Thinking about...

While in Kharkiv I found myself meditation on some basic issues at night; the prompts came from the war itself, but the time awake lent itself to the effort of connecting daily experience to bigger political concepts. Fascism, the topic of this recording, came to mind at night in Kharkiv for obvious reasons, not least the geographical proximity to fascist Russia, and the wild violence of Russia’s war of aggression. There are four videos remaining after this one: the next two, on AI and on human language, will be released tomorrow and the day after. The final three meditations will be released October 3, 4, and 5 (in between there will be more contemporary material on US politics.). I hope that these meditations are useful or fruitful for you. Please share them if they are.

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Wherever I am, I try to write in the morning; staying in Kharkiv, visiting friends and soldiers during the day, I found it most convenient to instead record a few things at night. The setting was an evocative one: a city that functions despite war and war crimes; the apartment of an interesting Ukrainian intellectual; the timely stimulus of the air raid siren. This is the fifth of ten video meditations I recorded; it is about the meaning of freedom. The next one, on fascism, will be released tomorrow.

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This is the fourth of the ten video meditations I recorded at night in Kharkiv, in northeastern Ukraine, near the border with Russia. This one is about a very simple idea; to believe in only one thing is to come very close to believing in nothing. It is an idea prompted by an essay written by George Shevelov about faith in communism; but it has much larger implications than that. Belief in only one good thing dulls us to the other good things, and puts us at risk that a loss of faith in one thing means a loss of faith in others. And so zealotry and nihilism are closer than they appear.

There will be six more of these videos: three to be released in the next three days, and then three more in early October. (In between, from September 28 to October 2, I will be using this platform and others for some discussions of contemporary US politics.)

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This is the third of the ten video meditations I recorded in Kharkiv, in northeastern Ukraine, close to the Russian border. The first couple were about courage and cowardice, which led me to the importance of moral categories in general. Is there anything more objective about terms like “interests” and “calculations” than there is about, say, “greed” and “sadism”? Or are we perhaps hiding reality from ourselves by the narrowness of our preferred vocabulary? The next video meditation (the problem of believing in only one big thing) will be released tomorrow, and the one after that (on freedom) the following day.

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This is the second of the ten video meditations I recorded at night not long ago in Kharkiv, Ukraine. They are thoughts that came to mind in a place which has been under constant attack by missiles and drones for more than four years. The topic this time is small acts of courage, and idea which came to me from observation of people who are effective during war and in resistance. It’s a phrase that works better in other languages, maybe; the idea is not to think of courage as something that is only epic of filmic and therefore out of reach, but as something that usually humble and, at meaningful moments, within our grasp. The next several of these Kharkiv Meditations will be released one per day.

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This is the first of ten video meditations I recorded at night in Kharkiv, a frontline city in northeastern Ukraine. They concern matters that came to mind during the general setting of a long and terrible war; they were inspired though by the particularities of daily life in Kharkiv, which is less than a minute away from Russia by missile. The topic of this first one is “cowardice,” in particular that of people who kill others whom they never see and for no reason; this led me on to thoughts about courage, moral language, and freedom. These next few will be released one per day in coming days. If I were at all good at this sort of thing I would have thought to bring a light and a microphone; I hope that the spontaneity of these meditations makes up for my technical limitations.

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Dear Thinkers,

Hard as it is to believe, today marks 164 days since President Trump dragged the United States into war with Iran — a war that has produced devastating and deeply humiliating consequences.

To make sense of where we are, Tim recently sat down with former U.S. Ambassador and Domestic Policy Advisor Susan E. Rice (Ambassador Susan E. Rice) for a wide-ranging thirty-minute conversation about the war, American power, and what this moment says about the state of our democracy.

They began with a fundamental question: Does this administration have a coherent conception of the national interest at all — or was this war undertaken without one? Along those lines, Susan made a striking case for just how unnecessary the war was, which led Tim to frame the conversation around three words that once defined the practice of American statecraft: Diplomacy. Doing the Work. Deterrence.

* Diplomacy requires diplomats. Susan pointed to the two years of painstaking, expert-driven negotiations that produced the 2015 Iran nuclear deal — including the involvement of a Secretary of Energy who was himself a nuclear scientist. She contrasted that process with the reportedly rushed June memorandum of understanding negotiated by figures including Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, which she described as poorly drafted and sufficiently vague that both sides could walk away with fundamentally different understandings of what they had agreed to.

* Doing the work. Tim raised the idea that expertise, relationships, and sustained effort — the kind of career Susan has had — used to be the basis of American power, and that the current leadership treats governance more like opportunism than genuine effort.

* Deterrence: Both Tim and Susan agreed that American military power was used extensively in the war, yet failed to achieve its stated goals, which Susan argued undermines the credibility of future threats. Tim added that broadcasting military plans publicly and fighting with munitions the U.S. can’t quickly replace reflects an outdated approach to modern warfare—one that hasn’t absorbed the lessons of Ukraine.

Tim closed by asking whether the war might ultimately help Americans see the connection between what he described as American fecklessness abroad and what is happening here at home.

Susan’s answer was one of my favorite parts of the conversation.

She pointed out that the money, attention, and political capital being spent on war are resources that could instead be devoted to the things Americans actually need: healthcare, Medicaid, rural hospitals, and Social Security — programs she argued this administration has moved to cut or undermine.

She also spoke candidly about a political moment in which dissent is being suppressed and rights are being curtailed. But she ended on a hopeful note, identifying three principles she believes Americans across political lines can still rally around: the Constitution, the equal application of the rule of law, and the founding belief in equality.

There was no better place to end.

I hope you’ll tune in, enjoy the conversation, and share it with anyone else who might be interested. There is a lot here to think about, and I think you’ll learn a great deal from Susan and Tim’s conversation.

Thanks, as ever, for being part of this community of thinkers.

Until next time,

Victor

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Dear readers:

Hope you have a cup of coffee in hand for this one. Tim joined Joyce Vance, former U.S. Attorney during the Obama Administration and host of Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance on Substack, to talk about what language to describe our moment, democracy, and civic participation look like today.

Tim and Joyce started off by talking about how “sugarcoating” political realities can become a form of collaboration, because it delays the public response necessary to defend democratic institutions. They both also reject the idea that democracy inevitably self-corrects, stressing that there is no political “pendulum” that guarantees a return to normalcy. Tim also emphasized that democracies survive only when citizens actively participate in shaping their future.

The rest of the discussion explored everything from the aftermath of the Iran war to threats against democratic norms at home, including debates over executive power, habeas corpus, voting rights, and the Supreme Court. Tim mentioned, regarding Iran, that authoritarian movements are often fueled by the illusion that force can solve complex problems, while history repeatedly shows that violence creates consequences its architects cannot control, which he writes about in his recent essays on Iran.

To me, the most striking part of the conversation focused on what comes next. Tim and Joyce both urged Democrats and democracy advocates to think beyond simply winning the next election. Success, as Tim said, requires a broad coalition, a compelling vision of the future, and a willingness to pursue ambitious democratic reforms—from voting rights and anti-corruption measures to structural changes that will strengthen democratic institutions.

Throughout the conversation, both Tim and Joyce returned to a common theme that has helped guide me as I try to navigate these times: history is not a script. There is no singular arc of the universe. The future remains unwritten. Whether America emerges stronger from this moment depends not on inevitability, but on the deliberate choices and actions citizens make now—and with each other.

As Tim and Joyce put it in their closing messages, the answer is always action.

Until next time,

-Victor

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Dear thinkers:

Earlier today, Tim talked with Jake Sullivan and Jon Finer, two former senior national security aides to President Biden on their new show, “The Long Game.:

They began with Iran — and, specifically, the power the United States has effectively surrendered through this war. As Tim put it during the conversation: “We’ve lost this war, and we lost it a long time ago.” The deeper question, he argued, is not simply how leaders can be so incompetent, but how we build institutions and a political culture that make radically incompetent leadership impossible.

If you'd like to read more on this theme, Tim explored it further in his recent essays, Utopias of Violence and Capitulation Day.

The conversation then turned to Ukraine: where the war stands today, why Russia is failing to achieve its objectives, the remarkable technological innovations Ukraine has developed under pressure, and what the Trump administration continues to misunderstand about the conflict. Tim also highlighted two organizations doing vital work in support of Ukraine: United24 and Razom.

They concluded with a discussion of freedom — a subject Tim examines at length in his book On Freedom. One of the central ideas is that freedom cannot simply be freedom from something. We must also strive for freedom to, creating the conditions and world that will lead to true freedom.

It was a thoughtful and wide-ranging conversation, and one that speaks directly to many of the challenges facing democracies today.

Until next time,

Victor

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Dear Thinkers,

This afternoon, Tim sat down with Ruth Ben-Ghiat for a conversation I think many of you will want to watch with a notebook in hand.

Ruth is one of the foremost scholars of strongmen and authoritarianism — she teaches at NYU and has spent her career studying exactly the kind of moment we find ourselves in now. Together, she and Tim covered a lot of ground, from strongmen to oligarchs, to fascism, but the heart of the conversation was about how to make sense of what’s happening around us.

One concept that stood out to me: the distinction between Superpower Suicide and Superpower Murder — a framework Tim has written about before, but which takes on new dimensions in conversation with Ruth. They also explored other ways of naming and framing this moment, and, crucially, what each of us can practically do in response.

As Tim put it near the end, getting the language right isn’t just an intellectual exercise. It’s clarifying. It’s even enabling.

Hope you find it as illuminating as I did.

More Thinking Live conversations are on the way — stay tuned!

— Victor

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