A guy on a comment thread the other day was explaining why you shouldn’t trust AI. His argument, in full: he’d asked a chatbot the same question twice and gotten two different answers. One was iffy. One was wrong. Therefore — and I’m paraphrasing only slightly — don’t trust the technology, and don’t trust anyone who says you should.

Then he went to bed.

I don’t bring this up to dunk on the guy. He’s not wrong that large language models are probabilistic, not deterministic. He’s not wrong that they hallucinate. He’s not wrong to be cautious. What he is, though, is done thinking. He arrived at a feeling — distrust — and mistook it for a conclusion. Then he declared the case closed and logged off.

This is not a technology problem. This is a thinking problem. And it’s one of the most corrosive habits in American life right now — not because it’s new, but because it’s everywhere, and because we’ve gotten so comfortable with it that we barely notice when we’re doing it.

The Backwards Thinkers

Here’s the pattern. You start with a feeling — fear, outrage, moral conviction, tribal loyalty, whatever — and then you work backward to construct an argument that justifies the feeling you already had. The conclusion comes first. The reasoning is just decoration.

This isn’t the same as having principles. Principles are starting points you reason forward from: I believe in individual liberty, so how should I think about this regulation? I believe people deserve a fair shot, so what does that mean for education policy? You follow the logic wherever it goes, even when it lands somewhere uncomfortable. You hold the principle, but you let the evidence shape the application.

Reasoning backward is the opposite. You start at the destination — I don’t like this technology, this price is unfair, this group is wrong — and you cherry-pick whatever evidence, anecdote, or moral framework gets you there fastest. It feels like thinking. It has all the surface features of thinking. But it skips the part where you might actually change your mind.

Here’s a simple test for which one you’re doing: can you name a piece of evidence that would change your position? If you can — if there’s some fact, some study, some outcome that would make you say “okay, I was wrong about this” — you’re reasoning forward. You’re holding a principle and following it honestly. If you can’t, if every conceivable piece of new information just gets absorbed into the conclusion you already hold, you’re not reasoning. You’re performing.

This shows up in several distinct flavors, each wearing a different disguise:

Fear as conclusion. “AI gave me a wrong answer once, so the whole technology is untrustworthy.” The feeling is discomfort with something new. The stopping point is a blanket rejection that doesn’t require learning anything.

Magical thinking about institutions. “Groceries are too expensive, so cap the prices.” The premise — usually unexamined — is that government can mandate outcomes into existence just by wanting them hard enough. The mechanism between “pass this law” and “problem solved” goes unexplored because the feelingof having a solution is more satisfying than the work of finding one that functions.

Moral identity. “I oppose X because opposing X makes me a good person.” The position isn’t the product of analysis — it’s a costume. It signals virtue to the right audience, and the righteous feeling it produces becomes self-reinforcing. Actually examining whether the position works would threaten the identity, so you don’t.

Tribal sorting. “My people believe Y, so I believe Y.” The reasoning runs from belonging to conclusion, not from evidence to conclusion. You don’t need to understand the issue — you just need to know which side you’re on.

Different motivations, same failure mode. Nobody plays it forward. Nobody asks the only question that actually matters about any policy, technology, or position: and then what?

The Test

This is the question that separates a position from a posture.

Cap grocery prices — and then what? Well, grocery stores operate on margins of one to three percent. Cap prices below what the market can bear and stores don’t just eat the loss — they cut product lines, reduce quality, or close entirely. The small neighborhood grocery goes first. Supply contracts. Shelves thin out. The people the policy was designed to help are now standing in longer lines with fewer options, or driving farther to a big-box store because their local shop shut down.

This is not speculation. Economists across the political spectrum agree that price controls on competitive markets produce shortages and make underlying problems worse. It has happened every time it’s been tried, from Nixon’s wage and price freeze in the 1970s to Venezuela’s catastrophic controls on basic goods. Ruy Teixeira, in what turned out to be one of his final pieces at The Liberal Patriot before the site closed its doors, described the current Democratic grab bag of price caps and controls as policies whose purpose is “mostly, if not solely, to signal that Democrats want to do something about the problem” — not to actually solve it. Even the people proposing these policies seem to know they won’t work. But they feellike answers, and in a culture that treats feelings as arguments, that’s enough.

The problem isn’t that people want affordable food. Of course they do. The problem is that wanting something isn’t a plan. The feeling — this is too expensive, someone should fix it — arrives, and it feels so obviously right that the hard work seems unnecessary. Why would you need to trace a supply chain, or understand the difference between a price shock caused by drought and one caused by trade policy, or grapple with the tradeoffs of every possible intervention, when the answer is right there? Just make it cheaper. Done.

Except it’s not done. It’s never done. Because reality doesn’t care what you wanted. Reality only cares about the chain of consequences your decision set in motion.

Now apply that same test to AI.

Refuse to engage with AI — and then what? The technology develops anyway. It gets integrated into industries regardless of whether you personally approve. The people who learned to use it — who understand its failure modes, who know when to trust it and when to check its work — have a massive advantage over the people who spent those years composing angry comment-thread manifestos. You don’t stop the wave by refusing to learn how to swim.

Declare AI untrustworthy because it gave you a bad answer — and then what? By that standard, you’d also have to declare Google untrustworthy (SEO-gamed garbage on page one), Wikipedia untrustworthy (edit wars, incomplete citations), your doctor untrustworthy (misdiagnoses happen), your accountant untrustworthy (errors happen), and the newspaper untrustworthy (corrections run daily). We navigate imperfect information all the time. We’ve built an entire civilization on the skill of taking flawed inputs and making reasonable decisions anyway. The question was never “is this source perfect?” It was always “what’s the failure mode, and what’s my process for catching it?”

The “and then what” test isn’t complicated. It’s just work — the boring, unglamorous work of following a chain of reasoning past the first step, even when the first step already felt satisfying.

The History of Not Adapting

I keep coming back to the historical analogies, not as gotchas but as genuine data.

The painters who hated the camera weren’t wrong that photography would destroy portrait painting as a livelihood. The carriage makers weren’t wrong that automobiles would end their industry. The human computers — yes, that was a job title — weren’t wrong that electronic computers would replace them. The original Luddites weren’t irrational cranks smashing machines for fun. They were skilled textile workers watching automation eliminate their craft, and their fear was entirely justified.

In every single case, the fear was accurate. The disruption was real. The pain was legitimate.

And in every single case, the people who turned that fear into adaptation fared better than the people who turned it into identity.

That’s the distinction that matters. Fear is an input — maybe the most important input you can have. It tells you something powerful is happening and you need to pay attention. Fear that drives you to learn, to retrain, to understand the new landscape, to figure out where you fit in the changed world — that’s not just useful, it’s essential. That kind of fear is really just respect: respect that something is significant enough to demand your engagement.

But fear that hardens into a stance — fear that becomes a tribal marker, a personality trait, a substitute for the engagement it should have prompted — that’s not caution. That’s calcification. And the world doesn’t wait for calcified people to catch up.

What to Do Instead

This isn’t a Silicon Valley “learn to code” dismissal. The pace of AI development is genuinely disorienting. The labor implications are real and, for some people, terrifying. The environmental costs of the data center buildout are real. The potential for misuse — deepfakes, synthetic propaganda, surveillance infrastructure — is real. There are serious people raising serious concerns, and those concerns deserve serious responses.

But serious is the key word. Oren Cass at American Compass has spent years arguing that when labor markets shift, the answer isn’t to mandate the outcome you want — it’s to invest in the conditions that help people adapt. Build workforce training that actually connects to available jobs. Fund education systems that prepare people for the economy that exists, not the one we’re nostalgic for. Create the conditions for productive work across a range of skills and geographies, rather than assuming everyone will become a software engineer or be left behind. Cass calls this “productive pluralism,” and while his framework is aimed at manufacturing and trade, the logic applies perfectly to the AI disruption: you can’t wish the disruption away, but you can invest in the inputs that help people navigate it.

Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution has been arguing for years that the defining economic question of this era isn’t whether AI will displace jobs — it will — but whether we’re building the systems that help people land on the other side. Recent research he’s highlighted suggests the answer is cautiously encouraging: workers in AI-exposed occupations who go through retraining programs see real earnings gains, though the returns are better for those who pursue broad skills rather than chasing AI-specific roles. The adaptation isn’t impossible. But it doesn’t happen by accident, and it doesn’t happen at all for people who opt out of the conversation entirely.

That’s the adult version of the conversation. Not “AI is fine, stop complaining.” Not “AI is dangerous, ban it.” But: given that this is here and accelerating, what are we going to invest in so people can actually deal with it?

The same logic applies to the grocery problem. You want affordable food? Great — so does everyone. Now do the work. Improve supply chain resilience. Reduce regulatory barriers that make it harder for small producers to compete. Target subsidies to the people who actually need them instead of distorting the entire market with blunt-instrument price caps. These are harder policies to design, slower to show results, and much less satisfying to announce at a press conference. But they work. They address the inputs — the conditions that produce the outcome you want — rather than trying to mandate the outcome directly and hoping the mechanism figures itself out.

Freddie deBoer, writing from a very different political position than Cass, has been making a parallel argument for years: that progressive politics has developed a habit of substituting what feels morally correct for what works practically. You can want desperately to close achievement gaps in education, but if your theory of how to do it doesn’t survive contact with the evidence, your wanting isn’t a plan — it’s a pose. Matt Yglesias at Slow Boring has built an entire publication around the same frustration: that boring, pragmatic, evidence-driven policy keeps losing to emotionally satisfying gestures that don’t accomplish anything.

These are writers who disagree with each other on plenty. But they share a core instinct: that the feeling is where thinking starts, not where it stops.

The Deeper Problem

Here’s what’s really going on under all of this, and it’s not about any single technology or policy. We’ve developed a culture that confuses feelings with arguments. Not feelings as inputs to arguments — that would be fine, that would be human. But feelings as replacements for arguments. The feeling arrives, and the thinking stops.

This isn’t a left-right thing, or a smart-dumb thing, or a young-old thing. Progressives do it when they propose mandating outcomes without grappling with mechanisms. Conservatives do it when they invoke tradition as a conversation-ender without examining whether the tradition still serves the conditions it was designed for. Tech enthusiasts do it when they wave away legitimate concerns with “progress is inevitable.” Tech skeptics do it when they treat their discomfort as a veto.

The common thread is the same every time: someone arrives at step one of a multi-step problem, finds step one emotionally satisfying, and decides the remaining steps are optional.

They’re not. The remaining steps are where the actual answer lives. The remaining steps are the difference between a position and a posture, between a policy and a bumper sticker, between someone who’s thinking and someone who stopped.

What I Might Be Wrong About

Maybe the pace of AI really is different this time. Maybe the adaptation curve is steeper than anything we’ve faced, and the gap between “this technology exists” and “most people can use it productively” is wider than optimists like me assume. Maybe “just learn to use it” is glib when you’re a fifty-five-year-old paralegal watching your entire job description get automated in eighteen months.

Maybe there are domains — education, criminal justice, medicine — where the cautious voices aren’t being fearful at all, but are doing the harder, slower, more important work of insisting we get it right before we move fast. The person who says “we shouldn’t use AI to make sentencing recommendations until we understand the bias in the training data” isn’t reasoning backward from fear — they’re reasoning forward from a principle, and that’s exactly the kind of thinking I’m arguing for.

And maybe I’m overweighting individual agency in a system that’s moving faster than individuals can respond. The original Luddites didn’t fail because they lacked grit. They failed because the economic forces they were up against were structural, and no amount of personal adaptation could change the macroeconomic reality. If AI displaces labor at a pace and scale that outstrips any retraining program we can build, then the “adapt” crowd — my crowd — needs a better answer than bootstrapping.

I don’t think any of that invalidates the core argument. But it should make me honest about where my own certainty might be doing the very thing I’m criticizing: arriving at a comfortable conclusion and skipping the hard parts.

The Only Question

The technology is here. It’s not going anywhere. Neither are the forces that make groceries expensive, or the disruptions that make people afraid, or the complexity that makes easy answers so seductive.

The relevant question was never how do you feel about it. It was never do you like it. It was never does it scare you. The relevant question is always, only, relentlessly: given that this is real, what are you going to do?

And then what?

And then what?

And then what?

Price caps don’t make groceries cheaper. Refusing to engage with AI doesn’t make it go away. Outrage about immigration doesn’t secure a border. Nostalgia for manufacturing doesn’t reopen a factory. Declaring your moral superiority doesn’t feed anyone, teach anyone, or protect anyone. At some point, the feeling has to give way to the work — or the feeling is all there is.

I don’t know what the right AI policy looks like. I don’t know how to retrain everyone who needs retraining. I don’t know how to weigh the environmental costs of the data center buildout against the productivity gains. These are genuinely hard problems, and anyone who tells you they have clean answers is selling something.

But I know that the people who will figure it out are the ones who got past the feeling and started working the problem. Not the ones who went to bed.

On Saturday, U.S. forces captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in a pre-dawn raid on Caracas. By Sunday, acting president Delcy Rodríguez was on national television explaining what happened.

Her explanation? “Zionist undertones.”

Not “American imperialism.” Not “illegal intervention.” Zionist undertones. For an operation with zero Israeli involvement, zero evidence of Israeli knowledge, and zero connection to Israel or Jews of any kind.

It would be tempting to write this off as a Maduro regime quirk—the ramblings of an authoritarian grasping for excuses. Except this isn’t a quirk. It’s a pattern. And the pattern has a century of data points.

The Historical Record

Start with Stalin.

In the late 1940s, the Soviet Union launched its “anti-cosmopolitan” campaign—a purge of “rootless cosmopolitans” who were insufficiently loyal to the motherland. The term was a euphemism. Everyone knew who it meant. Jewish intellectuals, artists, and scientists were arrested, fired, or executed. Yiddish newspapers were shut down. Hebrew schools were closed.

This culminated in the Doctors’ Plot of 1953, in which nine physicians—six of them Jewish—were accused of conspiring to poison Soviet leadership. Stalin personally ordered their torture. “Beat, beat, and beat again,” he instructed interrogators. The doctors were scheduled for a show trial and public execution around Easter. Historians believe Stalin planned to use the ensuing “popular outrage” as a pretext for mass deportation of Soviet Jews to camps in Siberia and Kazakhstan.

Stalin died before the plan could be executed. The doctors were released. But the infrastructure of Soviet anti-Zionism—the vocabulary, the tropes, the institutional machinery—remained intact for decades.

This wasn’t incidental. Soviet propagandists deliberately developed “anti-Zionism” as a politically acceptable container for antisemitic content. State media depicted hook-nosed Jewish bankers and serpents embossed with Stars of David. The messaging was explicit: Zionism was racism, imperialism, and a tool of Western capitalism. In 1975, the Soviet Union successfully pushed the United Nations to pass Resolution 3379, declaring “Zionism is a form of racism.”

U.S. Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan warned at the time: “The UN is about to make antisemitism international law.”

Poland, 1968. The Communist government launched an “anti-Zionist” purge during a period of economic stagnation and student unrest. Most of Poland’s remaining Jews—many of them Holocaust survivors—were driven out of the country. The framing was opposition to Israel after the Six-Day War. The function was old-fashioned scapegoating.

East Germany refused to pay Holocaust reparations, arguing that Nazism was a purely capitalist phenomenon with no connection to the socialist East. Former Nazis were quietly rehabilitated. Jews were viewed with suspicion as potential Western agents.

Cuba aligned with the PLO, broke ties with Israel, and watched most of its Jewish population emigrate. The rhetoric was anti-Zionist. The Jewish community got the message.

Hugo Chávez picked up where the Soviets left off. In his 2005 Christmas address, he declared that “the descendants of those who crucified Christ” had stolen the world’s riches. Under Chávez, Venezuela broke relations with Israel, allied with Iran and Hezbollah, and began accusing Jewish institutions of being spies. Venezuela’s Jewish population dropped from 25,000 in the 1990s to roughly 4,000 today.

Maduro continued the tradition. He blamed “international Zionism” for the 2024 election protests. He accused “Zionists” of trying to “hand the country over to devils.” And now his successor blames “Zionist undertones” for his capture.

Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party became a case study in how this happens to an individual. A lifelong “anti-racist” who would be horrified to be called an antisemite presided over what the UK’s Equality and Human Rights Commission found to be institutional antisemitism—23 instances of inappropriate interference in antisemitism complaints and two cases of unlawful harassment. The Commission noted “a culture within the Labour Party which, at best, did not do enough to prevent antisemitism and, at worst, could be seen to accept it.”

Today’s campus left follows the same script. “Zionist” as disqualifying identity. Jewish students asked to denounce Israel before joining progressive coalitions. Loyalty tests that require American Jews to reject the Jewish state as a condition for acceptance into progressive spaces.

This isn’t cherry-picking. It’s a through-line from 1948 to last weekend.

The Sleight of Hand

Here’s where it gets slippery. There are actually three different things getting conflated—and that conflation is how the move works.

Zionism (the actual thing): A political movement founded in the late 1800s, arguing that Jews needed a nation-state for self-determination and safety. It succeeded in 1948. Today it mostly means “believes Israel should exist.” That’s it. You can be a Zionist and oppose Netanyahu, support Palestinian statehood, criticize settlements. Most diaspora Jews—surveys suggest 80-90%—feel some connection to Israel. This makes them Zionists in the narrow sense.

“Zionist” (the epithet): In the vocabulary of the global left, “Zionist” has become shorthand for settler-colonialist, Western imperialist, oppressor-class, capitalism’s enforcer in the Middle East. It’s doing a lot of work that has nothing to do with whether someone thinks Israel should exist.

Jews (the people): An ethnicity, a religion, a civilization. Not all Jews are Zionists. Not all Zionists are Jews.

The left says “We’re not anti-Jewish, we’re anti-Zionist.” But then “Zionist” expands to mean “supporter of Western capitalism” or “hidden hand of global power.” And since most Jews are Zionists in the narrow sense, and since Jews have historically succeeded within Western economies, the categories start to blur.

So when Maduro says “international Zionism” is behind the protests, he’s not making a claim about Israeli foreign policy. He’s invoking the shadowy-cabal trope—global financial elites, hidden hands, powerful forces undermining the people’s revolution. “Zionist” is doing the work that “Jewish banker” did a century ago, but with plausible deniability.

The tell: Nobody says “Zionist undertones” when they mean “the Israeli government was involved.” You’d just say Israel. “Zionist undertones” points at something murkier, more diffuse, more conspiratorial. It’s not a policy critique. It’s a trope in a new costume.

The Mechanism

How does a movement built on solidarity with the marginalized keep ending up aligned with regimes that persecute minorities?

The answer is anti-imperialism as master value.

Once you define the West as the primary evil in the world—the source of colonialism, capitalism, and oppression—a certain logic follows. Israel gets framed as a Western outpost in the Middle East. Jews have succeeded within Western systems. The enemy-of-my-enemy logic kicks in.

The Latin American left has long embraced movements opposed to Western liberal capitalism. Many of those movements have centered “anti-Zionism”: see Corbyn’s sympathy for Hezbollah and Hamas, his warmth toward Cuba and Venezuela’s Chavismo. This entire coterie—the global far left, the South American authoritarian left, and various Israel-hating jihadist groups—are unlikely bedfellows who are also longtime fellow travelers.

The framework makes the destination inevitable. If Western power is the problem, and Israel is coded as Western, and Jews are successful within Western capitalism, then “Zionist” becomes the acceptable way to name the enemy. The vocabulary launders old hatreds through new categories.

This is how you get self-described Marxists who oppose all nationalism somehow spending disproportionate energy on one particular nationalism. This is how you get progressive coalitions that welcome every identity except one. This is how liberation movements keep generating the same output.

The Category Problem

Jews break the binary.

The left’s moral framework depends on a clean division: oppressor and oppressed, colonizer and colonized, powerful and powerless. Jews don’t fit.

They’re history’s most consistent victims—persecution, expulsion, genocide—and they’ve succeeded within Western systems. They’re white-passing in America but weren’t considered white for most of European history. They’re indigenous to Israel but also diasporic and European. They maintained cohesion and literacy and commercial networks while holding no political power for centuries.

For any ideology that needs clean categories, this is intolerable.

There’s something else: Jews are visible enough to target but invisible enough to fear. Compare to other minorities who’ve faced persecution—Black Americans (highly visible, oppression takes the form of overt exclusion), Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia (somewhat visible, concentrated in certain industries), Roma in Europe (highly visible, treated as permanent outsiders). Jews occupy an uncanny middle space. They can assimilate visually and culturally—often have—but maintain internal cohesion through religion, tradition, community institutions.

From the outside, that looks like: “They’re among us but not of us.”

And that’s the perfect fuel for conspiracy thinking. If you can’t see the group, but you believe the group exists and is coordinating, then their power must be hidden. The invisibility becomes evidence of sophistication rather than absence.

Here’s what’s darkly ironic: much of that insularity was imposed. Jews were forced into ghettos, banned from guilds, restricted from land ownership. The community cohesion that now reads as “clannish” was survival infrastructure. Then the survival infrastructure becomes the evidence for the conspiracy.

It’s a trap with no exit. Assimilate fully and you’re “infiltrating.” Maintain distinctiveness and you’re “refusing to integrate.” Succeed and you’re “taking over.” Fail and you’re “parasites.”

The Horseshoe

The right hates Jews for being cosmopolitan, rootless, undermining national purity.

The left hates Jews for being successful within capitalism, associated with finance, and—through Israel—associated with Western power.

Same target, different costume, same permission structure for hostility.

Some researchers argue that American polling shows antisemitic attitudes are dramatically more prevalent on the right than the left. That may be true in terms of raw numbers. But it misses something important: the right’s antisemitism is marginalized within mainstream conservatism. It exists, but respectable conservatives denounce it.

The left’s version is more interesting because it’s more contradictory—and more likely to be found in elite institutions. It comes wrapped in the language of liberation. It claims moral authority. It doesn’t feel like bigotry to the people practicing it. That makes it harder to name and harder to fight.

When a “Nazi and a Zionist” mean the same thing in Maduro’s mouth—as he called Argentina’s government—something has gone badly wrong with the categories. The term “Nazi” is supposed to refer to the ideology that murdered six million Jews. Using it interchangeably with “Zionist” isn’t political analysis. It’s incoherence dressed up as critique.

The Question

I’m not accusing anyone of conscious antisemitism. That’s not the point.

The point is that a movement’s vocabulary can do antisemitic work even when the people using it don’t intend it to. Structures produce outcomes. Frameworks generate targets. If your ideology keeps landing on the same scapegoat that every other authoritarian ideology lands on, maybe the problem isn’t the scapegoat.

So here’s the question worth sitting with: What does it mean for a liberation movement when its logic keeps producing this output?

Is it a bug—a correctable error in an otherwise sound framework?

Or is it a feature—something built into the structure of anti-imperialism as a totalizing worldview?

And what would it take to build a left politics that doesn’t require this enemy?

Related reading:

• Fathom Journal: “Soviet Anti-Zionism and Contemporary Left Antisemitism” — How Soviet propaganda shaped modern discourse

• The Connector: “On Antisemitism and the Fight for Democracy” — AOC’s dialogue on antisemitism and progressive spaces

• Jay Michaelson: “Liberal Zionists Are Finding Our Voices Again” — The disorienting experience of liberal American Jews post-October 7

• American Dreaming: “A Year of Leftist Anti-Semitism” — A retrospective on the discourse since October 7

• Damon Linker: “Liberalism v. the Left” — Isaiah Berlin and the limits of anti-nationalist universalism

• Australian Institute of International Affairs: “Red Terror: How the Soviet Union Shaped the Modern Anti-Zionist Discourse” — The origins of “Zionism is racism”

Most people inherit their politics the way they inherit their religion—family, geography, tribe. The rest pick a team somewhere along the way and spend decades defending positions they never really chose.

I got tired of the cognitive dissonance. I’d agree with a conservative here, a progressive there, then realize neither side’s framework actually fit what I believed. The positions were borrowed clothes.

So I did something embarrassingly earnest: I sat down and tried to figure out what I actually think is true about people and society. Not what sounds good. Not what my tribe believes. What I could defend if pressed. Then I reasoned outward from there.

What came out is something I’ve started calling classical civic liberalism—free markets and individual liberty, but bounded by the nation-state, grounded in functional communities, and skeptical of both progressive outcome-rigging and libertarian atomization.

This isn’t a manifesto. It’s a working document—a way to sort through policy debates without consulting my tribal affiliations first. I’m sharing it because I suspect I’m not the only one who’s felt politically homeless, caught between a Right that often ignores circumstance and a Left that often ignores agency.

Arnold Kling’s framework is useful here: progressives see the world through oppressor-oppressed, conservatives through civilization-barbarism, libertarians through liberty-coercion. Each axis captures something real. None captures everything. Building your own framework means refusing to pick just one.

The Framework

1. People are shaped by circumstances and defined by choices.

Where you’re born, who raises you, what opportunities exist around you—these matter enormously. Anyone who denies this isn’t paying attention. But they don’t erase agency. A just system acknowledges both: it works to improve the conditions people start in and expects them to own what they do from there.

Rawls had a phrase for this: the “social lottery.” The arbitrary circumstances of birth that shape your starting point. His concept of “fair equality of opportunity” has lexical priority over redistribution—fix the starting line before you worry about the finish.

But Rawls also understood that we don’t deserve our talents any more than we deserve wealthy parents. That produces humility, not nihilism. Michael Sandel’s point lands here: meritocracy becomes tyrannical when winners believe they fully earned their success and losers internalize their failure as deserved.

Amartya Sen pushed this further with his “capabilities approach”—what matters isn’t equal stuff but whether people have real capabilities to live the lives they value. That’s investing in inputs, not redistributing outcomes.

The synthesis: Circumstances shape starting points. Choices shape trajectories. Policy should address both—but in different ways.

2. Individuals flourish in healthy communities.

Agency means little if there’s nowhere to apply it. People need places with economic purpose—jobs, institutions, reasons to stay and build. Policy should strengthen these conditions, not sacrifice them for abstract efficiency or ideological goals.

Sandel’s critique of Rawls centers on the “unencumbered self”—the fiction that we can reason about justice as isolated individuals. We’re always already embedded in communities that shape who we are.

This isn’t new. Adam Smith—yes, that Adam Smith—understood it in 1759. His Theory of Moral Sentiments argued that morality stems from our social nature, from sympathy and the desire for approval from our peers. Everyone cites Wealth of Nations; TMS is where Smith makes the communitarian case that the vulgar libertarians miss. We’re not atomized utility-maximizers. We’re embedded social beings who need each other to become ourselves.

Tocqueville saw this in the 1830s. His observations about American “associations” weren’t just anthropology—they were a warning. He believed local institutions were essential bulwarks against isolated individuals submitting to a paternalistic state. Americans, he noticed, formed voluntary groups to solve problems wherever the French would find government and the English would find aristocracy.

Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone is the empirical sequel: decades of data showing what happens when that associational life erodes. Spoiler: nothing good.

Oren Cass has contemporized this with “productive pluralism”—creating conditions where people of diverse abilities and geographies can form self-sufficient families and contribute to their communities. The libertarian says markets will sort it out. The progressive says government programs will fill the gap. Both miss something: communities aren’t just delivery mechanisms for goods and services. They’re the context in which human lives become meaningful.

A town where everyone commutes elsewhere for work isn’t a community. It’s a bedroom.

3. Communities require boundaries to function.

Mutual obligation depends on shared fate—shared laws, shared institutions, shared consequences. That accountability breaks down at scale. The nation is the largest unit where “we’re in this together” still means something. Beyond that, there’s no mechanism to ensure fairness or hold anyone responsible when the rules fail.

This is where I part ways with cosmopolitan liberalism. Not because I don’t value human beings outside my borders—I do—but because I’m skeptical that political solidarity can be maintained at the global level. When everyone is responsible for everything, no one is responsible for anything.

Edmund Burke understood this instinctively—his whole project was skepticism toward abstract universalism, toward revolutionaries who thought they could design society from first principles without regard for the particular communities people actually inhabited.

Michael Lind makes this case from a secular, class-based angle: “To date the nation-state is the only unit of government that has been able to mobilise extra-political popular sentiments and national identity to improve the condition of the majority of people.”

Yoram Hazony argues similarly from a traditionalist position: the nation-state is the largest unit capable of genuine solidarity.

I’m aware this sounds like it could slide into ugly nativism. It doesn’t have to. The boundary I’m drawing is civic, not ethnic. It’s about shared institutions and reciprocal obligations, not bloodlines. The question isn’t “who looks like us?” but “who is in this together with us?”—where “together” means subject to the same laws, contributing to the same systems, sharing the same consequences when those systems fail.

4. Therefore, invest in inputs.

If circumstances shape starting points and communities enable agency, then the job of policy is to strengthen both beforethe race begins—education, infrastructure, stable families, economic opportunity in left-behind places.

Rigging outcomes at the finish line doesn’t fix anything upstream and breeds resentment downstream.

This is the policy orientation that synthesizes everything above. Rawls’s fair equality of opportunity, Sen’s capabilities, Cass’s productive pluralism—they all point toward front-loading investment rather than back-loading redistribution.

Tyler Cowen’s “state capacity libertarianism” rhymes with this: markets and capitalism are powerful, but they need a competent state to maintain the infrastructure and institutions that make them work. It’s not either/or.

The progressive critique is that inputs alone won’t overcome structural disadvantages. The libertarian critique is that government shouldn’t be shaping starting conditions at all. Both miss the point. The goal isn’t to guarantee outcomes or pretend starting conditions don’t matter. It’s to make the game worth playing.

A rigged casino isn’t fixed by giving losers their money back at the end of the night. It’s fixed by un-rigging the games.

What does “investing in inputs” look like?

• Education that prepares people for actual work, not just credential accumulation. Freddie deBoer has written extensively on how our current system treats the four-year degree as the only path to dignity, which is both false and destructive—and the credentialism arms race makes everyone worse off.

• Infrastructure that makes places economically viable, not just connected to places that are

• Family policy that doesn’t penalize single-earner households

• Economic policy that maintains domestic productive capacity rather than optimizing purely for consumption. Noah Smith has been tracking the early returns on industrial policy—and they’re more promising than the free-trade absolutists predicted.

• Immigration policy that considers effects on existing workers and communities, not just GDP

These aren’t radical positions. They’re what most countries took for granted before the neoliberal consensus declared that markets would handle everything.

What This Means in Practice

Having a framework doesn’t tell you exactly what to think about every issue. But it gives you a way to evaluate positions that doesn’t require consulting your tribe first.

On trade: If communities need economic purpose and boundaries are where accountability lives, then trade policy should be evaluated by whether it strengthens or hollows out the places people actually live. Globalization optimized for consumer prices while treating American towns as acceptable collateral damage. Cass’s work on how trade policy affects communities, not just consumers, is worth taking seriously. So is Noah Smith’s analysis of what a genuine industrial policy might look like—and why both Trump’s tariffs-only approach and the old free-trade consensus miss the mark.

On student loans: If circumstances shape starting points and choices define outcomes, then loan forgiveness gets the sequence backwards. It transfers costs to people who chose differently—those who didn’t go to college, chose cheaper schools, or already paid their loans. That’s outcome-rigging for a favored group. Fix the inputs: reform how colleges charge, expand alternatives to four-year degrees, invest in community colleges and trades.

On immigration: I favor controlled immigration that considers effects on existing workers and communities. Not because immigrants are bad, but because mass influxes can suppress wages and strain institutions in places already struggling—and unlimited movement undermines the bounded solidarity that makes mutual obligation possible. Matt Yglesias has the best version of the pro-immigration case, and even he acknowledges that enforcement and selectivity matter for maintaining political support.

On welfare: A genuine safety net is justified—people fall on hard times through no fault of their own. But a system that indefinitely subsidizes non-participation undermines agency and hollows out communities. Welfare should be a bridge, not a destination. Time limits, work requirements where able, and investment in what makes work possible: childcare, transportation, training.

I’ll be working through specific issues in more detail as this project continues. The framework is the foundation; the applications are where it gets tested.

The Name

I’ve been calling this “classical civic liberalism”—a mouthful, but each word does work:

• Classical in the sense of the older liberal tradition—Locke, Smith, Mill—before “liberal” became American shorthand for “left.” Individual liberty, property rights, free markets as defaults.

• Civic in its insistence that these operate within bounded political communities. Shared laws, shared institutions, shared fate. The nation-state isn’t a necessary evil to be minimized; it’s the container that makes liberal freedom meaningful.

• Liberalism because, despite my criticisms of both libertarians and progressives, I’m still working within that broad tradition. I believe in individual agency, skepticism of concentrated power, and the possibility of a society where people with different visions of the good life can coexist.

“Civic liberalism” already exists as a term—Thomas Spragens used it to argue against both libertarianism and egalitarian liberalism, emphasizing civic virtue and democratic ideals. I’m not claiming to have invented anything. But adding “classical” clarifies where I’m coming from: the older liberal tradition, updated for a world where atomized individualism has proven as hollow as top-down collectivism.

It’s neither libertarian (which treats individuals as the only relevant unit) nor progressive (which treats outcomes rather than inputs as the measure of justice). And it’s not nationalist in any ethnic sense—the boundary is civic, not blood. It’s about who’s in the system together, subject to the same rules, accountable to each other when things go wrong.

Other terms gesture at similar territory. Isaiah Berlin’s distinction between negative and positive liberty threads through all of this—I want the freedom from interference that classical liberals prize, but I recognize that freedom to flourish requires conditions that don’t appear from nowhere.

The point isn’t the label. It’s having a coherent framework that lets you think through problems rather than react to them.

Why This Matters

We’re living through a political realignment. The old left-right axis is breaking down. Education is replacing income as the primary class marker. The cosmopolitan-nationalist divide is replacing the labor-capital divide.

Most people are navigating this by instinct, picking teams based on cultural affinity rather than coherent principle. That works until it doesn’t—until you find yourself defending positions you don’t actually believe because your team believes them. Or until you’re find yourself questioning everyone around you’s political ranting because it’s so utterly and transparently devoid of any actual thought… just spouting whatever their favorite talking head or TikTok personality most recently told them.

The alternative is to build your own operating system. Figure out what you actually think is true about human beings and society. Reason outward from there. Accept that you’ll end up in uncomfortable places—agreeing with people you’re supposed to oppose, opposing people you’re supposed to agree with.

This is my attempt at that. It’s incomplete and probably wrong in places. Maybe this already exists either in name or philosophy. But the rigor of personal thought… that’s mine, which means I can actually defend it—and more importantly, I can revise it when I’m shown to be wrong.

That feels like progress.

Welcome to Foursquare

This is a place where I think out loud.

I’m not a foreign policy expert. I don’t have a blue checkmark or a TV hit to my name. I build things for a living, read widely, and pay attention to what’s actually happening—not what people say is happening.

I’m a classical liberal in the old sense: individual liberty, boundaries that create accountability, inputs over outcomes, skepticism of anyone who’s too sure of themselves. I think in frameworks. I try to see around corners. Sometimes I’m wrong, but I’d rather be wrong and thinking than right and tribal.

I started this because I keep having conversations—with friends, with my spouse, with myself at 10pm—where I’m working through something and realize I want to write it down. Geopolitics. Strategy. Philosophy. Whatever I can’t stop chewing on.

The name comes from an old word that means solid, planted, unwavering. It’s also a type of American house—practical, built to last, no ornamentation for its own sake. That’s the vibe I’m going for.

I’m anonymous because I want the ideas to stand on their own. If the thinking is sharp, that should be enough. If it’s sloppy, you’ll see it.

So here’s what this looks like in practice.

Maduro Is Gone. Now What?

What Actually Happened

On Saturday morning, the United States executed one of the most precise military operations in recent memory. In about two hours, Delta Force operators captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife from Caracas and had them on a Navy ship headed for New York.

This wasn’t impulsive. It was months in the making—150 aircraft, 20 bases, the largest U.S. military presence in Latin America since Haiti in 1994. The carrier strike group had been positioned since November. Basing agreements with Trinidad and Tobago were signed quietly. The “drug boat” strikes of the past few months now look less like interdiction and more like rehearsal.

Maduro’s in a Brooklyn jail facing narco-terrorism charges. He’ll be arraigned Monday.

But here’s what I think most of the coverage is missing.

Everyone’s overreacting to the wrong thing

Trump said the U.S. would “run” Venezuela until a proper transition happens. Cue the freakout: Iraq 2.0, imperial overreach, no exit strategy.

But since when do we take any single Trump sentence as policy? The man speaks in impulses. He regurgitates whatever the last person told him, without tact or awareness of how it’ll land.

What “we’ll run the country” probably means: Rubio’s in contact with the transitional figures, the carrier group stays offshore as leverage, there are conditions for sanctions relief, and if Venezuela doesn’t hold real elections, there’s more where that came from.

That’s not occupation. That’s coercive diplomacy with teeth.

Boz’s Substack has a smart early take on the uncertainty here—his point that “honest analysis means it’s ok to say ‘I don’t know’” is worth remembering. But I think we can sketch the outlines.

The real play is already in motion

Here’s what I think is actually happening:

Edmundo González is the legitimate president. He won the July 2024 election by a two-to-one margin before Maduro stole it. He’s been in exile in Spain, but he attended Trump’s inauguration last January and has been touring friendly Latin American capitals collecting recognition. The U.S. already recognizes him as the rightful leader.

María Corina Machado is the opposition’s engine—2025 Nobel Peace Prize winner, charismatic, popular. She was smuggled out of Venezuela with U.S. help in December after 11 months in hiding. She’s already announced she’ll serve as González’s VP. Within hours of Maduro’s capture, she released a statement calling for González to assume the presidency immediately.

That statement was pre-written. They were waiting for a go-signal.

Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s VP, is currently the nominal head of government in Caracas. Trump keeps weirdly suggesting he might work with her. But she’s publicly demanding Maduro’s release and calling him “the only president.”

My read: she’s a placeholder being managed. The U.S. needs someone in Caracas right now who controls the ministries, the cops, the utilities. They’re telling her: cooperate and maybe you don’t end up in a cell next to your old boss. Meanwhile, González and Machado get positioned to return.

This is the Panama playbook. In 1989, we grabbed Noriega, installed the guy who’d actually won the election, kept a presence for stability, and left. Panama’s been a functioning democracy since. This Substack piece does a thorough comparison of the two operations—worth reading if you want the historical parallels laid out.

Why hemispheric buffer matters

Here’s the part I think most commentators are glossing over, either because it sounds too “imperialist” to say out loud or because they’re not thinking structurally.

The United States is blessed with geography. Two oceans protect us from the great power conflicts that have consumed Europe and Asia for centuries. (Tomas Pueyo’s Global Chessboard piece makes the case that whoever held this land was destined to become a superpower—“the inevitable empire.”) But oceans aren’t enough. To be truly secure, you need buffer zones—friendly or at least non-hostile territory to your north and south that prevents adversaries from projecting power into your neighborhood.

This isn’t new thinking. It’s the Monroe Doctrine, articulated in 1823 and enforced, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, ever since. The core idea: the Western Hemisphere is our sphere of influence, and we don’t tolerate hostile foreign powers setting up shop here.

For most of the 20th century, this was about keeping out European colonial powers, then Soviet influence. Today it’s about the new axis: China, Russia, and Iran.

Venezuela under Maduro was becoming a forward operating base for all three. Russian military aircraft. Iranian drones. Hezbollah operations. Chinese loans and infrastructure investments. A sanctions-busting hub for all of them. This wasn’t a neutral neighbor having a rough decade—it was a hostile asset being cultivated 1,300 miles from Miami.

From that lens, the question isn’t “should we have done this” but “why did we wait so long?”

The Trump administration’s National Security Strategy explicitly invoked a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine. You can roll your eyes at the branding, but the substance is serious: the U.S. is reasserting that hostile powers don’t get to operate freely in our hemisphere.

Trump, being Trump, called it the “Donroe Doctrine.” Whatever. The point stands.

Our government’s primary job is to let everyone inside our borders be as free as possible. But maintaining that freedom requires doing what’s necessary outside our borders to ensure we stay secure. Oceans on two sides. Friendly neighbors to the north and south. That’s the architecture of American security, and Venezuela was a hole in it.

The regional alignment matters

This isn’t just about Venezuela. It’s about the hemisphere.

Javier Milei in Argentina knew this was coming. Days before the strike, he said he’d support U.S. intervention—“even with troops if requested.” Argentina immediately blocked entry for Maduro-linked officials. Milei’s been working with Trump on Venezuela for months, including a quiet operation to extract political prisoners from the Argentine embassy in Caracas.

Rubio’s broader project is pushing back the “pink tide”—the wave of left-wing governments across Latin America that tend to align with China and Russia. Milei is the anchor of a regional realignment: proof that radical free-market reform can work, a staging ground for coordination, and diplomatic cover so this isn’t just “the Americans.”

Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia are pissed. They’re condemning the operation publicly. But they’d already cooled on Maduro after he blatantly stole the 2024 election. Their condemnation is partly genuine, partly domestic politics.

The axis powers—Russia, China, Iran—are loudly upset and quietly impotent. Venezuela was their client state in our hemisphere, sitting on the world’s largest oil reserves. They’ve just lost it, and there’s nothing they can do.

David Blackmon’s energy-focused Substack frames this as a “$17 trillion reset of global geopolitics.” That might be hyperbole, but not by much.

The risks are real but manageable

This could still go wrong.

Chavismo isn’t dead. Maduro’s gone, but his interior minister Diosdado Cabello is still out there. The armed militias haven’t disarmed. Cuban intelligence is embedded in Venezuelan security services.

The economy is a crater. 80% poverty, worthless currency, collapsed infrastructure. Someone has to rebuild this, fast enough that the political window doesn’t close.

Trump could screw it up. If he gets bored, undercuts Rubio’s diplomacy, or picks fights on Truth Social that complicate the transition, the careful sequencing falls apart.

But here’s why I’m cautiously optimistic: the pieces are in place. The legitimate election winners are ready. The military operation was flawless, which suggests the planning is serious. Rubio—who actually knows Venezuela—appears to be running this. And the Venezuelan people, 70% of whom voted for change, are desperate for it to work.

CSIS has a solid rundown on the day-after challenges if you want the think-tank perspective.

The bottom line

The coverage is mostly asking “what’s the plan?” as if this were chaotic improvisation.

I think the plan is pretty clear: install González and Machado, hold elections to ratify it, stabilize the economy enough to prevent a refugee crisis, keep the axis powers out, get American oil companies back in, and leave.

Not utopia. Functional. And critically—a buffer secured.

The next 90 days will tell us if I’m right. Watch for whether González actually returns, whether elections get scheduled, and whether Trump can resist making this about himself.

My bet: this is closer to Panama than Iraq.

We’ll see.

—Foursquare