I was there as a student and when I returned in 2023, to teach, a great deal had changed. The air base was long gone — it had been shuttered under Russian pressure in 2014 — and the US presence in nearby Afghanistan had vanished as well. The swaggering military contractors were getting drunk in some other bar somewhere else in the world. And the NGO sector that, as one interlocutor put it to me in the 2000s, was “growing like mushrooms after the rain” had all but disappeared. I currently live next to the old Soros Foundation building — which closed its doors in 2024 following the passage of a Russia-inspired “foreign agent” law. It’s a large complex and it looks beautiful, but I’ve never seen anybody go in or out; it feels like a mausoleum for a whole generation of hopes about Westernization and liberal democracy.

My experience living here has largely been about pondering an absence, one which has become all the more striking since Trump’s re-election, the closure of USAID last year and the near-termination of US soft power in the region — even before the White House made explicit their focus on the Western Hemisphere with this week’s daring raid on Venezuela. I can count on one hand the number of Americans I’ve met who live here and, probably on two, the number of Americans I’ve met who’ve even passed through. It’s a part of the world that is about as far away from the contiguous United States as it’s possible to get but that had at one point seemed integral enough to the Pax Americana for a base to be set up and for a certain amount of soft power to flow through here, both to lend logistical support to operations in Afghanistan and to radiate power deep into the territory of the former Soviet Union. Now that the tide has gone out, the question is: what does a society look like if it’s basically untouched by direct American influence?

Why the US should be expected to have any contact with a country like Kyrgyzstan is a fair query to start with. Look at a map zoomed out and the country seems to be swallowed in an embrace by China to the east and by Kazakhstan and — more distantly — Russia to the north. The country is poor, with a nominal GDP per capita of under $3,000, and has limited natural resources. It’s mountainous and largely rural, with proud nomadic traditions, a culture taking in elements from the Russian, Chinese, Arabic, and Turkic worlds, and its history couldn’t be more remote from America’s. But spend time here and a certain US influence becomes obvious enough. I am able to teach my journalism course in English at an international university with good comprehension from my students. My students routinely make fun of me for how behind the curve I am in following P. Diddy’s trial or not quite being able to explain who Charli XCX is. Many of them fantasize about living in the US. If I’m in a cab, it’s routine for the driver to suddenly put on speakerphone a brother or cousin who’s living in the States so that we can trade pleasantries with one another. Bishkek is filled with malls that give me flashbacks to the time I spent living in Los Angeles. And, as an American, I am treated with a respect and an interest that I don’t think I’ve quite experienced anywhere else in the world — there’s just a curiosity about Americanness that I think much of the rest of the world has moved past. Actually, my number one complaint living here is about the tinny American music played in coffeeshops that I am forever asking waiters to change or at least adjust the volume on.

If that influence seems superficial — just the flotsam of 21st-century pop culture — it can also deeply influence people’s life choices. Agnieszka Pikulicka, a Polish journalist who has published widely on Central Asia and writes the Turan Tales Substack, certainly thinks so. “Thanks to US involvement, a whole generation of Central Asians — not only Kyrgyz — had a chance to build their own NGOs and media, study in English according to Western curricula, travel abroad and absorb democratic values,” she tells me.

It’s not always so easy to know where to assign attribution, but those democratic values seemed connected to a relatively open culture where crime and corruption have steadily decreased and the economy has for years had reliable growth. The quiet but effective tourist slogan “You’ll Like Kyrgyzstan” gives a general idea. Meanwhile, in the region as a whole, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan finally, in the last decade, transitioned out of their Soviet-era authoritarian leaders — the latter in particular has undergone an eight-year period of striking liberalization.

If I were writing this piece a year or two years ago, that’s probably where I would have ended it — with America’s direct influence on the region ebbing away but with the region making progress on its own terms and in a way that was not incompatible with liberal democracy. Now, though, I am far less sure. Kyrgyzstan has, since I have been here, arrested opposition figures; closed the leading independent media outlet; fallen into a pattern of repossessing private property based on a reading of arcane laws; installed new “firewall” systems for controlling web access; and fallen deeper into “not free” status in Freedom House’s annual report. The notion of Kyrgyzstan as an “island of democracy” — flung around in international circles just a few years ago — is giving way, under President Sadyr Japarov who came to power in 2021, to a creeping authoritarianism. To give a very small but telling example: when I first came here, I really enjoyed jogging in the main sports stadium — the one also used by the national football team. The track would always be full of people, and it would be a really nice time — people jogging or working out in the exercise park. When I would talk about what I liked about Kyrgyzstan, that would be the kind of thing I would point to — I never in my life in America had the opportunity to go for a jog in Yankee Stadium. About a year ago, though, when I went to take my usual run, the gate was closed and an intimidating guard shouted at the high school team who had come for their workout that the stadium was now closed to the public and closed for good.

More from this author

How psychedelics blew my mind

By Sam Kahn

I don’t want to draw too many inferences from events that are tied to Kyrgyz domestic politics, and it’s not as if there’s a clear cause-and-effect between, say, Trump’s election or the end of the war in Afghanistan and Kyrgyzstan’s authoritarian turn in the 2020s. But what clearly is true is that a sort of ideological vacuum showed up with the waning of US influence in this part of the world, and I suspect, in many other parts of the world that are in a similar place of choosing their geopolitical identity. The sense in the 2000s was that the future lay in the direction of capitalism and liberal democracy — as an irresistible trajectory for a developing country like Kyrgyzstan. That was far from seen as unequivocally a good thing — I remember concerns about “runaway capitalism” and about the loss of traditional culture — but it just seemed like a fact. That’s now far from the case. When I first returned to Kyrgyzstan in 2023, I was struck by how many more hijabs I saw around than I had noticed in the 2000s. The most visible manifestation of soft power in Bishkek is a gleaming mosque built and funded by Turkey. Chinese influence can be felt above all in large-scale infrastructure projects, such as roads and railways, financed by the Belt and Road Initiative. Russian influence is, not surprisingly, ubiquitous in a country that was part of the Soviet Union, with Russian widely spoken and Russian state media popular particularly among older people, but becomes distinctly more noticeable in the recent adoption of foreign agent laws or the Putinesque consolidation of political power around the President.

The deeper point I would make is that, in the battle to conceptualize the future, it now looks far less like an episode of American TV. One of my students, when we were going around the room introducing ourselves at the start of the semester, said as his kind of statement of purpose that he was “opposed to the LGBT agenda”. The phrase “human rights”, which seemed to be making its bid towards universalism in the 2000s, now — under the barrage of Russian state media — is understood as being inextricable from Western soft power. The US and its gold-paved streets might still figure in my students’ airy post-graduation plans, but they’re as apt to say something about Dubai or China — and the difficulty of getting student visas under the Trump administration has shifted their attention away from the US. Whatever the US was supposed to stand for — even if J. Lo can comfortably sell out her Kazakhstan tour, and the Back Street Boys can “get nothing but love” on theirs — is now in recession.

Suggested reading

The CIA: patron of the arts

By Ryan Ruby

Whether you think this is a deep loss or not reflects, of course, your underlying point of view. For Pikulicka, America’s inward turn directly undermines Central Asian civil society. “With Donald Trump taking a more authoritarian turn himself, those [NGO] groups have also lost arguments in their struggle against authoritarianism and local regimes, all of which have been tightening the grip over freedom of speech and — in the case of Kyrgyzstan — small but hard won democratic achievements,” she says. For Peter Leonard, a long-time editor at Eurasianet who now writes the Central Asian-themed Substack Havli, Trump’s reassessment of priorities may paradoxically lead to closer ties to Central Asia. “His vocal rejection of ‘woke’ politics is particularly appealing to conservative leaders in the region,” he tells me. “The president of Kazakhstan recently invoked Trump’s coolness toward LGBT values in an approving manner. This strongly suggests that US influence under Trump actually has room for growth, at least in political-cultural terms.” That new affinity with Central Asia seemed to produce surprising results at the end of last year in the C5+1 Summit in Washington where all five Central Asian countries signed far-reaching agreements with the US, including the eye-popping pledge for Uzbekistan to invest $100 billion in the US rather than the other way around.

Leonard’s is a very subtle point of view — that it’s not so much as if America’s influence in the region has waned as that the “brand” has shifted. Trump has a certain alignment with Central Asia that the more progressive NGO sector often didn’t. But living in Bishkek, where the volume of American influence is turned far down from where it was even a few years ago, I find myself reflecting on a vacuum— on the sense of something or other having been lost. What it is, I suppose, is some notion of the US as a force for good on a global scale. It’s not always so easy for me to tell if that’s something that Central Asians actually saw in the US or just what I hoped Central Asians saw, but there’s no question that propaganda from Russia has had its effect in depicting America as the origin point of various global conspiracies, while, especially with the closure of USAID, there is very little soft power initiative emanating from the US to counteract that impression. As Leonard thoughtfully says, there is a constructive role that the US could in theory play in the region. “It stands to bring investment with fewer political strings attached,” he says. “It brings knowledge transfer. And the US is legitimately, if self-interestedly, committed to advancing institutionalized integration among Central Asian states, which would make the region more sovereign and less dependent on China and Russia.”

There was a point in time when, no matter what else it might be, America was it — the future. Now that it’s become clear that capitalism no longer necessarily ushers in democracy and that the “American way of life” is not everybody’s cup of tea, there is a great lacuna in values on the international stage. Russia has been very aggressive in framing a vision of the future around conservative values; and China in doing so around a kind of state-managed technocracy. It’s far less clear now what the US stands for or why anybody should buy what it’s selling.

Yet here I am — still a loyal Democrat. Why is that?

I don’t love modern progressivism. I reject its yearning to reform not just institutions, but people’s souls. Indeed, Marc Dunkelman’s recent book Why Nothing Works has all but convinced me that modern progressivism has turned into a cannibalistic movement chewing to death any attempts at meaningful reform. And with every breath that brings me closer to age 40, I become more and more skeptical of the notion that public policy can right the crooked timber of humankind or alter the fundamentals of human nature.

Given all that, could it be that my loyalty to Democrats has to do with mere tribal identity? I hail from deep-blue New York, which codes entirely Democratic on cultural issues. To a great extent, my Democratic sensibilities can’t help but be shaped by the fact that everybody I knew growing up was Democrat. But tribal identity and teenage gut feelings aren’t solid guides to thoughtful, grownup political participation.

Luckily, there is a better answer, and it has to do with the historical role of the Democrats in America’s modern party system: the fact that in the 20th century, the party has stood for mature governance, warts and all, while the other, the GOP, has been and remains a party too often averse to government as such. When we support political parties, we choose people to govern us. It’s one thing to reject the progressive dream. It’s another to insist upon good governance. 

The Democratic Party was founded in the 1820s by Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren as a vehicle for disaffected farmers and workers. If these groups’ interests didn’t always align, they shared a hostility to the Northeastern establishment, embodied in the Second Bank of the United States, against which Jackson waged war as fiercely as he carried out Indian Removal. As the young republic developed, and sectional tensions over slavery intensified, Democrats found themselves divided in a way that simply wasn’t true of the Republicans, a party explicitly founded in favor of “free labor” and in opposition to the South’s Peculiar Institution. 

More from this author

I can’t believe I fancied David Walliams

By Sam Kahn

It wasn’t until the 1890s, then, that the modern party system in America really took shape. At that point, the US basically was a single-party state. Having supported secession, pro-slavery Democrats had discredited themselves, and the party as a whole, gifting Republicans with a 30-year run of near-total electoral dominance. The reconstituted Democrats emerged first out of a kind of a yearning for a splinter movement. Attempting to be cutting, a Republican surrogate in 1884 accused the Dems of being the party of “rum, Romanism, and rebellion,” but there were enough Catholics and rum drinkers around that the label stuck and became a rallying cry. The Democrats became once more, as in their Jacksonian roots, the party of the underdog and particularly of the urban disenfranchised. 

But that left the Democrats as merely a party of sentiment, not of ideas. The tossing-and-turning of the Grover Cleveland administration — a rare Democratic break in the GOP dominance of the Gilded Age — showed the need for a coherent political philosophy. Cleveland, a man of impeccable integrity, conceived of himself as a mountain of obstruction in the executive branch, scrupulously following the Constitution and vetoing everything that seemed out of bounds. And yet Cleveland was compelled, over the course of his presidency (especially in his second term), to abandon his entire political philosophy.

He sent the feds into Chicago to break a strike — with a number of strikers killed in the chaos. He laid groundwork for the annexation of Hawaii as much as he disliked territorial expansion. And he found himself turning the government into a kind of cash-for-gold program, stocking up gold reserves as much as possible and eventually turning to JP Morgan to bail out the Treasury. As Cleveland said of his reliance on the plutocrats, in a stinging rebuke of the populist wing of his party: “It never occurred to any of us to consult in this emergency farmers, doctors, lawyers, shoemakers, or even statesmen.… The prospect of what we needed might be somewhat improved by making application to those whose business and surroundings qualified them to intelligently respond.”

Every one of Cleveland’s decisions was almost certainly correct under the circumstances, but he left office as a pariah to his own party, at that time undergoing its Populist renovation. His GOP successor, William McKinley, planned to govern with traditional Republican values — above all, a protective tariff — but he, like Cleveland, found himself playing cards from a completely different part of the deck. He committed himself to massive territorial expansion, annexing Hawaii and eventually Puerto Rico, turning Cuba into a protectorate, and extending the US imperium as far as the Philippines. A president who had arrived in office anticipating enclosed continental borders was, by 1898, telling his staff, “it is evident that I must learn a great deal of geography in this [Spanish-American] war.” And protective tariffs — the cornerstone of McKinley’s governing vision — were all but forgotten as expansionism spurred free trade.

If the 1890s showed the incoherence of the governing philosophies of both parties, the 1900s helped to smooth them out. The United States came to terms with its expansionary role in the world — abandoning George Washington’s counsel against “entangling alliances” in his Farewell Address — recognizing it as a necessary adaptation to the era of high-seas navies, in which overseas territory not picked up by America would tend to fall to a rival. The new power of the executive branch was accepted in an era of heightened international exposure — and charismatically embodied in the almost universally popular Theodore Roosevelt. And the government could conceive of a new domestic role for itself: enforcing nascent antitrust legislation and curbing the monopolistic control of the trusts.

Having entertained William Jennings Bryan’s idiotic silver-standard movement, the Democrats straightened themselves through the Progressive Era, so that, as Dunkelman writes, the 1912 election would come down to “which version of Progressivism … would define the movement going forward.” Government was understood as what John Kenneth Galbraith would call a “countervailing power” checking big business, and an income tax was instituted to overcome the deeply unreliable revenue system of relying on tariffs (which, as often as not, had meant turning to Wall Street whenever there was a crisis).

This, then, is the heart of what the Democratic Party means to me: a robust conception of government, in which government, without ever sacrificing popular legitimacy, carries out executive functions, above all in exercising countervailing power to curb monopolistic practices and in running a coherent, far-sighted foreign policy.

Neither one of these is exactly enshrined in the Constitution, but what everybody in power in the early 20th century discovered was that the Constitution couldn’t solve all problems — that it was necessary to develop a more robust government to deal with new crises: global power politics, predatory business practices, and then the Jim Crow regime that protected itself in appeals to local government and separation of powers.

Republicans would gradually forget all this. In the Twenties, the Republican Party rebranded itself —  very far away from the party of Theodore Roosevelt — as isolationist, strictly laissez-faire in business, but with stultifyingly high tariffs and immigration barriers. That turned out to be exactly the wrong approach to an era of interconnected global crises, whether economic or political, and the result was not only a well-deserved 20-year loss of power for the Republicans starting in 1932, but the dominance of New Deal Democrats through the Sixties. 

The making of the midcentury Democrats involved a transformation arguably more dramatic than Trump’s remaking of the Reagan GOP. Going back to its Jacksonian roots, the Democrats were beholden to a Jeffersonian vision of independent yeomen which saw the Hamiltonian state as, at best, an evil to be minimized and tolerated — barely. There was virtue to this vision, but it failed to answer the problems of the industrial age, when American craftsmen and yeomen became wage-earning employees, who owned neither their own tools nor land, and who were lorded over by enormous oligopolies controlling their respective markets. Prices were no longer a pristine index of supply and demand or marginal productivity, as in the pre-industrial world — but an expression of sheer market power.

Against this backdrop, the Democratic Party managed to refound itself. It adopted a Hamiltonian vision that accepted the rational need for larger institutions. As Dunkelman writes, “these [Hamiltonian progressives] came to believe that the [Jeffersonian] vilification of ‘bigness’ was fundamentally off base. In their view, the salve wouldn’t be in eroding concentrations of power, but in establishing new nodes of public power to hold vast concentrations in check.” In other words, to protect the ideal of republican independence and dignity, it was necessary to wield the apparatus of the federal government: “Hamiltonian means for Jeffersonian ends,” in the famous formula of the liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

And it was that basic conception that drove the recovery from the Depression, the successful execution of World War II, and the phenomenal achievements of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt years. 

The tragedy of the 20th century is that at some point, the Democrats gave up on that political conception. In the Sixties, a progressivism emerged that was essentially nihilist, that believed in tearing-down all concentrated power, that mistrusted the very soul of America. I’m speaking, of course, of the decline of New Deal Democrats and the rise of the McGovernites and their ilk: the cohort that LBJ, the last New Deal Democrat, derided as “Harvard kids.” 

In a way, the acme of this shift was the progressive historian Robert Caro’s ferocious attacks against the legacy of New York’s legendary urban planner, Robert Moses. In his 1974 book, The Power Broker, Caro painted Moses as a liberal autocrat who tore through Gotham’s organic fabric in pursuit of large, rationalized infrastructure. The urbanist Jane Jacobs, representing a similar tendency as Caro, mounted a parallel attack. The enduring result was to delegitimize the Hamiltonian impulse in Democratic government. As Dunkelman puts it, the party’s “previous inclination to build power up had been replaced by an almost insatiable impulse to tear things down.”

Suggested reading

I can’t believe I fancied David Walliams

By Justin H. Vassallo

The result was paralysis and red tape everywhere. The Republican Party, having made its own peace with good government under Eisenhower and Nixon, had turned cannibalistic and libertarian by the end of the Seventies, demolishing everything in the American state that wasn’t the military. For their part, the progressive wing of the Democratic Party produced nothing but snarl. Anybody critical of Robert Moses’s excesses might pause to consider the 40 years it took, after Moses’s death, to build a meager extension to the Second Avenue Subway or the city’s utter inability to reconstruct Penn Station. Moses, by contrast, built up several enormous projects in far less time.

Which brings us to today’s Democratic Party. The party today still suffers from the damage wrought by its turn in the Sixties and Seventies. For example, the party’s 2020 assault on policing, now blessedly abandoned, was an echo of the same destructive tendencies that saw Democrats abandon New Deal models and New Deal patriotism in favor of McGovernite suspicion and Leftist excess.

Still, the Democratic Party retains enough muscle memory to be able — maybe, just maybe — to become once more the party of sound government. The movement for so-called abundance, spearheaded by the likes of Ezra Klein, promises to coordinate government and business in order to clear supply bottlenecks, lower prices, and promote the mass, middle-class prosperity that used to be the Democrats’ calling card. Some of this work is deregulatory and involves cutting the kinds of boutique environmental red tape that hinders development in the United States. Some of it, however, would involve — yes — proactive government where the market has failed: industrial policy, workforce training, and the like. 

Compare this to the chaos wrought by DOGE Republicans, as they slash through not just things that need to be slashed — but also funding for the sorts of basic research in the health sciences that form the foundations of US prosperity. This policy can’t but have long-lasting, and destructive, ramifications: researchers and academics leaving the United States in the kind of “brain drain” associated with Third World countries; economic uncertainty prompting other nations to look for new trading partners. 

Allies are caught in the lurch, not sure if they can rely on the United States to maintain its security commitments or even conduct a cogent foreign policy. The United States, whether it likes it or not, is an empire and a hegemon, and the nation owes it to the world to fulfill the imperial obligations it has accrued. That’s what both parties, actually, discovered in the crucial period when the modern party system developed, but the Republicans managed to forget all that and the Democrats almost have. But not quite as badly as the GOP.

So, yes, as much as Democrats drive me to distraction, I remain a Democrat. The party is flawed — deeply flawed — but the job of government, fundamentally, is to govern, and the Democrats are the only party of the two that still takes that task seriously.  

I can still, like in a recurring nightmare, remember the tone of voice of the techie who finished my purchase of my first iPhone. “Welcome to Apple”, he said, as if he were immersing me into a bath of smugness. If we were acting a scene, the subtext would have been completely clear: I was in now and would never get out again. AI firms are now inviting me — inviting us — in just the same way.

But I am not falling for it again. We have to decline. We have to collectively boycott artificial-intelligence products while there’s still time. Because AI is no good for us — no good for our minds, creativity, or competence — and as it gets jammed down our throats, we are the only ones with the power to refuse.

More from this author

How psychedelics blew my mind

By Sam Kahn

Looking back, I understand why I caved to Apple all those years ago. It really would have been social suicide to try to make my way in the 2010s professional class with anything other than a MacBook Pro and an iPhone. Apple really was better than anything else. But I regret that moment, all the same. Every intuition I had knew that opting in to companies like Apple, Google, and Facebook was a fool’s bargain.

The upside was a few years feeling like I was part of the future as I sipped my lattes and floated through the dawning post-industrial era with my sleek silver Apple gadgets. But I’m still paying the price for that: every time I log in to my bank account now, it’s like peeling barnacles off the hull of a ship to get rid of all the new charges that Apple and Google have concocted. Enshittification — the apt coinage by Cory Doctorow that turns out be, like, the word of the century — has revealed itself to be virtually a law of nature. Exactly as Doctorow analyzed it, platforms inevitably “abuse … customers to claw back all value for themselves”.

As AI emerges as the must-have technology of the shiny new future, and everybody starts naming their ChatGPT bots and having philosophical conversations with them, I have decided — formally, as of writing this essay — to opt out. The train is leaving the station without me. I still have not downloaded an AI app of any kind to my phone. And if this was, up until now, owing more to torpor than high principle, then thank God for laziness.

More from this author

Walt Whitman: the original Substacker

By Sam Kahn

AI can only lead to dependence on a technology, which really means dependence on Silicon Valley overlords looking to rip off their customer base. It’s exactly the same dynamic that we’ve all been experiencing and bemoaning for the last 20-odd years. And you can probably plug-and-chug all your own favorite statistics to tease out what that has meant: the average American spending close to five hours a day on his smartphone, while friendship rates have plummeted and teen depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicidality have spiked.

If you prefer, you can focus on attention span and the finding that the mere presence of a smartphone in a test setting impairs results. As the Silicon Valley apostate and head of the Center for Human Technology, Tristan Harris, put it: “Tech’s race to the bottom of the brain stem to extract information is an existential threat — using our [attention] to upgrade machines is ‘downgrading’ humans”.

Yet it seems that AI is here to stay. Big Tech is all-in on it, and governments aren’t close to getting their act together for meaningful regulation, with President Trump, for instance, reversing Joe Biden’s modest executive order erecting guardrails. But there is still personal choice in the matter, and now is the moment for those who care about human creativity and self-reliance to draw a line in the sand. No, I’m not talking about abandoning tech altogether. But we can, for example, click down below Google’s AI offerings to look at actual links. And we can generally go about living our lives in our sad old way without the benefit of AI “personal assistants” or bot “best friends” or whatever it is that the new technology is supposed to deliver to us.

To be honest, this stance of mine does make me feel like an Amish buggy driver whipping my carriage horses a little harder while the bicycles go whizzing past me; like the weirdos you occasionally see on city streets laboriously tapping out a message into a flip phone like they’re a living museum. But let’s try to get outside the hype for a moment and think through what AI actually is.

AI is basically text-predict combined with data mining. That’s it. It’s a super-Google that goes into the body of texts and rearranges the words into a very pleasing facsimile of a cogent argument. There’s no “intelligence” behind it, in the sense of a computer actually thinking. I’m not the first to be reminded of the story of Clever Hans, the horse that could count and toured widely at the turn of the 20th century.

What Hans was doing really was very cool: he would be given a mathematical question, and he would tap out the answer with his hooves. And Hans was right more often than not. But this was not, as it turned out, because Hans had mastered a numerical system, but because he was sensitive to the crowd and could feel the excitement cresting as he approached the correct number.

AI is more or less the same thing — it uses our wonder to convince us of a simulacrum of intelligence when what we are really witnessing is, in a sense, our own childish excitement at a trick of anthropomorphization: we are pleased by the sight of a calculator imitating something of our mental processes. Our tendency, unfortunately, is to give AI a kind of epistemological deference, to believe that this mash-up of data represents some kind of authority.

Suggested reading

How DeepSeek triggered a tech tantrum

By Malcom Kyeyune

Meanwhile, in the role of Hans’s trainer are the programmers who are influencing AI to give us whatever it is they want us to hear. The disastrous rollout of Google Gemini in 2024 really ripped away the curtain and showed us the strange little man playing with the knobs. Google’s corporate culture at the time happened to be very woke and, lo, the artificial “intelligence” started generating images of black Nazis.

But even if Gemini overtipped its hand, the same dynamics are obviously at play in every other AI model. The people pushing AI now are the same sorts who spent the 2010s promoting web 2.0 as a new vision of freedom and global connectivity, all while destroying traditional media and ripping off as much private data as they possibly could and cheerfully selling it to advertisers. By 2020, the freedom talk was gone and “fighting disinformation” (read: censoring wrong-thought) was in.

This recent history raises an important question: why in the world should we trust these people ever again?

Suggested reading

ChatGPT will kill off the Romantic genius

By Sam Leith

To be sure, we are already fairly late in the game. Even if we don’t use products like Grok and ChatGPT, chances are, we use more rudimentary forms of the same technologies. We use a version of AI to get around and to translate our ideas into other languages. These are remarkable achievements. But they do infantilize us. I’m pretty sure that, if my phone were taken away from me, I couldn’t find my own way from my home to my place of work. And they hinder our self-motivation: I’m also pretty sure that I’ve been much slower to learn foreign languages because I know, at some level, that Google Translate makes it unnecessary.

Do we really want to accelerate the decline in general competence even further? And in exchange for what? Many people remain mystified as to what actual service AI is supposed to provide. The current selling point is that AI gives you a “personal assistant”, but to be honest, I wasn’t aware until Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced “a personal Google, just for you” that I needed a personal assistant. I feel perfectly capable of buying my own airline tickets and booking my own restaurant tables.

What I was aware of needing was meaning and focus in my life: I wanted, for example, to translate the ideas for novels inside me into actual novels. I wanted to be the best, most self-reliant version of myself that I could manage. As for a machine writing a novel for me in a matter of milliseconds — I have no idea how that could possibly generate authentic pride or produce anything other than a cavernous inner emptiness?

Suggested reading

I'm in love with my AI girlfriend

By Sean Thomas

My hope for the past three years had been that AI would just sort of go away. In the Nineties, we expected ourselves to be overrun by clone armies (certainly, my sixth-grade science teacher gave many speeches to that effect). It didn’t come to pass. Could something similar transpire with AI?

That seems increasingly unlikely. For one thing, AI has already changed the face of war, and the AI arms race between the United States and China guarantees that AI will be a major presence in our lives. There was a brief moment in 2023-2024 when it was possible to imagine our AI anxieties going the way of Nineties clone fears. That was when Italy banned ChatGPT and the Biden administration issued its (since-overturned) regulations. But now we are plowing full steam ahead.

All that matters now is individual choices. Unwary, I fell for the techno-optimism of the past two decades and ended up with a diminished attention span and a bunch of mysterious subscription charges to show for it. Well. Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, shame on Sam Altman. I know, much better now, the folly of turning over my own mental powers to a bunch of techies promising a brilliant future.

I’m not making that mistake again. Nor should you.

It blew my head off. But not in the way I thought it might. There were no hallucinations, there was no Day-Glo assortment of colors. It was something much more profound. Basically, it was paradise, and it was paradise all the more so for being so adjacent to everyday reality.

The first time I did LSD I was in a family house — a house I’d been to thousands of times before. But suddenly, everything about the place was imbued with new layers of meaning. Touching the chairs that my grandparents and great-grandparents had sat in, I discovered a new understanding of these figures who had always been somewhat remote to me.

My thoughts were still recognizably my own, but rather than having, say, three or four at once, I now seemed to have 11 — each occupying its own dimension, as if in some kind of stereo effect. I would be thinking about different phases of my childhood and the music I was listening to and the room I was in and the dynamics I had with each person around me. At the same time, I felt a calm self-assurance. Having spent my twenties (in retrospect) in the grip of different anxieties, I could now, with the aid of the LSD, see myself far more fully, far more richly. I could see that there were worlds and worlds inside myself — as there are for everyone.

Inevitably, I suppose, that started a journey. The lab-created psychedelics such as LSD and MDMA showed the immense resources latent within a person, and the drop of acid, like a scientist putting a bit of fluid onto a slide, illuminated what was already there. The plant medicines, such as ayahuasca, were where it really got trippy, since these were entirely natural compounds. They seemed to be part of an intelligence that existed throughout the natural world. If I took kambo — a frog venom — I found myself seeing the world like a frog; if peyote, like a cactus. Each one seemed to have their own personality, to have a message directed at a particular psychological tangle in my own life.

Towards the peak of my psychedelic exuberance, in 2017, I realized that I was only a small part of a bigger movement, “a breath, sweeping through the cognoscenti”, as I wrote at the time. So many people I was coming across in this space — perfectly sane, balanced people — had psychedelic experiences that changed their lives. And, for a while, it felt like a dizzying scavenger hunt.

After my LSD experience I began to hear about ayahuasca — which, at the time, still seemed like an urban legend. Soon, I would find myself at a beach cafe near a group actually preparing for an ayahuasca ceremony, complete with Amazonian shamans in full regalia. And then when I was exchanging Facebook friendships with these ayahuascans, I discovered that the one friend we had in common was the most interesting guy I knew in college who turned out to be running a group, based in New York, for taking an African plant, iboga. Inevitably, not long after, iboga would blow my head off.

“All these people I meet all seem to be on the same page — with a united outlook, which is very different from how any of us were raised,” I wrote, trying to understand what was going on. “We believe in self-work, a kind of unremitting self-awareness and self-improvement. We are people of faith, which isn’t religious. It’s more that we believe everything anybody has ever said.” We were part of what became known as the “psychedelic renaissance” — a wave of young people, largely millennials, discovering that psychedelics had been seriously misrepresented in the aftermath of the Sixties culture wars and enthusiastically embracing them as a means for self-knowledge and self-growth.

Within the psychedelic community there were a few widespread, entrenched beliefs. One was that, throughout history, psychedelics had been a core part of the spiritual life of many societies. That is, the use of psychedelics was the norm, and our abstinent society was the exception. This was certainly true in indigenous societies all over the world. The classics professor Carl Ruck had very convincingly argued that the Eleusinian Mysteries in Ancient Greece partook of psychedelic ergot, a fungus that is also in LSD, while a few years ago Brian Muraresku was at least intriguing in claiming that early Christian rites, the Eucharist included, involved psychedelics. In the Fifties, the banker R. Gordon Wasson had been startled to come across a thriving mushroom sect in Mexico, and I experienced a mature, coherent religion in Gabon that centered on plant medicines.

Another belief was that the culture wars had basically gone the wrong way. After its lab discovery in 1943, LSD had been practiced in clinical settings throughout the Fifties and had been the therapeutic wonder drug of the era (you can see some of the videos of its use on YouTube). The belief was that the genie had escaped the bottle a bit too fast — above all, through the showmanship of Timothy Leary — and that resulted in a severe backlash. In 1970, the Nixon Administration gave LSD a Schedule I status, right alongside heroin, and then for good measure threw in plant medicines like peyote and ibogaine. Baby Boomers spoke wistfully of their LSD trips — a surprisingly large number of Americans claim to have dropped acid at one point or another in their lives — but, basically, the War on Drugs had stamped out both the clinical use of psychedelics as well as a great deal of psychonautic exploration. The belief in the millennial community was that this had vastly set the culture back. So much of the great art of the Sixties, the music above all, had been psychedelically inflected: the Beatles, for instance, dropped acid innumerable times during that period, with Paul McCartney saying “it started to find its way into everything we did, really”. Stories abounded that the Prague Spring had been a psychedelic event, that Kennedy had been turned on to LSD in 1963 and that it had driven his pursuit of peace in the Cold War, and that Silicon Valley was largely created on the back of psychedelic experiences.

I had a similar experience. Even early in my journey, the psychedelics helped me immensely. Writing had always seemed like a massive anxiety attack — it took me months to agonize over a play. But after trying LSD, I found it came easily, I sounded like myself, and writing became a pleasure. I haven’t had writers’ block since (although the anxiety never entirely goes away). My fear had been that psychedelics would cause me to “drop out”, to become some kind of a hippie, but, actually, they gave me a new relationship to work — I could understand much better that a job needn’t be all of my identity. Meanwhile, there were no deleterious effects from the psychedelics. To this day, I’ve never had a bad experience with any one of them.

More from this author

Is Trump the most libertarian president ever?

By Sam Kahn

The most influential book to make the case for the mainstreaming of psychedelics was Michael Pollan’s How To Change Your Mind (2018). Pollan told the story of the clinical use of psychedelics in the mid-20th century, and the “restart”, which was a series of studies starting in the 2000s by Johns Hopkins University that found that psychedelics could produce mystical experiences, reduce anxiety in terminally ill cancer patients, all with next-to-no-negative impacts. What seemed to have disappeared completely was the bad science of the War on Drugs — for instance, the myth that MDMA created a dopamine deficiency, which was based on a bottle mix-up during a study. Enough people were doing psychedelics, both in clinical settings and on their own, without going crazy or suffering flashbacks. So many of the arguments against the psychedelics just didn’t hold up. And then the clinical benefits did seem very real and were borne out in study after study.

I suppose the peak of my psychedelic journey occurred when I was stone-cold sober. I was working on a documentary about ibogaine — a derivative of iboga — and accompanied a heroin addict from San Francisco to a clinic in Mexico. The place was called “Clear Sky” because, apparently, an addict right after his treatment looked up outside and said “oh a clear sky” — it was the first thought, really, that he had had of the outside world after years of being in the grip of his addiction. My experience was very similar. I had seen how the addict I was accompanying was living — unable to sit through a meal without going to the bathroom to smoke heroin off tinfoil, driving to the airport with a car that would shut down completely if it ever came to a complete stop. And then I saw him a few days later, after the ibogaine trip. He had cut his hair for the first time in a decade. His voice had a different timbre and his eyes had a different light. He had no cravings for heroin at all — it was, in the language of the clinic, an interruption that could allow him to reset his life.

One of the medical practitioners I met during the making of the documentary, a former ER doctor, described the first time he saw an ibogaine treatment as “a miracle”. I felt the same way. There weren’t very good numbers on how well the ibogaine cure had worked but the clinic estimated that the recovery rate was about 40% after a year compared to around 5% in the mainstream recovery industry. If there weren’t good numbers to go by, I was at least somewhat persuaded by what I read in the clinic guestbook. “Take this moment, breathe the air, hug the staff, feel the tears coursing down your cheek. You have waited so long for this.” “I woke up from treatment if reborn, alive with senses I hadn’t felt in years,” wrote another. A third simply wrote: “Ibogaine saved my life.”

Suggested reading

America will always be hooked on drugs

By Adrian Nathan West

The psychedelic renaissance has since lost some of its momentum. There were a number of decriminalization initiatives in different states, and a number of companies attempting to put psychedelics through clinical trials. A ketamine spray for the treatment of depression was approved by the FDA in 2019 and ketamine treatments have become widespread among therapists. Psilocybin (magic mushrooms) continues to perform well in clinical trials, above all in alleviating depression. Microdosing has become widespread, most famously in Silicon Valley. But California’s governor vetoed a decriminalization bill and, more significantly, the FDA asked the company Lykos Therapeutics to redo their phase 3 trial for MDMA. Lykos’ offense had more to do with the fact that one of the therapists had had a sexual relationship with a patient six months after that phase of the study concluded — but it was enough for The New York Times to more or less declare the drug renaissance dead: “How Psychedelic Research Got High On Its Own Supply,” one recent article was titled. But even avowed practitioners have had to recognize setbacks. “The media pendulum is swinging,” Pollan said in an interview. “The wind has definitely gone out of its sails,” said researcher Rick Strassman.

Psychedelics disappeared from my life as well — and, as it happens, really around the time that the psychedelic renaissance was cresting. I can almost remember the moment when I knew that I wouldn’t have much to do with psychedelics again. It was during the pandemic, and it felt like a tide was going out. I had never had a directly negative experience with a psychedelic, but there were some adverse effects. Through my epiphanic period, I had probably developed a false optimism which turned out to be unsustainable. I had also come across some of the darker sides of the psychedelic renaissance — self-appointed “gurus” and “shamans” who allowed their transcendent psychedelic experiences to inflate their own egos and then enjoyed manipulative control over people who participated in their ceremonies. Looking back — and I think about this every day — it is very hard for me to say whether psychedelics have made my life better or worse.

But if I had a choice I would do it all again the same way. The psychedelics represented a journey into the unknown and the more complicated aspects of the self. They showed me that there was far more to the world than I ever would have suspected. And that seemed to be more or less the same place that the culture-at-large had got to. The sense with the Sixties was that it had been too much too soon — that society wasn’t able to handle the insights of psychedelics. We may have already started to feel the same way about the “psychedelic renaissance”, that psychedelics are so powerful that they can’t be casually disseminated on a mass scale.

That is not necessarily an indictment of psychedelics. They really are, as Aldous Huxley put it, “the doors of perception”. If psychedelics are too much for us (and they often are), that may say more about our own limitations than it does about the psychedelics themselves.

In reality, Trump might be the most radically libertarian commander-in-chief in US history. This, contrary to the fears of #Resistance liberals who created an entire cottage industry devoted to fighting Trumpian dictatorship; contrary, too, to the dreams of populists, “post-liberals,” and others in the so-called New Right who imagined that Trump would reconcile American conservatism with the state and promote the use of government power for Right-wing ends.

The fascist theory of Trump remains prevalent among progressives to this day, and received a boost in the closing days of the election when a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, and former Trump chief of staff John Kelly went on record calling Trump a fascist — which allowed Harris, Hillary Clinton, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, and a whole host of Democratic leaders to pile on with the fascist assertion. In The New Yorker, the Yale historian Timothy Snyder greeted the news of Trump’s electoral victory by calling Trump a fascist along with his “close fascist allies,” Elon Musk and Vladimir Putin.

Suggested Article

Trump's intellectuals will betray his base

By Matt McManus

Trump is vindictive, no doubt. By one estimate, he has made more than 100 threats to “investigate, prosecute, imprison, or otherwise punish his perceived opponents”. But fascism has come to be a slippery label. As The Washington Examiner has archly put it, “fascism is anything Democrats don’t like”.

The libertarian explanation, by contrast, is becoming more plausible by the day. Trump has made no secret of his leanings in this regard. In May, he spoke at the Libertarian Party National Convention — the “first president in history” to do so, as he boasted. His address, in which he attempted to stake his libertarian credentials, was remarkably on-message: “I will be a true friend to libertarians in the White House, and I am proud to be the only president in 70 years who started no new wars. I took on the military-industrial complex. I broke the stranglehold on neocons and warmongers on the Republican Party…. I withdrew from the Paris Accord. I withdrew from the anti-gun UN arms treaty, and I withdrew from the corrupt and very expensive World Health Organization”. He concluded by saying: “We want libertarian votes because you stand for what we stand for”.

The address was a somewhat strange spectacle, since Trump was booed by the crowd through much of it. Deep-dyed libertarians from the crowd shouted that he was a “tyrant” and “had crushed our rights”; one held up a sign calling him a “wannabe dictator”. But Trump’s position was that he had simply made libertarianism work tactically by tying it to the GOP. “What’s the purpose of the Libertarian Party getting 3%?” he argued with the crowd, inviting it to join forces with him.

Trump’s October interview with Joe Rogan — featuring his largest audience of the entire election cycle — was distinctly libertarian, as well. He argued for eliminating the income tax and railed against government regulation. He declared an intent to remove all governmental impediments to business, to make government truly as small as possible.

In tandem with his tax-eliminating, government-downsizing rhetoric, Trump developed a partnership with a number of Wall Street and Silicon Valley barons, culminating in Musk throwing his massive financial weight behind the GOP ticket. The two things — the libertarian rhetoric and the new alliances in tech and finance — went hand-in-hand, resulting in policy moves that should have utterly confounded Trump’s populist fans during the campaign.

Take Trump’s stance on legislation to ban TikTok unless the social-media platform separates itself from its Chinese owners. It should have been a perfectly Trumpian policy, striking at two birds, Big Tech and “Chy-na,” with one stone. Yet Trump came out against the ban, having earlier backed it, without offering a coherent explanation. It was notable, though, that one of Trump’s big libertarian backers, the hedge-fund honcho Jeff Yass, controls a minority stake in TikTok estimated to be worth north of $30 billion as of spring 2024.

Another telling campaign moment came when Trump appeared on an X (formerly Twitter) space with Musk and congratulated the world’s richest man for swiftly firing workers who organise to defend their mutual interests. A better Harris campaign might have made more of that unguarded moment for the way it belied Trump’s pro-worker rhetoric. Even Sean O’Brien, the president of the Teamsters and a rare trade-union leader willing to work with the GOP, was forced to accuse Trump and Musk of waging “economic terrorism”.

On immigration, too, Trump has allowed his libertarian instincts to run wild. This might appear surprising, since border restrictionism was and remains one of the signature elements of his agenda. But opposing chaos at the border isn’t incompatible with a libertarian stance. Many libertarians object to illegal migration, even as they support making it easier for labor to cross borders as a means to lowering its price.

During his campaign, for example, Trump said that the advent of artificial intelligence requires the United States to bring in “more people.” He also offered green cards to all graduating foreign university students, even those taking two-year associates degrees. These stances should have raised concerns among Trump’s populist supporters, but their enthusiasm swept all doubt.

Now, as his administration takes decisive shape, Trump is translating his libertarian instincts into personnel choices. The planned Department of Governmental Efficiency — headed by Musk and the venture capitalist Vivek Ramaswamy — is only the most visible. Musk has claimed that he could eliminate up to $2 trillion worth of expenditures from the federal government. In an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, Musk and Ramasaway described themselves empowering a “lean team of small-government crusaders … to cut the federal government down to size.”

Likewise, on the use of H1B visas that allow tech firms to import cheap workers, Trump sided with the likes of Musk and Ramaswamy — over and against his populist base. Last month, the president-elect told the New York Post, “I’ve always liked the visas, I have always been in favor of the visas. That’s why we have them. I have many H-1B visas on my properties. I’ve been a believer in H-1B. I have used it many times. It’s a great program.”

Other personnel choices bespeak similar intuitions: from snubbing his first-term tariff guru Robert Lighthizer for the top job at the Treasury in favor of Wall Street stalwart Scott Bessent; to tapping Howard Lutnick, another Wall Street man who has advocated for eliminating the income tax, to serve as commerce secretary. True, there are a handful of exceptions, such as his choice to lead the Department of Labor, Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer of Oregon, a rare Republican who favors strengthening collective bargaining; and Gail Slater, an antitrust crusader nominated to the Federal Trade Commission.

More From This Author

The Democrats got stuck in the Seventies

By Sam Kahn

These exceptions damn Trump in the eyes of “official” Washington libertarians, who view him as not nearly pure or orthodox enough. But Trump isn’t pure or orthodox on anything, and the salient question isn’t whether he qualifies as libertarian for the purists, but the overall makeup of his political inclinations. On that front, his plans for a massive reduction in government are a better fit for libertarianism than for populism, much less fascism.

This isn’t to play down the Trump threat from a progressive perspective. Libertarianism is a naïve ideology that risks cutting deeply into the core functions of a state. What’s insidious about libertarianism is that it looks good at first. Listening to Trump talk about over-taxation and overregulation with Rogan, I couldn’t help but nod along. The problem is the erosion of state capacity and mounting red ink.

In his first term, Trump increased the deficit by $8 trillion — a direct result of tax cuts that endeared him to Wall Street while slashing the US tax base without generating any other source of revenue to replace it. This time around, Trump and the Republicans are determined to maintain his earlier tax cuts while dramatically diminishing the state. That’s a recipe for a plutocratic order that rewards those at the top, while squeezing the working- and lower-middle-class Americans who sent Trump back to the Oval Office.

There is simply no way to trim $2 trillion from the federal budget, as Co-President Musk aims to do, without eating into entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare. So-called entitlement reform is deeply unpopular among nearly all social segments, Republicans and Democrats — except for the Wall Street fee-skimmers who’d benefit from administering privatized benefits and, of course, libertarian think-tankers in Washington.

Trump’s penchant for pulling all attention toward himself is reminiscent of a Mussolini type and thus seems to foreshadow an authoritarian takeover. But real authoritarianism takes work that Trump is uninvested in — and a state he’s unwilling to fund. He has a businessman’s revulsion for taxes and regulations. The other aspects of his worldview, including ones that seem to contradict his aversion to the state, amount to tactical maneuvring in service of his deeper pro-business agenda. That puts him in the libertarian camp, whether the libertarians themselves like it or not.

It really was as close to a religious experience as I’ve had without the use of psychedelics, and I don’t think I’ve ever entirely broken free of the spell of that moment. One of Whitman’s more ebullient contemporaries called Leaves of Grass “the Bible of America”, and that seems exactly right to me — it’s less a collection of poems and far more a religious text, a way of modelling the personality and giving full scope to one’s creativity and inner life.

More than I’m really comfortable admitting, I’ve tried to mould myself in the direction suggested by Whitman. To me that means, above all, a few things. It means treating the self as infinite: “I am large, I contain multitudes.” It means regarding the border between oneself and other consciousnesses as permeable: part of the thrill of Leaves of Grass is the whimsical way that Whitman slides into the consciousness of John Paul Jones, Davy Crockett, anybody at all really. And it means an abiding, non-negotiable sense of equality and respect towards all creation: “what is that you express in your eyes,” Whitman writes of oxen, “it seems to me more than all the print I have read in my life.”

Now that I have passed my Whitman year — “I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin” — I find myself reflecting a little more sombrely on Whitman’s vision and what it means for me. I also find myself asking the tough question — how did he do it? — since his achievement seems so simple and replicable, but no other writer that I’m aware of has ever hit quite the vibration that Whitman did. It’s a question that Whitman invites, and he is at his most teasing about it: “if you want me again look for me under your boot soles,” he writes at the conclusion of “Song of Myself”.

What we can rule out, in terms of explaining Whitman, is genius. I’ve recently read some of Whitman’s early poems, and they’re almost shocking in their banality – “Let glory diadem the mighty dead / Let monuments of brass and marble rise.” A recent cottage industry has emerged — although it might be one grad student who keeps finding all these lost Whitman works — that vastly increases our knowledge of Whitman’s early writing, but every one of these works is conspicuously lacking: none contain what Whitman called the “me myself”. And so when Ralph Waldo Emerson read the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855, he wrote to Whitman of his surprise: “I rubbed my eyes a little to see if this sunbeam were no illusion.” And as Whitman biographer David S. Reynolds put it 150 years later: “A dull, imitative writer of conventional poetry and pedestrian prose in the 1840s emerged in 1855 as a marvellously innovative, experimental poet.”

There seem to be three tacks to explaining this transformation. The first is on the order of a personal epiphany, “attributed to… a mystical experience he supposedly had in the 1850s or a homosexual coming-out that allegedly liberated his imaginations”, as Reynolds writes before soberly concluding, “in the absence of reliable evidence, such explanations remain unsupported hypotheses”.

Part of what has always so stunned me about Whitman is that he managed to have the epiphanies he did without the aid of psychedelics, but on closer inspection, he, uh, actually might not have been so unaided in his visions. Calamus — the grass-like plant that plays such an important role in Whitman’s writing (a set of his poems is named after it) — turns out to possess psychoactive properties, which was known in Whitman’s time. And Whitman himself was aware of its powers. “It is a medicinal root,” he told his amanuensis in 1891, and in the same conversation appears to be aware of calamus’ ability to induce tripping. At present, calamus is rarely ingested, but looking for trip descriptions of it online, I came across the following:

“Although the effect is very subtle, my senses are more sharpened and my mind is clear… A desire to go outside and take a walk overwhelms me. I put on my shoes and walk naturally towards the forest. Here I enjoy little things that strike me: the beautiful rustling of the leaves, the wind playing with my hair, the smell of the moss. A very peaceful feeling descends over me like a blanket.”

It sounds somehow familiar.

The other piece of folklore about Whitman’s transformation involves his homosexuality, and here I have recourse to a better-documented myth about Whitman. In 1966, an intrepid researcher discovered a robust urban legend in the small Long Island town where a young Whitman had taught. Whitman had been denounced from the pulpit for pederasty, and tarred and feathered. Townspeople recalled that Whitman had “left under a cloud”, and the school would for decades after be locally referred to as the “Sodom School”.

More from this author

The Democrats got stuck in the Seventies

By Sam Kahn

There are some documentary reasons to doubt the story, but Whitman historians, Reynolds included, take the possibility seriously. If it’s true, and Whitman had experienced public humiliation like that on account of his sexuality, a line like “I celebrate myself” — the opening line of “Song of Myself” — sounds very different. It’s as resilient as it is triumphant, like the light in the tunnel at the end of years of therapy — it comes across as a declaration of radical self-acceptance, overcoming his angry trauma-inflected writing of the 1840s, and speaking exuberantly, at the top of his lungs.

That reading of Whitman puts him in line with the human potential movement, with microdosers and psychoanalysis patients and health nuts. Part of the cache of recently rediscovered Whitman material reveals that he wrote a book-length article series called “Manly Health and Training”, basically a highly florid men’s magazine. Whitman’s longtime boyfriend would recall that “he was an athlete — great, great. I knew him to do wonderful lifting, running, walking”.

The Whitman I’m describing here feels surprisingly contemporary and close-to-home — get in touch with your sexuality, lift some weights, find a hemp shop that sells calamus and you too can write Leaves of Grass. The second tack on Whitman makes him a little more remote. That would be to link him with a particular moment in the development of American national consciousness. Whitman was maybe the most conspicuously patriotic of major poets and he explicitly linked his writing to the expansion of the United States. “The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nature,” he wrote in the preface to the Leaves of Grass. “The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.” We can understand this in two ways — one is that American English, in Whitman’s time, was a sort of fresh clay out of which a new literature could be moulded, much as Shakespeare in the 1590s or Pushkin in the 1820s had a sort of first-mover advantage with their respective literary languages. Or we can understand this as meaning that Whitman had a messianic vision distinctive to America — that American democracy and exuberance would produce what Whitman calls “a copious, sane, gigantic offspring”, a living poem replete with “perfect characters and perfect sociologies”.

It is this vision that, for us now, leaves a bitter aftertaste. Of all Whitman’s characterisations, “sane” is the hardest to apply to our particular moment of American history. Whitman did seem to anticipate that his idea of America might be overly optimistic. In the otherwise exuberant Democratic Vistas, he writes: “the United States are destined either to surmount the gorgeous history of feudalism, or else prove the most tremendous failure of time.” And it’s that tremendous failure that, in the year of our Whitman 170, I find myself grappling with — that America just failed to achieve its potential, never acquired a real maturity and then, eventually, lost its idealism. Whitman, in the closest he would get to standard-issue political critique, wrote: “the fear of conflicting and irreconcilable interiors, and the lack of a common skeleton, knitting all close, continually haunts me.”

Suggested reading

The torture of an unphilosophical life

By Agnes Callard

But it’s the third tack to understanding Whitman which actually may be the most relevant and direct lesson of Whitman’s. What Emerson called “the long foreground” of Whitman’s was mostly journalism and self-publishing. Whitman, who left school at age 11, trained as a printer’s devil. And, throughout his career, he was intimately tied (in a way that very few writers are) to the physical production of his own work. He worked as a typesetter for publications in New York, founded his own newspaper The Long Islander, and for two years was the editor of the well-known Brooklyn Eagle. What he mostly was, though, was a failure. The self-publishing didn’t earn much. His practical-minded brother George would lament that “he made nothing of his chance” during the “great boom in Brooklyn” in the 1850s. And Whitman, who seems to have been living rough as much by necessity as poetic persona, would in 1840 style himself as part of a “loafer kingdom”.

But it was Whitman’s outsiderness — combined with his willingness to take control over the means of production — that accounted for his literary miracle. High-brow American literature in Whitman’s time was awful, really awful — stale hand-me-downs of European prosody — and Whitman, too, struggled to break free of it. “I too, like all others, was born in the vesture of this false notion of literature,” he said late in life. But he did break free of it. He came across enough fresh influences — Martin Tupper, Emerson himself — that he was able to develop a more distinctively American sensibility, augmented with the language of the streets and a dash of the pulpy writing emerging from the nascent penny presses. And by 1855, he was able to take care of the publication of Leaves of Grass entirely by himself — writing parts of the famous preface directly onto the keys of the press in the print shop, and then handling his own advertising and distribution.

What Whitman was doing sounds, of course, very much like blogging or Substack — and I have no doubt that if he were alive today that’s exactly how he would be distributing his work. In an excitable mood, I wrote on my Substack recently that “what we’re really on the cusp of is a whole different way of being”, and what I meant was the capacity of the internet to eliminate gatekeepers and to open the way for the “new, superb democratic literature” that Whitman described. This statement of mine was met with some skepticism. If Emerson “rubbed his eyes a little” at Leaves of Grass, the Substacker Teddy Brown had to “close [his] eyes and rub [his] temples” at the sheer stupidity of what I was saying.

But I stand by it. In one of his more mysterious poems, “The Song of the Answerer”, Whitman describes a figure maybe a century or five centuries in the future who will be his poetic analogue. I had always taken the Answerer to be a kind of Messiah, a Mahdi of lyric poetry, who would provide the “answers” to the poetic questions that Whitman posed. But rereading the poem now, and meditating on the superhuman qualities of the Answerer it occurs to me that Whitman isn’t describing a person but a spirit. What it is is a profound sense of equality: of a mutual respect that extends from mechanics to soldiers to sailors to authors to artists to labourers to gentlemen to prostitutes to beggars to congressmen.

The exuberant, expansive, athletic America of Whitman’s era may be long gone — if it ever really existed — but the vision of the Answerer isn’t as remote as Whitman sometimes makes it seem. It is, simply, a democratic sensibility. To find it requires at the same time, paradoxically, immense humility and a nearly boundless confidence. As Whitman put it, “There was never any more inception than there is now,” and the vision of the Answerer requires little else than a reaching for it.

“You worked with [segregationist Senators] to oppose busing,” Harris said in a 2019 debate. “And, you know, there was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bused to school every day. And that little girl was me.”

It was an effective assault, abetted by the element of surprise. Above all because busing had disappeared from the national conversation 50 years ago. Biden, in the one off-the-record moment of his that makes me actually like him, turned to his debate neighbour Pete Buttigieg as soon as the cameras were off and said: “Well, that was some fucking bullshit.”

But Harris’ salvo was indicative of a general schism within the Democratic Party — and it’s telling that, according to a Politico article on the incident, she was willing to sacrifice a future career with a Biden administration in order to make this point. The Seventies revealed fundamentally different strains within the Democratic Party. The past half century may be thought of as a time loop of the Dems rehashing the same debates — not least because so many senior figures in the party were also around at that time. Perhaps Harris’ catastrophic loss in the 2024 election can be thought of as the end of that cycle.

Suggested reading

The march of Kamala's brides

By David Samuels

In the Seventies, the Democrats protected a fraying vision of the Great Society. Courts appeared to cement liberal principles into law, but public confidence in what was essentially a social democratic state was dissipating. The Republicans, in their period of exile at the time, withdrew from that system altogether with the famous formulation “government is the problem”. But the Democrats found themselves pulled in different directions — and continue to be all these years later.

Back then, the progressive wing of the party felt that it was on the cusp of a kind of cultural Götterdämmerung — finally putting to bed the monsters of America’s past and ushering in a more socially equitable society. That narrow success was symbolised by the vanishingly slight margins of victory in Roe v. Wade (1973), which used a somewhat tangential legal argument to close off the abortion debate, and in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), in which affirmative action survived through the highly ambivalent opinion of a single Supreme Court justice. But the Reagan Revolution and the gradual Rightward turn of the courts meant that progressives have had to fight tooth-and-nail since then for the kinds of social gains that for a brief moment in the Seventies seemed like they might materialise through popular will. Those causes included the long battle for gay and lesbian rights, which finally culminated in the Supreme Court’s 2015 support of gay marriage; the battle against restrictions on pornography and sexual harassment; and the battle for the Equal Rights Amendment, which had at one time seemed a foregone conclusion and then was fought out in a guerrilla campaign before finally being abandoned sometime in the Eighties.

To the extent that the short-lived Kamala Harris movement had a coherent theme, it was about going back to this moment in time in the Seventies, when the momentum stalled for social progressivism, and trying to start the clock up again. It seemed providential that Harris ascended to the top of the party not long after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, and that she made abortion rights the sole substantive issue of her presidential campaign. But Harris’ attack on Biden in the 2019 debate is maybe even more revealing. Harris wasn’t actually advocating for busing — which had been deeply divisive among liberals and was essentially a dead letter after a 1974 Supreme Court decision — but she felt that it was crucial to carry the torch. She symbolised the lost progressive cause, which could finally move forward.

Elsewhere on the progressive wing of the party, the focus wasn’t so much on 1973 or 1974 but on 1980. Bernie Sanders ran his two races for the White House on a notion that the United States had made a catastrophically wrong turn with Reagan’s election. That turn pulled the plug on a social democratic system and ushered in an era of runaway capitalism and rampant inequality. Sanders, in various speeches and statements, has been completely explicit about his political chronometry. “Over the past 40 years there has been a massive transfer of wealth from the middle class and working families to the very wealthiest people in America,” he wrote in 2021. In 2014, in what would become his standard campaign pitch, Sanders said: “We have a lot to learn from Democratic socialist governments that have existed in countries like Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Norway.” The point is that the Scandinavian countries never went down the Reaganite/Thatcherite road.

More from this author

Donald Trump: new media king

By Sam Kahn

It may seem surprising then that Joe Biden — the stick-in-the-mud villain of Kamala Harris’ framing — ended up, while in office, embracing a great deal of Sanders’ rhetoric and perspective. In announcing his 2021 Executive Order on Competition, Biden’s language was pure Sanders. “Forty years ago, we chose the wrong path in my view, following the misguided philosophy of people like Robert Bork, and pulled back on enforcing laws to promote competition,” Biden said from the White House. “We’re now 40 years into the experiment of letting giant corporations accumulate more and more power… I believe the experiment failed.”

Biden’s sudden adherence to a Sandersesque vision of government was comprehensible, according to the antitrust advocate Barry C. Lynn, in terms of generational memory. “I’ll admit, it’s a little funny to imagine Joe Biden as the striding guardian of liberty and light,” Lynn wrote in Harper’s. “But I’ve also long felt it somehow made sense. He is, after all, among the few politicians old enough to know where previous generations hid the key to building a fairer democracy and a better common future.”

And the centrist side of the Democratic Party, which houses Biden, has had its own fraught relations with the national dysfunction of the Seventies. Jimmy Carter, in his “Crisis of Confidence” speech of 1979, put into vivid terms the breakdown of the Great Society vision. “We’ve always believed in… progress. We’ve always had a faith that the days of our children would be better than our own,” Carter said. “Our people are losing that faith, not only in government itself but in the ability as citizens to serve as the ultimate rulers and shapers of our democracy.”

He knew that the problem was deeper than any individual issue. “The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways,” he said. “It is a crisis of confidence.” But, in terms of policy, what Carter actually did was to begin the dismantling of the Great Society and to pave the way for Reaganism. Historian Richard Aldous has argued that Carter can be considered “the first Reaganite”, introducing the deregulation, focus on supply-side economics, and broad tax cuts that would later be widely associated with Reagan. Carter’s mode of governance can be considered a sort of pastoral mourning for the Great Society as he was in the process of burying it. That approach didn’t work electorally, but it got a new look in the Nineties with Bill Clinton’s Third Way and his sub rosa embrace of Reaganism. The difference between Carter and Clinton was mostly tonal. Carter, for instance, committed adultery “in his heart” while Clinton did it in reality and promiscuously; Clinton buried the Great Society enthusiastically where Carter had done so mournfully.

The centrist side of the Democratic Party can be understood, then, as accepting the Reaganite turn but with a nod to what-might-have-been from a social standpoint. Hillary Clinton largely ran her race for the presidency on the notion of shattering the glass ceiling — a term that was introduced in a speech in 1978 — and that became a brutally vivid metaphor when she unwisely hosted her 2016 election night party under a glass ceiling at the Javits Center. It is a ceiling that has remained unshattered.

The Democrats aren’t the only ones who are caught in the squabbles of the Seventies. Senator Mitch McConnell — who has long been the dominant Republican figure on Capitol Hill — has dedicated his career to his “long game” of building a conservative Supreme Court. It’s a quest that has been widely interpreted as a reaction to his formative experiences with the liberal-leaning courts of the Seventies. With a conservative advantage in the Supreme Court, with Roe and Bakke overturned — and now with Donald Trump defeating Harris — the long war of the Seventies can finally be said to be brought to a close. The conservatives won, totally.

That’s a very bitter pill to swallow on the progressive side of the aisle, but in a way it may be a blessing in disguise. What it means is that the Left no longer has to dedicate itself to propping up a Great Society that has atrophied away; or to advancing progressive causes that, we now know, will never get past a conservative Supreme Court. The Left at least has the advantage of being jolted out of its time-warp and of looking at the political landscape with fresh eyes. However the Democratic Party reconstitutes itself — and it must reconstitute itself — it can do so with new faces and with ideas that speak to a very different era. The Seventies, at long last, are over.

“More or less, more or less,” said Trump, a little timidly.

It could have been any eager kid explaining a new technology to someone almost four times his age, but what Trump said next encapsulated so much of what he has brought to American politics. “It’s the new wave,” he said, to which Ross enthusiastically agreed.

Trump’s podcast blitz over the last few months — on Kick with Ross, on X with Elon Musk, on YouTube with Lex Fridman and Theo Von, and most recently on Ben Shapiro’s podcast — showcased his ability to adapt to new media forms. This started in the Nineties, when he rose to political prominence as a regular guest on talk radio. He then became a nationwide celebrity through his starring role on reality TV’s The Apprentice. He ran for president in 2016 largely through his Twitter account and, when that was disabled in 2021, switched to his own social media platform, Truth Social. His 2024 campaign strategy hinges on his ability to reach low-information voters who wouldn’t normally pay attention to politics. (Von is a comedian and Ross an online gamer.) From the standpoint of communications, his approach has been astonishingly successful and may well return him to the White House. Really, the entire Trump phenomenon is just media studies — but why, with Kamala Harris only just appearing podcasts now, have his political opponents been so slow to learn its lessons?

Every time I try to understand our era, I find myself — like the kind of person who pulls out their pocket Bible on any occasion to check the relevant verse — reaching for Martin Gurri’s 2014 text, The Revolt of the Public. Gurri, a former CIA analyst turned media theorist, outlined the dominant dynamic of our time: it is “an episode in the primordial contest between Centre and Border” but with a new array of weapons made available to the Border. “Each side in the struggle has a standard-bearer: authority for the old industrial scheme that dominated globally for a century and a half, the public for the uncertain dispensation striving to become manifest,” he wrote.

In the past, the Border had to make do with penny presses, alternative weeklies, late-night radio stations or, simply, the power of “word-of-mouth”. But, with the public-to-public traffic of social media, the Border developed an ability to communicate with itself at a staggering volume and to change the underlying dynamics of political discourse. For Gurri, 2012 was the watershed year, in which the two-way traffic of social media became a social force of its own, eclipsing the standard establishment media organs and creating an entirely different communicative discourse that was ripe for political exploitation. Gurri self-published The Revolt of the Public and the book passed largely unnoticed, but after Trump’s 2016 victory Gurri’s now-dug-up thesis was the only explanation that really fit.

Suggested reading

The poetic genius of Truth Social

By Malcom Kyeyune

Trump had said as much in a 2013 meeting with Republican supporters — a meeting reported on years later by Politico — in which he laid out his playbook for his longshot presidential campaign. “I’m going to suck all the oxygen out of the room. I know how to work the media in a way that they will never take the lights off of me,” Trump said. When told by an attendee that the only possible way to run was through lavish spending on paid advertisements, Trump said, “I think you’re wrong” — he would reach a “mass audience” entirely through the new possibilities afforded by earned media.

Initially denied the obvious entry points to airtime in his presidential run — he lacked endorsements and funding, and was far behind rivals like Jeb Bush and Scott Walker in access to conservative media — Trump made adroit use of the new technology. Twitter seemed juvenile for a presidential candidate — nobody else was really using it — but it allowed Trump both to make himself relatable and to take his case directly to voters. He became the protagonist of the election, and, when the establishment did what it could to sideline him, he turned the establishment into the foil of his story, attacking Megyn Kelly for her coverage of him.

Trump’s use of Twitter (and Truth Social) is, of course, well known. What’s vastly underappreciated, though, is the extent to which he’s consistently been ahead of his political rivals when it comes to social media and been able to use that playbook for other forms of new media. As a centrepiece of his 2024 campaign, Trump has, as The New York Times somewhat disparagingly put it, “embarked on a cavalcade of interviews”, appearing on podcasts, live streams, and basically any form of new media he can access.

That really shouldn’t be such a big deal. 360 million people use Twitter. 540 million people listen to podcasts. The only ones who don’t, it seems, are the grandees of the Democratic Party. Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden never made effective use of social media — up until Biden’s announcement of not seeking a second term — and, even Kamala Harris, who is closer in age to digital nativity, has been a less-than-enthusiastic adopter. Meanwhile, Trump’s streamed conversations over the last month brought somewhere on the order of 100 million views.

In that same time period, when Trump was embarked on his “calvacade”, Harris made one — count it — large-audience media appearance, in front of the friendly audience of CNN. She appeared in person at a large number of rallies and was also interviewed by comedian Rickey Smiley, an ABC affiliate, and a Phoenix Univision station — none of those with anything like the reach of the podcasters Trump appeared with. The YouTube stream of the Rickey Smiley interview, for instance, has attracted a pitiful 7,000 views. Her paid ads have been saturating the airwaves, she can rely on near-universal support from establishment print media and favourable coverage from network TV, with the exception of Fox. She has an army of surrogates pushing out the campaign’s messages across a variety of media sources. And her debate performance, unlike Trump’s, only proves her confidence with established media forms.

The problem is that none of this messaging takes advantage of the unique resources of new media. New media — whether podcasts or social media — is all about casual, easygoing, personality-driven conversation. In Gurri’s terms, what is happening is that the entire society is going through an emperor-has-no-clothes realisation. The immediacy of digital resources makes social media users — who are also voters — highly sceptical of anybody who over-ceremoniously cloaks themselves in the mantle of authority. In the Twitter era, everyone — the world’s richest man, world leaders, sports stars, celebrities, whatever — is reduced in the end to a common denominator: they are individuals sitting behind a device and tapping into it, just like anybody else. From the perspective of “authority”, that’s something close to an existential threat — a difficulty in reestablishing the lineaments of majesty. But, from the perspective of a democratic politician who relies on popularity and relatability for legitimacy, it should be a golden opportunity. And, for every day that Harris doesn’t appear on general-interest podcasts, she is, essentially, leaving votes on the table. The Harris campaign seems finally, belatedly, to be recognising what should have been obvious a month ago, with Harris appearing on Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy podcast and with the campaign announcing a media blitz which included an appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. But it may be already be too late. For every day that Harris hasn’t made a new media appearance, she has missed a chance to set the narrative for the campaign.

There is nothing whatsoever that Trump does that digital media users can’t do as well. Anybody under 40 or so can do it in their sleep. But the Democratic Party still hasn’t managed a generational handoff from the Clinton era. They both don’t recognise the power of the new modes of communication and don’t know how to exploit it. Those who do — like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — have a vast leg-up compared with the rest of the party. And, really, that is the entire explanation of the AOC phenomenon. She tweets like a pro, she’s relatable, and she makes herself the protagonist of her story. It’s not a hard playbook to emulate, but you need to be digital media-conversant to emulate it.

Instead, though, the Dems have moved in the other direction. They have come to rely on their stranglehold over traditional media. They have newspapers, network TV, public radio. They have a war chest that gives them an advantage in all traditional ad markets. And none of that is to be underestimated — that arsenal of communicative technology has enabled them to make inroads particularly with seniors, a traditionally Republican bloc.

What the Democrats, like some red-coated, overly regimented colonial army, fail to recognise, however, is that this is asymmetrical warfare. None of their preferred modes of communication make inroads into the younger or low-information voters who are, at this stage, most likely to swing the election. The Republicans already have talk radio and Fox-world. Through Trump’s media dexterity, they have done very well in social media and, now, on podcasts.

When we assess the results of this election, what we likely will assess isn’t issues or even messaging but modalities of communication. The parties have swerved into very different communications bubbles. This has been the case at least since the era of media revolutionary Rush Limbaugh and talk radio’s shift towards conservatism, while print media and network television tended to skew more liberal. But now, with media ever-more-siloed, those distinctions are only exacerbated across a variety of forms. What the Democrats are still failing to get through their heads is that it’s the newer, more dynamic communications technologies where the more effective persuasion can take place — and which require an aggressive, personable, let-it-all-hang-out approach. Harris should be more than able to hold her own in those formats. But if she doesn’t visit them, she’ll effectively be passing over undecided votes — and those votes will cost her the election.