I’ve read two books recently that have completely altered my worldview. Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine and Mary Harrington’s Feminism Against Progress. Both are, at their core, books about technology. But they diverge significantly from the mainstream critiques of technology that dominate our discourse. Kingsnorth and Harrington aren’t asking, are screens bad? Or is app-based gig economy labor exploitative? They’ve moved onto a level of systemic critique the mainstream discourse rarely touches, and it’s much more in touch with what it means to be alive in this system right now.

It’s not uncommon to be a remote worker who spends ten hours alone in a city apartment and unwinds at night by ordering takeout, which arrives via a DoorDash driver who “contactlessly” leaves it at the front door. Instead of going outside to see if the food has arrived, the remote worker checks the app for confirmation. He then turns on Netflix, opens the food, and passively scrolls social media until late into the night.

Brick and mortar retail businesses, once started with hopes of being community staples, now face fewer customers, and the squeeze forces them to adopt “free delivery on orders over $30.” Order by 2 p.m. to get your delivery the same day! Harried retail workers learn new apps to process the orders, while delivery drivers, people from all walks of life who have lost stable work, trickle into the store, heads down, phone in hand.

Liberal millennial women who think of themselves as secular have been taught to worship a form of feminist progress that meant climbing corporate and institutional career ladders. Big tech companies now incentivize and pay for reproductive assistance technologies, including egg freezing, to bring in “female talent.”

This is Western life in the 2020s. I’ve been all three of these people.

It seems obvious and intuitive to most people now that screens are bad, that they are fundamentally making us sadder, more isolated, and more distractible. Anyone who has worked in or been around the app-based gig economy knows it’s exploitative. Though Harrington’s critique of feminism remains largely taboo, even this seems to be changing. As more millennial women, myself included, look around at the realities of our career-obsessed lives and wonder what this was all for, Harrington’s arguments around the priorities of the feminist movement are actually not that radical.

Most discourse involves admitting technology is doing some harm but still assumes that its ascendance is inevitable and necessary. We can and should regulate gig work and screens, but we’re missing something more profound by not viewing the reality that technology has become an organizing principle of our lives as perhaps the most fundamentally political question of our time. Here again, is what sets these authors apart from the mainstream discourse.

Why we sustain being governed like this at all has a few possible explanations. One, common to the left, is that we’ve become too economically precarious and atomized to organize or meaningfully push back against any of it. I think there is good reason to believe this is true. Another, the lane of Harrington and Kingsnorth, is that an ideology, an almost religious-like adherence to “faith in progress,” has made it very hard to question or assert visions of “the good life” that fall outside of what can even be articulated without sounding reactionary.

Embedded in this is the idea that “progress” means moving forward, and that has become inextricably linked, whether we like it or not, with advances in technology. Both writers are critical not just of the technological developments that have shaped modern life, but of the ideology that justifies them. This idea of progress has perhaps been the single greatest story we’ve told ourselves in Western liberal democracies. Many of us believe it, or once did, structuring our lives around the assumption that history moves forward toward some greater good. Technology, in turn, fused with capitalist technocracy to become the default way we measure progress.

Kingsnorth and Harrington’s critiques challenge the authority of the technocrat. At such a level of abstraction, policy wonks and CEOs, with their data and studies, begin to seem less relevant and increasingly detached from the grounded realities of people’s lives.

To be clear, I’m not endorsing every idea these authors have espoused. I do think they are on a noble path. It’s a question that will have to be answered if the left is to build any sort of movement that addresses the realities of our time. This means asking how we can critique the parts of modernity that have been enabled by technology and have left us profoundly unfree, not just in our economic situations, but in our human quest for connection and meaning.

We don’t need to look into the near future to define a dystopian technoreality. The one we live in now is pretty close. This is where the gap between ideology and grounded reality is most jarring. We move forward in the name of progress, efficiency, liberation, and freedom, but we live in isolation, in dependency, and we are largely stripped of the agency to do anything about it. This is why most people can feel something is “off,” but naming it is much harder.

To obscure this further, the way we are taught to perceive politics, which has essentially become a 24/7 reality TV show, is yet another technological interface that mediates our reality. One of the most dystopian iterations of this happened yesterday, when a grandmother of ten, wearing a branded “DoorDash Grandma” shirt, was sent on a political stunt sanctioned by the mega-tech company and the White House to deliver McDonald’s to the Oval Office. Here the state and the tech companies are essentially one, staging a performance of their “no tax on tips” backdoor legislation that helped this woman pay for her husband’s cancer treatment by delivering for DoorDash.

Where Kingsnorth and Harrington deserve credit is in saying the entire system is wrong. That this way of organizing life is inhuman, an affront to the basic interpersonal structures that humans have derived meaning from for centuries. They offer a bit of light in a very dark time.

Read more

Thanks to all who joined and engaged with your comments and questions. We hope to hold another one of these Lives soon, so stay tuned!

Evelyn

Get more from Evelyn Quartz in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

It’s February in the Pacific Northwest. I open TikTok to a side-by-side video of the town, measuring the days a year apart. Sixty-six degrees, sunny skies, no leaves on the trees. Thirty-two, banks of snow, slip…

Read more

Read more

Read more

Read more

Books

The Revolt of the Elites, Christopher Lasch
Lasch’s book is relevant for anyone interested in the drift toward authoritarianism that began long before Donald Trump. What does it mean to have a society where elites are rootless, globalized, and completely detached from the things that make ordinary life worth living: community ties, family life, and a sense of belonging in place? This book reads more like a series of essays and was written at the end of Lasch’s life and storied career of cultural, political, and social criticism, it’s sharp and hauntingly relevant today.

Orwell’s Roses, Rebecca Solnit
I’m currently reading this, and it’s a lovely book that juxtaposes George Orwell’s love of domestic life — farming, gardening, and especially planting roses and fruit trees — with his literary and political work. Solnit travels to the rural cottage where Orwell lived and gardened, and takes the reader through his reported journeys, from the horrific conditions mine workers in Wigan to his experience embedded in the Spanish Civil War. It’s not quite a memoir; rather, it’s full of unexpected connections between Orwell’s political beliefs and the natural world, where he found meaning and comfort.

The full reading/ watching/ listening list, along with my notes on why these works mattered, is available to paid subscribers. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber if you’re able. You’ll get access to paywalled roundup posts and essays, as well as the full backlog of my work — and my eternal gratitude and support in helping me keep doing this.

Read more

Crockett herself says nothing in the ad. Instead, she appears with crossed arms staring into the camera like an footballer in a starting-lineup graphic. The top comment with 350 likes reads: “So, imagine having the confidence to take a sound clip of someone absolutely trashing you and making it a campaign ad. I love this woman.”

Crockett represents the #resistance-era, approach to Donald Trump. People in this worldview believe he’s an outlier in an otherwise healthy democratic system. They think fighting Trump will “restore the soul of the nation” if they just have the right brand, the right fighters. Another comment to the video reads, “I would love to see this dynamic, smart fighter win a [Senate] seat in Texas.”

It’s hard not to see ads like this as evidence that we aren’t dealing with politics so much as a managed simulation of democratic politics. In Crockett’s ad, Trump literally provides the soundtrack and voters are expected to tune in and cheer for their team.

For Crockett and the Democratic establishment she represents, the purpose of politics is the fight — not the material conditions that shape people’s lives: housing, health care, time off, good wages. She largely votes for and supports corporatist policies that have gutted all these things. Instead, from Crockett we get viral clips, flashy rhetoric, and photoshoots in Vogue. In her announcement speech, she even doubled down on a tired sports metaphor, saying, “the gloves have been off and now I’m jumping into the ring.”

I’ve been enjoying clips of pundits from independent media outlets destroying Crockett for all the right reasons: her corporatist record, coziness with the Israel lobby, and Harris-esque vapidity. The best ones I’ve seen are from Glenn Greenwald, Krystal and Saagar on Breaking Points, and Emily Jashinsky. I also really enjoyed this piece by Zaid Jilani.

They cover the history of Democrats’ performative, identity-politics-driven attempts to turn Texas blue, from Beto O’Rourke to Colin Allred and Wendy Davis — all relatively reactionary candidates who ran against Republican extremism. There is also good reporting that Republicans astroturfed Crockett’s campaign, knowing she’d be an easy target for them.

Like many of you, my media diet now leans heavily toward voices like Greenwald, the Breaking Points hosts, Jashinsky, and a long list of thoughtful Substack writers (check out my recommendations!). Their work is far more honest and adversarial than anything coming out of legacy media.

It would be a mistake, however, to assume that consuming better media makes us immune to the psychological allure of groupthink. I like the voices in my media diet because they feel aligned with how I see the world. This is a natural thing to want.

The biggest difference I’ve noticed in switching to this media diet, as compared with legacy cable news (which, believe it or not, I used to have on in the background eight hours a day as a political staffer), is that it does not demand my loyalty. I often disagree with Jashinsky, who comes out of the right, but I still appreciate her perspective and consider her a genuinely free-thinking person. The world of independent, dare I say, heterodox media permits and even encourages thoughtful dissent.

I’m not so starry-eyed that I can’t recognize that this diet also shares and reinforces many of the same narratives. The difference is that the gravitational pull I have toward it is built around critiquing power, not defending it. That, after all, is what journalism is supposed to be.

MAGA & Blue MAGA

What happens when critiquing power is applied selectively and only when it’s politically convenient? You get cult-like behavior.

Many of the most fervent anti-Trump, resistance-type liberals love to accuse Trump supporters of being in a “MAGA cult.” They insinuate that these voters are too stupid to see Trump’s obvious flaws and have instead been brainwashed by a cult of personality.

But what these same liberals rarely acknowledge is that they, too, participate in a kind of cult. If the MAGA cult is centered around Trump, “Blue MAGA” is centered around opposing Trump — and both are caught inside a closed circuit. What happens when you tell anyone they’re in a cult? They get angry, defensive, and write you off as the crazy one.

You often hear liberals say, “I’m not in a cult — I think for myself.” And I don’t doubt that they believe this. But start talking about the Israel lobby, the military-industrial complex, the surveillance state, the role of corporate money in both parties — and suddenly the conversation is over. These aren’t crazy fringe critiques, they’re the domains where major political decisions are actually made. And yet, for many in Blue MAGA, they are the exact places where dissent becomes impermissible.

This isn’t the only overlap — MAGA and Blue MAGA share several other cult-like traits. MAGA voters tell themselves they are “sticking it to the libs” by voting for Trump; Blue MAGA voters tell themselves they are on the “right side of history” by opposing him. Moral certainty is a hell of an effective blindfold. Once you’ve claimed the moral high ground, it becomes much harder to see how your own beliefs follow a similar psychological script.

Both MAGA and Blue MAGA isolate simplistic, singular villains who are to blame for society’s ills. For MAGA, it’s immigrants, Democrats, or the “deep state.” For Blue MAGA, it’s Trump, the people who serve him, and the voters who support him. They define themselves through Manichean binaries, and take delight in the purity of their group identities. Most crucially, both MAGA and Blue MAGA substitute emotional spectacle for structural analysis.

In this sense, politics is hardly about reality at all. The stage from which the two cults perform outrage completely obscures our shared humanity and what nearly everyone wants from politics: a safe and prosperous place to live, a family, friends and community, a meaningful and dignified job, access to quality health care, a life outside of work. It’s so basic, politicians know this — that’s why they pay lip service to it. But their actions speak differently; for tens of millions of Americans, many of these things are completely unattainable. Mainstream politics, as it stands, has profoundly failed.

To mask this, it becomes a battle between heroes and villains rather than a confrontation with the economic, social, and institutional forces shaping people’s lives, and neither side has any incentive — or even the conceptual awareness— to grapple with the conditions that produced Trump in the first place.

Ordinary people have become enlisted into a simulation of democracy as pawns; MAGA and Blue MAGA have been weaponized to cheer, boo, praise, and shout at one another. I call this a “simulation” because it performs the appearance of political conflict while leaving the underlying power structure completely untouched.

Who benefits from the cults? For the vast majority of voters (excluding those at the top financially), it’s not them. It’s the figures on both sides whose adherence to the corporate state incentivizes them to keep the infighting going. People are further divided and the power dynamics that have broken this country for ordinary people remain intact.

This is where Crockett comes back in. She’s useful precisely because she channels anger away from the corporate state and back into the safest outlet they have: Trump.

Crockett, like Trump, is a grifter in the system. They are both avatars designed to fight each other inside the simulation. They reward emotions, not the tangible, physical elements of life. Trump alone can fix it, and Crockett alone can fight him. They are essentially fighters in a WWE matchup. The purpose of the simulation is to keep the feud alive while the system stays intact.

It’s admittedly a hard show not to tune into. But people who watch WWE do so knowing it’s not real. Politics ought to be, right?

Crockett may be the first high-profile candidate for 2026 who is deep in Blue MAGA, but she certainly won’t be the last. This has been the Democrats’ default strategy for the last decade: stand for nothing, satisfy the donors, make Trump the source of all evil, and hope the power swings back.

But what if it doesn’t? What if the people denied a decent life by the corporate state finally came together to demand something different? What if we turn off the show and become active participants in democracy by building movements, punishing power, organizing where we live and work, and shedding the cults? Then the Democratic establishment would really be screwed.

*Thank you to the readers who pointed out that I incorrectly conflated WWE and boxing. The piece has been updated.

I’ve been pulling a lot from the tradition of thinkers such as Sheldon Wolin, Noam Chomsky, and Chris Hedges, who all argue that we are already living in a type of totalitarian regime—and have been long before Trump came along. Wolin called it “inverted totalitarianism,” while Chomsky used “self-imposed totalitarianism.”

Instead of an all-powerful state unified around an ideological project and willing to use force, as the Nazis did, inverted totalitarianism produces and requires something else: apathetic and depoliticized citizens. When people are too strapped for money and time under a suffocating corporate rule, it’s very hard to fight back. Worse, the totality of the corporate state isn’t explicit; it’s subtle. This makes it harder to notice; instead, we are trained to see the system we live in as “natural” and neutral.

I prepared some written remarks for our conversation that explain what I mean in more detail. They are copied below.

Is Bari Weiss a fascist? Before answering, we need to define our terms. “Fascism” is often used today as a catch-all insult to describe anything “bad” often MAGA and Trump, but historically it refers to a specific kind of political order.

Fascism, in contrast to communism, is a right-wing ideology rooted in ultranationalism, hierarchy, and often racial purity. It elevates a strongman, imposes a single-party state, controls culture and the media, and fuses political and economic elites into a corporatist order. Fascism can be totalitarian if it takes over the entire culture with a single ideological vision, this is the same with communism.

This is the standard against which any contemporary accusation of “fascism” must be measured.

I’ll argue that right now we don’t live under a fascist state but one of inverted totalitarianism by corporate rule.

Bari Weiss is not a fascist, at least by this standard.

She does, however, represent something I think is equally dangerous and repulsive.

Weiss’ political project is the status quo mode of governance—neoconservative policy abroad, driven by Zionist political commitments (unquestioned loyalty to Israel), and a centrist adherence to a corporate state at home. For the last several decades, this has been bipartisan US doctrine. It has produced a system that Sheldon Wolin coined “inverted totalitarianism.” This is a system we live in now and has existed long before Trump.

Unlike an explicitly totalitarian state, an inverted one does not have the enforced through state violence.

The American inverse version of this is not rule by a single dictator but a corporate state apparatus. Democracy exists insofar as we have relatively free elections but they are managed, with no viable candidate really challenging the status quo. The media is owned not by the state but by corporations. Compliance is enforced not through sheer force and terror but through economic precarity, consumerism, career advancement, self-censorship, and information overload. As opposed to an explicitly fascist regime, people are not mobilized but depoliticized, apathetic, too crunched for time and money to fight back.

We are consumers of democracy, not direct participants.

The professional-managerial elite—the mainstream media, government technocrats, heads of industry, public relations experts, and the like—are the ones who maintain the illusion of democracy. It operates like a reality TV show. This is the ecosystem in which Weiss operates. She recently said that a debate between Alan Dershowitz and Dana Loesch on gun control is what Americans want. This is what Chomsky called “the illusion of dissent.” What do they have in common, they both support Israel.

For a long time, Americans only had access to a handful of news stations this allowed gatekeepers like Weiss and the model she reveres saw their position as being challenged. This is why she went to CBS and has attempted to revive the gatekeeper era, even as it’s clearly lost legitimacy in the eyes of the American public. This is for several complex reasons but economic austerity driven by neoliberalism and the rise of alternative information sources and the internet are two big reasons.

As media scholar Martin Gurri has observed, we are living through the collapse of what he calls “the center” trying to reassert its broken legitimacy. This was illustrated perfectly when Weiss, speaking on her plans for CBS at the Jewish Leadership Conference, spoke of popular independent voices, Tucker Carlson, Hasan Piker and Nick Fuentes.

“I don’t think that they represent the values and the worldview of the vast majority of Americans. And so this is an opportunity to speak for the 75 percent of the people that are on the center left and the center right that still believe in equality of opportunity. That still believe passionately in the American project, that still believe in all of the things that everyone in this room believes in – which is liberty and freedom and individual responsibility.”

She says this without realizing WHY this language no longer works. The media stood by and enabled a corporate takeover of the government, breaking any legitimacy they had with the American public. This is why people are tuning to independent voices who are not constrained by corporate power.

We don’t have state-sponsored propaganda in the overt sense that characterizes fascist regimes. Our propaganda model is structural rather than coercive. The clearest breakdown of this comes from Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent, where he outlines five pillars of the American propaganda system:

• Corporate concentration of mainstream media

• Advertising as the primary revenue source

• Dependence on government and corporate ‘official sources’

• Punishing or discrediting dissenting or unorthodox narratives

• Anti-communism (and today, its successors: ‘terrorism,’ ‘Russia,’ ‘antisemitism,’ etc.) as a unifying civic religion; I’d also argue “pro-democracy” has become a similar call. They become a totalizing insult when someone wants to silence dissent under the guise of moral high ground.

This is not fascism. It is a managed democracy, a soft-authoritarian corporate order that shapes consent rather than outright demanding it.

Why does it matter that we identify fascism with a particular meaning, in other words why can’t it just represent “bad”? This is an age-old problem. George Orwell said of mid-century England: “almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist,’” describing how the word has been weaponized to the point of meaning anything bad.

In our current context around Trump, the rise of fascism has been deployed in bad faith by a liberal political class desperate to claim its own moral superiority by drawing comparisons with Trump. This is why they are so weak right now—they largely support the corporate takeover of the state, they perform outrage and bet the public will mistake it for politics. They say Trump’s a fascist, and we are pro-democracy. This allows them to use the term not analytically but performatively. Like all good propaganda there is of course an element of truth to this but again, check who is saying it and what their motives really are, are they trying to regain power and uphold the corporate order?

To me, it’s crucial if we are ever going to have a movement that does rebuild the welfare state and return people’s time, earnings, and agency back to them that we recognize that we already live in a version of totalitarianism. Bari Weiss and Donald Trump are mutually reinforcing in this system; they are both a distraction from the real work of rebuilding democracy. Weiss represents a depoliticized professional-managerial class; she exists to maintain elite consensus and narrative discipline. Trump is a largely symbolic leader to his followers and redirects their rage away from the corporate state and into the culture wars.

The only way we can fight back is to recognize the spectacle for what it is—a distraction and tool of control—and transcend it. This will demand popular movements that do not require the sign-off of the liberal class as the resistance movement and No Kings protests do, and instead take real risk to disrupt political and economic power. The most powerful way we can do this is by joining civic associations, unions, solidarity movements, churches, and mutual aid programs. What threatens the elite consensus of democracy most is real democracy, led by the people without their consent.

These are not facts. They are pictures in our heads painted by the state. The phrase “pictures in our heads” was coined by writer Walter Lippmann, who published one of the most influential books on propaganda, Public Opinion, in 1922. Lippmann believed we all live in a “pseudo-environment,” a form of perception altered by oversimplified narratives and stereotypes.

The mediators of our perception of reality are the state and the media, largely working together to uphold a narrative. Though far from democratic, in a way this makes sense. People are busy, their lives occupied with responsibilities that leave little attention for the often complex matters of the federal government. This is the mechanism that drives U.S. foreign policy: bipartisan power sustained by manufactured narratives.

Read more

During the Cold War, the American supermarket was propagandized as the ultimate free-market consumerist wonder. Aisles were full of endless choice; seasonal products were available year-round; and all at a price ordinary Americans could seemingly afford. The astute poets and writers of the time, however, captured something deeper: the supermarket as a source of unbridled consumerism, conformity, spiritual emptiness, and the increasing alienation of the individual under capitalism.

Wallace understood this when he portrayed the grocery store as the ultimate test of human empathy—a place where tired, overworked people converge at the end of the day. The only real freedom in dehumanizing spaces, he argues, is how one chooses to think about it. The empathetic choice is to recognize the humanity of others despite the conditions. The “frantic lady working the register,” wishing you a nice day in “a voice that is the absolute voice of death,” becomes a test of compassion.

But this isn’t the detached, performative compassion of people who will never have to relate to the checkout lady—people siloed into a class that can get by without others. Wallace is speaking to recent graduates of a prestigious college and acknowledges that they will be expected to have white-collar jobs and therefore cannot imagine the “daily tedium and meaninglessness” of her role. It’s society, he implies, run by the corporate overlords, that’s structured to make us think we have nothing in common with one another. He instructs the graduates to imagine a world in which they are all connected: where the woman yelling at her kids in line is exhausted and stretched thin, and where she might also be the DMV clerk who once helped their spouse untangle an infuriating bureaucratic problem with a small act of kindness. Wallace admits this may not be likely—but it isn’t impossible. It’s this type of thinking, the spirit of interdependence, that settings like the corporate grocery store try to rob from us by turning us into disinterested, individual consumers who just want to get on with our days.

Once a week or so, I venture into my local Safeway. It has everything Wallace describes: the ugly fluorescent lighting, scores of dead-eyed people lined up to receive prescription drugs at the pharmacy, the checkout people telling you to “have a nice day.”

Despite the setting, there are countless human acts of kindness to be observed: the cashier smiling and fawning over a baby, the older woman who’s moving so slowly but, once she realizes she’s in the way, makes a self-deprecating joke and smiles. I’ve come to notice one of the employees has a distinctly bubbly and infectious laugh I can make out from halfway across the store.

I see the grocery store at night too, when I’m scrolling on TikTok and come across “random act of kindness” videos. The overworked mother, kids in tow, making her way down the cereal aisle when a man rushes up to her and asks to borrow money. When she obliges, the man offers her a thousand dollars for her willingness to help. It’s all filmed and meant to make us feel warm, like the world isn’t a totally devoid place. I click on the guy’s account and watch a dozen or so more videos.

At my Safeway during the holiday season, there are tables covered with autumnal prints placed near the checkout. “Turkey Bucks,” it’s called. As a consumer I’m told to use the “amazing savings you’ve accumulated at Safeway this year,” and “be sure to give back to those less fortunate.” I try to do Wallace’s mental exercise: how many shoppers are themselves stretched thin, how many of them lost jobs or have a sick family member whose care has depleted their savings? How many have had to cut back already because of soaring prices?

I go back to the TikTok video—many of even the most desperate people still want to help. Like the video, the food drive at Safeway feels staged. It looks like a public act of mutual aid; it’s meant to make us feel like a community taking care of one another. But democracy here is being mediated by the very corporations that have largely broken it—through financialized greed and a cozy relationship with a government that has offloaded its own moral obligation to help.

This is what political theorist Sheldon Wolin coined as inverted totalitarianism: a society dominated not by a single, all-powerful ruler, but by the “faceless anonymity of the corporate state,” which has fused with the managerial elites of government. This bloc quietly makes the decisions that shape democratic life, while citizens are reduced to performing what Wolin called “a politics that is not political.”

“Turkey Bucks,” on the surface, looks like a civic ritual of neighbors helping neighbors—that’s the point. Examined more critically, however, it’s a performance meant to give citizens the illusion of participation and to legitimize our acceptance of being ruled like this.

Hunger, which plagues nearly every community in America, is political. It ought to result in a mass uprising. In a functioning democracy, hunger would be intolerable. It’s a failure of the social contract, the very basic obligation of the state to look after its people. So why do we allow it to persist? Because the corporations have invented a simulation to absorb that outrage. The system cannot allow the moral outrage and anger that people feel knowing that their neighbors cannot afford to eat to become a mass movement. Instead, it invents these staged corporate rituals to placate their instincts and absorb their feelings of rage and helplessness. After all, by donating $5 at the checkout to “fight hunger,” you’re not being asked to be political but to feel charitable. People’s pain and desire to help are redirected by the very sources of power that have largely stripped it away.

At the end of his speech to graduates, Wallace says that real freedom begins with the awareness to “truly care about other people” in small, unglamorous, everyday ways. That ordinary interdependence is precisely what Wolin warns inverted totalitarianism tries to steal—replacing it with a managed, corporate imitation of compassion that we have been trained not to recognize as false.

But everyone can feel that something is off. Going to the grocery store worried about money, only to be guilted by the ominous, impersonal, overly cheery voice on the loudspeaker asking you to donate to a corporate charity drive, is humiliating. And yet people genuinely want to help one another. Their small acts of kindness demonstrate this.

If we can recognize the corporate simulation of democracy for what it is, then maybe we can begin to rebuild the real thing. Because the truth is, ordinary people don’t need corporations to mediate compassion or civic life — it’s the corporations that need us to believe they do.

This is the real story of Washington: a bipartisan elite bound together by a code of decorum so rigid that even war crimes can be forgiven, that is if they are performed by a polite man in a suit, of course.

Glenn Greenwald made a crude but apt joke when he recently said that if Hitler came back from the dead and started bashing Trump, he’d get his own show on MSNBC. This doesn’t seem so outlandish given that Rachel Maddow — who once delighted in being a public enemy of the Cheney’s, even writing a book against the Iraq War and rage-dedicating it to Cheney — showed up to his funeral yesterday.

Bill Clinton, the chief architect of the “let’s leave the middle class to fend for themselves” trade deals, was smart enough to have a scheduling conflict and not be photographed at the funeral. He did, however, send out a tweet saying he respected Cheney’s dedication to the country and his “unwavering sense of duty,” then added a telling line admiring how Cheney was guided by a “deep belief that he was doing what was right for America.” Ah yes — he had good intentions!

The funeral was a perfect display of Washington elite decorum. These people put aside their differences and praise a life supposedly dedicated to public service, even when the person being remembered spent far more time enriching corporate arms manufacturers and oil companies than serving the public.

If there is one rule that matters more than any other in Washington, it’s this: you do not break the decorum. This isn’t just about manners or polite society; it’s the underlying agreement that matters of corporate interests, war, and intelligence are an unshakable bloc best left to the executive—with minimal alterations between administrations and no serious questioning.

This is why Dick Cheney went out by endorsing Kamala Harris. Harris would have largely continued the corporate-intelligence-war state. She was predictable and controllable. Her desire and ambition to become president seemed to outweigh any deeper conviction around ideology or morality.

This is what the forces in Washington want more than anything. It’s why Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, in different ways, destabilized them. It’s why you, dear reader, needed to be reminded a hundred times a day for eight years that Trump is Hitler.

Trump breaks all the decorum, which is the real reason the establishment hates him. He never would have gone to that funeral and called Dick Cheney a “devoted public servant,” as Harris did. He stood on the debate stage and debased Jeb Bush over his support for the Iraq War.

Trump is the tragic consequence of the corporate-intelligence-war state’s failure to provide even a baseline of stability for tens of millions of Americans. He won in counties that were forced to send their children to die in the Middle East — often poor and rural.

One in eight Americans relies on food assistance. Nearly 15% of children live below the poverty line — a number likely much higher given the pathetic baseline for such metrics. The same is true of unemployment, especially among young people and those without a college degree. The American health-care system is on the verge of collapse, and neither party sees anything other than a messaging opportunity to score political points (see my piece on the shutdown.)

So when you see the liberal class gathering at Dick Cheney’s funeral, ask yourself: what are they really protecting?

It’s almost too fitting this happened a day before Trump sat in the Oval Office, charmed by New York City’s mayor-elect, democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani. Trump and Mamdani are both products of this new era — whatever it is. As evidenced earlier today, mainstream elites, whether in Congress, the media, or the political-consultant class, will look for any explanation besides their own failure to explain Trump and Mamdani’s similarities.

Pod Save America’s Jon Favreau tweeted, “Trump is a skilled politician” — before making fun of JD Vance for not being smart enough to attend. MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell wrote, “Mamdani tamed the (politically weak) tiger.” The Bulwark’s Sam Stein posted, “It’s getting a little steamy in here.” These guys see politics purely as performance, they must, it’s all they have.

The one who summed it up most tellingly was Aaron Rupar, who said, “Trump feuding with Marjorie Taylor Greene but being in love with Zohran Mamdani was not on my November 2025 bingo card.”

Of course it wasn’t! That’s exactly the problem. The liberal class cannot and will not see that they’ve been made increasingly irrelevant by Trump and Mamdani.

The caveat here, of course, is that Trump and Mamdani are also largely role-playing as elected officials. As Stephen G. Adubato and I recently discussed on his podcast, it will be very hard for Mamdani to break significantly from the technocratic governance that is the default operating system in nearly every government bureaucracy. Still, his embrace of former FTC Chair and anti-monopolist Lina Khan is a promising move.

What we’re seeing isn’t just a political upset or a surprising photo-op. It’s the collapse of an old order that can no longer explain itself. If this moment puts the Dick-Cheney-decorum class out of business, that’s a good thing, though far from guaranteed. The system they built will fight to preserve itself long after its moral authority is gone. And they will do so telling you it’s for “democracy” as the ship comes crashing down and more people die. Just as Cheney did, RIP.

As most of my writing warns, we shouldn’t get too high on the performance. But for just a moment, we can enjoy the sight of an establishment so trapped by its own rituals that it can’t recognize the world shifting under its feet. They don’t understand what they’re seeing because they can’t imagine a politics where legitimacy isn’t bestowed from above — but demanded from below. This era is theirs to lose.

I’m sorry for the shameless plug, but if you’re in a position to become a paid subscriber and support my work, it genuinely helps me continue thinking and writing independently. I still can’t believe I get to do this for money — it’s a dream to no longer speak for institutional power, and I’ve made it my mission to figure out how to keep doing it. Unfortunately, money is a big part of that reality. Thank you, as always, for reading.

Read more

From the beginning, this shutdown was never about health care. It was about who could raise the most money, generate the loudest moral outrage, and walk away looking like they “fought” heading into the midterms. Even Ezra Klein said the quiet part out loud earlier today: “Democrats said the shutdown was about the subsidies, but for most of them, it wasn’t. It was about Trump’s authoritarianism. It was about showing their base — and themselves — that they could fight back.”

Since Democrats have shown no appetite to meaningfully challenge Trump on economic policy, they’re forced into the realm of political theater — where they perform for the cameras across national news and social media. Their strategy is driven mainly by polls that measure which side is to blame.

All of this relies on the assumption that the American public will view politics as spectacle and cheer for the right side. The problem is this is a game the elites play among themselves, much to the detriment of ordinary people.

The shutdown was, in truth, a proxy war. Like all proxy wars, those calling the shots didn’t pay the price. The public did, through missed paychecks, mounting bills, hunger, and the kind of instability that hits hardest the people who had no role in manufacturing the crisis. The two sides weren’t fighting over the stated issue of health care at all, but over control of the broader narrative: who could dominate public discourse, who could claim the moral high ground, who could galvanize their base and donors by projecting “strength.” The shutdown became a symbolic battlefield onto which Democrats and Republicans projected their messaging wars, leaving ordinary Americans to absorb all the collateral damage. This ought to be the source of your outrage.

The New York Times reported weeks before the shutdown that there was bipartisan appetite to extend the ACA subsidies. Yet, as Klein acknowledges, “if Democrats secured that extension — if they actually ‘won’ — they would be rescuing Republicans from a massive electoral liability.” In other words, both parties recognized that the clash over subsidies threatened their brand. And when politics becomes a battle of brands rather than a contest over material outcomes, the former must appear as the latter in order to maintain the illusion the system still holds.

This is why it’s so outrageous that nearly every major liberal and left group is directing their furor toward the eight Senators who voted to reopen the government. It reinforces the idea that this was ever meant to “work.” These groups are punishing deviation from the performance, not any policy goals, which ultimately legitimizes the entire spectacle.

We deserve leaders who don’t have to resort to the appearance of fighting in order to win back power. And the entire apparatus — from the media to politicians to groups like 50501 and Indivisible — deserves scrutiny for trying to con the American people into believing this was ever about their health care. They all benefit from the spectacle, which drives outrage, clicks, and donations in their direction. After all, Democrats, like Republicans, have done very little to provide health care that isn’t a kickback to the corporate state.

We are all prisoners of this theater unless we choose not to be. Even more damningly, we are human beings who ought to see each other’s suffering not reduced to bargaining chips through polling, but through the real world of people’s lives — health care bills, rent, lost paychecks, fear, economic precarity — as the meaning of politics itself.

Read more

When I was twenty-one, fresh out of college, wandering around NYC working odd jobs and an unpaid media internship, I took myself on the subway downtown to West 4th Street to the IFC Theater to see Citizenfour—the documentary by Laura Poitras on the Edward Snowden reporting. I probably did this three or four times over the weeks it played, dragging any friend who’d join. I was obsessed with it.

That film satisfied something in my recent-graduate homesick and addled brain. In it, Poitras and journalist Glenn Greenwald travel to Hong Kong to meet Edward Snowden, who had been working as a contractor for the secretive intelligence-gathering National Security Agency. Much of the film takes place in a claustrophobic hotel room in which Snowden, Poitras, and Greenwald strategize on how to report on the documents Snowden has shared. His revelations are stunning: the NSA had been conducting mass warrantless surveillance on ordinary American citizens. It had access to data provided by all of the major tech companies. The head of the NSA had also publicly lied to Congress. The reporting won the journalists a Pulitzer Prize and Citizenfour an Oscar, but Snowden was deemed a traitor and given asylum in Russia.

The most remarkable part of the film, aside from its jaw-dropping revelations, is the way it captures time. The few days in the Hong Kong hotel room are Snowden’s last days of freedom as he knows it. Everyone around him, including the viewer, senses this tension. Despite the circumstances, Snowden remains serene. When Greenwald probes him over the possibility of going to prison, Snowden replies: “I am more willing to risk imprisonment, or any other negative outcome, personally, than I am willing to risk the curtailment of my intellectual freedom and that of those around me. That’s not to say that I’m self-sacrificing, because I feel good in my human experience to know that I can contribute to the good of others.”

I now realize that what kept me going back to see this film is that it took seriously the tradition of thought I’d been taught to revere in college — that participating in society means thinking for oneself and questioning power and institutions.

I was lucky to have received a liberal arts education minimally corrupted by the pressures of capitalism. Or perhaps it’s just that I chose to study philosophy and politics, programs you either enter with ambitious sights set on law or graduate school, or with no plan at all. I certainly didn’t have a plan; my only desire was to be active in the “real world.”

In college, we were taught to engage with deep philosophical questions, which often revolved around obligation. What do we owe to one another? How ought society be structured to protect the most vulnerable? What is required to be a free political agent? I was grateful to be afforded the opportunity to go to this type of school, which allowed us to absorb the great thinker Hannah Arendt’s view that education is meant to form citizens capable of exercising judgment in public, not simply to produce compliant professionals. Arendt believed that without the courage to act in public, politics ceases to exist; what’s left is merely a performance.

So when I saw Citizenfour, it wasn’t idealism but recognition that kept me going back. There was a courage to it whereby political actors were assuming real risk to shine light on abuses by those in power.

I’m not saying my education taught us to become Snowden, or that we were obligated to take the risks he did — only that, in an abstract sense, it implied that this is what thinking is for. The irony, of course, is that these same schools then funnel their students into careers inside institutions built to suppress exactly that impulse.

This is what happened when I became staffer on Capitol Hill a few years later. It wasn’t until recently that I understood my job there was not to be a free political agent, but to role-play as one. Everyone there was — the elected officials, the staffers, even the journalists. Just as Arendt warned, people could still think and judge in private, but they could not bring those judgments into the public realm. This isn’t enforced by any overt set of rules; it survives by controlling one thing: access to what people need to do their jobs. If a journalist uncovers a state surveillance program or secret war operation, they lose access to sources and funding. If a congresswoman deviates from party leadership, she loses access to committee assignments and campaign financing. If a staffer bucks their boss’s stance, they lose access to assignments and career advancement.

The journalist Chris Hedges is very familiar with these consequences. When he started to question U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, he was pushed out of the New York Times newsroom. It’s fear, he argues, that pushes people toward what he calls “careerism,” a disease that coerces people to stay inside systems they know are wrong.

Arendt does not let individuals off the hook for this. She acknowledges the structural forces at play, but still believes we have a responsibility to choose. The choice of safety over courage, she warned, is to become complicit in the very system one may privately decry.

On Capitol Hill, there was an unspoken sense among staffers that the system was broken. To avoid reckoning with this uneasy, existential feeling, we told ourselves a comforting myth: we were the “good” ones, there to resist something worse. This framing allows the system to limp on — while placating precisely the people who might otherwise revolt. As long as this logic prevails, politics will remain a performance acted out by those who’ve been taught to believe that courage isn’t political — it’s just deviant, or worse, too inconvenient.

The stakes are too high for this type of avoidance. To see that the system survives on compliance is to understand both its strength and where our power actually lies. It’s why what Snowden did is so extraordinary. Snowden unveiled what many in government already knew. The difference is that he had the courage to act publicly. In the political society Arendt envisioned, Snowden would not be an extreme outlier — he would be a citizen.

What I understood instinctively at twenty-one — and was later taught to distrust on Capitol Hill — is that politics begins where compliance ends.

I’m not writing this to pose as an example of courage. I stayed inside the system because it was comfortable and only left when I could no longer convince myself that comfort was enough. Maybe you too, feel that way.

I’d like to posit two kinds of centrism — one on the way out and one on the way in in Washington. The first is corporate centrism. House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, along with …

Read more

Yesterday’s “No Kings” protests were full of references to the founding fathers, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution.

Yet the protests’ singular focus on Trump as a king runs afoul of the revolutionary spirit of the founders. The founders rejected not just one “bad” king, but a system of governance by kings that no longer served the people.

Today, the failure of democracy’s elite stewards to reckon with their own role in creating the crisis that Trump exploited is pushing liberal democracy toward illegitimacy. These same elites have found refuge in the No Kings Day protests, where moral symbolism replaces honest introspection. This allows them to perform reverence for the founders rather than confront the conditions that would have alarmed them most.

Several of the founders warned that the people turn to a demagogue once elites stop serving the public good. Alexander Hamilton wrote in 1792:

“The truth unquestionably is, that the only path to a subversion of the republican system of the Country is, by flattering the prejudices of the people, and exciting their jealousies and apprehensions, to throw affairs into confusion, and bring on civil commotion.”

Trump is the demagogue that arose not from some far-off place, but from the tangible policy failures of American governance. A healthy liberal democracy — one that delivers material prosperity and security to its people — does not elect Trump. In this framing, protesting Trump is a way of protecting the system that produced him.

The elite liberal class behind these protests — the mainstream media, the donor class, the PACs, the parties, the advocacy groups — share an interest in defining the crisis as anything other than their own failure. Worse, many of them do not see it as their failure at all. They see themselves as righteous defenders of democracy, needed now more than ever to “save” the system from Trump. Because they believe they are saving democracy, they are structurally incapable of reckoning with the decaying form of democracy that produced the crisis.

Here’s the central problem: because the elite class has convinced itself that its own self-preservation is a moral duty, it cannot be trusted to engage in the introspection this moment requires. What it will not confront is that this is not a crisis of Trump, but a crisis of liberal democracy — and it is not unique to the United States.

To understand this better, we should look to France. Centrist president Emmanuel Macron’s unpopularity has destabilized parliament to the point of paralysis. He now faces calls to resign from both the far right and the far left, and it is widely expected that one of those forces will replace him in the next election. Here it is not a demagogic strongman who has failed to command legitimacy, but the neoliberal centrist.

Now imagine Marine Le Pen comes to power and the French flood the streets with “No Kings (or Queens)” banners. It would look absurd. Le Pen would not be a monarch; she would be the predictable consequence of elite failure — just as Trump is here. In both countries the cause is not reducible to one leader but to decades of neoliberal austerity politics. That, not Trump, is what the No Kings protests should be confronting: forty years of governance that has pushed liberal democracy to the breaking point where figures like Trump and Le Pen are even possible.

And this is where the purpose of No Kings comes into view: it does not stop Trump; it keeps liberalism from examining itself.

So what would a protest movement faithful to the founders look like? To start, it would correctly diagnose the crisis — not as a crisis of Trump, but as a crisis of institutional legitimacy within liberal democracy. Next, it would treat institutions not as sacred objects but as reformable and accountable when they fail the people. And perhaps most crucially, it would displace the parasitic elite class that created the crisis yet now presents itself as its moral steward.

Who replaces this governing class is the crucial question. Let me offer a broad answer. The void ought to be filled by a movement rooted in social democracy — one committed to relegitimizing politics through material gains, not symbolic identity. The old class politics of the left have been co-opted in recent decades by a donor-aligned, NGO-filtered version of woke identity campaigns and PACs, many of which participated in the No Kings protests.

What is needed instead is a movement that organizes from the conditions people actually live in — one rooted in pluralism and respect for diversity, but also in difference. Legitimacy will be rebuilt through a bold restructuring of the social contract, where health care, good wages, time off, parental support, and retirement are guaranteed by the state.

Millions turned out yesterday. Their instincts are right — imagine if that energy were attached to a movement as serious as the one the founders began. Not focused on one bad king, but the ills of a system that produced him.