Cromwell

The Saudis are crying out for American military help against the Houthis, who are threatening the Red Sea escape route for their oil. Trump can’t make up his mind, and with good reason; doing nothing will result in significantly higher oil prices and cause the Saudis to look for security alternatives, while simply bombing the Houthis hasn’t worked in the past and probably won’t work now. What should the man on golf cart do?

There are no good alternatives. The only military option with any real chance of success is a ground invasion of Yemen. Such are the consequences of launching a stupid war.

He should have thought of that six months ago.

The NYT wants the US government to create a regulatory system for AI that mirrors the one created for nuclear energy after World War II. Does that make sense, and can it work?

Yes, but it will be much harder, because the bomb was purely a government project, while AI labs belong to incredibly wealthy tech titans with powerful incentives to escape regulation. In addition, the US government had the trust of its citizens after the war; do you really trust Trump to regulate AI wisely? Finally, adding layers of regulation would probably slow innovation and would expose the regulators to criticism about falling behind the Chinese. That will be a political football if there ever was one.

Of course, falling behind in the race to exterminate mankind is not necessarily a bad thing.

AI is software, not hardware; it only exists and operates in computers and cyberspace. That being the case, how can it destroy civilization as we know it today?

Here are three scenarios:

1. ECONOMIC DISASTER: A large portion of the world’s population is dependent on the internet in one way or another. Our economic system and our infrastructure rely on it. Rogue AI agents could essentially take over the internet without any help from humans; we would have to adjust by returning to the world of, say, 1990. The costs of doing so would be immense.
2. AI KILLS ALL OF MANKIND: To use one example here, AI can identify a way to create a bioweapon that would destroy humanity, but it can’t actually do it by itself, because it doesn’t have a corporeal existence. For this to happen, it would have to operate through collaborators (either robots tied to the internet or disgruntled humans) or be so intelligent that it could turn itself into matter. The last scenario here would make AI truly godlike.
3. AI ENSLAVES HUMANITY: Same as #2–it would require collaborators or the ability to escape cyberspace and become corporeal.

Ted Cruz is concerned about the impacts of AI, but he wants to regulate with a light touch, because he wants the killer robots of the future to be American, not Chinese. Does he really understand the problem?

No. The ultimate regulatory issue is whether AI can escape human control. If it does, the “American” killer robots of Ted’s imagination are far more likely to kill Americans than Chinese.

You can make a pretty strong argument that Trump 1.0 was better than Bush. Yes, his rhetoric was obnoxious and divisive, he sucked up to dictators, his response to the virus was shambolic, and he tried to overthrow the system in his last days, but he didn’t initiate an unsuccessful Middle East war, constantly threaten us with the use of emergency powers, or drive us into a massive recession through inept deregulation. The economy was running strongly prior to the virus. That, along with some collective amnesia about the events of 2020 and January 2021, is why he won in 2024.

You can’t make the same argument about Trump 2.0. As I predicted, his economic plans were not designed to return us to the glory days of 2019. He has started his own ridiculous Middle East war, attempted to wreck more American institutions than I can count, and generated unnecessary inflation with his tariffs. The threat of pure autocracy through the use of emergency powers hangs over us every day, and a serious recession caused by a popping of the AI bubble is a real possibility.

It’s as if we combined the worst elements of both Bush and Trump 1.0 and amplified them.

When I listed the boxes DeSantis is checking off in his effort to prove himself to the reactionary base, I neglected to mention his new zeal for executing prisoners. Florida may or may not be the state where woke goes to die, but it certainly has become the place where criminals do.

Hey, it worked for Bill Clinton. Why not DeSantis?

Donald Trump and Kash Patel think Flock cameras are just awesome. The base disagrees, and other reactionary politicians are listening. Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott are taking action to limit the use of the cameras. Are there any lessons to be learned here?

Two. First of all, Trump never felt any obligation to follow the Constitution or the law; if he no longer cares about the opinions of the base, what obstacles remain to fend off a purely personal autocracy? Second, having profited from widespread cynicism about government, Trump is having trouble turning it off when it no longer suits him.

Call it Epstein Syndrome.

A GOP candidate named Bo French caused a stir by complaining about the number of Asians at the University of Texas. Some Texas Republican bigwigs disowned his comments, but MAGA mostly piled on to support him.

The litigants in reverse discrimination cases typically were of Asian origin in order to preserve the illusion that the right was colorblind and meritocratic, not anti-black. This episode assures us that the protection of white Christians, not meritocracy, was always the ultimate goal for at least a large segment of the right.

The next logical step for MAGA is to impose a DEI program for white Christians at elite universities. Given the identity of his wife, that would be a hard pill for J.D. to swallow, but it’s on the way.

J.D. apparently told his audience to disregard the administration’s lousy record and vote for Republicans anyway because things could get better and the left was much worse during a podcast on Monday. Is this sales pitch likely to motivate the base?

It reminds me of the admonition to ignore the man behind the curtain in “The Wizard of Oz.” It will probably be about as successful, too.

There is a new book out entitled “Profiles in Cowardice,” which, as you would expect, is about powerful people who rolled over for Trump. I haven’t read it, but I understand that Mitch McConnell is identified as one of the cowards, presumably because he voted against the second impeachment. Is that fair?

McConnell clearly decided not to convict at the second impeachment trial because he thought Trump was finished politically and he didn’t want to lose votes from the reactionary base. As it turned out, this was a colossal miscalculation–one that I’m sure he deeply regrets. That mistake doesn’t make him a coward; it makes him a fool.

All of us have been fools at one time or another. It is less morally reprehensible than being a coward. Let’s cut Mitch a little bit of slack.

“Have more kids than you can afford” is the rallying cry for Godly Society pro-natalists. It is also evidence of the futility of their cause. How many women are going to opt for poverty and desperation over economic security? Not too damn many, I would guess.

The attempts to use tariffs and deportations to make single earner families with lots of kids economically viable has already failed, and the advantages of AI for working people are speculative at best, so what can J.D. do? He can try making dramatic changes to the welfare state to help families with kids, but he will get plenty of resistance from members of his own party, and in any event, attempts to reward parents with large families have already failed in countries such as Hungary. There just aren’t enough carrots available to make it happen.

J.D. in power would have to use sticks. He knows the Griswold decision is vulnerable. He will test his instincts by proposing a federal ban on birth control. There is no other plausible option if he is genuinely determined to get what he wants.

The blue team’s view of sex is essentially that anything goes, but subject to three strict conditions: there must be no hint of coercion; both parties must give their fully informed consent; and no one, either inside or outside the relationship, can be injured. The right-wing critique of this position comes from two mutually exclusive directions. First, the traditional values crowd believes that the only acceptable kind of sex is between a married man and his wife; any other kind is immoral and destructive to society even if it has no immediate tangible negative impacts. Second, the male libertarians in the GOP despise the conditions placed on men by the allegedly overly feminized Democrats. They object to the puritanism of the left and believe that boys should be permitted to be boys.

Trump exemplifies the second line of attack, while J.D. is on the first team. The two agree only on their hatred for the left. Can the two views be reconciled in the long run, particularly if J.D. is in power and free to pursue his agenda? I doubt it.

How can reactionary politicians such as J.D. maintain good relations with both the techno-aristocracy and with the base? By constantly bashing the barons in public, while quietly opposing any meaningful effort by the government to regulate them.

Like the bankers during the Great Recession, the barons are notoriously touchy, so this tactic might not be completely successful. Most of them would probably buy into it if they understood the public jawboning as part of a dirty bargain, however. Self-interest trumps image most of the time, if not all of it, and some of the barons might even enjoy being portrayed as Bond villains. One in particular comes to mind.

Mike Johnson and J.D. have plenty in common. Both are prominent and ambitious Republican politicians with strong ties to the religious right. Both are therefore highly visible proponents of the Godly Society. And both of them have jobs which require them to maintain good relations with all of the factions of the GOP even when they have wildly different objectives.

Johnson has followed the Trumpian lead and is advocating for deregulation of AI in order to keep the tech barons and their CL supporters in line even though that position is difficult to reconcile with his otherwise reactionary views. J.D. hasn’t said much on the subject recently, but the comments he has made suggest he has made the same choice. If so, it may cost him dearly in the long run; the base has no love for the barons.

Donald Trump says concerns about AI and data centers are a HOAX. Steve Bannon, one of his most important acolytes, begs to differ. Trump has been unusually tone-deaf to the base on both AI issues and the Iran war over the last several months. Could the base peel away?

Trump and J.D. are going to have serious problems maintaining complete control over the base as long as AI and the war have the attention of the public. At some point, however, the war will end, and J.D. has consistently fought to keep the base united by focusing its attention on the danger presented by the left.

I think it depends on whether J.D. gets a serious challenge from a fellow reactionary during the campaign. If he does, it may become impossible to paper over the differences of opinion within the base. If not, the base will have nowhere else to go, and the blue team will have to hope its members just stay home in 2028.