Hollowed Out

Revisiting Russia-Ukraine, group chats, and CS Lewis

A couple of weeks ago, ranting about the absurdity of Trump’s Ukraine policy, I said he had nothing resembling a plan and even his fiercest detractors tend to give him too much credit. Unfortunately, it turns out I was right. Since then, Trump and Zelenskyy agreed to the original mineral deal they bombed on live television. Trump, who so boldly declared he’d end the war before he got into office, has concluded he won’t be ending the war because it’s possible Putin isn’t that honest. Vance, a longtime proponent of a ceasefire deal, has concluded a ceasefire deal isn’t possible. Trump is going to keep backing Ukraine against Russia, after meeting with Zelensky and concluding Russia was settling for nothing less than all of Ukraine, which is exactly what we resistors were saying since the beginning. In other words, Trump has decided to do almost exactly what Biden was doing, except after a bunch of avoidable humiliations. The main difference is Ukraine is offering the United States a stake in its mineral extraction— which was neither Trump’s idea nor a concept introduced during his Presidency.

To top it off, even though Trump ultimately changed nothing from Biden and ended up conceding he was right about everything, his theatrics probably will make him the easiest person to pin the blame on as Ukraine’s military situation gets worse, meaning this time he’s even failed to get away with selling it as a success to the American public. This is highly embarrassing if you’re a normal person, but Trump’s flock will predictably keep defending him even though he has actively contradicted his previous policies, which they also defended. The same people who crowed and cried about how it was better for Ukraine to surrender than suffer more war, and the same people who touted the wisdom of letting Russia back into the global economy. But you knew that already.

Does Trump selling 2028 hats mean he’ll actually run for a third term? He says he’s not going to. But if he does, he’ll be nominated. Of course, SCOTUS will immediately shoot it down in a 9-0 decision, and Democratic election authorities— and probably a nonzero number of Republican ones— will remove him from the primary ballot, but that won’t matter. Quite a few will break the law for him. He’ll beat Brian Kemp 2-1 in the 2028 California Republican primaries as a write-in, just like in 2024. When Pennsylvania doesn’t put him on the ballot, his mob will post about how this is 1984, a couple of them will shoot up kindergartens in vengeance, and then the rest of them will pin the shootings on Antifa. He’ll have zero chance in the general but it will only strengthen his hold on the Party. If you really, honestly believe the clear text of the Constitution will stop them from supporting him in a plainly impossible effort to keep him in power, then you don’t understand them. Trump’s approval will get a lot worse, but it won’t matter. Twenty million people voted in the 2024 Republican Presidential primaries, and Trump’s real floor of support is probably higher than that number.

I actually remember the first time I saw our Vice President on TV. I must’ve been 11 or 12, and it was a Ted Talk. I didn’t even remember his name until a lot later, but the absurdity of the situation was hard to miss. Here was a guy, on TV, writing a whole book postulating (or so you’d think, given how they were talking about it) why my godfather voted the way he did, when the guy himself would tell you for free. MAGA has that little intellectual power. Actual, true believer MAGA guys don’t write books themselves, other people write the books about them. The people on the MAGA side who do have intellectual power plainly position themselves as distinct from the masses. Chuds on platforms like Substack aren’t MAGA so much as they’re MAGA-shepherds, or, as Curtis Yarvin put it, “dark elves” as opposed to “hobbits”. There are no equivalent class divisions on the left, at least not acknowledged ones.

In normal human interactions, you’d probably prefer the hobbits. I know I would. At this point, most of us probably love someone among those bottom twenty plus million Trump 2028 write-in voters, mysterious as they are to us. That mystery is a defining question for Democrats. Why do Trump voters vote the way they do? Are they just racist? Sexist? Can we win them by offering a helping of my exact brand of leftism? It’s all bullshit, and none if it matters anyway. Take the ridiculous left-wing discourse that followed 2016: slate.com and salon.com traded conflicting bulls on the subject of whether working-class voters were racist or just wanted Bernie, and eventually the left-wing consensus came to be that Hillary Clinton, who rejected her own Administration’s free trade policies, was too pro free trade and elitist. The Democrats then proceeded to nominate the aging Vice President of that Administration on a protectionist, pro-union platform, and he suffered similarly lopsided defeats with those voters and only won because of suburbs and a global pandemic.

You’re going to pretty much see the same thing over the next few years, but unlike 2016-2020’s Council of Trent the movement so far seems more promising. Most Democrats have broadly accepted they lurched too far to the left. The basic idea goes, Kamala Harris was a little too woke, or if nothing else “failed to prioritize working class issues”, which in practice means the same thing. Pete Buttigieg and AOC took pronouns out of their bios and Tim Walz is bringing up Musk’s immigration status. The idea goes, Democrats just need to be a little more normal, more middle-of-the-road, less identarian, maybe keep quiet on some of the most off-putting parts of the transgender rights movement, wrap everything they’re saying in the flag and Christianity, and then they’ll win.

Which is the exact same strategy the Harris/Walz campaign used! Check out any one of those AOC speeches in the wholesome based “Fight Oligarchy” tour, line it up against a Harris speech and actually tell me what the difference is beyond AOC’s is a bit saucier. To be clear, I’m not complaining. Harris’s strategy was reasonably smart, and she almost won anyway under fairly adverse circumstances. Someone saucier doing the same thing and claiming victory is far from the worst outcome, even if the victory happens solely because of Trump’s failures. There are far worse outcomes, although my personal feeling, one I’ll elaborate more on some other time, is Democrats would benefit most from some hard policy centrism in the long term and mistaking a rejection of Trump for a mandate for their policies is part of how they got in this hole to begin with.

Democrats, to borrow a term from far-right lexicon, are the longhouse personified. They are heavy on processes, institutions, and paperwork and skeptical of strong male leaders railing against the elites. There is a set, if theoretically meritocratic, order things in the Party are supposed to go, and going up against that order gets you punished. There are plenty of times this has come in handy. It kept out the worst people in the Bernie movement. Was Nina Turner calling Biden a bowl of shit really that big of a deal? Not really, lots of good Democrats (me being one of them) feel exactly the same, but it did show Turner was a performative asshole and encouraged lots of left-wing people who might otherwise be sympathetic to steer clear of her. This is the basic story of how Bernie lost 2020, too— Elizabeth Warren’s supporters, in theory closer to him on policy, backed Biden because he was simply less risky. Almost everyone in the Bernieworld has fallen of favor in Democratic politics. It’s hard to argue not putting Briahna Joy Gray, Nina Turner, and Tulsi Gabbard in positions of power was a bad move. All of these people turned out to be idiots or the kind of insincere grifters populism sends to the top (and Gabbard, after all, ended up defecting to Trump for precisely that reason). RFK Jr. also got iced by Democrats when he tried to cash in with them, too, which makes perfect sense if your goal is to keep sleazy idiots out of positions of power and doesn’t make sense if you want wholesome JFK guy to expose the CIA.

But this also means bad ideas don’t get challenged, which is the basic story of how the Democrats lost 2024, even if they did course-correct their way out of the worst ending. Biden was in fact too old to keep the Presidency and Harris was too much of an intellectual lightweight to win it. All of these criticisms would’ve gotten you called something unpleasant in Democratic politics for the four years and two months between Biden winning the nomination in 2020 and losing the debate in 2024, but they were completely true and if Democrats listened we might’ve won. Of course, the upside of Democratic bureaucracy-politics is they don’t fall for the same absurd tricks Republicans do and are better positioned to adapt from their defeats and take advantage of their victories.

Men Without Chests (and Brains)

Around a week ago, a story dropped about the Silicon Valley group chats that created the emerging axis between the tech industry and right wing politics, and it confirmed something very alarming: the internet informs the worldview’s of the most powerful people on earth. A lot of the stuff you see on far-right Twitter is stuff the biggest players in Silicon Valley believe or are sympathetic to. It’s all Discord bros, all the way down. On Signal (where else?), tech billionaires and new right thinkers hung out and talked about politics, and found quite a bit in common. Big tech, which at that point was staunchly woke-coded and still is according to many right-wingers, found the left an ungrateful ally constantly trying to regulate them and continuously making nebulous, repressive demands that disrupted their business and cancelled their social peers. When red states started punching back, the tech lords quickly got impatient with the wishy-washy liberals talking about free speech and got closer to guys like Chris Rufo.

In other words, the richest people in the world collectively decided to regime change the greatest country ever so LittleGirlEnjoyer1488 could be unbanned with less backlash.

I’ll admit, I have never read guys like Curtis Yarvin or Bronze Age Pervert, and I also don’t feel the need to. From what I know of Yarvin and his ideas they’re derivative of much smarter, better men from awhile ago. He doesn’t seem to ask himself the most elementary questions about how ideas like the “CEO King” (not what the link is about) would actually work in practice. It strikes me as romanticism, but dumber. Bronze Age Pervert, meanwhile, seems to follow Nietzsche’s ideas from the half of an episode I listened to, but he is considerably less self-aware and leans too hard into “based” terminology for me to take him seriously.

Is that my personal taste? Is there really a difference between the discourse in right-wing group chats and the discourse in Plato’s Symposium? I’m not sure how to prove my point either way, or if I’ve even completely worked out my thoughts on the matter. I feel more confident saying big tech’s partners in crime, the right-wing activists on the ground, are abnormally dumb from a historical perspective, and I think it says something that the tech guys hitched their bandwagon to them. According to the article I linked, Marc Andreessen’s online behavior is the kind of stuff that’s usually called joblessness— (“My impression is Marc spends half his life on 100 of these at the same time”) he is constantly online, gossiping with racists about the long-term future of the world. And apparently he and his fellows really did not think backing the Tariff Guy could create problems until Liberation Day hit, and most of them are still faithfully trusting the plan.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that technology and punditry consuming politics, and especially right-wing politics, is coinciding with some of the least responsible public ethics ever, with right-wing politics being especially irresponsible. If people who are influential in partisan politics and people who are really influential in the tech industry are the elites, they sure seem less well-read than their forerunners. Conservatives used to carry around pocket-sized Constitutions and larp as minutemen. Now, it seems like they’re best at making excuses for why the Constitution is dead, and this means they fall for Trump’s pathetic lies. The civic elite has gone from polymaths in Masonic Lodges debating the great ideas of republicanism, to Bronze Age Pervert and a tech billionaire on their phones in a GC defending Hitler. Truly, the west has fallen.

The book that explained this problem best, many years before it actually existed, was not anything written by John Locke, Francis Fukuyama, or John Stuart Mill. No, it was from Christian apologist extraordinaire, Narnia author, and frequent coalposter C. S. Lewis. The Abolition of Man is probably Lewis’s best known nonfiction work, and without a doubt his most influential. The book also is a hallmark of modern conservative thought, with figures from Winston Churchill to Jonah Goldberg citing it as a major influence. I’d bet you every single Republican Presidential nominee and their braintrusts from the end of World War Two has read it and been directly inspired by it until the 2016 Donald Trump campaign.

Unlike Lewis’s other works, AoM does not rely on Christian apologetics, although that’s clearly what he’s going for. Lewis argues there’s a trend in modernity to “debunk” the concept of transcendental values. The example he uses is an English textbook, matter-of-factly explaining to students that the beauty in a waterfall is a subjective thing, only in the eye of the beholder. Lewis argues this is a departure from how previous humans all thought about these things (“The Tao”), and misconstrues the purpose of education and scientific inquiry more broadly. He closes his argument by envisioning a world where the horse gets put before the cart— where the endless pursuit of science and technology puts objective value in the passenger seat and eventually replaces it entirely, leaving power over morals and moral ideas in the hands of a small group of experts, who get where they are thanks to their mastery of science and technology— “What we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.” And because these guys don’t have any underlying sense of morality to ground them, they are just governed by their basest impulses. Lewis says “We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.” It is broadly similar to how Plato envisions his tyrant.

“The final stage is come when Man by eugenics, by pre-natal conditioning, and by an education and propaganda based on a perfect applied psychology, has obtained full control over himself. Human nature will be the last part of Nature to surrender to Man. The battle will then be won. We shall have ‘taken the thread of life out of the hand of Clotho’ and be henceforth free to make our species whatever we wish it to be.

The battle will indeed be won. But who, precisely, will have won it? For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means, as we have seen, the power of some men to make other men what they please.”

As far as I can tell, the tech guy GC experiment proceeded on roughly similar lines to AoM. The tech guys started off chafing under the obvious, ludicrous contradictions of wokeism (these are usually the kind of people who are comfortable comparing wokeism to Christianity, and using that as a negative descriptor), and then decided the world would be better run if the smartest, most elite humans got put in the driver’s seat and ran it based on reason, not the woke tears. Unlike the woke establishment soft-controlling pretty much every aspect of society, the tech guy GCs can open-mindedly discuss whether black people have the same faculties as white people. But the result was anything but rational. Like Lewis said, rather than conquering nature, they became dominated by their animalistic natures. Andreessen’s many group chats are disintegrating over the Trump question, with loyalists purging members suspected of “Trump Derangement Syndrome”, just like they purged liberals objecting to the DeSantis bills of 2022.

The irony here is AoM has been very right-coded historically, and most commentators tend to deploy it against the political left. And rightfully so— the left has been the one trying to debunk the objective beauty in the waterfall in favor of an ethics system built around “objective” harm, which never ends up being that satisfying. There’s something that bothers me when leftists try to debunk the misty-eyed feeling pledging to the flag gives us, and that’s not something I want to change. A lot of the left’s more successful political campaigns over the last fifty years, and perhaps the nature of leftism itself, has been to challenge or undermine some form of transcendentalism promoted by the right, which makes it an unconvincing avatar for arguing Trump is undermining institutions. And of course, big tech and the left were on the same side until the left overplayed their hand and failed to understand the transactional nature of the relationship. Chris Rufo turned out to be a lot better at bribing the tech lords than Matt Ylgesias and the editorial board of the Huffington Post.

I do think there’s cause for optimism if you’re a Democrat right now. Like I said, the tendencies that make the Party annoying, insufferable, and ineffectual-seeming also make it very good at course-correcting and weeding out bad actors. Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, the guys who blew the last election, are collectively polling at under a third. John Fetterman may be popular in Pennsylvania, but nationally Democrats and liberals aren’t responding to his stunts. Same thing with Gavin Newsom. Democrats, meanwhile, are responding to AOC, who has considerably toned down her rhetoric and media profile since the peak woke days (she used to be really bad!), and now invokes the flag and her Catholic faith on the campaign trial.

David Hogg is another good example. In the Republican Party, the famous guy who celebrated the defeat of Democratic incumbents and ran on taking the fight to the establishment would win, and when he misused the institution’s money to do things against the rules he would be celebrated. The end result would be state Parties in the Great Lakes having $50 in funds and importing Orange County’s man of the year to run for a high-stakes Senate race. In the Democratic Party, Hogg gets swiftly punished.

The question is whether Democrats can dissect their very real faults without giving into the bullshit that is killing the Republican Party. I’m not sure if they can. Changing the nature of an organization when its members are one thing is not always possible. If AOC is running in 2028 and broadly using the same bag of tricks Kamala Harris used in 2024, the results may be different, but it also means the Party might eventually step on the same rake, with disastrous consequences. But it’s always been hard for me to imagine open discourse ever makes things worse, and at least the Democrats are doing that right now. The main problem Republicans have, bottom to top (perhaps even more so on the top— you’d never hear Democrats call themselves dark elves and their voters hobbits), is they’re hollowed out. They reject basically every moral principle, which in turn has made them animalistic, bad at chasing whatever original principles they had. They are idiot tyrant traitors and to top it off they can’t even manifest Lewis’s nightmare world of perfect, uniform world of genetic engineering and specialized education.

Liberal soul-searching is exhausting and much of it will be pointless, but perhaps we will learn something. And soul-searching rarely hurts anyway.