The rivers are polluted, the oceans full of plastic, oil spills fouling the coasts, forever chemicals in your blood. Capitalism.

Three men own more wealth than the bottom half of the country combined. Most of the gains from a generation of growth went to the top while everyone else treaded water. The billionaires.

The factories left. The towns died. Fentanyl moved in to fill the silence, and a generation of men in Ohio and Pennsylvania and West Virginia is dying of despair. Globalism.

Your kid is on her phone nine hours a day, teenage loneliness is setting historical records, a handful of companies in Northern California ran the experiment on a generation of children for ad revenue. Big Tech.

Four people. Four different villains. One thing being complained about. None of them have named it.

That’s the problem. Naming it wrong is why the proposed cures keep failing.

The wrong target

There’s a name for what all four are actually complaining about. None of them are using it.

Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, an economist at Penn, spent the last week working through this on X in a three-thread sequence that Tabarrok aggregated on Marginal Revolution. His argument, distilled: most critics of capitalism are critics of modernity wearing borrowed clothes. The grievances are real. The diagnosis is wrong.

The natural experiment is sitting right there in the historical record. In the first thread, Fernández-Villaverde points out that the pollution, depersonalization, alienation, inequality, and consumerism people blame on American capitalism in 2026 also showed up — sometimes worse — in factories in Leningrad in 1970 and on collective farms in Jiangsu in 1978. The Soviet Union ran the most catastrophic environmental disaster of the twentieth century in the Aral Sea, drained an entire inland body of water for cotton irrigation, and produced air quality in its industrial cities that made Pittsburgh in its grimmest decade look like a spa. The nomenklatura had dachas and special hospitals and hard-currency stores while ordinary workers waited in bread lines — the form of inequality changed under socialism, the structure didn’t. China today, the canonical “communism with Chinese characteristics” outlier, is the world’s largest emitter, runs surveillance more aggressive than anything Silicon Valley has dared, and produces inequality that would embarrass a Gilded Age robber baron.

The second thread puts a finer point on it. Imagine you’re trying to run a serious country without capitalism. Now imagine you also want your citizens to have access to MRIs and mRNA vaccines and FLASH radiotherapy machines. You’re going to need the scientific-technological complex that develops those things. You’re going to need the industrial capacity to produce thousands of machines and millions of doses on schedule. You’re going to need bureaucracies — large, hierarchical, impersonal, rule-bound bureaucracies — to coordinate it all. There is no other way. And those bureaucracies are going to have all the pathologies — careerism, asymmetric information, internal politics, denied claims, three hours on hold — that critics blame on capitalism. The bureaucracy isn’t capitalist. It’s modern.

The third thread is the analytical engine, and it’s the one Tabarrok buried in a parenthetical. The standard objection — fine, but capitalism created modernity, so the distinction collapses — confuses two different questions. One is genetic: how did this institutional form arise historically? The other is taxonomic: what kind of thing is it, and how does it relate to other things of its kind? Even granting that capitalism caused modern bureaucracy, that tells you nothing about whether the pathologies of bureaucratic life are features of capitalism or features of bureaucracy. The Soviet evidence settles the second question. The iron cagedoesn’t care who owns it.

This is also why “late-stage capitalism” is doing no analytical work. The phrase was coined in German by Werner Sombart in the early twentieth century, revived in 1972 by the Marxist economist Ernest Mandel, and popularized in 1991 by Fredric Jameson. Capitalism has now been “late” for roughly a century. It survived the Great Depression, two world wars, the postwar boom, stagflation, neoliberalism, the financial crisis, the smartphone, the platform economy, AI, and Trump twice. If your category has outlived multiple eras, multiple technological revolutions, and multiple of its own predicted deaths, your category isn’t doing analytical work. It’s a vibe.

The right uses different vocabulary, but it’s not actually anti-capitalist either. It says “globalism.” It says “the managerial class.” It says “the deep state,” “woke capital,” “Big Pharma,” “the system,” “the cathedral.” Different words. Same target. Impersonal, rationalized, scale-driven coordination grinding individuals up. The left calls it capitalism. The right calls it everything else. Both are pointed at the same thing, and neither has the name right.

Modernity isn’t one thing

Granted all of that. The diagnosis is right. But Fernández-Villaverde stops where the interesting question begins.

He ends in fatalism. Modernity is inescapable. Deal with it.

That’s where I get off the train.

Human flourishing was never about a single layer. Coordination happens at different scales, and the scales want different things.

At the largest scale — nation, supply chain, hospital system, semiconductor fab, university, military — you need rationalized, impersonal, rule-bound bureaucracy. There is no MRI without it. There is no iPhone, no vaccine, no power grid, no Boeing. Trying to run any of that on personal trust and particular relationships is a fantasy. The big stuff requires the big institutional form, and the big institutional form has costs. People don’t get to be known there. The form is the form.

At the smallest scale — neighborhood, family, congregation, fraternal order, school small enough that the principal knows your kid by name — the same logic is poison. People need to be known. They need particular relationships, not impersonal ones. They need institutions where the rules bend for the kid you’ve watched grow up, not where the rules apply uniformly to a case number. The bottom layer doesn’t run on rationalized impersonal coordination. It runs on the opposite.

The mistake isn’t choosing one layer over the other. The mistake is treating them as a single problem.

Two camps, each half right

Two camps in current American politics each see one layer clearly and miss the other.

The populist right — the Cass-Vance-American Compass coalition, with the New Right intellectuals around it — correctly diagnoses the hollowing-out. Oren Cass put it cleanly on Yascha Mounk’s podcast earlier this year: when you say you don’t care about the factory and let it close and move to China, the experience of that community is going to be very, very different. The factory anchors the town. The town is more than the factory, but it isn’t viable without one. Cass is right about this, and the policy tools he proposes — tariffs against rigged competition, reshoring of strategic industries, industrial policy that values production over pure consumer welfare — are real tools that defend real things.

But here’s where it goes wrong. Tariffs and reshoring defend the economic conditions for community. They don’t, by themselves, build community. You can keep the factory open and still have nobody at the diner, no rotary club, no parish, no parents who know each other’s kids’ names. You can win every trade fight Cass wants to fight and end up with a town where everyone has a job and nobody has a neighbor. Economic policy is necessary. It is not sufficient. Treating it as sufficient is the error.

The abundance liberals — Yglesias, Klein, Thompson, Smith, after Klein and Thompson’s Abundance, Noah Smith’s review of it, and Yglesias’s own articulation of the project — make the opposite mistake from the opposite direction. They correctly diagnose the supply problem. America builds too little housing, too little energy, too little of everything that matters. Most of the scarcity people scream about is self-inflicted, the product of veto points and procedural gunk and well-meaning rules that strangle the things they were supposed to enable. The abundance camp is right about this, and the policy tools they propose — zoning reform, permitting reform, more housing, more energy, more state capacity — are real tools that build real things.

(Worth noting that Yglesias’s Substack is named Slow Boring, after Weber’s “Politics as a Vocation” — politics as the slow, strong boring of hard boards. Yglesias has been the most explicitly Weberian voice in American political writing for five years. When Fernández-Villaverde says “spend more time with Weber,” the abundance liberals are the people who already are. There’s a real fight between Cass and Yglesias about this — they debated it directly at the Abundance 2025 conference, and it’s worth your time — but it’s a fight inside the top layer. Neither side is wrong. Both are partial.)

Here’s where it goes wrong on the abundance side. Material abundance does not produce community as a side effect. You can build a million more housing units and have nobody know their neighbors. You can solve every supply problem the abundance camp wants to solve and end up with a country of cheaply housed, well-fed, climate-controlled, fundamentally lonely people. Noah Smith calls industrial modernity “the powerful, but fragile, engine that allows humanity to escape” the natural state of poverty, and he’s right. But the engine doesn’t make a life. It makes the conditions for one. Material flourishing is necessary. It is not sufficient. Treating it as sufficient is the error.

Both camps are correct about what they see. Both are wrong about what’s missing. The fight between them is real, but it’s a fight inside the top layer of the system. Neither one is doing serious work on the bottom layer, because the bottom layer isn’t an economic problem.

The coalition no one names

This is why American politics keeps realigning in ways the legacy categories can’t account for.

“Modernity is grinding me up” doesn’t fit the left-right axis. So you get strange-bedfellow coalitions complaining about the same thing in different vocabularies: the trad-Catholic right and the degrowth left. The Wendell Berry agrarians and the Brooklyn anti-development activists. RFK wellness and post-work theorists. Rural conservatives who think the FDA is run by Big Pharma and urban progressives who think the FDA is run by Big Pharma. Mom influencers fighting seed oils and homesteaders fighting the grid and union men fighting H-1Bs and academics fighting “the neoliberal university” — all complaining about the same thing from different angles, in different vocabularies, convinced their enemies are each other.

The grievance is real. The thing being grieved is real. Modernity does grind people up. The dignity of being known to your community, the rhythm of unmediated work, the experience of consequence at human scale — these are real losses, and the people who feel them are not crazy and not crybabies and not, usually, even confused about what they’ve lost. They’re confused about what to call it. And calling it the wrong thing produces wrong cures.

Freddie deBoer, a Marxist who is more honest than most about this, calls the reflex to dismiss every modernity-grievance as crank stuff “the digital immune system.”Worth reading. He’s also written, in a different piece, against the lazy left reflex of blaming everything from depression to bad dating apps on capitalism. A leftist saying “stop blaming capitalism for everything” and a Penn economist saying “stop blaming capitalism for everything” are pointed at the same problem from opposite tribes. That should tell you something about where the actual fault line runs.

What the bottom layer actually requires

Here’s the part that should change the politics.

If you took the Cass program — reshoring, strategic tariffs, industrial policy, antitrust against captive markets — and combined it with the abundance program — more housing, more energy, walkable zoning, removing the veto points and procedural gunk that strangle building — you’d get most of the conditions the bottom layer needs.

A working factory in a town with affordable housing in walkable neighborhoods, near extended family, with cheap energy and accessible production and a Main Street that isn’t a ghost town. That isn’t nothing. That’s actually a lot. Both camps think they’re enemies. On the conditions question, they’re allies who refuse to recognize each other.

But conditions aren’t community. You can have all of that and still not know your neighbors. The factory being open doesn’t mean people show up at the rotary club. Walkable zoning doesn’t mean walkers say hi. Affordable housing in your hometown doesn’t mean you’re embedded in anything when you live there. The conditions are necessary. What you build inside them is what matters, and that’s where the actual civic work has to happen.

What does that work look like?

Defend civic and religious institutions from regulatory creep. Tax-exempt status protected, even for institutions that are out of fashion. Less paperwork to operate a youth sports league, a fraternal order, a parish. End the regulatory pressure that pushes every civic institution into either becoming a 501(c)(3) social-services arm or dying. Stop treating informal community structures as suspect by default.

Smaller schools, neighborhood schools, parental authority. End the mega-consolidated model that produces graduating classes of eight hundred and parents who’ve never met. K-8 within walking distance. Parent organizations with real budgetary authority, not advisory roles. School boards small enough that running for one doesn’t require a campaign manager.

Walkable, mixed-use zoning. Legalize the corner store in residential neighborhoods. Allow accessory dwelling units near family. Cut minimum parking requirements that kill main streets in favor of strip malls. Stop pretending walkable community happens by accident; it requires being legal.

Cut the regulatory load on small commercial spaces. Liquor licenses, food permits, ADA compliance, occupational licensing, insurance requirements — each defensible individually, collectively a slow strangle of the bar, the diner, the bowling alley, the music venue, the third places that make community possible. Apply rules proportionally. A five-employee business shouldn’t face the compliance burden of a five-thousand-employee one.

End the over-regulation of informal reciprocity. A grandmother should be able to watch her neighbor’s kids without a license. A retired coach should be able to coach the rec league without a credential. We have credentialed and regulated and formalized basic human reciprocity into oblivion, and people are paying for daycare and tutoring services that used to happen across a fence.

Federalism that means something. Block grants instead of categorical funding. Let states actually differ from one another instead of pretending we’re a federation of slightly-tinted Departments of Labor. Let counties differ from each other within states. Different places want different things. That’s not a bug.

Local journalism. This one’s harder. The market hasn’t sustained it and there isn’t a tidy answer. Tax credits, philanthropic models, public-broadcasting-style funding for local newsrooms — something. The death of the local paper is one of the most consequential losses of the last twenty years and it’s directly upstream of communities not knowing what’s happening on their own school boards.

None of this is glamorous. None of it makes a viral post. None of it builds an electoral coalition by itself. All of it is what we mean when we say a place is a community rather than a zip code. And almost none of it is on the agenda of either camp.

What I might be wrong about

The Marxist rejoinder is real. The serious version of it goes: scale itself was driven by capital accumulation. Soviet industrialization was reactive — the USSR was modernizing in a competitive world shaped by capitalist powers, racing to keep up or get crushed. Maybe the distinction between modernity and capitalism collapses under historical pressure, and Fernández-Villaverde waves at this with Quine and moves on too fast. I think the Soviet evidence still does the work — the pathologies persisted long after the immediate competitive pressure — but I don’t want to pretend the move is obvious. It’s the strongest objection in the room.

The anti-monopoly diagnosis is the second tension, and it’s the sharpest critique in this terrain. Captive markets erode agency. Amazon as platform-plus-merchant, hospital systems consolidating until the nearest alternative is two states away, four meatpackers controlling most of the market, four airlines controlling the skies — these are real concentrations of power, and “we have markets” is not an answer when buyers and sellers have no real alternatives. Cass and the New Right see this clearly and propose antitrust and structural reform within capitalism, which is defensible and probably correct. The danger isn’t Cass. The danger is when the same diagnosis gets weaponized in the other direction: parts of the left argue from “concentrated power erodes agency” toward state-as-sole-supplier, which is monopoly all the way down. The socialist commonwealth is by definition the ultimate monopoly: one provider of MRIs, one allocator of housing, one employer, one owner. The diagnosis can run two ways; only one of them survives its own logic. Antitrust is right where it lives — at the level of the firm, the sector, the market. It is wrong as a stalking horse for the state-as-sole-supplier.

The revealed-preference critique is the third. Most people, given the choice, pick modernity. The Soviet citizen did not, in fact, want to go back to the village. The American suburbanite does not, in fact, want to give up the MRI machine for the front porch. Maybe what I’m calling community erosion is the price modernity charges, and most people have already decided to pay it. Maybe I’m overweighting what’s been lost relative to what’s been gained. I don’t think so — the loneliness numbers, the civic association numbers, the suicide and despair numbers all suggest the price is higher than the revealed preferences make it look — but it’s a real argument and it deserves to be named.

Here’s where I land.

Modernity is real, and it isn’t going anywhere. The MRI machine isn’t optional. Neither is the supply chain that makes it, the bureaucracy that staffs it, or the rationalized impersonal coordination that delivers it to your hospital on time. Anyone telling you we can return to a smaller, more particular world by tearing modernity down is selling you nostalgia at the price of children dying of cancers we can currently cure.

But human flourishing was never just the top layer. People need to be known. They need places where they belong, institutions they recognize, neighbors who would notice if they vanished. None of that comes from optimizing modernity. None of it comes from rejecting modernity either. It comes from doing different work — civic work, particular work, work at a different scale — that modernity cannot do for us and cannot replace.

The fight that matters isn’t capitalism versus its alternatives. It isn’t even abundance versus industrial policy. It’s whether we can keep modernity working at the top while refusing to live entirely inside it. Keep the MRI hospital. Build the front porch. Stop pretending those are the same fight, and stop pretending you have to pick.

That isn’t nostalgia. That’s the actual project.

A new word entered the discourse last summer, and it tells you everything you need to know about where this conversation actually lives. The word is “slopper” — coined on TikTok, popularized by Rusty Foster’s Today in Tabs newsletter, and deployed with the kind of gleeful contempt usually reserved for people who microwave fish in the office. A slopper is someone who uses ChatGPT for everything. Ordering dinner. Writing emails. Thinking, or whatever passes for it.

Foster didn’t invent the word, but he sharpened it into a weapon. When Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle mentioned on X that she uses AI to research, transcribe interviews, generate pushback on her arguments, and fact-check her columns, Foster’s response wasn’t to engage with her workflow. It was to question her entire career. Twenty-five years of bad opinions, he wrote — no wonder she’s happy to hand the work to a machine. Then the kicker: “Kind, good, happy, secure people never go AI.”

That’s not an argument about writing. That’s a purity test.

And it’s worth sitting with for a minute, because the entire debate over AI and writing has this same structure — moral intuition dressed up as craft criticism, with nobody stopping to ask the question that would actually resolve it.

The Question Nobody’s Asking

Here’s what happened. McArdle posted about her AI workflow. The internet lost its mind. A Rutgers philosophy professor said she should be fired — “at the very least,” a qualifier that invites you to imagine what punishments he considers proportionate for using a search engine with better syntax. Charlotte Alter, a journalist, offered the most elegant version of the critique: “Research is thinking. Outlining is thinking. Writing is thinking. Any portion of that done by AI is less thinking done by you.”

Then Richard Hanania wrote a piece for the Boston Globe arguing that writers should be allowed to use AI not just for research but for composing text — that the ideas are what matter, and the writing is just the delivery vehicle.

McArdle herself wrote a column explaining her approach and pushing back on the outrage. Mathew Ingram, a veteran media journalist, pushed back on the purity-test framing while defending McArdle’s actual practices as reasonable. Katie Parrott at Every opened up her entire AI-assisted drafting process to show that writing with AI involves more friction, not less — more decisions, not fewer. Becca Rothfeld, now a staff writer at The New Yorker, argued that McArdle was violating the Post’s own standards policy. Marisa Kabas at The Handbasket went further, calling the whole thing symptomatic of an AI-poisoned future of journalism.

Everyone is talking past each other. And they will keep talking past each other, because they’re arguing about a tool when they should be arguing about a job.

The question isn’t “Should writers use AI?”

The question is “What is this writing for?”

Two Jobs, One Word

Here’s the problem: we use the word “writing” to describe two fundamentally different activities, and then we argue about them as if they’re one thing.

Job One: Conveyance. You have information, ideas, or instructions in your head. You need them in someone else’s head. The writing is a means to an end — a vehicle. Emails, reports, memos, marketing copy, most journalism, documentation, business correspondence. The measure of success is whether the cargo arrived intact. Did the reader understand the thing? Good. The writing worked.

Job Two: Art. The writing itself is the point. Poetry, literary fiction, personal essays, the kind of journalism where the voice and the thinking are inseparable from the content. You’re not moving cargo from A to B. You’re building something that didn’t exist before, and the how of the building is the what of the product. A Mary Oliver poem summarized in bullet points is not a Mary Oliver poem. The container is the thing.

Most writing is Job One. Almost all of it, actually. The overwhelming majority of words produced in a given day — across every industry, every profession, every inbox — exist to move information from one place to another. They are functional. They are utilitarian. They are, in the most literal sense, a means to an end.

This is not a value judgment. Utilitarian writing can be done well or badly. A clear, well-structured memo is a beautiful thing in its own way. But its beauty is instrumental. You admire it the way you admire a well-designed bridge — for how well it does its job, not for its existence as an object.

The small fraction of writing that qualifies as Job Two — where the process of writing is itself the product — operates on completely different logic. When Alter says “writing is thinking,” she’s describing something real. For an essayist working through an idea, the act of writing is the act of reasoning. Outsourcing the prose isn’t saving time on a task. It’s skipping the task entirely.

Both of these things are “writing.” They share a word the way “bank” means both a financial institution and the side of a river. And the AI debate is two groups of people standing on opposite banks, shouting about the same word, meaning completely different things.

What the Camera Did

This has happened before. Not with words, but with images.

When photography arrived in the mid-1800s, it detonated the art world — but not in the way people expected. The panic was that the camera would kill painting. It didn’t. What it killed was painting-as-documentation.

Before photography, if you wanted a visual record of something — your face, your estate, a battlefield, a botanical specimen — you hired a painter. Many painters were essentially human cameras. They had technical skill, they could render reality with precision, and they were paid to produce accurate visual records. This was a job. An important one. And the camera made it obsolete almost overnight.

But here’s what didn’t happen: the camera didn’t kill painters who painted because the painting itself was the point. The Impressionists didn’t stop. The Expressionists hadn’t started yet. If anything, photography freed painting from documentation duty. Once you didn’t need a painter to record what things looked like, painters could explore what things felt like, what they meant, what they looked like when you stopped pretending objectivity was the goal. Monet didn’t lose his job to the camera. The camera made Monet possible.

The painters who got replaced weren’t the artists. They were the conveyors — skilled professionals doing Job One with brushes, who got outperformed by a machine that did Job One faster and cheaper.

AI is doing the same thing to writing right now. And the people panicking are making the same mistake the portrait painters would have made if they’d argued that cameras would destroy all visual art, instead of recognizing that cameras would destroy their particular job within visual art.

The Identity Problem

So why is this so hard to see? Why can’t smart people — journalists, professors, professional writers — just sort their work into Job One and Job Two and act accordingly?

Because the sorting threatens something deeper than workflow. It threatens identity.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: a lot of people who think of themselves as writers — capital-W Writers, people whose professional identity is built around the craft of putting words together — are actually doing Job One most of the time. They’re packaging information. They’re conveying arguments. They’re summarizing research and structuring narratives and explaining complex things in accessible language. These are valuable skills. They are also, fundamentally, conveyance.

When Alter says “Research is thinking. Outlining is thinking. Writing is thinking,” she’s describing her experience of her own process — and she’s probably right about it. For a features journalist working through a complex story, the writing process is genuinely intertwined with the thinking process. But that’s not a universal truth about all writing. It’s a truth about her writing, and maybe about a relatively small category of writing that operates the same way.

The person drafting a project update is not thinking-through-writing in the Charlotte Alter sense. The person writing marketing copy is not on a journey of intellectual discovery. The lawyer drafting a contract brief is not exploring the human condition. These people are doing Job One — important, skilled, valuable Job One — and AI makes Job One faster.

But if you’ve built your identity around being a Writer, and someone points out that most of what you do is conveyance, that’s an existential threat. It’s not that the tool is bad. It’s that the tool reveals something you didn’t want to see about the nature of your work. Noah Smith described this dynamic when software stocks crashed earlier this year — the fear wasn’t just about lost revenue, it was about the end of an entire professional identity built around technical expertise. Writers are having the same reckoning, just louder.

This is exactly what happened to portrait painters. The ones who panicked about the camera weren’t worried about art. They were worried about themselves. The camera didn’t just threaten their livelihood — it reclassified their work. Yesterday you were an artist. Today you’re a human Xerox machine, and the Xerox machine just got invented.

Foster’s “slopper” framework makes a lot more sense through this lens. It’s not a craft argument. It’s a tribal boundary. Clean people don’t use AI. Dirty people do. The line isn’t about the quality of the output — it’s about the moral status of the producer. And once you’re drawing moral lines around tool usage, you’ve left the territory of craft criticism and entered the territory of identity defense.

The Honest Position

Let’s be direct about where this lands.

If you’re doing Job One — conveyance — and you refuse to use AI on principle, you’re not protecting craft. You’re protecting a self-image. The economy has never paid a premium for artisanal status updates. Nobody ever got promoted for hand-coding an email that could have been drafted in thirty seconds. The reckoning was always coming. The typewriter replaced the scribe, the word processor replaced the typewriter, email replaced the memo, and now AI is replacing the part of writing that was always, honestly, just packaging. Fighting it on principle is like insisting on hand-addressed envelopes for your gas bill.

If you’re doing Job Two — art, genuine essay writing, literary work where the process is the product — then AI defeats the purpose, and you should say so clearly. Not because AI is bad, but because using it for art-writing is like hiring someone to run your marathon. You can cross the finish line that way, but you didn’t do the thing. The thing was the running. If you write to think, and you outsource the writing, you’ve outsourced the thinking. Alter is right about this. She’s just wrong to universalize it.

And if you’re Hanania — arguing that anyone should be able to use AI to compose text because the ideas are what matter — you’re half right. For Job One, absolutely. If someone has good ideas and bad prose, AI is a reasonable accommodation. We don’t insist that people with mobility issues take the stairs to prove they really wanted to reach the second floor. But Hanania’s position breaks down for Job Two, because for art-writing, the prose is the idea. You can’t separate them. A well-composed essay isn’t a good idea wrapped in nice sentences. The sentences are the thinking.

The McArdle position is the most defensible and the least interesting. She’s basically saying she uses a very good search engine with extra features. Nobody should be scandalized by this, and the fact that people are tells you the debate was never really about her workflow.

Some writers already get this intuitively. Noah Smith put it bluntly: he thinks AI could probably be trained to write like him, but he’s not sure why anyone would want it to. That’s a Job Two writer who understands exactly what makes his work valuable — and it isn’t the efficient arrangement of words on a screen. It’s the thinking that produces them.

The Question That Resolves Everything

Here’s the test. Before you argue about whether a piece of writing should involve AI, ask one question:

If a machine produced this text and a human produced that text, and you couldn’t tell the difference, would it matter?

For a project status update? No. The update is cargo. If the cargo arrives, the job is done. Use whatever vehicle gets it there.

For a poem? Yes. Absolutely. Because the poem isn’t the text on the page — the poem is the human act of wrestling language into meaning. A machine-generated poem that reads identically to a human one isn’t the same thing. It’s a replica of the output without the process, and for art, the process is the product.

For a news article? Depends. Straight reporting — who, what, when, where — is mostly conveyance, and AI-assisted conveyance that’s accurate is fine. A reported essay where the journalist’s perspective and voice are the value proposition? That’s closer to art. The writer’s thinking process matters.

This isn’t a bright line. It’s a spectrum, and reasonable people can disagree about where any given piece of writing falls on it. But the spectrum itself resolves the debate, because it reveals that the McArdle defenders and the McArdle critics are both right — about different things. They’re just too busy performing their team allegiances to notice.

What I Might Be Wrong About

The binary might be too clean. Most writing lives somewhere in the middle of the conveyance-art spectrum, and my framework might undercount how much thinking-through-writing happens even in utilitarian contexts. Maybe the lawyer drafting a brief is doing intellectual work that’s inseparable from the writing process. Maybe the marketing copywriter is making creative choices that constitute a kind of art. If that’s true, then the “just use AI for Job One” advice is too glib, and the real answer is something more granular — something about which specific cognitive tasks within a piece of writing benefit from human friction and which don’t.

I’m also not sure the photography analogy holds perfectly. Painting and photography are different media — the camera didn’t produce paintings, it produced photographs, a genuinely new thing. AI writing produces... writing. The same medium. That might matter in ways I haven’t fully thought through. When the output is indistinguishable from the human version, the identity questions get harder, not easier.

And there’s a downstream problem I’m skating past: if AI handles all the conveyance writing, where do young writers learn the craft that eventually lets them do art-writing? The journalism pipeline has always been: do a lot of Job One, get good at sentences, eventually develop a voice, graduate to Job Two. If AI eats the bottom of that pipeline, we might get a generation of people who want to write essays but never built the muscle. That’s not an argument against AI. But it’s a real cost, and pretending it doesn’t exist is its own kind of denial.

There’s also a version of AI skepticism that my framework doesn’t address at all — the Freddie deBoer position, which isn’t about purity or identity but about whether AI is actually good enough to matter yet. DeBoer’s been saying, essentially: stop telling me what AI will do and show me what it’s doing now. That’s a different and maybe more interesting objection than the moral one. If AI writing is still mediocre — and for a lot of use cases, it is — then the whole conveyance-vs-art framework is premature. I don’t think it is. But I’d rather engage that argument than the one about whether McArdle is a slopper.

The Real Debate

The AI-and-writing conversation will keep going in circles until people stop treating “writing” as a single thing and start asking what each piece of writing is actually for. The tool isn’t the issue. The job is the issue. And until you’re honest about which job you’re doing — conveyance or art, cargo delivery or construction — you can’t have a coherent opinion about whether AI belongs in the process.

The camera didn’t kill painting. It killed painting-as-documentation, and it freed painting-as-art to become something it couldn’t have been before. AI won’t kill writing. It will kill writing-as-packaging, and the writers who survive will be the ones honest enough to ask which kind of writing they were doing all along.

Tyler Cowen may have already shown us what the resolution looks like. His recent generative book on marginalism is written entirely by him — every word, no AI drafting — but it’s designed so readers can use an attached AI to interrogate the ideas, generate their own indexes, and explore connections across chapters. Job Two on the creation side. Job One on the consumption side. The writer does the thinking. The machine helps the reader access it. That’s not a compromise. That’s a division of labor that respects what each party is actually good at.

That’s the question the McArdle discourse is dancing around. Not “Should she use AI?” but “What was the writing for in the first place?”

And if the answer makes you uncomfortable, the discomfort isn’t about the tool.

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