best prediction of modern AI ever to appear on the screen. The “engineers” on the Enterprise are clearly vibe-coding and prompting the ship’s computer,2 which is so powerful that it sometimes accidentally creates human-level intelligence as part of a holographic entertainment program.

But in real life, the physical requirements of deep space exploration are such that it will never make sense for human beings to be at the forefront, except potentially as digital uploads. And even if we did go, AI’s superhuman intelligence, data assimilation capacity, and speed would remove most or all of the need for human judgement in the loop. If the Romulans attack us, it will be Claude or GPT who handles them.

But outer space is not our true final frontier. The true space that we, as humans, are exploring is our own set of possibilities. In fact, Q, a whimsical omnipotent trickster-god-being that serves as Picard’s foil throughout the series, says this to Picard in the final episode of the show — see the quote at the top of this post. It is our quest to chart the unknowable possibilities of our own existence.

The ultimate destiny of humankind is a consistent theme of Star Trek: TNG, and the show strongly implies that we’ll eventually ascend to some sort of godlike posthumanity. There are multiple instances of humans or human-like beings turning into some sort of higher cosmic being, and Q himself implies that he’s testing humanity for admission into the realm of the space gods. This is probably where we’re headed in reality — our new AI scientists will help us figure out how to expand our consciousness and merge it with the digital realm, until we become something greater than we can currently imagine.

But before that happens — and perhaps even after it happens — it’s possible to envision a better version of Humanity Classic. It’s possible to imagine that through the right combination of technology, governance, and culture, we can put the lie to the old saw that “human nature never changes”, and become more like the characters in Gene Roddenberry’s universe.

In fact, though the overall picture is murky and the road has been stochastic, there is some evidence that we’ve already been moving in a more humane, rational direction — that Captain Picard is less alien to the human race of 2026 than he would have been to the human race of 1626. We once embraced slavery as a way of life; today we regard it as anathema. We once tortured cats to death in public for entertainment; today that would land you in prison. We are far less murderous than we once were.

It is not clear exactly what led to these improvements. Perhaps with scarcity alleviated — with our bellies full, and tractors instead of slaves — we are naturally gentler and more magnanimous. Perhaps more information has given us more empathy toward people far away. Perhaps the social adaptations needed to handle modern economies — markets, property rights, police, democracy — have tamed and civilized us.

Whatever it was, it offers the hope that we can do more of it — that whatever cosmic ascension we might eventually undertake, human beings as they exist in 2026 are not the best we can do in the current form factor.

I won’t lie. The last quarter century has been brutal to the hopes of those raised on Star Trek: The Next Generation. The promise of a liberal society has not been eliminated, but it has been tarnished by over a decade of social media hatred and rising authoritarianism. Neither greater prosperity nor more information nor giving voice to the voiceless has made our societies more like the United Federation of Planets. Sci-fi marvels are coming to life around us, but every day the people who lead our species seem less like the crew of the Enterprise.

But as the 1990s were not the end of history, neither are the 2020s. Moral progress is not a smooth upward line; there have been reversals before (and there certainly are plenty in the Star Trek timeline). It’s about time to pick ourselves back up and start the journey again. We should all go back and watch Star Trek: The Next Generation, with its silly haircuts and its dated special effects, and remember who we thought we could become.

Farewell to the great Patrick Stewart. And farewell also, Captain Picard. In the greatest trek of all — our search for the possibilities of our better selves — you will always be our Captain.

Share

Notes:

1 From the third season onward.

2 This was a lucky accident, since vibe-coding and prompting are easier to portray on screen than writing lines of code.

<https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/farewell-my-captain> <https://www.noahpinion.blog>

NoahpinionFarewell, my Captain“That is the exploration that awaits you. Not mapping stars and studying nebulae, but charting the unknowable possibilities of existence.” — Q…Read more2 days ago · 388 likes · 33 comments · Noah SmithNoahpinionEconomics and other interesting stuffBy Noah Smith

Brad DeLong here: Do note that ST:TNG may be the best prediction of modern AI ever put on screen. The crew is basically vibe-coding the ship. And as AI flies the starships, the frontier left for humans is moral. Do note the difference between ST:TOS in which Spock is always fixing broken electromechanical systems under pressure and in which Scotty is pretty much the only person whose touch on the control board can make the transporter behave. I can only recall a very few similar moments of electro-mechanical fixing in ST:TNG, usually involving Geordi La Forge. The rule is that the computer needs to be told to reconfigure itself, and then it does so: “modify the deflector dish to emit an inverse tachyon pulse” as a vibe-coding command to the computer.

And let me 100% endorse Noah’s prescription: rewatch, and remember who we thought we could become. Remember that, as Noah says:

Picard realizes that the highest application of intelligence is not to thwart your enemies, but to design a world in which you and they can live in mutually beneficial coexistence…

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

If reading this gets you Value Above Replacement, then become a free subscriber to this newsletter. And forward it! And if your VAR from this newsletter is in the three digits or more each year, please become a paid subscriber! I am trying to make you readers—and myself—smarter. Please tell me if I succeed, or how I fail…##crosspost-noah-smith-patrick-stewart-as-jean-luc-picard-in-star-trek-tng-farewell-my-captain
##public-reason
##crosspost
#noah-smith-patrick-stewart-as-jean-luc-picard-in-star-trek-tng-farewell-my-captain
#noah-smith
#patrick-stewart
#jean-luc-picard
#star-trek-the-next-generation
#st-tng
#gene-roddenberry
#liberal-optimism
#utopian-futures
#science-fiction
#parasocial-grief
#kurt-vonnegut
#mother-night
#ryan-avent
#in-memoriam