And yet it is all still a sign of the times — of a broad move toward something ugly and profane. “How easily men may be corrupted,” Machiavelli observed, “and how they may transform themselves and give themselves a completely different nature, no matter how good and well educated they may be.”
This may not be exactly true of Zuckerberg and the others — I’m not sure that they have merely begun to be, to borrow from Machiavelli again, “friends of tyranny for the little bit of profit it provided them” — but it is undoubtedly true of those who have and will contort themselves for Trump in search of some advantage for themselves.
What I Wrote
I wrote about all the ways Trump’s second-term agenda seems to be a recapitulation of many of the worst parts of America in the 19th century.
Imposing tariffs, expanding territory, a new Mexican war and a traditional vision of the American people — these are what the nation needs, Trump says, to be “great again.” In which case, MAGA cannot possibly refer to anything in the 20th century, when the United States essentially built the modern international order, as much as it must refer to some time in the 19th century, when the United States was a more closed and insular society: a second-rate nation whose economy was far smaller and less prosperous than our own.
Now Reading
Lila Shapiro on Neil Gaiman for New York magazine’s Vulture:
Sexual abuse is one of the most confusing forms of violence that a person can experience. The majority of people who have endured it do not immediately recognize it as such; some never do. “You’re not thinking in a linear or logical fashion,” Pavlovich says, “but the mind is trying to process it in the ways that it can.” Whatever had happened in the bath, she’d been through worse and survived, she thought.
Rebecca Shaw on the tech moguls for The Guardian:
I knew that one day we might have to watch as capitalism and greed and bigotry led to a world where powerful men, deserving or not, would burn it all down. What I didn’t expect, and don’t think I could have foreseen, is how incredibly cringe it would all be. I have been prepared for evil, for greed, for cruelty, for injustice — but I did not anticipate that the people in power would also be such huge losers.
Andrea Pitzer on resisting the new administration for her Beehiiv newsletter:
But in the meantime, don’t just stand there waiting to get hit. We need to get ourselves and as many people as possible off the tracks, whether it’s immigrants, protesters or civil servants. A lot of people have been working to get free already and just need a little backup. Others are still in deep danger or have fewer options. In each case, we need to act now.
Brett Murphy on how President Biden’s State Department allowed Israel to get away with atrocities in Gaza, for ProPublica:
Time and again, Israel crossed the Biden administration’s red lines without changing course in a meaningful way, according to interviews with government officials and outside experts. Each time, the U.S. yielded and continued to send Israel’s military deadly weapons of war, approving more than $17.9 billion in military assistance since late 2023, by some estimates. The State Department recently told Congress about another $8 billion proposed deal to sell Israel munitions and artillery shells.
Samantha Hancox-Li on failed blue state governance for Liberal Currents:
It is sometimes said that Democrats don’t have the political will to spend money to solve social problems. But money is not the problem. Los Angeles voters appropriated billions of dollars to build housing for the homeless; you only need to look around to see that it hasn’t solved the problem. The California Legislature appropriated $300 million for first-time home buyers, a fund that was depleted in fewer than two weeks by fewer than 3,000 people. In New York City, the Second Avenue subway extension project, underway since 2016, is estimated to cost more than $6 billion — for about a mile and a half of subway. Money is not the problem. We spend enormous amounts of money to get nothing. An unwillingness to do what’s necessary to turn that money into results is the problem.
