Aaron Ross Powell's Blog

The path forward, from all of this, will be legal and institutional, but it will also need to be cultural and social. Both have their own institutions, of course, and their own unwritten laws in their norms. But those institutions and those unwritten laws are macro-products of micro-behaviors, the result of ethical choices you and I and all of us make throughout every hour, every day, and every year.

What all of this is showing, now, is that the micro-choices made by many of our elites, and many of those adjacent to them, in the decade or two before all of this happened (and happened with demoralizing speed once the far-right took control in January) were broken or cramped. They refused to see, or in fact participated in, what was happening while it was still in the phase something could’ve been done. Before it metastasized into our present moment.

They still do it. You can see it every time the press or a national magazine publishes another fawning “aren’t these people interesting?” interview with a character from one of the right’s fever swamps. A professor who thinks maybe what we need is a Catholic theocracy. A couple who advocates for traditional families, and large ones too, because birth rates are down, and by that they mean birth rights among those who share their skin color and cultural origins. A podcaster who winks at antisemitism, or maybe doesn’t wink, but raises its tropes with enough plausible deniability to make whatever journalist it is feel okay with writing up the interview. The person who takes money from the far-right because it’s a job or it’s funding, and maybe a little of what the far-right says has a point behind it because it sure feels like our cities aren’t as safe as they remember when they were still sheltered by their parents’ roof. Whatever the crime stats say.

The world is diverse. And the content of that diversity changes. That’s what a liberal, pluralistic society is. You can’t have it otherwise and still have liberal pluralism. But that doesn’t mean you have to like every tributary of that diversity, and it doesn’t mean you’ll feel as comfortable with all of it as you felt when you were a child sheltered by your parents’ roof. You go from being a kid to talking about the kids these days, and that’s natural, because all of us stop being kids, and in stopping being kids we settle into preferences and give up experimenting. Mostly.

So you look out at that diversity, and that change, and you put up with it, because that’s what it means to be a liberal. Which you think of yourself as, in part because the non-liberals, at least the ones who call themselves that outside of limited circles of post-liberal academia or the attendees at a National Conservatism conference, are just so uncouth. So uncultured. So proletariat.

But sometimes a resident of one of those tributaries, or someone sharing the same stream as you in all this pluralism, tells you the way you think, now, might’ve been okay, or at least accepted, during your formative years, but it’s not anymore. You can’t say that. Not about those people over there. You can’t joke at their expense. Or you can’t treat the people who work for you that way, not like people in your position in years past were able to get away with. Or you have to accept that people who look like you, or come from the same background as you, aren’t so much the culture’s focus anymore. Instead, people who don’t look like you, or didn’t come from the same background as you, have a degree of privilege and regard that feels, in its emphasis, like privilege and regard taken from you.

You’re still a liberal, you tell yourself, but this is all a bit too much. You’ve earned more than you’re getting, or feel you’re getting, not just (or even) financially, but in terms of having things be the way you want them to be. The future you imagined when you were still on your way up has been taken from you, maybe before you even reached the top. You’re haunted by its absence, a ghost of what never came to be.

And here are these people, on the fringes, in strange corners of the intellectual and social landscape, removed enough from you and your peers to feel slightly exotic, saying that, actually, what you’re feeling is okay. Proper. Because that future, that settled feeling of being atop the culture and uncriticized in your ways, that you were anticipating, or had a taste of, was taken from you. By them. The people not like you. The youth, or the culturally distinct, or the woke, or the professors in the sociology department. This isn’t change you’re experiencing, or not just change. Instead, it’s corruption. It’s bad values, bad beliefs, replacing good values and good beliefs. The good values and beliefs are the traditional ones, the old ways, because they were the values and beliefs from before all this corrupting change. And you know they’re good because they’re your values and beliefs, or a heightened version of them, and your values and beliefs can’t be bad. Otherwise you wouldn’t hold them, and that’s what’s so unjust about the youth or the woke or the professors in the sociology department telling you that making those jokes or treating your assistant that way isn’t okay and you should knock it off.

So you cozy up to them. You might not buy the whole of what they’re selling, but you’re intrigued. And, besides, they feel a little transgressive, and that reminds you of the rush of your own youth, when you were the one telling your parents’ and grandparents’ that their beliefs needed updating. Or maybe you’re still young now, but feel out of step, uncomfortable in the culture, and here are these people telling you that it’s the culture’s fault. And so you give them interviews, you hang out with them at conferences, you take jobs and money from them, and let them into your circles, if only on the periphery. Because, again, they might be outsiders, but maybe they’re onto something? Their ideas are fun to think about, anyway.

This was all one thing when they stayed on the periphery. It wasn’t wise, because the content of those ideas was, let’s be honest, always rather abhorrent, because the content of those ideas always included racism, and sexism, and a belief in natural hierarchies among human beings. It wasn’t moral to entertain the beliefs of this fringe. It was a sign of poor character to find them intriguing and titillating. But now... Now those ideas and those attitudes are no longer on the periphery. They are the commanding heights. They control the federal government, and are asserting control over our institutions. They’re mainstream because they’ve poisoned our political headwaters.

When we get through this, then, when our political institutions are no longer controlled by the sorts of people who currently control them, we’ll need to think long and hard about how we got here, and about the degree to which getting here was the result of not just tolerating, but entertaining, these ideas.

They must no longer be edged up to because they feel transgressive. They are not harmless, we now see. They are gravely, apocalyptically harmful. We knew this from history, of course, because we’ve seen this before, but the people who really needed to see it only had in the pages of history books, where a kind of depersonalizing sanitation takes place. Where there’s enough distance, over space and time and culture, that we can turn our eye away from seeing ourselves, or seeing our friends or acquaintances or colleagues, in their pages and their stories of how other places and other times ended up here.

Every time another one of these people makes the news for taking the mask off to such a degree that what they really can no longer be ignored or explained away, and if you spend time in what we’ve taken to calling “elite circles” over the last decade or two, you’ll hear the same refrain. I used to know him. I used to work with him. I used to have drinks with him. I had drinks with him last week, he’s a fun guy. Often there were signs of the kinds of values that lead to believing these ideas, and then believing them enough to take the mask off. He drank and harassed interns. He joked about women or gays or minorities. He was rather fond of talking about genetic differences in IQ or how evolution built women to be better in the home than the boardroom. It’s all unfortunate because he does good work, though. It’s just foibles. It’s all in good fun.

That’s what we have to abandon, when we get through this and begin the process of rebuilding our political and cultural institutions. Liberal pluralism means allowing, in a legal sense, bad people to hold bad ideas. There are calls, as we watch the horrors around us, to give that up. To turn the state against the expression of these ideas, when liberals regain the state. We mustn’t do that, mustn’t give into that urge, because we’re seeing now what it’s like to have a state use its muscle to crush what its rulers believe to be improper ideas. Besides, it wasn’t the allowing that got us here. The failure of elites wasn’t that they merely tolerated a certain fringe. It’s that they gave platforms to that fringe, normalized it, sanitized it. If they’d only ignored it, we might be in better shape. But instead they were intrigued by it, liked what it had to say, made its voice part of the conversation they then pushed, through the outlets they controlled, to everyone else who might’ve otherwise left it on the fringe, too. They were corrupted by it, by the fact that it was telling them their feelings of alienation from the wider culture, or from their children and grandchildren, were justified and their sense that alienation resulted from cultural injustice valid. And they were corrupted by knowing enough of these people to believe them fun to have drinks with.

We have to give that up. We have to make these ideas and the people who hold them socially anathema again. Not legally, because the First Amendment is good and just, but they ought not to be our friends. They ought not to be welcome members of our social and professional groups. There needs to be consequences for aiding and abetting all of this. We’ll need to relearn the lessons of history elites waved away out of a pull towards the exotic and a desire to be maybe a little transgressive themselves. We’ll have to relearn what is acceptable and what isn’t, what leads to a wholesome society and what drags us into a vicious one.

We’ll need the courage of our convictions, if we in fact mean them, to reshape the culture so that these ideas, of racism and sexism and hierarchy and domination, are forced back to the fringe. And stay there.

Listen to this episode in your favorite podcast app.

We sometimes talk about technology on ReImagining Liberty, in the context of how it interacts with a liberal society, or how technology can help us defend and advance liberal. The big technology everyone’s talking about right now is, of course, artificial intelligence. It’s a topic I’ve written about, but not one I’d yet done an episode about specifically regarding what it means for liberalism.

Then I read an essay by Ted Underwood, a professor in the School of Information Sciences, and in the English Department, at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. It’s titled “A more interesting upside of AI” and you can find a link to it in the show notes. He argues that the framing of AI technology as aiming at “super-intelligence” is misguided, both undesirable and misunderstanding important aspects of society and culture. Instead, he’s an advocate of viewing AI as a cultural technology. What grabbed my attention was his further claim that, as a cultural technology, it can help us map and appreciate cultural differences, and cultural similarities, in ways that line up with, and support, liberal principles like pluralism, tolerance, and understanding.

It’s a big claim, and a fascinating one, and it lead to really fun and illuminating discussion.

Former North Carolina governor Roy Cooper announced he’s entering the state’s Senate race. This has upset a lot of people on Bluesky. Not because they object to Cooper’s politics—he’s a Democrat who is popular enough that he could well flip a critically needed Senate seat—but because, in his announcement, he mentioned that he’d prayed before coming to the decision.

I have thought on it and prayed about it, and I have decided: I am running to be the next U.S. Senator from North Carolina.

[image or embed]

— Roy Cooper ([@roycoopernc.bsky.social](http://roycoopernc.bsky.social)) July 28, 2025 at 6:05 a.m.

Prayer, you see, is something only religious people do. In Cooper’s case, Christian religious people. And because far-right Christians are currently doing their damndest to destroy the country and inflict great cruelty on marginalized Americans, a devout Christian like Cooper, even one who quite clearly views such destruction and cruelty as running counter to the ethics of his faith, is anathema. For these Bluesky types, religion itself is evil. Or, at best, in the political sphere ought to be confined by a policy of “Don’t ask, don’t tell.”

This enragement in the replies takes the form of a lot of people condemning religion not just as evil but all religious faithful as irrational. Or whatever else might track with the way the New Atheists, back when that was a culturally relevant thing, talked about religious belief and religious believers. Reading these replies brought a feeling of cringe. Not just from seeing these, as I’ll argue, nonsense positions stated openly and righteously, but because when I was in my late teens and early 20s and in college, I made similar statements. I cringe at the Aaron who once was, but who I grew out of.

I’m writing about it, though, because I set off a rather minor conflagration when, in response to a criticism of such anti-religious criticisms of Cooper, someone wrote that lots of people have been “harmed, traumatized, or oppressed” by “religion” and so it’s okay to be mad about its expression, even in as what one might’ve thought as anodyne a form as, “I prayed while wrestling with this major decision.”

I can’t find that post to link to here, because the person blocked me, but what I wrote in reply was:

No one has ever been harmed, traumatized, or oppressed by “religion,” just like no one has ever been harmed, etc., by “philosophy.” They have been harmed by particular people with particular religious beliefs. Conflating those with the concept of religion itself is just a way to sneak in bigotry.

I bring this all up here not to just surface Bluesky drama into a different medium, but because the anger directed at me criticizing the anger directed at Cooper, and the anger directed at Cooper in all its teeth-gnashing enthusiasm, I think speaks to a real problem with the way some people on the left—in particular the Very Online left, but also in my old “logic and reason” libertarian circles—think about religion. And how they think about religious people.

To get mad at someone expressing anything religious—or, if we want to narrow it, to get mad at someone expressing any sort of a religious belief hooked onto a religion as broad and diverse as Christianity—is to be collectivist in a way similar to ethnonationalism or racism. It is, as I said, to be a bigot. It is to unreasonably, and irrationally, other most of the humans you share the planet with. Which is mean-spirited, ignorant, and quite stupid.

The typical response to my claim that no one has been harmed by “religion,” just as no one has been harmed by “philosophy,” but that plenty of people have been harmed by religious people acting out of their religious belief—just as plenty of people have been harmed by people acting in application of particular philosophical beliefs—was to point out a litany of specific harms done in the name of specific religions. It was, in other words, to restate my argument while mistakenly thinking one was rebutting it.

It might be that religions, of one sort or another, have led to so much harm that it outweighs any of their particular value. That strikes me as implausible, but it’s not incoherent. But religion is such a vast category of beliefs that it makes no sense whatsoever to condemn it as evil, or to claim that any expression of any religious belief is wrong and bad and impermissible just because some religious people have done some bad things, and even if those things they’ve done have been very bad.

But it is also to display a total lack of curiosity about the lives of others, and in a way strikingly analogous to the sort of dehumanizing hate the people mad at Cooper claim to be against. The fact is, most everyone you share this planet with has some religious beliefs. Atheism is rare. (And if you think some atheistic worldviews, such as Buddhism, still count as religion, then not even all atheists are irreligious.) To believe that any religious viewpoint is the result of evil and/or irrationality is to say, in other words, that very nearly everyone you share this planet with is evil and/or irrational, and that you, due to your uncommon sophistication and moral insight, are one of the few rational and good people out there.

None of this tracks with history, or philosophy, or sociology. Some religious people are evil, or do evil things. Most aren’t and don’t. Some religious people have used their faith to justify horrors. The overwhelming counterbalance hasn’t. At the same time, some entirely secular people are evil, or do evil things, and some entirely secular people have used their philosophies and ideologies to justify horrors.

The trouble with the New Atheists, whose arguments echo through Bluesky’s anger at Cooper, is that they lied to their readers. If you explored atheism through the context of Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins, you came away thinking all religious faith is stupid, because the arguments for religious faith they presented and then knocked down were stupid. And many of those arguments were. But they also aren’t the arguments sophisticated advocates of religious faith actually make. You can, of course, still believe those more sophisticated arguments fail. (I do, which is why I’m still an atheist.) But they’re not stupid. And the people who think they do work aren’t stupid, any more than philosophers who argue for consequentialism as the correct moral theory are stupid, even though I think consequentialism is pretty clearly not the correct moral theory.

And just as consequentialists can be good and moral people grounding their goodness and morality in consequentialism, even if I’m not persuaded by the arguments for their moral theory, the same applies to religious faithful to ground their morality in that faith. The fact is that a lot of moral goodness is the result of, or built upon, religious faith. Both now and historically. A lot of the expanding sphere of moral concern has come from people advocating for it based on their religious faith. To deny that, to condemn religion itself (versus particular religious beliefs held by particular people) as so without merit that the very expressing of any of it in a public forum is anathema is, to be blunt, to be a bigot, and of a particularly ignorant variety.

This ignorant bigotry is, I think, the result of a lot of people simply having a difficult time with a theory of other minds. It is to be solipsistic. It is to be incapable of accepting intellectual or value difference, and so to treat any intellectual or value difference from your own perspective as being necessarily stupid or corrupt. People who hold this view—well represented among those most angry at Cooper’s faith— simply can’t put themselves in the head of another, and don’t much care to. To accept pluralism would be to undercut their own sense of elitism and righteousness. Empathy is only for the in-group.

It’s deeply corrosive to humanity’s shared bonds. And it’s no way to go through life.

Is lack of male teachers to blame for boys underperforming and otherwise falling behind? Probably not, at least according to the data Jessica Grose marshals in a New York Times column. (Gift Link) She raises what’s typically a good critique to point out whenever someone says, “Here’s something bad that has recently, and it must be caused by this feature of the world.” Namely, she asks, “Is that feature new?” If it isn’t, if it’s been around for a while, then chances are it isn’t the cause of the new bad thing.

In this case, she correctly points out that, well, young boys have been taught overwhelmingly by female teachers for much longer than we’ve been fretting about the “boy crisis.”

Boys and girls were made to sit for long periods of time in the 1950s, and their punishment for disobeying was likely harsher than it is in many schools today. (I have heard so many tales of nuns hitting kids with rulers.) I don’t think there was a widespread embrace of boys acting out in the classroom in previous generations, and yet no one is arguing that American education of the Eisenhower era made boys less ambitious. This revelation made me want to see if there was actually empirical support for the boy-crisis argument.

This sounds right. So what has changed? I think the correct answer is: opportunities. It used to be that a boy could underperform a girl in school, but still be confident in achieving higher status once he graduated, because high status positions were closed to women, and so less qualified boys could still get them. Or, if they weren’t closed, their environments were so hostile to women that few women pursued them, and fewer still stuck around.

In other words, in the high-status professions, there used to be a good deal less competition, which meant that relatively more mediocre men were able to find positions and success than can today when those relatively more mediocre men have to compete with a greater number of less mediocre women. (And, in the case of white men, fewer qualified minorities, as well.)

In a knowledge economy such as ours, status very much latches onto educational attainment. Yes, you can achieve high status while not achieving high educational attainment (you can drop out of college and launch a successful tech firm). But if you want a surefire bet, getting a graduate degree helps a ton. Which means going to undergrad and doing well, and that means doing well enough in high school to be accepted into a good undergraduate program. Girls perform better in K-12, and that’s not terribly new, which is Grose’s point. What is new is that those better-performing girls have far more opportunity to get into top schools, and then go to grad school, than they did in the middle of the last century.

That, in turn, means that the guys who aren’t as successful aren’t just finding themselves competing against a field of higher-qualified peers than before, but they’re competing against more of them, as well. And, the ones who do make it into higher-status professions aren’t getting the cushy boys' clubs of yesteryear, where they could coast comfortably in a comparatively less demanding environment. (I suspect this is the root cause of men in traditionally male intellectual professions getting rather incensed by finding themselves now among female peers who are showing them up. And then spinning up rather silly arguments about how those women aren’t really showing them up.)

Put another way, there’s no longer (as much of) a default status that comes with being a guy, nor does being a guy give you exclusive access to the high-status professions. The K-12 educational success gap isn’t new, but those status and access changes are exposing it, where before it was more hidden. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t look for ways to bring up the educational achievement of boys, including acknowledging that boys, particularly younger boys, might need different methods to pay for their different behaviors. But it also doesn’t mean we should see the fact that the relative success of boys and girls, and then men and women, is shifting in itself a problem. If women were kept down, and now they aren’t, then it will appear that boys are losing ground. If that’s at least part of what’s going on, then the solution isn’t to drag women back down again, but to encourage our boys to recognize that it’s actually okay if the girls around them, or some of them, or many of them, are as good, if not better, at school or work or careers than they are.

“996” is, according to Wired, finding its way to Silicon Valley. It’s a term for a Chinese model of work: you start your labor at 9am, finish at 9pm, and do it six days a week. In other words, it’s basically being an associate in a big law firm, spread to other economic sectors.

The way this horrific work/life imbalance gets sold by the people selling it is under the flag of “productivity.” Whatever company it is they head is doing important work. World-changing work. Historically world-changing work. And if you want to be a part of that, you need to feel a drive towards all-in-ness. Which in turn means not being weak by wanting, say, time with your family or friends or the opportunity to relax.

But it’s not really about productivity, because nothing about 996 boosts productivity. Instead, its about the guys at the top, the ones telling the people below them to work 12 hours a day six days a week, wanting to feel important and powerful.

Take this from the Wired piece.

Companies aren’t having trouble finding willing employees, and some frame it as core to their work culture. Rilla, an AI startup that sells software designed for contractors (like plumbers) to record conversations with prospective clients and coach them on how to negotiate higher rates, says nearly all of its 80-person workforce adheres to the 996 schedule.

“There’s a really strong and growing subculture of people, especially in my generation—Gen Z—who grew up listening to stories of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, entrepreneurs who dedicated their lives to building life-changing companies,” says Will Gao, the company’s head of growth. “Kobe Bryant dedicated all his waking hours to basketball, and I don’t think there’s a lot of people saying that Kobe Bryant shouldn’t have worked as hard as he did.”

Notice the disconnect between the people Will Gao compares himself to and the product his company actually builds. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, in a very real sense, forged (or the people working at their companies forged) the modern technological world. Kobe Bryant was one of the greatest basketball players who ever lived. Will Gao makes recording software to help plumbers eek out a bit more profit. This isn’t nothing, it’s good to help people figure out how to earn a better living, but it’s probably not going to be “life-changing” even for the plumbers, let alone world-historically.

But the other disconnect is that Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Kobe Bryant were all the guys at the top. Jobs wanted to build Apple, and he wanted to work long hours to do it. Gates wanted to build Microsoft and was driven to do so. They weren’t told to by a boss. Likewise, Kobe Bryant put in endless practice time toward becoming the best basketball player he could be because, to start with, he absolutely loved playing basketball.

What Will Gao and the other executives at Rilla are instead doing is demanding, in an exceptionally tight technology labor market, that anyone who wants a paycheck from them needs to give up their lives. Maybe some people do, and maybe some don’t feel they have much choice, but let’s not kid ourselves that this is about an existential drive towards world-historical impact à la Jobs, Gates, or Bryant.

Further, if the goal is actually productivity, well, 996 ain’t gonna do it. We have research on this. A lot. Long hours don’t make people more productive, because there are only so many hours in a day, and only so many days a week, you can be at peak productivity. Instead, long hours burn you out. And as you burn out, as you become exhausted and stressed, your productivity (and creativity and everything else needed for a successful, world-historical start-up) declines. By a lot.

In my experience, though, the people who push this stuff aren’t terribly curious about the state of the research. They want to work long hours, because they believe in their company, or because they bought into the grind mindset false bill of sale. They’ve swallowed an image of what being serious about work looks like, and they’ve made that image so central to their identity that to admit it’s a mirage, that they’re instead just making their companies worse while making their workers miserable, would be to admit, well, that they’re maybe not as world-historically important as they imagine themselves to be.

But I think there’s something else going on, too, and it’s about power. Years ago, in a conversation with a CEO who proposed reconfiguring his organization’s headquarters from largely private offices with doors that could close to largely open-office floor plans and removing doors from the remaining private offices, I mentioned the research. I said, “You argue that this change will increase both productivity and collaboration. But there’s robust evidence that it will do precisely the opposite. Workers in open-offices are less productive, and they tend to shift to electronic communication rather than face-to-face just to carve out some degree of privacy.” And he screamed at me.

He screamed because he didn’t want to hear what the research said, because, like a lot of the guys calling for 996, this move wasn’t, I suspect, motivated by a genuine desire for greater productivity and collaboration. Or, if it was genuine, it was a thin genuineness, more of a “he’d convinced himself his pretext wasn’t pretextual, but authentic” than “he legitimately wanted to pursue whatever changes would maximize productivity and collaboration.”

No, the actual motivation is when you’re at the top, for many of these guys, the way you feel like you’re at the top is to see people beneath you. It’s why Trump wants his staff to genuflect, and why he likes parades. He’s the guy in charge, and being the guy in charge only really feels like it if you can see the people who aren’t in charge. In other words, you want to exercise your in-charge-ness, and witness those subject to it. Otherwise your in-charge-ness is as much a mirage as those open-office productivity gains. Or at least feels like it.

What 996 accomplishes, then, isn’t a more productive company than one where workers come to work each day feeling happy and refreshed. What 996 accomplishes is workers being in the office basically all the time the guy at the top would care to look out into the office and see his workers there. What taking doors off of offices and moving to an open-office floor plan accomplishes (if the goal isn’t merely some gain in how many people can be packed into limited square footage) is that if you’re the guy at the top, you can walk around the building and see the people who report to you. You can see them working for you. And not just individually, such as if you had online one-on-ones with them regularly, or if you swung by their (private) offices, but as a mass.

That doesn’t increase collaboration. It doesn’t increase productivity. The evidence for both is overwhelming. But it is a pretty powerful feeling. And if you get to feel it, it means you’re pretty important. Maybe even as important as Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Kobe Bryant.

“996” is, according to Wired, finding its way to Silicon Valley. It’s a term for a Chinese model of work: you start your labor at 9am, finish at 9pm, and do it six days a week. In other words, it’s basically being an associate in a big law firm, spread to other economic sectors.

The way this horrific work/life imbalance gets sold by the people selling it is under the flag of “productivity.” Whatever company it is they head is doing important work. World-changing work. Historically world-changing work. And if you want to be a part of that, you need to feel a drive towards all-in-ness. Which in turn means not being weak by wanting, say, time with your family or friends or the opportunity to relax.

But it’s not really about productivity, because nothing about 996 boosts productivity. Instead, its about the guys at the top, the ones telling the people below them to work 12 hours a day six days a week, wanting to feel important and powerful.

Take this from the Wired piece.

Companies aren’t having trouble finding willing employees, and some frame it as core to their work culture. Rilla, an AI startup that sells software designed for contractors (like plumbers) to record conversations with prospective clients and coach them on how to negotiate higher rates, says nearly all of its 80-person workforce adheres to the 996 schedule.

“There’s a really strong and growing subculture of people, especially in my generation—Gen Z—who grew up listening to stories of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, entrepreneurs who dedicated their lives to building life-changing companies,” says Will Gao, the company’s head of growth. “Kobe Bryant dedicated all his waking hours to basketball, and I don’t think there’s a lot of people saying that Kobe Bryant shouldn’t have worked as hard as he did.”

Notice the disconnect between the people Will Gao compares himself to and the product his company actually builds. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, in a very real sense, forged (or the people working at their companies forged) the modern technological world. Kobe Bryant was one of the greatest basketball players who ever lived. Will Gao makes recording software to help plumbers eek out a bit more profit. This isn’t nothing, it’s good to help people figure out how to earn a better living, but it’s probably not going to be “life-changing” even for the plumbers, let alone world-historically.

But the other disconnect is that Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Kobe Bryant were all the guys at the top. Jobs wanted to build Apple, and he wanted to work long hours to do it. Gates wanted to build Microsoft and was driven to do so. They weren’t told to by a boss. Likewise, Kobe Bryant put in endless practice time toward becoming the best basketball player he could be because, to start with, he absolutely loved playing basketball.

What Will Gao and the other executives at Rilla are instead doing is demanding, in an exceptionally tight technology labor market, that anyone who wants a paycheck from them needs to give up their lives. Maybe some people do, and maybe some don’t feel they have much choice, but let’s not kid ourselves that this is about an existential drive towards world-historical impact à la Jobs, Gates, or Bryant.

Further, if the goal is actually productivity, well, 996 ain’t gonna do it. We have research on this. A lot. Long hours don’t make people more productive, because there are only so many hours in a day, and only so many days a week, you can be at peak productivity. Instead, long hours burn you out. And as you burn out, as you become exhausted and stressed, your productivity (and creativity and everything else needed for a successful, world-historical start-up) declines. By a lot.

In my experience, though, the people who push this stuff aren’t terribly curious about the state of the research. They want to work long hours, because they believe in their company, or because they bought into the grind mindset false bill of sale. They’ve swallowed an image of what being serious about work looks like, and they’ve made that image so central to their identity that to admit it’s a mirage, that they’re instead just making their companies worse while making their workers miserable, would be to admit, well, that they’re maybe not as world-historically important as they imagine themselves to be.

But I think there’s something else going on, too, and it’s about power. Years ago, in a conversation with a CEO who proposed reconfiguring his organization’s headquarters from largely private offices with doors that could close to largely open-office floor plans and removing doors from the remaining private offices, I mentioned the research. I said, “You argue that this change will increase both productivity and collaboration. But there’s robust evidence that it will do precisely the opposite. Workers in open-offices are less productive, and they tend to shift to electronic communication rather than face-to-face just to carve out some degree of privacy.” And he screamed at me.

He screamed because he didn’t want to hear what the research said, because, like a lot of the guys calling for 996, this move wasn’t, I suspect, motivated by a genuine desire for greater productivity and collaboration. Or, if it was genuine, it was a thin genuineness, more of a “he’d convinced himself his pretext wasn’t pretextual, but authentic” than “he legitimately wanted to pursue whatever changes would maximize productivity and collaboration.”

No, the actual motivation is when you’re at the top, for many of these guys, the way you fell like you’re at the top is to see people beneath you. It’s why Trump wants his staff to genuflect, and why he likes parades. He’s the guy in charge, and being the guy in charge only really feels like it if you can see the people who aren’t in charge. In other words, you want to exercise your in-charge-ness, and witness those subject to it. Otherwise your in-charge-ness is as much a mirage as those open-office productivity gains. Or at least feels like it.

What 996 accomplishes, then, isn’t a more productive company than one where workers come to work each day feeling happy and refreshed. What 996 accomplishes is workers being in the office basically all the time the guy at the top would care to look out into the office and see his workers there. What taking doors off of offices and moving to an open-office floor plan accomplishes (if the goal isn’t merely some gain in how many people can be packed into limited square footage) is that if you’re the guy at the top, you can walk around the building and see the people who report to you. You can see them working for you. And not just individually, such as if you had online one-on-ones with them regularly, or if you swung by their (private) offices, but as a mass.

That doesn’t increase collaboration. It doesn’t increase productivity. The evidence for both is overwhelming. But it is a pretty powerful feeling. And if you get to feel it, it means you’re pretty important. Maybe even as important as Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Kobe Bryant.

What happens if the spread of AI slop crowds out the market for original writing and art? It’s easy to read that as the goal of OpenAI et al. Sam Altman would much rather you pay him $20 a month to have his bot tell you about what new albums you might like than have you pay Rolling Stone and its stable of writers $20 a year to do the same. And given that most of us have a lot more we’re interested in than just new albums, and ChatGPT will readily tell us about all those things too, while Rolling Stone output is rather more limited, it’s easy to see how that $20 a month can be tempting. If enough people are tempted enough, then every subscription that might’ve gone to a publication goes to Sam Altman instead.

The trouble, of course, is that to know which new albums to tell you about, ChatGPT needs to be able to find content about new albums, either in its training data or by searching the web and ingesting what it finds. And while plenty of people will LiveJournal for free, to get good original content to ingest, that good original content needs to be paid for. Professionally produced content needs professionals, and professionals need salaries. Or, at least, freelancing checks.

You can maybe replace some of the lost market for media subscriptions by publications signing deals with OpenAI et al. to give them access to whatever they publish. And then they use the fees OpenAI pays them to pay their writers and artists and other contributors. OpenAI takes what those writers and artists and other contributors contribute, and spits it back, or spits back the information it contains, to people paying OpenAI $20 a month to have it answer all their questions.

This is basically ChatGPT as a bundled subscription. Except it’s more like if you bought a bundled subscription that sent a ton of publications to a warehouse in your backyard, along with a strange little man who lives in that warehouse, reads everything that arrives, and then answers whatever questions you might have when you knock on his warehouse door. But, regardless of this Lynchian third party, the publications generating all that new content are still getting paid. (Let’s set aside, for just a moment, the oddness of experiencing new writing and art not through the words or images of the writer or artist, but instead through the second-hand lecture of that weird little Lynchian guy who lives in a text prompt.)

Where this could all go wrong in a way that destroys the flow of money from all of us to the writers and the artists, even the flow through the OpenAI middleman, is if it turns out what most of us want isn’t really new information, new styles, new expression, but a remixing of the old.

Even if we’d had super powerful computers 50 years ago, we couldn’t have built ChatGPT, not like it exists now, because what also exists now but not 50 years ago is the internet. And not just the internet in terms of a globe-spanning computer network, but the internet in terms of vastness. We needed decades of people putting stuff online. To train a frontier model, you need a lot of material to train it on, and training it on a lot of material is possible in a world where the sum of human knowledge and output exists in digital form at publicly accessible URLs. It’s not possible in a world where that knowledge and output is tucked away in physical objects (books, tapes, scrolls) spread out in countless collections in buildings all over the planet.

So what an LLM knows is a snapshot, at the time of its training, of everything it could access on the internet at a given moment, supplemented, as you use it, by what it can find through traditional search. This means an LLM knows a ton, but it also means an LLM is like those photographs the Zoomers pass around of a 90s bedroom. It’s a freeze frame, or at least most of it, and while you can introduce new ideas when you run the prompt, it interprets those new ideas in the context of that frozen moment.

Of course, you can retrain the AI. You can say, “Okay, let’s look at the internet again, now, and base your new knowledge on what it looks like in this updated state.” You’re creating a new frozen moment, like a photograph of a 2000s bedroom. The fresh version of the model can then have that extra bit of freshness–until the world moves on and new content is created and tastes change. If the company waits long enough to retrain it, it’ll be like Disco Stu: hip and with it in a moment that has passed it by.

Assuming people paying that $20 a month for their favorite chatbot want something a little more fresh than Stu, assuming they want what’s current, what’s at culture’s novel edge, then maybe the bundling economy works. It won’t be perfect, because OpenAI isn’t going to sign a licensing deal with every creator who wants to create and get paid to do so. It’ll sign deals with the big publishers, who have legal departments for such things. The market for new creative works will look more like three channels of network TV than the long tail, but it’ll still be a market.

The worry is what if people don’t even want that? Everything, after all, is a remix. We endlessly recycle. The youth of 2025 long for the bedrooms and CRTs of 1995. Marxists complain that capitalism keeps bundling the past and selling it to us as the latest product. We revive folk, and swing, and new wave, and whatever 80s video the TikTok kids have found in the last week. Ours is, in other words, a nostalgia culture.

And this is what AI is really good at. You want something in the style of something? And that style is an established one, well-represented in whatever moment of the internet the AI was built on? That bot has you covered. It can remix with the best of them.

There’s clearly a market for this stuff, too. Stranger Things convinced a generation that what they really wanted was the future, but endless recycling of an idealized past. Old sitcoms find new life with people too young to have ever seen them when they aired. Etc., etc., etc. The worry, the way the market doesn’t just contract, but becomes small enough to drown in a bathtub, is people, or enough of them at any rate, is that most people in fact just want the old reflected back to them in ways changed just enough to not feel like a rerun but to still feel nostalgic.

I think there will always be a market, from the perspective of the companies making the bots, for breaking news. People do want to know what’s happening in the world around them. We need someone to tell the bot when Russia invades Ukraine or who won the election or what’s up with the price of eggs. The bots need that kind of information to answer “What’s happening?” questions, and so even if the newspapers go under, the corporations gathering those $20/month fees will want to hire enough people to answer them. But the rest of it? At a scale where we can consider it a sector of the economy? At a scale where someone can say, with a degree of reasonable hope, “I want to be a writer or an artist when I grow up?” It’s easy to tell a story about how all that could collapse.

In this world, original content becomes like oil: It’s what powers our existing technologies, but it’s only ever the product of the dead and gone, and we’re not getting any more of it. That sounds bad. I wouldn’t like that world, even if it comes with a cheap bot who lives in my phone and can tell me about everything there was to know at a moment somewhere behind me. And even if that bot is quite clever, and can give me writing of a kind I enjoy or music of a kind I enjoy, the fact that it’s “of a kind” means there’s something pretty important missing: namely, the whole point. What the tech bros who say they’ll never read a novel again because they can have ChatGPT tell them any story they want miss is that it’s not just about the story, it’s about the fact that someone is telling it to you. Art is beautiful and exciting and all that, but it’s also connection. It’s knowing there’s someone else on the other side of that prose or the other side of those notes, and if the novel or the song are meaningful to you, it’s because that other person on that other side gets you. Or gets something important about you, or about something you share.

A world without that is a world I wouldn’t want.

Which is why, even though the above story makes a certain sense, even though we can see how the economic incentives and the cultural preference for nostalgia could pull us in that direction, I’m optimistic we won’t actually head all the way there. Or, if we do, we’ll turn around and head a good deal of the way back.

Because this sort of society is undesirable, and people really do strive for what’s new and interesting, and not merely what is remixed, I am skeptical that such an economy would last. I think people will dial back their use of AI to generate endless slop because the market for slop will collapse. I lived through the era of reality TV. It was crap and it was everywhere, because enough people liked it and it was so cheap to produce compared to scripted shows. But the era of reality TV gave way to the era of prestige TV, and not because the relative costs shifted, but because people decided they actually liked watching shows with a bit of narrative quality. You can still find reality TV, of course, just like you’ll always be able to find plenty of AI slop. But reality TV didn’t eat the world, and, for the same reasons, AI slop won’t, either.

Markets, when left to do their thing, can run off in stupid directions. But they also have mechanisms to correct course. Nostalgia culture is real, the desire to endlessly reduce the cost of content is real, and they can interact in ways that very likely will cost some people the ability to earn a living. We likely can’t avoid that, because LLM technology is here, and people like it, and it has enough genuinely useful applications that we wouldn’t get rid of it entirely, anyway. But it also can’t do novelty, it can’t be a cultural innovator. And plenty of people want both. And are willing to pay for it.

Over at Techdirt, Mike Masnick has an excellent new article about “Who Goes MAGA?” He sets out a taxonomy of the sorts of people prone to drifting into Trumpism, from “The Wellness Influencer” to “The LinkedIn Thought Leader” to “The Facebook Mom” and more. I recommend it as a catalogue of archetypes to keep your eye on.

I wanted to call out one in particular, “The Contrarian Intellectual,” in part because it’s the character class I have the most experience with, but also to highlight a example of one of the dynamics Mike notes in passing.

He’s not technically MAGA yet, but he’s on the glide path. He writes long pieces about how “the left has lost its mind” and how “we need to have difficult conversations.” He appears on podcasts to discuss “the excesses of woke culture” and “the importance of free speech.” He’s built his brand on being the reasonable liberal who’s willing to criticize his own side.

But his criticism only flows in one direction. He’s endlessly concerned about cancel culture but never mentions voter suppression. He worries about campus speech codes but not about book bans. He’s created a career out of giving conservatives permission to feel intellectual about their prejudices.

His MAGA turn will come when he finally admits what’s been obvious all along: he’s more comfortable with the right than the left. He’ll frame it as a principled stand against progressive extremism, but really it’s just the natural conclusion of a grift that started with “I’m just asking questions.”

I’ve bolded the relevant sentence because, having worked for years in libertarian public policy—including through the rise of the culture war to subsume most other politics—it’s a move I see a lot. Let’s say you want to (1) push right-wing culture war preferences in state education while also (2) maintaining a rhetoric of liberty, limited government, and open inquiry. Obviously (1) is incompatible with (2). It’s possible that in a regime of perfect liberty, people will choose right-wing cultural preferences. But experience doesn’t bear that out. Freedom tends to lead to social liberalism. The solution is to equivocate on school choice.

Instead of giving your own opinion of the merits of bans (not just on books, but more broadly, including expression by teachers), you can argue that we wouldn’t be having these kinds of fights at all if, instead of government and mandatory schools, we had school choice. If parents were free to send their kids to whatever school they want, and if entrepreneurs were free to set up schools catering to a wide range of preferences, then parents who want their kids exposed to, say, LGBTQ identities could send them to socially liberal schools that center and celebrate that. Parents who instead don’t want their kids exposed to these identities, or don’t want them told that such behaviors and expressions are acceptable, could send their kids to more socially conservative schools.

The school choice argument is that when parents can decide what is best for their own kids, and don’t have to worry about parents with differing views forcing those views upon them, then everyone can adopt a live and let live approach to each other. But if the school district has to pick a single curriculum, or a single standard for which books go in the library (and it must articulate some standard, after all), and every parent living in that district is compelled to send their kids to the state run schools, then disagreements become zero sum. If I get my way, you don’t get yours. If you get your way, then I don’t get mine. Thus, fights.

Now, you might disagree with school choice for any number of reasons. But this argument in its favor, even if you find it ultimately unpersuasive, isn’t unprincipled. It’s making a point about how schools could be better by being restructured to remove a frequent cause of conflict. That’s a worthy goal. And, while the person making the school choice argument isn’t weighing in on the wisdom or moral permissibility of book bans directly, it would be wrong to read the argument as supportive of the bans. Instead it’s saying, “We shouldn’t be focusing on efforts on the symptoms, but rather trying to ameliorate the underlying cause.”

The trouble is the inconsistency Mike notes. Because a great deal of the people who make the above argument also believe that both public and private universities ought to have viewpoint diversity. If you’re on the cultural right, what you likely mean by that is that universities ought to center culturally right perspectives more than you believe they do. They’re not diverse now because they heavily emphasize a culturally left perspective, so making them diverse means emphasis in the other direction.

Again, this argument can be made in a principled fashion. Even if you yourself are not on the cultural right, you can argument reasonably that, given many Americans are, it’s better for schools to expose students (who are less likely to be from a culturally right background than the typical American) to a representative range of views. Fair enough.

But if you goal—your actual motive—isn’t “all views treated equally” but instead “a thumb on the scale for culturally right-wing views,” you can slide between these two arguments (for school choice and for higher-ed viewpoint diversity) as the situation aligns with your preferences. You argue “school choice” when a school district is banning books with LGBTQ characters or telling teachers not to put a photograph of their same-sex partner on their desk. You argue “viewpoint diversity” when a university is overwhelmingly populated by left-leaning professors, or when classes don’t take Russell Kirk as seriously as they do Michel Foucault. You pick an argument to apply when that argument will get you the conclusion you want, and you don’t deploy it when it won’t.

The inconsistency exposes itself readily, however. If the answer to fights about curriculum is “school choice,” then “school choice” ought to be the answer to fights about curriculum in universities. And the think about universities is, unlike primary and secondary education, we already have nearly perfect school choice. Chances are, if you went to public school for K through 12, you went to the school assigned to you by wherever your home address happened to be. You didn’t have a choice. But if you went to a public university, chances are you had quite an array of ones to pick from. I grew up outside of Detroit but attended the University of Colorado, and could have attended universities in pretty much any of the fifty states. And I could’ve picked a private university (as I did for law school) if I couldn’t find a public one I liked. In other words, if the answer to fights about what views should be represented in a given school is simply “If we had school choice, parents could send their kids to a school representing their views, and so there’s no need to fight about any particular school,” then that same answer should trump calls for any given university to be viewpoint diverse. The CU Boulder English department was pretty lefty, true. But I could’ve gone to Hillsdale.

This equivocation allows someone to stick to libertarian rhetoric (“choice” and “intellectual pluralism”) while actually holding to a goal closer to right-wing cultural hegemony. Neither argument, choice or intellectual pluralism, is, on its own, a problem. Both are perfectly principled. Laudable, even. But if you’re going to be principled about libertarianism (which, it ought to go without saying, demands not being MAGA), you have to apply them consistently.

Roughly speaking, there are three reasons we might engage in political discussion. The first is intellectual interest. Playing with ideas, including political ideas, is fun, and banging them against each other to see which comes out on top is fun. So just as some people find it enjoyable to hash out who’s the best quarterback of all time, some people find it enjoyable to hash out which political institutions or rules are most just or most likely to create a flourishing society.

The second is domination. Politics is, ultimately, about the exercise of power. It’s about controlling others, and who gets to do that controlling, and to what ends. So you might engage in political talk to point out to the people you intend to control that you’ll be the one doing the controlling (or, at least, people like you), and they’ll be the ones getting controlled. This is politics as verbal bullying.

The third, and the one that motivates most of us when we engage in political talk, is persuasion. I want to bring you around to my political view, because my political view wins out when enough people have come around to it. So I offer arguments, and debate your arguments, and if all goes well, one of us will move the other closer to his position.

Let’s set aside the first, intellectual interest, for now. If you’re reading this, you’re probably the sort of person who finds political talk at least somewhat intellectually interesting even outside the context of the other two reasons. But let’s focus instead on why most people talk politics, which (they think) is to persuade, but is, more often than they’d like to admit, to instead dominate.

You get this a lot on social media. It’s what pile-ons are all about. I express an opinion the prevailing culture on the platform disagrees with, and the response is threats, or insults, or quote posts of “can you believe this guy?” The goal is to make me feel stupid or small, and so to make the pile-on-ers feel smart or big. It’s pretty prosaic stuff: Make yourself feel good by making someone else feel bad. And that feeling-bad-ness is a form of domination, especially when it arises out of political talk. The people doing the dominating know that. The person getting dominated knows that. There’s an implied threat in the pile-on itself: there are more of us doing the pile-on against the one of you that we’re in a position of power. Or, at least, appear to be, because a pile-on isn’t actually indicative of the pile-on-ers’ opinion being more widespread than that expressed by the piled-on. (I’m reminded of the line from The Mr. T Experience song “Two of Us” about how the “two of us outnumber every single one of them.”)

But there are cases when the people engaged in a game of domination believe they’re engaged in a game of persuasion, and it’s actually pretty common in a lot of political discourse. It happens when the person arguing is an asshole.

I wrote here a while back about how people who think their strong commitment to principle justifies their being an asshole are mistaken both about the content of their principles and the nature of principle itself. It’s basically, “I believe in this so strongly, and my cause is so moral and just, that nothing else matters, and that includes being courteous and respectful to those around me.” The trouble with this line of thinking is that morality and justice are about our relationship to other people. You can’t be just while treating others unjustly—even in the cause of “justice.” You can’t be moral while treating others immorally—even in the cause of “morality.”

But that’s a claim about ethics: being an asshole demonstrates that your professed ethical character isn’t an ethical character, but instead an unethical one draped in some degree of ethical talk. Adding on the above context about persuasion and domination helps us to additionally see that being an asshole (a form of domination) is unproductive, too.

If you want to persuade someone of your political position, you need to convince them that your position is better. And that means better for them. Or better for everyone. Or better for most people. It doesn’t mean just better for you. Or just better for people like you, but not like them, and not like most other people. Persuasion in politics means convincing others that your way is the best way for them to achieve their aims. Or it means convincing them that their aims weren’t the right ones. In other words, it’s fundamentally not about domination.

But to be an asshole is to position yourself as a dominator to those around you, because to be an asshole is, simply, to tell everyone around you that your interests are always more important than theirs, and that one of your interests is making them feel small or stupid in order to make yourself feel big and smart.

Thus “I can be an asshole and persuade” is, in almost every instance, a mistake. You can’t. Because coming off as an asshole to your interlocutor, or to people who hear your arguments, is telling them up front that your motivation is domination, and so they will view your political arguments in that context. What you want, they’ll reasonably assume, is to use politics to dominate, just as you are using your asshole-ness to dominate. You’re signaling, from the opening gate, that the politics you want to persuade them of are, whether explicitly stated or not, about political domination instead of political cooperation. You’re telling them your worldview is zero-sum instead of positive-sum.

Being an asshole makes people justifiably suspicious of whatever politics you advocate, and they will assume that, even if you talk about freedom and liberty and openness and exchange, what you’re really all about is power and control and, well, domination. Maybe you can talk your way out of that hole (there are assholes who advocate genuinely emancipatory politics, after all), but you are starting in a hole, and the more of an asshole you are, the deeper it is, and the more likely your arguments will come across, to your listeners, as digging it even deeper still.

If you care about your politics, just as if you care about your principles, you should fight every urge that might arise to be an asshole about it. It’s not just more ethical. It’s more persuasive, too.Roughly speaking, there are three reasons we might engage in political discussion. The first is intellectual interest. Playing with ideas, including political ideas, is fun, and banging them against each other to see which comes out on top is fun. So just as some people find it enjoyable to hash out who’s the best quarterback of all time, some people find it enjoyable to hash out which political institutions or rules are most just or most likely to create a flourishing society.

The second is domination. Politics is, ultimately, about the exercise of power. It’s about controlling others, and who gets to do that controlling, and to what ends. So you might engage in political talk to point out to the people you intend to control that you’ll be the one doing the controlling (or, at least, people like you), and they’ll be the ones getting controlled. This is politics as verbal bullying.

The third, and the one that motivates most of us when we engage in political talk, is persuasion. I want to bring you around to my political view, because my political view wins out when enough people have come around to it. So I offer arguments, and debate your arguments, and if all goes well, one of us will move the other closer to his position.

Let’s set aside the first, intellectual interest, for now. If you’re reading this, you’re probably the sort of person who finds political talk at least somewhat intellectually interesting even outside the context of the other two reasons. But let’s focus instead on why most people talk politics, which (they think) is to persuade, but is, more often than they’d like to admit, to instead dominate.

You get this a lot on social media. It’s what pile-ons are all about. I express an opinion the prevailing culture on the platform disagrees with, and the response is threats, or insults, or quote posts of “can you believe this guy?” The goal is to make me feel stupid or small, and so to make the pile-on-ers feel smart or big. It’s pretty prosaic stuff: Make yourself feel good by making someone else feel bad. And that feeling-bad-ness is a form of domination, especially when it arises out of political talk. The people doing the dominating know that. The person getting dominated knows that. There’s an implied threat in the pile-on itself: there are more of us doing the pile-on against the one of you that we’re in a position of power. Or, at least, appear to be, because a pile-on isn’t actually indicative of the pile-on-ers’ opinion being more widespread than that expressed by the piled-on. (I’m reminded of the line from The Mr. T Experience song “Two of Us” about how the “two of us outnumber every single one of them.”)

But there are cases when the people engaged in a game of domination believe they’re engaged in a game of persuasion, and it’s actually pretty common in a lot of political discourse. It happens when the person arguing is an asshole.

I wrote here a while back about how people who think their strong commitment to principle justifies their being an asshole are mistaken both about the content of their principles and the nature of principle itself. It’s basically, “I believe in this so strongly, and my cause is so moral and just, that nothing else matters, and that includes being courteous and respectful to those around me.” The trouble with this line of thinking is that morality and justice are about our relationship to other people. You can’t be just while treating others unjustly—even in the cause of “justice.” You can’t be moral while treating others immorally—even in the cause of “morality.”

But that’s a claim about ethics: being an asshole demonstrates that your professed ethical character isn’t an ethical character, but instead an unethical one draped in some degree of ethical talk. Adding on the above context about persuasion and domination helps us to additionally see that being an asshole (a form of domination) is unproductive, too.

If you want to persuade someone of your political position, you need to convince them that your position is better. And that means better for them. Or better for everyone. Or better for most people. It doesn’t mean just better for you. Or just better for people like you, but not like them, and not like most other people. Persuasion in politics means convincing others that your way is the best way for them to achieve their aims. Or it means convincing them that their aims weren’t the right ones. In other words, it’s fundamentally not about domination.

But to be an asshole is to position yourself as a dominator to those around you, because to be an asshole is, simply, to tell everyone around you that your interests are always more important than theirs, and that one of your interests is making them feel small or stupid in order to make yourself feel big and smart.

Thus “I can be an asshole and persuade” is, in almost every instance, a mistake. You can’t. Because coming off as an asshole to your interlocutor, or to people who hear your arguments, is telling them up front that your motivation is domination, and so they will view your political arguments in that context. What you want, they’ll reasonably assume, is to use politics to dominate, just as you are using your asshole-ness to dominate. You’re signaling, from the opening gate, that the politics you want to persuade them of are, whether explicitly stated or not, about political domination instead of political cooperation. You’re telling them your worldview is zero-sum instead of positive-sum.

Being an asshole makes people justifiably suspicious of whatever politics you advocate, and they will assume that, even if you talk about freedom and liberty and openness and exchange, what you’re really all about is power and control and, well, domination. Maybe you can talk your way out of that hole (there are assholes who advocate genuinely emancipatory politics, after all), but you are starting in a hole, and the more of an asshole you are, the deeper it is, and the more likely your arguments will come across, to your listeners, as digging it even deeper still.

If you care about your politics, just as if you care about your principles, you should fight every urge that might arise to be an asshole about it. It’s not just more ethical. It’s more persuasive, too.

The sense of dread from some corners of the Trump-supporting world as he carries out what he said he’d carry out—and with predictably dire results—is the sorry consequence of smart people talking themselves into drawing the wrong conclusion from the fact that America mostly survived Trump’s first term.

Most politicians don’t follow through on their campaign promises, but Trump very much is. That’s a problem for America, and for the world, because what he promised during his campaign was to remove constitutional limits, rule as an autocrat, break the economy, and upend the global order.

Now, lots of people who supported him in the election are freaking out. Not everyone, of course. His support is still there. But from the Wall Street Journal editorial page to the Wall Street Bets Reddit, there’s a growing sense of “Oh, shit.”

The disconnect here, between what Trump said and what many of his supporters thought he’d do, only makes sense if those supporters didn’t believe him. If they thought, Sure, he keeps telling us he’ll impose ruinous tariffs, but he won’t actually. Sure, he keeps telling us he’ll tear America out of its place of global leadership and instead make it a vassal state of his buddy Putin, but he won’t actually. Sure, he keeps telling us he’ll destroy the federal government and the constitutional system with it, without a clear plan to meaningfully replace any of it beyond a massive tool to carry out revenge against those he thinks wronged him, but he won’t actually.

The easy response—“I didn’t believe he’d do it”—is to proclaim the incredulity a sign of stupidity. Of course he’d do it. Every sign pointed to him doing it the moment he was sworn in. Just as the easy response to why working-class Americans, dependent on federal jobs, Social Security, Medicaid, and the Veterans Administration, would vote for a guy who was promising to take it all away is to say, “Man, those guys just didn’t know anything.” And there’s some truth to the stupidity and the ignorance.

But I think something else was going on for a lot of them. Namely, they misread Trump’s first term in a way that they shouldn’t have, but in a way that isn’t entirely irrational, either.The fact is, Trump said he’d do a lot of bad things in his first term, and then largely didn’t. Or he started to, or announced he was going to start to, and then backtracked or gave up at the first resistance. Or he implemented some de minimis version of the bad thing that failed to achieve much harm. Or he did some, but definitely not all.

Smart people who wanted to talk themselves into supporting Trump concluded from this that he didn’t mean those stupid things, and so he didn’t mean them this time around, either. He’s just a bullshitter, and the thing about bullshitters is that most of what they say is bullshit. So let it wash over you, while telling yourself that a second Trump term will look much like the first. There’s the informed and engaged voter version of that, which tallies the list of first-time campaign promises and the actual policies his administration carried out and draws the comforting conclusion. Then there’s the uninformed and disengaged version, where low-information voters had a vague sense of “prices were lower in 2019” and so voted for what they imagined, in a haze of ignorance and misunderstanding, would be a return to 2019.

But what the first weeks of the second Trump administration have made clear is that he probably wasn’t bullshitting the first time around, just as he wasn’t last fall, but that structural barriers existed to mitigate the bad stuff in Trump 1.0 that have been circumvented in Trump 2.0.

Namely, Trump 1.0 didn’t expect to win.

The first Trump administration wasn’t as bad as it could’ve been because it had relatively normal people in positions of power, who responded to incentives in a relatively normal way and had moral features within relatively normal parameters. Some were stupid and evil, yes, but plenty weren’t. And that made it harder for Trump to get done all the stupid and evil things that appeal to Trump.

For the second campaign, though, his people put in the work to remove those barriers. They made a plan, much of it set out in Project 2025, to hit the ground running in a way that would overwhelm the system, take advantage of its weak points, and ensure the stupid and evil stuff would be fully inflicted this time.

So the shock from the corners that ought to have known better really is that they thought there’d be adults in the room, because there were adults in the room before. They thought Trump would talk about burning the economy down, but he wouldn’t have the opportunity to light the match. They were, in other words, paying attention to what Trump was saying and assuming it was bullshit instead of paying attention to what the people around him were saying and taking it seriously.

And now it’s too late, and it turns out everyone was telling the truth.