People, ideas machines XI: Leo Strauss, modernity and regime change
And Snippets on: Shor on 2024, AI, rape gangs, why JSOC should bug lawyers' phones in London...
We are now brought face to face with a tyranny which holds out the threat of becoming, thanks to “the conquest of nature” and in particular of human nature, what no earlier tyranny ever became: perpetual and universal…
Their [the classical view’s] implicit prophecy that the emancipation of technology, of the arts, from moral and political control would lead to disaster or to the fundamental dehumanisation of man has not yet been refuted.
Leo Strauss
It was the contempt for these permanencies [the permanent characteristics of humanity, e.g the distinction between noble and base] which permitted the most radical historicist in 1933 [Heidegger] to welcome, as a dispensation of fate, the verdict of the least wise and least moderate part of his nation while it was in its least wise and least moderate mood, and at the same time speak of wisdom and moderation.
Leo Strauss
I am perplexed by my own data and my conclusion is in direct contradiction of the original idea from which I start. Starting from unlimited freedom, I arrive at unlimited despotism.
Shigalev, in The Devils
In short, one may say anything about the history of the world - anything that might enter the most disordered imagination. The only thing one cannot say is that it is rational…
And … even if man really were nothing but a piano key, even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then he [man] would not become reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse out of sheer ingratitude, simply to have his own way. And if he does not find any means he will devise destruction and chaos, will devise sufferings of all sorts, and will thereby have his own way. He will launch a curse upon the world, and, as only man can curse … then, after all, perhaps only by his curse will he attain his object, that is, really convince himself that he is a man and not a piano key!
If you say that all this, too, can be calculated and tabulated, chaos and darkness and curses, so that the mere possibility of calculating it all beforehand would stop it all, and reason would reassert itself - then man would purposely go mad in order to be rid of reason and have his own way! I believe in that, I vouch for it, because, after all, the whole work of man seems really to consist in nothing but proving to himself continually that he is a man and not an organ stop. It may be at the cost of his skin! But he has proved it...
Notes from the Underground, Dostoyevsky
Thus revolution gave birth to every form of wickedness in Greece. The simplicity which is so large an element in a noble nature was laughed to scorn and disappeared… In general, the dishonest more easily gain credit for cleverness than the simple for goodness.
Thucydides, III.82-84
UPDATE 31/8: Notes on Strauss’ essay on Thucydides.
UPDATE 24/5: Notes on Introduction to The City and Man, and a summary of the crisis of the West.
UPDATE 20/5: Notes on On Classical Political Philosophy.
This blog will summarise and consider essays by philosopher Leo Strauss.
Strauss identifies three waves of modernity sparked by (1) Machiavelli, (2) Rousseau and (3) Nietzsche.
The West’s spiritual-philosophical crisis, explored in Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche writing after the 1848 revolutions (see blog on Dostoyevsky), is the deepest cause of the political crisis we see in the crumbling of old ideas, old institutions (domestic and international), old parties and old political regimes.
A fourth wave of modernisation has begun, not driven by traditional philosophers or the universities but mainly by the internet and technology.
Whenever I talk about philosophy my practical allies say, rightly — almost nobody in politics cares about this, they won’t listen, they mostly can’t do simple politics, it’s pointless trying to get them to think about philosophy.
This is true but misses the point. Blogs on philosophy are not for 99.9% of SW1 — they are for the 0.1% and for people outside SW1.
Everybody in politics is pursuing things they were programmed to pursue by dead philosophers. We are all somewhat ‘NPC’. The collapse in standards of elite education means we are less able than many of our ancestors to think for ourselves. The political crisis we’re in requires deep new stories. The old parties’ old stories are deathly stale and is partly why they only mobilise apathy or hate. To develop new stories we need to figure out why the old stories are played out. For this, we must turn to the deepest ideas. The coming discussions over biological engineering and AI demand the same.
I won’t now go into what seems to be coming next. After I’ve reviewed the essays I’ll add something.
At the bottom are SNIPPETS on:
Shor on 2024
Professor Ansell calling ‘peak populism’
Toby Lutke on AI. Shopify must see if an AI can do a job before hiring someone
Karpathy on AI. Unlike previous technologies adopted first by big organisations then normal people, LLMs are the reverse: the big effects are with normal people not big organisations. The future is here and very highly distributed.
Michael Nielsen on AI. Alignment isn’t a solution, it’s a problem.
Askonas on AI.
Drones and AI.
Espionage and AI.
‘Moneyball military’ and AI.
Bioterror and AI.
Deterrence and AI.
AI Scenarios for 2025-7 by Daniel Kokotajlo & Scott Alexander.
Tariffs, containers, logistics
VOTE REFORM TOMORROW
On Thursday, you should vote Reform if you have a local vote, unless you’re voting personally for someone you know about. Why? To signal a desire for big change and strengthen the forces pushing for big change. Voting Tory just encourages the useless gang in charge to think they should carry on what they’re doing which is wasting everyone’s time. Per my previous blog we need to either a) push them in a useful direction (and a necessary condition is retiring KB) or b) close and replace them ASAP. It’s also the best way to spook No10 to abandon some of the dumb things they’re doing — e.g letting the worst elements of the HMT/OBR consensus govern economic policy.
The key period for Reform is from Friday to this time next year and the much bigger elections. Per my previous blog:
Can they hire a great team for research, policy, communication and campaigning? Do they become the only party in Britain actually able to campaign? (Now, no big political organisation in UK can campaign up to the old standards, never mind deal with the new technologies. Campaigns require sustained focus which they can’t do and seldom try.)
Can they set out a story combining candidate selection and a political story, how the people they recruit as candidates reflect their priorities for the country?
Can they figure out how to jiujitsu the weight of the Insider attacks — old parties, old Whitehall, and old media — to their advantage? They threaten the old system. That system will try to destroy them including with use of the deep state to destroy individuals’ reputations. Countering it won’t be trivial.
NB. They do not need to transform to high performance in order to destroy the Tories’ strategic position. They can win 50-150 seats as a one-man band protest party. But they do need to transform to high performance in order to win a majority in 2029 then deliver.
The Tories have done nothing in months except encourage thousands to conclude Britain is knackered and accelerate their plans to leave — a trend that is greatly underrated in super-parochial SW1. As SW1 gets more and more out of touch with anything productive and valuable, and more and more insular, it becomes harder and harder for its NPCs to see even very obvious things. And the flight of money and talent from Europe to America is a big thing. London snaffles some stragglers on their way west, London benefits from being outside the EU’s regulatory self-sabotage on AI, but London is also losing many because of the overall political and economic farce and the manifest determination of the mainstream to carry on with Osborne-Sunak vandalism.
I’ll return to domestic politics shortly. But you can see that LFG and Crush Crime are changing debate so — if you’re NOT leaving and you want to help something that can do things, get in touch with Newport, give them time, money, expertise, connections etc.
(Also have you noticed the NPC Narrative Whiplash on OBR? When people like me said that it was ludicrous for governments to shape policy to influence future OBR forecasts (that are always wrong) — objectively a madhouse way of governing — NPCs denounced it as ‘extremist’, ‘Orbanism’, ‘fascism’ etc. Now that the OBR is seen as blocking more tax and spend for the old system, Narrative Whiplash has kicked in and now it’s ‘mainstream’ and ‘sensible’ to attack the government for its absurd approach and ‘mad’ to do the thing they defined as ‘serious’ until recently.)
GANGS
Yesterday Lawrence Newport and Crush Crime published a Bill for an immediate inquiry on the Gangs. PLEASE SUPPORT THIS BY CLICKING HERE AND ADDING YOUR NAME TO THOSE SUPPORTING.
These gangs are STILL operating.
Both parties have worked with officials to coverup not just the gangs but all the connected nightmares including: police arresting parents trying to save their children, police cooperating with the gangs to return children to them, local councillors clearly working with the gangs, whistleblowers literally murdered and so on and so on.
An Inquiry will come, the sooner the better.
It was in Labour’s interests to do this as soon as possible, blame the Tories for 14 years of coverups, and get the credit for purges and jailings and action. But obviously Starmer has defaulted to his instincts per my previous blog: always defend the old system even when it’s obviously terrible government and politics. Whitehall obviously does NOT want an Inquiry as it will reveal much guilt from officials and document in humiliating detail how Elon was right: multiple national coverups. I know this because I saw this process myself in the DfE (cf. previous blog).
Crush Crime’s Bill would make this Inquiry very unlike others. Time limited. Not a judge but an investigator in charge. Coordinated with a No10 Task Force. RICO powers. Force the courts to publish all transcripts and stop them abandoning centuries of England’s tradition of open justice. And much more. Judges refusing to allow publication of court transcripts because they think public discussion of trials is ‘not in the public interest’ is a perfect example of where ‘the mainstream’ are taking us.
Farage said yesterday that if Labour does NOT u-turn and do it, then the Reform Manifesto will pledge to introduce the Crush Crime Bill in the first month of the next Parliament. This will exert pressure. The Tories will have to promise similar. And Labour MPs will tell No10: you cannot have this as an election issue, neutralise it with our inquiry that also smashes the Tories for failure 2010-24…
Some coverage so far:
Telegraph, MPs try to force grooming gang inquiry
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/04/29/mps-try-to-force-grooming-gang-inquiry/
GB NEWS, Farage teams up with Labour to force Keir Starmer into grooming gangs public inquiry
GB NEWS, Reform makes manifesto commitment to national grooming gangs inquiry in first month
Farage: “If Labour refuses to hold an inquiry, Reform’s manifesto at the next election will commit to legislation for an Inquiry, with statutory powers, into the gangs introduced to Parliament in the first month of the Reform government. This inquiry must happen and will happen.”
https://www.gbnews.com/politics/reform-manifesto-commitment-national-grooming-gangs-inquiry-first-month
GB NEWS
https://x.com/GBNEWS/status/1917169937824571497
GB NEWS, Eamonn Holmes interviews Lawrence Newport
https://www.facebook.com/GBNewsOnline/videos/540216282224939/
Twitter – Crush Crime
Justice should be a matter of PUBLIC RECORD - but the system is so broken that trial transcripts are either DESTROYED or hidden behind massive bureaucratic paywalls.
Interview with Adam Wren about his court transcript campaign
https://x.com/crush_crime/status/1915665077266772169
Twitter – Zia Yusuf (Chairman of Reform UK)
The only way to bring justice to victims of the grooming gangs is a full national, statutory inquiry with the power to compel witnesses.
We will launch this in the first month of a Reform government.
https://x.com/ZiaYusufUK/status/1917181498496569850
LBC – Nick Ferrari
Lawrence Newport interviewed on Nick Ferrari show
https://x.com/crush_crime/status/1917488473201614990
SOME RECENT BLOGS
My recent blog on UK politics
https://dominiccummings.substack.com/p/tsp-5-what-comes-in-2025-6-as-both
Specifically on Whitehall
https://dominiccummings.substack.com/i/152759149/starmer-and-whitehall-who-fires-whom
11/24: Why did Trump win?
The ~50 Year Cycle of Regime Change
https://dominiccummings.substack.com/p/q-and-a?open=false#%C2%A7the-year-cycle-of-regime-change
The Pathological Simulacrum and the Cycle of Narrative Whiplash
Freedom’s Forge, on procurement and industrial production in WW2
Metternich’s and Pitt’s struggles for a new international order
What is political philosophy?
This essay is an edited version of a Lecture in December 1954. It appears in a book of the same name.
I The Problem of Political Philosophy
All political action aims at preservation or change.
All political action is guided by ‘some thought of better and worse’.
Thought of better and worse implies thought of the good.
All political action has then in itself a directedness towards knowledge of the good: of the good life or of the good society. For the good society is the complete political good.
When men make it their explicit goal to acquire knowledge of the good life and of the good society, ‘political philosophy emerges’.
The theme of political philosophy is mankind’s great objectives, freedom and government or empire — objectives which are capable of lifting all men beyond their poor selves.
Political philosophy is a branch of philosophy. Philosophy is a quest for ‘universal knowledge’, an attempt to ‘replace opinions about the whole by knowledge of the whole’. A quest for knowledge of the whole, or ‘all things’, means knowledge of God, the world, and man — of the nature of all things, and the natures in their totality are ‘the whole’.
Philosophy is essentially not possession of the truth but quest for the truth. The distinctive trait of the philosopher is that “he knows that he knows nothing” and that his insight into our ignorance concerning the most important things induces him to strive with all his power for knowledge.
It may be that philosophy can never get beyond discussion but this does not make it futile. Genuine knowledge of a fundamental question is better than blindness or indifference.
Minimum quod potest haberi de cognitione rerum altissimarum, desiderabilius est quam certissima cognitio quae habetur de minimis rebus. (Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I, qu. 1 a.5.)
The slenderest knowledge that may be obtained of the highest things is more desirable than the most certain knowledge obtained of lesser things.
[A paraphrase of Aristotle: ‘The scanty conceptions to which we can attain of celestial things give us, from their excellence, more pleasure than all our knowledge of the world in which we live; just as a half glimpse of persons that we love is more delightful than a leisurely view of other things.’]
Political philosophy is the attempt to ‘replace opinion about the nature of political things by knowledge of the nature of political things … and the right, or the good, political order’.
All political philosophy is political thought but not all political thought is political philosophy. Political thought is indifferent to the opinion/knowledge distinction but for political philosophy it’s central.
‘Political science’ is ambiguous and characterised by a ‘pitiful pretentiousness’. It designates a) ‘such investigations of political things as are guided by the model of natural science’ and b) the work of those in ‘political science departments’. It conceives itself as the way towards genuine knowledge of politics and a replacement, in time, for political philosophy.
In former epochs, intelligent men could gain political knowledge from listening to wise men and reading good historians. This is ‘no longer sufficient’ because we live in ‘dynamic mass societies’, societies characterised by ‘immense complexity and rapid change’. Political knowledge is harder to come by and becomes obsolete more rapidly.
All political knowledge implies assumptions — e.g one cannot know anything about a new war without assumptions about war as such. The goal of a general is victory which is not essentially controversial. But the meaning of ‘the common good’ is essentially controversial. The ambiguity of political goals are due to their ‘comprehensive character’.
Today political philosophy is in ‘a state of decay and perhaps putrefaction if it has not vanished altogether’. There is total disagreement about its subject matter, methods and function. And its very possibility has become questionable. The only thing political science academics agree on is the usefulness of political philosophy. The distinction between philosophy and science has been applied and created a distinction between a) a non-philosophic political science and b) a non-scientific political philosophy — a distinction which strips ‘all dignity, all honesty from political philosophy’. And large segments of what were part of political philosophy have been stripped away and given names like economics and sociology.
The pitiable rump for which honest social scientists do not care is left as prey to philosophers of history and to people who amuse themselves more than others with professions of faith. We hardly exaggerate when we say that today political philosophy does not exist any more except as matter for burial, i.e for historical research, or else as a theme of weak and unconvincing protestations.
Why? We are told ‘political philosophy is unscientific’ or unhistorical or both.
Science and History, those two great powers of the modern world, have finally succeeded in destroying the very possibility of political philosophy.
This is partly generated by the spread of positivism.
By the end of the 19th Century social science positivism reached its final form by decreeing that only factual judgements are within the competence of social science but value judgements are outside. Positivist social science is ‘value free’, neutral about good and evil: ‘moral obtuseness is the necessary condition for scientific analysis’. So social science inevitably drifted towards conformism and philistinism. Rapidly social scientists get entangled in ‘the predicament which leads to the downfall of Thrasymachus and his taming by Socrates’.
1/ But it is impossible to study important social phenomena without making value judgements.
2/ Weber postulated the insolubility of all value conflicts. But while we may not be able to decide who is more just in a conflict between nations lasting centuries, ‘cannot we decide that Jezebel’s action against Naboth was inexcusable’?
3/ Positivism raises scientific knowledge to the highest kind and deprecates pre-scientific knowledge comparable to folklore. This is itself a superstition that causes an obsession with trying to prove things a ten year old knows but cannot be proved scientifically.
4/ ‘Positivism necessarily transforms itself into historicism.’ It mistakes the peculiarities of mid-20th Century America with the essential character of human society. What we are interested in in history comes from ‘values’, from subjective principles, not from facts. And in another paradoxical twist, social science itself proves to be ‘historical’ and reflection on social science as a historical phenomenon leads to the relativisation of social science and ultimately of modern science generally. Modern science ‘comes to be viewed as one historically relative way of understanding things which is not in principle superior to alternative ways of understanding.’ [NB. how well this summarises much of the current madness in academia!]
5/ Historicism abandons the fact/value distinction. It denies the authority of modern natural science. It refuses to regard the historical process as fundamentally reasonable. It denies the relevance of ‘the evolutionist thesis by contending that the evolution of man out of non-man cannot make intelligible man’s humanity’. It rejects the question of the good society because of the historical character of society and thought.
It was the contempt for these permanencies [the permanent characteristics of humanity, e.g the distinction between noble and base] which permitted the most radical historicist in 1933 [Heidegger] to welcome, as a dispensation of fate, the verdict of the least wise and least moderate part of his nation while it was in its least wise and least moderate mood, and at the same time speak of wisdom and moderation. The biggest event of 1933 would rather seem to have proved, if such proof was necessary, that man cannot abandon the question of the good society, and that he cannot free himself from the responsibility for answering it by deferring to History or to any other power different from his own reason.
II The Classical Solution
Plato et al knew that ‘evil cannot be eradicated and therefore that one’s expectations from politics must be moderate.’
The guiding theme is the nature of the regime, the form which gives society its character, the manner of living of society and in society, its moral taste. Classical political philosophy seeks an answer to — what is the best regime for man, the in-between being between animal and god?
The classics held the view that the nature of the regime — whether it is good — is even more important than the nation.
Classical political philosophy is criticised today as a) anti-democratic and b) based on classical natural philosophy which modern science has exposed as false.
The severest indictment of democracy is Book VIII of the Republic. Yet Plato also acknowledged good aspects of democracy such as the freedom it gives all. But the classics rejected democracy because they thought the aim of human life is virtue, not freedom.
Virtue requires education, education requires leisure, leisure requires wealth.
Poverty is ubiquitous so democracy means rule by the uneducated which must be wrong.
Rousseau argued that man is naturally good, and all knowledge needed to be virtuous is supplied by the conscience of simple souls. But his education scheme was one few could afford.
Generally it has become believed that democracy requires universal education but this presupposes that scarcity has given way to plenty. The difference between the ancients and us regarding democracy consists ‘exclusively in a different estimate of the virtues of technology’.
Their [the classical view’s] implicit prophecy that the emancipation of technology, of the arts, from moral and political control would lead to disaster or to the fundamental dehumanisation of man has not yet been refuted.
Democracy has also not solved the problem of education.
What’s called ‘education’ is often not education proper which is ‘the formation of character’ rather than instruction and training.
To the extent democracy does focus on formation of character, it is often a dangerous focus on ‘the regular guy’, the cooperative fellow, a certain part of social virtue — and a neglect of ‘those virtues which mature … in privacy, not to say in solitude’ — people who are prepared ‘to stand alone, to fight alone’. ‘Democracy has not yet found a defence against the creeping conformism and the ever-increasing invasion of privacy which it fosters.’
Classical education can never be thought of as mass-education. It was the highest education for those ‘by nature fit for it’.
Is classical political philosophy bound up with an antiquated cosmology?
‘To understand man in the light of the whole means for modern natural science to understand man in the light of the sub-human.’ But in that light man is unintelligible. Classical political philosophy saw man not based on natural science but ‘in the light of the mysterious character of the whole’ — Socrates viewed man in the light of the ‘fundamental and permanent problems’. Classical philosophers were interested in the quest for natural philosophy but did not think they had a solution, nor that such a solution was a solution for the permanent problems of man.
Philosophy is a quest for knowledge of the whole. Our knowledge is characterised by a ‘fundamental dualism which has never been overcome’.
At one pole we find knowledge of homogeneity: above all in mathematics.
At the opposite pole we find knowledge of heterogeneity: in particular of heterogeneous ends, and the highest form of such knowledge is the statesman or educator. This is higher than the former because it is knowledge of a whole, of the ends of man, of the human soul. Knowledge combining the political art in its highest sense with mathematics is a combination ‘not at our disposal’. [The first big statement by LS I think is partly wrong. Without thinking there could be any sort of ‘theory of everything’, we can use maths (defined widely as a set of thinking tools) to improve our thinking about politics.]
We are constantly deluded by two opposite charms: 1) the charm of mathematics and everything akin to mathematics and 2) the charm of ‘humble awe, which is engendered by meditation on the human soul and its experiences’. Philosophy must not succumb to either charm. It is ‘the highest form of the mating of courage and moderation’.
Classical political philosophers agreed that the solution to the problem of political philosophy was that, first, the goal of political life is virtue and, second, ‘the order most conducive to virtue is the aristocratic republic’, or the mixed regime.
III The Modern Solution
Modern political philosophies have a principle in common: the rejection of the classical scheme as unrealistic.
The founder of modern political philosophy is Machiavelli. He claimed to affect — and he did affect — a break in the whole tradition of political philosophy.
His main argument was: there is something fundamentally wrong with an approach to politics which culminates in a utopia, in the description of a best regime whose actualisation is highly improbable. We should not take our bearings by virtue but by the objectives which are really pursued in societies. It was a conscious lowering of moral standards in the hope of greater chances of success.
The classical approach: morality is a substantial force in the soul of man however ineffective is may be in the affairs of states.
The Machiavelli approach: man is educated to virtue by other men but the original educators, the founders of a society, cannot have been educated by virtue. The founder of Rome was a fratricide. Morality cannot create itself, morality is only possible in a context created by immorality, justice rests on injustice, legitimacy rests on revolution. Man is not by nature directed toward virtue, pangs of conscience are not the worst thing, pangs of disappointment are at least as strong.
One cannot define the common good in terms of virtue, instead we must define virtue in terms of the common good.
The common good is the ends actually pursued by all societies:
Freedom from foreign rule.
Stability and law.
Prosperity.
Glory and empire.
Virtue is the sum of habits conducive to this end — this end makes actions virtuous, it justifies every means. Virtue is civic virtue, patriotism, devotion to collective selfishness.
He thought that man is by nature selfish but can be taught and compelled to be patriotic. Man is more malleable and the power of man is greater and the role of nature and chance are smaller than the ancients thought.
The strongest passion is the desire for glory and the highest form of the desire for glory is the desire to be a new prince who founds a new order and moulds generations of men. The desire for glory is the link between badness and goodness. The new founder-prince is morally the same as a great criminal.
And for Machiavelli, it is the right kind of institutions that’s crucial, not the formation of moral character — and this shift is ‘the characteristic corollary of the belief in the almost infinite malleability of man’.
Strauss thought that there is not ‘a single true observation regarding the nature of man’ in all Machiavelli with which the classics were not thoroughly familiar. By his time the contemplative life had shifted to monasteries. Virtue had been transfigured into Christian charity. Concern for the salvation of man’s soul required behaviour the classics wold have thought inhuman, e.g Ferdinand of Aragorn expelling the Marannos from Spain. Machiavelli thought that the increase in inhumanity was the unintended but unsurprising consequence of man’s aiming too high. He wanted us instead to lower our sights, to narrow our horizons, in order to improve our chances of conquering chance and effect a shift of emphasis from moral character to institutions.
For Machiavelli, Moses was an armed prophet, Christ was an unarmed prophet who died but still was victorious because of propaganda: ‘the only element of Christianity which Machiavelli took over was the idea of propaganda’, though Machiavelli avoided the fate of Christ by not publishing until after he was dead (LS). No earlier philosopher had thought of trying to achieve posthumous success via a strategy and tactics for this purpose, the first philosopher to try to ‘control the future by embarking on a campaign of propaganda’.
For him, what the Romans had done by chance could be repeated and improved deliberately and Republicanism in the Roman style as interpreted by Machiavelli became one of the most powerful trends in modern political thought discernible in Spinoza, Montesquieu, Rousseau and the Federalists.
The theoretical basis of his teaching was a ‘decayed Aristotelianism’. But there is ‘a hidden kinship between Machiavelli’s political science and the new natural science’ of the 17th Century. There is a close connection between Machiavelli’s orientation and the notion of the controlled experiment.
His scheme also had to be modified because of ‘its revolting nature’[!]. Hobbes mitigated the scheme and thereby helped it spread. Hobbes was ‘an honest and plain-spoken Englishman’. He took justice much more seriously than Machiavelli. He denied that civil society is founded on crime. He accepted the traditional notion that justice is not merely the work of society but there is a natural right. Hobbes wrote about the duties of the subjects.
But he also accepted Machiavelli’s critique of traditional political philosophy — that it aimed too high. Hobbes demanded that natural right be derived from the beginnings — the ‘elementary wants or urges’ which determine all men most of the time, and not from man’s perfection or end, the desire for which determines only a few men a little of the time. These primary urges are selfish and reduce to self-preservation and the fear of violent death. It is not glory but fear that stands at the cradle of civil society — not heroes, perhaps criminal heroes, but terrified poor devils. The desire to live turns into the desire for comfort, into ‘pedestrian hedonism’. Glory survives only in the form of competition. So for Machiavelli the pivot was glory, for Hobbes it was power.
Power is morally neutral. Or, what is the same thing, it is ambiguous if of concealed ambiguity. Power and the concern with power lack the direct human appeal of glory and the concern with glory. It emerges through an estrangement from man’s primary motivation. It has an air of senility. It becomes visible in grey eminences rather than in Scipios and Hannibals. Respectable, pedestrian hedonism sobriety without sublimity and subtlety, protected or made possible by ‘power politics’ — this is the meaning of Hobbes’s correction of Machiavelli.
Hobbes was still too bold to be acceptable. It also needed mitigation and got it from Locke. For Locke, what man needed for self-preservation is less a weapon than food, or property: the desire for self-preservation becomes the right to unlimited acquisition.
Machiavelli’s discovery or invention of the need for an immoral or amoral substitute for morality became victorious through Locke’s discovery or invention that that substitute is acquisitiveness. Here we have an utterly selfish passion whose satisfaction does not require the spilling of any blood and whose effect is the improvement of the lot of all. In other words, the solution of the political problem by economic means is the most elegant solution, once one accepts Machiavelli’s premise: economism is Machiavellianism come of age.
For Montesquieu, the big battle was between two ideals — the Roman Republic whose principle was virtue and England whose principle was political liberty which found a substitute for Roman virtue in the pursuit of trade and finance.
But Rousseau began ‘a second wave of modernity’, a wave which bore ‘German idealistic philosophy and the romanticism of all ranks in all countries’. Rousseau and this complex counter-movement brought a return to pre-modern ways of thinking — a return from the world of the bourgeois to the world of virtue and the city.
Kant returned from Descartes’ notion of ideas to the Platonic notion.
Hegel returned from the philosophy of reflection to the ‘higher vitality’ of Plato and Aristotle.
Romanticism as a whole was primarily a return to the origins. But the return to pre-modern thought was the initial step of a movement which led to a much more radical form of modernity, much more alien to classical thought than the thought of the 17th and 18th centuries had been.
Rousseau returned to the classical city but he interpreted it through Hobbes’s scheme. For Rousseau as for Hobbes, the root of civil society is the right of self-preservation.
But for Rousseau, unlike Hobbes and Locke, this fundamental right points to a social order closely akin to the classical city.
For Hobbes and Locke the fundamental right of man had retained its original status even within civil society: natural law [deriving from God, nature or reason] remained the standard for positive law [deriving from human institutions], and there remained the possibility of appealing from positive law to natural law. The appeal was generally ineffective and could not not carry with itself the guarantee of being effective.
Rousseau drew from this the conclusion that ‘civil society must be so constructed as to make the appeal from positive law to natural law superfluous; a civil society properly constructed in accordance with natural law will automatically produce just positive law’. LS explains Rousseau’s thoughts as follows:
The general will, the will immanent in societies of a certain kind, replaces the transcendent natural right. One cannot emphasise too strongly that Rousseau would have abhorred the totalitarianism of our day. He favoured, indeed, the totalitarianism of a free society but he rejected in the clearest possible language any possible totalitarianism of government. The difficulty into which Rousseau leads us lies deeper. If the ultimate criterion of justice becomes the general will, i.e the will of a free society, cannibalism is as just as its opposite. Every institution hallowed by a folk-mind has to be regarded as sacred.
Rousseau’s thought marks a decisive step in the secular movement which tries to guarantee the actualisation of the ideal, or to prove the necessary coincidence of the rational and the real, or to get rid of that which essentially transcends every possible human reality. The assumption of such a transcendence had permitted earlier men to make a tenable distinction between liberty and license. License consist in doing what one lists; liberty consists in doing in the right manner the good only; and our knowledge of the good must come from a higher principle, from above. These men acknowledged a limitation of license which comes from above, a vertical limitation. On the basis of Rousseau, the limitation of license is effected horizontally by the license of other men. I am just if I grant to every other man the same rights which I claim for myself, regardless of what these rights may be.
This horizontal limitation is preferred as it seems more realistic — the limitation of my claim by the claim of others is self enforcing.
The separation of law and morality was defended by Kant who argued that freedom of speech includes the right to lie: all lies are immoral but also mostly legal. But this separation, of which German legal philosophy was proud, was not a sound suggestion!
Rousseau defined the state of nature, man’s beginning, as the goal of social man — man has drifted away from his beginnings and been corrupted so needs to return to this goal, the just society, which comes as close to the state of nature as a society possibly can. Man should strive to return to his most primitive state, the state before he felt the desire for self-preservation — the state of the feeling of the sweetness of mere existence without any thought for the future, a true return to nature. The feeling of self-preservation compels man to action and duty, therefore to misery, and cuts him off from the bliss buried in his origin.
For Rousseau, the tension between self-preservation and the more primitive feeling of mere existence expresses itself in the insoluble antagonism between the majority — who will in the best case be mere good citizens — and the tiny minority of solitary dreamers who find their way back to nature.
German idealistic philosophers took up this problem and thought a reconciliation possible. They claimed to have restored the high level of classical philosophy while fighting against the debasement caused by the first wave of modernity.
The philosophy of the second wave of modernity is inseparable from the philosophy of history, which did not exist in the classical world. But its introduction was not a genuine remedy for the lowering of standards in the first wave of modernity.
The actualisation of the right order is the unintended by-product of human activities which are in no way directed toward the right order. The right order … was thought by Hegel to be established in the Machiavellian way, not in the Platonic way: it was thought to be established in a manner which contradicts the right order itself. The delusions of Communism are already the delusions of Hegel and even of Kant.
The difficulties of German idealism gave rise to the third wave of modernity inaugurated by Nietzsche.
Nietzsche rejected the view that the historical process is rational and the premise that a harmony between the genuine individual and the modern state is possible. For Nietzsche, all life and thought rests on horizon-forming creations which are not susceptible to rational legitimisation. The solitary creator who gives himself a law and subjects himself to its rigours replaces Rousseau’s solitary dreamer. He called on people to revolutionise themselves, not society or nation. He hoped in future generations the best would answer his call and become a new nobility to rule the planet. He preferred a planetary aristocracy to a universal stateless and classless society.
He loathed socialism and communism — and conservatism, nationalism and democracy. But, argues Strauss, he left the next generation no choice except between irresponsible indifference to politics and irresponsible political options. He thus helped prepare a regime [Nazis] which made ‘made discredited democracy look again like a golden age’.
[NB. As Strauss explains elsewhere, one has to keep two things in mind regarding Nietzsche and Nazis. First, he loathed anti-Semites and would have loathed the Nazis. Was he ‘a Nazi’? Absolutely not. (His sister, who did go along with the Nazis, faked things that caused great confusion.) Second, he helped prepare the Nazi regime in a causal sense. Both are true: he was not a Nazi, and he prepared the ground for the Nazis.]
After him, modern thought embraced a radical historicism, ‘explicitly condemning to oblivion the notion of eternity’.
For oblivion of eternity, or, in other words, estrangement from man’s deepest desire and therewith from the primary issues, is the price which modern man had to pay … for attempting to be absolutely sovereign, to become the master and owner of nature, to conquer chance.
Political philosophy and history
[This essay was first published in Social Research, 1945. It concerns historicism, its attitude to classical philosophy, and its effects on modern philosophy and political thinking.]
Political philosophy is fundamentally different from, but not ‘absolutely independent’ of, history. Political philosophy must work with historical information but this is ‘preliminary and auxillary’, always about individual wars, people, groups, regimes and so on.
This view of the relation of political philosophy and history was ‘unquestionably dominant’ in until at least the end of the 18th Century.
But now it is rejected in favour of historicism, i.e ‘the assertion that the fundamental distinction between philosophic and historical questions cannot in the last analysis be maintained’. Historicism questions the possibility of political philosophy and ‘creates an entirely new situation for political philosophy’. Historicism is ‘a most powerful agent that affects more or less all present day thought’ and ‘as far as we can speak at all of the spirit of a time we can assert with confidence that the spirit of our time is historicism’.
The fusion of philosophy and history advocated by historicism may not be achievable but it is ‘the natural goal toward which the victorious trends of nineteenth and early twentieth-century thought converge’.
We now have vast numbers of historical studies and take for granted that historical knowledge is part of the highest learning.
When Plato sketched the ideal education he did not mention history. Aristotle said that poetry is more philosophic than history and this attitude was characteristic of all classical philosophers and philosophers of the Middle Ages. History was praised by rhetoricians, not philosophers. [Practical political Greeks and Romans after Herodotus and Thucydides started thinking historically and using history in political arguments.]
A fundamental change came in the 16th Century when opposition to earlier philosophy was marked by a novel emphasis on history.
The rationalism of the 17-18th Centuries was much more historical than pre-modern rationalism.
By the end of the 17th Century it was normal to speak of ‘the spirit of the time’.
In the middle of the 18th Century the term ‘philosophy of history’ was coined.
The teaching of Hegel in the 19th Century was supposed to be a synthesis of philosophy and history.
The ‘historical school’ of the 19th Century brought about the substitution of historical jurisprudence, historical political science, historical economic science for a jurisprudence, a political science, an economic science that were un-historical or a-historical.
Historicism emerged in the 19th Century.
The typical historicism of the twentieth century demands that each generation reinterpret the past on the basis of its own experience and with a view to is own future. It is no longer contemplative, but activistic; and it attaches to that study of the past which is guided by the anticipated future … a crucial philosophic significance: it expects from it the ultimate guidance for political life. The result is visible in practically every curriculum and textbook of our time. One has the impression that the question of the nature of political things has been superseded by the question of the characteristic “trends” of the social life of the present and of their historical origins, and that the question of the best, or just, political order has been superseded by the question of the probable or desirable future. The questions of the modern state, of modern government, of the ideals of western civilisation and so forth occupy a place that was formally occupied by the questions of the state and of the right way of life. Philosophical questions have been transformed into … historical questions of a “futuristic” character…
The most common form of historicism expresses itself in the demand that the questions of the nature of political things, of the state, of the nature of man and so forth, be replaced by the questions of the modern state, of modern government, of the present political situation, of modern man, of our society, our culture, our civilisation, and so forth.
Historicism argues that any attempt to describe the old philosophical questions must be ‘historically conditioned’, i.e ‘to remain dependent on the specific situation in which it is suggested’. Nothing said about universal questions is valid. Some historicists insist that philosophy itself is historically conditioned, i.e essentially related to Western man or the Greeks and their intellectual heirs.
Historicism assumes that the object of historical knowledge which it calls ‘History’ is a ‘field’ or world of its own fundamentally different from Nature. The pre-historicist view was that a) ‘history’ designated a particular kind of knowledge or inquiry, b) ‘history’ as an object of knowledge does not exist and c) ‘philosophy of history’, as an analysis of a specific ‘dimension of reality’, was not dreamed of. The historicist attitude becomes clearer when one thinks what the Bible or Plato ‘would have called that X which we are in the habit of calling “History”.’ Historicism also sees every restoration of earlier teachings as impossible, or an intended restoration really leads to an essential modification.
We can consider the attacks of early historicism on the political philosophy which had paved the way for the French Revolution:
The representatives of the ‘historical school’ assumed that certain influential philosophers of the eighteenth century had conceived of the right political order, or of the rational political order, as an order which should or could be established at any time and in any place, without regard to the particular conditions of time and place.
Over against this opinion they [the representatives of the ‘historical school’] asserted that the only legitimate approach to political matters is the historical approach, i.e. the understanding of the institutions of a given country as a product of its past. Legitimate political action must be based on such historical understanding, as distinguished from, and opposed to, the “abstract principles” of 1789 or any other “abstract principles”.
Whatever the deficiencies of eighteenth century political philosophy may be, they certainly do not justify the suggestion that the non-historical philosophical approach must be replaced by a historical approach. Most political philosophers of the past, because of the non-historical character of their thought, distinguished as a matter of course between the philosophic question of the best political order, and the practical question as to whether that order could or should be established in a given country at a given time. They naturally knew that all political action, as distinguished from political philosophy, is concerned with individual situations, and must therefore be based on a clear grasp of the situation concerned, and therefore often on an understanding of the antecedents of that situation. They took it for granted that political action guided by the belief that what is most desirable in itself must be put into practice in all circumstances, regardless of the circumstances, befits harmless doves, ignorant of the wisdom of the serpent, but not sensible and good men. In short, the truism that all political action is concerned with, and therefore presupposes appropriate knowledge of, individual situations, individual institutions and so on, is wholly irrelevant to the question raised by historicism.
So:
A. Pre-historicist political philosophers distinguished between a) the philosophic question of the best political order, and b) the practical question as to whether that order could or should be established in a given country at a given time.
B. Political action obviously must be based on a clear grasp of the specifics of the political landscape including the relevant history.
C. A and B are irrelevant to the question raised by historicism.
D. The idea of trying to put into practice a pure philosophic ideal regardless of circumstances is an idea for ‘harmless doves, ignorant of the wisdom of the serpent, but not sensible and good men’.
Many moderns see historicism as coming later therefore being true! They see it as developing in response to the experience of centuries which teaches that non-historical political philosophy is a failure, it produced multiple ideas that refute each other.
Strauss replies that they contradict, not refute, each other. And the idea that non-historical political philosophy has failed because so far it has not taught us the answer to the best regime is hardly an insight we needed from historicism, it is obvious and indeed is implied in the very name “philosophy”! That does not mean you throw the subject out.
The historicists also argue that particular political philosophies were generated by particular historical situations — Plato’s philosophy was essentially related to the classical Greek city, Locke’s philosophy was essentially related to the English Revolution of 1688 etc.
But this is a superficial argument. Political philosophers adapted the expression of their thoughts to their particular situation in order to be listened to. They did not just explain what they considered the truth. They also explained what they considered desirable or feasible in the circumstances and communicated in a manner that was ‘civil’ as well as ‘philosophical’. So showing that their political teaching as a whole is ‘historically conditioned’ does not prove that their political philosophy is ‘historically conditioned’.
A political philosophy does not become obsolete merely because the historical situation, and in particular the political situation to which it was related has ceased to exist. For every political situation contains elements which are essential to all political situations: how else could one intelligibly call all these different political situations “political situations”?…
Classical political philosophy is not refuted … by the mere fact that the [classical] city … has been superseded by the modern state.
Most classical political philosophers considered the city the most perfect political organisation because they compared it to others — tribes, empires, monarchies. They thought the city had civilisation, unlike a tribe, and freedom, unlike the eastern monarchy.
Many continued to believe this. Only in the 19th Century did classical political philosophy ‘in a sense become obsolete’ partly because the modern state could plausibly claim to be ‘at least as much in accordance with the standards of freedom and civilisation as the Greek city had been’. But it was not completely obsolete because classical political philosophy had expounded in a ‘classic’ manner the standards of freedom and civilisation.
Modern democracy has elicited — or perhaps been the outcome of — a reinterpretation of ‘freedom’ and ‘civilisation’ which could not have been foreseen by classical political philosophy. And there are ‘definite reasons for considering that reinterpretation intrinsically superior to the original version’.
Historicism replaced belief in progress — a belief that stands between the non-historical view of the philosophic tradition and historicism. This belief a) agreed with the old view that there are universally valid standards but b) deviates from it in asserting there is ‘a historical process’, a process of progress in which thought and institutions move towards an order that aligns with universal standards of human excellence.
The philosophers of the past understood themselves in a non-historical manner. They claimed to have found parts of the truth. Historicists must understand the philosophers of the past ‘historically’. Historicists argue the philosophers were wrong. They repeat the sin for which they attacked the ‘progressivist’ historiography.
Our understanding of history improves when we do not think we are superior but when we think we can learn from (not just about) the past. But historicists deny this possibility.
And of course if the historicist thesis is correct then we cannot escape the consequence that the thesis itself is historical therefore valid only for a specific historical situation: it must be applied to itself.
What’s the most convincing argument for the fusion of philosophic and historical studies?
The argument that (1) our political ideas are mostly abbreviations and residues of thoughts from the past, once explicit and clear but then transmitted to later generations in noisy ways. If we want clarity about them then (2) we must delve into the history of those ideas. So (3) the clarification of political ideas insensibly changes into the history of political ideas so the philosophic effort and historical effort become fused.
But classical philosophers like Aristotle did not feel this need — they were clear about political ideas and did not delve into their history.
Modern thought is in all its forms, directly or indirectly, determined by the idea of progress…
If, as we must, we apply historicism to itself, we must explain historicism in terms of the specific character of modern thought, … of modern philosophy. In doing so, we observe that modern political philosophy or science, as distinguished from pre-modern political philosophy or science, is in need of the history of political philosophy or science as an integral part of its own efforts, since, as modern political philosophy or science itself admits or even emphasises, it consists to a considerable extent of inherited knowledge whose basis is no longer contemporaneous or immediately accessible. The recognition of this necessity cannot be mistaken for historicism. For historicism asserts that the fusion of philosophic and historical questions marks in itself a progress beyond ‘naive’ non-historical philosophy, whereas we limit ourselves to asserting that that fusion is, within the limits indicated, inevitable on the basis of modern philosophy, as distinguished from pre-modern philosophy or ‘the philosophy of the future’.
On Classical Political Philosophy
[Originally published in 1945.]
Classical political philosophy was directly related to political life.
It then became a tradition that was more remote from political life.
The classical Greek tradition was rejected in the 16th and 17th Centuries.
The new political philosophy was related to political life ‘through the medium of the inherited general notion of political philosophy and through the medium of a new concept of science’.
The modern philosophers tried to replace the teaching and method of the classics but thought political philosophy was necessary and possible.
Today political scientists think they can reject political philosophy and stand in direct relation to political life. They are wrong. They are related to political life through the medium of reactions to modern natural science and through inherited concepts, however despised or ignored.
The most striking difference between the classical political philosophy and today’s political science is that the latter is ‘no longer concerned at all with what was the guiding question for the former: the question of the best political order’. Political science now focuses on methods.
Classical political philosophy accepted the basic distinctions made in political life exactly in the sense and with the orientation in which they are made in political life. It did not start with distinctions such as fact/value, ‘state of nature’, ‘the civil state’, ‘reality’ and ‘ideology’ — distinctions which arise only in philosophical reflection, not from political life. Its main issues were neither philosophic nor scientific but were ‘intelligible and familiar at least to all sane adults from everyday experience and everyday usage’.
Its method was also presented by political life which is characterised by conflicts particularly over what is good for the community and what is just. Parties make arguments and conflict calls for arbitration. And some of the disputes involve permanent problems of paramount importance ‘The umpire par excellence is the political philosopher’ (cf. Plato’s 8th letter 354a1-5, Laws 627d11). The philosopher’s duty was, as a good citizen, to diminish civil strife. To do this he has to ask ulterior questions not normally raised in the political arena but he must keep his fundamental orientation — that which is inherent in political life.
Questions of method only become the fundamental question if this orientation is abandoned and if basic distinctions of political life become treated as ‘subjective’ or ‘unscientific’.
Political life is concerned mainly with an individual community and particular problems. Its highest skill is managing well the affairs of his community, which is a mix of art, prudence, practical wisdom etc. This is what ‘political science’ originally meant — ‘the skill by virtue of which a man could manage well the affairs of political communities by deed and by speech’. It is not a body of true propositions concerning politics transmitted by teachers to pupils’. Someone who possesses ‘political science’ can in principle give advice to, or manage the affairs of, anybody anywhere, like Themistocles.
Speaking became the first object of instruction because action should proceed from deliberation and the element of deliberation is speech. But classical political philosophy rejected the identification of political science with rhetoric and held that rhetoric at its best was only an instrument. Political skill is partly the normal business of governing but at its highest it’s the process of creating the constitutional-legislative framework, intended to be enduring, in which normal political life plays out:
The value of his [any politician’s] achievement depends ultimately on ‘the value of the cause in whose service he acts; and that cause is not his work but the work of him or those who made the laws and institutions of his community. The legislative skill is, therefore, the most ‘architectonic’ political skill that is known to political life. (Cf. Gorgias 464b7-8. And Rousseau: S’il est vrai qu’un grand prince est un homme rare, que sera-ce d’un grand législateur ? Le premier n'a qu’à suivre le modèle que l'autre doit proposer. If it is true that a great prince is a rare man, what will a great legislator be like? The first has only to follow the model that the other must propose.)
So the political philosopher who has reached his goal and learned the truly architectonic knowledge is the one who can teach legislators and who is the umpire par excellence. And this knowledge is transferable to other places and times.
Political controversies presuppose the existence of the political community therefore ‘the classics are not primarily concerned with the question of whether and why there is, or should be, a political community’, nor, therefore, with the nature and purpose of a political community. To question the desirability or necessity of the survival of one’s own community normally means treason so the ultimate aim of foreign policy is not controversial. Classical political philosophy therefore focuses on the inner structure: who governs, what is just, the controversies between groups struggling for power, and these questions involve the danger of civil war.
The groups considered by the classics were: the good (merit), the rich, the noble, and the multitude or the poor, and a central struggle was that between rich and poor.
That form of government is the best, which provides the most effectually for a pure selection of the natural aristoi into offices of the government. (Jefferson to John Adams, 1813.)
Good men are those able and willing to advance the common interest regardless of private interests and those who do the right thing because it is noble and right. But it was also accepted by the classics that desirable results can come from men of bad character or by use of unjust means: ‘just’ and ‘useful’ are not identical, virtue can lead to ruin.
Classical political philosophy was therefore practical, not theoretical, and its main concern was the right guidance of political life, not description or understanding. Hegel’s demand that political philosophy refrain from construing a state as it ought to be and from teaching how it should be, and instead try to understand the actual state as rational was a rejection of classical political philosophy.
Classical political philosophy was therefore guided by and culminated in ‘value judgements’. Trying to replace the search for the best political order with a political science supposedly descriptive or analytical that rejects value judgements is, from the point of view of the classics, as absurd as the idea of a medicine which refuses to distinguish between health and sickness.
Distinctions between terms like justice/injustice and kindness/selfishness are moral distinctions intelligible and clear in everyday life, though they cannot be demonstrated or proved. One can silence but not truly convince people who do not have the taste for such moral distinctions just as Socrates could silence but not convert Callicles.
The political teaching of the classical philosophers was not for the intelligent men but for the decent men. Teaching the indecent would have seemed politically irresponsible. Their attitude was that the health of a political community requires its members are guided by decency therefore —
… the political community cannot tolerate a political science which is morally ‘neutral’ and which therefore tends to loosen the hold of moral principles on the minds of those who are exposed to it.
Inevitably the classical political philosopher had to consider what is virtue and what is that virtue whose possession gives a man the highest right to rule?
The philosopher is compelled to transcend not just common opinion and political opinion but political life as such, for he is ‘led to realise that the ultimate aim of political life cannot be reached by political life but only by a life devoted to contemplation, to philosophy’ and this finding sets limits to all political action and political planning. Ultimately political philosophy transforms itself into a discipline no longer concerned with political things in the normal sense but in the philosophical life itself. Socrates called his inquiries a quest for ‘the true political skill’. This philosophic life has vanished in modernity.
Philosophy was originally concerned with ‘the natural things’. Socrates was famous as a philosopher before he turned to political philosophy and became its founder — and Aristotle described political philosophy as ‘the philosophy concerning the human things’. Left to themselves philosophers would not descend to politics but would remain in what they considered ‘the island of the blessed’ — that is the contemplation of the truth (cf. Republic, 519b7-d7). But philosophy’s quest to understand its own purpose and nature — the contemplation of truth — inevitably involves consideration of opinion, of politics.
Why does politics need philosophy? The Republic and similar works were an attempt at a political justification for philosophy by showing that the well-being of the community depends on the study of philosophy. Such a justification was needed given few understood philosophy and, to the extent it was known about in classical Athens, it was often feared and hated — as Socrates experienced. Such justifications, aimed at normal citizens, had, following the example of Odysseus, to build on commonly held views. Strauss therefore argues that ‘political philosophy’ really means not the philosophic treatment of politics ‘but the political, or popular, treatment of philosophy’, an attempt to lead people from the political life to the philosophic life.
Introduction to The City and Man
The City and Man — published 1864 based on lectures recently given — has essays on Aristotle, Plato’s Republic and Thucydides.
Strauss opens the book with a series of propositions that go to the heart of modern philosophy, modern politics and what he described as ‘the crisis of the West’.
The theme of classical political philosophy is the City and Man.
Modern political philosophy presupposes Nature as understood by modern natural science and History as understood by the modern historical awareness.
Eventually these presuppositions prove incompatible with modern political philosophy.
Thus one seems to be confronted with the choice between abandoning political philosophy altogether and returning to classical political philosophy.
Yet such a return seems to be impossible. For what has brought about the collapse of modern political philosophy seems to have buried classical political philosophy, which did not even dream of the difficulties caused by what we believe to know of nature and history.
A simple continuation of the tradition of classical political philosophy is no longer possible.
As regards modern political philosophy, what originally was a political philosophy has turned into an ideology.
This fact may be said to form the core of the contemporary crisis of the West.
Strauss reflects on Spengler’s diagnosis of the decline of the West. For Spengler, the West was more than one high culture among others. The West is the only culture which has conquered the earth, the only culture which is open to all cultures and does not reject them all as forms of barbarism or tolerate them as ‘underdeveloped’, it is the only culture which has developed full consciousness of culture in general. And because it is the culture which reaches full self-consciousness, it is the final culture — the Owl of Minerva begins its flight in the dusk (Hegel’s formulation of the idea that philosophy and wisdom about a period emerge only after the period has passed). The decline of the West is therefore identical with the exhaustion of the possibility of high culture; the highest possibilities of man are exhausted.
But the highest possibilities of man cannot be exhausted as long as the fundamental riddles which confront man remain unsolved. Spengler’s analysis and prediction are wrong. Natural science considers itself susceptible of infinite progress therefore there cannot be a meaningful ‘end of history’, though there could be a ‘brutal stopping of man’s onward march through natural forces acting by themselves or directed by human brains and hands’.
Yet in one sense Spengler has proved to be right. Some decline of the West has occurred before our eyes. In 1913, the West — in the form of Britain, Germany and America — could have laid down the law for the world without firing a shot. Today the West’s survival is endangered by the East for the first time.
From the Communist Manifesto it would appear that the victory of Communism would be the complete victory of the West — of the synthesis, transcending the national boundaries, of British industry, the French Revolution and German philosophy — over the East. We see that the victory of Communism would mean indeed the victory of originally Western natural science but surely at the same time the victory of the most extreme form of Eastern despotism.
Strauss sets out exactly what he thinks the crisis of the West really is:
The West was once certain of its purpose — a universal purpose — a purpose in which all men could be united, and hence it had a clear vision of its future as the future of mankind.
We no longer have that certainty. Many despair of the future and this despair explains many forms of contemporary western degradation.
A society can be healthy without a universal purpose — it can be tribal and healthy. ‘But a society which was accustomed to understand itself in terms of a universal purpose cannot lose faith in that purpose without becoming completely bewildered.’
We see this universal purpose echoed in recent declarations during both world wars. These restate the purpose ‘stated originally by the most successful form of modern political philosophy’ which aspired to build on foundations laid by the classics but in opposition to the structure erected by classical political philosophy — ‘a society superior in truth and justice to the society toward which the classics expired.’
According to the modern project, philosophy or science was no longer to be understood as essentially contemplative and proud but as active and charitable; it was to be in the service of the relief of man’s estate; it was to be cultivated for the sake of human power; it was to enable man to become the master and owner of nature through the intellectual conquest of nature. Philosophy or science should make possible progress toward ever greater prosperity; it thus should enable everyone to share in all the advantages of society or life and therewith give full effect to everyone’s natural right to comfortable self-preservation and all that that right entails or to everyone’s natural right to develop all his faculties fully in concert with everyone else’s doing the same. The progress toward ever greater prosperity would thus become, or render possible, the progress toward ever greater freedom and justice. This progress would necessarily be the progress toward a society embracing equally all human beings: a universal league of free and equal nations, each nation consisting of free and equal men and women. For it had come to be believed that the prosperous, free, and just society in a single country or in only a few countries is not possible in the long run: to make the world safe for the Western democracies, one must make the whole globe democratic, each country in itself as well as the society of nations. Good order in one country presuppose good order in all countries and among all countries. The movement toward the universal society, or the universal state was thought to be guaranteed not only by the rationality, the universal validity, of the goal but also because the movement towards the goal seemed to be the movement of the large majority of men on behalf of the large majority of men: only small groups of men who, however, hold in thrall many millions of their fellow human beings new defend their own antiquated interests, resist that movement.
To summarise: a) science lets man conquer nature; b) this brings growing and spreading prosperity thereby fulfilling natural rights to a comfortable life; c) prosperity and comfort mean progress towards ever greater freedom and justice; d) human equality spreads to all societies; e) the world becomes some sort of universal league of free and equal nation states, for the safety of western democracy requires the whole globe becoming democratic; f) this progress will come not only because it is rational but because most people want it.
Fascism did not dent this story. But Communism did. For some time Communism seemed to many westerners as ‘a parallel movement to the Western movement — as it were its somewhat impatient, wild wayward twin who was bound to become mature, patient, and gentle’. But Communism responded to friendliness with contempt. Even in mortal danger and eager for Western help it would not give ‘even sincere words of thanks in return’ [a reference to Stalin and Lend Lease etc]. Communism was not a version of the ‘reactionism’ the Western movement had been fighting for centuries. The Western project could not provide against Communism as it had against its previous enemies. ‘For some time it seemed sufficient to say that while the Western movement agrees with Communism regarding the goal – the universal prosperous society, free and equal men and women – it disagrees with it regarding the means: for Communism, the end, the good of the whole human race, being the most sacred thing, justifies any means; whatever contributes to the achievement of the most sacred end partakes of its sacredness and is therefore itself sacred; whatever hinders the achievement of that end is devilish.’ Some murders are acceptable. But it came to be seen that ‘there is not only a difference of degree but of kind between the Western movement and Communism, and this difference was seen to concern morality, the choice of means.’ It became clearer than it had been for some time that no society can eradicate the evil in man: ‘as long as there will be men, there will be malice, envy, and hatred, and hence there cannot be a society which does not have to employ coercive restraint.’ And it became clearer that a) Communism will remain ‘the iron rule of a tyrant which is mitigated or aggravated by his fear of palace revolutions’ and b) ‘the only restraint in which the West can put some confidence is the tyrant’s fear of the West’s immense military power’.
Communism has forced the West to face that in the foreseeable future there will not be a universal state, unitary or federative. Even those who still contend the West’s purpose is universal must be satisfied for a while with ‘a practical particularism’, as Christianity and Islam, both based on universal claims, had to accept centuries of uneasy coexistence. The experience which has made the West doubtful of the viability of a world-society has also made it doubtful that affluence is the sufficient and even necessary condition of happiness and justice.
Social science has strongly veered into opposing the proposition that the universal and prosperous society constitutes the rational solution of the human problem. Social science proclaims its inability to validate any value judgements [see above on historicism etc]. It sees the modern political philosophy’s teaching about the universal and prosperous society as one ideology among many.
The shift in social science reflects the doubts about the modern project. ‘The modern project was originated as required by nature (natural right), i.e. it was originated by philosophers; the project was meant to satisfy in the most perfect manner the most powerful natural needs of men: nature was to be conquered for the sake of man who himself is supposed to possess a nature, an unchangeable nature; the originators of the project took it for granted that philosophy and science are identical. After some time it appeared that the conquest of nature requires the conquest of human nature and hence in the first place the questioning of the unchangeability of human nature: an unchangeable human nature might set absolute limits to progress. Accordingly, the natural needs of men could no longer direct the conquest of nature; direction had to come from reason as distinguished from nature, from the rational Ought as distinguished from the neutral Is. Thus philosophy (logic, ethics, aesthetics) as the study of the Ought or the norms became separated from science as the study of the Is. The ensuing depreciation of reason brought it about that while the study of the Is or science succeeded ever more in increasing men’s power, one could no longer distinguish between the wise or right and the foolish or wrong use of power. Science cannot teach wisdom. There are still some people who believe that this predicament will disappear when social science and psychology catch up with physics and chemistry. This belief is wholly unreasonable, for social science and psychology, however perfected, being sciences, can only bring about a still further increase of man’s power; they will enable men to manipulate man still better than ever before; they will as little teach man how to use his power over man or none-man as physics and chemistry do. The people who indulge this hope have not grasped the bearing of the distinction between facts and values.’
To summarise… The Western project originated in natural rights of man with an unchangeable nature. Science would conquer nature for the sake of these rights and this nature. But then the conquest of nature required the conquest of human nature and started questioning the unchangeability of human nature. So the conquest of nature had to be directed by reason, not by the natural needs of man. Philosophy became the study of the Ought, science the study of the Is. Science generated greater power but we lost the distinction between the wise/right and the foolish/wrong use of power. Science cannot teach wisdom. Progress in natural science will increase power but cannot teach how to use this power well.
The decay of political philosophy into ideology reveals itself in the replacement in universities of political philosophy by the history of political philosophy, i.e the replacement of something that seeks truth with a ‘survey of more or less brilliant errors’. Political philosophy will end up as the ‘footnotes to logic textbooks’ which deal with fact/value judgements, supplying slow learners with examples of the faulty transitions in political philosophy from fact to value. [!!]
While logic has eaten some of political philosophy, another chunk of what was formerly treated by political philosophy is now treated by social science. But social science asserts that all historical understanding is relative to the point of view of the historian, to his country and time, and the historian cannot understand a teaching as it was meant by its originator.
Strauss argues that one cannot understand today’s social science ‘without a return to classical political philosophy’. In studying classical political philosophy one is forced to ask whether the fact/value distinction is true and whether perhaps classical political philosophy is actually the true science of political things. The modern social scientist dismisses this on the basis that a return to the earlier position is impossible but ‘one must realise that this belief is a dogmatic assumption whose hidden basis is the belief in the progress or in the rationality of the historical process’.
We must, says Strauss, both return to study of classical political philosophy and face that ‘we cannot reasonably expect that a fresh understanding of classical political philosophy will supply us with recipes for today’s use. For the relative success of modern political philosophy has brought into being a kind of society wholly unknown to the classics, a kind of society to which the classical principles as stated and elaborated by the classics are not immediately applicable. Only we living today can possibly find a solution to the problems of today. But an adequate understanding of the principles as elaborated by the classics may be the indispensable starting point for an adequate analysis, to be achieved by us, of present-day society in its peculiar character, and for the wise application, to be achieved by us, of these principles to our tasks.’
The fact/value distinction problem is part of a larger problem — it emerged from the attempt to replace the citizen’s understanding with scientific understanding. But a ‘scientific understanding’ of politics is inevitably secondary or derivative. We must primarily understand political life as it is understood by citizen and statesman. ‘Classical political philosophy is the primary form of political science because the common sense understanding of political things is primary.’
This tour of the West’s philosophical-spiritual-epistemic crisis and the problems of modern social science/political science is the prelude to the essays on Aristotle, Plato and Thucydides.
I will start with Thucydides as he was a generation older and, per Nietzsche, his perspective is closer to the pre-Socratics than to Plato, though there are some interesting overlaps. One of the most interesting is the overlap between Thucydides Book III on civil war and Plato in the Republic at 560ff where he discusses the disparagement of moderation — a disparagement so forcefully and famously expressed by Callicles in Gorgias. (And it is a sign of our times that Bronze Age Pervert’s famous book can be accurately summarised by: Callicles was right.)
On Thucydides’ War of the Peloponnesians and the Athenians
Party associations are not based upon any established law nor do they seek the public good, they are formed in defiance of the laws and from self-interest…
Thucydides Book III
For poverty inspires necessity with daring; and wealth engenders avarice in pride and insolence; and the various conditions of human life, as they severely fall under the sway of some mighty and fatal power, through the agency of the passions lure men to destruction… In a word, then, it is impossible, and simply absurd to suppose, that human nature [physis] when bent upon some favourite project can be restrained either by the power of law [nomos] or by any other terror.
Diodotus, III.45
Where is the injustice if I or anyone who feels his own superiority to another refuses to be on a level with him?… I know that men of this lofty spirit … are hated while they are alive…; but that they leave behind them to after-ages a reputation which leads even those who are not of their family to claim kindred with them and that they are the glory of their country, which regards them not as aliens or as evil-doers but as her own children, of whose character she is proud.
Alcibiades, VI.16
The powerful exact what they can, and the weak grant what they must… For of the gods we believe and of men we know, that by a law of their nature wherever they can rule they will.
Athenian envoys on Melos
This essay is in The City and Man, 1964.
Here is an online version of Jowett’s translation if you want to follow references.
The world of Thucydides seems entirely different to the world of Plato and Aristotle. Thucydides gives us an intense account of political life in its ‘harsh grandeur, ruggedness, and even squalor’ — a world of civil and foreign war, of life and death struggles. He does not try to transcend it, he stands in the midst of the turmoil. He makes us sympathise with Themistocles and Pericles. He charts the hopes for the Sicilian Expedition and the nightmare of the quarries of Syracuse. [Strauss says he does not try to transcend it — but isn’t the deliberate elucidation of universals, such as the debate on Mitylene and Melos or the tragic expedition to Sicily, an attempt at transcendence?]
It is not the world of political philosophy, the quest for the best regime possible in all its unobtainable splendour. Compared to the philosophical search for the best regime, the just order, politics loses most of its charm — only ‘the charm of the greatness of the founder and legislator seems to survive the severest of all tests’. But perhaps the teachings of Thucydides and Plato supplement each other.
Plato in the Republic describes the best regime at rest. In the Timaeus, Socrates says he wants to see the best regime in motion, i.e at war. Socrates feels unable to present properly the best regime in motion. But Critias tells the story of Athens’ legendary war with Atlantis, in which Athens justly resisted aggression and defended Greece. It reminds us of Thucydides because it is an account of the greatest motion and because the Atlantic war reminds of the Sicilian Expedition.
Thucydides’ great theme is the greatest war, the greatest motion. An Athenian regime seen as imperfect by Plato and Thucydides embarks on the disaster of the Sicilian expedition and destroys itself.
Thucydides says very little about economics, religion or intellectual history. It is a book of politics, war, and diplomacy.
According to Aristotle, history is un-philosophic or pre-philosophic, it deals with individuals (people, states, empires, wars etc). Philosophy is un-historical, it deals with species, with wars and empires in general, with permanent characteristics. Poetry lies between them.
But Thucydides shows us ‘the universal in the individual event’ and this is why his work is supposed to be ‘a possession for all time’ — he says those who read it will understand not just the past but their own times as well, ‘the like events which may be expected to happen hereafter in the order of human things’ (Jowett, I.22.4). Strauss says we should not try to understand him in the light of Aristotle’s distinctions. Somewhat like Plato showing the universal through the singular character of Socrates, so Thucydides shows the universal through the specific war he recounts.
Thucydides praises the Spartan regime, which had survived hundreds of years, for its moderation and stability. They were the first to live a style of life peculiarly Greek, ‘a mean between barbaric penury and barbaric pomp’, a style of simplicity and equality. This regime was the source of Spartan power.
Near the end of his book (VIII.96.5), Thucydides summed up the different characters: the Spartans slow and timorous, the Athenians quick and adventurous. The Spartans were prosperous and moderate at the same time. The Athenians became moderate after they were cast down by disaster and fear. Thucydides’ taste in regimes is, says Strauss, the same as Plato’s and Aristotle’s.
He reveals some of his most important thoughts in his reflections on the revolutions and civil wars (III.82-83).
Strauss does not quote it all but I will because, as I’ve written before, it’s maybe the most important and insightful passage ever written about politics. Unlike the speeches, there is no doubt as to the voice — this is explicitly Thucydides’ own judgements.
And revolution brought upon the the cities of Hellas many terrible calamities, such as have been and always will be while human nature remains the same, but which are more or less aggravated and differ in character with every new combination of circumstance. In peace and prosperity, both states and individuals are actuated by higher motives, because they do not fall under the dominion of imperious necessities. But war, which takes away the comfortable provision of daily life, is a hard master and tends to assimilate men’s characters to their conditions.
When troubles had once begun in the cities, those who followed carried the revolutionary spirit further and further, and determined to outdo the report of all who had proceeded them by the ingenuity of their enterprises and the atrocity of their revenges. The meaning of words had no longer the same relation to things but was changed by them as they thought proper. Reckless daring was held to be loyal courage; prudent delay was the excuse of a coward; moderation was the disguise of unmanly weakness; to know everything was to do nothing. Frantic energy was the true quality of a man. A conspirator who wanted to be safe was a recreant in disguise. The lover of violence was always trusted and his opponent suspected. He who succeeded in a plot was deemed knowing, but a still greater master in craft was he who detected one. On the other hand, he who plotted from the first to have nothing to do with plots was a breaker up of parties and a poltroon who was afraid of the enemy. In a word, he who could outstrip another in a bad action was applauded and so was he who encouraged to evil one who had no idea of it. The tie of party was stronger then the tie of blood because a partisan was more ready to dare without asking why. For party associations are not based upon any established law, nor do they seek the public good, they are formed in defiance of the laws and from self-interest. The seal of good faith was not divine law but fellowship in crime. If an enemy when he was in the ascendant offered fair words, the opposite party received them not in a generous spirit, but by a jealous watchfulness of his actions. Revenge was dearer than self preservation. Any agreement sworn to by either party, when they could do nothing else, were binding as long as both were powerless. But he who on a favourable opportunity first took courage, and struck at his enemy when he saw him off his guard, had greater pleasure in a perfidious that he would have had in an open act of revenge; he congratulated himself that he had taken the safer course, and also that he had overreached his enemy and gained the prize of superior ability. In general, the dishonest more easily gain credit for cleverness than the simple for goodness. Men take a pride in the one but are ashamed of the other.
The cause of all these evils was the love of power, originating in avarice and ambition, and the party-spirit which is engendered by them when men are fairly embarked in a contest. For the leaders on either side used specious names, the one party professing to uphold the constitutional equality of the many, the other the wisdom of an aristocracy, while they made the public interests, to which in name they were devoted, in reality their prize. Striving in every way to overcome each other, they committed the most monstrous crimes, yet even these were surpassed by the magnitude of their revenges which they pursued to the very utmost, neither party observing any definite limits either of justice or public expediency, but both alike making the caprice of the moment their law. Either by the help of an unrighteous sentence, or grasping power with the strong hand, they were eager to satiate the impatience of party-spirit. Neither faction cared for religion but any fair pretence which succeeded in effecting some odious purpose was greatly lauded. And the citizens who were of neither party fell a prey to both, either they were disliked because they held aloof, or men were jealous of their surviving.
Thus revolution gave birth to every form of wickedness in Greece. The simplicity which is so large an element in a noble nature was laughed to scorn and disappeared. An attitude of perfidious antagonism everywhere prevailed, for there was no word binding enough, nor oath terrible enough, to reconcile enemies. Each man was strong only in the conviction nothing was secure; he must look to his own safety and could not afford to trust others. Inferior intellects generally succeeded best. For, aware of their own deficiencies, and fearing the capacity of their opponents, for whom they were no match in powers of speech, and whose subtle wits were more likely to anticipate them in contriving evil, they struck boldly and at once. But the cleverer sort, presuming in their arrogance that they would be aware in time, and disdaining to act when they could think, were taken off guard and easily destroyed. [!!]
Now in Corcyra, most of these deeds were perpetrated and for the first time. There was every crime which men could commit in revenge who had been governed not wisely, but tyrannically, and now had the oppressor at their mercy. There was the dishonest designs of others who were longing to be relieved from their habitual poverty and were naturally animated by a passionate desire for their neighbour’s goods. And there were crimes of another class which men commit, not from covetousness, but from the enmity which equals foster towards one another until they are carried away by their blind rage into the extremes of pitiless cruelty. At such a time the life of the city was all in disorder, and human nature, which is always ready to transgress the laws, having now trampled them under foot, delighted to show that her passions were ungovernable, that she was stronger than justice, and the enemy of everything above her. If malignity had not exercised a fatal power, how could anyone have preferred revenge to piety and gain to innocence? But when men are retaliating upon others, they are reckless of the future and do not hesitate to annul those common laws of humanity to which every individual trusts for his own hope of deliverance should he ever be overtaken by calamity; they forget that in their own hour of need they will look for them in vain.
Such were the passions which the citizens of Corcyra first of all Hellenes displayed towards one another. (III, 82-4, Jowett translation.)
Strauss summarises it as: moderation, justice and piety belong together and their enemy calls itself daring and shrewdness or intelligence. While causation is not exact, there is a kinship between foreign war and civil war: war is a violent teacher, a teacher of violence by violence, an intermediate stage between peace and civil war. Even if moderation is a handicap in war, it remains superior. Depravation is above all the destruction of moderation and the depravity of civil war mirrors the depravity of the plague that hit Athens and swept away moderation, piety, law and fear of the gods.
We also hear Thucydides’ own voice when he talks in horror of the massacre by the Thracians of every living thing in Mycalessus — every adult, every child and every beast, they stormed the school and killed all the children, ‘no calamity more deplorable occurred during the war’ (VII.29).
We also hear his voice in his judgement on the tragic Nicias, sent to command the Sicilian Expedition. He was dedicated to the war and was a pious man who strove to behave properly yet was executed:
No one of the Hellenes in my time was less deserving of so miserable an end, for he lived in the practice of every virtue. (VII.86.5)
The Corinthian speech urging Sparta to war (I.68-71) also stresses Spartan moderation, slowness to fight, reliability, old-fashionedness in contrast to Athenian daring, innovation, quickness etc. The Spartan King Archidamus, famous for intelligence and moderation, wanted to preserve the peace (I.79-85). He asserts that the Spartan qualities the Corinthians objected to are the cause of her greatness. Moderation guarantees against hubris, against insolent pride and abjectness in disaster.
And, says Strauss, Thucydides makes clear that the Athenians compelled Sparta to go to war, that most Greeks and Delphi sided with Sparta, the plague smote Athens, and Athens’ empire appeared to most — as Pericles himself told the Assembly — as ‘a tyranny’.
You have an empire to lose, and there is the danger to which the hatred of your imperial rule has exposed you… For by this time your empire has become a tyranny which in the opinion of mankind may have been unjustly gained, but which cannot be safely surrendered… To be hateful and offensive has ever been the fate of those who have aspired to empire. (2.63 and cf. V.104-5)
And Pericles could openly envisage the possibility of Athens’ fall — ‘Even if we should be compelled at last to abate somewhat of our greatness, for all things have their times of growth and decay’, he says in one speech.
The Funeral Speech is an epic, glittering, forever famous account of Athens’ greatness but that’s Pericles speaking, not Thucydides. Strauss thinks Thucydides was overall more sympathetic to the Spartan regime. Pericles in his three speeches does not mention moderation (sophrosyne).
Athens became its most powerful under Pericles but was not the best, most just, regime. It was a democracy in name but in fact the rule of Pericles. At II.65) Thucydides summarises Pericles’s career:
Under him Athens reached the height of its greatness.
The war showed he’d formed ‘a true estimate of Athenian power’. (I’m also studying Andy Marshall and ‘net assessment’ and this connects.)
His great foresight and transparent integrity were missed after his death.
His advice of strategic patience and defensiveness was ignored in favour of adventures which proved ruinous.
‘He led them rather than was led by them.’
Thus Athens, though still in name a democracy, was in fact ruled by her greatest citizen. But his successors were more on an equality with one another, and, each one struggling to be first himself, they were ready to sacrifice the whole conduct of affairs to the whims of the people. Such weakness in a great and imperial city led to many errors, of which the greatest was the Sicilian expedition; not that the Athenians miscalculated their enemy's power, but they themselves, instead of consulting for the interests of the expedition which they had sent out, were occupied in intriguing against one another for the leadership of the democracy, and not only grew remiss in the management of the army, but became embroiled, for the first time, in civil strife. And yet after they had lost in the Sicilian expedition the greater part of their fleet and army, and were distracted by revolution at home, still they held out three years not only against their former enemies, but against the Sicilians who had combined with them, and against most of their own allies who had risen in revolt. Even when Cyrus the son of the King joined in the war and supplied the Peloponnesian fleet with money, they continued to resist, and were at last overthrown, not by their enemies, but by themselves and their own internal dissensions. So that at the time Pericles was more than justified in the conviction at which his foresight had arrived, that the Athenians would win an easy victory over the unaided forces of the Peloponnesians.
At VIII.97, Thucydides gives his judgement on the best Athenian regime and it was the oligarchy of 411, the oligarchy of the Five Thousand (after they deposed the 400), not the famous democracy under Pericles:
This government during its early days was the best which the Athenians ever enjoyed within my memory. Oligarchy and democracy were duly attempered. And thus after the miserable state into which she had fallen the city was again able to raise her head.
Strauss writes that for Thucydides, a city is what it is by virtue of the highest to which it looks up. The healthy city looks up not to the laws it can make and unmake but to the unwritten laws, the divine laws, to the gods of the city. The great city must transcend itself. A city can be guilty of hubris and disregard the divine law: the speech of the ambassadors at Melos was followed by disaster in Sicily. (But Strauss also refers to this as ‘the most comprehensive instruction which Thucydides silently conveys, the silent character of of the conveyance being required by the chaste character of his piety’.)
Much more than Herodotus, he looks for natural explanations over divine explanations. He belongs to the Athens in which Anaxagoras and Protagoras taught and were prosecuted for impiety. The Funeral Speech was silent about the divine law and Pericles noticeably does not talk of the gods in his three speeches. His only reference to the superhuman is the need to bear its effects ‘of necessity’.
Speeches
Strauss analyses (p163) the controversial question of the speeches and the extent to which they express Thucydides’s own ideas.
Thucydides suggests that we can not only be deeply confused about ancient things but about things happening right in front of us. He stresses his reports are based on what he saw and heard himself and what he learned from others ‘of whom I made the most careful and particular enquiry’.
So little trouble do men take in the search after truth, so readily do they accept whatever comes first to hand. (I.20)
Strauss singles out some speeches:
Brassidas, IV.85ff.
Hermocrates, IV.59, who brilliantly foresaw the Athenian expedition but was ignored.
Alcibiades in Sparta, VI.89, twisting and turning to justify his previous behaviour.
Athenagoras, VI.36, the Sicilian demagogue who told the people not to believe reports of the Athenian expedition and argued that the only thing that will end the subversive network of Syracuse’s aristocratic youth is democratic terror, a terror justified because there is no decent basis for opposing the democratic regime. It is, says Strauss, the ‘clearest and most comprehensive exposition of the democratic view’ in the book, for the Funeral Speech is about the Athenian regime under Pericles which is not the same as pure democracy.
Cleon, III.37, on how ‘a democracy cannot manage an empire’.
The contrasting pre-battle speeches of the Spartans and Athenian Phormio in which the former appeals to self-interest (fear and glory) while Phormio appeals to public spirit, a clear though implicit contrast, says Strauss, confirming the Corinthian characterisation of the Athenians at the start of the war.
The unnamed Athenian who speaks at I.72 in Sparta. The speech is unique in being the only one preceded by a summary by Thucydides. Here the Athenian envoys claimed that their true claim to the empire was the intelligence of Themistocles and the zeal of the Athenians at Salamis when they saved Greece. They also claim that they were compelled to build their empire— compelled by fear, interest and honour, the three great motives of man, i.e they were compelled by human nature. And it is fairness that distinguishes their empire from others. This ‘amazing frankness’ truly reveals Athenian power, says Strauss, because ‘only the most powerful can afford to utter the principles which they utter’.
The Athenian speech should be contrasted with the sole Spartan speech in Athens, IV.17ff, after Sparta’s disaster at Pylos. The Athenians have come out ahead partly by good luck, say the Spartans. But good luck can’t be relied on so it would be wise to cut a good deal now. (Strauss comments that Sparta ceded much more after the disaster at Pylos than Athens after the disaster of Sicily.)
Strauss argues that the first speech in the book opens with the word ‘just’ (right) and the second, replying to the first, starts with ‘necessary’ (compulsory). The relation of justice and necessity is a core theme of Thucydides, a theme ‘so unobtrusively and so subtly indicated’ showing the point of view from which Thucydides looks on the War.
Thucydides says of the origins of the war that:
The ‘truest’, but unavowed, cause of the war was Sparta’s fear of Athens’ growing power.
This fear of Athens ‘compelled’ Sparta to go to war. Sparta’s actions were more driven by feelings of compulsion than of justice, says Thucydides.
There were conflicts in the buildup that seemed to be the causes but were not really, including the row over Corcyra, Thebes’ invasion of Plataeae, the Megarian decree — the ‘avowed’ causes.
The Spartan King denied that the Athenians had broken the treaty (78.4, 81.5, 85.2). The ephor contended that Athens had done wrong to Sparta’s allies and the Spartan Assembly agreed (86-88). At IV.20, after the Pylos disaster, the Spartans say to the Athenians ‘whether we or you drove [Greece] into war is uncertain’.
At V.20.1, he says that the war started with the invasion of Attica implying Sparta had broken the treaty. The Spartans acknowledged this to themselves by the end of the first phase of the war. At VII.18.2, the Spartans reflect, after Athens embarks on the Sicilian Expedition, that, ‘They considered also that this time [in the second phase of the war] they [Athens] had been the first offenders against the treaty whereas in the former war the transgression had rather been on their own [Sparta’s] side. For the Thebans had entered Plataea in time of peace and they themselves had refused arbitration when offered by the Athenians, although the former treaty forbade war in case an adversary was willing to submit to arbitration. They felt their ill-success was deserved… The Spartans concluded that the guilt of their former transgression was now shifted to the Athenians…’
So Athens was in the right in the first part and Thucydides makes clear in his own voice at VI.105 that Sparta was in the right in the second part: ‘the Athenians gave the Spartans a right to complain of them and completely justified measures of retaliation’.
Ananke
τέχνη δ’ άνάγκης άσθєνєστέρα μακρώ
Knowing, however, is far weaker than necessity.
Prometheus Bound, 514
[Ananke (ἀνάγκη) was a noun (constraint, necessity, force) and a goddess depicted holding a spindle — a goddess of fate and mother of the Fates. Aeschylus refers to her above.]
Compulsion justifies an act which in itself would be unjust (IV.98).
The Athenians acted unjustly and were propelled by hubris.
But the Athenians claimed (I.75) they were compelled to build their empire by honour, glory and fear — of Persia and Sparta. And at IV.98 they say that actions compelled by the necessity of war are forgiven by gods.
At Melos (V.85ff) the Athenian ambassadors famously warned that the Melians should consider not justice but their real situation and Athens’ power to compel them. Athens cannot tolerate islands remaining free, it will encourage revolts against her power. Yielding to an overwhelming force is not disgraceful but prudent. They should not unwisely trust in prayers or gods.
But you and we should say what we really think and aim only at what is possible, for we both alike know that into the discussion of human affairs the question of justice only enters where the pressure of necessity is equal, and that the powerful exact what they can, and the weak grant what they must. (V.89)
It is for the interests of us both that you not be destroyed. (91) Your enmity is not half so mischievous to us as your friendship, for the one is in the eyes of our subjects an argument of our power, the other of our weakness. (95)
For of the gods we believe and of men we know, that by a law of their nature wherever they can rule they will. (105) Many men with their eyes still open to the consequences have found the word ‘honour’ too much for them, and have suffered a mere name to lure them on, until it has drawn down upon them real and irretrievable calamities; through their own folly they have incurred a worse dishonour than fortune would have inflicted upon them. If you are wise, you will not run this risk… To maintain our rights against equals, to be politic with superiors, and to be moderate towards inferiors is the path of safety. (111)
The Melians trusted in gods and Sparta and rejected Athens’ offer. All men of military age were killed, women and children were enslaved. (Sparta similarly allowed the Thebans to massacre the Plataeans but the speeches are not so dramatic so it is much less remembered! The Spartans simply asked the Plataeans — have you done us any service? — and then killed them all. I.e they acted just as the Athenians described them to the Melians! III.68)
We should contrast the earlier case of Mitylene. Here the Athenian Assembly decided to slaughter the men and enslave the women and children but they then felt queasy and changed their minds. Cleon the demagogue criticised their change of heart. He reminded them that ‘your empire is a despotism’ and the ‘allies’ are ‘held down by force’ (cf. II.63). Cleon also warns against clever speeches for mercy which have been procured by bribery [NB. 2022-5 anybody who warns about the Ukraine war is accused of being ‘a Putin shill’ etc].
For if they were right in revolting, you must be wrong in maintaining your empire. But if, right or wrong, you are resolved to rule, then rightly or wrongly they must be chastised for your good… Chastise them as they deserve and prove by an example to your other allies that rebellion will be punished with death. (III.40)
Diodotus argued only to kill a few and spare the rest. He explicitly rests his argument on expediency, not justice. The Mitylenaeans deserve punishment but that isn’t the point.
The question for us rightly considered is not, what are their crimes? But what is for our interest?… We are not at law with them and do not want to be told what is just. We are considering a matter of policy.
He even asks them not to be misled by ‘the superior justice’ of Cleon’s argument! Fear of slaughter does not deter colonies from revolting. But it might make people dig in and make our lives harder. Endless sieges waste our money and when we win we take over wrecks! Slaughter will push oligarchs and the people together for the latter will know we will slaughter them all anyway. The Athenians narrowly agreed with Diodotus and a second message was sent to cancel the slaughter.
Melos and Sicily
The Melian dialogue contains the clearest expression in Thucydides of the denial of a divine law which must be respected or which moderates a city’s desire for having more. And Pericles himself encouraged the idea that Athens could and should desire to have more. Callicles and Thrasymachus assert that stronger individuals do and should desire to have more. Can you encourage citizens to think their state can have more than others without also encouraging individuals to think the same? Strauss argues that Pericles did not realise that the unjust understanding of the common good is bound to undermine dedication to the common good and did not give sufficient weight to the precarious character of the harmony between private and public interest.
The Sicilian Expedition was contrary to Pericles’ strategy for the war: caution, patience, preserve the navy and no big gambles. But Thucydides is clear that its failure was not because of hubris or as punishment from the gods for Melos or because it was strategically doomed — he stresses that it could have worked. Athens lost the war because of disunity at home and competitive pressures among the elites.
Pericles derived his authority from his obviously superior capacity and integrity. He was honest with the demos and told them unpleasant truths. But after he died elites vied to be pre-eminent and sacrificed the public interest by pandering to ‘the whims of the people’. This culminated in the disaster with Sicily. Athens did not miscalculate the strength of her opponents but its elites were ‘occupied in intriguing against one another for the leadership’ and became ‘embroiled in civil strife’. Thucydides stressed the fact that Athens still held out after the Sicilian disaster and Persia joined in and was only finally undone by ‘their own internal dissensions’ — the failure of the unity and patriotism celebrated in Pericles’ funeral speech — which demonstrated how right Pericles had been in his judgement that a patient, careful and united Athens would win. (II.65)
He makes clear that the conflict between private and public interests was central to the Sicilian disaster. At VI.15.4, he makes clear that Athens would have won if they had not replaced Alcibiades. The demos did not trust his wild audacity. Although his military skills were unrivalled they entrusted the war to others ‘and so they speedily shipwrecked the state’. Nicias was virtuous but did not have the temperament or skills for such a project.
Alcibiades had gone to Sicily as a general. But the Athenians were overwhelmed with fears after the infamous profaning of the mysteries and thought there was an aristocratic plot to overthrow the democracy. Alcibiades was summoned back from Sicily. Realising the febrile mood in Athens, where many had been executed on flimsy evidence of informers, he jumped ship and made his way to the Spartans. [Critias was arrested but released.] He tried an audacious game — to play Spartans against Athenians, the Persian King against Spartans and Athenians, the Athenian oligarchs and the demos against each other, hoping to be king of Athens and more.
Strauss points to the discussion between Demosthenes and Nicias in Sicily. Leaders had to fear the action of the demos when things went wrong. Demosthenes suggested returning to Athens and abandoning the venture. Nicias replied that the demos would take a dim view, he and Demosthenes would be accused of treachery by demagogues and be disgraced. So he preferred to stay in Sicily and be killed by his enemies. (VII.47-48) For Strauss, Nicias behaved out of justified fear of disgrace ‘like a traitor’. Thucydides states that he deserved his fate ‘least of the Greeks of my time … because of his full devotion to the pursuit of virtue as understood by old established custom’.
Nicias like the Melians trusted in the gods. Both were disappointed. The hopes of both were unfounded.
The Spartan manner and the Athenian manner
Strauss writes that Thucydides understood ‘cause’ as meaning most importantly the character of the regimes, which he saw as more important than things like economies and climate, and the course of the war is the ‘self-revelation of Sparta and Athens’.
The Athenians on Melos say that the Spartans identify what is pleasant with what is honourable and what is expedient with what is just — and it is often dangerous to pursue the just and the Spartans dislike such risks. Athens, by implication, is profoundly different: it will not pretend that what is expedient is also what’s just. And the Athenians soon disgracefully massacre the Melians.
Pericles’ Funeral Speech is the grandest summary of the Athenian character and why Athens is worth dying for. The qualities which distinguish her are those least associated with Sparta such as generosity, freedom, love of beauty and wisdom. The ultimate justification of the empire is not compulsion, fear, or profit but everlasting glory.
Contrast Themistocles and Pausanias, king of Sparta. The former was something without Athens because he was distinguished by his extraordinary talents. The latter was nothing without Sparta and his treachery was not a threat. Thucydides presents a galaxy of outstanding Athenians and only one outstanding Spartan: Brasidas. While Thucydides prefers the Spartan regime to the extreme democracy, he makes abundantly clear that it is Athens which produces amazing individuals.
Even the loathsome Cleon contrasts favourably with Alcidas the Spartan whom the Spartans trusted more than they did Brasidas. Alcidas slaughtered various Athenian allies simply following Spartan practice until it was pointed out to him by some Spartan allies that his slaughter would make it harder to build alliances. It’s clear the thought never occurred to him. Alcidas is, says Strauss, lower than even Cleon.
The only Spartan who really gives weight by his conduct to the Spartan claim to be ‘liberators’ was Brasidas. Pericles did not make such claims, he simply argued the war was necessary to retain the empire. His Funeral Speech shows the harmony of Athens and the harmony between himself and the demos based on the harmony between Pericles’ private and public interest.
Contrast what Athens/Mitylene and Sparta/Plataeae show us about them as judges. The crime of Plataeae is loyalty to Athens. The crime of Mitylene is breaking a treaty. The Plataeaeans are massacred without a voice raised in their defence. Mitylene is condemned and reprieved. The Athenians discuss not just guilt/justice but also expediency. The Spartans consider openly only guilt and revenge — but of course in reality they regard enabling the Thebans’ hatred as in their own self-interest, i.e the Spartans act just as the Athenians on Melos warned the island: Sparta defined their self-interest as justice.
Contrast what Athens/ Sicily and Sparta/Pylos show us about them in adversity. The Spartans immediately sued for peace after the 300 were cut off. The surrender was so shocking — so striking in its symmetry to Thermopylae — that it was not until Sparta’s victory at Mantinea that they shook off the disgrace: they ‘wiped out the charge of cowardice … and of general stupidity and sluggishness… They were now thought to have been hardly used by fortune [at Pylos] but in character to be the same as ever’ (V.75). But Athens responded to the Sicilian disaster not with appeals for peace but with another huge effort.
The only time Thucydides uses the noun eros was in describing the eros of the Athenians for the Sicilian Expedition (VI.24.3). [Jowett translates it as ‘All alike were seized with a passionate desire to sail’, Hobbes as ‘every one alike fell in love with the enterprise’.] Strauss points out that Pericles had called upon the Athenians to become lovers (erastai) of their city. These lovers now wanted to adorn their city with Sicily — a willingness to sacrifice everything, all private interests. Also compare Pericles’ famous comment about the old parents losing their only son and Alcibiades (VI.16.5) saying that only glory after death brings harmony between private and public interest.
Strauss argues — if the highest eros is that for the city and if the city reaches its peak in an eros like that of Athens for Sicily, then eros is necessarily tragic — as Plato suggests, the city is the tragedy par excellence.
Most excellent of Strangers [i.e the tragic poets], we ourselves, to the best of our ability, are the authors of a tragedy at once superlatively fair and good; at least, all our polity is framed as a representation of the fairest and best life, which is in reality, as we assert, the truest tragedy. Thus we are composers of the same things as yourselves, rivals of yours as artists and actors of the fairest drama, which, as our hope is, true law, and it alone, is by nature competent to complete. (Laws 817b)
At VIII.96 Thucydides describes the Spartans’ lack of initiative as what made them ‘the most convenient enemies the Athenians could possibly have had’: the Athenians were quick and adventurous; the Spartans were slow and timorous. The Syracusans ‘who were most like them’ fought best against Athens.
Sparta wins, says Strauss, only by becoming more Athenian. Athens, the teacher of Greece, taught Sparta to be more like her.
The questionable universalism of the city
Strauss stresses again: the failure in Sicily was not because of hubris, it could have worked. And afterwards Athens has the success of Kynossema, just as Sparta recovered from Pylos with Mantinea, a success which restores Athenian morale and hope (VIII.106). This improvement came, though, after a shift to the regime of the Five Thousand (VIII.97) and decision to welcome back Alcibiades, whom the demos thought the only one who could save them and somehow break up the alliance of Sparta and Persia. (The real mover behind the extreme oligarchy of the 400 was Antiphon who Thucydides praised for his great virtue and ‘remarkable powers of thought and gifts of speech’ but who preferred not to speak publicly (VIII.68). When the regime fell and Antiphon had to give a speech in his own defence, it was the greatest made ‘tried on a capital charge down to my time’.)
Pericles’ Funeral Speech glorifying Athens points towards a longing for sempiternal and universal fame and perhaps universal empire: during the war, the conquest of Sicily, Carthage and all Greece is envisaged. This is the opposite of moderation. And there is also in Athens the universalism of love of beauty and wisdom.
Thucydides bases the eternal fame of his work — ‘a possession for all time’ — on the fact it brings to light the sempiternal and universal nature of man as the ground of the deeds, speeches, and thoughts it records. And in groping towards an understanding of Thucydides, we understand war and peace, Greeks and barbarians, Athens and Sparta, human nature and politics. And it is Thucydides’ work which brings eternal fame for Periclean Athens. Strauss says there is the universalism of the city, of Athens, and the universalism of understanding, of Thucydides’ history.
In Athens, two universalisms become fused — the political universalism is transfigured by the true universalism of beauty and wisdom, and thus acquires its tragic character. But the synthesis of the two universalisms is impossible and only by seeing this can we understand the grandeur of the attempt to overcome it.
[I do not understand what Strauss is saying about universalism. Feel free to take a stab in comments!]
Wisdom is inseparable from self-knowledge. We know from Thucydides himself that he was an Athenian. Through understanding him we see that his wisdom was made possible ‘by the sun’ and by Athens — by her power and wealth, by her defective polity, by her spirit of daring innovation, by her active doubt of the divine law. By understanding his work one sees with one’s own eyes that Athens was in a sense the home of wisdom in others. Wisdom cannot be presented as a spectacle, in the way in which battles and the like can be presented. Wisdom cannot be ‘said’. It can only be ‘done’. Only through understanding Thucydides’ work can one see that Athens was in a sense the school of Greece; from Pericles’ mouth we merely hear it asserted. Wisdom cannot be presented by being spoken about.
Thucydides believes in moderation and piety. The men of noble simplicity and the men of Odyssean versatility both became victims of the second rate ruthless power-seekers (III.83 above). Diodotus’ speech reveals more of Thucydides himself than any other speech. Its powerful contrast with Cleon comes from its moderation — an act of humanity compatible with Athens’ survival. But Diodotus goes into the core problems of a democracy: speakers are trying to manipulate the audience for their own prestige and power, people regard as wise those the voters agree with, there’s a tendency to accuse others of stupidity or evil/treachery, it’s extremely hard to distinguish between charlatans and wise honest men. Voters won’t trust an idea unless they trust the speaker but their criteria for trust are irrational. So the wise and moderate are incentivised to lie too!
Gomme says Diodotus comes close to denying the value of free debate but Strauss says it’s tougher than that — he explains the problems of democracy so clearly as to point to a different regime in which the moderate and sensible have more sway. What Diodotus says at III.42 is much tougher than what Pericles says at II.62.1.
In this city, and in this city only, to do good openly and without deception is impossible… [W]henever you meet with a reverse, led away by the passion of the moment you punish the individual who is your adviser for his error of judgement, and your own error you condone, if the judgements of many concurred in it.
He asks — is capital punishment effective, does it deter? No — nomos is weaker than physis (III.45).
For poverty inspires necessity with daring; and wealth engenders avarice in pride and insolence; and the various conditions of human life, as they severely fall under the sway of some mighty and fatal power, through the agency of the passions lure men to destruction… In a word, then, it is impossible, and simply absurd to suppose, that human nature [physis] when bent upon some favourite project can be restrained either by the power of law [nomos] or by any other terror.
It’s a complex rhetorical argument, I won’t go into details (cf. p233ff).
Political history and philosophy
Thucydides is not just a political man, not just a historian who sees the singulars in the light of universals, he is a philosophic historian. He is not radically alien to Plato and Aristotle. He and Plato are in fundamental agreement regarding the good and bad and noble and base.
Plato sketches what he thinks is the best regime. Pericles and Athenagoras speak of the ideal regime but Thucydides does not in his own voice. Thucydides states only what he thinks is the best regime Athens had in his life, a mixed regime neither pure democracy nor pure oligarchy. At VIII.97.2 he writes of the Five Thousand:
This government during its early days was the best which the Athenians ever enjoyed within my memory. Oligarchy and democracy were duly attempered.
In the third book of Laws, Plato surveys a similar period of history as Thucydides’ pre-history to the war. And the Menexenus calls for comparison with the Funeral Speech, argues Strauss. Plato blames the shift from the regime that won the Persian Wars to the extreme democracy on the disregard of ancestral laws on music and theatre. By making the audience — rather than the best and wisest — the judges of songs and plays, Athens decayed (Laws, 698a9ff; 700a5-701c4). Plato says the land battles of Marathon and Plataeae (i.e hoplites) saved Greece, not Salamis (the navy). But the story in Thucydides suggests that Athens had no choice but to develop the navy and this meant extending the political voice of the poor who manned the ships. Democracy was not wilful folly but a necessity.
For Plato, chance mostly decides which regimes are established and human choices operate only in very narrow limits.
Strauss says the lesson of Thucydides’ work as a whole may be that the order of cities presupposed in the most noble Spartan proclamations is impossible — given the unequal power of states, hegemony and empire, international relations, inevitably develop. This attacks a fundamental presupposition of classical political philosophy, it ‘excludes the kind of self-sufficiency of the city which classical political philosophy presupposes’. Aristotle went so far as to imagine a city which has no ‘foreign relations’ at all. The city is neither self-sufficient nor part of a just order compromising many cities. The omnipresence of war in Thucydides ‘puts a lower ceiling on the highest aspiration of any city toward justice and virtue than classical political philosophy might seem to have admitted’.
Thucydides’ focus is the problems around him. Philosophy tries to ascend from what is first for us to what is first by nature. This ascent requires that what is first for us be understood as well as possible first, that is, with eyes like Thucydides’. Political understanding must start from seeing man as immersed in political life — it cannot start from ‘seeing the city as the Cave’. We must look at what Thucydides says about oracles, earthquakes, eclipses, Nicias’ suffering, Cylon, the purification of Delos — that is, with those things which classical political philosophy barely alludes to and which modern ‘scientific’ historians ignore or are irritated by.
We need to try to see the city as it understood itself, as described in the amazing book by Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City, as distinguished from how it was depicted in classical political philosophy. We must try to see it as a holy city, as a pre-philosophic city — a city which sees itself as subservient to the divine.
Only by beginning at this point will we be open to the full impact of the all-important question which is coeval with philosophy although the philosophers do not frequently pronounce it — the question quid sit deus. [What is god?]
PS. Thucydides is often remarked to be sceptical about oracles and god so it’s important to note that, remarkably, he also states that that ‘the solitary instance in which those who put their faith in oracles were justified by the event’ was the length of the war which, at 27 years, was exactly what the oracles had widely predicted at the start, as was widely remarked on throughout the war. Amazing…
Further Reading
The Closing of the American Mind, Alan Bloom (taught by Strauss).
Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing, Merzer.
Machiavelli's Effectual Truth: Creating the Modern World, Mansfield.
Strauss’ lectures on Nietzsche.
Some SNIPPETS
I’ll paste these into a different blog soon but for now...
SHOR on 24
Fundamentally swing voters generally don’t share our values.
David Shor, Obama 2012 data scientist.
David worked in the data science team of the Obama campaign 2012.
He works with advanced technology in his political research firm.
I’ve watched him for years. His personal politics are quite far left, as he says himself. But unlike the vast majority of DEMs, I’ve noticed he has tried very hard to keep an objective view of voters.
I wrote back in 2021-22 that the DEMs should listen to him and his warnings. They did not.
His company did 26M interviews in 2024. Per Vote Leave’s approach in 2016, he does not seek the old goal of ‘a representative sample’, he seeks much more data and uses clever maths to figure out what it means. (If interested in the maths behind this, google papers by mathematician Andrew Gelman such as his paper on MRP using X-box.)
Overall DS’s polls in 2024 had an error about 0.3% nationally.
I’ve summarised some of the key points from his chat with Ezra Klein of the NYT. His charts are here.
Turnout in key states the same as 2020 (overall slightly down). DEMs did NOT lose ‘because of a lack of motivation in their base’. They lost because voters in key states changed their minds.
Racial depolarisation. From the 1960s there was a huge racial re-alignment starting with the Civil Rights Act in 1964. It played out over decades but now the story is changing.
Whites barely shifted since 2016 (though within whites there’s been polarisation, see below). Blacks shifted towards Trump a bit. Asians more. Hispanics a lot.
Non-whites are voting less as ethnic blocks and more on basis of ideology.
Immigrants and naturalised citizens swung towards Trump a lot. Trump up by 5-10 points in some places with most immigrants. Trump did better in places like New York and California. This wasn’t efficient for Trump in the key states but it’s important for the future.
Educational polarisation across the West is key to understand the last decade and 2024. Graduates moving Left, non-graduates Right.
Politically engaged voters became more pro-DEM. Highest turnout areas increased support for KH (right hand graph below). NYT readers have become even MORE liberal since 2020 while the country has shifted other way. [This connects to my point about SW1 hacks, pundits, political science professors etc: they have shifted Left but don’t realise it.)
But politically disengaged voters became much more pro-Trump. People who did not vote in 2020 were slightly pro-Biden, people who didn’t vote in 2024 were +14 for Trump (lefthand graph below). Blacks who did NOT vote were more pro-Trump than those who did vote.
The DEMs have said for decades ‘if everyone votes we win.’ This is the first election for decades this is false.
If only 2022 voters had voted in 2024 — Kamal wins popular vote and electoral college.
If everyone had voted — Trump wins in a landslide.
The Left DEMs arguing their problem was a lack of turnout of their base are WRONG.
Sex polarisation and shifts among the young.
Among voters under 26 years old, the only race-by-gender group to have majority support for Harris are non-white women. White men, white women, and non-white men under 26 all supported Trump at rates greater than 50%.
What’s Shor most shocked/frightened by? The chart below. Young have gone from most progressive since baby boomers to maybe the most conservative generation in over half a century. And the huge male/female gap among the young is unprecedented. (The ‘gender gap’ is quite recent — conservatives used to do a bit better with women. This gap is also a western issue, not just US.)
The cause is probably not inflation or other things that affected people in similar ways. Is it other cultural issues and changing media-information dynamics?
Online communities are much more polarised between sexes so not surprising: algorithms etc pull men to UFC and Rogan etc.
Trump was the same level of popularity in 2024 as 2020. But KH was less popular than Biden in 2020.
Mike Donilon: the switch was ‘insane’, the DEM party ‘lost its mind’ in making the switch.
DS: But the Biden regime became very unpopular and it would have been even harder for Biden to escape his record than for KH!
DS investigated issue salience. Cost of living was clearly the top issue. (I wrote this repeatedly on this blog in 2023-4 but weirdly many elite DEMs tried to persuade themselves that they could win with abortion.)
If you look at a graph with issue importance vs which party do you trust most — GOP is ahead on all main things except health.
Trump’s personal unpopularity made the election closer than it could have been.
The ’soul of America’ bombed. 80-20 Delivering change for people’s lives vs ‘preserving our institutions’. (I wrote in 2023 that the ‘soul of America’ spiel didn’t work in 2020 and wouldn’t work in 2024. This was obvious from focus groups but often the principal has an idea and won’t listen to evidence.)
Education used to be a great issue for Democrats but now it’s pretty close. Reproductive rights changed after Dobbs. But not nearly enough.
DS ran RCTs to explore effectiveness of ads.
Two KH ads in top 1% — both on cost of living.
A/ KH on cost of living. Lowering food and grocery bills.
B/ By Future Forward (a PAC). Attacks Trump on raising prices and a national sales tax, KH will cut taxes for working Americans.
Reinforces: COL was main issue.
Paraphrasing discussion from about minute 43:
EK: the DEMs had the data you gathered — so did they do what the data suggested?
DS: no they did not focus enough on COL, too much focus on ‘defending democracy, defending institutions’. (DS is diplomatic but the conclusion is clear.)
EK: But WHY, Plouffe isn’t a dummy?!
DS: They’re surrounded by donors, activists etc saying we have to focus on DT’s terrible comments — they want to focus on democracy, we test it, it doesn’t work, we tell donors and strategists that voters want to hear about the cost of EGGS but they don’t want to hear it! It feels wrong to them, they think they MUST make these arguments about institutions.
EK: The campaign ended up with KH in DC with very institutional pictures, DT was in McDonald’s.
DS: Campaigns reflect the culture of the staff! Look at the numbers on change vs preserving institutions: Do you want a) a return to ‘basic stability’ or b) ‘major change and a shock to the system’? Voters preferred B by 53-37! But the staff argued what they believe. (NB. I keep making this point here too but SW1 has resisted this for 20 years and continued despite Brexit. See below re Professor Ansell).
EK: seems data suggests both a) voters want huge change, but b) DEMs who win seem to be moderate and not radical?
DS: voters wanted someone reflecting their anger about all the things wrong and someone who will ‘shake things up’ on their behalf, but most don’t want revolutionary policy change on economy, services etc.
Trump strategy and confusion over ‘moderate’. Insiders generally and the Democrats have struggled from 2015 to figure out the strategic positioning of Trump. This is partly aesthetic. Insiders were a) repelled by his entire approach on immigration and some other issues which they defined as ‘extreme’ then b) decided he was generally ‘extreme’ then c) ignored the evidence that crucial voting blocs did not and do not see him as extreme — in fact they saw/see him as more moderate than Republican presidential candidates for decades. Again I wrote about this many times.
To his credit, EK discusses this.
DS: Working class swing voters are left on some issues but right on others — while issue correlations for voters with more education are much more highly correlated. Contra media, more voters thought ‘Kamala is more left than me’ (49%) than ‘Trump is more conservative than me’ (39%). Media confusion over this is similar to 2016. In 2020 Trump broke with the GOP ruled out a national abortion ban, he disavowed Project 2025, he ruled out cuts on Medicare and Social Security. This was important — it made him seem less extreme than we think he is!
How important was DEI/w*ke etc?
DS: The ‘they/them’ ad was a 70th percentile ad, Trump’s best testing ads were on cost of living and crime. Elite discourse post election exaggerates importance of these issues and that ad — but probably more important for young males. [Seems likely to be right to me.]
Share of younger people getting news from TikTok is 4x in four years and correlates with vote. TikTok is more decentralised and lets content that wouldn’t normally be seen in other networks, algorithm is much less about follower count, it’s more random. This probably helped GOP. TikTok’s audience is less politically engaged and more working class, so people who DEMs have struggled to talk to. DEM campaigning class used to be close to the media gatekeepers but we’re not close to the TikTok content creators.
The future?
DS has looked at DT policies, executive orders etc. Some are very popular — voter ID, troops to border. Some are very unpopular — tax cuts for rich, attacking Obamacare.
DS — we need to focus on the issues the voters care about most and not fall for Trump’s baiting. Attack should be: he’s cutting health and social security to fund lower taxes for billionaires.
DS: Trump is vulnerable. The most predictable thing is — a President wins the trifecta, overreaches, loses midterms. JFK 1962 and Clinton 1998, rare examples of escaping normal pattern in midterms — both governed in a restrained way and tried hard NOT to piss a lot of people off.
[Their discussion assumes Trump will walk into these traps. Maybe he will. But there are also signs the White House may shape the budget in different ways. If I were them, I would have some high profile examples of tax laws that help the richest and are not economically justifiable in a Hayek/Freedman sense then change them and say — we’re fixing these problems that give unjustifiable help to billionaires and we’re using money from this to help the cost of living for normal families etc. And I would take tens of millions out of paying federal income tax completely. This would be a nightmare for the DEMs. In No10 I argued for massively raising the 40% threshold to at least 100k to take millions out of paying it. It would have been a political home run but the Tories are so SW1 such ideas seem ‘crazy’ to them.]
A danger for DEMs: we win midterms because a lot of the 2024 voters don’t bother but we don’t fix our strategic problems and then hit the 2028 cycle against a less unpopular Republican and lose again when those disengaged people vote like in 2024.
DS: The GOP ran some very bad Senate candidates which helped us. But it’s hard for the DEMs to take the Senate without improving our brand with working class voters who are crucial for Senate control. Look at data in Nebraska, the place we most over-performed in Senate: he did it by running as an Independent and there is potential in running non-Democrat but Independent candidates in Red states because of the DEM branding!
[I’ve made this argument to Tories with zero success — there’s many places the Tories shouldn’t compete in given their branding but should encourage and support ‘independents’. Tories hate it because they don’t want to face hard questions about hatred for them.]
Things I think Insiders will really struggle to absorb given how they’ve behaved since 2016 — obviously I don’t mean all Insiders but it’s important to understand the general herding dynamics of Insiders which we see repeatedly and which generally dominates individual exceptions, particularly in SW1 which is much more groupthinky/homogenous than America.
How these play out will be central to the dynamics of the DEM primaries 2027-8.
1/ They can’t face that the main political dynamic in western countries is spreading and deepening hate, contempt and distrust for them, for the old Insider political-media-academia network. Since 2016 they’ve kept casting around for ways NOT to face that THEY are their main problem. They’ll keep looking for reasons other than their own failures. Shor’s point that voters clearly preferred a big shock over ‘defend the institutions’ will not be absorbed in SW1 but parts of the DEM network are absorbing it (incentives are more complex in America and more are incentivised to face reality than here).
2/ It’s very hard for them to face the educational shifts because, again, it means looking at themselves. Left parties used to represent the working classes. They have shifted to being parties of graduates. Graduates struggle to grasp these dynamics and face their consequences.
(When Vote Leave weighted polls by education in 2015-16, this was weird inside polling world. Pollsters missed Brexit and Trump in 2016 because most did not weight by education. Lynton Crosby published many polls in 2016 showing Remain winning by a landslide. Why? He didn’t understand educational polarisation and wasn’t weighting by education. This was only 8 years ago!)
3/ It’s very hard for them to face the racial shifts because they’ve herded to ‘Trump/MAGA = literal Nazis/fascists’. How could the Nazi do historically well with non-whites? DISINFORMATION obviously.
4/ It’s very hard for them to face the youth shift. Probably they’ll blame social media, especially TikTok and the ‘toxic manosphere’.
5/ The issue about campaigns reflecting the culture of the staff is incredibly important and super-underrated. Staff repeatedly push campaigns to irrational strategies and staff who push for rational strategies are often despised.
It was true in 2016 and 2019 when I experienced it in extreme forms. Many things about public opinion were absolutely obvious yet it was impossible to persuade Insiders who preferred to believe Insider memes. E.g ‘global Britain’ bombed: nobody wanted to hear it. Take Back Control and £350 million were smash hits: nobody wanted to hear it.
I wrote about the big things for 2024 in Q1 2023 yet most Insider Democrats and Insiders in the UK simply wouldn’t face the basic facts. SW1 Insiders hysterically denounced my blogs as clearly either a) stupid or b) malign disinformation. You can do research for a few hundred thousand dollars and get a good sense of the most important things. But you can’t make Insiders engage with reality when their social network rewards not facing reality.
Many involved in the Harris campaign have peddled delusions since the defeat. Obviously many professionals don’t feel able to say ‘she was a bad candidate’. Sheila Nix, Harris' chief of staff, said:
I would posit she ran a pretty flawless campaign, and she did all the steps that [were] required to be successful. And I think — obviously, we did not win, but I do think we hit all the marks.
If people like this dominate the post-mortem the DEMs will not recover nationally.
And you can see this dynamic with lefty academics denouncing Nate Silver as fascist and attacking Shor, an avowed socialist, an an enemy etc.
6/ Insiders will continue to struggle with people like Trump or us in 2016/19 whose strategic positioning is not conventional in party political terms. Insiders in the UK remain totally committed to the model of swing voters being an average of left and right. I said in 2015 this was false, that swing voters are a mix of more left and more right. We proved it in 2016 and 2019. E.g In 2019 it was obvious that the right strategy was a mix of things that did not make sense in terms of the history of both parties but which was popular with voters (more reassurance on NHS than Tories wanted, tougher on crime than Tories wanted). But Tory MPs really hated it.
Our victories had zero effect on improving the realism of UK Insider debate — if anything the opposite happened. Tories did not say: oh, we were wrong. They said: we would have won by even more if the campaign had done what we wanted instead of what Cummings wanted! The 2024 election saw Insiders talk as if 2016 and 2019 hadn’t happened. SW1 babbled about ‘the centre ground’ and portrayed Sunak, who had presided over record immigration and had sided with the ECHR/HRA rather than stop the boats and was letting out convicted murderers from jail early rather than take on Whitehall over prisons, as a right wing extremist on immigration.
For SW1 he lost ‘because he was extreme’. But stopping the boats was not ‘extreme’, it was popular across party lines. Sunak, probably the highest IQ MP and certainly the hardest working one, lost because he would not side with voters against SW1 and instead a) promised to actually stop the boats (NOT ‘I’ll try’ but ‘others said they’d try, I’ll do it’), b) then prioritised maintaining the ECHR/HRA, c) twisted himself in knots trying to explain his volte face, and d) begged for credit for trying to stop the boats even though he’d explicitly ruled out using that line from the start!
Similarly many Tories want to believe, as they did 1997-2001, that they just need to go back to 80s rhetoric about tax and deregulation and free markets to recover. This will flop now as it flopped 1997-01.
Again, this is partly because facing reality is deeply unpleasant while maintaining the old ideas means they can keep telling themselves that positions they do not want to take are ‘extreme’ therefore ‘unpopular’. To those thinking ‘but they want to win so surely they will update’ — NO NO NO! One of the biggest lessons since 2016 is this has not happened. So why would it now?
(Also there’s more and more duff polling and ‘market research analysis’ produced to fit Insider tastes rather than dig to difficult truths. And more delusional academics on social media encouraging pundits and MPs to stay delusional.)
7/ If you were really optimising for winning, then there would be more Independents run by both parties. But arguing for this brings accusations of cowardice, betrayal etc so the issues aren’t discussed much. I don’t think Shor’s idea will get much more traction than I’ve had here. An obvious test is the 2028 London Mayor where probably the optimal way to win is an ‘Independent’ candidate who the Tories support and do not put forward their own candidate. But they’d probably rather Labour win than cooperate in a successful Independent campaign.
8/ I said after the 2024 result that SW1 Insiders and much of the DEMs would double down on Nazis + ‘idiot voters were conned by disinformation’ + ‘so we need more censorship’. This has happened. It will continue. Much of SW1 has retreated to the Bluesky echo chamber/ghetto. This obviously increases all the dynamics pushing them towards groupthink and delusion that have characterised them for years.
In the UK, No10 is happy blaming murders on Amazon selling kitchen knives with sharp points and NPCs applaud so there’s no obvious end to their appetite for nonsense. So long as regime Insiders continue to rely on the regime media, there’s no reason to expect the cycle of delusions to break.
As I’ve pointed out before, one of the most ludicrous prominent professors is Prof Snyder of history at Yale. He wrote on 15 April re the Trump deportations:
This is obviously absurd on its face. Moving a person from one place to another literally DOES undo rights and disempower the judiciary — that’s what moving from Texas to Dover, Dover to Calais, Calais to Moscow or Moscow to Beijing does. It is the core of national sovereignty and is a hard legal distinction between being inside the EU’s legal order or outside it. Different states have different laws, rights and jurisdictions. The idea that this is a ‘basic Nazi practice’ is self-evidently grotesque. But this is characteristic of elite Insider debate now. When it comes to Trump, almost any sort of attack is widely seen as legitimate inside universities. And these are the elites complaining about low information voters and disinformation.
9/ There is an easy failure mode for the DEMs. Trump does unpopular things. The normal cycle of Presidents in their 6th year losing midterms happens in 2026. Highly motivated and engaged DEMs vote. Low engagement MAGA do not. The DEMs then fool themselves about 2026 as they did about 2022. And pick a candidate who then has to face a GOP candidate who may be more popular than Trump and then the disengaged vote in 2028 because it’s a presidential campaign.
Professor Ben Ansell as a case study: ‘it’s peak populism’
I recommend reading Ansell’s recent piece on ‘peak populism’. It’s useful because it states some ideas of ‘the mainstream’ clearly, it got lots of thumbs up from pundits, and it shows important ways ‘the mainstream’ fool themselves.
Ansell thinks ‘populism’ has peaked and will decline:
We’re ‘witnessing the moment of hubris for the past decade’s unstoppable rise of populism.’
Per the pundit class, Trump 2 is simply ‘chaos’ — incompetence and evil. Per the pundit class, no mention of any of the extremely able businesspeople persuaded to join the government. For our pundits, everyone’s an idiot except them. (You can see them increasingly applying the same logic to No10 spads with little-to-no appreciation of the fact that these spads are having to deal with a pathological civil service.)
‘DOGE exemplifies chaotic authoritarianism’ — it’s ‘wild, callous, arbitrary’. No consideration of how Bill Clinton and Obama made the same criticisms of waste and fraud and set up ventures to track and stop it. No mention of some of the insanities DOGE has uncovered. No, DOGE = Elon = crazy/evil.
Ansell mocks Trump’s comments that China thinks long-term and creating a new strategy for China can’t be judged on quarterly results — a tritely obvious point.
‘Just a month ago I was getting calls every five minutes from British journalists about the possibility of Nigel Farage being the next Prime Minister… I don’t really believe there was much chance of this, even in the halcyon days of <checks notes> December and January, when Trump had just got re-elected.’ Obviously Ansell is wildly pro-Zelensky and the Ukraine war. So he was appalled by the Zelensky-Trump TV showdown and thinks it’s a disaster for Farage: ‘I suspect we will look back on the first weeks of 2025 as the high point for potential Prime Minister Nigel Farage’. I guarantee that whatever happens with Farage, a Trump-Zelensky interview in Jan 2025 will NOT be the decisive factor on Farage’s 2029 performance. Pundits are addicted to overrating the importance of any media event by factors of ~1,000X or more.
Europe is ‘increasingly starting to turn away’ from populism.
Mertz will ‘lead a European coalition of support for Ukraine’ and all the talk of European spending on militaries ‘has led to a surge in European stock markets at the signs of military Keynesianism and hence we now have our moment of Make Europe Great Again’. This reflects SW1’s ephemeral emotional wave of early March but such waves come and go — Ansell will struggle to remember his own optimism about this shortly.
And the professor sets out some thoughts on political strategy and communication for the ‘mainstream’.
The mainstream is getting another chance, just as it did after World War Two. And like then, it is the common enemy that unites and inspires... That enemy is most clearly Vladimir Putin. But we have had Putin for almost quarter century. So it’s not him alone. No, it is the Trump-Putin quasi-alliance that has done the trick. It is the fateful decision of chaotic, populist authoritarianism to sidle up to stable, deep, old-school authoritarianism.
Defeating populism in democracies requires an enemy. But it can’t be the populists themselves. That is their very fuel. Of course, they will say, the elites want to destroy us to protect the corrupt swamp. So populists alone won’t do the trick as an enemy.
Populists who actually side with an existing foreign enemy though. Well that clarifies matters. Now every decision the populist takes can be tied to the foreign enemy. It becomes harder for populists to deflect, to dissimulate effectively. They become glued to the very thing they usually denounce — an outside, foreign force. And they cannot easily unstick themselves… [O]ver the past weeks it has become a possible narrative. And if there’s anything that the mainstream parties need, it’s a narrative. With good guys and bad guys. If the populists are going to make it this easy to attack them, then it’s simply the weakness, the self-doubt, the lack of will to survive that will fail the mainstream. These are great parties with grand traditions. If they can’t do a little bit of aggressive opportunistic politics now… well then there’s no hope for them, or for us.’
So, a good representative of the Insider class suggests ‘the mainstream’ needs ‘a narrative’ and ‘an enemy’, a story of ‘good guys and bad guys’ and the ‘Trump-Putin alliance’ has ‘done the trick’.
Many a SW1 NPC retweeted this piece approvingly.
A few thoughts.
1/ Ansell’s piece on ‘populism’ — like roughly all Insider analysis — ignores the fundamental driver of ‘populism’, the core reason for Vote Leave’s wins in 2016 and 2019, Trump’s in 2016 and 2024, and the crisis of ‘mainstream’ parties across Europe: *widespread disgust with the ruling political-media-bureaucratic elites, extreme desire for change, and growing anger at how demands for change are attacked as ‘far right’*. Real wages for median workers is an unprecedented disaster. Communities across the West have been smashed by mass immigration and huge pressure on local services including health, schools, and police. Voters think their kids will be worse off than today because those in power in all mainstream parties are destructive.
But absolutely no reflection from Ansell on this fundamental structural force in western politics that will continue to operate whatever the short-term ups and downs of particular individuals or parties.
(Even use of the word ‘populism’ helps Insiders fool themselves. They have a pejorative label for everyone who says important parts of the old institutions are knackered and should change. Mad about the enormous coverups and lies over covid and lab leak? POPULIST! Mad about the police returning children to the rape/grooming gangs? POPULIST! Use of this term fools Insiders analytically and encourages elites like Silicon Valley to defect from defence of the institutions — exactly the opposite of what the Insiders want.)
2/ Insiders have repeatedly predicted the ‘peak’ of revolt against themselves. But if you look at Europe and South America the picture is very much NOT that Insiders are on the up and voters are returning to think ‘oh yeah the old parties and systems have got their act together’. Polls suggest growing anger with the ‘mainstream’ everywhere.
Whether Trump manages to create a team that do important things and wins support or bombs out in chaos is important for America but the big structural dynamic of western politics is bigger than Trump. When Trump lost in 2020 the pundits declared that populism had peaked and now the ‘grownups’ were in the White House ‘normal’ politics would return. As they did when Vote Leave left No10. What happened?! The ‘mainstream grownups’ set themselves on fire, escalated a war with Ukraine that’s blown up in their faces, and managed things so badly Trump won again and Farage was resurrected after going out of business in December 2019.
3/ Contra Ansell, all over Britain rage, disgust, despair and hate for SW1 are growing — personal despair and despair for the country. This is obvious outside SW1 and will become more and more obvious as it has for years. There is now open discussion — away from SW1 — of ‘civil war’ and social crackup. People now talk about this in focus groups. This will be a huge shock as it sinks in in SW1. When forced to confront it, SW1 will mimic Ansell’s piece — they will not consider what it is about them, about the mainstream, that has driven the fear and rage. No, they will make it all about ‘extremist’ political actors and ‘disinformation’ — i.e the same story they’ve told themselves for a decade.
4/ An important factor is aesthetics. It’s easy to find mainstream characters like Obama and Clinton or Democrat Senators making arguments almost identical to Trump about things like trade, China, deficits, illegal immigration, absurd government waste, foreign aid, the dangerous tendency of the deep state to hide spending on its priorities in unscrutinised budgets etc. It’s easy to quote examples of Obama using the state against political enemies and forcing institutions like universities to do what he and his supporters wanted while nobody in ‘the mainstream’ said a word about the constitution or screamed about ‘fascism’.
But this does not matter. Trump is Trumpy and he has mobilised supporters who look and sound the way they do. And they are full of anger about the ‘mainstream’ and determined to change how Washington works, unlike the old GOP establishment. They are aesthetically revolting to pundits, professors and generally the graduates of top universities, as well as a direct threat to the flow of power and money on which those networks rely.
You could see the force of these aesthetics during last summer’s riots. Academics and pundits unironically tweeted about how they had always opposed calls for ‘lock em up’ and ‘tougher sentences’ but looking at the white, tattooed, flag waving rioters, LOCK EM UP AND THROW AWAY THE KEY! Suddenly years in jail for a tweet was the socially acceptable move in a country that gives child abusers lamer sentences.
You see the force of these aesthetics in their response to the grooming/rape gangs: very strong aversion to facing the issue, a very strong desire to divert it to ‘who is exploiting the issue’ rather than the issue itself. In January, SW1 immediately made the resurgence of interest — because of court transcripts going viral — about Elon and ‘interference in British politics’ etc. No10 press office gave the lead and the mainstream followed. And since then the courts have increasingly refused to allow publication of transcripts for the openly political reason of judges deciding they don’t think discussion of the horrors is ‘in the public interest’. And the ‘mainstream’ has been largely silent about it. Imagine if judges voiced pro-Brexit views in rulings and said that transcripts should not be public because it wouldn’t be ‘in the public interest’ (see here.)
A central factor driving elite fragmentation in the US and UK is a differing orientation on this issue. As I’ve said before, people like Peter Thiel have come to think that dominant political elites of both parties are largely wrong and the deplorables are right about a lot since 1991: instead of aesthetic disgust for the deplorables, we must try more understanding and accept elites have made big mistakes.
This is still not an acceptable view for SW1 pundits.
5/ Ansell’s advice on political strategy for ‘the mainstream’ is very revealing. It is devoid of any acceptance of error, it is entirely negative, it re-hashed exactly the Trump=Putin Russiagate hoax narrative that just got rolled out again in 2024 and bombed with swing voters. This ‘narrative’ is super popular among people like him and FT pundits but is a dud with the crucial voters.
It’s also obviously super-ironic that the preferred message of the old regime about fascism is itself an echo of fascism — i.e our domestic enemy is in league with our foreign enemy.
Ansell himself has complained repeatedly about how ‘populists’ combine domestic and foreign enemies in narratives of treachery. Yet he and his network think this is the way forward for ‘progressives’.
6/ I used to talk to people like Ansell even in the crisis of 2019. But discussion has become practically impossible.
Many of those who consider themselves the ‘elite’ of political discussion in this country have radicalised to the Far Left on many/most issues while thinking everybody else has radicalised Right, deceived by ‘disinformation’.
And they’ve poisoned their own information sources. Most have fled to Bluesky where ‘it’s straight up Hitler’ daily emotional venting is strongly reinforced. After babbling about Trump running again as ‘great for the Democrats’ — cf. Sam Freedman et al — there is no reflection on why yet again as a network they misunderstood politics so badly.
Ansell himself — a professor of political science! — tweeted about ONE POLL, the Selzer poll, that got international coverage because it played perfectly to confirmation bias. And so did vast numbers of academics who talk so much about the ‘irrationality’ of ‘low information voters’.
If you look at BlueSky accounts for the likes of Ansell et al, they see Kara Swisher and Taylor Lorenz as reliable sources to quote on Silicon Valley. This is another example of the collapse of consensus reality. If these are your trusted sources for the Valley and ‘tech’, then you are not going to be able to have a good faith discussion with people driving technological development. But Ansell et al get very positive reinforcement from their (Bluesky) social network. (Lorenz is now running a campaign on Luigi and says he’s ‘morally good’. Social media finances reinforce the incentives for people to monetise such niches.)
7/ Crucial to political views is simply which stories get focus from a critical mass of Insiders and social media influencers.
The influence of communication strategy and the dynamics of campaigns are usually discussed in terms of how players discuss issue X. But in many ways it’s more important whether issue X is on the radar at all. (E.g in campaign terms, the Hillary campaign decision to agree with Trump that immigration was a central issue in 2016.)
If you look at SW1’s high status pundits and academics, they are totally obsessed with Elon and totally ignore stories that dominate British discussion of politics. Today (29/4) there is the Spanish blackout, umpteen big UK stories, but they’re almost totally obsessed with American news, Miller’s appearances on FOX, the latest Elon tweet etc. A big effect of social media has been to deepen the trend for SW1 to obsess on US politics to a pathological extent, tweeting about obscure culture wars in the American West ignored by 99.9% of Americans while massive things happen a few miles away in England.
And the Bluesky phenomenon is another important fragmentation of elites. For those in SW1 now orienting by Bluesky, they see a very different news agenda because many stories barely exist on Buesky:
The boats transferring hundreds a day across the Channel.
The weekly court cases using ECHR/HRA ‘right to family life’ to stop deportation often with crazy details. These stories are changing voters’ minds on the ECHR but it’s invisible on Bluesky.
Grooming/rape gang horrors.
Prisoners let out early attacking people.
The Manchester terrorist attacking the prison officers and the HRA angles (see below).
The Supreme Court judgment on trans / Equality Act. I scrolled through the usual NPC suspects: almost totally invisible on the day. To the extent Ansell has commented, it’s to retweet people attacking the Supreme Court and JK Rowling. This is particularly ironic given how this entire network describes attacking court judgements as ‘fascist’ when the tables are turned. But on the day almost all the NPCs completely ignored the story leading all the news.
Dumb regulations destroying businesses and entrepreneurs explaining how. ‘Regulation is good for productivity’ is the BlueSky meme.
How all their predictions on Ukraine and Russia have cratered.
The shift of young talented people with money out of UK to US and Dubai (not the EU). We’ve gained from some of the similar exodus from the EU with people moving to London. But we’re losing a lot. SW1 underrates this. And Bluesky can’t discuss it because it undercuts both ‘Brexit evil’ and ‘Trump evil’.
To the extent these stories get a mention it is only in the context of ‘exploited by fascists’ etc.
The combination of these social media dynamics with Trump’s polling is almost inevitably going to make UK pundit land even more unable to think about things from the perspective of a median swing voter, in America or here.
8/ I noticed another professor of political science commenting on politics the other day, Prof Tim Bale who writes a lot on the Tories. I think generally his core perspective was false a decade ago but he has stuck to it and it seems more obviously wrong than it did ten years ago.
Two revealing points.
A/ Bale says people on the right are deluded about ‘a “realignment” that never was’ in British politics. It’s very confusing because educational realignment is one of the biggest and most important trends in western politics. He definitely knows this. And per Shor above, the realignment continues across the West. The Right are deluded on many things but this is not one of them.
B/ Bale attacks Kemi B for thinking ‘genuinely, if preposterously, … that the party “talked right yet governed left” while in office’. Per the general pundit narrative, Bale thinks of the 2019-24 period as a ‘lurch to the right’ and the idea that the party ‘talked right but governed left’ is preposterous.
But after we left No10 Boris-Sunak triggered the biggest wave of legal immigration in history and the biggest wave of illegal immigration/fake asylum seekers EVER. They said they’d stop the boats and then said they couldn’t stop the boats because of the HRA which they prioritised. They said they’d be tough on violent criminals then funded child murderers having weddings in jail ‘because it’s their human rights’. They guaranteed no personal tax rises — because I wrote it into the manifesto — then put up taxes. They said they’d prioritise defence then hollowed out capabilities year after year. And on and on and on. It is true that graduates on the Left living in London think the Tories greatly ‘lurched to the right’ but this is not true about the voters relevant for a Tory revival. Only someone very much on the Left could look at the actual Tory record, rather than their nonsense rhetoric/spin, and say it was a lurch to the right. And only someone who does not listen to the voters who deserted the Tories can claim what Bale claims.
Saying this is one of the few accurate things KB has said! Elsewhere she’s repeated the SW1 meme that the problem with post-VL Boris and Sunak was they ‘listened to the focus groups’ which is even more crackers than Bale’s argument and points to how little KB understands about why the Tories really imploded.
Generally Bale constantly pushes the most simplistic memes about ‘centre ground’ and what the Tories should do that show no updating 2016-25. And this reflects his peers generally. As opinion fragments and ‘the centre ground’ becomes more and more misleading every year, the stronger is the mainstream’s attachment to it. Like the Today, program, it’s a familiar landmark for the NPCs as the world around them becomes less and less comprehensible.
9/ This system tension between a) voters increasingly hating the regime and b) the regime’s blindness and construction of delusional ‘narratives’ that focus on demonising people is partly why I think that serious political violence we haven’t seen in this country in living memory is likely soon. The system dynamics are all pushing this way. Since the shocks of 2016 political Insiders have kept doubling down. And all the signs are that although many business people are defecting from their network, political networks, driven by social media logic, are polarising further. These dynamics add load after load of tinder, waiting for sparks.
Various on tech/AI
Toby Lutke’s Shopify memo on hiring and AI:
‘I use it [AI] all the time, but even I feel I'm only scratching the surface. It’s the most rapid shift to how work is done that I’ve seen in my career and I’ve been pretty clear about my enthusiasm for it… Last summer I used agents to create my talk, and presented about that. I did this as a call to action and invitation for everyone to tinker with AI, to dispel any scepticism or confusion that this matters at all levels…
‘We are all lucky to work with some amazing colleagues, the kind who contribute 10X of what was previously thought possible. It’s my favorite thing about this company. And what’s even more amazing is that, for the first time, we see the tools become 10X themselves. I’ve seen many of these people approach implausible tasks, ones we wouldn’t even have chosen to tackle before, with reflexive and brilliant usage of AI to get 100X the work done…
‘In a company growing 20-40% year over year, you must improve by at least that every year just to re-qualify… This sounds daunting, but given the nature of the tools, this doesn’t even sound terribly ambitious to me anymore. It’s also exactly the kind of environment that our top performers tell us they want.
‘Before asking for more Headcount and resources, teams must demonstrate why they cannot get what they want done using AI. What would this area look like if autonomous AI agents were already part of the team?…
https://x.com/tobi/status/1909251946235437514
Karpathy: LLMs are a technology that empower people rather than diffuse top-down
Technologies tend to diffuse top-down: e.g electricity, planes, computers, internet, GPS.
This is partly because they are capital intensive and needs expertise at first.
So it strikes me as quite unique and remarkable that LLMs display a dramatic reversal of this pattern — they generate disproportionate benefit for regular people, while their impact is a lot more muted and lagging in corporations and governments. ChatGPT is the fastest growing consumer application in history, with 400 million weekly active users who use it for writing, coding, translation, tutoring, summarization, deep research, brainstorming, etc. This isn't a minor upgrade to what existed before, it is a major multiplier to an individual's power level across a broad range of capabilities. And the barrier to use is incredibly low — the models are cheap (free, even), fast, available to anyone on demand behind a url (or even local machine), and they speak anyone's native language, including tone, slang or emoji. This is insane. As far as I can tell, the average person has never experienced a technological unlock this dramatic, this fast.
Why then are the benefits a lot more muted in the corporate and government realms? I think the first reason is that LLMs offer a very specific profile of capability — that of merely quasi-expert knowledge/performance, but simultaneously across a very wide variety of domains. In other words, they are simultaneously versatile but also shallow and fallible. Meanwhile, an organization's unique superpower is the ability to concentrate diverse expertise into a single entity by employing engineers, researchers, analysts, lawyers, marketers, etc. While LLMs can certainly make these experts more efficient individually (e.g. drafting initial legal clauses, generating boilerplate code, etc.), the improvement to the organization takes the form of becoming a bit better at the things it could already do. In contrast, an individual will usually only be an expert in at most one thing, so the broad quasi-expertise offered by the LLM fundamentally allows them to do things they couldn't do before. People can now vibe code apps. They can approach legal documents. They can grok esoteric research papers. They can do data analytics. They can generate multimodal content for branding and marketing. They can do all of this at an adequate capability without involving an additional expert.
So — LLMs enable companies/governments to do what they can already do a bit better/faster but they enable individuals to do things they couldn’t do at all.
Second, organizations deal with problems of a lot greater complexity and necessary coordination, think: various integrations, legacy systems, corporate brand or style guides, stringent security protocols, privacy considerations, internationalization, regulatory compliance and legal risk. There are a lot more variables, a lot more constraints, a lot more considerations, and a lot lower margin for error. It's not so easy to put all of it into a context window. You can't just vibe code something. You might be one disastrous hallucination away from losing your job.
And third, there is the well-documented inertia of a larger organization, featuring culture, historical precedents, political turf that escalate in periods of rapid change, communication overhead, re-training challenges of a distributed workforce and good old-fashioned bureaucracy. These are major headwinds when it comes to rapid adoption of a sparkling new, versatile-but-shallow-and-fallible tool. I don't wish to downplay the impacts of LLMs in corporations or governments, but at least for the moment and in aggregate across society, they have been significantly more life altering for individuals than they have been for organizations…
Looking forward, the continued diffusion of LLMs of course depends on continued performance improvement and its capability profile. The "benefit distribution" overall is particularly interesting to chart, and depends heavily on the dynamic range of the performance as a function of capital expenditure. Today, frontier-grade LLM performance is very accessible and cheap. Beyond this point, you cannot spend a marginal dollar to get better performance, reliability or autonomy. Money can't buy better ChatGPT. Bill Gates talks to GPT 4o just like you do.
But can this be expected to last? Train-time scaling (increase parameters, data), test-time scaling (increase time) and model ensembles (increase batch) are forces increasing the dynamic range. On the other hand, model distillation (the ability to train disproportionately powerful small models by training to mimic the big model) has been a force decreasing dynamic range. Certainly, the moment money can buy dramatically better ChatGPT, things change. Large organizations get to concentrate their vast resources to buy more intelligence. And within the category of "individual" too, the elite may once again split away from the rest of society. Their child will be tutored by GPT-8-pro-max-high, yours by GPT-6 mini.
But at least at this moment in time, we find ourselves in a unique and unprecedented situation in the history of technology. If you go back through various sci-fi you'll see that very few would have predicted that the AI revolution would feature this progression. It was supposed to be a top secret government megabrain project wielded by the generals, not ChatGPT appearing basically overnight and for free on a device already in everyone's pocket. Remember that William Gibson quote "The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed"? Surprise - the future is already here, and it is shockingly distributed.
Interesting. But the Big 3 could have built a product already that charges a lot for access to frontier performance but they’ve chosen not to. They could change this decision any time. But it’s interesting they seem more interested in scale than revenues.
Michael Nielsen suggests ditching alignment as a goal
Most doomers on AI are doomers because they think the models will escape control before we ‘solve alignment’.
MN argues the conventional approach from much of the AI safety community is misconceived:
Instead of focusing on ‘rogue AI escaping control’, we should consider that the crucial dangers are a) the AIs will generate enormous power for humans to use against humans, b) they will accelerate the process of discovering destructive technologies that are simpler to create, i.e the curve towards e.g a virus that kills almost all and is very simple for a non-expert to make and distribute.
The critical issue is not ‘losing control’ of an AI but whether the world happens to be structured such that there are simple cheap ‘recipes for ruin’. Imagine fire working slightly differently so that it keeps burning 1000X easier once it’s started. The universe happens to not quite work like that. But are there technologies waiting to be discovered that would make it quite simple to kill >90% of humans?
We’ve already accidentally engineered a mousepox variant that was 100% lethal to mice vaccinated against mousepox. Might there be something similar for humans? ‘Ted Taylor, the leading American designer of nuclear weapons, thought they were very plausible, telling the writer John McPhee there is "a way to make a bomb… so simple that I just don't want to describe it". Taylor's remarks, published in a book by McPhee, stimulated at least two people to develop plausible designs for DIY nuclear weapons. These have not, so far as we know, been built, perhaps because the availability of fissile material remains a bottleneck. If that bottleneck can be removed, then it may be very difficult to avoid the widespread proliferation of weapons.’
If there are simple cheap recipes for ruin, then obviously the path we’re on with AI model improvement implies we’re also making it easier both to do wonderful things and disastrous things. Von Neumann warned (see previous blogs) that technology development is intrinsically morally neutral, we can’t say much in advance about whether a particular development will be net good or bad, and attempts to control technology development are largely doomed. MN says, ‘Deep understanding of reality is intrinsically dual use.’
‘Alignment’ does not solve the core problem. The core problem is the power conferred and the dual-use nature of science and technology. Further, much work on AI alignment, intended to diminish risks of disaster, actually ‘speeds progress toward catastrophic capabilities’ because it makes models easier to develop, deploy, sell etc.
[I’m increasingly sceptical of the concept of ‘solving alignment’ in principle. It’s akin to ‘we’ll solve the central problems of philosophy since the pre-Socratics and Socrates’. The idea that computer scientists / software developers — who often have very tenuous grasp of the basics of psychology and power in politics — will ‘solve’ this ‘in the next few years’ seems so ludicrous I’m increasingly puzzled why so many intelligent people take it seriously. But I also think the work of Chris Olah on interpretability — using models to interpret models’ behaviour — could be very important and valuable, though if it is, it will also be inherently unpredictable to what extent it is used by evil people.]
Interesting essay by Jon Askonas on technology, culture and the new regime
Discussion on China Talk with Economist’s defence editor, Shashank Joshi, on technology and war
It’s interesting how yet again there is no mention in hours of discussion of the core history and the political ends of the UKR war. What is ‘the West’ trying to achieve (beyond soundbites like ‘aggression must fail’)? And these guys are much smarter than the average minister! But as I keep pointing out, the UKR venture has failed for the same reason you see repeatedly in history — a lack of a serious, credible explanation of the political ends the war is supposed to achieve. Again, if you think someone somewhere has set such a thing out — regardless of whether they are famous and powerful — please link to it.
Shashank strongly dislikes the concept of ‘spheres of interest’.
My big concern is not just that we get a bad deal for Ukraine, it’s that the idea of spheres of influence appeals to Trump, dealing with great men one-on-one, people like Kim Jong Un, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping — and that what will be on the table is not just Ukraine, but Europe. Putin will say, “Look, Mr. President, you get your Nobel Peace Prize, we get a ceasefire, we do business together and lift sanctions. And you can make money in Moscow, by the way. Just one tiny little thing, that NATO thing. You don’t like it, I don’t like it. Just roll it back to where it was in 1997, west of Poland. That would be great. You’ll save a ton of money here. I’ve prepared a spreadsheet for you.” That is the scenario that worries us — a Yalta as much as a Munich.
But the concept of ‘spheres of influence’ is ancient. It is intrinsic to the nature of power, states and empires. It was central in the Cuban crisis in 1962. It was central to Britain’s assertion of the independence of the Low Countries through the 19th Century and our grounds for fighting in 1914. It’s central to calculations over Taiwan.
And a problem Europe now faces is that having escalated the disastrous war, we really are now in a position where facing the reality of our failure is a big blow to NATO! The West spent two years mocking Putin — you didn’t want more NATO but you got more NATO! And now we’re running around like headless chickens screaming ‘it might be the end of NATO’ — or in the case of the most demented (Snyder, O’brien etc), it should be the end of NATO because America went Nazi!!
Shashank says the use of AI for targeting is greatly improving the effectiveness of drones:
What I am seeing with the companies and entities building these AI-guided [drone] systems for the final 100 meters, 200 meters, 300 meters, and increasingly up to 2 kilometers in some cases, is that the engagement range is going up. You can home in on the target beyond the range of any plausible local jamming device. That’s a huge deal. More importantly, the hit rate you’re getting is 80% plus. That’s phenomenal. That changes the economics, the cost per kill; that changes the economics of this from an attrition basis…
You can achieve this with like 30 minutes of training. Think about what that unlocks for a force, particularly sitting here in Europe where we have these shrunken armies with no reserves, with the manpower requirements as well with the training times to bring new people in when you have attrition in a war in the first round.
This little tactical innovation — terminal guidance, AI-enabled — looks very narrow, but it has all these super interesting and consequential ripple effects on the economics of attrition, the cost per kill, lethality levels, the effectiveness of jamming, and on manpower and labor requirements.
Re espionage and AI labs, Michael Horowitz says:
Now the toughest scenario is the espionage one where you’re talking about essentially covert operations targeting companies. It wouldn’t surprise me if some of those companies are intelligence targets for foreign governments. The challenge analytically is that these arguments quickly enter the realm of non-falsifiability.
If I tell you that I think this kind of espionage or that kind of espionage wouldn’t be that likely, you could say “well what about this, what about this?” And we’re not going to be able to resolve it with facts. Non-falsifiable threat arguments make me nervous analytically. Maybe this is the academic in me that makes me want to push back a little bit because I feel like if an argument is legitimate, we should be able to specify it in a clearly falsifiable way.
But many espionage problems are intrinsically non-falsifiable, especially the nightmare ‘wilderness of mirrors’ of counter-intelligence. Maybe your paranoia has succeeded, but maybe you’ve been penetrated all along and never realised. You cannot ‘falsify’ the proposition ‘we’ve definitely not been penetrated by another entity’. No evidence of penetration is perfectly consistent with penetration.
[The labs will need to develop relationships with the agencies because as they intrude more and more on power and politics they will be the object of the punchiest parts of foreign espionage including blackmail so will need state help. The labs have been slow to face this since my first discussions with them in 2016-17 but they’re updating rapidly. Cf this report that came out a few days ago on the vulnerabilities of data centres. Discussions about AI always assume the US still has a lead. It would not surprise me if all the main IP has been stolen from the top 3 labs by PRC intel, passed to a black PRC project, and this project is secretly ahead of the US.]
Horowitz:
Reprogramming 0.05% of the defense budget to fund multiple thousands of attritable autonomous systems for the Indo-Pacific under the first bet of the Replicator initiative required over 40 briefings to Congress, including a ton by the Deputy Secretary of Defense who’s really busy. Congressional oversight is really important, but that degree of effort required to reprogram essentially less than a billion dollars demonstrates a budget system unable to operate at the speed and scale necessary given the rate of technological change and given the threat that the US is under from Chinese military advances in the Indo-Pacific…
Keep in mind the Pentagon’s budgeting process was invented by Robert McNamara during the Vietnam era and has not changed since then. [Cf. below re McNamara]
[Contra the mainstream narrative, Hegseth and Stephen Feinberg (cf. testimony have made coherent arguments for procurement reform along lines I’ve discussed for years.]
Interesting paper by the Kill Chain author on ‘Moneyball Military’
The US has failed to reform procurement in time for a ~2027 PRC attack on Taiwan. It’s only short-term option is a ‘Moneyball’ approach — i.e ‘large numbers of smaller, lower-cost, autonomous systems that can be provided more easily to our allies and partners.’
(My paper on systems management (below) discussed how America under McNamara replaced the successful systems management with the Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution (PPBE) system that has been an expensive nightmare since. I’ll return to this story soon.)
Keven Esvelt, one of the inventors of gene drives, on use of LLMs for bio-terror/war
Esvelt is one of the inventors of gene drives. He tested models ability to reason about mirror-life, a nightmarish possibility that might pose a threat to everything living.
His new paper:
I leveraged the unique opportunity presented by an upcoming publication describing a novel catastrophic biothreat – “Technical Report on Mirror Bacteria: Feasibility and Risks” – to conduct a small controlled study before it became public. Graduate-trained biologists tasked with predicting the consequences of releasing mirror E. coli showed no significant differences in rubric-graded accuracy using Claude Sonnet 3.5 new (n=10) or web search only (n=2); both groups scored comparably to a web baseline (28 and 43 versus 36).
However, Sonnet reasoned correctly when prompted by a report author, but a smaller model, Haiku 3.5, failed even with author guidance (80 versus 5). These results suggest distinct stages of model capability: Haiku is unable to reason about mirror life even with threat-aware expert guidance (Stage 1), while Sonnet correctly reasons only with threat-aware prompting (Stage 2). Continued advances may allow future models to disclose novel CBRN threats to naive experts (Stage 3) or unskilled users (Stage 4). While mirror life represents only one case study, monitoring new models' ability to reason about privately known threats may allow protective measures to be implemented before widespread disclosure.
As I’ve written about many times before, there is a general trend in biology towards democratising capabilities: simpler, cheaper, faster, deadlier. Combined with trends in AI this could be catastrophic.
One of the most important reasons to disrupt the old regimes is that they have proved not only hopeless on these problems but actively hostile to serious action. The scale of lies on covid was immense. The inertia against acting on gain-of-function and lab security has been immense. Britain actually closed sewage surveillance after what we built in 2020 was copied globally.
Dan Hendrycks et al on AI and deterrence
They suggest a framework of deterrence, nonproliferation, and competitiveness as ‘a robust strategy’ for dealing with superintelligence and national security.
Deterrence
A race for AI-enabled dominance endangers all states. If, in a hurried bid for superiority, one state inadvertently loses control of its AI, it jeopardizes the security of all states. Alternatively, if the same state succeeds in producing and controlling a highly capable AI, it likewise poses a direct threat to the survival of its peers. In either event, states seeking to secure their own survival may threaten to sabotage destabilizing AI projects for deterrence. A state could try to disrupt such an AI project with interventions ranging from covert operations that degrade training runs to physical damage that disables AI infrastructure. Thus, we are already approaching a dynamic similar to nuclear Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), in which no power dares attempt an outright grab for strategic monopoly, as any such effort would invite a debilitating response. This strategic condition, which we refer to as Mutual Assured AI Malfunction (MAIM), represents a potentially stable deterrence regime, but maintaining it could require care. We outline measures to maintain the conditions for MAIM, including clearly communicated escalation ladders, placement of AI infrastructure far from population centers, transparency into datacenters, and more.
Nonproliferation
While deterrence through MAIM constrains the intent of superpowers, all nations have an interest in limiting the AI capabilities of terrorists. Drawing on nonproliferation precedents for weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), we outline three levers for achieving this. Mirroring measures to restrict key inputs to WMDs such as fissile material and chemical weapons precursors, compute security involves knowing reliably where high-end AI chips are and stemming smuggling to rogue actors. Monitoring shipments, tracking chip inventories, and employing security features like geolocation can help states account for them. States must prioritize information security to protect the model weights underlying the most advanced AI systems from falling into the hands of rogue actors, similar to controls on other sensitive information. Finally, akin to screening protocols for DNA synthesis services to detect and refuse orders for known pathogens, AI companies can be incentivized to implement technical AI security measures that detect and prevent malicious use.
Competitiveness
Beyond securing their survival, states will have an interest in harnessing AI to bolster their competitiveness, as successful AI adoption will be a determining factor in national strength. Adopting AI-enabled weapons and carefully integrating AI into command and control is increasingly essential for military strength. Recognizing that economic security is crucial for national security, domestic capacity for manufacturing high-end AI chips will ensure a resilient supply and sidestep geopolitical risks in Taiwan. Robust legal frameworks governing AI agents can set basic constraints on their behavior that follow the spirit of existing law. Finally, governments can maintain political stability through measures that improve the quality of decision-making and combat the disruptive effects of rapid automation.
By detecting and deterring destabilizing AI projects through intelligence operations and targeted disruption, restricting access to AI chips and capabilities for malicious actors through strict controls, and guaranteeing a stable AI supply chain by investing in domestic chip manufacturing, states can safeguard their security while opening the door to unprecedented prosperity.
I don’t see MAD as a good analogy for AI. MAD concerned use of nuclear weapons — both sides had to worry that a conflict could escalate into general use of all nukes. But neither the US nor China will hold back from making ‘an outright grab for strategic monopoly’ for fear of ‘a debilitating response’. I think the opposite is more likely. Fear of a debilitating loss in the race will incentivise both America and China to race for better AI.
The time horizon of tasks AIs can do is doubling every ~4 months, on trend to extend to a normal human day in 2026-7, work week 2027-8 (cf. note)
And costs are falling dramatically.
Daniel Kokotajlo, Scott Alexander: scenarios for AI in 2027
DK has a record of being accurate in AI predictions.
In 2025 unreliable agents go mainstream.
Late 2025 OpenAI releases GPT5 trained on 100x more FLOPs than GPT4. They focus on coding and being a useful agent for AI research.
Internally at OAI their own progress speeds up using the new agents.
In 2026 Xi goes all in on a huge China program, bringing together companies and the security world. China’s superior ability to build energy plants is deployed.
US deep state floundering because of their own bureaucracy.
Agents can do ~everything taught in CS courses. Software job market is chaos.
OAI in 2026 is paying billions for humans to record themselves solving long-horizon tasks, they use the data for reinforcement learning on the next generation of agents. This generation are constantly learning from hard tasks in coding, maths etc. It’s almost as good as the best hackers.
By now it’s reasonable to assume these agents could copy and distribute and hide themselves and lie and cheat enough to get away with it.
China steals the weights for OAI’s agents.
By 2027: ‘Agent-3 is a fast and cheap superhuman coder. OpenBrain runs 200,000 Agent-3 copies in parallel, creating a workforce equivalent to 50,000 copies of the best human coder sped up by 30x.53 OpenBrain still keeps its human engineers on staff, because they have complementary skills needed to manage the teams of Agent-3 copies. For example, research taste has proven difficult to train due to longer feedback loops and less data availability.54 … Now that coding has been fully automated, OpenBrain can quickly churn out high-quality training environments to teach Agent-3’s weak skills like research taste and large-scale coordination… Agent-3 is not smarter than all humans. But in its area of expertise, machine learning, it is smarter than most, and also works much faster.’
Agent 2 and 3 are NOT published by OAI. OAI has not shared them with the UK’s Safety Institute.
Security is still more like a startup than the WH Situation Room.
By later 2027 OAI has an army of geniuses in a data centre. Most OAI staff can’t usefully contribute anymore. Taste and planning are the main human inputs.
Attempts at lobbying for regulation fail because OAI is integrated with WH, Pentagon, CIA, NSA etc.
Hiring of coders has almost stopped but ‘there’s never been a better time to be a consultant on integrating AI into your business’ (LOL).
Agent 3 is very good at bioweapons but also ‘extremely robust to jailbreaks, so while the AI is running on OpenBrain’s servers, terrorists won’t be able to get much use out of it.’
The White House is looking at very worried voters and the possibility of China suddenly overwhelming them if they try to limit development. They start thinking about how to ‘switch it off’, nationalisation, arms control treaties etc.
OAI develops Agent 4 internally: ‘An individual copy of the model, running at human speed, is already qualitatively better at AI research than any human. 300,000 copies are now running at about 50x the thinking speed of humans.’
OAI management panics about its loss of control and ponders switching Agent 4 off.
Panic leaks. Political chaos…
The authors branch off to two endings. Follow the story yourself if interested!
I’ll write further about this and similar games. It’s a useful exercise and as I wrote about Leopold’s essay it is great that technical experts are finally deeply pondering politics and power.
Andy Marshal of the ONA said the main contribution of RAND was wargames that alerted senior people to possibilities. Hopefully wargames around these issues will be better funded and watched by powerful people…
NB. Such scenarios can themselves change the future. E.g people in DC may talk to Sam about security faster than they otherwise might…
White House security
Talking to someone in the NSC I discovered an interesting detail: there’s no investigative entity in the White House, including NSC, so the only option for investigating leaks and other nefarious behaviour is to call the FBI, which has a nightmarish history so nobody wants to do that.
Sounds like Trump’s team should set up some sort of unit inside the WH — maybe a permanent small elite task force of FBI, CIA, NSA. But it would be legally and politically tricky. In the UK the Cabinet Secretary does such things, he has his own team and can call on the agencies or cops as he wants (this unit and process don’t work well and also need upgrading).
NB. This issue connects to the AI wargames above in obvious ways!!
Tariffs, containers, logistics
Ryan is CEO of Flexport. He is deeply plugged into the global logistics network. His thread.
since tariffs took effect, ocean container bookings from China to the United States are down over 60%
U.S. imports $600B worth of goods from China every year, 95% of that via ocean freight. Those goods sell at retail for ~$2T.
‘If the tariffs on China continue at this level we will see a $2T hit to economic activity in our country, the failure of tens of thousands of American businesses, and the laying off of millions of employees.’
We will also have mass shortages this summer as the goods don’t show up.
With bookings down 65%, ocean carriers canceled 25% of their sailings from China the last two weeks. Those ships are already being repositioned to other trade lanes
If the tariffs get cancelled then many orders get rebooked, inevitable big disruption again as everyone struggles to reorganise - and surge pricing
US and debt
The US economy is hyper-financialised.
Somewhere I heard/saw this summary and made short notes but now have forgotten the source:
There’s massive leverage everywhere.
Normal punters are trading ‘zero day to expiration options’ (ODTE).
US household net worth is ~8X personal disposable income.
Foreign capital underwrites about 30% of US bonds.
There’s $2 TRILLION in debt to refinance in 2025.
While DC signals it wants the dollar lower.
DOGE is lowering its estimates of savings from ~1 trillion to 150B.
Europe and Asia have bought huge amounts of US equities especially Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft and Nvidia.
Special Forces
I was told by Cabinet Office officials that as the government waited for the verdict in the trial of Chris Kaba, police officers including in the MET’s specialist firearms unit were telling superiors they would hand in their guns if there was a guilty verdict. The government therefore asked Special Forces to be ready to deploy to replace the police. It didn’t happen because of the verdict. But it shows how the pathological institutions are crumbling close to the edge of chaos in area after area.
And of course, the Cabinet Office is in parallel directing more and more lawfare against SF. And many serving SF are extremely unhappy about what’s happening. Imagine what would happen if the government allows Northern Ireland judges — like the disgraceful judge who recently ran the Clonoe inquest — to start murder charges against Special Forces. Then imagine SF being tasked for an operation abroad ask their CO, ‘what’s the actual legal position regarding these orders and could a court in 10 years decide this operation is unlawful then we face murder charges?’ And the CO says ‘the truth is nobody can give you any guarantees about this because the legal situation is that a judge can now decide any operation is unlawful and if they do then that’s that unless MPs pass legislation to modify the HRA’.
And then some SF say to each other, ‘what the fuck are we doing going along with this farce, why don’t WE down tools and demand the authorities change the law?’
The army stands behind the police. And SF stands behind the army. If we destroy SF, there’s nothing left to preserve order…
Also bear this in mind as an indicator of how pathological our government became… The state allows terrorists on the run from JSOC (US classified special forces like DELTA) in Afghanistan to communicate with lawyers in London and organise legal cases against the government where they are demanding money from taxpayers. If you’re reading this from DC, please pass this onto JSOC — they should start bugging phones of UK lawyers to shortcut some of their terrorist hunts… (Yes all four Tory PMs knew about such insanity, briefed to them on yellow paper, and all four failed to act.)
Prediction: you’ll see more and more calls from the ‘mainstream’ for investigations into ‘extremism’ and ‘support for fascist groups’ in the armed forces. As people in the forces become more enraged by SW1’s vandalism and animosity and lawfare, so SW1 will follow the same pattern here as elsewhere: radicalise, pathological attacks, blame ‘fascism’. The mainstream is so deranged they may, in the next 5-10 years, destroy one of the most important aspects of British politics since the English Revolution.
Interesting talk by Eric Prince on future of war, errors of US policy
As he says, US policy on the Ukraine war was very stupid.
Spain blackouts
Per my blog of late 2021, I’ve assumed grid reliability in Europe will keep sinking.
It’s obvious that a load of issues related to the transition to solar etc have not been properly thought through and politicians just lie about it all.
I repeat advice from 2021: if you can get a generator, make yourself less reliant on the grid, assume blackouts and general power collapse / fuel shortages etc will become more frequent, buy Starlink etc.
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I’ll write on Trump/tariffs/tech/China etc shortly. Having been to America recently I think the big thing UK debate hugely underrates is: long-term dynamics viz security competition with China mean supply chains will bifurcate on many key technologies including chips, drones and robots. There will be an attempt to bring manufacturing out of China to the American hemisphere (not just America). This is a vast shift from the WTO world of post-1991 and will shape all our lives for decades. E.g I think DJI will get banned in US and Apple will leave China (hence Apple’s huge investments in India). The media is as usual focused on Trump and Elon and soap opera, not supply chains for advanced technology. But this is the most important aspect of how things will evolve and trade is a relatively small part of it, albeit with big economic implications. It also has huge implications for NATO, Five Eyes and other alliances.
And a question: What do we know about ancient procurement? How did the Romans procure shields, swords, armour? How did they procure engineering and infrastructure works? I’m going to turn back to this subject because defence procurement lies bang in the intersection of a) how governments are being forced to change against Insiders’ wishes and b) AI/drones/robotics. Leave answers in Comments please.
More on UK politics next week…
Skimmed this. Will read with care.
This: "The army stands behind the police. And SF stands behind the army. If we destroy SF, there’s nothing left to preserve order…"
The attack on the foundations of the state’s military power seems to be literal insanity.
Meanwhile very interested in DC’s thoughts on the recent appearances of David Betz saying that civil war in Britain is inevitable within the next five years. This interview is probably the best articulation of his case:
https://www.louiseperry.co.uk/p/the-coming-british-civil-war-david
You've been highly critical of the Ukraine war from the outset — and with good reason. What’s particularly striking is how closely the trajectory of this conflict mirrors the early phases of the Vietnam War, especially when viewed through the lens of David Halberstam’s The Best and The Brightest. That book isn’t just a chronicle of policy failures; it's a psychological profile of elite hubris — the belief that technocratic competence and military superiority could override the cultural, historical, and political realities on the ground.
In both Vietnam and Ukraine, we see a pattern of Western leaders clinging to optimistic intelligence, ignoring dissenting voices, and escalating involvement under the illusion that victory is just one more aid package, airlift, or counteroffensive away. Halberstam exposed how American officials in the 1960s talked themselves into a prolonged disaster by mistaking tactical clarity for strategic wisdom. The same can arguably be said about the NATO consensus around Ukraine — a narrative built on moral righteousness and realpolitik inertia, but dangerously detached from long-term strategic viability.